by Tim Weaver
I wiped my feet on the mat, and then took in the layout: stairs ahead of me, a kitchen beyond that which, in turn, led to the garden room; a large living room on the left with leather sofas in it. The hallway floors were oak, and on the wall beneath the incline of the staircase was a nest of family photographs, shaped like a tree. I could see Patrick and Francesca Perry at the centre, and then what I assumed were extended family at the edges, but mostly I could see Ross. As their only child, he was the dominant fixture in the tree, the pictures charting his life, from the day he was born, to a shot, only a couple of years old, of him in a suit, holding a trophy up at some sort of industry awards ceremony, his parents flanking him, proud, smiling.
I walked to the wall and looked more closely at the Perrys. In a shot similar to the one that had run most often in the media, they were outside a villa in Spain, Patrick in a polo shirt and shorts, Francesca in a dress, but in others the two of them were in the Alps, in Thailand, New York, Dubai. They were attractive, still young-looking even as they got to their late forties, Patrick handsome, tall and athletic, with silver-flecked hair, Francesca dark-eyed, dark-haired and slender.
‘They loved to travel,’ Ross said from behind me. ‘Even after so many years of being married, they never lost that spark. They just loved spending time together.’
That was pretty clear, but while the majority of the photographs of the two of them had been taken on holidays, there were a few that weren’t. In one, Patrick was in a pair of shorts, a vest and a hard hat, in the space that would eventually become their porch. Off to the side of the shot, I could see a vague image of the other two houses, less developed than the Perrys’ – in fact, little more than concrete beds at that stage.
‘Is it right that Chris Gibbs built these homes?’ I asked.
‘Sort of,’ Ross replied. ‘I mean, he didn’t build them all himself – he brought a firm in to do it – but it’s his land and, once they were finished, he sold them through us. That was how Mum and Dad ended up here: as soon as Chris came to me with the properties, I phoned Dad because I knew they would love the house and the area it was in. They were big walkers, always outdoors. It wasn’t that they weren’t happy in Denshaw, but Dad was working from home by that stage, so there was no need to be so close to the city.’
‘I read that your dad was a journalist.’
‘Yeah, for the Manchester Evening News.’
‘Why did he leave?’
‘They made him redundant in 2010. He was forty-five, at a bit of a crossroads in terms of his career, so he took the redundancy money, put it in the bank and then caned it for a year as a freelancer. At the end of that, he took out a loan and put in everything he’d earned to set up his PR business.’ Ross glanced at one of the photographs of his father; a flicker of a smile. ‘He nailed it, David. I knew he would. He didn’t stretch himself thin, didn’t take on too many clients – he wanted everyone to feel like they were getting the personal touch. By the end of 2014, he was turning down work.’
‘They didn’t struggle to afford this place, then?’
‘No, definitely not.’
‘I’m guessing Chris Gibbs didn’t do too badly out of it either.’
Ross nodded. ‘He didn’t have to pay for the plot, so that instantly saves a lot. The houses cost £250,000 to build – and he sold them for four hundred grand each.’
A profit of almost a million.
I’d already wondered if money might be at the heart of this case, and now I thought about it again. Patrick Perry’s PR business was flying; Chris Gibbs had made almost seven figures on the houses. Jealousy often shadowed financial success.
‘So Chris had a lot of cash burning a hole in his pocket?’ I asked.
‘He said there was no money in farming any more, so I think he saw it as clever business. A nest egg for Mark. But you know what? Chris was never money-oriented. I know that’s easy to say when you’ve got nine hundred grand sitting in your account, but he wasn’t. He bought himself that Land Rover out there, farm machinery or whatever, but Dad said he never lorded it over anyone. You’d never have known that he had all that cash. Mum and Dad really liked him, and Laura too. They were just normal people.’
I looked at the pictures of Ross again. He was an only child. John and Freda Davey’s daughter, Rina Blake, had a brother, Ian, but he was in Singapore. Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson had never married and never had kids. Chris Gibbs had a sister who lived in London called Tori, but his parents were both gone. Laura Gibbs didn’t have any siblings and her mother was in a nursing home in Leeds and had late-stage dementia. What that meant was that there were surprisingly few family connections left behind: Ross Perry, Tori Gibbs, Rina Blake, and then her brother who lived and worked seven thousand miles away and who, with the best will in the world, was going to be of little help in the search for answers. It was why everything had begun to drift. It was always the reason cases began to drift. The fewer people directly connected to a disappearance, the more difficult it was for it to stay afloat.
‘Have you got keys to the other houses?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Ross replied, and reached into his coat pocket. ‘Because Tori’s in London and Rina’s in Cambridge, they like me to check on the properties when I come up here. I tend to come every couple of weeks or so, just to make sure everything’s all right.’ He handed me a set of keys. ‘The one for Randolph and Emiline’s place is on there too. It’s still complicated, obviously, because we don’t know if any of them are …’ He trailed off. Dead. He couldn’t say the word and I didn’t blame him. That was the best and worst bit about a disappearance: there was always the chance they were still alive, so you always had hope, but it was the hope that so often inflicted the most damage. ‘What I mean is,’ he continued, his voice low, affected by what lay unspoken, ‘in Randolph and Emiline’s will, they state that they want any money from the sale of the house to go to charity, but nothing can be done until we know for sure what happened to them. So, in the meantime, the key is with their solicitors, and because I’ve worked with the firm before, and recommended them to clients of mine – and because I’m checking on the properties every fortnight or so – Randolph and Emiline’s solicitor gave me a copy of the key.’
He looked around the house, his expression dropping slightly, as if he hadn’t noticed before how dark it was, how quiet and uninhabited. As I walked through to the kitchen, modern and smelling of surface cleaner, I heard the vent flicker into life. I heard a fence post creak softly in the garden, the weathervane again, and a rumble of thunder. But then all of those noises died away and in their place came an almost suffocating quiet. For a moment, the moors were absolutely soundless, and so were the houses.
I had to find a way to make these walls talk.
5
I headed upstairs.
At the top there were skylights, so it immediately felt lighter and less closed in than downstairs, even if the air was still dry. The main bedroom had an en suite and a walk-in wardrobe, and there were two spare bedrooms either side of it.
The fourth room was an office.
I stopped in the doorway and looked around. On the walls were some framed art, an autographed Manchester United shirt, and a three-tiered bookcase. There was another free-standing bookcase below that. The shelves were filled with classic literature, but there were a few sports biographies in the one on the wall and some books on journalism in both. On top of the mounted bookcase were two picture frames – glossy reprints of Manchester Evening News front pages. One was about a violent gangland shooting, the other was about how the leader of Manchester City Council had illegally redirected taxpayers’ money to the account of his mistress. The stories had been written in the 1990s and Patrick’s byline was on both.
There was a computer on the desk, but the hard drive had been removed from the tower and was sitting next to it, still wrapped in an evidence bag. The fact that it had been returned suggested nothing had been found on it by the forensics team.
After going through the kitchen again, I did another circuit of the house, this time going back to front in order to check access points. None of the windows or the doors had been tampered with. I was looking for clear indications that someone had come back in the aftermath of the disappearances and tried to get into the property, for whatever reason, but there was nothing as conspicuous as a jimmied window and no suggestion the locks had been picked. I grabbed everything and headed outside.
It was raining hard now, chattering off the stone of the cottages and slapping against the mud. As quickly as I could, I loaded the PC, the hard drive and the photos into the Audi and then waited under the porch for Ross to finish a call. I could hear snatches because he had it on speaker, but I wasn’t really listening. Instead, I was trying to build a picture of what might have happened here two and a half years ago.
One of the theories the police had initially floated was the idea that the villagers had all headed out on to the moors as part of a dare, or a game, fuelled by booze. From what had been found in the recycling bins at the back of the farmhouse, at least three bottles of wine, eighteen bottles of lager and a bottle of rum had been consumed that night, so even if not all of them were drinking at the same rate, most of the neighbours were likely to have been pretty well oiled by the evening’s end. Perhaps they were trying to frighten each other with their Halloween masks. Perhaps it was a drunken game of hide-and-seek. The moors at night, unlit by street lamps or nearby towns, would have been the perfect setting for that kind of thing, especially when there was enough alcohol in the blood. Police surmised that a game could be the sort of thing you might suddenly decide to do when you’re intoxicated, the kind of unplanned change of direction that felt like the funniest, most important thing in the world after four or five drinks. But it wasn’t a theory that held up to any real scrutiny.
And it was why the cops had ditched it soon after.
A game of hide-and-seek in Halloween masks might have fitted the profile of a group of people in their teens, maybe even in their twenties or thirties, but it was harder to picture a group in their fifties, sixties and seventies heading out on to the moors after dinner, in the dark. Randolph Solomon’s medical records showed that he’d had a hip replacement the previous June, and old medication found in John and Freda Davey’s bathroom confirmed that she’d had oral chemotherapy the year before and was – at the time of her disappearance – taking painkillers for an ongoing muscle complaint.
And even if they had – even if, for whatever reason, all nine of them went out on to the moors that night, and got lost in a drunken haze, or were injured – why hadn’t the police found them in the three searches they’d conducted? Conversely, if someone had come to the house, maybe a group of people, and taken all nine of them against their will – an idea that had to be considered given the length of time they’d been missing, even if it was hard to know what the catalyst for that might be – where was the evidence of it? Where were the tyre tracks from another car? Where were the footprints belonging to other people? Where were the trails on the moors? Where were the signs of a struggle?
And, in the end, all of that ignored something else.
If this had happened straight after – or around the same time as – they’d eaten, why were the houses so tidy? Why were all the bottles of booze already in the Gibbses’ recycling bins, all the food packed up and all the plates washed and put away? It was just about possible to accept that the Perrys, the Daveys and Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson might leave their homes totally spotless before heading down to the farmhouse for dinner, but there was no way I could get on board with the idea that they’d then helped clear up at the Gibbses’ after eating – while probably quite drunk – including wiping down kitchen surfaces, and then decided that the perfect epilogue was to head out to the moors with their wallets and phones.
Which was probably why the investigation had ultimately stalled, and why the news stories eventually petered out: the Halloween tie-in made for good copy, but it was largely irrelevant if they had actually left the next morning, not on 31 October, which would also explain how the residents had found the time to clean their houses. There was no explanation for why they left en masse, or where they went, but there were also no signs of a struggle, no upturned furniture, no blood, no damage of any kind. Nothing at the scene implied an actual crime – and to the police, to the media, that was the problem. The crime itself was like oxygen.
When it was there, a case and a story continued to breathe.
When it wasn’t, everything withered and died.
6
Thunder rumbled above the village, a low sound like an old engine trying to fire, and, finally, Ross hurried over to me, shielding his hair from the rain with his coat.
I told him what I’d removed from his parents’ house.
‘Did the police say anything about your dad’s PC?’
‘Just that they didn’t find anything on it.’
I nodded. ‘And you’ve left the house as is?’
Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve kept it tidy but I haven’t changed anything.’
I looked at an alarm box, high up on the front of the house, and to similar ones on the other two. When we’d entered earlier, Ross had put in a code. He’d told me that he knew the codes for the other properties too.
‘When you arrived here on the 3rd of November,’ I said, ‘was the alarm set?’
‘No. None of the houses had their alarms on.’
It was hard to know whether that meant anything or not. The couples were going to a dinner party less than a minute’s walk away and the houses were in a remote location where the threat of crime was minuscule. They’d locked up their homes that night but there were almost certainly times before that when they’d popped in to visit each other and hadn’t even bothered doing that much. There were probably times when they’d gone further afield and never bothered setting the alarm either, because of how low risk the area was. I’d noted that the Perrys’ alarm – and most likely the others too, because they were all fitted by the same firm – had a police response function on it, which meant that if the alarm went off in suspicious circumstances, the security company informed the cops. But that was irrelevant if they’d never been set in the first place.
I walked over to John and Freda Davey’s home. Their house was much less contemporary, the furniture more functional, perhaps a reflection of the fifteen-year age gap between them and the Perrys. It was lovingly put together, though, photos of their kids – Rina Blake and her brother, Ian – absolutely everywhere, along with pictures of their grandchildren: Rina had a girl and a boy, although the boy wasn’t in any of the pictures here because he was only about a month old; Ian had one boy, and in most shots was in Singapore, where he’d lived and worked since 1999.
I lingered next to a photograph of John and Freda on what looked like a cruise ship. He was a big guy, bald, a little overweight, maybe six three. He might have been a rugby league player once, because he had a Leeds Rhinos shirt on and was built like a prop. Freda couldn’t have been more different: she was youthful and attractive, mid-height, the top of her head about level with her husband’s chin, and had lovely eyes, like the ocean in a brochure. But she was pale and absolutely stick-thin. It could have been her natural build, but it w
as more likely that at the time the photograph was taken, she’d been sick and was in recovery. In 2013 she’d had treatment for cancer, and according to her medical records had – for a second time – been referred to the oncology department at Harrogate District Hospital in the months before she vanished. Police had managed to confirm with staff there that the cancer had returned and that they were, at the time of Freda’s disappearance, exploring the options available to her. There had been an interesting side note too, which had caught my attention in the police file: one of the nurses, who’d known the Daveys through mutual friends, remembered Freda saying that she and John might go on a holiday before she began the ordeal of more chemo.
I wandered through the house, going through drawers, repeating exactly the same steps as with the Perrys’ – and in the bedroom found an iPad inside another evidence bag – but there was little else that caught my attention. Both of them had been retired for a while, so their disappearance was unlikely to be linked to anything that had happened in their jobs, and their time as pensioners seemed pretty low-key: they liked to travel, they were both in a bowls team, they went down to Cambridge a lot to see Rina.
I went to the house next door.
Of all the couples at Black Gale, Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson were probably the least known. They had no kids and little in the way of close family, so, unlike the others, they had no one fighting to keep their story above water. Randolph had had a brother who’d died when still young, and Emiline was an only child whose parents were both long gone. They were active socially – he was a huge Middlesbrough fan and, until his hip replacement, had always attended home games with mates; she met a group of friends from school in Kendal once a week – and Emiline also had a part-time job at the library in Grassington. But none of that was much help in finding out what had happened to them: they’d said nothing out of the ordinary to people they’d known or worked with in the weeks leading up to Halloween – nothing about taking a holiday; no emergency trips – and Emiline hadn’t put in for any time off at the library.