by Tim Weaver
‘So are you going to start calling me by whatever name I get next?’ he asked, popping the card into the power socket. The lights in the bathroom and bedroom flickered into life. Before this, we’d tried to get into a routine of only calling him by the name we’d arranged last, Bryan Kennedy – but it had never felt natural.
‘No,’ I said. ‘To me, you’ll just be Colm Healy.’
Colm Healy.
His real name weighed heavy on the air. There were so many miles attached to it, such anger and tragedy and sadness, and yet – as a smile formed at the edges of his mouth – it was clear that this was what he’d always wanted; he wanted to go back, even if it was only when the two of us were alone, to return to the part of his life that had made the most sense, when he’d had the structure of a family and a career.
‘Thanks, Raker,’ he said quietly.
I looked at the walls.
He’d moved aside a desk, the TV, a corner table and chair. He’d taken down a painting. In its place, he’d filled the entire wall, every inch of it: tacked-up photocopies, pictures, printouts, a cascade of paper, of headlines and handwritten notes that meant nothing to anyone except us. This was no one else’s obsession but ours.
At the top, on hotel stationery, was a title for it all.
Black Gale.
When he’d first floated the idea of looking into what happened at the village, I’d said no. I’d said no a month later when he tried again, even though I knew he was going stir-crazy stuck in a hotel room in the north-east; he’d moved there from Devon as a safety measure when a journalist had started sniffing around my life. Eventually it dawned on me that giving Healy something to get his teeth into made sense, as it was then less likely that he would get careless, and at the time I’d taken ownership of all the information that was now pinned to the wall of this room. So as a peace offering, perhaps as an apology too, I’d couriered everything back to him in Newcastle in an effort to keep him focused, but also to send him a message: I still wasn’t ready to get involved. Missing people had always been my life, as essential to me as the blood in my veins, but my last case had almost killed me. I hadn’t felt ready for something on this scale, and the idea of working a case with Healy seemed a bad way of acclimatizing.
But that was just the problem: when something was in your blood you could never really get rid of it. I could deny it for a while – or try to – but the compulsion would always remain. So when we’d talked on the phone three nights ago and he’d mentioned Black Gale again, this time I let him tell me about it. I put the phone down afterwards and went looking myself. And then the next day I woke up and I realized something: this job had nearly destroyed me before, but it had saved me as well. It had brought me out of the darkness after my wife had died. It had given me focus, and maintained me, and taught me how to live. It was like breath.
It was how I felt normal.
‘We came here once with the kids,’ Healy said, the distance in his voice instantly bringing me back, its timbre laced with the anguish of events long past. He was looking at a picture of Black Gale. ‘I mean, not here, but the Yorkshire Dales. We stayed at some place near Malham Cove.’ Another smile, there and gone again. ‘Leanne was always easy; she’d just go along with whatever Gemma and I decided. But the boys …’ He made a noise through his teeth: amused, then more emotional. ‘All they did all week was whine. Every walk, every place we took them.’
I watched him for a moment, the dull light of the room reflected in his eyes. There was no animosity in his voice. Just sadness because of what came after, the things he’d lost.
The family.
‘I wish I could come with you,’ Healy said.
It was hard to remain silent, harder still to insist that he didn’t, but that the best place for him was right here, inside a room booked in a false name, where no one would remember him or ask questions about who he was. When a man wasn’t supposed to exist, you risked absolutely everything even by driving into the middle of nowhere.
Even so, it hurt me to deny him the chance; if it wasn’t for Healy, we wouldn’t have ever got this far. Before he was forced to relocate, in his evenings, at weekends, alone inside my parents’ old cottage, with no access to the Internet, he’d spent the money that he’d earned on the trawler paying for photocopies and books, and on bus tickets to the local library. There, he’d kept his sanity by reading newspapers, using their computers to get online, even sitting at ancient microfiche readers, in order to study old, unsolved cases. That was where he’d found this one. If the world hadn’t believed him dead, this would have been the sort of case he would have worked. Instead, he’d called me, telling me to look into it, knowing the whole time that – whatever contribution he made – he’d always exist in the shadows.
I’d brought a backpack with me from the car and, as I looked at the walls again, reminding myself of the timeline that Healy had constructed of what had happened out at Black Gale two and a half years ago, I handed him the bag.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, taking it from me.
‘A printout of the police investigation. One of my old sources at the Met mailed it over to me, but it just came through this morning so I haven’t had a chance to look at it properly.’
He unzipped the bag, pulling out a stack of paper.
‘I thought you could go over it while I’m out,’ I said.
‘This file could be the jackpot, Raker,’ Healy said, his face coloured with excitement, his fingers fanning the pages of the file.
I stepped closer to the wall. ‘Maybe.’
A cut-out of a front page was pinned in the centre.
Or maybe not.
The photograph was of the farmhouse at Black Gale, shot from the bottom of the mud track with the other homes on the fringes of the frame.
Under that was a simple, two-word headline.
GHOST HOUSE.
3
I was still thinking of the hotel room with the Black Gale case pinned to its walls when Ross Perry asked me, ‘Do you want to go inside the house?’
I looked at the other homes in the village and then back to his parents’ place. I did want to search it, but first I wanted to spend a little longer outside, looking at the view and getting a sense of Black Gale itself. All the power was off in the homes anyway, which meant they were unlikely to be any warmer. We moved closer, beneath the shelter of the Perrys’ porch.
‘When did you realize something was up?’ I asked him.
‘I called Mum on the 1st of November,’ Ross said. ‘As I’m sure you know, this would have been the end of 2015.’
‘But she didn’t respond?’
‘No. She didn’t pick up the landline or her mobile phone, so I tried Dad’s mobile instead. But he didn’t answer either. Mum was useless on her phone, but for Dad not to answer … that was unusual.’ He shrugged, eyes watering. It was hard to tell if it was tears or the cold. ‘Anyway, I guess I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Mum had been to the doctor’s a couple of days before because she needed to talk to them about her blood pressure pills – they were making her light-headed – so I was only checking in on how things went. I just figured the two of them were out to lunch or something.’ He shrugged a second time, but it was less certain now. ‘There was a country club in Skipton they loved.’
The wind picked up again, rattling the fence posts that separated the houses. Rain dotted my skin, and then sleet. I started making notes, sheltering my notebook from the weather.
‘I tried them again in the evening and then again the following morning. Nothing. I’m not sure that I was worried by that point …’ His voice trailed off, his gaze fixed on a space beyond me. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I was. It wasn’t like we talked every day. It’s just, after you send someone two or three texts and you leave them a few messages, you do start to wonder.’ His eyes strayed back towards me. ‘I live south of Leeds, so it’s a seventy-mile drive up here. It wasn’t like I could just pop round to see if they were all ri
ght. It was a Monday, the branch was open, so I had clients and viewings. I would have been busy.’
He said it like it was a decision anyone could understand him making, but his voice betrayed him. He’d spent every day of the last two and a half years wishing he’d reacted faster, because driving seventy miles was nothing when you were doing it for the people you loved. Would it have made a difference if he’d dropped everything and come here on Monday 2 November? Or, as the police suspected, were the Perrys and the rest of the families in Black Gale long gone by that time? The not knowing was the problem. It was the prickle in his skin, the irritant.
‘So when did you finally come up here?’
‘When Rina Blake called me on Tuesday the 3rd.’
I flipped back to some details I’d logged the night before, at home in London as I’d gone over Internet accounts of the Black Gale disappearances. Chris and Laura Gibbs, and their teenaged son Mark, were the family who’d lived at the farm. Patrick and Francesca Perry I already knew about. In the house next to theirs had been seventy-year-old Randolph Solomon and his sixty-four-year-old girlfriend Emiline Wilson. And then, finally, in the last house, was a retired couple called John and Freda Davey. He was sixty-eight, she was sixty-five, and Rina Blake was their daughter.
‘How did you know Rina?’ I asked.
‘We’d met a few times when we’d both been up here visiting our parents. She knew I ran my own estate agency in Leeds, so she knew where to find me. She called me and said she’d been trying to get hold of her mum and dad and neither of them had responded. She and Freda were in touch every day – literally, every day. She said her mum would often just call to ask how Rina’s day was going. I think she could be a bit of a mother-hen type sometimes, but Rina said she never minded. She said Freda had been a great mum.’
‘Rina lives in Cambridge, right?’
‘Right. So she was even further away than me.’ Ross looked out at the moors; a storm was coming towards us, the clouds pregnant with it. ‘She said she’d tried calling my parents on their home number, then the Gibbses, then Randolph and Emiline, but couldn’t get through to any of them, so she asked if I could speak to Mum and Dad – maybe try their mobiles – and see if they could check in on her folks. That was when I said to her, “I can’t get hold of my parents either.” I started to panic. We both did.’
‘So then you headed up here?’
He nodded. ‘The moment I got here, I knew something wasn’t right. It was so quiet. Normally, Chris and Laura were out on the farm: Chris would be repairing machinery, or be working on the tractor, or in the sheds. Mark would be there too, a lot of the time. He was nineteen, at agricultural college, but whenever he wasn’t down in Bradford he was helping his parents out.’ He stopped, pointing to the house next to his mum and dad’s. ‘Emiline, she was always outside as well. Loved her garden; would be out there rain or shine. But that day there was no one around. The houses were all locked up. It was dead.’
I stayed silent, looking out at the moors.
The police had done three separate searches of the surrounding area in the weeks following the disappearances – the second and third time with cadaver dogs – and had found nothing. No bodies, no clothing, nothing belonging to any of the nine missing Black Gale residents. Two months in, they took a helicopter out, with cameras capable of revealing recently disturbed earth – and, in turn, potential grave sites – but that came up short too. Before that, they’d found no unidentified tyre tracks in the surface mud on the road in and out of the village, and therefore no evidence that any vehicles – other than Ross’s, and the ones belonging to the villagers – had driven up here on the date of the disappearance, or the days that followed. CCTV coverage was virtually non-existent this far out and there were no witnesses to anything suspicious in the villages that circled Black Gale. The police concluded that the last physical contact anyone had had with the village was when a postman delivered mail to the Daveys and the Gibbs on Saturday 31 October.
Or, at least, that was the last contact they knew about.
‘They reckon it happened on or just after Halloween night,’ Ross said, his voice muted. He looked from one house to the next as if willing someone – anyone – to come to the front door. His eyes eventually landed on the farm. ‘I couldn’t see it from the outside, but when the police broke down the doors on the farm it was obvious that the Gibbses had thrown a dinner party. Although everything had been packed away – all the plates, all the food, the booze – it was still done out in a Halloween theme: you know, cobwebs, pumpkins, that sort of thing.’
‘But the rest of the house was tidy?’
‘Yes. Immaculate.’
‘All the houses were tidy, right?’
‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘They’d all been left spotless.’
But not suspiciously clean – not deliberately wiped down in order to hide evidence – just hoovered and dusted, items packed away, electrical items switched off, as if the occupants were all going away on holiday. Which they weren’t, at least not abroad: in the file, investigators said all nine of the missing villagers had taken their wallets or purses with them, their mobile phones too, which never pinged a single tower after Halloween night, and were never switched on. But they hadn’t taken their passports.
‘And they didn’t take any clothes with them, correct?’
‘That’s right.’
‘No suitcases?’
‘Nothing,’ Ross said. ‘Nothing’s missing from any of the cupboards – or not that you can tell, anyway. I mean, when you go on holiday, normally you make some sort of dent in your wardrobe, but in Mum and Dad’s room, in the bedrooms of all the others, it doesn’t look like anything’s been removed at all. And, like I just said, no suitcases got taken either. No other baggage. It’s all so …’ He shook his head. ‘Weird.’
It was certainly weird if it really had been a holiday. But the fact that none of them had used any ATM machines, or credit cards, and that their phones were off – and never came back on – from around 10 p.m. on Halloween night, and were all last geo-located to Black Gale, didn’t really fit with the idea of a trip, whether it was planned or a last-minute getaway. So why take the wallets? Why take their mobiles?
‘The police got hold of a load of photos from the Cloud,’ Ross said. ‘It’s how they knew the dinner took place on Halloween. Metadata, or whatever.’ He gave a forced smile. ‘On Chris Gibbs’s phone there were all these pictures. You know, selfies, that sort of thing. The police showed me a few of them. They looked like they were having a laugh. Relaxed. Like I said, everyone always got on well.’
I’d seen some of the photos that Chris Gibbs had taken too.
On the police database, there would have been the option to view the photos in a higher resolution, but I’d had to make do with the low-res printouts I’d been given. They’d be good enough for now, though. Even pixellated, they backed up exactly what Ross was saying about the Halloween dinner: the four couples – and Mark Gibbs too, who appeared in a number of the shots – had all been having a good time.
‘They all had Halloween masks,’ Ross said. ‘In one of the pictures, I think Chris must have set his phone on a timer because there’s all nine of them, with masks on.’ He went to say something else and his breath caught. ‘Mum and Dad …’
I waited for him.
‘They wore these stupid zombie masks.’
It seemed a trivial, almost comical detail at first, but this was exactly the kind of thing that swelled and intensified the longer a person was missing. It became the element that the families fixated on when they were left behind, the madness in which they tried to find rational answers. Was there something in that choice of mask? Had it been a sign? Did it mean something? Ross’s parents were out there somewhere, maybe dead, maybe alive. The more he thought about that, the more it became significant.
To Ross Perry, the choice of mask was some kind of portent.
In the sky around us, the storm had started to brea
k: there was a charge in the air, and though I could almost feel it on my skin, I wasn’t thinking about it.
I was thinking about the Halloween party.
For the media, it had been a gift: three couples, and the farmer and his family, all vanishing into thin air, never to be seen again, on the same night the world celebrated monsters, and ghosts, and the unexplained. It had allowed journalists to push the idea that Halloween might, in some way, be responsible for what had happened at Black Gale, that something this strange, this uncharted, could only ever have occurred on the last night of October. And the longer the police went without something tangible to counter it with – some compelling piece of evidence, some theory that altered the narrative – the more the idea began to take hold.
Two and half years on, the disappearances had long faded from the headlines, and from most people’s memories as well, but in the online accounts of that night the concept of Halloween was still deeply embedded, not least because you almost always found the same image republished. It had become synonymous with the case: a front page from one of the country’s biggest tabloids, published on 5 November, two days after Ross called the police. The headline was GHOST HOUSE. Under that was a subhead: Like something out of the Twilight Zone … Beneath both of those was the now familiar image of the farm, abandoned and dark.
It didn’t look like a home any more.
It looked like a mausoleum.
4
Inside, the Perry house was clean, the downstairs rooms orderly and attractive. Ross hadn’t just kept an eye on the property, he’d kept it looking the same as the day his mum and dad were last there. A refillable air freshener had been left running in the hallway, presumably in an effort to offset the musty aroma of a house without fresh air, but otherwise it appeared exactly like the photos attached to North Yorkshire Police’s original investigation.