by Tim Weaver
‘Did Laura ever say anything to Patrick?’ I asked.
Tori nodded. ‘He told her he was trying to get into photography, and that he thought sunrise and sunset would be the best times to get the most dramatic photos.’
‘Which is perfectly plausible.’
‘It is, yes.’
She seemed a little defeated now, as if – for the first time – she understood the arguable nature of this line of enquiry. The decision not to mention anything to Rina or Ross looked like a good one.
Tori moved, her chair squeaking gently. ‘For what it’s worth, he told her he was practising taking photographs on his phone with a view to getting a proper camera later on down the line – which is what he did do. Laura said he showed her the pictures he’d taken, and they were beautiful, and then he showed her a camera he’d bought a few weeks later that he started carrying on him. So, whatever else was going on, he wasn’t lying about that. He did go out there and he was taking pictures.’
‘And did you tell the police what you just told me?’
‘Yes. All of it.’
Except it wasn’t in the file, which meant they clearly didn’t see anything worth pursuing. It was easy to see why. As I thought about that, out of the corner of my eye I saw Healy holding something up. It was a six- by four-inch picture he’d lifted out of the shoebox full of photographs that I’d found in the Perrys’ living room: taken from the moors, it was a shot of the village, the four properties just silhouettes against the red stain of a sunrise.
‘What about Francesca?’ I asked. ‘Did Laura ever speak to her about it?’
‘Yes. She said, after the seventh or eighth time it happened, she casually dropped it into conversation with Francesca, but Francesca seemed to be pretty accepting of the explanation Patrick had given her.’
‘That he was out there taking pictures?’
‘Right.’
‘Okay, Tori,’ I said. ‘I appreciate you mentioning it.’
We said goodbye and rung off.
I turned and looked at Healy. He was going through the shoebox, picking out and setting aside other photos that Patrick had taken: there were at least six of them.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
He stopped and looked up, one of the pictures – a shot of a valley, a woodland in its cleft, the sky a deep, vivid mauve – pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
‘We forget it and move on,’ he said.
‘You don’t think there’s anything in it?’
‘In a guy going out with a camera and taking pictures of the countryside?’ He placed the photo on to the pile. ‘It’s like Chris Gibbs being a gambler, or no one knowing anything about Randolph and Emiline, or Mark Gibbs being “obsessed” with some girl he went to school with. None of it means anything until we can prove that it does.’ Healy held up my phone so I could see what he was looking at: onscreen was the website for one of the red-top tabloids and the story that Tori had been referring to: GHOST HOUSE KID ‘STALKED’ INSTAGRAM GIRL.
‘“Stalked”. Is that in any way accurate?’
‘Not based on what’s in the story. He was “obsessed” with her because he wrote three separate comments under one photograph she posted.’ Healy checked the story again. ‘First comment: “You look hot.” Second comment: “Do you still live in Skipton?” Third comment: “How are your family doing?”’ Healy shrugged. ‘She didn’t reply to any of the comments.’
He threw me the phone and I started going through the story. On the surface there was nothing in it. There was nothing in Patrick going out to take photos either, or in Chris’s history as an alleged gambler. But when you were looking for missing people, the answers were rarely, if ever, bobbing around on the surface.
The truth was never in the shallows.
It was always somewhere much deeper.
10
We called it a night.
I went downstairs to reception and booked a second room, next door to Healy, and then began the process of taking the computers and tablets upstairs. That meant the hard drive and tower from the Perrys’, laptops belonging to both Mark Gibbs and Randolph Solomon, and the iPads that had been on Laura Gibbs’s bedside table and in John and Freda Davey’s home. Healy didn’t argue – computers had never really been his strong point as an investigator, technology had moved on since he was at the Met, and he’d always been more effective in the field, anyway – so we’d make more headway if I did a first sweep of them in the morning. In reality, though, I didn’t expect to find much: if all the tech had already been released from evidence, that was normally a fair indication of its worth.
While I was outside at the car, I also put in a call to the old newspaper source I’d mentioned to Healy. His name was Spike. He was a hacker, hidden away at an address he’d never given me, using a name that wasn’t his. We’d never met in all the time we’d known each other, and when I paid him, I left the cash in a locker at a sports centre close to where I lived. But when it came to getting beyond firewalls and never leaving a trace, Spike was the best there was. I asked him to get me the mobile phone records for the nine Black Gale residents, starting two months before they vanished. The police had only gone back a fortnight.
‘Wow,’ he said, ‘that’s a big job.’
‘Yeah, I know. Reckon you can handle it?’
‘Ha ha. This is me you’re talking to. You want landlines as well?’
‘Yeah, across the same period of time.’
‘What about after they disappeared?’
‘None of the handsets have been used since 31 October 2015, so I don’t think there’ll be calls into or out of them after that – but if you see anything, let me know.’
I hung up and headed back to the room.
As I was letting myself in, my phone sprang into life again. I expected it to be Spike with a question he’d forgotten to ask, but instead it was my daughter, Annabel.
I pushed the door shut and hit Answer.
‘Hey, sweetheart.’
‘Hey, how are you?’
‘I’m good. How was your day?’
‘Not bad,’ she said, although she sounded tired. I’d only known her for around five years, her entire existence kept secret from me – and mine from her – until she turned twenty-four. But while I sometimes worried that we’d never capture the bond that flourished and matured between a father and daughter, I knew enough about her now to pick up on the things that were concerning her. Often, she would try to hide those things from me because she believed they were unimportant when compared to what I dealt with in my work. But they were never unimportant to me. Those things were everything I’d missed for twenty-four years.
‘Is Liv okay?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, we’re both fine.’
She lived with her thirteen-year-old sister, Olivia, in the house in south Devon that they’d grown up in; a house that had been left to them by the people Annabel had – for nearly a quarter of a century – believed were her parents. Biologically, Liv wasn’t mine, but it had never felt that way: I treated her exactly the same way as I treated Annabel.
‘So what’s up?’ I said.
‘I think I might have done something I shouldn’t have.’
I pulled a chair out and sat down.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I messed up before school this morning.’
Annabel was a teacher.
‘Messed up how?’
‘Liv’s being a pain in the arse at the moment,’ she said, her words soft. ‘“School’s boring, I hate school, I hate learning” – all of that. I try to laugh it off, try to tell myself it’s just a phase she’s in, but it grinds me down. I had her in one ear, and then all this lesson prep, and I just …’ A pause. ‘Someone called this morning.’
‘What did they want?’
‘He said he was a friend of yours.’
A low-level alarm started to grip me.
‘Okay. What did he say his name was?’
‘That’s
the thing, he didn’t, and I didn’t ask. I know that’s stupid.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, attempting to sound calm, even though I didn’t feel it. I tried to imagine who’d call Annabel claiming to be a friend of mine, without offering a name.
I could only really think of one person.
‘Did this guy have an accent?’ I asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He sounded cockney.’
Shit.
‘What did he ask you?’
‘He just wanted to know if I knew where you were. He said you and him had been working on an investigation together but he hadn’t been able to get hold of you on your mobile. He said, in those circumstances, you’d encouraged him to call me because, if you weren’t in London working, you’d generally be staying here with us.’
That was a complete fabrication.
The alarm started to turn to anger now.
‘Did you tell him where I was?’ I asked her. There wasn’t a hint of accusation in my voice, but it still felt like some kind of an attack on her, especially as I’d phoned her yesterday evening to tell her I was working a case in the Dales. Apart from Healy – and the calls I’d made to Ross Perry, Rina Blake and Tori Gibbs to offer to help – Annabel was the only person who knew where I was heading.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t tell him you were up north.’
I felt the relief wash through me.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay, that’s good.’
‘After he asked me that, I thought to myself, “Something’s not right.” I realized he hadn’t offered his name, and when I began asking him who he was, he tried to talk his way around it again – and when that didn’t work, he hung up on me. Have you got any idea who it was?’
‘No,’ I said, trying to make light of it. ‘Probably some chancer.’
Except it wasn’t.
It was a journalist from the Daily Tribune called Connor McCaskell. He’d been the one who’d started sniffing around my life in the weeks after I’d completed the case at Christmas, but unlike other journalists who’d pursued me in the aftermath, McCaskell hadn’t been interested in the case itself. His interest was in me, my life, my background, my history, and it had eventually led him to the cottage in Devon and to questions about the man called Bryan Kennedy who was living there. McCaskell was the whole reason the cottage was empty now, why we’d shifted Healy out of there so quickly and then begun the process of changing his name for a second time.
He hadn’t called me since early January, he hadn’t left any messages, or sent any emails. I’d hoped he’d forgotten about me, or decided my life wasn’t actually that interesting. I’d even started to believe that might really be the case, to the point where – when Healy had asked me about him in our weekly calls – I’d assured him everything was fine. I’d floated the idea we might be in the clear.
But now I knew we weren’t.
McCaskell was still after me, and still after Bryan Kennedy.
He still had the scent of a story.
The Motel
1985
Los Angeles | Tuesday 23 July
The entrance to the Star Inn was off Santa Monica Boulevard, although nothing of the building was visible from the street. The parking lot was accessed via a ramp, itself small and easy to miss, and only then – once you’d passed under part of the second-floor corridor – did you even realize you were in a motel. The courtyard was narrow, with five parking spaces on either side, and kicked out in an upside-down L-shape, with rooms all along the right and directly ahead. Now, though, there was no access for potential guests, if anyone would ever, truly, choose to stay here: instead, everything was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape and the lot was filled with vehicles from the Sheriff’s Department, a van with a blue stripe along its flank that belonged to the county coroner, and a Dodge Charger driven by Dan Chen, a pathologist from the medical examiner’s office. Jo levered down her window, showed a waiting, uniformed deputy her badge, and then pulled in alongside Chen.
The moment the a/c died and she opened the door of the Oldsmobile, hot air rushed her. She left her jacket in the car and, as she moved across the lot, looked up to her right, where – on the second floor – she could see activity in a room at the end.
She rolled up her sleeves and took the stairs.
The closer she got to the room, the more she could see and hear of what was going on – the blink of a coroner investigator’s camera flash, voices, the occasional, subdued hum of laughter – and, on the air, there was a smell too: fetid, decayed. She checked the courtyard for any dumpsters, wondering if the smell might have been exacerbated by torn trash bags, by spoiled food rotting in one-hundred-degree heat, but it was more out of hope than expectation. She knew exactly what the stench was, and she knew why it was so bad. She’d joined Sheriff’s Homicide in 1978, had spent every day of the seven years since turning up to murders, and when she finally arrived at the open door of Room 17, the smell hit her as hard as it always did.
The room was small and tired, everything bleached by age, the drywall punctured. Bed sheets were lying in a pile on the floor and on the nightstand was a bottle of bourbon and an open bag of potato chips. Some of the chips were on the floor, crushed into the carpet, next to a soda can and a pile of clothes. The clothes looked male: Jo could see some boxer briefs and a big pair of white sneakers.
Just inside the door, in a wide semicircle around the bed, were Greg Landa, a detective from the LASD, a forensic tech – already suited up – who identified himself as Austin Davis, and someone from the ME’s office who was here to assist Chen. Jo didn’t know Davis or the guy who’d come with Chen, but she knew Landa: he was a twenty-year veteran who’d spent his career working murders in West Hollywood, East LA and Compton. Because of that, Jo always tried to afford him the proper respect, but it was hard because she detested him. It wasn’t because he was fifty pounds overweight and permanently flushed, or even that his face was always beaded with an unsightly sheen of sweat, even when it was in the low forties outside; it was because he would always try to use his size to intimidate her, subtly stepping into her personal space, presumably in some primal effort to show her where the power lay. No woman in the LASD needed reminding of that: Jo was the only female detective in Homicide and everything she did was analysed and judged, joked about and criticized through the prism of her sex. Male detectives were allowed ten mistakes before anything got written up, but she’d get ripped for one. So Greg Landa wasn’t different from any of the other men she shared a building with, he was just one of the worst: she’d never seen him drink, and because he sucked on extra-strong Altoids the whole time, she’d never smelled it on him either, but his cheeks were criss-crossed with a mesh of prominent blood vessels and a few people in the office called him ‘Grog’ behind his back. If that was true, if he really did drink heavily out of work, Jo knew that Landa would be the worst kind of drunk – slimy, hostile, violent.
As soon as Landa saw Jo, he started to sing the Dolly Parton song ‘Jolene’, the words softened by the smacking of his lips as a mint moved around his mouth. The song was a long-running joke he liked to reanimate every time the two of them met.
‘How you doing, Greg?’
‘I’m doin’ fine,’ he said, his Texan roots still evident even thirty years after he’d moved to California. He quickly but unmistakably looked her up and down, a smirk on his face, and then nodded towards the bathroom. ‘Hope you didn’t eat breakfast.’
Jo ignored him. ‘I thought you were on the Night Stalker task force.’
‘I am. I was close by, so Lieutenant Hayesfield wanted me to make sure the vic ain’t one of ours, because some of the injuries’ – he tapped a pudgy finger to his forehead, signifying that the victim in the tub took a bullet there – ‘are consistent with what we’ve seen.’
That was total bullshit: LA was a city of guns, and wherever there were guns there were murders. People were taking a bullet to the head in this city all the time.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘turns out he ain’t one of ours. I mean, the Stalker don’t off ’em in hotel rooms for one thing, and while he’s pretty messed up in there, it ain’t the kind of messed up the Stalker likes.’ He shrugged indifferently, as if he were talking about someone stealing a few bucks out of a cash register, not the murder of a man.
And that was probably the real reason Jo disliked Landa so much: not his stupid, predictable rendition of the song; not even the way he’d tried to suggest that she’d puke as soon as she saw the body, or that he got here first because Hayesfield thought it might be related to the Stalker, rather than the truth, which was that Hayesfield frequently sent male cops out to assess Jo’s crime scenes before she arrived. Instead, what she disliked about him was that he’d become detached. He’d lost his sense of obligation to the victims. He wasn’t receptive to the loss of life in the way a cop should have been, even if a cop’s only burden extended as far as a promise to find the killer. She’d heard Landa talk about a son, but she couldn’t imagine he’d spent a single day at the door of his boy’s bedroom while the kid was growing up, wishing the world were a little safer. To Landa, after twenty years behind a desk in a squad room, after hundreds of killings, the man lying in the bathtub was just another face to forget.
‘Anyway,’ Landa said, pushing the mint to one side of his mouth, ‘thought I better hang around until you got here in case these assholes screwed up your crime scene.’ He winked at the two men: Davis, the forensic tech, clearly didn’t know how to react to that, so smiled at Landa and then looked uncertainly at Jo, while the guy who came with Chen erupted into laughter, as if Landa had delivered a joke for the ages. ‘I was tellin’ Bobby here about a case I worked out in Wellington Heights where a –’