by Weaver, Tim
‘Okay. Hold on a second, please.’
The intercom went dead again. About ten seconds later, the same woman came back on: ‘I’ll buzz you in and meet you out front.’
I thanked her and waited for the gates to open. They fanned out slowly, wheezing on their hinges, and I took off up the drive, gravel spitting out from beneath the tyres. Halfway along, the front door opened, a huge slab of oak with a small half-oval pane of glass cut into it, and a woman in her early forties emerged from the house, pausing at the top of a set of sandstone steps. She watched me all the way up the drive and into a space next to the Vectra, and didn’t break her gaze as I got out of the car and grabbed my notebook from the back. I headed over to meet her.
‘Mr Raker?’
‘Morning.’
She smiled. ‘Katie Francis. I’m Mr Graham’s PA here at Farnmoor.’
Slim and attractive, her hair scraped back into a ponytail and dressed in a green skirt-suit, she looked every inch the harassed assistant: cordless telephone in one hand, a desk diary in the other. Through the door behind her I could see people moving around: a female in a cleaning tabard, and a chef carrying empty silver platters.
I stopped short of her on the front steps. She nodded. ‘You’ll have to bear with us, I’m afraid – we’re throwing a charity gala dinner here tomorrow, so it’s a little manic.’
She nodded again and I realized it was a habit of hers, like the bridge between one conversation and the next. I followed her into the house. It was beautiful: original oak panelling everywhere, without the musty stench of a stately home. Every room had been furnished with a modern twist: light, airy colours, all creams and browns and reds, contemporary art, twenty-first-century furniture. I only caught brief glimpses of each, but I was immediately impressed by Graham’s tastes. From one room came the whine of a vacuum cleaner; from another the conversation of workmen. One corridor branched off and headed towards a kitchen. Another headed in the opposite direction to a locked door. Ahead of us was a wide corkscrew staircase that gracefully wound up to the first floor, carpeted in cream and lined with photographs of Graham at various social functions. ‘This way,’ Francis said, and as we headed up I glanced at a few of the pictures. Him with a former prime minister. Him at another charity gala, surrounded by four members of the England football team. Him shaking hands with a renowned media mogul.
At the top of the stairs the landing unfurled, leading down to further rooms. Francis took me in through the first door. In front of two huge bay windows was a desk, perched alone with a Mac on top, a small steel bin at its feet, and a leather office chair so comically huge it looked like it belonged to a Bond villain. Apart from a smaller, less impressive chair for visitors to sit on, the rest of the room was empty: literally no other furniture, just plain magnolia walls and a carpet in the same colour.
‘Please, take a seat.’ I sat and retrieved my notebook while she walked around the desk and sank into the chair. ‘So, you’re some kind of … detective?’
I smiled. ‘Some kind of one.’
‘You’re not a detective?’
‘I’m a missing persons investigator. I find people.’ I got out a business card and slid it across the desk to her. ‘At the moment I’m doing some work for the Ling family.’
She nodded again.
‘Does that name ring any bells with you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You remember the family?’
‘Well, I never knew them personally, but I obviously knew about their disappearance. The police came up here after they went missing because one of our staff claimed to have seen them near the house. I managed to put the investigating team in touch with Mr Graham – he was in New York at the time – and I think everyone came to the conclusion that it was a case of mistaken identity. Why, has something changed?’
‘No. Nothing’s changed.’
She seemed confused. ‘Okay.’
I held up a hand. ‘There’s no mystery, I promise. This is kind of a favour to the family. I just need to check all this sort of stuff off the list to make sure I’m up to speed on what the police did after the Lings vanished. Then I can do the opposite.’ I smiled again, and this time she responded, smiling herself and gesturing for me to continue. ‘So, maybe you can start by just giving me a brief overview of the set-up here?’
‘The set-up?’
‘You run the house for Mr Graham while he’s away?’
‘The house, the grounds, his interests in the local community. He still has great affection for the area, as you can probably imagine, and likes to get involved in local issues when he returns to Farnmoor. He has PAs in each of his offices who deal directly with regional issues; I deal with the really regional issues.’ She smiled. ‘I enjoy it.’
‘How many people are employed at the house on a full-time basis?’
‘Full-time? Just me. I’m here five days a week, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Those are my official hours anyway. Sometimes Mr Graham needs me in earlier, or needs me to stay later; it’ll depend on what his diary is looking like, and what his plans are when he’s back in the country. I do late nights and weekends on an ad hoc basis too, if we’ve got something like this charity gala going on.’
‘So, some days you’re here on your own?’
‘No. Never on my own. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we have a cleaning team in. Tuesdays and Thursdays it’s the gardeners. Other people come and go too.’ She realized I wanted to know who. ‘Oh, you know: delivery men, that sort of thing.’
‘So, what can you tell me about Mr Graham’s gardener, Ray Muire?’
‘Ray.’ A softer expression filled her face, as if Ray was someone she liked a lot. ‘Ray was an old family friend of Mr Graham. They went to school together. When Mr Graham started Empyrean in 1967 – right here in Dartmouth – Ray made the furniture for his office. Mr Graham reckons Ray was one of the cleverest guys he’d ever met, in any line of work – you should see the furniture he made. There’s a set of bookshelves downstairs that Mr Graham commissioned for his sixtieth birthday. They’re exquisite. Anyway, Ray was never the type to slow down, so even after he’d officially retired he used to come back and mow Mr Graham’s lawns once a week. That’s why the police referred to him as a “gardener”, I think. But he was never a gardener. Not really.’
‘So is he around today?’
‘No.’ A flicker of sadness told me what was coming next. ‘Ray died in February. He was only sixty-seven. The same age as Mr Graham.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He’d been out for a drink in Totnes, and on his way home … well, he lost his footing and fell into the river. He was washed away. Police found him the next day.’
‘He was drunk?’
She seemed a little embarrassed to admit it, as if she were betraying Ray Muire’s memory. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘Police said he was three times over the legal limit.’
‘Was he a big drinker normally?’
Another pause. ‘Yes. I suppose he was.’
‘How did Mr Graham take Ray’s death?’
‘Not well, as you can probably imagine. He paid for the funeral, made sure Ray’s wife didn’t have to contribute, and then took two days off to fly back from Tokyo to attend. If you know Mr Graham, you’ll know that’s pretty unusual.’ She shifted forward in her seat and dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘But he made it back for Ray Muire.’
‘Ray was partially sighted, right?’
‘Right. That was another reason police reckoned he’d strayed too close to the water’s edge – and, to be honest, one of the reasons why he had to scale back some of his responsibilities here. We couldn’t in all good conscience have him rewiring plugs or fixing our plumbing when he was losing his eyesight. But mowing the lawn was fine – he just pushed it across the grass and then left one of the younger men to do all the edging.’
She smiled again.
This was all getting a bit cosy and contemplative so I backed out and pushed on. ‘
How did you first find out about what Ray supposedly saw here – did he tell you he thought he saw Paul and Carrie Ling himself, or did he go directly to the police?’
‘The first we heard about it was when the police turned up here.’
‘I wonder why Ray didn’t speak to you himself?’
She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He seems to have been well liked here, felt at home here, was good friends with Mr Graham – I’m just wondering why he didn’t go to you directly.’
‘Mr Graham was out of the country at the time.’
‘But you were here, right?’
She paused, looking like I’d accused her of something terrible, but the question seemed like a pretty obvious place to go: Graham wasn’t around, she was the only full-time member of staff here, and presumably everyone at Farnmoor knew that. She was, for all intents and purposes, the only point of contact while the boss was out.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘You don’t know why he went to the police first?’
‘No.’
‘He hadn’t fallen out with Mr Graham?’
She frowned. ‘No. Absolutely not.’
I retraced my steps back through the conversation, to when I’d first mentioned Muire to her. I could tell immediately that she’d liked him, so I had to assume the feeling was mutual. ‘Do you think he might have been embarrassed about saying something to you? As if, by doing so, he was accusing you – and, indirectly, Mr Graham – of being involved in something you shouldn’t have?’
She seemed to give it some thought, her eyes off in a space across my shoulder, nails of her right hand drumming out a rhythm on the desk. Finally, her lips flattened and she started shaking her head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I think the only person who would be able to answer that is Ray. I’m guessing the police still have his statement to hand?’
‘Yeah, I’m guessing they will.’
The printouts from the case file were in the process of being sent to me, so without looking at Muire’s witness statement myself, I could only really go on Task’s impressions. Rambling and incoherent was how he’d described Muire’s interview, at least towards the end, and – based on how Katie Francis had painted him, as a loveable, infirm drunk – it wasn’t hard to see why.
‘Where was it Ray Muire claimed to have seen Paul and Carrie Ling?’
She got up from her desk, went to the window and gestured for me to join her. Through the glass there were a series of fields, one after the other, like a patchwork quilt; each was fenced and gradually dropped down towards a sheer cliff face. ‘The tenth field along is where Mr Graham’s land stops,’ she said. ‘See the barn?’ She was referring to a big, empty corrugated steel outbuilding in the third field. ‘Ray said he saw them – with someone else, if I remember correctly – just in front of that.’
‘That’s, what, a quarter of a mile away?’
‘Probably a touch more.’ She pointed to something else: a narrow path running along the bottom of the fields, parallel to the cliff edge. ‘That’s the public right of way,’ she said. Wire mesh fencing protected walkers from going over the side. ‘It goes way beyond the Farnmoor boundaries, but anyone can pick up the path just outside the main gates and follow it down. They can’t get inside here without coming through the gates first, but anyone can come around the boundary and follow the path.’
I nodded. ‘What would be the chances of speaking to Mr Graham directly?’
Given his relatively low profile, I wasn’t expecting the response to be positive. Instead, she nodded. ‘I can certainly see what I can do.’
‘I’m happy to chat to him over video conference.’
‘Ah, well, that’s just the thing,’ she said, leaning towards the computer and clicking on something. ‘He’s back in the country tomorrow for this charity gala. If I ask him nicely, he might be prepared to set aside some time before the guests arrive.’
‘That would be great.’
‘The only thing is, as you can imagine, Mr Graham is in demand – so if I give you a call late tomorrow afternoon telling you he’s got a gap in his diary, you’re going to have to drop everything and drive like a maniac to get here.’
I smiled. ‘I’m pretty certain I can do both of those things.’
After I left Katie Francis, I walked out into the fields a little way. The wind was icy coming in off the water, and the waves made an immense roar as they crashed on to rocks somewhere over the edge of the cliff. I stopped in the middle of the first field and looked ahead to where the barn stood – disused and open now, its basic structure still intact, but only a few of its panels in place. I think police doubted his abilities to spot anyone from further than about six feet, Ewan Tasker said. He had some kind of a degenerative eye problem. This quack said he was a year out from full blindness. It was hard to make out detail on it, even with good eyesight like mine. I didn’t see how it was possible for Ray Muire.
I turned around and headed back to the car.
The Teeth of the Trap
Friday, 19 August 2011 | Fifteen Months Ago
The diner was at the north end of Paradise Road, squeezed between a run-down motel and an adult bookstore. On the opposite side of the street was a square of undeveloped land, scorched brown by the desert sun and fenced off from passers-by. A FOR LEASE sign stood in the middle, burnt and weathered by age. Beyond that, looming over Las Vegas Boulevard, was the Stratosphere hotel, its tower reaching up into a cloudless sky. Apart from the occasional cab ride to the neon lights of Freemont Street, taking the elevator to the top of the 1,149-foot observation deck was about as far north as most tourists came, and none made the journey east to Paradise; certainly not since the Sahara had closed.
That’s probably why Cornell had wanted to meet here.
Carlos Soto nosed the black Lincoln into the corner of the parking lot and killed the engine. It was lonely, litter blowing across the tarmac, no one else here this early. Beyond the gentle tick of the engine cooling, he could hear the hum of an air-conditioning unit on the outside wall and the faint sound of people’s voices through a side door, left ajar, about twenty feet further back. He adjusted the rear-view mirror so that he could see when Cornell pulled into the lot, then buzzed open his sunroof.
Warm air drifted in. Early mornings in the desert could be cool late in the year, but this was August and there was nothing cool about August. It was already sixty-eight, even though the sun was still a pale molten disc shimmering above the horizon.
The sun was the only thing that closed in Vegas.
His old man used to tell him that all the time growing up. They’d lived in a house near Hartke Park, just him, his pa and his mom, and often Soto and his dad used to sit on the back stoop and watch the sun bleed out along the ridges of the Spring Mountains. They’d never had any money, never went on vacation, never even saw his mom’s family, even though they only lived down in Henderson. His childhood wasn’t bad exactly, it was just small and unremarkable. All he’d done growing up was ride with his pa down to the Strip where Carlos Sr had worked as a cage manager. The abiding memory of his youth was hanging around in the foyer at the Desert Inn for two hours every day, waiting for his mom to come and collect him after she’d finished her cleaning shift at The Dunes.
His mom had gone on to higher service when he was eighteen and, after that, he and his pa got closer, leaning on each other; basically, two men completely out of their depth. His mom had been the glue that had held the house together, and without her it felt like every minute of every day they were waiting for things to fall apart. So, four months later, he lied his way into an entrance exam for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and a month after, he started as a cadet. He’d made his dad proud that day, so proud Pa had taken him out for a steak. It was the first time Soto ever remembered that happening, and the last: the old man went downhill after that, and two years later Soto was burying him in Woodlawn Cemetery.
A minute passed.
&nb
sp; Then two.
He glanced in the rear-view mirror, checked his watch, then checked his phone to see whether he’d missed any messages. After fifteen years on the force, he’d been offered the job of Director of Security at the Bellagio, the equivalent of a city police chief, by an old friend who was now the HR Director there. He’d taken it in a heartbeat. He’d been looking for a way out, and knew, if he failed to do anything about it, the Department would eventually destroy him. So he made the move, leaving behind a life that had been his entire existence for a decade and a half, for neon and noise and camera feeds.
He cycled through his messages. They were all from the keno manager: there’d been an incident the night before in the keno lounge, where a couple of men had started throwing punches. Soto didn’t give much of a shit about it – drunk people tended to fight; there was no mystery in that – but there was paperwork to fill out and a report to file with LVMPD. All that was secondary, though, at least for now: he wasn’t looking for texts or missed calls from the keno manager, any other manager or any department head. He was looking for messages or calls from the guy he was supposed to be meeting.
Soto didn’t know much about Jeremy Cornell. All he could say for sure was that Cornell was English and he organized a get-together every three months for a bunch of international high rollers in the Lakeview villa. Neither Soto, the casino manager or the Director of Operations asked much more than that: the villa cost six grand a night, which the casino waived because the whales spent their evenings playing six-figure hands in the baccarat bar, before running up drinks tabs into the tens of thousands of dollars at their villa. They came to Vegas for anonymity, and – for better or for worse – that’s what the casino gave them. No one was about to ask questions that didn’t need asking, and no one was going to say no if Cornell wanted something done.
Soto glanced at the clock again.
Checked the rear-view mirror.
He started to remember the Saturday before – the last time they’d been in – and then all the times before that. Most of the men were pretty normal: rich guys letting off steam, pissing money away like it was water, and screwing anything that moved. But Cornell was different. He was pleasant enough on the surface, but, underneath, he had this way about him; this stillness. The times Soto had spoken to him face to face, Cornell would talk blandly, refusing to commit to any point of view unless it directly affected him or the group, but while he could keep up a conversation, it was always obvious that he wasn’t engaged in it. The times Soto had watched him from afar, he’d seen a man who liked to stand there in the shadows, barely communicating, watching the rest of the high rollers, like he was waiting for someone to make a mistake – say something or do something they shouldn’t. Soto assumed Cornell was a firefighter: the minute one of the whales screwed up, he stepped in to put the flames out, to maintain the sanctity of the group, to brush whatever had been done under the carpet. Whatever Cornell was, Soto didn’t like him.
