by Tim Weaver
Finally, she turned the radio off completely.
For twenty minutes she revelled in the quiet, the drive into West Hollywood filled with nothing more than the low throb of the engine and the repetitive sounds of the freeway. She thought about the day ahead, about the men she worked with, about the things in her life that she could control, and then a picture of her son filled her head, an image of Ethan asleep in his bed, and everything settled. He was her ballast.
Her son was everything.
And, in that moment, Joline Kader found some peace.
She would never find it again.
7
We talked about what I’d found out at Black Gale over dinner in Healy’s hotel room, although dinner was something of a misnomer: we were five miles from the nearest town of any size and wedged between the motorway and the main building of a service station, so we’d had to make do with Burger King.
‘What did you find in the file?’ I asked him.
‘It’s a pretty thin case,’ Healy replied through a mouthful of burger, ‘but not because of sloppy police work. They worked all the angles you’d expect them to, they tried to tie available evidence to the biggest questions, but the lack of an obvious crime means some of it feels desperate. I mean, it’s not hard to see why they dropped the idea of it being a pissed-up game of hide-and-seek.’ He reached over and picked up a thick sheaf of papers; on top was a gallery of low-res shots extracted from Chris Gibbs’s phone. Healy waved it in his hand. ‘They were pretty well oiled even before they ate, judging by these pictures. Maybe not hardly-able-to-stand bad, but we’re clearly in warm-glow-and-stupid-grin territory. The empty bottles in the recycling bins seem to back that up too. And when you’re half-stewed, some spontaneous Halloween game is the sort of nutty shite some people might find fun. But I don’t know …’
‘Not this group?’
‘No.’
‘I agree. I think we can dismiss the idea of a game.’
I looked at the printouts that Healy had in his hands, in particular the photo that Chris Gibbs had taken on his mobile phone using the timer: nine faces, partly obscured behind party wear, but all of them recognizable. I tried to force myself to see something in the shot, some minor giveaway, something to help me make sense of what happened afterwards, but there was nothing. And that was something else that had begun to occur to me as I drove back from Black Gale: everyone had gone. The four couples liked each other, that much seemed to be indisputable, but was it really normal for nine individuals – including a kid of nineteen – to operate with such a hive-mind mentality? Wasn’t it more realistic to suppose that one or two of them might have decided they didn’t want to leave the village that night?
‘What if someone forced them to leave?’ Healy asked, as if he knew where my thoughts were at.
‘There were no foreign tyre tracks in the village.’
‘Maybe whoever it was came in on foot.’
‘One person versus nine?’
‘The person could have been armed.’
‘Still,’ I said, ‘it’s not great odds. You only have to make one mistake, turn your back at the wrong moment. Even with a gun, it’s tricky to herd nine people around.’
‘Maybe there was more than one attacker.’
‘If there was, there should have been evidence of it.’
He’d started nodding before I’d even finished my sentence because he already knew it was unlikely to have happened in that way: there wasn’t only a lack of tyre tracks, but forensic techs had meticulously matched footprints in and around the properties to footwear left behind in the four homes. That still left the shoes that the nine villagers were wearing at the time they exited the village – which, of course, the investigators couldn’t match in the same way – but there were no prints leading up to Black Gale’s main gate, suggesting they hadn’t left on foot, and the unmatched moulds taken from the scene belonged to nine people and nine pairs of shoes. So, in essence, the police had nine shoe prints they couldn’t definitively link to the missing villagers, but it was almost one hundred per cent likely that it was them, especially as those footprints all moved in the same patterns around the homes, in repeated loops.
‘What’s your thinking on the timing?’ Healy asked me. ‘Did they disappear on Halloween night? The next morning? November the 2nd?’
I looked at the selfies that Chris Gibbs had taken and then picked up one of the shots: ‘It says in the file that none of the clothes they’re wearing in these pictures are listed as clothing the police found in any of the four homes, right?’
He nodded, again seeing where I was going: the clothes in the selfies weren’t discovered in any of the properties, which heavily suggested that the villagers were still wearing them at the time they left the village.
‘I think it happened on Halloween night,’ I said.
‘Or they woke early and pulled on exactly the same clothes as the night before because they’d been left nearby in the bedrooms and were convenient.’
That was possible too, but Halloween night still felt more likely: their phones were off from ten that night, and none of the alarms had been set, so it seemed like they’d gone to the dinner party expecting to return to their homes at the evening’s end. If they’d known what was coming – if they’d known that they’d be away from the village for days, weeks, months – they’d have surely set the alarms. The fact that they didn’t seemed to suggest that something had interrupted them that night. The question was what – or who?
‘Does this smell like an inside job to you?’
Healy glanced at me, but not in surprise at the question. It had been on my mind from the second I’d first started looking into the case and I could see he’d been considering it too.
‘It would explain why there are no other footprints,’ I went on, studying the same photos, ‘and it explains the lack of suspicious tyre tracks. Chris Gibbs had a Land Rover, the Daveys had that Porsche SUV, and Randolph and Emiline a camper van. They’re all big cars, capable of ferrying around lots of people at once.’
He shrugged. ‘There could be something in it.’
‘But?’
‘But which of the villagers had the motivation?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the same one – or ones – who had the motivation to take the camper van and make it disappear.’
‘Randolph and Emiline, you mean?’
‘Not necessarily. I mean, it’s their vehicle but it wouldn’t have been hard for someone else in the village to gain access to it.’
I looked at my notes, at the names of the villagers, at the possible suspects – and the possible reasons – why one or more of them would have taken the Volkswagen. There was little of substance about the missing vehicle in the police file, only that the cops had looked for it and gone through the same thought processes we just had. Ultimately, it was another line of enquiry that had hit a dead end.
I looked at the villagers’ jobs again, trying to seek my answers there. Patrick was running a PR firm and Francesca Perry was a nurse in Cumbria. John and Freda Davey were both retired. The Gibbses ran a farm and their son was at college. And Randolph and Emiline were retired and worked part-time at a library respectively. Nothing rang alarm bells in terms of their employment, so – if I was going to run with the idea any further, or make any sort of connection from them back to the unaccounted-for camper van – I’d have to dig down into who they were as people.
‘Here’s something else,’ Healy said, bringing a page of phone records towards him. ‘Why bother taking wallets and mobiles if they had no intention of using them?’
‘Maybe they did intend to use them.’
‘But the phones didn’t come on after Halloween night and there’s been nothing since,’ he went on, ‘not even a minor blip on the radar. I looked at the phone records here. They only cover the two weeks before everyone went missing, but I can’t see much to get excited about. We’d be looking for calls to strange numbers, repeated calls to the same numb
er, that sort of thing, but there’s nothing like that here. No issues on Internet activity either: the Gibbs kid is the only one who seemed to use his phone for actually going on websites, and that seems to be a mix of video games and porn. I mean, he was a teenage boy – that’s pretty standard, right?’ He checked the printouts again. ‘The others used a few apps here and there, but it’s mostly uninteresting and expected: Mail, WhatsApp, some news feeds – and Patrick Perry used Twitter and Instagram.’
‘Anything on them?’
‘Nothing.’
‘So maybe we need to go back further than a fortnight. Two weeks doesn’t give us much of an overview. I’ve got a guy I can ask.’
He nodded, knowing not to press further. I had sources from my newspaper days that I still used, but I never discussed their identity with anyone, not even Healy.
I gestured to some of the paperwork he still held in his hands. ‘Ross said that Chris Gibbs made almost seven figures from the building and sale of those houses.’
Healy nodded. ‘So you think this could be about money?’
Our eyes both shifted to a photocopy of a tabloid story – run a couple of days after the villagers went missing – that we’d pinned to the wall. The newspaper had managed to locate a friend of Laura Gibbs who claimed that, five or six years before he vanished, Chris had started to ‘get a taste for gambling’. In the same article, Tori Gibbs – Chris’s sister – completely disregarded this statement, calling it a lie, but the friend – who wanted to remain anonymous – said Laura had told her in confidence that no one else, not even Tori, knew about Chris’s ‘demons’, and said she had only come forward because she wondered whether the gambling had something to do with what happened at Black Gale. Could Chris have owed someone money?
And did the other villagers get caught in the crossfire?
‘There’s no evidence to support what’s on the wall there,’ Healy said, taking another bite of his cheeseburger. ‘If Chris was a gambler, I can’t see it in these financials.’
‘So what did he do with all the money he made from the houses?’
Healy leafed through the police file.
‘He invested in some more property in Harrogate and York and rented both of those out, he paid a whopping tax bill, and then the rest of it is all audited and spoken for in black and white. There are no dodgy payments to cryptic bank accounts, no notable transfers in the days before they went missing. He had no accounts with online betting companies. I mean, it’s possible that his gambling habit – if there even was one – may have been physical: he could have withdrawn cash, which is more difficult to track and trace, and then gone into an actual bricks-and-mortar bookies – but the nearest ones are in Kendal or Skipton and they’re thirty-odd miles away in opposite directions. If he was a gambler, why not just do it online?’
I looked at the article on the wall again. ‘So your gut reaction is –’
‘We probably shouldn’t dismiss it until we know for sure, but I reckon it’s pretty unlikely. And, anyway, for the past two and a half years there’s been no activity at all in Chris and Laura’s accounts and nothing in any of the others either. The cops have got alerts set up with all their banks, so if money had suddenly come out at any point, or if someone had gone into any of the accounts to recoup a debt, it would have been noted. But it hasn’t. These accounts have been dead for the entire time the nine of them have been gone.’
He handed me the bank statements and, for a while, we worked in silence, both of us inching our way through the nine missing persons reports.
Eventually, I said, ‘What was the weather like at the time?’
Healy held up a finger and worked his way back through the paperwork until he found what he was looking for. ‘Dry,’ he said. ‘On Halloween it had been clear skies in the day, minus temperatures at night, with frost. The day following that was the same; the 2nd of November was cloudy but no rain, and so was the 3rd.’ That was when Ross had arrived at the village. ‘It rained on the 4th of November.’
‘So there was no chance other footprints had been washed away before the police got there on the 3rd?’
‘Unlikely.’
I glanced at the wall we’d set up, the cascade of paper shivering as the air from the heating vent whispered across it. I’d pinned up some of the pictures I’d taken from the houses, photographs of the four households, on holidays, at home, living out their lives with no idea of what was coming down the line. In among them was another shot of them all – this time without their masks – gathered around the Gibbses’ table. Freda Davey in a floral dress. Emiline Wilson in a red one with blue trim. Chris and Patrick in jeans, Patrick with a green V-neck sweater, Chris in a checked shirt. Randolph in cords and a pair of polished brogues, his right foot inching out from behind a table leg. Everything looked so normal.
But it wasn’t normal.
Nothing was normal.
The more of them that were missing, the easier they should have been to find, because nine people meant nine potential trails. Instead, the case was constricting, closing itself off, the trails vanishing. Black Gale had started out as one of the strangest disappearances I’d ever come across.
Now I could sense it turning into something else.
Something much more unsettling.
8
Just after 9 p.m., I video-called Rina Blake and Tori Gibbs.
I’d already talked to both of them before leaving London, but we’d only covered the basics. Rina – John and Freda Davey’s daughter – lived in Cambridge and was currently six weeks into maternity leave after the birth of her second child; Tori, Chris Gibbs’s sister, was down in Deptford, and wrote about politics for the news website FeedMe. When we talked, the two women admitted they’d grown close since the disappearances, and because they were only a fifty-minute train ride apart would often meet up, primarily for Tori to give Rina updates about the case: Tori admitted she’d always had an interest in true crime and was now using that to try and spearhead her own search in her spare time into what happened at Black Gale.
It would have been easy to be cynical about that last part – especially because, if she’d found anything in the last two and a half years that was in any way useful, the search wouldn’t still be in deep freeze – but I chose to see it as an opportunity: if it turned out Tori had anything I could use, that was a bonus; if she didn’t, I hadn’t lost anything. And, anyway, her efforts were driven entirely by the same things that drove me.
Unanswered questions.
The pain of grief.
The people she’d loved.
I’d decided to split the calls, talking to Rina first, then Tori, then both of them together, and when Rina came on, she was in a low-lit living room, with a floor lamp beside her. It was quiet apart from the occasional crackle from a baby monitor.
I started by asking her about the movements of her parents in the weeks and months before they disappeared, and she replied in a soft South Yorkshire accent, her blonde hair scraped into a bun, her face carrying the lines and shadows of a mother whose six-week-old baby was waking up on the hour, every hour, all night. Despite her obvious exhaustion, her responses were lucid, often very detailed and precise, perhaps reflecting the nature of her work as a forensic accountant at KPMG, her face a clear echo of her mum’s: I recalled the photo I’d seen of John and Freda Davey on the cruise ship, him in a rugby league shirt, her underweight and pale, and it had been the colour of Freda’s eyes that had caught my attention. Rina’s were the same vivid blue.
‘So your parents seemed all right in those last few weeks?’ I asked her.
She picked up a glass of water, sipping from it, thinking. ‘They seemed fine. I honestly can’t think of anything we talked about that raised any alarm bells with me.’
‘How often did you speak to them?’
‘Mum, I would normally speak to three or four times a week on the phone, and then we’d text most days. Dad, I would text less often – maybe once or twice a week.’
<
br /> ‘I read that your mum had cancer.’
A flash of distress.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
She shrugged. ‘It is what it is, I guess.’
‘This was the end of 2013?’
‘That’s right, yeah.’
‘And it came back a couple of years later, before she disappeared?’
‘She went to see her GP in August, I think, and she was back at the hospital in September. She said to me that the doctors reckoned it was early and it was treatable, and so she was due to start chemo in October, but decided to delay for a few months.’
‘Any idea why?’
‘She told one of the nurses she wanted to go on holiday first.’
That had been in the file too.
‘But she didn’t tell you that?’ I asked.
‘I remember her talking about it. She’d always wanted to go to Australia, and it was something she and Dad discussed often, especially after they’d retired, because he was more interested in New Zealand and they always said that they’d just combine the two into one massive trip. But it wasn’t something they ever booked – certainly not in the weeks after she got the news about the cancer. I’d bet my house on the fact that what she told the nurse that day was just the same things she’d talked to me about, over and over again – her dream trip, the places in Australia she wanted to go, all that sort of thing …’ Rina glanced to the side of the camera, as the baby monitor sprang into life. When her eyes came back, they were pained. ‘When she said she was going to delay the chemo, I remember thinking, “Just get it done, Mum. A stupid bloody holiday can wait for a few months, this is your life.” But then I realized she was scared. She was just really scared. The treatment was brutal the first time – and so a holiday sounds a hell of a lot better than the reality of having more poison pumped into your body.’