Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  I clicked on the first one. A movie of Olivia came on: she was dancing around her room, hair done up, singing into an empty tube of Pringles. It felt somehow intrusive watching her, and I thought again how desperate this move had been. When one video ended, the next one started up automatically: Olivia again, taken moments after the end of the last video, same clothes, same Pringles tube, a different song. I watched her, anguish mixed with frustration, and then got up and went to the window. As I looked out into the road, one video stopped and another began. Olivia again, a third different song.

  Where next?

  The road was still quiet. No cars. No people. Beyond, out on the lake, small boats – smudged and indistinct – drifted across its surface. All the time, rain continued falling.

  Behind me, Olivia had stopped dancing and was talking to the camera. ‘When I get older, I’m going to have twenty-five dogs and they’re all going to run around the garden chasing each other.’ Listening, I felt a deep, pervading sadness. ‘I’m going to call one of them Lexy, and she’s going to be the mummy, and look after all the pups.’

  As Olivia’s voice played in the background, I tried to get everything straight in my head. Things had quickly gone bad. All three men, anyone who knew who Daniel Kalb might be, were dead. The police were going to come at me for lying about Prouse. The trip up here had been wasted. There was a dissertation on a laptop that didn’t exist.

  Where the hell do I go next?

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Shut up. Just shut up.’

  I turned back to the laptop.

  Olivia was gone.

  ‘But, Mum–’

  ‘Just shut up.’

  The next movie was a shot from the landing, down through the slats in the bannister, in the direction of the kitchen. The quality of the footage was poor, everything blocky and pixellated. But then I realized what I was seeing: Paul Ling being filmed from upstairs, backed up against one of the kitchen worktops, the fridge door open next to him. There was a four-pint bottle of milk on the floor, slowly emptying out across the lino.

  Spreading around his feet.

  And around the feet of the man who had come for him.

  54

  Next to Paul Ling was a man, dressed head-to-toe in black, a balaclava on his head with the eyes, nose and mouth cut out. He was holding a gun. For a moment, everything was still – and then, like an animal trap snapping shut, the man grabbed Paul by the arm, spun him around, clamped his other, gloved hand to Paul’s mouth and put the gun to his head.

  ‘Quiet.’

  ‘But Dad is–’

  ‘Quiet.’

  Carrie and Annabel. They’d been upstairs when the man had come for them. A couple of seconds later, another voice, off camera: ‘Daddy!’ It was Olivia. ‘Daddy!’ She sounded distressed. The camera rocked a little, and I heard a sharp intake of breath from Carrie – the helpless cries of her eight-year-old were like a knife twisting in her guts.

  ‘They’ve got Liv now,’ Annabel whispered, tearful. ‘Who are they, Mum?’ Her voice was painful to listen to: she was so utterly terrified, it was like she’d regressed.

  Ten years old again.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There was a degree of control left in Carrie’s voice, but slowly it was starting to slide away. Her voice wobbled briefly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said again.

  ‘Why are you filming?’

  ‘Because someone needs to know.’

  ‘Needs to know what?’

  Carrie didn’t reply this time. She shifted the camera right – along the slats of the stairs – and Olivia came into shot. Both women audibly gasped, and the sound distorted in whatever feeble microphone Olivia’s computer had. Standing in the doorway of the living room was Prouse, looking towards the kitchen. He also had a balaclava on but I could see the remnants of his beard and recognized the blackness of his eyes. He’d lifted Olivia right off the ground, and though her legs were kicking furiously, she made little sound. His big, gloved hand covered her mouth, reducing her cries to a soft muffled moan.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Annabel said.

  From the left of the shot came the other man, dragging Paul along the hallway. Paul was now limp, unconscious. Again, the women made soft, suppressed sounds, fear caught in their throats. ‘The others must be upstairs,’ Prouse said. Somewhere close to Carrie, I could hear Annabel starting to cry properly now, unable to stop herself.

  The other man dropped Paul on to the hallway floor.

  A dead weight.

  ‘Do you want me to go and get them?’ asked Prouse.

  The other man didn’t reply, his hands wriggling in his gloves. His eyes scanned the hallway, the living room, the study, and as they drifted up towards the camera a memory took flight in me, a flash of déjà vu: five years ago, in a bar in the Mandalay Bay.

  That same look.

  It was him.

  Cornell.

  He’d come for the Lings himself; flown over from the States to make sure it was done properly. And, immediately, I felt certain he was here again. The man who’d come for Prouse. The escape route through the grass. The massacre at Farnmoor. He’d come over, ready to finish things once and for all. Now the only one left was me.

  ‘Come on,’ Carrie said to Annabel.

  I heard Prouse say something else, but then his voice was gone. For ten seconds the footage descended into a blurred, pixellated mess. When it settled again, I could see where we were: in Olivia’s bedroom, exactly where I was. Carrie placed the computer down on the pull-out desk. Behind her was the door, the posters of the boy bands, and – in the shadows of the room – Annabel, glancing from Carrie to the door, from Carrie to the door, over and over. For a few brief seconds I watched the living, breathing versions of them, not the ones I’d seen in photographs, not the ones Prouse had talked of. In that moment, even as the shadows of their deaths began to form, they were very much alive.

  ‘I think this has to do with Kalb,’ Carrie said, leaning in to the caterpillar camera. I could hear her breath, short and frightened, Annabel wide-eyed behind her. ‘Paul was right. He said we were in danger. He said it had something to do with the notebook. But I didn’t believe him.’ She paused, tears shimmering in her eyes. ‘I didn’t believe him.’

  Then she got out her phone.

  ‘What are you doing, Mum?’

  Carrie didn’t respond. She was making a call, concentrating on the phone, looking down at it, as she held it in her lap. Then I realized something. She wasn’t making a call.

  She was sending a text – to Robert Reardon.

  Dissertation is in the laptop.

  ‘Are you calling the police?’ whispered Annabel.

  ‘There’s no time for that now.’

  ‘What are you doing then?’

  ‘Leaving a trail.’

  ‘Mum!’

  Carrie looked behind her, still operating the phone, and I realized then what she must have been doing: deleting any evidence she’d sent the text to Reardon. It occurred to me again how fortunate Reardon had been: whether she’d meant to or not, Carrie had left no route back to him.

  Out on the landing, a floorboard creaked. She threw the phone off to the side, and I heard it hit the wall with a dull thud. Then she leaned in, all the way up to the microphone, until only her chin and her teeth were visible on camera. She stayed like that for five or six seconds. The camera shifted to the right as her chin brushed against it. ‘The dissertation is in the laptop,’ she said, a low whisper now. ‘Please. Somebody help us.’

  Then it cut to black.

  For a moment, I sat there stunned.

  But then my brain started to fire again.

  Dissertation is in the laptop.

  I looked down at it, its red plastic case, its caterpillar camera. It was the perfect hiding place. Cornell had been through their machines, phones, through anything Paul, Carrie or Annabel would have used to communicate – but who would have thought to have
checked Olivia’s toys? The hiding place was too good, though, too effective: not only had Cornell failed to find what Carrie had hidden inside it, but so had the police.

  Slowly, I started going through it, checking the other movies on there: they were all of Olivia playing around in her room. There was a ninety-second limit on files, and the maximum resolution was 352 x 288 pixels. If I somehow got them off the laptop and blew them up, they’d be unwatchable. But none of them was her dissertation. There were no USB slots on the machine, no email function, no way of getting anything on to it.

  So I played the movie again.

  There was a sickening inevitability to it the second time, like watching a death in slow motion, and the moments with the girls – Olivia screaming for her dad; Annabel’s tears shining in the half-light of the bedroom – were even more affecting somehow. Both of them were so young, even Annabel, and neither had any remote understanding of why this was happening. I watched those last ten seconds again: Carrie coming in close to the camera, whispering into the microphone, her voice cleaved through with so much fear.

  Then the camera shifted to the right.

  Dissertation is in the laptop.

  In it.

  I picked it up and turned it over. On the bottom were four screws, fused to the plastic. There was no way Carrie, or anyone else, would have been able to open it up with a screwdriver. But in the middle was a slot for four D-size batteries. I flipped it off.

  Inside was a memory stick.

  I felt a charge of electricity pass through me, a buzz in my veins. It was about four centimetres long and a quarter of a centimetre thick, just a plain red casing with a slimline USB connector. If it was any thicker, it would never have fitted in front of the batteries. But Carrie had thought it out. Paul was right. He said we were in danger. I didn’t believe him. Except a part of her believed him enough, even as she’d told him he was overreacting, to copy her dissertation across to the memory stick and hide it inside her daughter’s laptop. And now I had what Cornell was looking for. The thing that had cost countless people their lives.

  Now I had the thing that could bring him down.

  55

  There was a campsite a mile south of Totnes with a small room next to its shop that had a computer and internet access. I’d been past countless times on the way along the A381, seen the ‘Surf at the beach – then come back and surf the web!’ sign out front, and I knew this time of year it would be empty. They were a week short of closing for the winter so the whole place was deserted. I paid for a couple of hours, then pushed the door shut.

  In the silence of the room, I started to realize how tired I was. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d last slept and I was beginning to feel exhaustion dragging at me, deep down in my bones. But I pushed it away and tried to press on, slotting the memory stick in and double-clicking on its icon. Carrie had called the stick ‘Diss/CL’. I’d expected to find Word docs full of notes, interview transcripts, perhaps some scans of history books; instead, it contained a single folder called ‘Pics’. There were fifteen photographs inside.

  I opened them up.

  As I saw the first, I felt the tiredness slip away immediately. Eric Schiltz, Carter Graham and Ray Muire were all in the centre, arms around each other’s shoulders, all smiling at the camera. They were young, in their mid twenties, all dressed in the same early 1970s fashion. It wasn’t the original – the picture was of a frame with the original photograph inside. This is it. This is the one Carrie must have taken in Schiltz’s study.

  In its background a building was taking shape, at the midway point of being constructed, and as I double-clicked on it and zoomed in, I felt something else fall into place. It’s part of a series I’ve already seen. This was Carter Graham’s LA office, rising up out of the Californian dust. The other stages of its assembly were documented in the twelve photographs I’d seen behind the door in the library at Farnmoor. I wondered why he’d never made this one a part of it, then recalled something he’d said: Eric emailed a picture – I don’t know, maybe a year ago, maybe eighteen months … I remember it because it was taken around the same time as these ones – except his one had all three of us in. Even if he’d wanted to include the picture of the three friends standing next to the office, he wouldn’t have been able to. Because Katie Francis had been into Graham’s email and deleted it.

  Just like she or Prouse had done with Ray Muire.

  Just like Cornell himself had done with Eric Schiltz.

  I remember Eric and I were down there a lot, watching it all take shape, he’d said to me. We clubbed together and flew Ray out a couple of times too. They were good days.

  I looked around the edges of the shot.

  The backdrop was dusty, without landmarks, but I’d read that Graham had chosen Marina Del Rey, a man-made harbour south of Venice Beach, for his LA office, and I knew from my time in the city that it had only opened in 1965. Five, six, seven years later – when the picture was taken – it would still have been a development, full of pockets of space. On either side, people and machines milled around – construction workers, the right angles of heavies and cranes, big piles of concrete slabs and huge metal girders.

  My eye was drawn to the far left.

  There were two men.

  One, in a hard hat, was pointing to something off camera; it looked like he was talking to someone else, perhaps relaying instructions. He could have been the foreman.

  Then there was the second man. He was in his early fifties, almost entirely obscured behind the foreman, only his top half visible. It looked like he’d been in the process of stepping back as the picture was taken. His shape had a gentle curve to it, as if he was leaning away. He was slim and well built, smartly dressed in a pale blue flannel suit, with a waistcoat buttoned up underneath. He had a tan, silver hair swept back from his face, and a thin scar – coloured a deep pink – running down the left side of his forehead, from his hairline to the ridge of his eyebrow.

  I clicked through to the next photograph.

  It was a second camera-phone picture taken in Schiltz’s study of the photo frame. Same resolution, same light. Except this time Carrie had cropped in on the man to the left-hand side. Graham, Schiltz and Muire were all to the right, Muire barely in it at all.

  This had been the one she’d had in her notebook.

  This was the epicentre.

  This was Daniel Kalb.

  56

  I sat there for a long time, just staring at Kalb, wondering who he was and why he might have been there. Why LA in the early 1970s? Why at the building site? Why did this photograph even matter to Cornell, forty-one years on? And then another thought came to me: because this could be the last remaining evidence Daniel Kalb ever existed.

  I moved on.

  The third photograph wasn’t of Kalb at all. It wasn’t of anyone. It was a black-and-white shot of a forest, tall trees reaching up into the sky from a vast bed of pine needles. There was a gap among the trees, probably about the size of a small barn, where nothing grew, and on the right-hand side of the picture, a path – maybe twenty feet across – cut through the forest, arrow-straight, its eventual end obscured in a bright shaft of sunlight.

  The next picture was shot across a bed of grass; a meadow of some kind. On the other side, I could make out the red roof of a bungalow, a chimney, a street light outside the front window. I clicked through. The fifth photograph was another shot of the same meadow, but this time it was higher up off the ground, and I could see more of the house: a little square of front garden, another building to its right with a pale blue roof, and – at the top of the shot – telephone wires, birds perched on them, one after the other. There was something else too: among the grass, half obscured but not covered completely, were railway tracks. There were two sets, one running parallel to the other. When I tabbed through to the next picture, I got an even clearer view: this one had been taken in winter, with snow on the ground, and the hard weather had compressed the grass, so tha
t it seemed less overgrown and the tracks were more visible. It was shot from a different angle: down the lines, instead of across them. There was something else as well: to the left of the picture, a hundred feet from the bungalow, I could see a platform.

  Suddenly, a memory flared.

  Did I recognize this place?

  All three photographs looked like they had been taken relatively recently – probably the last five to ten years. In the third, to confirm it, I could see a silver Skoda Octavia. In the bottom corner of each was a stamp: © Museum of Modern History. I didn’t know the location of the museum, but it was clear Carrie had taken these from its website.

  I clicked through to the seventh picture, hoping to find another shot of the platform, but instead it was of something different: a group of five men sitting at a table. They were all laughing at something. The photograph was black and white, and looked older than the last ones. Much older. The men’s hairstyles were short and severe, hair melded to their scalps and glistening with oil, and their fashion spoke of the 1940s or early 1950s. Behind them on the wall was a map, too fuzzy and indistinct to see in detail, that looked like Europe, from the western curve of the Norwegian coast down to the Franco-Italian border and east into Russia, as far as the Ural Mountains. In the centre, hands flat to the table, was Kalb.

  He looked in his early twenties.

  Over two decades before he had accidentally strayed into shot behind Carter Graham, Ray Muire and Eric Schiltz, he looked different: younger obviously, with no hint of the grey that would mark him out later on, but he seemed more intense too. He wasn’t laughing like the others. Instead, his mouth was turned up in a half-smile. Nothing more. He was the only one looking directly into the camera, his eyes so dark they were like ink spots on the film. There was no scar either. The one that had run from his hairline to his eyebrow wasn’t a part of him then. It must have come later on.

  I moved on to the next.