Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  I tuned back in.

  On the TV a reporter was standing on the edge of a winding coastal road, a block of grey-blue sea bleeding into the sky behind her. On her left was a metal barrier, tracing the turn in the road; on her right, a length of blue and white police tape snapping gently in the wind. She had a stern expression on her face: ‘… yet to confirm anything about the victim, other than to say it’s a white male. However, a source we spoke to suggested that identification of the victim could still take weeks owing to the fact that – and I quote – “There are some unusual aspects to the case.” Currently, it’s unclear what that means.’

  It means they haven’t got a clue who he is.

  If police really were saying identification of the body could take weeks – and not just feeding the media a line to keep them occupied – then that almost certainly meant the victim’s prints hadn’t led anywhere. There were two possible reasons for that: one was that they’d lifted prints but couldn’t find a match because the victim wasn’t on file; the other was that they’d failed to lift prints due to decomposition. It was more likely to be the first. Healy reckoned the body had been frozen, which would have helped preserve it, and when Rocastle had come to see me at the house, he’d inadvertently said that police believed the body had been dumped the day before, on Monday. That wouldn’t give it enough time to decompose. Separation of the skin from the digits generally didn’t start until the second week, and even then a good forensic tech would still have been able to lift prints from the skin, whether it was detached or not. The race of the victim was interesting, though.

  A white male.

  That, at least, discounted any of the Ling family. In the back of my mind, I hadn’t been able to let the possibility go that the body on the beach and the disappearance of the family were linked. It seemed a compelling reason for Rocastle to have been involved in both cases and to have come to the house to talk to me himself. Now, though, I could forget about that – and I could forget about the body on the beach.

  Thirty minutes later, a package arrived. It was printouts of the police file on the Lings. Ewan Tasker hadn’t left his name anywhere near it, no details, no indication of who had sent it or where it had come from – but in the right-hand corner of the opening page, he’d scribbled a note: Hope this helps. Emailed audio file of anonymous call to you.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, I spread everything out and started going through it. A lot was a repetition of what Task had told me over the phone two days earlier, and the police interviews with Emily echoed exactly the account she’d given to me. I was pleased about the second part: too often in cases the families of the missing would neglect to tell me things, sometimes by mistake, more often because they were trying to paint a picture-perfect portrait of their loved one, believing that lifestyle or relationship choices might impact negatively on how hard I worked the case. It didn’t necessarily mean Emily had told me everything: I remembered a fleeting look, inside Paul and Carrie’s house, when I’d asked her why they’d waited so long to try for a second child, a look that suggested she hadn’t been completely honest with me. But until I saw a direct connection to the disappearance of the family, I was prepared to let it go. Sometimes, when so much of a life was laid bare, you felt you had to cling on to small secrets in order to retain something of the person you loved. They weren’t Emily’s secrets, but she was their keeper now.

  I skim-read the file from start to finish, then turned back to the beginning and started going through it more methodically, writing down key events in chronological order:

  7 January

  – Family go missing.

  8 January

  – Emily files missing persons report.

  – Ray Muire thinks he sees Paul and Carrie at Farnmoor.

  9 January

  – Ray Muire calls police to report sighting.

  – DCI Colin Rocastle and DC Stuart McInnes, plus forensics, go to Lings’ house. Take DNA samples, fingerprint lifts, etc.

  – Anonymous call made to police re: Miln Cross.

  – Story gets released to the media.

  10 January

  – Barry Rew calls police to tell them he thinks he’s seen Annabel and Olivia close to ExCeL. (HOW DID REW KNOW ABOUT THEM/KNOW WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE? NATIONAL MEDIA COVERAGE WAS THIN ON THE GROUND, EVEN AT THE START … ?)

  11 January

  – McInnes takes over as lead and calls in Missing Persons Bureau (BECAUSE THEY’VE ALREADY HIT A DEAD END AT THIS POINT IN THE INVESTIGATION?).

  – Rocastle ends interest in the case (WHY?).

  17 January

  – Police interview Carter Graham about sighting at Farnmoor.

  I found the answers to my initial questions quickly enough. Despite there not being a lot of national media coverage of the case – at that point, police hadn’t released any information about the way the house had been left, which would have been the angle that got news editors interested – I soon found out how Barry Rew had recognized the girls. In two separate interviews, first over the phone with McInnes, then – thanks to the cooperation of the Met – with McInnes a second time at a station in west London, Rew talked about how his family had come from south Devon, and he still tried to keep up to date with local news. He’d read about the Lings on the internet.

  It was difficult to get a sense of him from the interview. His record was attached, and it didn’t make for pretty reading, yet he spoke lucidly throughout, recalling the same details and articulating them in roughly the same way both times McInnes talked to him.

  One section in the second transcript particularly stood out:

  MCINNES: How did you know it was Annabel and Olivia?

  REW: It looked like them.

  MCINNES: How can you be sure?

  REW: I guess I can’t be, not one hundred per cent.

  MCINNES: But?

  REW: But I’d only been reading about them on the internet that morning. My sister used to live down in Kingsbridge, so I know the village they lived in. What happened to them, all of them just disappearing like that, it stuck with me. You don’t hear much about whole families going missing like that. Like … not together, and definitely not down in south Devon. That place is so safe. It’s like a theme park. So when I saw them, I just knew.

  MCINNES: You knew it was them?

  REW: I was pretty certain, yeah.

  MCINNES: So who was with them?

  REW: Some guy. A white guy.

  MCINNES: Age?

  REW: I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at him.

  MCINNES: Anyone else?

  REW: No. Just the guy. He was driving. From my angle, I could mostly see the girls. The little one had a Mickey Mouse doll.

  In both interviews, McInnes subtly pushed a parallel line of questioning, where he tried to figure out what Rew’s play might be, and why he might lie about seeing the girls. But both times it went nowhere. Nothing in Rew’s record, as chequered as it was, pointed towards any kind of relationship with the Lings, or with anyone else connected to the case. So that only really left one option: he genuinely believed he’d seen them.

  Ultimately, though, it was a dead end. The car had never been traced, because Rew had never been able to get the police even a partial plate. The temporary roadworks had been set up close to Connaught roundabout, at the eastern end of Victoria Dock Road, where there was no street-based CCTV. There were no other eyewitnesses. And then, as I searched the file for any other interviews with Rew, any other contact the police might have had with him in the months after, I found something else. In some paperwork immediately after the transcripts, McInnes had included copies of some daily reports on the status of the investigation, which he’d emailed across to Rocastle. One, dated Tuesday 20 March, stood out:

  No new leads. Figured it might be worth going back to the eyewitnesses, so I called Ray Muire, left a message on voicemail, and am still waiting for him to call back. Barry Rew’s a bit of a shocker, though: couldn’t get him on the p
hone, and no one answered when I drove down to his house. He doesn’t have any family, so I put his name through the computer – turns out he died on 17 Feb from a drug overdose.

  That stopped me.

  So, Rew and Muire were both dead.

  Ewan Tasker had failed to mention that over the phone, probably because he’d been looking to give me the headlines rather than the detail. But clearly there was a pattern: Rew ODs on 17 February; Muire falls into a river eight days later. As I read over McInnes’s email again, a hint of unease took flight in me. And yet investigators – and an autopsy – didn’t find anything suspicious about either of the deaths.

  Included in the file were contact details for Ray Muire’s wife, Martha.

  I noted them down and moved on.

  Next were the transcripts of the interviews with Muire and Carter Graham. Task had been right about Muire’s: he came across as well intentioned, but while both interviews he’d done started out well enough, building a very clear, very precise picture of his day at Farnmoor up to the point at which he’d apparently seen Paul and Carrie, his answers soon became long and difficult to follow. There were inconsistencies too. First, he claimed to have seen Paul and Carrie in front of the barn in the fields outside Farnmoor, but then in the second interview he said they’d been on the other side of it; in one interview he said the person who’d been with them looked like a man, in the second he said he wasn’t sure any more. Rocastle had done both interviews with Muire before he’d passed the case on to McInnes, and from his line of questioning it was obvious that, midway through both, he’d dismissed Muire as a witness they could rely on. Even so, it was easy to see why police hadn’t dismissed him completely. I’d rarely seen such a disconnect in an interview: in one half of it, Muire was as articulate and resolved as you could hope a witness to be; in the other, it was like he was a completely different person.

  Carter Graham was different. He’d talked to McInnes from New York, via video conference, having been in the States since Monday 2 January, after spending Christmas at Farnmoor. Graham spoke eloquently, answered all of McInnes’s questions without hesitation and became more concerned when he heard Ray Muire was the eyewitness:

  GRAHAM: Ray said he saw them?

  MCINNES: Yes, sir. Do you know Ray Muire?

  GRAHAM: He’s a very old friend of mine. A dear friend.

  MCINNES: So you believe him?

  GRAHAM: I trust Ray implicitly.

  MCINNES: He’s saying he saw that family on your land.

  GRAHAM: That’s what I understand you to mean, yes.

  MCINNES: Why would that family have been on your land?

  GRAHAM: I don’t know. I mean, some of it’s a public right of way, so it’s hard for us to police everyone who comes and goes, but I don’t know … I’ve no idea why they would be there.

  MCINNES: So you’re saying they could have been there?

  GRAHAM: I’m saying it’s perfectly possible, yes. Look, I’m not home for long periods of time, and I wasn’t at home at the time of the sighting, but if you speak to my PA – her name’s Katie Francis – she’ll know the comings and goings there. If you find any of her answers unsatisfactory, I’d be happy to get involved.

  I was impressed by Graham’s statement. When you had as much money as he did, things tended to lose their value quickly – including friends and family – but there was no sense of that with him. He seemed genuine, was courteous to McInnes and frequently repeated the same offer of help. Despite that, there was nothing of any real substance in the interview. It was getting easier to see why the investigation had hit a wall so quickly.

  The evidence inventory listed everything – computers, paperwork, even clothes – that forensics had taken from the Lings’ house in the days after they went missing. None of it led anywhere, just as Ewan Tasker had said the day before. Trace evidence, fibres, prints, were a similar dead end. I went down the list again, seeing if anything leaped out.

  Halfway down, I found something: Paul’s wallet.

  I flipped back through my notes and found the conversation I’d had with Emily a couple of days before. Paul’s wallet – last thing to be returned in July/August. I’d asked myself at the time why police had held on to it for so long. Most of the rest of the Lings’ possessions were returned to them inside the first couple of months.

  The wallet took seven.

  According to the entry, something had been found inside the wallet alongside the usual array of cards, money and receipts: a list – or, at least, the beginnings of one – on a page torn from an A6 notebook. Forensics had quickly matched it to Paul’s handwriting.

  The list had just three words.

  Parker. Cathedral. Dicloflex.

  I grabbed my phone. ‘Parker’ got me eighty-five million search results in Google, and nothing I found on the first three pages seemed to connect with the family. ‘Cathedral’ gave me twenty-five million results, and just as little to go on. When I flicked forward to the investigating team’s findings, I discovered they’d been back through every aspect of the Lings’ lives on discovering the list, trying to find some kind of connection: companies called Parker the Lings had used, worked alongside or been in contact with; then anything in their life that vaguely connected them to a cathedral of any kind. They found nothing. Trying to narrow it down would have been long, arduous and futile work, and eventually the line of inquiry dried up completely.

  The third word, however, was different.

  Dicloflex was a prescription painkiller.

  To treat what, though?

  I turned the question over in my head as I moved through to the living room and switched on my Mac. Emily hadn’t mentioned any illnesses in the family – but then I’d never specifically asked, and maybe she hadn’t thought to say. I made a note to call her.

  Now the only thing I had left was the audio file.

  I dragged it out of my email and on to the desktop.

  Then I hit Play.

  It started with a jet of static before settling down into silence. One ring. Two. Three. Then a 999 operator picked up. The person on the line asked for the police. I paused the audio, dragged it back a couple of seconds and played his voice again. ‘Police.’

  That was it. One word only.

  Six seconds later, a police operator answered. ‘I’m calling about that family that went missing – the Lings. I saw the husband and wife at Miln Cross today. You should go down and take a look.’ And then he hung up. I dragged the slider back to the start of the call and listened again. The person’s voice was muffled, as if they were pressing the handset too close to their face. In the background there was virtually no sound. Maybe a faint buzz that was probably the line. Only that. I went back through to the kitchen and grabbed the case file to see what forensics had made of the call. They’d been into it and ripped it apart looking for low-level sounds, and came back with a short list: the ticking of a clock, the buzz of a TV. But as I read further down, something else caught my eye.

  Police had been unable to trace the location of the call, even retrospectively, and by way of explanation a forensic tech had written: Substituted CLI. Caller line identity. By substituting the CLI during the call’s journey, you disguised its origin.

  Six days earlier, Paul Ling had received the same type of call.

  Maybe even from the same person.

  27

  There were no medical records for any of the family in the case file, but it was safe to assume that, on finding mention of Dicloflex in Paul Ling’s wallet, police would have secured a warrant for them. Again, the lack of progress on the case since the discovery of the list suggested that, even if they’d matched the drug to an illness one of the family may have had, it hadn’t led them to anything worthwhile. The other two names on the list were probably the reason police had held on to the wallet for so long: they’d been trying to find out if there was a connection between whatever or whoever Parker and Cathedral were and the mention of the painkiller. When I tried to
second-guess the police, I kept coming back to the only theory that made sense: one was the name of a doctor, and the other was a medical insurer, or perhaps a clinic. There was no way of knowing for sure, though. I’d found no indication of a private medical scheme in any of the Lings’ financials.

  I grabbed my phone and scrolled through the address book until I found Emily’s landline. It was Saturday, so there was a good chance she’d be at home. Once she answered, we chatted for a couple of minutes about how things were going, but I danced around much of what I’d learned so far. I wanted her as clear-headed as possible. She hadn’t mentioned any of the family as having been seriously ill, probably because – if they had – she’d never seen the relevance, or none of them had been sick in the recent past.

  ‘Let me ask you something,’ I said to her eventually. ‘Have any of the family suffered any kind of serious illness over the past two to three years?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Something came up.’

  A pause.

  ‘Emily?’

  ‘Yes.’ She sounded in pain. ‘Annabel.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Almost two years back …’ A pause. ‘She was involved in this car accident. It was awful. Some idiot was going too fast, lost control of his car and drove right into the side of her. We were all just …’ Another pause, longer this time. ‘We were all just stunned. I remember feeling … it’s hard to put it into words. Just numb. The worst bit was having to watch her in the days after. The fear in her face. She thought she was going to lose her leg. I mean, that’s what they told her. It was all I could do not to constantly cry.’

  ‘I guess Paul and Carrie took it even harder than you.’