Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  He checked the rear-view mirror again.

  Still no sign of him.

  ‘Where are you, asshole?’

  Then there was a tap at his window.

  Soto turned in his seat, in the direction of the motel next door – and then recoiled. ‘Shit!’ Cornell was standing right outside the driver’s door, one hand already on the roof, the other at his side. For a brief second the early morning sun cut across his face, across his smooth, tanned skin, and all Soto could see was his eyes, dark, as if even the sun couldn’t light them.

  Cornell leaned right into the glass. ‘Morning,’ he mouthed.

  Soto buzzed down the window, glancing in the rear-view mirror again. No car, which meant he’d walked from somewhere. So, how the hell did Soto manage to miss him?

  When the window was all the way down, Cornell’s eyes moved quickly around the interior of the Lincoln and then pinged back to Soto. ‘How are you today?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m good. I didn’t see you come in.’

  Cornell said nothing in response, just tilted his head slightly to the left.

  Soto scanned the parking lot again and turned back. ‘You said on the phone you had a problem when you were in on the weekend?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cornell said, mouth peeling back to reveal two lines of perfectly white teeth. That was another thing Soto didn’t like: Cornell dressed smartly, had a desert tan and teeth that cost money. He looked completely normal when you saw him at a distance. But then you got up close, and things started to change, subtly, slowly, as if his appearance was a deliberate reverse of the person he actually was. Some kind of trap.

  ‘So, what’s the problem?’ Soto asked.

  ‘It’s a delicate issue.’

  ‘When is it not?’

  Cornell nodded, as if he agreed. ‘When we were at the hotel on Saturday, one of our group …’ He paused; tilted his head a little further. ‘How shall I put this? Eric, unfortunately, had something taken from his room.’

  Soto frowned. ‘Taken?’

  ‘His laptop was stolen.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report it?’

  ‘We didn’t feel it was necessary.’

  ‘You need to report all break-ins otherwi–’

  ‘It wasn’t a break-in.’

  Soto paused. ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  Cornell blinked a couple of times and then the point of his tongue emerged from between his lips. ‘He met someone in the bar. This is all very embarrassing.’

  ‘She was a prostitute?’

  ‘Correct.’

  Carlos looked away. He’d come all the way up here for this crap.

  ‘I need to find that laptop,’ Cornell said.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It contains some … sensitive material.’

  ‘Such as?’

  No response. Cornell blinked again, almost in slow motion.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I don’t think we need to get into that, Carlos.’

  Soto shrugged. ‘Fine. I’ll go back and see–’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘We’d like to handle this internally.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  Cornell didn’t react. ‘I’d like to keep this quiet.’

  ‘Who am I likely to tell?’

  ‘I know the room keys at the hotel keep a record of the time, date and whether they’ve been issued to a guest or a hotel employee,’ Cornell continued, as if he hadn’t heard the sarcasm in Soto’s reply. ‘I know each lock keeps track of the last two hundred times the key has been used to open the door. I know there’s a camera forty feet to the left of the room. Given that level of technology, I feel confident we can handle this ourselves, internally, so you don’t have to worry yourself about it.’

  ‘You’re asking me to distribute guest information and CCTV footage.’ Soto shook his head. ‘There’s absolutely no way I can sign off on that.’

  Cornell said nothing.

  ‘Look, we value your–’

  ‘I’d like that information.’

  ‘I can’t give it to you.’

  ‘I’d like you to give it to me.’

  ‘Look, I cannot give you that information. We’ll always try to accommodate any and all requests you have, because we value your custom, but I ca–’

  ‘You live down at Southern Highlands, right?’

  Soto felt a flutter of disquiet. ‘What?’

  Cornell nodded. ‘San Sevino. You bought a little two-storey place down there after your father died. Very nice. All gated and safe, mountain views, three-car garage.’

  ‘How do you know where I live?’

  Cornell just stared at him.

  ‘Are you threatening me now – is that it?’

  Again, no reply. Cornell stepped away from the Lincoln for the first time but kept his hand on the roof. ‘Carlos, people like you don’t need to be threatened, because you can see the bigger picture. You can see this isn’t worth you losing your job over.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Suddenly – a flash of movement – Cornell leaned right into the Lincoln. Soto jolted, shifting back automatically, his knee banging against the steering column.

  ‘You listen to me, you fucking wetback,’ Cornell spat, his diction immediately changing. ‘One click of my fingers and you’re gone. You get that, right? The people in that group, they’ve got more money in their wallets than you’ve got in your whole fucking life. So you’re going to do this for me, because you want to know what happens if you don’t? I make one call, and inside an hour you lose everything.’

  Soto stared at him.

  Cornell must have seen something in Soto’s eyes – some kind of acquiescence – and straightened, adjusting his jacket. ‘In three days we’ll meet back here,’ he said, playing on his Englishness again, pronouncing every word. This was the image he’d built: the quiet, thoughtful, articulate expat. ‘Same time. You’ll bring all the relevant CCTV footage for the night of 13 August: foyer, reception, casinos, bars, restaurants and, most importantly, the thirty-second floor. You’ll bring all relevant information from every card used on that floor to help me narrow down the search.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  He sighed. ‘Do we need to go over this again?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t care if I lose my job.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not your job I’m talking about.’

  A smile pierced Cornell’s face – like a crack in a pane of glass – and then, slowly, all the light seemed to leave him: his expression, his eyes, the way he spoke. For the first time, Soto really saw the man beneath the disguise: not the regular guy in the regular clothes, but the person he’d only glimpsed in flashes.

  The teeth of the trap.

  ‘Are we clear, Carlos?’

  Soto nodded once.

  Cornell nodded in return.

  Then, a second later, he was walking off, across the parking lot, and – as quickly and silently as he’d arrived – he was gone again.

  22

  As I got to the main road, about half a mile from the front gates of Farnmoor House, my phone started buzzing on the passenger seat. I scooped it up and put it in the hands-free.

  ‘David Raker.’

  ‘David, it’s Spike.’

  He was calling back with the information on the Lings I’d requested: financial history, phone calls, passwords for the email addresses. ‘Spike. Good to hear from you.’

  ‘Sorry it’s taken me a day to get this over.’

  ‘No apology needed. What have you got for me?’

  I could hear the gentle tap of a keyboard. ‘Everything you asked for I’ve managed to pull together. Incoming and outgoing phone calls for dad, mum and daughter. Addresses for each of the callers. Passwords for their emails. And a full financial history. That’s what took the time. These days, it’s a pain in the ass trying to extract those things.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘Hey, it’s my job.’

 
‘Anything leap out at you?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It’s all pretty standard stuff as far as I can tell, although I haven’t gone deep into anything. You’re the detective, I’m the criminal, remember.’

  ‘I remember. You going to send it to me?’

  ‘Already done. Separate PDF files for both the financial history and the phone calls, and then the passwords for the email addresses in the actual body of the mail.’

  I thanked him and killed the call, then pulled out on to the main road. A couple of miles further on, as the snaking coastal road narrowed, rising and falling above a series of beautiful crescent-shaped beaches, I stopped at a pub called The Church. It was a pokey one-room inn, with white walls and slate-grey roof tiles, perched on a mound of land – as the name suggested – behind an old Saxon church. I liked it a lot. It had character, log fires and cold beer, and – best of all, given south Devon’s flaky 3G connection – it had free Wi-Fi. I flipped the boot, grabbed my laptop and notebook, and went inside.

  It was quiet. I headed over to the fire, placed my laptop down on the nearest table, and ordered a beer and some food. After chatting politely to the landlord for a while, I connected to the Wi-Fi and logged on to my email. Spike’s message was waiting for me.

  I dragged the two attachments on to the desktop – one labelled ‘Financials’, one ‘Phone Records’ – but read through his email first of all. He was basically just going over what he’d told me on the phone. At the bottom were the login details for each of the Lings’ personal email accounts. Paul had a work account too, and if I felt like I needed to go down that route, I’d have Spike hunt around in the hospital system for his details. But for now I concentrated on the three addresses I had.

  There wasn’t much to find in Paul Ling’s account. Two pages of messages, forty-seven in total, suggested he got pretty aggressive with the Delete button. I went through the other folders – Sent, Drafts, Spam, Trash – and found nothing of interest. Going through each of the messages, one at a time, was like an echo of the life I’d seen on his PC desktop: discussions with other doctors, the submissions to medical journals, lighter conversations with friends and family.

  I moved on to Carrie’s account. There were about three times as many messages as I’d found in her husband’s inbox, but as she’d been a stay-at-home wife and mum, most were conversations with friends and family. She was on Olivia’s school committee, and looked to have taken part in a volunteer programme on Mondays, where she went into the school and read to the kids. But otherwise, the same names came up time and time again: friends, fellow school committee members, extended family, a reading group she was involved in in Kingsbridge. There was one surprise, though: an email thread entitled ‘Dissertation’, in which I discovered Carrie had been sixteen months into a two-year part-time MA in History at Exeter University. When I followed the thread back, I discovered that she already had a BA in History from Exeter, which I vaguely remembered once I’d read it, although she’d graduated years before I started dating her sister. Something else came back to me as well: the folder on Paul’s PC marked ‘MA’. It hadn’t been Paul’s, it had been hers. She’d been the one interested in the Soviet Union after the Second World War.

  Finally I moved on to Annabel’s email account. Somehow this felt more intrusive, wading through the messages a 24-year-old had been sending friends, potential suitors, and the teenagers she’d had in her drama class. But nothing stood out.

  I closed the email account, and moved to Paul and Carrie’s financial history. Like everything else so far, it was black and white. Plenty of money in savings, none of it withdrawn in the time since they’d been missing. Manageable mortgage, insurance policies that had remained unchanged for three years, an ordinary list of direct debits – council tax, phone bills, satellite TV – no loans, no money on their credit cards. If they’d left of their own accord, they hadn’t left under any kind of financial pressure.

  Next were the phone records.

  This was a mammoth job. Three phones and one landline, itemized bills for each one, with names and addresses for each of the incoming and outgoing calls in the last six months of 2011 and January of this year. Immediately I could see that no calls had been made from any of the phones after the family disappeared on 7 January, which gave me a definitive full stop, but would ultimately make it harder to find them. Zero calls meant there was a clean break: either they’d done their homework, created a foolproof back-up and made their escape, knowing everything was in place; or it meant they’d been pulled out of their lives against their will, and whoever had done it had covered their tracks. I scrolled quickly through the July-to-December data, seeing if any names leaped out, but as I returned to the top of the first page – to the landline – my food arrived.

  After I was done, I ordered a coffee and started over again, edging through the list of calls to their landline. They didn’t use it much. That wasn’t unusual: with so many free minutes in mobile phone packages, fewer people used landlines these days. I was through the itemized bill inside twenty minutes, with little or nothing to stop me along the way.

  Carrie Ling’s mobile was next. I cross-checked the names Spike had got me with the names in her email account and noticed that, generally, the people who were calling her were the same people emailing. I doubted I’d find much at the school committee or in her reading group, but three-quarters of the way down was a landline for Exeter University. I’d already written down the name of her History professor – Robert Reardon – and, when I went to the university’s website, saw that the main number for the History department was different from the one listed in Carrie’s bill, suggesting this was Reardon’s direct line. I dialled it, but hit a default BT answerphone message, so hung up again. The MA was interesting: Reardon was one of seven people she’d texted on the day the family disappeared, but more than that, the course was the one part of her life where she was doing something for herself. Everything else was out of some wider commitment – to the school, to friends, to Olivia – whereas the MA was solely about her. It was a small, possibly meaningless anomaly, but it stuck with me all the same. In missing persons, changes in people’s lives – however small – were often where the ripple effect began.

  Annabel’s bill was about twice as long as her mum’s and about four or five times as long as her dad’s, but seventy per cent of the numbers were the same nine people. Ignoring the calls to Paul and Carrie, and to the landline at the house, I checked the names and addresses Spike had got me against the names of the people she’d been emailing and found there was a core group of friends that she spoke to three or four times a day, seven days a week. Nothing in the emails she’d sent to any of her friends set off alarm bells. The rest of the calls – to recruitment agencies, to local schools – seemed to back up the picture of Annabel I’d managed to gain already.

  I took a break for a moment, finishing my coffee and clearing my head, and then pushed on. Paul Ling’s itemized bill made up the last three pages, and – like his wife and daughter – many of the numbers married up with the people he was sending emails to.

  But not all.

  One, made in the week before the family went missing, was to a company called Carling Reid, based in Kingsbridge. He called them just once, and only for nine seconds.

  They were a travel agency.

  I googled them. It was a family-run business, specializing in Far Eastern travel. Had he been thinking about going home? I referred back to the first PDF, which included the bank statements for the months prior to their disappearance. No money had been paid to Carling Reid, or to a travel company of any kind. The fact the call lasted for only nine seconds seemed to suggest that even if Paul had phoned with the intention of booking something, he’d changed his mind. The question was why. Had he been thinking about getting the family out of the country, or just himself? Was he running from someone?

  There were four numbers in his bill that weren’t Devon numbers. One was for the Lancet – the
medical journal he’d written for – based in central London. Another was a Cambridge number, which – via one of his email chains – I knew belonged to a friend of his who now worked in paediatrics at the CUH in Cambridge. A third entry didn’t have a number or a physical address, just a series of question marks. It had come through four days before the family disappeared, and Spike had made a note next to it: Not sure what the story is here. Think it might be a spoofing service or some kind of re-origination call.

  A way of disguising the origin of a phone call.

  Was this the reason Paul called the travel agent?

  I moved on to the fourth number.

  An 01822 area code.

  There was no specific address attached to it, other than a road – Long Barn Lane, Princetown. That was in the centre of Dartmoor. I brought the bill closer towards me, flipped back to the start of the records and pinpointed the three conversations Paul had had with whoever had called him from the 01822 number. They were all in the three weeks before he disappeared: one on Tuesday 20 December, for thirty-two minutes, the number calling Paul; one on Friday 23 December, for seventeen minutes, the number to Paul for a second time; and, finally, Paul to the number on Monday 2 January, the conversation lasting eight minutes. A day after that final one, he had received the re-origination call. Twenty-four hours later, he called Carling Reid.