Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  Again, no reaction.

  Come on, Lee.

  I put my ear to his mouth, but I couldn’t feel his breath. When I came back up again, I had a brief moment of dizziness, rolling from side to side like I was adrift in an ocean. Once things settled, I shifted left on my knees and dropped to his chest.

  Please be alive.

  But there was nothing.

  No breath.

  No heartbeat.

  Part Four

  43

  Three hours later, I watched as a forensic team continued to move through the house. They were done in the kitchen; now they were in the living room. There were three of them, all dressed in the same white paper boiler suits: one at the rear doors dusting down the frames; one on his hands and knees at the sofa taking scrapings from the blood; and one out in the garden, on his haunches, placing a marker by a stray nail. The electricity had been restored, but they’d also set up two big standalone lamps.

  After forensics had bagged my clothes I’d had my statement taken, and now I was watching the scene-of-crime officer ripping a uniform apart for not sticking to the prescribed route in and out of the house. ‘It’s there for a bloody reason!’ she shouted at him. The SOCO was a woman in her forties, with a soft expression that was at odds with the sort of things she must have found at crime scenes. She emerged from the living room, passed me at the kitchen table and then headed outside, into the night.

  That was when I saw Rocastle.

  He was out on the driveway, holding an umbrella above him, talking to a couple of uniforms, one of whom was an inspector. The inspector had come in as I was giving my initial statement, and listened to what I had to say. He looked officious and naturally inclined to disbelieve anything anyone had to say, which was good preparation for what was coming next. After Rocastle nodded a couple of times, he made a beeline for me.

  Inside the door he stopped, flicked the rainwater off his umbrella and leaned it against the wall. Then he unbuttoned his coat and came across the kitchen.

  Outside, the weather was getting worse, storms swelling in the sky out to sea. He sat down. ‘Weather could be better,’ he said.

  ‘A lot of things could be better.’

  ‘True.’ He reached inside his jacket pocket and took out the same notebook and pen he’d had the first time he’d been to the house. He placed them down on the table, set them parallel to one another and took a long, deep breath. ‘Sorry about your friend.’

  I nodded.

  He looked out of the window. ‘You remember when I came up here the first time? I think my exact words to you were, “If you’re getting in my way, that’s when we have a problem.” You recall how I asked you not to get involved in my case?’

  ‘I didn’t realize I was.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s cute.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  He turned back to me, running a hand through his beard. ‘I don’t know what kind of village idiot you’re used to dealing with down here, David, but the fisherman that just happened to turn up at your house earlier on was a fairly significant part of the case I was trying to build. You do remember that case, right? The one where a body washed up on the fucking beach?’ He spoke softly, but he was angry. His words were clipped and sharp, the muscles in his face set like concrete. ‘Another case that has absolutely nothing to do with you somehow ends up with you front and centre of it. I’m wondering, do you have problems understanding basic English, or are you just wilfully ignorant?’

  ‘Prouse tried to kill me.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘What, you think I’m lying?’ I leaned forward, pointing to the bruises streaked across my face like ink spills. ‘Why don’t you take a closer look at these?’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘What am I supposed to do when someone comes to my house, puts a gun against my head and tells me he’s going to blow my brains out?’

  He shrugged. ‘You’d know better than me.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, you’re the one with all the experience of catching bad guys. Maybe we should be wheeling you out at police training days. Hell, maybe you should be in charge.’

  I shook my head. ‘This is pointless.’

  ‘Well, you’re right about that, at least.’ We sat in silence for a moment, staring at each other, then Rocastle flipped the cover on his notebook and picked up his pen. ‘Your statement says you don’t know why Prouse turned up here and attacked you. That right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He didn’t say?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So he was just completely silent the whole time?’

  I looked at him. ‘When you came to the house, I asked you whether there was any kind of connection between that body on the beach and the disappearance of the Lings.’

  He put his pen down again. ‘So?’

  ‘So, is there?’

  ‘I thought I already answered this.’

  ‘You sidestepped the question.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Where’s this going, David?’

  ‘You told me to keep my nose out of your case and that’s exactly what I’ve done.’ I looked at him with a blank, unreadable expression and let that settle. It wasn’t totally true, but I didn’t care. ‘Prouse was your witness, not mine. Prouse had nothing to do with me. Up until tonight, he had nothing to do with the Lings – I haven’t found a single link between him and the family. So why the hell was he trying to kill me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I smiled ruefully. ‘Of course you don’t.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Stop being so obtuse.’

  ‘Obtuse?’

  ‘You’re just making this harder.’

  ‘How exactly am I making this harder, David?’

  ‘Prouse links the cases.’

  ‘Not any more he doesn’t.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if he’s dead or alive, he links them.’

  ‘He’s useless to me now.’

  ‘He’s not usel–’

  ‘He was my best fucking lead!’

  In the living room, the forensic team all looked up. Rocastle glanced at them and then slumped back in his chair, arms crossed, and turned and looked out of the window.

  ‘Look,’ I said, keeping my voice even, ‘I don’t expect you to like me. I accept that the police will view me with suspicion, wherever I go and whatever I do. There’s nothing I can do about that. If I cared about what people thought, I’d never find a single person. You, as much as anyone, must know that.’ A brief smile formed on his face, as if there was some resonance to what I was saying. ‘I just want to find out where the Lings are. That’s what I’ve been asked to do. That’s what I want to do. That family, they deserve to be found.’

  The forefinger of his right hand, flat to the notepad, started tapping out a soft rhythm. A seagull squawked and passed the house. Finally, he shifted in his seat and fixed his gaze on me. ‘So what are you proposing?’

  ‘How about comparing notes?’

  A snort. ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s definitely not a joke.’

  He could see the rest written in my face: Or you can refuse – and I’ll just keep on digging, and keep getting in your way, until I find out where the family have gone.

  Rocastle turned to the window again and looked out into the night, his eyes tracing the shoreline, the sea wall and, finally, the cove. ‘The body on the beach,’ he said quietly, distantly, a far-off look in his eyes, ‘it’s a waste of time. The case is going nowhere. No dental records, no prints, nothing in the database.’ He smiled, just a parting of the lips, but this one was more mournful. ‘All we know about him is that someone stuck him in a fridge.’

  ‘How did he end up on the beach?’

  A shrug. ‘To start with, we worked from the assumption someone had thrown his body from the top, over the side of the cliff. But we’ve been studying the tidal patterns.’
>
  ‘You think he washed in?’

  ‘I think he was dumped out to sea.’

  Out to sea.

  He glanced at me and saw I’d made the connection. A subtle nod of confirmation. ‘You can see why I was so interested in Mr Prouse. He had his own boat, no one in the village seems to know that much about him – at least not what he does in his personal life – and something your friend Healy said to me also stuck. He said, when Prouse took him to the body, the fisherman showed no emotion at all. Zero. He wasn’t surprised or horrified by the sight of what was there on the beach. In my experience, even an old sea dog like Prouse would baulk if he’d found a corpse, however many times he’d seen it.’

  ‘You didn’t have anything to tie him to it?’

  Rocastle shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘What about the Lings?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Is there anything that might connect Prouse to them?’

  He held his hands out in a you tell me gesture. ‘I was only on their disappearance for a few days. You probably know all this already. McInnes was running the show, but he’d just got a promotion, was new to this part of the world, and the super said I should ride along for a few days, make sure everything was all right. So I helped set things up.’

  ‘What did you make of it?’

  ‘Them disappearing? Probably the same as you. It was weird.’ He became distant again for a moment as he cast his mind back. ‘It was all weird. That was another reason the super asked me to help out. The way the house was left – the dog wandering around, the food on the stove – nothing at Farnmoor, nothing at Miln Cross, and yet we had two unreliable eyewitnesses spinning two pretty convincing stories; and then there were a whole bunch of leads that went precisely nowhere.’ He seemed almost to shudder out of the memories. ‘Did you find your way to that old farmhouse up on Dartmoor?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘You didn’t find anything there?’

  ‘McInnes said it was empty.’

  ‘It wasn’t empty.’ I looked through to the living room. Lee’s body had long since gone, but his blood remained, dried and hard on the carpet and the sofa. In the light from the lamps, it looked pink and streaky, like a floor of frayed ribbon. ‘Lee was living there.’

  ‘In the house?’

  ‘In the roof. He said he saw McInnes snooping around, and by the time he came back the next day with a warrant, Lee had cleared the place out. McInnes was just unlucky.’

  ‘And you weren’t?’

  I shrugged. ‘I had the advantage of knowing Lee. He wasn’t worried about me in the same way he was worried about the cops. That made him sloppy.’ I remembered what else he’d said to me when he’d called the phone box. 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. I looked at Rocastle. ‘Lee was running from something. A group of some kind. I think they might have been the same people who kidnapped the Lings.’

  ‘Based on what evidence?’

  ‘Based on what Lee told me.’

  If I wanted to get something back, I knew I’d have to give him something in return. So I met him halfway. I told him about what had happened to Annabel, her accident, her recovery in the States, how Lee had paid for and organized everything, and how Schiltz had been their doctor. And then, finally, I told him why it had all gone wrong. ‘Carrie saw some sort of photograph at Schiltz’s place.’

  ‘Photograph?’

  ‘A photograph she shouldn’t have seen.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I don’t know. But, whatever it was, I think that’s why the family were kidnapped. Trouble was, Carrie made a copy of the photograph and she hid it somewhere, and now no one can find it. And whoever these people are, and whoever they work for, they’re trying to get to it, whatever the cost – because it’s big enough to bring them all down.’

  ‘So she didn’t tell them where the copy was?’

  I looked at him silently, and we both understood. She didn’t tell them, and it cost her. A sadness settled around us, heavy and funereal.

  ‘Nothing about the Ling disappearance felt right,’ Rocastle said. ‘That guy in London – Rew – getting back on the drugs after three years of being clean. Him and Muire ending up six feet under the ground inside eight days of one another.’ He shrugged. ‘Even for a man who believes in coincidence, that takes a lot of swallowing.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask around about Rew yourself?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You must have had contacts at the Met?’

  He didn’t reply for a long time, eyeing me, trying to figure out how I knew about his time in London. ‘I was CIB, David. A rubber heeler. Do you know what that means? It means no one trusts you. No one wants to help you. In all my time up there I only met about three people who ever treated me like a cop and not some sneering backstabber.’ He sighed. ‘When Muire died, the Ling case got flushed. It was over. In February, we had no leads, no idea where they’d gone, all we had were two eyewitnesses – and, by March, we didn’t even have that. We just had a drunk floating in the Dart, and a dead junkie. We had no trail to the Lings, not at the start and not at the end. And now my latest case is going down the shitter as well.’ He looked into the living room, where the forensic team were finishing up. ‘So, how is Prouse connected to the Lings?’ He said it quietly, remotely, not even really a question. ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

  He continued staring at the forensic team.

  The conversation was over.

  ‘Well,’ Rocastle said, flipping his notebook shut and tuning back in. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to remind you everything I just told you, I told you in complete confidence.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  He looked at me momentarily, as if he wasn’t sure he believed me, then pocketed his notebook and stood. ‘I’d better see how the search for our old friend Prouse is going.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You said he headed up into the hills?’

  ‘Yes. After I managed to get the better of him, I came back inside and checked on Lee, and …’ I paused, a moment of clarity hitting me like a wrecking ball: two hours ago, he died on your living-room floor. ‘I went back out to the garden and he was gone.’

  ‘We’ll find him,’ Rocastle said.

  ‘I hope you do.’

  ‘He can’t have gone far.’

  I watched Rocastle go, then looked down towards the sea wall, to where my car had been parked for the past three and a half hours.

  No, I thought. Prouse hasn’t gone far at all.

  44

  At the Ley, a mile out of the village, I killed the car engine and listened to the rain on the roof. The darkness was absolute. There were no more street lights until a small knot of houses another mile further on. Here, out on the edges of the lake, there were only sounds: water gently lapping on the shore; animals, out in the black, cawing and crying out; the constant, unceasing whine of the wind, and the gentle chatter of rain.

  I grabbed a torch from the passenger seat and headed around to the boot. Very softly, its noise deadened by high banks of shingle between the Ley and the beach, the sea crackled, its noise metronomic like a record stuck in a loop. I popped the boot, lifted it up and a pair of eyes caught the light from the torch. Prouse – gagged, arms tied, ankles bound – looked up at me. There was blood all over his front: his stomach, his arm, on his cheek, matted like treacle in his beard. In his hand one of the nails remained, piercing the triangle of skin between his thumb and forefinger. I’d tied his hands together so that one set of knuckles was pressed to the other, making it impossible for him to remove the nail.

  His eyes flicked past me, trying to get a sense of where we were. He’d know soon enough. He knew this area better than me. But for now, I enjoyed the sense of confusion in his face. His eyes moved left, right, over my shoulder and down past my hip,
trying to understand where he was and how he’d got here. But then he had to start blinking away the drizzle as it drifted in at him, and I filled in the gaps in his memory: ‘You killed Lee Wilkins and you tried to kill me.’ He eyes fell on me. ‘Now I’m going to find out why.’

  I clamped two hands on his arm and heaved him out of the boot.

  He came halfway and then his clothes caught on something, the breath jetting out of his nose making him sound almost feral, like a muzzled dog. I pulled at him a second time, hauled him all the way out and dumped him on to the dirt track. He cried out again, the noise instantly washed away by the melody of the lake. I shone the torch back up the dirt track I’d come in on. It was a quarter of a mile long, overgrown and silent. On the edges of the water, this far in, all anyone would see from the road was a wall of reeds.

  I’d be fine here for as long as I needed to be.

  Bending down, I ripped the duct tape away from his mouth and stuck it to the car in case I needed it again. His breathing began to regulate. I didn’t let on that my own head was still pounding: I’d hit the side of my skull before anything else when the chair had tipped over, and the paramedics who’d attended to me after I’d called the police, and lied to them about Prouse, told me I had mild concussion and gave me a dose of aspirin. I’d waited five hours after the police left, to make sure they weren’t coming back and to try and clear my head, but it had made no difference at all.

  ‘You’re in some deep shit here, boy,’ Prouse said.

  He was hoarse from the gag, from trying to scream through it, from the lack of air in the boot. I changed the settings on the torch so it switched to a muted yellow glow, and then set it down on the back bumper of the BMW, angled towards him.

  ‘Where are the family?’

  His lips peeled back in a smile. He tried to shift position on the mud, but with his hands and legs tied together he just slithered around like an eel caught on dry land.

  ‘Where are the Lings?’ I said again, in exactly the same tone.

  ‘Why the fuck should I tell you?’

  I reached around to the back of my trousers and removed the Glock 19 he’d been pressing to my head only hours before. His eyes narrowed when he saw it, as if he didn’t think I’d have the balls to fire it. ‘Let me ask you something,’ I said, placing the gun on the bumper, next to the torch. ‘Does it even bother you that you killed a man tonight?’