Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  ‘Just think about it, okay?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it.’

  And then he got up, grabbed his coat and headed out.

  16

  I set up Paul Ling’s PC and Annabel’s MacBook in the living room, put some coffee on and started going through them. Paul’s desktop pointed towards a tidy mind: a series of applications on the left, then a line of folders with names like ‘Photos’, ‘Receipts’, ‘MA’ and ‘Research papers’. I went through them methodically. The folder of photos turned out to be shots from a conference he’d done the October before the family disappeared. The folder marked ‘Research papers’ was a mixture of papers he’d submitted as part of his ongoing studies, and articles he’d written for the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. The ‘MA’ folder was just a page of notes, most of which seemed to be about the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was just a list of historical events, detailing how the country had seized its opportunity after the Second World War. I didn’t know what it related to, but there was a section headed ‘Medical care’ towards the bottom of the page, so I figured Paul must have been in the middle of constructing something.

  Next, I fired up the browser and went through his history. Two weeks before the family disappeared it had been Christmas, so the trail back to the beginning of December was full of online retailers. When I clicked on the links it clearly pointed in the direction of gifts Paul and Carrie Ling had got for their girls. One of them was the chunky red plastic laptop, with the caterpillar camera, I’d seen in Olivia’s room. The MacBook that was now sitting in front of me had been bought for Annabel for Christmas: there were a series of links in Paul Ling’s history to the exact same model, and when I checked Safari on the MacBook I saw Annabel’s history only went back as far as Christmas Day.

  Clearly, the Lings weren’t struggling for money.

  In just two weeks Annabel had visited almost as many sites as her father had in two months, but there weren’t many surprises. Facebook and Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest. The MacBook had remembered her username and password for both Facebook and Twitter, so I went in and looked around. On Facebook she’d had 1,123 friends, and scores of them had posted to her wall pleading for her, and her family, to come home. Her last status update had been on the morning of 7 January, before she’d headed off to work: Looking forward to teaching my fab 11yo’s today! Previous updates were just the same: work, nights out, funny things she’d found. Nothing to suggest any problems.

  I went through Twitter doing the same checks, looking for tiny inconsistencies, for posts that didn’t sit right, for anything that struck me as odd – but after ten minutes I moved on. I went through her folders, through her hard drive, applications, cookies, cache. Nothing. As I leaned back in Dad’s old chair, the leather wheezing beneath my weight, I flicked a look between the two machines.

  Father. Daughter.

  Police would have been through both computers in the weeks after the family vanished: in the history there was activity after 7 January, but only revisiting sites Paul and Annabel had already been to. That pointed to the investigators doing the same thing I’d just done: clicking on links, following the same paths through the Web that the Lings would have travelled. So far, all roads headed towards a dead end: nothing on the computers, nothing on a first search of the house, and Emily hadn’t been updated for months. I was starting to see why the police investigation had stalled.

  Taking a break, I padded through to the kitchen.

  As the kettle boiled, rain spat against the kitchen window, and when the wind came it was hard and aggressive, pressing and grabbing at the house until every wall seemed to sigh and every pane of glass rattled. I saw my phone sitting on the table, pulled it towards me and thumbed through my address book.

  Eventually I got to Liz’s number.

  My finger hovered over the Dial button, Healy’s words still swimming through my head. Whatever you think’s happened between you, she needs to hear it. He was right, even if it felt disconcerting taking relationship advice from a man like him. The silence of unanswered calls wasn’t what she deserved, even if – ultimately – all I would be doing by calling her was confirming what she already knew.

  We’d come to the end.

  And now it was over.

  17

  Healy looked out through the glass of the old red phone box, rain spattering against the windows, wind whistling as it passed through rusted-out gaps at ankle level. He’d walked the entire length of the sea wall, from one end of the village to the other, in order to get here, in order to make this call, and now he was drenched. Rain matted his hair to his scalp, darkening it like it had been dyed, and he was damp all the way through to his skin.

  He removed the handset from the cradle, wedged it between the side of his head and his shoulder, and fed a couple of coins into the slot. Then he removed his phone from his pocket, placed it on top of the dial box and scrolled through to the number he wanted to call. He could have waited for Raker to head out, or he could have gone somewhere private, like the lane outside the house – but this was a call he didn’t want Raker to see him making. He didn’t want it showing up in his Call History, or on any itemized bill. Which was why he was making it from a phone box almost a mile away from the house.

  He found the number he wanted, punched it into the dial box and waited for it to connect. As it started to ring, he looked left and right, back along the sea wall towards the village, and the other way, out of the village, along the Ley. The Ley was an oval-shaped expanse of fresh water further along, separated from the shingle beach by a narrow stretch of road. At the other end of it, in among the folds of those same hills, surrounded by oak and ash forests, was where Raker had said his parents’ farm had been. Healy didn’t care about that now, though. He didn’t care about anything but making sure he was alone.

  ‘John Sampson speaking.’

  Healy cleared his throat. ‘John.’

  ‘Uh, yeah. Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s …’

  Maybe this is a mistake.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have called.

  No.

  No, screw Raker. I don’t take my orders from him.

  ‘It’s Colm Healy.’

  A pause. ‘How are you?’ came the reply, but it sounded strained. Put on. Healy could hear Sampson moving, passing people. Then a creak. Then there was total silence.

  ‘John?’

  ‘What are you calling me for, Colm?’

  Healy looked out at the beach. ‘I just wanted to–’

  ‘I’m at work.’

  ‘I know. I just wanted to find out how you were.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Good. That’s good. How’s the family?’

  ‘They’re fine. What do you want, Colm?’

  ‘I was just … I was thinking maybe …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got this thing I’m working on and–’

  ‘You want help?’

  ‘I just need a–’

  ‘Bryan Strydom said you called him this morning.’

  ‘Yeah. I called Bryan. So? I worked with him for years.’

  ‘He said you wanted him to see what he could find out about a murder down in Devon – and you wanted a background check on some fisherman. Are you insane?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘What do you think it means? Not only were you asking Strydom to break the law and do a database search for a member of the public, but you were asking him for details about an active case.’ Sampson paused. ‘Does any of that sound remotely okay to you?’

  ‘Like I say, I’ve known Bryan for year–’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Healy. You don’t work for the Met any more.’

  Healy stopped. ‘I just thought–’

  ‘You thought wrong.’

  ‘Samp, listen–’

  ‘No, you listen, Healy. I knew you a long time. You were a good copper once. But if you call me or
any of my team again, I will put you down, and I will make sure–’

  ‘Fuck you, Samp.’

  Healy hung up.

  He stayed like that for a moment – fingers around the handset, eyes on the beach. The sea suddenly seemed to roar as it crashed on the shore, and then the crackling sound of shingle followed as it was dragged back into the wash. Healy thought of Raker. You got fired from the police. Those people there you call friends, colleagues, whatever they were to you – they aren’t going to go out to bat for you, because they don’t want to end up like you. The waves came again and again, massaged by the wind, climbing their way up the shingle in a relentless assault. I know, one hundred per cent, I can rely on Tasker. No mistakes. No trails. Can you say that about the men you know? Can you say it with absolute certainty? Finally, there was the smell of salt, a reminder of where he was.

  ‘Raker was right,’ he muttered.

  The words were so big, such a stark realization, that for a fraction of a second there seemed an odd kind of silence in the phone box: no rain, no wind, no waves from the beach. And then, the next second, all the noise seemed to come at once, like water breaking through a bough.

  Healy squeezed the handset tight, knuckles blanched, teeth clenched – and then he smashed it against the windows of the phone box, over and over.

  Thirty seconds later, there was no glass left in it.

  And all he could feel was the rain.

  Let the Cards Fall

  Saturday, 13 August 2011 | Fifteen Months Ago

  There were five of them in the courtyard. They sat at the edge of the pool, all in shirt sleeves, empty beer bottles stacked in the centre of their table. From inside the villa they could hear music and laughter, could see men wandering around, some still dressed in the sharp, tailored suits they’d landed in; some already on their way to undressing as they led attractive, paid-for women half their age into the villa’s secluded side rooms.

  Outside, though, things were different.

  The night was utterly still, no movement on the surface of the pool, no breeze passing through the palm fronds, just the gentle hum of traffic from Las Vegas Boulevard. The game of blackjack had quickly descended into silence as a sixth man – a shipping magnate called Stuppuco, acting as dealer – slowly went around the table, watching the hand signals from the men as they decided whether to hit or stand. The last of them, more chips in front of him than anyone else, was Eric Schiltz. He’d had a good night so far, and it was about to get a whole lot better. He maintained his composure as Stuppuco got to him, and then swept the flat of his hand across his cards. He was going to stand.

  ‘Okay,’ Stuppuco said. ‘Let’s see ’em, boys.’

  They all flipped their cards over and, inside a second, the other men zeroed in on Schiltz’s hand. An Ace and a Jack: twenty-one. Groans of disappointment went up in unison.

  ‘Are you cheating, Schiltzy?’ one of the men joked.

  Schiltz winked at him. ‘Only with your wife.’

  Laughter erupted among the group, and as Schiltz pulled a whole new set of chips towards him, whatever tension had built up in the last game instantly fell away. More jokes got passed around the table, mostly at Schiltz’s expense, before they all broke into smaller clusters, talking about the NFL pre-season, the recession, Obama, and then their plans for the rest of the night. Finally, one of the men, a Hollywood exec with a belly as big as his drug habit, peeled himself out of his chair and offered to go and get another round of beers. As he left, Schiltz’s cellphone started ringing.

  He pulled it out and looked at the display. Caller unknown. ‘Listen,’ he said to the others, ‘if I come back and find these chips missing, I’ll operate on all of you.’

  More laughter.

  Schiltz wandered across to a quieter part of the courtyard, where a second door, leading through to one of the bedrooms, was closed, its curtains pulled. Beside him the wall that ran the circumference of the courtyard dipped slightly and he could see over it, across the Bellagio’s lake, to where the Eiffel Tower at Paris – on the other side of the Boulevard – erupted out of a bed of light and reached into the black desert sky.

  ‘Hello?’

  A buzz on the line.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nothing. Schiltz waited another five seconds, then when there was no response he hung up. Just as he did, the doors to the bedroom opened, almost on to him, and as he stepped back to see who it was, he realized it was Cornell, immaculately dressed in a grey shirt, black trousers and black brogues, his hair slicked down, not a strand out of place along his arrow-straight parting. Cornell didn’t notice Schiltz at first, but as he moved further into the courtyard, Schiltz came out from behind the door. Inside the room a woman, naked from the waist up, was hoisting a tight pink dress up over her thighs.

  ‘Eric,’ Cornell said. ‘I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘This looks bad,’ Schiltz said, smiling.

  Cornell glanced at the woman, fully in her dress now, and then seemed to realize what Schiltz meant. ‘Oh, her. Don’t worry. I know you’re not the peeping Tom type.’

  ‘Then my cover remains intact.’

  Schiltz smiled again but got no response from Cornell. He nodded to the table where his chips were still stacked up in piles. ‘I was the Blackjack Butcher tonight.’

  Cornell nodded.

  He didn’t talk much, didn’t smile much either, which always struck Schiltz as strange given how much he must have spent on his teeth. But Schiltz had known Cornell long before he’d paid out for a Californian grin, and he’d been exactly the same then.

  ‘Do you want one of your own?’ Cornell asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I can arrange it for you.’ He glanced back at the woman, who was applying some lipstick and running a brush through her hair. ‘Someone like that.’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks, Jeremy.’

  ‘You have someone else in mind?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Schiltz frowned. ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Only, I saw you in the hotel bar earlier, talking to someone.’

  ‘Oh, her. Talking was all it was.’

  ‘You seemed to be getting on pretty well.’

  Schiltz shook his head. ‘She was a fifty-dollar-an-hour hooker.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, that’s not really my scene.’ Suddenly, Schiltz’s phone started buzzing again. Another unknown number. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Cornell. ‘I need to take this.’

  Cornell nodded.

  Schiltz stepped away and pushed Answer. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Eric?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Carrie Ling.’

  ‘Carrie. How are you?’

  ‘I’m good. I just tried calling you a minute ago, but I don’t know what happened – I could hear you but you couldn’t hear me.’ A brief pause on the line. ‘Wait, I’ve just realized how late it is there.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘One in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, Eric, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think. Did I wake you up?’

  ‘It’s fine. Honestly. I’m up in Las Vegas for the weekend, so the likelihood of me getting to bed early was always going to be slim.’

  Carrie chuckled. ‘Well, I’m sorry all the same.’

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Schiltz saw Cornell take a couple of steps away from him and look over at the blackjack table. This is what he liked to do: watch other people.

  ‘How’s Annabel?’ Schiltz asked.

  ‘Oh, she’s doing great.’

  ‘She’s a tough cookie, your daughter.’

  ‘She is. But you were a miracle worker.’

  That made him smile. ‘You should do my PR.’

  They talked for a while about Annabel’s recovery, about making some slight adjustments to her exercise routine, and then Carrie began talking more generally about settling into life back home. ‘Do you eve
r miss Devon?’ she asked him eventually.

  ‘It’s where I grew up. Sometimes I miss it a lot.’

  ‘I guess you’ve got all your photos.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘How’s the scanning going?’

  ‘It’s going well,’ Schiltz replied, looking across the courtyard. Cornell had moved again, perching himself on the steps leading out of the bedroom. He was about six feet away, arms resting on either knee, fingers locked together, half obscured by shadows.

  ‘Did you start with that one of the three of you?’

  ‘Which one was that?’

  ‘The one in your study, of you and your two friends.’

  ‘Oh, that one. I can’t remember if I started with that one or not.’

  ‘But you scanned it in?’

  ‘Yes, it definitely made the cut. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was just wondering. I thought it was a nice photo.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Schiltz said. ‘I like it too. It’s the only one I’ve got from that period of the three of us. Funnily enough, I emailed a copy of it to both of the guys yesterday.’

  ‘Did they like it?’

  ‘One of them’s back in your part of the world, and he’s terrible at checking his email, so I don’t expect to hear for a while. But the other is here tonight. I’ll go and ask him later. I’m sure he’ll get a kick out of it. We all look devilishly handsome, after all.’

  Schiltz smiled and turned around, facing off along the edge of the pool towards the makeshift blackjack table. His eyes fell on Cornell. He was standing again, staring into space as if deep in thought. Or listening to Schiltz’s conversation.

  ‘Listen, Carrie, I’d better go.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I just wanted to ask you about those exercises.’

  ‘Well, it’s lovely to hear from you.’

  ‘Thank you again, Eric.’

  ‘Say hello to Annabel, Paul and Olivia.’

  ‘I will. Bye, Eric.’

  Schiltz hung up.

  Immediately, Cornell picked a hair from his shirt sleeve and took a couple of steps towards Schiltz. ‘Couldn’t help overhearing your conversation.’