by Tim Weaver
‘Thanks for coming down, Greg,’ Jo said, cutting him off and letting him know that he could get the hell out of her crime scene now. She didn’t wait for a response, just stepped past him and headed to the bathroom. Behind her, she heard Landa say something quiet to Bobby, the guy who’d come with Chen, and they began laughing.
She ignored it and paused outside the bathroom.
This close in, the smell was horrible.
Two more men were inside: one was knelt beside the tub with a camera, taking pictures; Dan Chen was watching from the opposite corner. The bathroom was gloomy, the faucets speckled brown with a mix of mould and rust, the walls slick with trails of water. Chen stepped away from the wall and moved towards Jo.
‘What’s up, Kader?’
‘How’s it going, Danny?’ She looked at the tub. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Just let us finish up and it’s all yours.’
She nodded, her eyes still on the tub.
‘Landa said he took one to the head?’
‘Yeah, looks like it,’ Chen said. ‘But he was put in here afterwards.’
The tub had been filled up. The man was face down, his buttocks, his shoulders and the rear of his skull the only parts of him that weren’t submerged. Something weird had happened to the water, though: it was slightly misted, as if the victim had been washing with soap, and there was a thin, almost creamy substance floating on the surface. Jo wondered if that was the reason why the scene smelled so bad. Dead bodies never smelled good, and decomposition was a stench you never got used to, but there was something different about this one.
The camera flashed again, and then again.
‘What’s that on the surface, Danny?’
‘Fat,’ Chen replied.
‘Fat? You mean, from the body?’
‘Exactly.’
Jo frowned. ‘How come it’s leached away like that?’
‘Because it’s not water he’s in,’ Chen said. ‘It’s acid.’
11
At 2 a.m., I woke with a jolt.
I’d been dreaming, my head full of images of moorland, an endless ocean of crests and plunges, the fields absolutely empty except for the silhouettes of nine people. They moved slowly in a line, almost shuffling, one following the other, and yet they always stayed just out of reach, even when I was running; and then, when the sun came up and the night flickered out like a candle, everyone simply vanished.
I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. It had been a long time since I’d dreamed, a longer time since I’d had one as forceful and vivid, so I felt almost disorientated, my heart thumping in my ears, sweat at the arc of my hairline and all the way down my back, as if I’d woken with a fever. Eventually, though, I felt my body begin to relax, the tension easing out of my bones, and once it did, I hauled myself on to my feet, poured a glass of water and stood at the window watching the rain fall across the emptiness of the car park.
I turned on a light, sat down at the desk and began going through some of the photos I’d removed from the houses. Patrick and Francesca Perry, mid-hike, rolling hills beyond them. Chris, Laura and Mark Gibbs gathered around a table in a restaurant somewhere, smiling for the camera. John and Freda Davey in the same photo I’d seen earlier, on a cruise, Freda, in remission, small against her husband, John looking small too against the backdrop of the vast ship. And then Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson on their holiday in the States, the two of them pointing from either side of the photograph at the Hollywood sign way off in the distance. I thought again about all the things that could have led to nine people disappearing – an affair, a gambling debt, the awkward comments of a teenager on social media, the fact that two of the nine were much less known than the others – and then switched my attention to the computers and tablets. I’d planned to wait until the morning to tackle them all – but then I hadn’t banked on being awake at 2 a.m.
Once I started going through them, I quickly discovered that most had nothing useful to offer, but I got to know each person a little better: Randolph Solomon, the Middlesbrough fan, was into football in a big way generally, his web history showing repeated visits to an online fantasy league; his girlfriend, Emiline, as her job at the library suggested, was a big reader, as well as a keen gardener and landscaper, and she’d uploaded photographs of her work to a horticultural forum where she’d been an active member; Laura Gibbs was interested in interior design and had created a Pinterest page full of things she’d decorated and bought for the farm, and Chris’s hobbies lay in areas related to his job – machines, agriculture, countryside; John Davey wasn’t only a big rugby league fan, he was into cricket too, and played golf a couple of times a week; and Freda would often use the web to go to running forums – which echoed what Rina Blake had told me about her mother being a gifted athlete – where she’d read about marathons and trail running, about routes people had found and places she’d maybe still dreamed of trying for herself one day, however unlikely it may have seemed. She also spent a lot of time on travel websites, including plotting the locations in Australia where she wanted to go on her dream holiday.
The most used piece of tech was Mark Gibbs’s, but only because his laptop was powerful enough to run computer games, which he seemed to have sunk hours into. He used the Internet a lot, as a nineteen-year-old would be expected to, but nothing in his browsing habits rang any particular alarm bells. Chrome had remembered his passwords for both Facebook and Instagram, though he obviously hadn’t been on either for two and a half years, and all his notifications were from friends of his. I went back through some of his posts to see if anything stood out, or if any comments rankled, but he uploaded rarely and posted even less. One of his friends had created a ‘Find Mark Gibbs’ account on Instagram and Twitter, posting pictures of him; a few had DM’d him directly on Facebook in the immediate aftermath of his vanishing, begging him to come home. I took down their names. There were a few similar messages in the email accounts of the Daveys and the Gibbses too, from friends and family. A week after her parents had vanished, Rina had sent John and Freda Davey an email begging them to get in touch.
I love you both so much, she’d written. Please, please call.
My eyes lingered on that second part, feeling the emotion in it.
Eventually, I started examining the Perrys’ PC.
Tearing the evidence bag off the hard drive, I set up the tower next to the TV, clicked the hard drive into one of the bays on the reverse and used an HDMI cable to connect the PC to the hotel room’s TV. It took a couple of seconds for the TV to work out what was going on, but before long I had an image of the PC’s desktop onscreen.
It was tidy, a series of applications in three vertical lines on the left. Most were of little or no relevance, except for Firefox. I clicked on the icon and then went to History. The last Internet activity was at the end of November 2015, a month after the disappearances at Black Gale. But there was nothing suspicious about that: it was a forensic tech. They’d been back over the same websites that Patrick Perry had been looking at before he vanished. I checked his email, which automatically opened at start-up, and then moved the cursor to the bottom left and selected File Explorer. Soon, it became a cycle of repetition: Powerpoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, invoices, pitches he’d made, letters on headed notepaper, the same stuff duplicated over and over. I also found folders full of photographs – landscapes, hills, valleys, the village at sunset and sunrise. Was this the evidence that finally proved his trips to the moors – witnessed by Laura Gibbs – were genuinely to take pictures and not for some other purpose? One thing was for certain: not a single document even remotely suggested something illicit had been going on between Patrick and anyone else.
Drained, I got up and went back to bed, crawling beneath the duvet again. The mattress was lumpy, cold, two singles pushed together with a ridge along the centre where they met. I tried to still my thoughts, and slowly I began to drift, images of Black Gale – of nine untold stories – giving way to fa
tigue.
Silence. Darkness.
And then a sound from the corridor.
I got up again and went to the door, opening it. There was no sign of anybody outside. Halfway between my room and the lift was a skylight, reduced to a square of blackness now: the rain was making a machine-gun sound against it, harsh, forceful, like pebbles scattering.
Had that been the noise I’d heard?
I paused there for a moment, holding the door open with one hand, and then grabbed my keycard, let the door click shut behind me and went to Healy’s room. I stood there, listening for a while, and then heard it again: the same noise as before.
It took me a couple of seconds to place it.
And, once I did, my heart dropped.
Inside his room, Healy was crying.
12
He opened the door halfway.
He was dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, but it was clear that the delay in answering had been because he’d tried to clean himself up. There were still beads of water on his cheeks where he’d washed his face, droplets in his beard too, and he was standing straighter, more upright than normal, as if he were trying to offset some of the sadness. It was an act that he barely seemed to have the energy for.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked, despite seeing the answer.
He went to speak and then swallowed, his reply failing to form properly. After a couple of seconds, he nodded and said, ‘Yeah.’ Sniffing, he wiped some of the water from his face, and then his body relaxed. He couldn’t be bothered with the act either.
I looked past him.
The wall of paper was still intact. The Black Gale file was on a table at the window, empty coffee cups and fast-food wrapping dotted around it. He’d kept going after I’d left, evidently returning to the start, the file open at a point about a fifth of the way in. Beside the file was a series of photos that didn’t belong in the investigation, or on the wall, and had nothing to do with Black Gale.
They were pictures of his family.
He watched my gaze, saw that I’d zeroed in on the portraits, and then stepped back from the door, letting it swing open fully. Wandering across to the table, he slumped into the chair next to it and drew the pictures closer to him.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I asked him gently.
He shrugged. ‘What difference does it make now?’
I perched myself on the edge of the bed.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe it might make some.’
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
‘Healy?’
Finally, he muttered, ‘When I was down in Devon, I read this book.’ His forefinger was tapping out a gentle rhythm against a photo of his daughter, Leanne. Even from where I was, at the edge of the bed, I could see her face, her smile, a teenage girl frozen for ever in time. His finger eventually stopped next to her face, as if he were trying to scratch his way into the shot and touch her. ‘Anyway, this book, it was written by this scientist – he was trying to explain physics and quantum particles and how the universe works, all that shit. He wrote it for morons like me, who’ll never have a hope in hell of ever understanding these things properly, but it was still a bit of a headfuck. I managed to follow some of it, managed to get confused by most of it, but there was this one thing that really stuck with me.’ He paused, fanning out the photos slightly. I could see he had five in total. The one of Leanne, one each of his sons, Ciaran and Liam, one of the three of them together, and then one of the Healy family as it had once existed: the three kids, Healy and his ex-wife, Gemma. He glanced at me and then back down at the pictures. ‘This one chapter, it was all about how quantum mechanics describes the world in terms of probabilities, not definite outcomes. I mean, I left school with half an education, maybe not even that much, so I only really get the basics, but the mathematics of a theory like that means that all possible outcomes of one particular situation – one choice – can occur. In other words, in this outcome right here, we went across the road and got Burger King tonight; but in another, we didn’t get Burger King, we got a sandwich; in yet another, we only bought ourselves coffee.’
‘You’re talking about parallel universes.’
He nodded. It was obvious where this was going now.
‘It sounds like some bullshit out of Star Trek,’ he said, ‘but this physicist, he works at one of the big universities in America, and it’s an actual thing. It’s real. A lot of the most incredible human beings on the planet say it’s real. It’s to do with string theory, particles, the substance of the universe, the infinity of space – something, I don’t know. But like you say, parallel worlds. Basically, what this guy is saying is that in each possible outcome, in each universe, there’s a copy of you that thinks their reality is the correct reality. Which means, somewhere out there, you and me are sitting in a room just like this one, but with sandwich wrappers all over the floor.’ His eyes moved to the remnants of our burgers, to the wall full of paper, to me, and then to the photos of the family he’d once called his own. He lifted the shot of Leanne away from the table. ‘And somewhere out there, there’s a version of me that still has this.’
It was difficult to know what to say to that. I’d been down this road myself, when I’d mourned Derryn, when I’d landed the case at Christmas that had brought all those memories back to the surface, and it was so hard to push past grief when it was this intense; it may have been harder for Healy than anyone I’d ever met because he’d left so much unsaid. I, at least, got to say goodbye to the person I loved. He hadn’t. His daughter had been murdered, his sons had disowned him, and – ground down by years of Healy maniacally working cases, of putting his job ahead of everything else, of hurting her emotionally and once, to his shame, physically – his wife finally left in the aftermath of an investigation that snapped him into pieces: an obsessive search for the murderer of a mother and her twin girls.
‘I remember a dinner I had with Gemma once,’ he said. His voice was still small, distressed. ‘It was for one of our anniversaries. I turned up late as usual. I was right in the middle of a case. I guess I was a mess, but I never saw it then. Anyway, I remember she left me at the restaurant because we got into an argument, but before she did, she said, “You’re a good man, Colm. There are lots of days when I loathe you, but you do the right things for the right reasons, and that’s more than a lot of people do.” She was talking about how the work would consume me. I didn’t think about it at the time – didn’t even consider it, really – but that was the moment.’ He sniffed, looked up at me. ‘That was the moment I should have walked away from the Met. All the shit I put her through, all the times I wasn’t there for her or the kids, and she still managed to tell me that. That was my exit, I can see that now. That was the universe I should be in. But I’m not. I stayed because I think, as weird as it sounds, my life at the Met made more sense than my life at home. I didn’t know how to handle teenagers, but I knew how to run a murder investigation.’
And that was why, when he was fired, when the central pillar of his life collapsed, when he ended up entirely alone, with no family and no work colleagues left to hear his cry for help, he had to start again as someone else. He’d had an idealistic notion of disappearing and becoming someone better, but the reality had long proved to be different. It was playing out in front of us tonight. I aided him in getting to this point, perjuring myself in front of the police in order to help him stay hidden, because I suppose, for a time, that same idealism had captivated me. I’d seen at first hand what he’d become and I wanted a better life for him, and I didn’t see how it could be any worse than it was. But this – this room, this wall full of paperwork, this concealed existence that meant even his walking outside to the car in the morning was a risk to us both – this was the reality of the life he’d chosen.
‘You did what you thought was best,’ I said.
‘Did I?’
His gaze was still on Leanne. She’d been gone over seven years now. Neither of us moved
for a long time and then he looked up and I could see he’d finally given in, the control gone, the attempt to seem impassive: tears filled his eyes.
‘I liked that book,’ he said, the tears carving into his words, breaking them as they formed in his mouth. ‘I liked the idea of her being alive somewhere, of us being together.’ He stopped, wiping his eyes. ‘She’d be twenty-seven. Can you believe that? My baby, twenty-seven.’ Again, he paused, brushing his cheeks with his sleeve, pinching the photograph of Leanne so hard between his thumb and forefinger it was starting to crease. ‘Maybe – somewhere – she’s married. Maybe she has kids.’
He forced a smile.
‘Maybe I’m a grandfather.’
I nodded, smiled, watching as he held on to the picture for a moment longer, before placing it down on the table again, next to the other memories of his family.
‘I hope I’m a better father in that place,’ he said.
He looked up at me.
‘I hope I always tell my family that I love them.’
Part Two
* * *
THE DEER
13
By 8 a.m., we were on the mud track leading in through the gate at Black Gale. The rain of the day before was gone, and under a perfect blue sky the colour of the fields seemed so bright, so different from my first visit, it was like seeing it through some kind of filter. Snow still clung to the hills, but it was a perfect spring morning.
Ross had left me the alarm codes for the houses, as well as the keys, so Healy and I went around unlocking the properties, and then I gave him an overview of what I’d found – or hadn’t – inside each the previous afternoon. I’d also brought a copy of the police evidence inventory, and a checklist I’d written of items most likely to have been taken by the villagers, alongside their wallets and phones – jackets, hats, beanies, torches, practical belongings that might help with a planned disappearance and tell us a little more about where they were headed. It was, in truth, going to be impossible to account for any missing effects definitively, but piece by piece we might build a bigger picture.