by Tim Weaver
‘Don’t I even get a hello?’ he said.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
But I already knew: I’d been so conscious of digging myself a grave at the house, of leaving more evidence, of giving Rocastle another reason to come after me, I’d never checked Graham’s body. I couldn’t have. If I’d crossed the room, I’d have left my footprints in his blood: it was all over him, under him, the whole place a massacre. I remembered the way his body had been left: contorted, neck twisted at what seemed like an unnatural angle, face pushed all the way into the skirting board, as if he’d been blown halfway across the room. But I realized why there had been all the blood between us, and why he had lain with his head away from me: so I wouldn’t approach him and he wouldn’t give himself away. All I’d see was a crime scene I knew I couldn’t touch and his PA down the hall, a bullet in her head. I remembered then what I’d thought at the time: Something isn’t right. Something isn’t right about the way he died. I’d thought it was the fact there was only one security guy with him, despite him lying and telling me he had seven. But it wasn’t that. It was that, deep down, somewhere unacknowledged, I knew.
‘That was sloppy police work at the house, David,’ Graham said.
‘It was a crime scene.’
‘Well, I think we both know that’s not the case now, don’t we?’ He paused, eyes narrowing. ‘I would have thought you’d be more careful about these things now. I mean, what was it that almost led to you losing your own life?’ We both knew what he meant. He’d read up about my last case. ‘Exactly. You are, I’m afraid, an incompetent idiot.’
‘And yet I found you.’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding, a wry smile. ‘That is true.’
‘And I found your son.’
A darkness moved across his face.
‘And I found out who your father was.’ Everything was slowly shifting into focus. I let it all unfold, lining everything up for the first time. ‘All that blood, it wasn’t yours. It was that security guard’s. You cut him open and let him bleed out across the room.’
He said nothing, but I knew I was right.
‘All this – and the irony is, you could have killed me at the house.’
‘Rocastle,’ he said quietly, venom in his voice.
My mind shifted back sixty hours.
Rocastle told me what Cornell had been like on hearing that I was on my way to the house. As soon as we found out you were going to Farnmoor, he started panicking about … Then he’d stopped himself. But I knew what Cornell had been panicking about now.
Carter Graham.
About it all coming tumbling down around his father.
‘Jeremy was a good boy,’ Graham said. ‘He was effective; had his grandfather’s pragmatism. But he was always a little … frenzied around me and my father. Family was absolutely everything to him. I suppose you can understand it: we were the only people who ever really loved him. Basically, we were the only people he ever knew.’ His face had softened at the thought of his son, but then it hardened a second time as he returned to Rocastle. ‘So Rocastle used that weakness, that one weakness. Katie, my security detail, they were both dead. We killed Katie because she knew far too much, and we were trying to clear up the mess you were creating – and the security guy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jeremy put them out of their misery. Rocastle, he just sat there – like he always did – judgement in his eyes, but never any words.’
The plan was a mess; a reactionary, desperate mess. There had been no endgame other than to throw me off the scent. The irony was, they could have used it to discredit me, make me look paranoid and barely cognitive. If Graham had come out as alive and well after I’d shouted from the rooftops about his death, I would never have been taken seriously again. Katie Francis and the security guard would already be buried somewhere they’d never be found, and the police would be all over me for lying about Prouse. But, in truth, I doubted they’d even thought that far ahead. It was why Rocastle was able to manipulate them so effectively. Both Graham and his son only cared about their family.
‘You thought you could keep everyone onside with money.’
He smirked. ‘I didn’t think. I did. Believe me, you pay people enough, they soon lose their conscience. Plus it never hurts to apply a little pressure.’
I thought of Rocastle: the money Graham had paid him for his help, that was now on an ATM card in my kitchen; and Prouse threatening to kill his kids.
‘Why not come after me at the start?’
‘You were just another snoop asking questions about a family no one would ever find. I wasn’t concerned. None of us were. We’d seen off the police, we’d slowly picked off anyone who even vaguely knew about my father. We were feeling pretty secure.’
‘And then the body washed up on the beach.’
He nodded; a flicker of sadness. ‘That fucking fisherman,’ he said, voice quiet but seething with anger. ‘We’d already smoothed the fallout from the photograph. When that stupid bitch took her picture, Jeremy went and closed off every avenue: her, her family, Eric, Ray, that drug addict in London – there was no trail to my father. It was all sorted. But then, a month ago, Dad started getting ill …’ He paused and then glanced at me, and for the first time I saw compassion in his face, reminiscent of the man I thought he’d been. ‘Dad had had a long life, a good life – but he had been ill for a while. Four, maybe five years. A couple of weeks back, he really went downhill, and we realized this was the end. So we spent the day together, the three of us, up here on the deck … and then a day later he was dead.’ He paused, and I remembered the last photo on the wall outside: the three of them, at the end, Las Vegas in the distance behind them. ‘He told us he wanted to be buried at Miln Cross. It was the place he loved best. He said Devon was the only time in his life he ever felt like he wasn’t on the run.’
‘So why’d he leave?’
‘The harbour mistress.’ He looked down at the shotgun in his lap. ‘She had her aunty to stay for a couple of weeks – this old Jew from Vienna, who had never travelled abroad before – and she recognized Dad straight away. She’d been in Sobibór. Dad had lived in Miln Cross since the end of the war, unnoticed. They loved him there. Thom Graham: born in Gothenburg to a Swedish mother and English father. He had it all worked out. I didn’t even know his real name, who he was, until I was twelve.’
‘One big lie from the start.’
He shrugged, like he hadn’t heard me. ‘As it turned out, him being spotted was a good piece of timing, one of those supreme pieces of fortune that can only be fate. We both got out of there the night of the storm – but, officially, only I did. I pretended I was down in Dartmouth when it hit. That’s what I told everyone, over and over. That my father was one of the forty-two. A lot of the bodies were buried under landslides, crushed under fallen masonry. But eleven other villagers were never accounted for, their bodies just washed out to sea. No one questioned whether he was one of them or not, whether I was telling the truth. They just believed me. I mean, who would lie about something like that?’ A nasty, vindictive smile filled his face. ‘Meanwhile, we both started a new life in London. I moved my company there, and when I expanded into the States, it seemed an even better idea to move him to LA. New country, no questions, space to disappear.’
‘Shame you got sentimental.’
He frowned, initially confused, then he understood what I meant: taking the body back to Miln Cross, even if it had been packed in and frozen for transportation, had cost them everything. It had cost him his son’s life. And, as soon as the police back home began making the connections between who Cornell was and where he came from, they would come for Graham. It was why he’d so vehemently protected his father for so many years, why he’d encouraged Cornell to do the same, why they were prepared to kill to safeguard his secret – and why he’d so obsessively kept Kalb out of any and all photographs. Kalb was his father: Graham didn’t want him being put on trial, being dragged back to Europe
to face justice. But he knew as well that his whole company would go down the toilet the minute shareholders and investors realized he’d been harbouring a Nazi – and that Kalb was his own flesh and blood. If Carrie had been allowed to propagate the photograph, or publish her dissertation, Graham’s whole business empire, everything he’d ever built and cared about, would collapse around him. It was why this house, Firmament, was the only place his father had ever existed. Once, as a man, now only as a series of photographs. The walls were a chronology of their life, pinned in a locked room in a house no one knew was here; the one place Carter Graham could return to, to remember his father.
‘Where are the girls buried?’ I said to him.
His eyes drifted to the trapdoor.
I took a step towards him, anger flaring in me, then – in the blink of an eye, with a quickness that defied his age – he had the shotgun up off his lap and pointing at me.
‘Why don’t you stay there, David?’
‘I’m not leaving without them.’
‘They’re just maggot food now.’
He saw the pulse of anger travel up my throat, and broke out into a smile: ‘I don’t know what Jeremy got up to here, but he was careful and that was all I cared about.’
‘Why the fuck are you even here?’ I asked him.
He shrugged. ‘As I said, Rocastle tricked me. He told me I should get away after Farnmoor. He said it would take a few days to clear up the mess. He said he needed to get rid of you. Except he was a snake in the grass. He was busy telling me one thing, Jeremy another. We both believed him, because we thought the money was all he cared about.’
‘Where’s Cornell’s mother in all this?’
‘I never wanted kids,’ he said. He hadn’t answered the question, but I sensed it coming. ‘It was a mistake, outside of my first marriage, with a woman I hardly knew. By then I was well known, so the damage to my reputation could have been considerable.’
I got it immediately. ‘You killed her.’
‘She had a big mouth,’ he said, and when I saw the look in his eyes it was like Cornell had come back from the dead. ‘Her surname was Cornell so, aside from giving birth to Jeremy, she made one useful contribution. After he was born, though, my stance on children changed slightly. I liked the idea of being able to shape someone, bend them to your whim, enable them to do things you weren’t capable of yourself. So when he was only a few days old, I brought him up here to live with my father, in this house I built.’
Suddenly, something else clicked into place.
This house.
I knew why I recognized it.
‘Yes,’ Graham said, seeing that I understood. ‘Those photos I showed you weren’t my office in LA. They were the side of this house. You can see why I kept them close.’
I made the natural next step. ‘Is this place what the high-rollers group paid for?’
‘Very good. I started to realize I needed to keep this place entirely off the grid so we set up that group, creamed a little off the top and cooked the books. It worked beautifully. You’d have to look hard to see Firmament even existed.’
‘What about Schiltz and Muire?’
‘What about them?’
‘Did they know who Kalb was?’
‘No. Only a version of his history – one that I made up.’ He paused, and I recalled Cornell saying exactly the same thing. ‘I told them, early on, in the days after we moved to London, that the British government wanted us to keep Dad’s identity a secret, and that was why I was telling everyone he was dead. I said I couldn’t tell them any more, but I hinted he was informing on the Soviets, and that was part of the reason we were moving out to the States. As you can imagine, that played out pretty well back in the sixties.’
‘And they believed that bullshit?’
‘It was the Cold War, David. Anyone believed anything.’ He lowered the shotgun slightly, still aiming at me, but using his knee for support. ‘Plus they were my friends.’
‘Friends who you killed.’
‘The irony is, they would probably still have been alive if Eric hadn’t started scanning in all his old pictures. They knew Dad, they knew not to take pictures of him, so I never worried about that side of things until Eric’s photograph landed in my inbox.’
‘And Cornell – did they know he was your son?’
‘Yes. I told them the truth: that it was a mistake, a one-night stand, and that his mother abandoned him, and he was living up here in secret with his grandfather.’
‘That’s not the truth.’
‘It’s close enough.’
‘You lied to everyone.’
‘What about Lee?’ he said. He was smiling again, a mirror image of his son. ‘That was a good turn, wasn’t it? Asking him to come and entertain us. I was thinking of Ray.’ The smile lingered on his face – and then it dropped away. It felt like we were at the end of the road now. All the secrets were out. Now there was just me and him and a gun.
I drove them up into the hills.
Then I cut them both into pieces and buried them in the desert.
‘Open the trapdoor,’ I said.
‘I’m the one with the gun, David.’
‘It’s over for you. In a week, everyone will know who you are. You think holing up here in the wilderness is going to stop the tide from turning? You’re done, Graham.’
He got out of his seat, shotgun against his hip, pointing it at my stomach.
I held up a hand. ‘It’s over. You know it is.’
‘It’s over after I put a hole in your chest.’
Then something moved on the monitors.
70
We both flicked a look at the monitors, an automatic reaction. Someone was approaching the house. As Graham moved, the shotgun moved with him; a foot, maybe less.
But enough.
What he’d done seemed to hit him.
By then it was too late.
I smashed into him, chair toppling over, both of us crashing into it and falling to the floor. I already had hold of the barrel of the gun, wrestling it from his grip, directing it up to the ceiling. He pulled the trigger. The sound was immense: a throaty boom that sent a debilitating ringing through my head. It took everything I had to cling on. He pulled the trigger again, more desperate this time; and while it wasn’t as loud, my hearing dampened, defective, it was painful, like he was sticking his fingers into an open wound.
But I held on.
We rolled half a turn, side to side on the floor, and then – with every last drop of strength I could pull out of the ground – I yanked it free from his grasp, the momentum carrying me across the room and into the bank of monitors. They rocked on the table and fell to the floor, coming to rest next to me. But the feed didn’t cut out. Through the corner of my eye, I saw an indistinct figure was almost at the house, a gun down at their side.
I didn’t try to get a better look.
Not until Graham had been properly put down.
Getting to my feet, I headed across the room and pressed the end of the gun into the centre of his spine. He’d been trying to scramble across the floor, back out the door.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
I glanced up, into the room full of photos, then back to the monitors.
The figure was on the front porch.
It was Carlos Soto.
I didn’t try to put it together, didn’t think about anything else apart from the girls. ‘Give me the keys for the trapdoor.’ Graham remained still. ‘Give me the fucking keys!’
He slowly moved his arm, sliding it down his side to his pocket. I pressed the end of the gun harder into his back so he knew not to screw around. As he reached in and I heard a faint jangle, I glanced back at the monitor. Soto was inside the house.
What the hell is he doing here?
Graham got out the keys and held them up to me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re unlocking it.’
I reached down, grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled hi
m into the centre of the room. Then I pulled the door closed. It clanged shut. There was a lock on the inside, a wheel, like you found in bank security vaults. I spun the wheel once, hard, and it went through a series of rotations by itself. Then it made a soft sucking sound. It was locked. On the other side of the room, Graham had backed up against one of the walls. There was blood on his face.
‘Unlock it.’
He crawled across on all fours and started going through the keys. I glanced at the monitors. Soto was on the stairs, coming down to the panic room. When I turned back to Graham, he’d selected a key and was sliding it into the padlock. A turn. It popped open.
‘Take off the padlock.’
He did as I asked.
‘Now open it.’
He looked from the gun to the trapdoor, knowing there was no choice now. Then he slid his fingers in around the handle welded into it, and slowly pulled it up and over.
A smell instantly took flight across the room.
I tried to ignore it, tried to fight against the voice in my head. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. But I had to. I had to make sure it was them. I had to see my daughter.
Stopping on the edge of the trapdoor, I looked down.
A square metal shoot, about four feet wide and about thirty feet long, dropped down to the side of the mountain, stopping about six feet above it. What I could see of the slope, visible beyond the end of the shoot, was steep: a forty-degree gradient, maybe more. It was why the deck had been built on stilts. Below the end of the shoot, a hole had been cut out of the dirt and the rock, and then filled in again. It was a rough circle, full of sand. A burial ground. Items were scattered in the scrub around it: a necklace, the broken heel of a stiletto, a torn shred of blouse pierced on a clump of cholla. And then, in the centre, something else.
Olivia Ling’s Mickey Mouse doll.
‘That’s where he would put the bodies,’ Graham said quietly, matter-of-factly, as if he were describing something routine.
