Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  Her eyes were fixed on the photograph, caught in a memory somewhere. Maybe something Carrie had said to her. Maybe some reason for waiting seventeen years.

  ‘Emily?’

  She started slightly and looked at me. ‘They were happy with just one, and then, when she hit her forties, Carrie started to feel a pull for a second. It happens.’

  I studied her, but if she was hiding something else, it was well disguised. I let it go for the moment, finished my notes and told her I was going upstairs to look around.

  Paul and Carrie’s bedroom was done out in a warm cream, with built-in wardrobes and a huge oak bed. I went through their bedside cabinets, pulled a couple of storage boxes out from under the bed and sifted through their closets. Everything was neat and tidy: shoes lined up in the wardrobes, clothes folded into piles on shelves, expensive, name-brand clothes on hangers. It was obvious someone – almost certainly Emily – had been through the house in the months after the family disappeared, tidying all the rooms up.

  The bedroom had an en-suite, again spotlessly clean, which included a black-and-white-tiled wet room. Matching towels were stacked in an alcove, like a set of dominos. Next to that was a bathroom cabinet. I opened it up and looked inside. Deodorants. Hand creams. Sometimes prescription medication could give you an in, but there was nothing like that. The closest the Lings had was a bottle of Calpol and some cough mixture.

  I moved to the next bedroom.

  Annabel’s.

  Like her parents, it was pretty understated. Cream walls, no posters now she was in her twenties, no toys, no games. This was, as expected, a room belonging to an adult. On one wall were three bookshelves, a mix of paperbacks and research tomes. I stepped in closer. Brecht. Stanislavski. Books with names like Directing a Stage Play and Set Design. I remembered Emily saying Annabel was teaching drama between applying for other jobs. There was no way to gauge for sure because I didn’t know any of the family, and only really knew Carrie as a memory, but I started to wonder whether part of the reason Annabel might not have been able to get a full-time job was because she didn’t really want one. Maybe she didn’t try as hard as she could have. Maybe because teaching kids drama was all she really wanted to do.

  There were three big wardrobes full of clothes. As in Paul and Carrie’s, everything was neat and tidy. When I closed the doors on the last of them, I felt a pang of frustration. It was easy to understand Emily’s mindset. I completely got her reasons for going over everything, for putting the family’s things back in place as if readying it for some kind of homecoming. It was an emotional response, a practical one too. But there was no sense now of how the house had been left. Anything that had been even slightly out of place in the days after the four of them went missing had been put right. The previous night, Emily had said the house was like a museum when she’d got there on the day they vanished. But she’d got it the wrong way around: this was the museum, everything arranged and composed as if it were some kind of show home. Now there was no going back to the way it had been left on 7 January.

  Before I headed across to Olivia’s room, I booted up Annabel’s MacBook, which was sitting on a corner table with a printer to the side. I had a quick search around but then decided to take a closer look when I got it home, so shut it down again and took it with me.

  Olivia’s room seemed the most incongruous: posters of boy bands on the walls, a Disney Princess clock, a High School Musical duvet and curtain set in a cabin bed with stickers dotted all over it – but no mess. It was the bedroom of an eight-year-old if the eight-year-old never played in it. Toys had been put into giant boxes, or into a two-door fitted wardrobe. When I went through the wardrobe, there were clothes on one side and even more toys, also in boxes, on the other. Like her sister she had a laptop, except this one was another toy: chunky red plastic, yellow keyboard, small ten-inch screen and a camera – moulded to look like a caterpillar – sprouting from the right-hand side. It sat on a desk that pulled out from under the cabin bed, alongside pencil tins and safety scissors.

  When I got back downstairs, Healy was busy disconnecting the computer in Paul Ling’s study. As he started coiling the leads, I told him not to bother. My parents had an old PC at the cottage, along with all the connections. We could use that, and plug the tower into their CRT. Wobbling slightly as he hoisted it up off the desk, he took the tower to the car, and I placed Annabel’s laptop alongside it. Then I headed back into the house and did another sweep, making sure I hadn’t missed anything.

  As I came back around to the front door, a feeling nagged at me. This is the place they disappeared from. Most of the time, in the cases I took on, the victims’ houses were part of the journey; a stop-off in which I familiarized myself with them. But with the Lings it was different. This wasn’t a stop-off.

  This was the entire case.

  15

  After telling Emily I’d call her as soon as I had any updates, we drove home in silence. Healy had never been big on apologies, even when he knew he was wrong, so I let local radio fill the gap in conversation. The DJ was talking about the body on the beach.

  Heading up the narrow lane towards the cottage, I caught a brief glimpse of a figure on my driveway – the bob of a head, the flash of a vehicle – before they were gone from view again. But ten seconds later, I found out who it was. ‘Rocastle,’ Healy said, nodding towards a grey-haired man standing at the front door. He turned as he heard us pull in through the gates, eyes narrowing, frown forming. ‘Plain-clothes officer’ had to be the biggest misnomer going: even in civvies, cops rarely looked like anything other than cops. The way they dressed, their facial expressions, their body language, it was all a dead giveaway, and Rocastle was the dictionary definition of police. He watched the car come all the way in, eyes never leaving me, then started a slow, cautious approach.

  I got out.

  He looked from me to Healy and then back again, and started fiddling around in his jacket pocket for his warrant card. I saved him a job. ‘That’s fine, DCI Rocastle.’

  He half-heartedly smiled his thanks.

  ‘I was hoping I could chat to you about the recent events on the beach, Mr Raker. Nothing sinister. As I said to Mr Healy yesterday, we’re canvassing the whole village.’

  I told him that was fine and, after he and Healy had greeted each other, we headed inside, leaving the computers in the car. He might not have thought anything of it if we’d popped the boot and got them out. But he might. Often, the early stages of my cases were about dancing around the police, about getting a feel for their involvement in the lives of the people I was trying to find – and only then approaching them. Rocastle had been at the Lings’ house in the hours after they’d gone missing, so I wanted to talk to him just as much as he wanted to talk to me. But he was an experienced cop, and they were always the most controlled; less prone to slip-ups. They had a feel for the flow of conversation and where it was headed, and if he saw it going somewhere he didn’t like he’d shut it down. I doubted Rocastle would tell me anything about 7 January purely out of choice. So the computers stayed where they were because they would give him pause for thought, and how you got at men like Rocastle was basically how you got at anyone.

  You cornered them.

  Rocastle and Healy talked in general terms about the body on the beach, but, as I’d expected, Rocastle side-stepped anything important. In a weird reverse of how he’d been the previous day, Healy hardly seemed interested in the answers he got and I remembered again how he’d disappeared for hours at a time the day before. Whether this was all an act for Rocastle or not, I didn’t know, but I wanted the truth. Without it, I risked him contaminating the search for the Lings with the fallout from whatever he was doing.

  I made us all coffee, and then Rocastle and I sat at the kitchen table. He got out a pen and a pad and sat them perfectly parallel to one another, while Healy remained at the front door, which was slightly ajar, leaning against the frame while he smoked. Rocastle started off by talking bla
ndly about what they’d found on the beach, but most of it was what had already been reported in the media, probably because he was the one who’d signed off the press release. But then, about a minute in, as he danced around a potential revelation about the condition of the body, a thought came to me: Why send Rocastle up here? He was a DCI, probably ten years past door-to-doors. I quickly considered the reasons: a lack of manpower, or at least a lack of available manpower, but that seemed doubtful given the gravity of the crime; perhaps he was the kind of SIO that liked a firm hand on the tiller, one who didn’t fully trust anyone’s instinct but his own; but much more likely was that he’d picked and chosen which people he wanted to interview in the village.

  And, for whatever reason, I’d made the cut.

  ‘So, I’m asking everyone this,’ he began, flipping open the front page of his pad. It had no notes in it at all, although slivers of paper remained in the spiral binding where he’d recently torn them out. Sometimes the clearest picture of a person came from the smallest things: the way he’d set his pen and paper down parallel to one another pointed towards a meticulous mind; the way he’d torn out the last notes in the pad – as if to keep them away from prying eyes – suggested a suspicious one too. He looked at me. ‘Could you tell me what you were doing on or around Monday afternoon this week?’

  It was Thursday now. Healy had found the body on Tuesday. So police obviously believed, probably on the advice of the pathologist, that it had either washed up or been dumped twenty-four hours before that. He’d have had a hard job narrowing down time of death if the body parts had been in water for long; ‘immersion’ meant skin started to wrinkle and loosen during the first week, and by the second week it started to detach completely. The fact he’d been able to be so accurate meant Healy’s theory could have been right.

  The body had been frozen.

  ‘I was here,’ I said.

  ‘At home?’

  ‘All day. Healy can back me up on that.’

  Rocastle looked over his shoulder. Healy nodded.

  ‘Why did you move down here?’

  ‘I like it down here.’

  ‘You didn’t have any particular reason?’

  ‘My parents lived in the village. This was their house.’

  He nodded, making more notes. I flicked a glance at what he was writing, but it looked like it was some sort of shorthand – except I knew shorthand and I couldn’t decipher it. A system only he can translate: a way to disguise his thoughts.

  ‘So you weren’t down in the village at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you didn’t see anything?’

  ‘As in?’

  ‘As in, anything worth reporting.’

  I frowned. ‘Like I just said, I was here all day.’

  ‘So that’s a no?’

  ‘Obviously it’s a no.’

  He nodded, made some notes. ‘You don’t look bedridden.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I’m just wondering why you stayed inside all day on Monday.’

  I studied him. I was tempted to say Because I wanted to, but it was best I kept him onside for the moment. ‘Some days I still feel tired.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  I lifted up my T-shirt, and for a moment Rocastle looked surprised. Then he saw the pink scarring on my stomach. ‘It’s been five months. Sometimes it’s still painful.’

  ‘I see.’ He glanced at his pad. ‘So you’re sure?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That you didn’t see anything?’

  He wrote something else down, on a fresh line and in a fresh jumble of words. I glanced at Healy for a moment, and in his face I saw the same expression I must have had. He’s trying to lead me somewhere. Finally, when Rocastle looked up, there was nothing in his face. An unreadable blank.

  ‘Mr Raker?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re absolutely positive you didn’t see anything?’

  But now he’d tilted the question in a different direction. No longer an attempt to bait me, or even really an accusation. Just an innocent point of clarification. I studied him for a second time, trying to decide exactly what his play was – and then it came to me.

  ‘Mr Raker?’

  ‘You already knew I’d been stabbed.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You already knew all about me.’

  A flash of something in his face – just a split second of reaction – but there long enough for me to see that I’d been right. He’d done background checks on all the people in the village – and I’d been the one with a file. The missing people I’d found, the killers I’d ended up hunting, the detectives I’d had to cross. All my statements, all the lies I’d weaved and managed to convince them of, there in black and white. I wasn’t sure if he’d come here because he saw something in my past that suggested I might be capable of killing a person and dumping them out to sea, or whether he’d come as some kind of warning. We know who you are. We know what you do. Stay the hell away.

  He leaned forward. ‘I’m going to level with you, Mr Raker. I do know about you. I’m not sure if what’s in the database is everything. I guess only you and’ – he glanced back over his shoulder – ‘perhaps Mr Healy know whether you were one hundred per cent honest with the Met.’

  He waited for an answer that didn’t come.

  ‘You have a habit of getting involved in cases that don’t seem to have a hell of a lot to do with you.’ A pause. A shrug of the shoulders. He glanced at Healy again, as if giving him the chance to answer on my behalf. ‘Maybe you have a strong opinion on that, or maybe you don’t – but ultimately I don’t really care. For your opinion, or for those cases. Because those cases weren’t here. I don’t want to sound uncaring for my fellow boys in blue up north and in the Met, but I frankly couldn’t give a rat’s arse about their crime scenes. But I give a rat’s arse about mine. Are we both clear on that, David?’

  David now. Trying to make himself seem like a good guy, someone reasonable. But it was clumsy psychology, the first amateurish thing he’d done since he’d arrived.

  ‘Mind if I ask you something?’ I said.

  The response took him by surprise, but he did a good job of disguising it. His eyes narrowed slightly and then he set his pen down next to his pad. Adjusted it. Looked up.

  ‘Does the name Carrie Ling ring any bells with you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Carrie Ling. She and her family disappeared on 7 January.’

  A look on his face like he genuinely had no idea who I was talking about.

  ‘She used to live here in the village.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Her sister arrives to find the front door unlocked and everything still on: TV, computer, food cooking on the stove, the whole thing. Except the family are missing.’

  A flash of recognition.

  ‘You remember them now?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah. I remember them. What about them?’

  Apart from a momentary lapse, he’d conducted this whole thing perfectly. Given nothing away. Made his point. Now he’d turned the conversation around again: no longer on the defensive, but forcing me to reveal my hand. ‘Do you think there’s any link?’

  ‘Between what?’

  I smiled. He’s playing dumb. ‘Between the Lings and the body.’

  He stared at me, shrugged. ‘Why would there be a link?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just thinking aloud.’

  ‘Anything’s possible. But we’re talking about a family that lived twenty miles from here. Does every case within a twenty-mile radius have to be linked to this one?’

  ‘She used to live here, in the village.’

  ‘A long time ago, as I recall.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Are you telling me you’re working for them – is that it?’

  ‘No one’s working for them – they’ve never been found.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘That sounds like
a sly dig, David.’

  ‘It was just interesting that you were involved in both cases.’

  A smirk passed briefly across his face, and he leaned in towards me. ‘Look, you’re a clever guy. That’s probably why everyone at the Met hates you. But you’re barking up the wrong tree. There’s no link and there’s no grand conspiracy. I don’t care if you’re looking into that family’s disappearance. I really don’t. What I care about is closing my case, and if you’re getting in my way – and given your history, you can’t blame me for coming up here to make sure you’re not – you’re making life complicated for me, and that’s when we have a problem.’

  We sat facing each other in silence for a moment, and then he got to his feet, pushed his chair under the table and started buttoning up his coat.

  ‘Would you be willing to share anything on the Lings–’

  ‘Thanks for your time.’ He pushed a business card across the table. ‘If you think of anything that might be useful, do let me know. Otherwise, let us do our jobs.’

  After he left and we’d heard his car leave the driveway, Healy came over and sat at the table, fingers opening and closing the lid of his cigarette packet.

  ‘So what do you make of him?’

  I watched Rocastle’s car – a dark blue Volvo – weave its way down through the lanes towards the beach, where, just marks against the shingle, the same uniforms were positioned at equal intervals, preventing people from getting close to the rocks.

  ‘Raker?’

  ‘I think he’s smart.’

  ‘Cocky, you mean.’

  ‘Not cocky. Just smart.’

  ‘You in love?’

  ‘We’ve had our fight for today, so you can suffer this next bit in silence because I don’t want another.’ I paused, saw anger flare in his eyes, but pushed on. ‘Whatever it is you’re getting involved in, whether you’re trying to prove something to yourself or you think they’ve missed something you picked up, tread carefully. Rocastle won’t get near you when you’re on your game, Colm – but if you’re off it, he’ll nail you to the wall.’

  ‘You can’t speak to me like that.’