by Tim Weaver
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’
A long pause. ‘You’re brave.’
‘Why do you say that?’
I waited her out, but I thought I might already know what she was failing to put into words: people weren’t the only vessels for memories. In my work, in the search for the missing, I’d been to places that had a resonance, a sense of what had taken place in them, even years after they’d been abandoned. It wasn’t ghosts, it was something real and more powerful; as if a place could become scarred by its history.
Eventually, she said, ‘If you’re really thinking about going, you should cross at Parl Rock.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Another half a mile further down the coast. The crossing takes a little longer, but because of the sandbanks the water level never gets quite as high.’
I paused, wondering how she’d come to know that.
She seemed to sense my thoughts. ‘I had some friends who went across, after it closed. They did it as a dare. I’ve got a brain between my ears, so I just watched from the beach.’ She cleared her throat, as if finding it hard to articulate the words. ‘On one side of the building, there are all these windows. Loads of them, all looking out to sea. I remember watching my friends head out there and thinking those windows … they looked like …’
‘What?’
‘It makes me sound crazy.’
‘It’s okay.’
A brief hesitation, then: ‘They looked like eyes. Some had already been vandalized, smashed and broken, but lots of them were still intact – and when the moon, or the lights from the beach, reflected off the glass … it was like people were moving around in there.’
I looked out into the darkness.
‘Just be careful,’ she said.
‘I’ll let you know if I’m being washed out to sea.’
She made a brief, amused sound. ‘Honestly, cross at Parl Rock. That’ll make it easier. All you need to do to get there is follow the signs for Brompton Lee.’
‘Okay, I wi –’ I stopped. ‘Wait, where?’
‘Brompton Lee. It’s the last village before Parl Rock. That was where my friends lived. The ones who went across.’
‘What’s in Brompton Lee?’
‘In it? I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Houses? Shops?’
‘Yeah. Uh … a pub. A post office.’
I removed my pad and flicked through the notes I’d made. Pretty soon, I found what I was looking for: what Franks had written on the scrap of paper and the pub flyer. What I’d found printed on the plastic tag I’d dug out of the ground on Dartmoor.
BROLE108.
I told Annabel I’d check back in a couple of hours, then hung up, powering on my mobile. I went to the web browser and searched for ‘Brompton Lee post office’. After a couple of seconds, I found a picture of it in Google Images. It was a post office inside a general store. On the board above its entrance, in a thin serif, was BROMPTON LEE GENERAL STORE AND POST OFFICE. Next to that was its phone number.
BROLE 577233.
When I scrolled down, I found its opening hours. Because of what else it sold – milk, bread, newspapers – it opened at 6 a.m. It was a stroke of good luck, as I could take a look inside and still get down to Parl Rock for low tide the next morning.
But that wasn’t what caught my eye. Instead, what I zeroed in on was part of a list below the store’s opening times.
Its facilities and services.
Including one hundred and ten post-office boxes.
63
Brompton Lee was a mid-sized village south of Salcombe, set on the edge of the coast. It had maybe eighty homes, in a raft of different colours, two pubs, a butcher’s, an estate agency, a tea room and a pharmacy. The general store sat on its own, midway through, an extension on its side doubling up as the entrance. The A-road in and out meant the village had good access to Salcombe, Kingsbridge, the surrounding villages and everything east of the Avon, which was probably why this post office had survived the government cull.
In the windows was a mix of foodstuffs, ice-cream signs and postcards of the local area. A sign confirmed its opening time as 6 a.m. I drove past, finding a spot about two hundred yards away. When I switched off the engine and the lights, the night washed in, and – except for the metronomic crash of the sea on the beach, eighty feet below – all I could see were squares of light from the village, hanging there in the blackness.
I got out, the night cool, and walked further into the lay-by, where a hole had been cut out of a thick tangle of ivy. Through it, I could see the vague outline of boats, drifting slowly across the channel, miles out to sea. In front of them, it was difficult to see anything.
But I knew the hospital was there.
A ghost marooned in the water.
I’d set my alarm for five-forty-five. As it started to go off, I shrugged off the spare coat I’d been using as a blanket, and sat up on the back seat. It could easily have been midnight. The sun wasn’t going to be up until after eight, so there was absolutely no hint of light in the sky at all. It was as cold as a tomb too. The first thing I did was clamber into the front, start up the engine and put the heaters on full.
Ten minutes later, warm and awake, I locked the car and headed back into the village on foot, trying to keep my arrival as low-key as possible. The lights above the store were already illuminated, and forty feet from the entrance I could see a grey-haired woman in her sixties standing at the window, turning an Open/Closed sign around. I was at the door before she realized she had a customer, the darkness disguising my approach.
The store was small and cramped, shelves packed with produce. At the front, in wicker baskets, was fresh fruit. At the other end was a dark wood counter, a sweet display and the day’s newspapers on top, then a cove beyond that, perhaps ten feet across. Inside was the only thing in the store that looked like it belonged in the twenty-first century: post-office boxes, built floor to ceiling. The antiquation hadn’t quite been abandoned, though: the boxes were all housed behind a pair of old-fashioned saloon doors.
‘Morning,’ the woman said.
I smiled at her. ‘Morning. How are you?’
‘I’m good. You’re up early.’
It was clear she didn’t recognize me as a local, her eyes lingering on me a fraction longer than they should have done. She moved slowly, was slightly hunched, round and overweight, but she was switched on. There was a spark to her. At the back, through a glass sliding door behind the counter, I could see a man about the same age. Her husband. He was marking something off on a printed list. Next to him, on the wall, was a board full of hooks. From the hooks hung one hundred and ten keys, all secured behind a locked, reinforced-glass cabinet. They were spares for the PO boxes.
Each key had a red plastic tag on it.
‘I’m just passing through,’ I said.
‘Ah. I didn’t think I recognized you.’
‘I’ve been in a few times before.’
She frowned. ‘Oh, right.’
‘Your husband helped me with my PO box.’ I nodded to the cove at the back. ‘My wife and I have just moved to a place on the other side of East Prawle.’
‘Oh, right,’ she said again. It was obvious she didn’t recognize me, but she tried to pretend my story rang a bell.
‘Anyway, I’d better get on.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, gesturing towards the cove at the back. ‘Do you need anything else? I can gather some stuff together for you in the meantime.’
I needed to keep her occupied while I had a look around, but sending her on a milk and bread run wasn’t going to take longer than a minute. I felt around in the pockets of my jacket: the plastic tag, my notepad, my mobile phone.
My lock picks.
‘That would be great,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
I told her what I needed and then left her, making a beeline for the saloon doors. On the other side, I waited for them to settle back into place, got out my phone,
then put in the number for the general store. When I looked out over the doors, I could see the woman was already at a refrigerator.
‘What size milk do you want?’ she asked, without looking at me.
‘Just a couple of pints – thanks.’
I took in the boxes. They were standard-sized, all red, numbered 1 through to 110, and were built across three walls.
Box 108 was on the bottom row, right-hand side.
Returning to my phone, I called the number for the general store and placed the mobile back into my pocket. Somewhere beyond the cove I heard a ringing, then footsteps. They weren’t the woman’s, they were her husband’s. As I dropped to my haunches at the lock, I heard him say hello. By the time he was saying hello a second time, I had the tension wrench in and was using the pick to apply pressure to the pins.
The man put the phone down.
In my pocket: the soft sound of a dialling tone.
‘Brown or white?’ the woman called over.
‘Brown,’ I said, adjusting the tension wrench slightly and feeling the pins settle against the pick. I looked through the slats on the saloon door and could see her at the wicker baskets now, choosing the three apples I’d asked for. Returning my attention to the box, I tried to work faster, but any excessive movement and everything reset – and then I’d have to start all over again.
Suddenly, beyond the walls of the cove, there were more footsteps and the sound of a sliding door. The husband was in the shop now too.
Steadying my hand, I closed my eyes for a second, trying to focus on what I was feeling rather than seeing. As I slowly drew the pick back out, I heard the two of them talking – the woman explaining to her husband what she was doing and where I was – and, when I opened my eyes, I could see the husband looking my way, head tilted, frown on his face. She’d repeated what I’d told her: that he’d help me set up the box.
Except he couldn’t remember me.
Because it was all a lie.
He came out from behind the counter – and started to come towards me.
Damn it.
Suppressing the urge to withdraw the pick, I steadied my nerves and wriggled the wrench again. Tiny, fractional movements, but enough so that I could feel the pins dab against the pick, and the lock turn gently from left to right.
Come on.
The husband was six feet away.
Come on, come on.
The dialling tone in my pocket had turned into the constant whine of a terminated phone call. I checked through the slats.
Four feet away.
One pin left.
Slowly drawing the pick towards me, I saw the husband’s feet come into view beneath the bottom of the saloon doors. Then the top of his head.
I’m not going to make it in time.
Shit, shit, shi –
The door of the box popped away from its frame.
Immediately dropping the pick and wrench into my opposite pocket, I opened the box and looked up over the saloon doors.
The husband’s head emerged fully above it.
He smiled politely. ‘Hi. How are you?’
I tried to look nonplussed, my hand snaking into my jacket and killing the sound of the phone. ‘I’m good, thanks. Nice to see you again.’
He nodded, still smiling politely at me.
He didn’t remember me, but he tried to pretend he did. With my hand still in my pocket, I pressed Dial, knowing it would call the last number.
Their telephone started ringing a second time.
The husband looked towards the counter and back to me, rolling his eyes. ‘Sorry. I won’t be a minute.’
I told him that was fine and then watched him go. Once he was far enough away, I turned my attention back to the box.
Inside was a foot-long mini-holdall.
The phone stopped ringing elsewhere in the shop as the husband answered. I heard his voice beyond the walls of the cove and an echo of it through my mobile. When he got no response, he asked who it was, annoyed, frustrated.
I dragged the bag out and slung it over my shoulder.
It was time to go.
64
At the car, I dumped the holdall and the shopping bag on to the passenger seat, then followed the signs out of the village, towards Parl Rock. It was a claw of land that reached out into the channel like a finger pointing across the causeway. A narrow road took me halfway down, where a car park had been created inside a natural ring of slate and knotted quartz.
Turning off the lights, I sat in the dark for a moment, wondering what I was about to find. And then I clamped the torch between my teeth and unzipped the holdall.
It was full of money.
For a moment I just sat there, looking into the holdall, slightly dazed, my mind spinning. But then I reached in and pulled some out.
It was segregated into three-hundred-pound bundles, secured with paperclips. As I started counting through them, I found twenty separate bundles. Six thousand pounds.
Beneath the money was something else.
A mobile phone.
I took it out and powered it on. It was a three-year-old Nokia – no touchscreen, just a selection wheel. At first I thought it had been restored to factory settings, or maybe never even used. There was nothing in the address book, no texts, no calls, no web history. But then I started looking through the photos and videos.
It wasn’t empty.
There was a single two-minute film.
I selected it and pushed Play.
At first it was hard to tell what was going on. The camera was struggling to focus in a poorly lit room, as fuzzy black-and-white shapes merged with one another, and then separated again. I looked at the timer on the video.
Fifteen seconds had already passed.
But then, a moment later, the picture snapped into focus.
The camera wasn’t amazing, but it was good enough, and it became clear what everything was: the fuzzy black was the edges of the dark room it had been filmed in; the white, blurry shape it had been merging with was a television.
The person recording the video moved closer to the TV, the camera snapping in, out and back in again to focus on it, and this time there was a much clearer sense of what was being filmed: a TV show set in a pub. It was packed: people lined up at the bar, trying to order drinks; the tables – further back – were all occupied; and a small dancefloor off to the right was filled. The camera-phone video had sound, because I could hear the rustle of clothes, and the hum of electrical equipment, but there was no sound coming from the TV show.
It was on mute.
Suddenly, there was a clumsy fast-zoom in towards the left side of the screen, and for the first time I caught a glimpse of the phone’s operator, frozen there in the black edges of the television.
It was Leonard Franks.
I’ve found you.
He was holding the phone out in front of him, his face claimed mostly by shadow, the room behind him indistinguishable and inexact. I heard him sniff once, then he moved away again, his reflection dissolving into the gloom.
Onscreen, the camera remained zoomed in on an actor at the bar, one elbow on the counter, one holding a beer bottle. He was talking to someone. Franks edged the zoom out again, more carefully this time, and there was an actress there too.
And then I realized something.
It’s not a TV show.
It was security camera footage.
It was Pamela Welland and Paul Viljoen.
Franks adjusted his position and suddenly it became clearer. The scene was exactly as Murray had described: Viljoen, all muscle and brawn, trying to impress; Pamela Welland, blonde, petite, polite but disinterested. Franks’s hand steadied, showing the two of them interacting, Viljoen trying his luck again after a knock-back, getting closer, his fingers flat to the bar, almost brushing against her arm. She smiled at something he said this time, and he smiled back. She looked at her watch. He asked her something else and she leaned in towards his ear – the first time she’d
been that close.
But then it started to break up.
Slowly, the quality of the footage on the TV began to deteriorate. Interference sparked on the screen, disrupting the clarity of the picture. Franks tried to move in closer, but it made no difference. As Viljoen closed the gap again, between himself and Welland, a series of scanlines broke, moving bottom to top, and I realized Franks must have been filming this from an old VHS tape.
So how old is this camera-phone footage?
I paused the film and went to the video’s data: Franks had shot the footage on 1 March 2013. Two days before his disappearance.
And yet the tape he was filming was much, much older.
I realized what that meant: he’d called Paige and Murray, not because he wanted a copy of the footage, but because he wanted a better quality copy of it. Better than the one he had here. But why? What was he seeing in these moments between Welland and Viljoen? What had made him rewatch it so many times his original copy – his VHS copy – had become so badly damaged? Why had he gone back and filmed it forty-eight hours before he vanished?
I returned to the camera-phone video Franks had shot and picked up where I’d left off, more scanlines pulling at the images of victim and killer.
There was thirty seconds left.
And that was when everything changed.
65
Franks moved even closer. He was right next to the television now – maybe two or three feet away – but his attention had drifted from Welland and Viljoen. They were on the far left of the shot. Instead he’d focused in on the edge of the dancefloor area to the right, where four men and five women were gathered around a table. It looked like they’d come straight from work: the men were in suits, the women in skirts and blouses, in dresses, in trousers and jackets. The scanlines were even worse, the picture on the TV jumping, stuttering, the colours fading and retuning. The tape had been played over and over – but why?
A second later, I got my answer.
One of the women left the table, her back originally to the CCTV camera, and headed towards the bar. She was in a grey patterned knee-length dress and black heels.
