by Tim Weaver
If you’d ever even had a choice.
‘Did you ever worry about him before then?’
‘Worry about him?’
‘That the combination of the drink and his eyesight might be a problem?’
‘We’re old, David, but not that old.’
It seemed another weird answer, but before I had the chance to follow up on it, she said, ‘I’m sorry to be rude, but I’m meeting a friend in twenty minutes.’
‘Of course.’
‘If you want to know anything else, you can call me again.’
‘I appreciate that, Mrs Muire. Thank you.’
‘It’s been a pretty terrible year what with one thing and another.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Ray going like that, then the house …’
‘House?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I was burgled a month after Ray died.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ But my mind was already ticking over. ‘What was taken?’
‘That was just the thing. Nothing, really. They smashed the front door in, left the house in an awful mess, but the only thing they took was a photograph from a frame.’
‘A photograph of what?’
‘A photograph of Ray.’
29
Once I got on to Dartmoor, the weather changed. Cloud rolled in, coming fast over the hills, as I followed a lonely B-road into the heart of the park. After about ten minutes it started to spit with rain. After twenty, the roads were awash with rivers of water as big, gnarled stormclouds opened in the skies above. Through the heavy rain it was hard to see the phone box initially, but – as the rooftops of Princetown came into view in the distance – it emerged from behind a bank of trees that had already been stripped of their leaves for winter.
Beyond it was the farmhouse, empty in the pictures I’d seen of it on Google. As there was nowhere to park on the road, I turned off and headed up the dirt track towards the house. The road up was like the building: broken, pockmarked, and in desperate need of repair. Out front there was the space for three cars, but there were no vehicles – save the rusting skeleton of a tractor in an adjacent barn – and no sign of life. If anything, the house looked in an even worse state than it had online. A door. Two windows. Two more on the first floor, one of which was missing a small pane of glass and part of its shutter. A cluster of roof tiles were ripped off too. Everything around the house was overgrown.
I killed the engine and looked back across my shoulder, to the B-road I’d come in on, then down to the phone box. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d been expecting. Maybe, in my more hopeful moments, some kind of marker; an idea of why someone would choose this phone in particular. But, in reality, I hadn’t been expecting a revelation, and I knew why the caller had chosen this place: it was a public payphone on the edge of a village in the most remote part of the county. No CCTV. No onlookers. No chance of being caught.
A couple of seconds later, my phone started buzzing.
Number withheld.
I pushed Answer. ‘David Raker.’
‘Raker, it’s Healy.’
I hadn’t been expecting to hear from him, and as I tried to imagine why he might be calling I knew, instinctively, it wouldn’t be a social call. That wasn’t how Healy was programmed. I couldn’t remember a single time in the year we’d known each other when he’d picked up the phone to see how I was. So that really left only one possibility.
He needed something.
‘Healy. How are you?’
‘Fine.’
He didn’t say anything else.
‘What’s it like being back in the big, bad city?’
‘Same as it ever was.’
‘Where are you staying?’
A pause. ‘Just a place I know.’
Terse, guarded answers. This was a conversation we’d had countless times – and usually in the days before I had to dig him out of the mire. ‘What’s going on, Healy?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
A long silence on the line. In the background, I could hear the faint sounds of the city: endless cars, buses wheezing into action, distant police sirens. ‘I’ve got a question.’
‘Which is?’
A moment of hesitation. ‘You heard anything about that body?’
Here we go. ‘Why?’
‘I’m just interested.’
‘Why?’
‘I told you, I’m just interested.’
‘Come on, Healy. We both know that’s not true.’
Silence.
‘That body doesn’t matter any more,’ I said to him.
‘What, a murder victim doesn’t matter to you?’
‘You know I didn’t mean that.’
‘Then what did you mean?’
I felt my hackles rise, but this time didn’t bother reining myself in: ‘I haven’t got time for another argument, okay?’ I stopped, letting that hit home – but not long enough for him to cut in. ‘It’s irrelevant, Healy. I told you that. You aren’t a cop any more. The whole point of moving back to London was to make a fresh start.’
‘Was it?’
‘You said it yourself.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘You did.’
‘Don’t tell me what I said, you patronizing prick.’
‘I’m not patronizing you, Healy. Don’t you get that? I’m trying to save you from yourself. Have you ever stopped to think about what would happen if Rocastle, or one of the others on that team, found you snooping around an active case?’
No response.
‘Healy?’
‘You think I’m cooked, is that it?’
And then it all fell into place.
I remembered he’d said the exact same thing to me before he’d left: You think I haven’t got anything left in the tank. Everyone thinks I’m done. Suddenly, I could read between the lines: while he was still in Devon he’d tried to prove me wrong, tried to get back in touch with his old colleagues at the Met to show me his sources were as good as mine. But they’d turned him down flat. Now the embarrassment and anger burned in him.
‘Just let it go, Healy.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Forget the body. Forget everything. Start over.’
Nothing.
Then, finally, he said, ‘I’ll see you around.’
And the line went dead.
30
Getting out of the car, rain drifting in towards me, I headed to the front door of the house. It was locked. So were the windows. Shutters, not clipped to the walls, swung in the wind, moaning gently as they moved. I walked around to the sides of the house to see whether I could get through to the back. On the right, it was overrun: knee-high grass crawled out of the broken concrete path, while a waterfall of brambles and ferns cascaded down from a patch of raised vegetation above. When the house had been lived in and cared for, the fact that it was carved into the slope of the hill would have made it attractive. But, after years of neglect, the moors had started to claim it back: bleak and lifeless, it had no heartbeat any more – and, gradually, it was being returned to the earth.
On the left, I managed to find a narrow path through more vegetation, helped by the fact that the barn was directly adjacent to the property on this side, acting as a barrier between the moors and the house. I took a look through both downstairs windows before heading around. The first, to the left of the front door, was smeared with grease. It was difficult to see anything other than two vertical blobs, which I assumed were patio doors at the other end. The second window looked into a room with nothing in it. No carpet, just floorboards. No furniture. No light fittings. The only hint the room had even been occupied at one time were square marks on the faded wallpaper – like echoes from another time – where pictures had once hung. I headed around to the back garden.
Except there was no garden, just a small paved area, broken slabs sitting awkwardly in their beds, grass and weeds coming throug
h between them. A stone wall, gently curving from one side of the house to the other, rose up twelve feet, enclosing the patio. Ferns and grass spilt over it, clawing their way down from the slope of the hill.
On the ground floor there was a back door – originally painted blue, but bleached by age and weather – a long window, and the patio doors I’d seen from the front; on the first floor, two windows, both boarded up. Cupping my hands to the glass of the patio doors, I looked inside. It was a living room, running all the way along to the window I’d been looking through minutes before. No carpets, nothing on the walls, no furniture.
Through the rear door, I could see a pokey kitchen. Old-fashioned cabinets. A sink with nothing in it. No appliances of any kind. In the space where the washing machine should have been, the outlet hose snaked off across the room; where a fridge had once stood I could see four impressions – carved into stained, beige-coloured lino – where its feet had dug in. I tried the door, expecting it to be closed.
Instead, it swung away from the frame.
I stood there for a moment, fingers still around the handle, paused in the open doorway. Then, finally, I stepped into the house and pushed the door shut. The sound of the rain dropped away instantly, reduced to a gentle background chant. Inside it was silent. Even in empty homes there was usually noise: the hum of the refrigerator, the soft tick of a clock, but here there was nothing.
The kitchen had been completely stripped back. Anything not nailed down was gone. I pulled out drawers, slowly, quietly, looking over my shoulder the whole time, into the hallway that led off this room. I expected to find some forgotten utensils, old cans of food, reminders that this place had once been lived in, but everything had been removed. Perhaps whoever had once lived here could see what was happening. The walls were decaying, blackened by damp, moisture running in trails from the coving; the cabinets were uneven, sinking in on themselves, rotting from the inside out. The whole house was dying, slowly and painfully, as if it were a real, living thing.
When I was done, I walked to the hallway door and stopped. The living room was off to the right. Stairs to the left. The empty, smaller room at the front of the building was beyond the stairs. More walls infected with damp. No furniture. No carpets. I carried on along the hall to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. I could see only two doors, but I knew there were four rooms. Two at the front. Two at the back.
I made my way up. At the top, the house suddenly got darker. The two rooms at the front – empty and stripped of furniture – both had windows, but the two at the back were boarded up. There was no light anywhere inside them. Chips of glass lay on the floor beneath the windowsill in the first, and an old dark-wood fireplace, gradually losing its colour, was cut into the wall. As I took another step in, I felt floorboards bend beneath my feet, and the gentle suck of moisture. More rot. More decay.
Then a noise.
I listened for a moment. It sounded like it was coming from outside, although it was hard to tell for sure. Upstairs, the rain was louder, drumming hard against the roof and coming through to the ceiling itself where the tiles had fallen away. I backed out and edged along the hallway to the second, darker room.
This one wasn’t empty.
Pushed up against the far wall was a bed: it had an old metal frame, flecked with rust, its springs on the point of collapse. On top of it was a thin, blow-up mattress.
On top of that was a sleeping bag.
I stayed in the doorway but leaned further in, just in case I’d missed someone in the shadows. But there was no one waiting. When I edged further forward, my eyes started to adjust and I made out a wooden storage box – about five feet long by three feet wide – next to the bed. I dropped to my haunches in front of it and flipped the lid.
There were three separate sections. In the first was tinned food: processed meat, vegetables, fruit, rice pudding, stacked up three tins deep. In the second was a box of teabags, packets of biscuits, crisps, some fresh fruit, a tin of powdered milk and some cereal. In the third was a portable gas stove, with a green aluminium kettle sitting on top. Basically, nothing that required refrigeration or electricity.
Then the same noise again.
Closing the box, I moved out to the landing, then down the stairs to the ground floor. At the bottom I paused, trying to pinpoint the noise. For a moment, all I could hear was the rain, sweeping in against the house. But then, briefly, I heard the same sound again; a split second of it. Shrill. Mechanical.
Is it a car engine?
Quickly, I made my way back through to the kitchen. The rain was heavier than ever, drumming against the windows. I stepped out, into the storm, closing the door behind me, and moved to the corner of the building. Peered around. Tried to see if anything had changed. There was no one approaching and my car was still where I’d left it. But if someone’s staying here, they’ll be back.
I was already soaked – clothes plastered to me, water running down my face, hair matted to my scalp – and the weather was only getting worse. Clouds were darkening. Wind was picking up. Inside five minutes the roofs and spires of Princetown – only half a mile away – would disappear behind a wall of rain. Inside ten, I’d be struggling to see the road. That meant I wouldn’t see anyone approach – but, with the car still in front of the farmhouse, they’d be able to see me. It was time to get the BMW somewhere else.
I hurried across to it, mind ticking over, trying to remember any places on the way in that I could leave it. A lay-by. A side road. Somewhere I could walk in from. I looked in at the empty barn, past the rusting machinery, mud and hay caked to the floor.
And then I stopped again.
Suddenly, I could hear the noise more clearly than ever. Beyond the rain, beyond the sound of it beating against the corrugated iron of the barn. I swivelled and looked back at the house. It lay dormant, dark, the undergrowth either side of it swaying in the wind, massaged by it; a sea of ferns, grass and thorns, rising and falling like waves.
But it wasn’t coming from the house.
It was coming from the main road.
Someone was calling the phone box.
31
It took me half a minute to get back down to the main road. The phone never stopped ringing the whole time. At the bottom of the drive, I paused, looking both ways. No cars. No people. The phone box was about fifty feet further along, its glass panels steaming up, condensation breaking in thin lines out of the dome-shaped roof. Inside, it was empty.
I headed towards it as water sloshed in the gully to my side and puddles formed in the uneven tarmac. Trees swayed as I passed under them, leaves snapping and twisting. I was starting to feel cold now. The wind was icy, funnelled along the road by the walls on either side of me. As I got to the phone box and pulled the door open, there seemed to be a momentary lull, the rain easing off, the wind dying down. Then, as I stepped inside, the storm stirred and came again, great sheets of water smashing against the glass. I pulled the door shut and placed my fingers around the handset. And then I picked it up.
Silence on the line. Then some distortion.
‘What do you want?’ A man.
I looked out of the phone box again, in both directions along the road, and across into the fields opposite the house. ‘I just want to talk,’ I said.
‘About what?’
‘About the Ling family.’
No response. I looked for a third time, trying to spot him through the rain. If he could see me, I should have been able to see him.
‘You need to leave,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘It’s safer that way.’
‘For you or for me?’
More distortion. ‘You think this is a game?’
He said it matter-of-factly; calmly, evenly. I turned to the house, damp and dark and being taken back by the fields around it. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think this is a game.’
‘Are you sure? Because you look like you’re enjoying this.’
There was no one on th
e road. No one in any of the fields I had a view of. No one at the house. Because you look like you’re enjoying this. Was it just a figure of speech or did he really have a clear sight of me? I removed my mobile phone and placed it on top of the dial box. The line crackled and shifted, as if the caller was moving around.
‘Seriously, why are you here?’ He sounded more impatient now. When I didn’t respond, I could sense his agitation rise again. ‘Huh? Why are you here?’
‘I want to find that family.’
‘Forget them.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Just forget them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they don’t matter.’ His breath crackled down the line. ‘Nothing matters any more. It’s all fucked. Forget that family. Drop the search for them. Walk away.’
‘I can’t do that.’
He sighed. ‘Do you want to get killed? Is that what you want? Because they’ll do it. They’ll bury you so far under the earth, even the worms won’t find you.’
‘Who will?’
‘Are you listening?’
‘I’m listening. Who are we talking about?’
‘We’re not talking about anyone. This is me telling you what’s going to happen.’ He stopped, sighed, and then said very calmly, ‘Do yourself a favour. Walk away.’
‘I told you: I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I want to find the family.’
‘Forget them.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Forget them!’
I turned back to my mobile phone. I’d placed it there for a reason. Moving it right to left, I pretended to scroll through the address book, and for a second time the line glitched and shifted, like the signal was drifting. There was something else, too: the very gentle sound of footsteps. He’s moving around again. I stepped in even closer, hunching over the phone, and the same sounds came again. He’s trying to get a better view of me.
