No One Home

by Tim Weaver

  A light was blinking on its underside.

  Getting to my feet again, I grabbed the bottom of the sofa and – as carefully as possible – tilted it back enough to see underneath. Screwed to the base was a small device, a digital readout on its front showing a series of red vertical bars. It was an audio equalizer, like the kind you’d find on an old stereo. A barely visible lead ran from the back of the device down and through a pinhole in the carpet.

  That was why I hadn’t been able to find any wires.

  They ran under the flooring.

  Gently, I placed the sofa back and checked the rest of the room, then moved through to the kitchen. Another device, exactly the same as the one I’d found in the living room, was hidden inside the plastic casing of a strip light, its connection to the hard drive snaking off through another minuscule hole, this time in the ceiling. I had to take the entire light fixture apart in order to find both the device and the connecting wire, but they were there, the readout on the device bobbing up and down in response to my actions, even when they were minor. Afterwards, I stayed exactly where I was on a chair in the middle of the kitchen, silent, motionless, just observing it, and quickly realized that every sound registered, no matter how faint. We’d come into the house with no shoes in an attempt to conceal our search, but it had been a completely worthless act: even the softness of my breathing was getting a response, the equalizer pulsing into life.

  Back in the hallway, I stopped, my gaze falling on the photographs under the stairs, the pictures hanging like fruit. There was no device here, no place to disguise it, but it was clear that the technology in the living room and kitchen would have been powerful enough to register conversations at a distance. It would have recorded the exchange I’d had with Ross the day before as we’d stood in front of the picture tree. I didn’t remember us saying anything revelatory – but that hardly seemed the point.

  Someone had been listening.

  Someone wanted to know what I was saying.

  A creak on the landing. I came around the stairs and looked up. Healy was standing at the top, waving me towards him. He’d found something. I was pretty sure I knew what it would be, and when I got to Patrick Perry’s office I saw that I was right: another device, attached with duct tape to one of the legs on Patrick’s desk, hidden from view.

  I pointed to the device, then to the floor, and held up a couple of fingers, indicating I’d found two more downstairs.

  Healy mouthed, What the hell?

  I put a finger to my lips and cupped my ear.

  They can hear everything.

  Inside ten minutes, we’d found two more.

  One was in Patrick and Francesca’s bedroom, hidden in a false panel at the top of one of their fitted wardrobes; a second was in an air vent in the bathroom, placed there – I was guessing – because the bathroom represented the midway point of the first floor and would therefore be able to pick up sounds from all directions.

  I led us downstairs, put on my shoes and headed out of the house, out of the gate that marked the start of Black Gale and beyond that for forty feet.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Healy said, once we’d stopped walking.

  ‘You really need me to answer that?’

  ‘You think that Mills guy put those things in there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but he seems like a pretty good place to start.’

  I looked at the Perrys’ house and then at the others. Were there bugs inside all four properties? We’d need to make sure, but – given the way Isaac Mills had checked the sides of the other homes in the same way as the Perrys’ – I was willing to bet there were. It explained something else too that I’d been trying to figure out: how Mills had seemed to know who I was, even before asking. It was because those same bugs had recorded my visit to Black Gale the day before and he’d heard Ross using my name.

  ‘How did the police miss these?’ Healy asked.

  ‘Because there was no crime here.’

  He looked at me, instantly understanding.

  It was the thing that every retrospective failure in the case – every oversight – would always come back to: if there had been upturned furniture, or damage to the walls, or blood, if it had looked in any way like someone had been hurt here, then the houses would have been pulled apart, top to bottom. But it didn’t. It looked like four households had cleaned their properties, locked up and then left. And maybe they had, or maybe they hadn’t, but it was why the bugs – leaving aside the fact that they were so well hidden – were never found when investigators arrived here. It was eventually why the case lost momentum in the media as well: because as compelling a mystery as Black Gale was, as much as the papers would have loved to have continued running stories on it, there had never been any evidence of wrongdoing. People had the legal right to disappear – the legal right never to be found too – and that was a hard reality to swallow when you were looking for a headline to sell.

  ‘Maybe the bugs weren’t even here two and a half years ago,’ Healy said, his thoughts echoing ones I’d had myself. ‘Maybe they were installed afterwards.’ But then he stopped and we looked at each other, the same question in both our faces. Why install a bug in an empty house? It was of value now, when someone was actually looking into what had happened, but – apart from a few true-crime bloggers, and amateur sleuths like Tori Gibbs – no one had been actively looking into Black Gale since the media lost interest and the police investigation hit a wall. It was much more likely that the bugs were in here before any of the villagers left – and that, in turn, changed the entire perspective of the case.

  It made it something else.

  Something worse.

  I thought about the hard drive in the cavity wall, about the devices dotted around the house, and about the way the technology monitored and reacted to our sounds. The soft hum I’d heard, the sound creeping out from under the sofa that had helped me zero in on the first bug, didn’t seem to start until I’d strayed within range.

  Before that, the device had been silent.

  ‘I think the bugs have got motion sensors in them.’

  Healy frowned. ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘It would explain why Mills arrived here when he did. These devices go into hibernation when there’s no movement in the house, so when we returned here this morning and began looking around, we set them off again. And as soon as we did, they sent out confirmation that there was fresh activity in the village. Some kind of pulse.’

  ‘A pulse?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Maybe that hard drive isn’t just a hard drive; maybe it’s a communication device too. Maybe this whole village is still on the grid, switched on even if the phone company don’t know anything about it. The thing is, we can’t remove the hard drive and check, or Mills will know for sure that we’ve found it. But it makes sense. Think about it: once we were done here this morning, once we’d left the village, once – if I’m right – the bugs went into sleep mode again, they, or the hard drive, sent out a second pulse, confirmation that we were gone. Because of that, Mills – who must have been listening in – thought we’d left, so he heads up here to see what else we’ve been up to, to make sure everything’s still in place. But then, a half-mile down the road, we hit a deer.’

  ‘And we decided to come back.’

  ‘If there are bugs in the farmhouse, they’d have come to life once we returned here to dress your wound – but, by then, it was too late for Mills to notice as he’d stopped listening to us.’

  ‘Because he was already driving up here.’

  I nodded, looking at him, seeing the sense in it. Right now, Mills was probably still in his car, so he wouldn’t realize we’d found the bugs yet. But if there was more than one person listening in, someone else might.

  And then I realized something else.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What?’ Healy said, seeing my face drop.

  ‘Shit.’

  Dread pooled in the pit of
my stomach.

  ‘What is it, Raker?’

  Except, a second later, he got it too, and when he did, it was like he’d been hit by a wrecking ball, his feet slipping on the mud as he stumbled back against the wall, his skin blanched, whatever he was trying to say lost on his tongue. He looked at me.

  ‘What the fuck are we going to do now?’ he shouted.

  At the farmhouse, Healy talked about living in Devon. He’d talked about hiding out down there, in secret. But worse than both of those was what I’d said: that he was supposed to be dead – and if he didn’t hide from Mills, we were both going to prison.

  And we couldn’t deny any of it.

  We couldn’t hide from what we’d said.

  Because everything was on tape.

  19

  ‘I never used your name,’ I said, trying to sound in control.

  ‘He’s got us on tape, Raker.’

  ‘I know, but I never used your name,’ I repeated, more firmly this time. And that was true, I didn’t: I’d talked about his death being faked, but I’d never used his name.

  ‘So – what? – everything’s all right now?’

  ‘No, I’m not saying that. Just …’

  ‘Just what? Calm down?’

  ‘Just give me a moment to think.’

  I turned away from him, trying to clear my head, and as I did, I started to realize how cold it had got, the wind whipping in off the moors, the sun lost behind streaks of bruised cloud. Somehow, the drop in temperature – the chill in the air – all felt right. I needed to come up with something. I needed a plan.

  I needed to head this off.

  Suddenly, my phone shattered the silence. I looked down at the display: it was Ewan Tasker calling me back about Mills, about the registration plate I’d given him.

  ‘Hey, Task.’

  ‘Raker,’ he said, by way of a response.

  There was something in his voice.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve just had déjà vu, that’s all.’

  ‘Déjà vu?’ I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your guy, Isaac Mills, he’s an ex-cop.’

  I quickly processed the information and started making it fit. If he was an ex-cop, that probably meant he was on the payroll at Seiger and Sten as an investigator.

  ‘Fifteen years in Lancashire Constabulary,’ Task went on. ‘I’ve been into the PNC and he’s got no record, no cautions, no formal warnings or reprimands; there’s nothing pending. No court orders, no driving convictions. His only registered vehicle is the Lexus you gave me the plate for. Like I say, fifteen years in the Lancashire Constab and a pretty good reputation from what I’ve been able to find out. A guy I used to know on a Major Investigation Team down in Lambeth works up in Preston now, and he’s done some asking around for me. He says people remember Mills as a good cop. Professional, hard-working, smart. Could be a bit of a loner sometimes, didn’t socialize much, but then that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve known plenty of cops who socialize. They’re normally the biggest arseholes.’

  He paused briefly, obviously reading from some of the notes he’d made.

  ‘Anyway,’ Task went on, ‘he’s divorced with no kids, and it says down here that he was at Lancashire Constabulary from 1996 to 2011, and spent most of that time working major crime. His current address is in Keighley. You want it?’

  ‘Yeah, definitely.’

  He read it out to me.

  ‘Oh, and his DOB is the 4th of November 1966,’ Task said.

  ‘Did your guy say what Mills went on to do after he left the police?’

  ‘Private sector, apparently.’

  ‘Any idea what?’

  ‘My guy didn’t know, but he thought it might have been some sort of security job. You know, advising on surveillance and protection, that sort of thing. A lot of ex-cops go that route: the pay’s better, and you leave most of the stress at the door. But he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure. The day Mills left was the last day any of them ever saw him.’

  Surveillance and protection.

  That just about fitted with a law firm like Seiger and Sten.

  ‘What did you mean earlier about déjà vu, Task?’

  ‘I mean, you told me when you called that you thought something was going on, and that something turns out to be you looking into an ex-cop. We’ve done this dance before, Raker, and I know you’re going to tell me everything’s fine, but whenever you do, a few days later I discover that you’ve walked into some shitstorm. I’m not going to be giving you this information, then turning up at your funeral next week, am I?’

  Tasker’s concerns weren’t overblown: I’d come close to losing my life before, been dragged so far into the shadows I’d wondered if I’d ever get back, but I quickly tried to allay his fears, as convincingly as I was able, and shifted our conversation on.

  My daughter, Annabel, would often raise similar worries about my job, about the risks it posed to me, to our lives together, but she was a dance and drama teacher, far removed from the world that I existed in, and which Tasker was a part of as well, so my reassurance carried more weight with her than it did with him. Task had been a cop, in one form or another, for the best part of fifty years. He’d seen everything the world was capable of, all its lies and its devastation, all its violence and its blackness, and he’d seen it repeated over and over, time after time. That made him perceptive, it made him cynical and wary – but, most of all, it made him realistic.

  So I knew he was right: sooner or later, a case would come for me and pull me back into the shadows.

  And maybe there would be no way back.

  I just had to hope it wasn’t this one.

  20

  There were five recording devices in each of the homes, concealed so well that it took us over ninety minutes to find them all. The only difference was the design: the Perrys and the Daveys had one type – theirs smaller, and more difficult to find – while Randolph and Emiline and the Gibbses had another: a little larger, possibly newer, but without the audio equalizer bars on the side of them.

  Neither of us talked about it until we were clear of the village, the car rattling and whining as we made our way back down the track. It was too risky to leave Healy at Black Gale now, so we’d made sure the four properties were exactly as we’d found them, light fixtures screwed in, picture frames returned, the feet of the sofas placed into the same indentations in the carpets. We’d been quiet and we’d been careful, but ultimately none of that really mattered much: we’d talked enough before we realized we were being recorded, and our complete silence in the aftermath of Mills’s appearance would almost certainly arouse suspicion once the recordings were played back, as would the minor snaps and clicks close to the microphones. Those noises would appear like someone trying to suppress the sound of their movements, which was exactly what it was: it wouldn’t take a genius to realize we’d found the hard drive and then gone looking for the bugs.

  ‘So what now?’ Healy said.

  It was obvious from his voice that he was battling to stay focused on anything other than the fact that his voice was on tape somewhere, three and a half years after his name had been etched into a headstone. His gaze was fixed on the road and his fingers were forming a fist and then opening again, like a pulse, something that happened when he was nervous. It was a hangover from his days as a smoker, when he’d have already sparked up at this point.

  ‘I have to get the car fixed,’ I said.

  ‘And where does that leave me?’

  ‘You need to disappear for a few days. I don’t know who the hell this guy Mills is. I don’t even know if he’s the one that put bugs in those houses. So while I’m trying to figure it out, I can’t be worrying about you.’

  Healy looked at me. ‘You don’t think Mills installed the bugs?’

  ‘I’m saying I don’t know for sure.’

  But he could see what else lay unspoken in my face.

  ‘Wait a second
, you think Ross might be involved?’

  I didn’t reply immediately, because I was still trying to get my head around the idea, to figure out why Ross would do something like that. But one thing was certain: Ross had keys and alarm codes for all four houses.

  ‘I need to look into Mills and I need to speak to Ross,’ I said, ‘so until I know either way, I think it’s better for both of us if you lie low.’

  He nodded, seeming to accept his fate.

  ‘The nearest town between where we’re staying and here is Skipton,’ I went on, ‘so I’m going to try and find a garage there. I’ll drop you at the station before I do. I suggest jumping on a train to somewhere like Leeds: a big city; busy, lots of people. We need you to fade into the background. I’ll give you my other bank card for a hotel room: don’t go for some shithole, but avoid a top-of-the-range one as well. The blander and more anonymous the better. Once you’re settled, call me from a payphone and give me the details. In the meantime, while the car’s being repaired, I’ll go back to the hotel and box up all the Black Gale paperwork. As soon as the car’s ready, I’ll meet you.’

  After that, we were both quiet, the car filled with the defective tick of whatever was broken in the engine and the sound of rain on the roof. Eventually, Healy shifted in his seat, and I saw him glance at me, poised as if to say something.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked him.

  He made a grunt of disbelief. ‘What do you think? We’ve been listened to, maybe watched as well, and some arsehole’s got me on tape when I’m meant to be six feet under the ground.’

  But it didn’t feel like that was it.

  ‘What else is on your mind?’

  We were a couple of miles outside Grassington now, where I’d met Ross Perry for the first time the day before, and where Emiline Wilson had worked at the library. I turned to Healy and said, ‘He doesn’t have your name, okay?’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t need my name.’

  ‘If he doesn’t have a name, it’s much harder.’