by Tim Weaver
The snow had all but gone from this part of the country, pulped by the rain, but it was colder than ever. I got out of the car and wandered down to the edges of the sea, to where I’d stood with my mum what felt like a lifetime ago. Additional eight-foot walls had been erected around the circumference of the island now, obscuring most of the hospital. But not everything could be disguised: as the day broke beyond Bethlehem’s lonely spire, I could see graffiti on the perimeter, some on the actual building itself too. Smashed windows. Crumbling masonry. Holes in the roof. It was the kind of slow decomposition only a building could go through: solitary, silent, arrested.
People were already out walking dogs, or running across the sand, earphones in, breath forming above their heads. As I watched them, I thought again about the pictures of Bethlehem that Reynolds had been keeping. I thought about the reasons he might have them. I thought about Preston’s former girlfriend, about who she might be, and whether she might be relevant. And I thought about the sketches of the hospital layout that Franks had made, some time between 1995 and 2004. The question was why he’d drawn it.
And whether the answers might lie across the water.
Even if they did, they would have to wait for now. With the sun up, crossing the causeway on foot was going to be too much of a risk. I needed to travel at low tide and under cover of darkness and that meant either four-fifty tonight, or five-twenty in the morning. The issue with tonight was that, despite the winter gloom, people would still be around, walking dogs on the beach, coming home from work. At five-twenty tomorrow morning, it would be quieter, but the risk remained the same: if I was even slightly longer than an hour out there, there was the potential to get caught on the island. An hour either side of low tide, the water level could rise by as much as a foot – and the higher it got, the choppier it got, and the more difficult it became to navigate without a boat.
Rowing across gave me more options and would allow me to leave at any time I wanted. But for that I needed a decent boat, and there was nowhere to hire them on this part of the coast. The best I could lay my hands on at such short notice was a dinghy at my parents’ old cottage, and I seriously doubted it would be able to cope with the rigours of anything other than low tide. Plus, if I bought a bigger boat, I had to transport it, and then I had to find a way of securing it out of sight once I got across to the island.
That, in truth, was the real issue: not getting over there, but remaining unseen during daylight hours. If I got caught going out to the hospital – or coming back – by a passing boat, or people on the beach spotted me and reported me, I risked derailing the entire case. At best, I’d return to the loving arms of the local police force and get a ticking off. At worst, I’d be dragged into an interview room and charged with trespassing.
I also felt like I needed a clearer sight of where Bethlehem fitted into Franks’s life. It closed in 2011 – the year Leonard and Ellie retired to Devon – and Ellie had said Franks never came down to Devon, separately from her, in the years before they moved. It seemed likely she would have noticed if he had. And yet a conversation I’d had with her stuck with me. She’d said that, after they moved down, they liked to go hiking together.
Did he ever go hiking by himself, without you?
Very rarely, she’d replied.
But it happened sometimes?
Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes he just liked to be alone out there.
What if, when he went out alone, he wasn’t going hiking on the moors? What if he was heading to the coast? What if he was journeying across the channel? From the pictures in Reynolds’s flat, it was clear he thought there might be answers in the hospital, but what could possibly have been so important to Franks that he’d risk rowing across the causeway to a closed hospital complex? Whatever the answer, if Neil Reynolds had taken those photographs himself, it meant he had also been inside the hospital at some point since its closure. But nine months after Franks disappeared, he remained missing, which seemed to suggest Reynolds had found nothing, otherwise Franks wouldn’t still be in the wind.
Yet I wanted to make the crossing myself.
One of the two photos Reynolds had in his possession had been of the entrance to the room with the metal stand in it. Why photograph that entrance? Why that room? The hospital was a spectre, forgotten and empty – but Reynolds had gone anyway, and he’d chosen to take that shot.
He hadn’t found Franks.
But maybe he’d found something else.
44
An hour later, at just gone nine, I finally reached Dartmoor. Winter had robbed it of its colour, reducing its bracken to a scorched brown, its trees to corpses, its views to a fine grey mist. As I came in on the B3212, caught in a conga-line of cars, I could see snow in the craggy folds of the hills – but mostly it was wet, drizzle dotting the windscreen, obscuring the road ahead, slowing my progress even more into the heart of the park.
My thoughts shifted to Craw.
For the moment I decided against calling her, not until I had a clearer sight of how things fitted together: Preston, the woman he’d been living with, Bethlehem, Welland. But, even without calling her, I could guess how these latest revelations might feel: like her life was coming off the rails. The man she’d modelled herself on – her beliefs, her career, her family life – had spun a succession of lies to keep anyone from finding out who Simon Preston was – and, in doing so, he’d cheated the same system he demanded others uphold so aggressively. Given all that I’d learned about him, Franks was certain to have done it for what he thought to be the right reasons – but that didn’t change his actions.
Or the damage it might do to his daughter.
At nine-thirty, I finally reached Postbridge. It was still and silent, seemingly in hibernation, little sign of life except for the gentle, almost serene ascent of smoke from chimneys. There were six, maybe seven buildings visible from the road, and by the time I’d passed the last of them I’d left the village and could see a wooden sign ahead marked ‘Franks’.
I pulled off on to a mud track awash in water and grey slush. It rose sharply across the face of the moors, the house not yet visible from the bottom. On my left, I followed the treeline I’d seen in the video Craw had shot, a procession of old, gnarled trunks, their leaves long since gone. Halfway up, an A-frame rooftop emerged above the brow of the hill, and then the track started to veer right. As it did, more of the house came into view, perched like a bird in a nest, fields rolling off either side, the moor continuing its flight upward, beyond the boundaries of the property to where a tor – a third of a mile further up – was marked by a collection of huge boulders. Everything was just like it had been in the video, except film had failed to fully grasp how removed this place was: a tiny house set among endless fields, under the shadow of a tor, below perpetual sky.
I parked up and got out.
Standing in the drizzle at the front of the house, I knew answers were unlikely to be here, even though it was the scene of the crime. It was the reason I hadn’t already been down, why I’d relied on Craw’s video: if Franks had left of his own accord, I felt certain he would have covered his tracks; if he’d left because Reynolds had come for him, it was even less likely mistakes would have been made, let alone missed by Craw. Reynolds had been flying below the radar for a long time, and even when questions were raised about him – as they had been constantly, from the moment he came under Franks’s command – there was never enough to pin on him. He was slippery. But, worse, he was clever.
That was what made him frightening.
I did a circuit of the house.
The woodshed looked even less sturdy in the flesh, a lean-to with warped, misshapen support beams and a corrugated-iron roof that had rusted in the middle. Chunks of wood remained inside, but the nine months since Franks’s disappearance had seen them gradually succumb to moss.
I continued around to the back of the woodshed, where I found the tree stump I’d seen in the film. The axe that had been embedded in it was lo
ng gone.
A few feet further on was the toolshed.
Its door was padlocked. I opened it up with the keys Craw had given me, and looked inside. It smelled of old wood and oil, and Franks’s tools had all been removed, except for a shovel, a brush and a rusting lawnmower. No hammers. No screwdrivers. No chisels. I went through pots of nails, wall plugs and curtain hooks, and found nothing.
There was a small porch at the back, leading into the kitchen. Through the glass I could see glimpses of the Frankses’ half-finished renovation. In the parts that had been fully fitted, drawers were empty and shelves were bare. As I rejoined the front side of the house at the end of the veranda, I looked up to the tor, two hundred feet higher than me. The boulders that had marked out its peak had now been consumed by mist.
Inside, I walked the rooms, opened the cupboards and the wardrobes, and found nothing. Franks’s old PC was still in the study, but the electrics had long since been switched off. Craw had told me that would be the case, so I’d brought an extension cable and an adaptor. Setting the engine of my car running, I slotted the plug adaptor into the cigarette lighter, and the extension cable to the plug, then ran the cable all the way through the house to the study. But Craw had warned me about the PC too and after ten minutes all I found were duplicates of the pictures Franks had uploaded to his iPad.
Then I heard something.
I got up from the PC and wandered into the living room.
It had sounded like a series of clicks.
Now, though, there was nothing: the house was utterly silent. I retraced my steps through both floors again, listening out for the same sound, but all that came back was the patter of rain on the roof. After a moment more, I began looping up the extension cable.
As I closed up the house and returned to the car, I paused for a moment midway across the lawn and looked back at the woodshed.
An odd feeling ghosted through me.
I’d just spent an hour searching the place, opening every door, checking every loose floorboard, making sure nothing remained hidden.
And yet something unsettling clung on.
A sense that I’d missed something.
I watched clouds pass in the windows of the house. Listened to the soft moan its wooden bones made as the wind pressed against them. My eyes traced the spaces beyond the building, across the rolling moorland, falling on three paths that had been carved – through seas of heather and bracken – by walkers over the years. They moved parallel to one another, like claw marks, until they finally faded from view.
Maybe it’s nothing.
Maybe you just want something to be here.
I headed back to the car.
45
My parents’ old place was west of Dartmouth, off the coastal road that eventually wound its way to Kingsbridge. It was part of a small settlement built on a curved bay, although – of all the houses in the village – theirs was the most physically removed from it, perched in the hills above: the kitchen looked out over a line of fishermen’s cottages butting up against a sea wall, and to the beach beyond, boats moored on its shingle. At night, when the wind passed through, sometimes you could lie in bed and hear their masts chiming. Other nights, the sound of laughter from the Seven Stars, a shabby, salt-blanched pub that sat among the cottages. But, mostly, all you could hear was the sea, relentless, metronomic, the gentle chatter of pebbles in summer and the boom of breaking waves in the winter.
I let myself in, turned on the electrics and the water, then sat at the table in the kitchen, listening to the kettle boiling. There was no mist here but the skies were equally oppressive, and as I nursed a mug of coffee, rain began peppering the glass, and it was like moments in time had become tethered. Thirteen months earlier, I’d been in the same position, with the same drink, looking out at the same weather.
Another time. Another life.
Connected to each other by the missing.
I woke to the sound of my phone. For a moment I was disorientated, unsure of where I was. But then slowly, as I crawled from the depths, everything shifted into focus.
I glanced at my watch.
Ten past five.
I’d been asleep for six hours.
I brought the mobile towards me and looked at the display. Annabel. Taking it through to the kitchen, I sat down at the table.
‘Hey, sweetheart.’
‘Hey. Are you okay?’
‘Catching up on some sleep.’
‘You burning the candle at both ends again?’
‘Not in a fun way.’ It was dark outside now, the village reduced to dots of light. ‘Actually, I’m back in the motherland.’
‘Oh, cool. Are you coming to see us?’
‘Definitely. I just need to take care of a couple of things first.’
‘You still trying to find that guy?’
‘Still trying.’ In the background of the call, I could hear Olivia laughing at something. ‘How’s Liv?’
‘She’s good. Glued to the TV.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m fine.’
But, as she paused for a moment, I sensed she wanted to give voice to something. ‘You sure?’
‘It’s Emily,’ she said. ‘She keeps trying to call me.’
Emily: the woman who’d kept Annabel’s real parents a secret from her, from me, from anyone. She’d had her reasons, good reasons some of them, but it didn’t make it any less painful for Annabel. It pained me too – some days a great deal – because I’d spent twenty-four years not knowing my daughter. But I was older, a little more sculpted by life. Maybe, in a strange way, I was even expectant of lies now, because of the nature of my work. Annabel would come around – but in her own time, and on her own terms.
‘Things will get easier between you,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to speak to her.’
‘I understand that. But if you think, even for a moment, that you can make it work, I’d pick up the phone to her. Emily’s just like the rest of us.’ I looked out across the table, at the pictures I’d laid out, of Franks, of Ellie, of Craw. ‘We all just want to be surrounded by the people we love.’
46
Although Franks’s iPad – and the photographs on it – had been destroyed, in a moment of what was either fortune or foresight, I’d removed the SD card from his SLR camera when Craw had first handed me Franks’s boxes at her house. I’d left the camera with her, but taken the SD card with me, ostensibly as back-up in case I ran into any problems with the pictures on the iPad. I hadn’t been expecting the kind of problems Reynolds had brought me, but when he turned over the house, he missed the SD card, as I’d left it in the car.
After I was finished with Annabel, I went out to the BMW and retrieved the old laptop I’d brought from home, returned to the house, and slotted the SD card into it. A minute later, the pictures were copying across to the desktop.
As I sat there waiting, I still couldn’t shake the feeling I’d missed something.
Maybe something Murray had said.
Maybe something at the Frankses’ house.
Using the trackpad, I double-clicked on a picture of their home, taken by either Leonard or Ellie in the months after they’d moved in. Next to the laptop, in two rows on the table, were colour printouts of the photos that Craw had given me, which I’d asked her to resend after Reynolds had taken the original printouts from my house. Craw’s were different shots, taken over two and a half years later, but of the same house from the same angles.
The house is empty.
You didn’t miss anything.
My eyes drifted back to the photograph on the laptop, of the home when Leonard and Ellie had first moved in. I’d looked at it countless times. When I compared it with the ones Craw had taken in the months after Franks went missing, they appeared identical. Same A-frame roof. Same veranda. Same woodshed. The same sense of complete isolation.
I moved through the photographs on the PC desktop, then through the hard copies on the table. Outside,
through the rain, the beach was barely visible now. Inside, my work was lit by a single table lamp and accompanied by the gentle hum of the central heating.
After ten minutes, I got up and filled the kettle again.
Clear your head.
I walked to the kitchen door and opened it up, letting the bitter air ghost past me. The rain made a soft sound on the gravel of the drive, like a gathering of voices. As I listened, I thought of another picture, also taken on Dartmoor: the one Franks had two copies of – the shot of the valley with the remains of the tinner’s hut in it, and the church spire in the distance. This one was a real church spire built on top of a real church, not the kind I’d seen on the hospital at Keel Point. But I was yet to narrow down the location, and still hadn’t been able to figure out why Franks had two versions of the same shot: one taken on film years ago, and one taken in the time after he retired to Devon.
As the kettle came to the boil, my thoughts shifted again, back to Bethlehem, and to my plan to get across there in the morning, at low tide. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find, but I knew there was something there, my mind returning over and over to the room with the IV stand. Why was Reynolds so interested in it? Why that room, of all the hundreds of rooms there must have been in the building? What did it represent?
If I was going to do it, I had to be at the beach for 5 a.m. I’d bought a wetsuit on the way down from Dartmoor, and had packed that, a change of clothes and a torch into a waterproof backpack and left it in the boot of the car. Deep down, I knew a boat would be more practical, safer too, but it would also be harder to hide once I got across – and that just gave me one more thing to worry about.
I closed the door and poured myself a coffee, returning to the pictures.
I moved from the front-on shot of the house taken two and a half years back, around the time the Frankses had first moved in, to the one Craw had taken on a grey autumn day only a few months ago. The only change was in the colour of the structure itself, a subtle, imperceptible difference, the wood lightening by a couple of shades as sunlight bleached it over time.
