by Tim Weaver
Again, I moved through the house, picking up a Dell laptop from upstairs, and then stopped to look at pictures of the two of them in the living room. Their holidays didn’t appear to have been as exotic as the Perrys’, a mix of package deals to Spain and Portugal, and some city breaks to places like Berlin and Venice, but there were some shots from a trip they’d made to the States, maybe five or six years back. I got the sense though that, the trip to the US apart, foreign holidays weren’t as important to them, something backed up by another picture I found loose in one of the drawers: Randolph and Emiline standing either side of a 2012 Volkswagen camper van, a Caravan Club sticker in the window. It was parked on their driveway. I took the photo out, removed some of the others from their frames as well, and then pocketed them all.
Finally, I headed to the farmhouse.
Inside it was lovely: big rooms with beamed ceilings, white walls, bright, modern furniture; a mix of flagstone floors and carpets, with log burners in both the living room and the kitchen. Despite the power and heating being off, it was easy to imagine it as a home people loved coming to. Quiet as it was now, its former life echoed throughout.
The kitchen was divided by an island, the cabinets on one side, a long oak table on the other. The table was where the four couples – and, presumably, at some point – Mark Gibbs had congregated for the Halloween dinner. It was hard to know whether he’d spent all night with his parents; the only thing that was certain was that, when everyone upped and left, he left with them. I found it hard to imagine that a nineteen-year-old kid would voluntarily want to hang out for an entire evening with his mum and dad and a bunch of people three – and in Randolph Solomon’s case, almost four – times as old as him, but he’d appeared in some of the photographs that his father had taken on the night of the disappearances. Maybe he came down for dinner, or just to say hello. Maybe he spent the rest of the time upstairs in his bedroom studying, or playing video games, or texting his friends.
None of the Halloween decorations were up any more, Tori Gibbs attending to her brother and sister-in-law’s house the same way Ross had done to his parents’, but the rest of the place looked untouched. Clean surfaces, clean carpets, beds made.
I went to the kitchen sink and looked out over the land at the back of the house. Two and a half years ago, there would have been hundreds of sheep, a few chickens in a pen too, but now the fields were empty and the runs were unfilled. The Gibbses had owned three dogs too, but those had been found new owners. In the media, on the twelve-month anniversary of the disappearances, Ross, Rina Blake and Tori Gibbs had tried to re-engage people by giving interviews to the local media, including the Yorkshire Evening Post, and it had been in that story that I’d read about Tori Gibbs having to sell off her brother’s livestock. She’d admitted to having no idea how much she should ask for them, and hadn’t even really been sure it was the right thing to do. What if he and Laura return home tomorrow? she’d said. Chris would have an absolute fit. This is his livelihood. But Chris Gibbs didn’t return home, and neither did the rest of them – so the sheep were sold and the moors became still.
I looked around the rest of the house – the living room, the bedrooms – grabbed an iPad from what appeared to be Laura’s bedside cabinet and a laptop belonging to Mark, and then ended up in a utility room at the back of the property. It had a sloped tiled roof and was glassed in on three sides, the views presumably spectacular on a clear day. Today wasn’t that day: a fog had begun dragging across the fields, following the swirling curtain of rain.
There was a washing machine and tumble dryer, shelves full of powders and soaps, and a shoe rack, the Gibbses’ footwear – their mud-caked wellies, their walking boots, their old trainers – stacked in a mess of upturned soles and snaking laces. For some reason, the image gave me pause, the way they were all discarded there, one on top of the other. It was so mundane: whenever it was they dumped their shoes here, the three of them could hardly have imagined that they might never do it again.
I locked up and went to the barns beyond the house, to a workshop in which Chris Gibbs had kept tools, and took pictures on my phone. After that, I returned to my car, loading everything in, ensuring it was all secure for the drive back. Ross wandered over, this time holding an umbrella. I held up the property keys.
‘Mind if I keep these for a day or two?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘of course not.’
I didn’t really want to have to return here with Healy, because any journey with him, anywhere, represented a risk – but I couldn’t help thinking it might be useful to get a second pair of eyes on these places. Nine people, four houses, eight rooms in each of the new-builds, ten in the farmhouse, plus barns, a workshop, and that was without even stepping on to the surrounding moorland: I’d been thorough, and was pretty confident nothing major had been overlooked – but that was a lot of ground to cover.
I dug the photograph of Randolph and Emiline’s Volkswagen camper van out of my pocket and said, ‘You mentioned your mum and dad’s car to me earlier.’
He nodded.
‘And the Daveys’ and the Gibbses’ vehicles are obviously still here too.’
‘I think Rina and Tori feel the same way as I do.’
‘You all want to keep the cars here in case your families return?’
‘Right.’
I handed him the picture of the Volkswagen.
‘Any idea where Randolph and Emiline’s camper van went?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It was gone when I got here.’
I’d read the same thing in the official investigation. The other vehicles had all been taken away for testing – and returned afterwards – but the police had never had the opportunity with the camper van. It hadn’t been parked here on the day Ross came to the village and realized everyone was missing – and it had never been found in the time since. I studied the photo again. Could they all have left in one vehicle?
‘Thank you.’
I looked up at Ross. ‘Sorry?’
‘I just wanted to say thank you,’ he repeated quietly. ‘When you called me up out of the blue the other day, when I phoned Rina and Tori and told them that you had offered to look into what happened up here, it was just … it just felt so … it just felt …’
He cut himself short, embarrassed about becoming emotional again, and then looked away from me. I’d worked a lot of cases, and seen a lot of people cry; from the outside looking in, the idea of a brawny twenty-six-year-old man being reduced to tears so easily might have seemed unusual. But I saw it all the time. You grieved for a disappearance just like you grieved for someone you loved when they died, but they weren’t exactly the same thing – not quite. When someone died, you walked an upward trajectory, a path out of the darkness, however slow: the grief got easier eventually, or you buried it effectively enough for it not to destroy you every day. When someone vanished, the trajectory went in the other direction: the longer you went without answers, the worse it got. There was no certainty in a disappearance. All of the demons, all of the pain, were in the unanswered questions. What happened to the person I loved most in this world?
What if someone had hurt them?
‘You don’t need to thank me, Ross.’
‘I want to,’ he said, holding up a hand. ‘It’s just, we thought it was the end of the road, I guess. The police haven’t called for a year. They seem to have forgotten us. I mean, I know they have to move on, I get that, but Rina, Tori and me, we just stay where we are. We’re stuck.’
He swallowed and expelled a long breath.
‘I know you’re not doing this for free,’ he said, his voice barely audible above the rain, ‘I know we’re all paying you, so I suppose this is just a job for you as well –’
‘This isn’t just a job for me,’ I said.
He looked at me, blinked.
‘It’s not just a job,’ I repeated, more softly.
He wiped at his eyes, the rain disguising his tear trails, unsure if I meant it, or i
f I was just repeating myself for his benefit. But I wasn’t. I meant every single word.
This wasn’t just a job to me.
Missing people were my life.
Joline
1985
Los Angeles | Tuesday 23 July
Her pager started buzzing just before 5 a.m.
Jo didn’t register it to start with. Ethan had been up most of the night with a summer cold, his nose blocked, his eyes streaming, and she and Ira had taken it in turns to go through to their son. She’d done the last run, just before 3 a.m., and when she’d returned to bed, she’d struggled to fall asleep again. It was just so hot in the house, so hot everywhere in the city right now, and neither the ceiling fan in their room nor the pedestal fan they’d brought in from the garage seemed to make any difference at all. If anything, as she’d lain there staring into the darkness, they’d made everything worse, recirculating hot air and masking all the sounds beyond the house: the traffic, their neighbours, doors closing, approaching footsteps. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have mattered, but these weren’t ordinary times.
People wanted to be able to hear everything now.
Every creak; every whisper.
She hauled herself up, trying to work out how much sleep she’d had. Ten until ten fifty, one to two thirty, and four until almost five.
Just over three hours.
‘Urgh,’ she said softly, and started rolling the stiffness out of her neck. Next to her, Ira moved, the sheet twisted around him, and when he moved again she felt his hand brush against the small of her back. Taking his fingers in hers, she scooped up the pager and checked the number. It was the night-shift supervisor.
‘What time is it?’ Ira whispered, his voice dulled by the pillow.
‘Way too early.’
She leaned over, kissed Ira on the cheek and went through to the phone in the living room. As she did, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror: she was only thirty-four but this morning she looked about ten years older, her eyes puffy and tired, her skin pale, her black hair escaping its braid and plastered to her face where she’d sweated during the night. Well, you look like shit, she thought, and – thanks to three hours’ sleep – she felt like it too. Ignoring her dishevelled image, she dialled the night supervisor. He picked up after two rings.
‘Rise and shine, Kader.’
‘Urgh,’ she said again.
‘I got something for you.’
‘Is it a pay rise?’
‘Funny. You got a pen?’
‘Yeah.’ She grabbed one off the table. ‘Shoot.’
‘Ten-oh-five La Cienega. A motel called the Star Inn.’
She wrote it on the back of her hand.
‘And what am I going to find there?’ Jo asked.
‘A body in a bathtub.’
They lived in a bungalow in North Hollywood, a block from Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Whenever she went out to the car, especially this early in the morning, she could usually smell eucalyptus on the air, cypress too, and hear the fronds of the palm tree in her yard snapping in the breeze. One or two of her neighbours would normally be up as well: Ricardo, opposite them, always rose early – she’d often come out and find him on his front porch, with a coffee and a newspaper; there was a young guy in his twenties too, five houses down from them, a jogger whose name she didn’t know, but who always headed east towards the freeway and North Hollywood Park. Not this morning, though.
It was already in the low seventies and there wasn’t a breath of wind, not even a murmur. But there were no people outside either, no sounds drifting from open windows or from doorways that had been left ajar. Every single window in the road was shut; every last door locked. For months now, when people slept, their houses were sealed like a tomb and they kept a gun under their pillow.
It was why, before leaving the house, Jo had watched Ethan for a while, standing inside his bedroom as she’d quietly eaten her breakfast, worried about his cold, but worrying more about what sort of world they would be sending their son out into. Would it always be this bad? Deep down, as she’d stood there watching him, she’d known the answer. She saw it every day when she went to work. Nothing got better. Perhaps the best she could hope for was that it stayed the same.
By the time she was done with her breakfast, the emotion had formed like a lump at the bottom of her throat, and when she leaned over the crib and kissed her son lightly on the cheek, a tear blurred in one of her eyes. I love you so much, baby boy. She straightened, cleared her head, made sure Ethan’s windows were definitely locked, and then did the same with all the windows and doors in their home, the sound of the fans disguising her movement as she went from room to room. She finished in the kitchen, where, bleary-eyed, Ira was busy making eggs.
‘I’ve got to go to a scene in Hollywood first, but I’ll be in the office after that.’ She put her bowl in the sink. ‘Any emergencies, just page me.’
‘Emergencies? Like, emergency food orders? Because I was talking to a client yesterday and he said there’s a new Italian place on Ventura that does killer takeout.’
‘Is that a fact?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
They smiled at each other.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Ira said. ‘It’s only a cold.’
‘I know. I just don’t like seeing him like this.’
Ira nodded at her cereal bowl. ‘Is that what passes for washing-up these days?’
Jo winked at him. ‘It is when you’ve got a manservant.’
Kissing her husband goodbye, she headed outside, locking the screen door, checking and double-checking it. Popping the locks on their Oldsmobile, she looked out at their street. Four of the houses had been repainted in the last week alone; Ricardo was halfway through doing the same, the original beige exterior giving way to a tepid coral. Because most of the attacks had taken place in beige or yellow homes, people had started to think it was a colour thing: they now had a blue home in their road, a green one, white, grey. Jo had been in a meeting yesterday where Lieutenant Hayesfield had told her there was such a run on guard dogs that animals had to be brought in from neighbouring states. Locksmiths were working twenty-four hours a day. Gun-shop owners were turning up in the mornings to find people already waiting in line. The city was in a perpetual state of fear and panic and it was all down to one man.
The media had dubbed him the ‘Night Stalker’.
So far he’d killed eleven people, raped four women, attempted to rape another, beaten a sixteen-year-old girl so badly with a tyre iron she’d needed 478 stitches in her scalp, and gouged out the eyes of one of the victims when she tried to shoot him. He didn’t just break into homes, he ravaged them, physically and psychologically. He’d brought terror to the whole city, not just because of the sheer brutality of his crimes, or because he was a satanist, scrawling pentagrams on the walls and making his victims swear allegiance to the devil, but because his hunting ground seemed to be everywhere: he’d started off in Glassell Park, four miles from Downtown, but had since spread out to Monrovia, seventeen miles east of there, Whittier, fifteen miles south, and then twelve miles to the north in Sun Valley. Because of that, the whole thing was a jurisdictional nightmare, with the LA County Sheriff, the LAPD and eight other separate police departments involved. Yet Jo wasn’t a part of any of it. Hayesfield had expanded the twenty-five-strong team of detectives at the Sheriff’s Department without ever asking Jo to join, and for reasons she knew had nothing to do with her abilities as a cop and everything to do with her being female and having given birth eighteen months ago.
Before she’d had Ethan, most of the men she’d worked with more or less treated her the same, at least to her face. That didn’t mean she hadn’t overheard discussions about the size of her breasts, the shape of her ass, how she would perform in bed and what her favourite position might be; about how she wouldn’t be strong enough to pick up a Remington, the department’s shotgun of choice, or how the kickback would probably burst her right tit; and then there were all t
he barbed comments – dressed up as light-hearted fun – about how she’d never be as effective as a man in chasing down a suspect because, again, her tits would get in the way; and in a high-speed pursuit she wouldn’t be able to keep up, or just crash the car completely, because everyone knew how bad women drivers were. It was generally done out of earshot, or when they thought she wasn’t around, but even when it wasn’t, even when her male colleagues said things directly to her face, all she could do was swear at them or ignore them, because there was no recourse. There was no system of complaint, not even the basic framework for it. There were no other female Homicide detectives to go into battle with, and every senior position was held by a man. So, unless she wanted her career to be over, there had never been any point in protesting about the discrimination before, and – with so much focus on the Stalker, so much tension inside the department, and resources so stretched – it would have been even more suicidal to say something now. All of which meant that, for the past year, she’d not only had to endure all the usual comments, repeated jokes, sniggers and put-downs, she’d had to work some investigations entirely by herself – without a partner – because so many other detectives had been seconded to the Stalker. Worse, it meant she was catching all the shitty cases no one else wanted or got given, and she was having to watch one of the biggest manhunts in the entire history of Los Angeles play out from the opposite side of a squad room. And it was making her angry. It was making her bitter. It hurt.
Starting up the car, she pulled off the driveway and headed south, into the Hills, trying to calm herself by listening to the radio. Tears for Fears played for a while, but when the music stopped, the DJ began talking about the Night Stalker. She switched stations, but the same thing happened again, and then again, over and over, the lulls between songs, the gaps between ads, dedicated to the actions of a depraved animal.