No One Home

by Tim Weaver

  SMOULTER: Are you saying you don’t?

  VALE: No. I don’t drink.

  SMOULTER: You don’t drink alcohol? Why not?

  VALE: My father was an alcoholic. He died when I was fifteen. Alcohol doesn’t hold much appeal to me.

  Even reading the words on the page, shorn of their delivery, the nuances of expression and inflection, it was obvious that the response put a hitch in Smoulter’s stride. At that point, he asked if Vale wanted something else to drink – a coffee or a tea – and the interview was temporarily halted.

  When it started again, Smoulter picked up where he left off.

  SMOULTER: Did you chat to Beatrix at any point while you were both inside the property at the party?

  VALE: No, I didn’t.

  SMOULTER: So the first and last time you spoke to Beatrix Steards was when she left the party?

  VALE: Yes.

  SMOULTER: Why did you go outside to smoke?

  VALE: It seemed like the polite thing to do.

  SMOULTER: What’s polite about it?

  VALE: Well, not everyone likes the smell of cigarette smoke. I try to be cognizant of that.

  SMOULTER: But it’s not a crime to smoke inside.

  VALE: I didn’t say it was. I said not everyone likes it, so I thought it would be polite to –

  SMOULTER: Did you go outside to smoke because you’d seen Beatrix getting ready to leave the party?

  VALE: No, I did not.

  SMOULTER: Was her ‘bumping into you’ on the front steps of that house actually part of your plan?

  VALE: I didn’t have a plan.

  SMOULTER: So you just got lucky?

  VALE: That’s not what I meant.

  SMOULTER: We spoke to Robert Zaid and he told us that you had previously admitted to liking Beatrix.

  VALE: Liking her?

  SMOULTER: You fancied her.

  VALE: I don’t remember saying that.

  SMOULTER: So Mr Zaid is lying?

  VALE: No. You’re twisting my words.

  SMOULTER: You didn’t find Beatrix attractive?

  VALE: I don’t believe that thinking she was attractive is the same thing as ‘fancying’ her. You can admit to finding someone attractive without it meaning that you want to date them or ask them out.

  SMOULTER: So you did find her attractive?

  VALE: Do I remember telling Robert that? No, I don’t. Does it mean I didn’t say it to him? No, it doesn’t mean that either. I probably did say that to him in passing. But, as I said, admitting a person is attractive isn’t the same as having something to do with them going missing. It’s not the same at all. Beatrix and I, we talked for ten minutes, and then she headed towards the Tube station at Kennington. That was the last time I saw her.

  Smoulter tried to push the same agenda for a while, tried to catch Vale out by mining for inconsistencies in his account of the night, but the interview began to wane shortly after and, towards the end, it became a painful exercise in repetition as Smoulter desperately attempted to unearth leads that clearly weren’t there. After two hours, Vale’s solicitor began to get more involved, and by the end he was cutting into Smoulter’s questions every time they were posed, querying relevance, objecting to veiled accusations and highlighting a lack of evidence tying Vale to any crime.

  Finally, at 9.37 p.m. on 6 March 1987, the tape was turned off.

  It was the one and only interview conducted with Vale.

  Police appealed for other eyewitnesses: people who might have been on a night out in the area at the time, or perhaps been waiting on the platforms at Kennington station, where Beatrix had told Vale – and friends at the house party – that she’d been headed. There was no footage of her on CCTV, because her disappearance had taken place at a time when security cameras were nowhere near as prevalent, especially not within the concourses and corridors of the Underground, so the appeal eventually led nowhere. The more his investigation stalled, the more Smoulter went back to Vale, securing financial statements from his bank account at the Midland, as well as an itemized bill from the phone line he’d had at his flat near Clapham High Street.

  Again, they were dead ends.

  After that, Smoulter started digging into Vale’s upbringing, his background, his family, including the father Vale said had died when he was still only fifteen. That felt especially irrelevant, but I imagined it was done not because Smoulter distrusted the story that Vale had painted about his dad and his alcoholism – though he may have done – but because, by that stage, Smoulter and the Met were desperate. They had nothing. But, this time, the search failed for another reason, and it wasn’t down to the information not being there, it was down to it being hard to access.

  Vale, it turned out, was in the UK on a scholarship.

  He was American.

  Clear: Part 1

  1985

  Los Angeles | Tuesday 30 July

  The squad room was quiet, the graveyard shift gone, all of the desks empty except for one at the back where a member of the Night Stalker team was already in place and screaming into his phone about a detective he’d had to deal with at Glendale PD.

  Jo had overheard enough shouting the day before to know that Homicide at Glendale were on an LASD shitlist: two of the Stalker murders on 20 July had happened inside the city’s thirty-square-mile boundaries, at a house close to the Ventura Freeway, and – a week and a half on – the task force believed detectives over there were still withholding important information they’d gathered at the scene because they wanted to make headlines for themselves. Jo didn’t know if those suspicions were correct or not. She only knew that the LASD was supposed to be acting as the lead agency because of the chronology and location of the initial murders, that cops were territorial, in the same way as they could be intractable, driven, disingenuous and entirely self-serving, and that the frenzied hunt for the Stalker had brought out the worst in a number of them.

  She wheeled herself in under her table and opened the top drawer of her desk. Inside was a Walkman. She put the headphones on and pressed Play, not caring what tape she’d left in last time, just wanting to tune out the sound of the detective, who was now threatening to drive to Glendale and get someone fired. The irony wasn’t lost on Jo. She’d had to watch more resources being poured into the Night Stalker, and more attention directed his way, than any case she’d ever orbited in seven years as a detective. But all that extra money and manpower hadn’t acted as a glue. If anything, it had turned the city on itself.

  She took her investigation into the motel killing and the xeroxed copy of Ray Callson’s murder book out of her tray and placed them on her desk. In her ears, Marvin Gaye was singing like an angel.

  She started going through the suicide first, leafing through photos she’d already seen of Donald Klein’s body, his skin marbled, his eyes glazed, the top of his skull missing. The day after she’d met him, Ray Callson had mailed over the full forensic report, and she’d since got one hundred per cent confirmation that the bullet Klein used to kill himself with came from the same gun used to murder ‘Gabriel Wilzon’ before he was dumped in the tub. On a scrap of paper in the same envelope, Callson had written down numbers for both his pager and his house, and had told Jo to call him any time she needed. She’d tried to do so once, to clarify something minor, but Callson had never picked up, so she’d left a message on his machine.

  She was still waiting for a callback five days later.

  She pictured the man she’d met the Wednesday before up on the slopes of the park. He’d been tired, grieving, in pain. He’d told Jo his wife only had a few days left.

  Maybe those days were over already.

  It didn’t matter how much you loved a person.

  Eventually, you had to let them go.

  Between the vertical edges of the binders, under the glass top of her desk, a photo of Ethan looked out. He was smiling and had an ice cream in his hand, while Ira was holding the camera up, at the end of an outstretched arm, in order to f
it them both into the frame. Light shone in the perfect blue of Ethan’s eyes, his skin unblemished. She switched cases, flipping open the front of the motel binder, and shifted the paperwork across the desk so that it completely covered the portrait of her son’s face. Ethan had looked different this morning when she’d left at six, less angelic, his diaper sagging, his nose still blocked from the cold he couldn’t shift. He’d been crying too, trying to escape from his high chair as Ira attempted to feed him. But healthy or unwell, laughing or crying, even-tempered or difficult, she didn’t ever want him – even his photograph – to come close to the world contained inside the binders. Not now. Not ever.

  She refocused.

  The full autopsy report from Dan Chen was due this morning, but Jo had seen and heard enough the day before to know she shouldn’t expect much. She’d spent ninety minutes in a white room in the basement of the county coroner’s building as Chen carved apart Gabriel Wilzon, and she’d still come away with nothing.

  Leafing through the shots of Wilzon, she looked at the artist’s sketch that had been made from what the manager at the Star Inn could remember, but so far it had got her very little. Wilzon was Hispanic – Chen had confirmed as much – but the sketch made him look Caucasian. It felt like she’d studied the sketch and the photographs a thousand times over, one half of Wilzon liquefied, the other half showing more traditional signs of decomp: at the Star Inn, his back had a sheen to it where the breakdown had begun and blisters had formed and ruptured on his skin; in pictures that Chen had taken at the autopsy, he was cleaned up, his face like wax, his body bloated from the gases.

  Odontology had proved just as worthless as everything else: there was no match for the teeth, and so far no indication that Wilzon had received treatment at any clinic in Los Angeles. Jo had started to send out teletypes to agencies further afield, in an effort to see if Wilzon had come from somewhere else in California, but it was a long shot, she didn’t expect to get any hits, and she wasn’t convinced that that was where the answers lay, anyway. Forensics believed it was much more likely that Wilzon just hadn’t attended a dentist regularly, or perhaps at all. Chen had said that, judging by the condition of the skin, bones and internal organs, Wilzon was in his early to mid twenties, and during the transition from high school to college it often happened that as kids became adults, and moved away from home, they forgot to get their teeth checked regularly. Or perhaps, as Jo believed, there was another reason his teeth came up blank.

  He never went to a dentist in America.

  Because he wasn’t American.

  From her in-tray, she took a sheet of dot-matrix printer paper that had been mailed over to her by Paolo Caraca, the owner of Caraca BuildIt. It was the details of all thirty-six members of staff he’d employed since 1982, when he’d bought out and changed the name of the supplies yard. Including former members of staff as well as current ones was more than Jo had asked him for so she’d spent the previous day running background checks on all of them. As much as she’d appreciated the gesture, though, it was still a dead end: none of his staff, former or current, had a record. A few had some minor traffic violations, but nothing to raise the pulse. What had been more interesting than the names, though, was what else she’d found out about Paolo Caraca’s business: it dealt in the supply of corrosive chemicals for industrial use – and one of them was muriatic acid. He told Jo that, at any one time, he could have as much as six hundred gallons in the yard, so she’d asked him to do a stocktake to ensure all containers were accounted for. He hadn’t liked it, because he felt he’d already done her a big favour with the employee list, but he’d agreed to do it anyway. Now she was waiting for the results.

  She felt someone moving her chair.

  Taking off her headphones, she swivelled around and could see that it was Lieutenant Hayesfield: he was walking past, clicking his fingers at her and pointing towards his office. Jo put the headphones down and looked at the clock. She’d lost all track of time. It was after 9 a.m. and the squad room was now full.

  Closing the binder, she grabbed her notes and followed Hayesfield. His office was small and unimpressive. There were blinds at the window, which he never closed, a green, black and yellow flag in a frame on the wall – the official flag of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department – and a detailed map of LA County itself, with sticky notes all over it indicating the active crimes that detectives were currently investigating. Jo noticed that there was no sticky note anywhere close to the Star Inn.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Hayesfield said, easing himself into his own chair. He was in his late forties, mixed race, burly and strong, an amateur boxer who’d won heavyweight belts all across the state in his twenties. He reached for a plastic cup of black coffee on the desk, steam smoking out of it, and said, ‘So where we at, Kader?’

  She looked at his map. There were three sticky notes with her name on them: one in Altadena where a woman had been raped and shot outside a country club, another at the fringes of the Angeles National Forest where a man had been found by a trail head on State Route 39 with a bullet in his chest, and a third next to a burger joint on the corner of Sunset and Palm where two men had got into a fight and one of them killed the other.

  ‘Ortiz, the kid who popped his pal on Sunset, has his arraignment later on this morning,’ Jo said. ‘The case is a slam dunk. We’ve got eyewitnesses all over the place, we’ve got ballistic matches, his prints are all over the gun – it’s going all the way.’ She took out her notebook and leafed through to what she had on the killing at Route 39. ‘The guy we found up in Azusa has been ID’d as Gerald Krysinski. After I’m done at the arraignment, I’m going to head out and talk to his family. His sister told me over the phone they hadn’t seen him for months.’ She flipped through more pages. ‘The rape: we all know it was Kyle Hansen – we’ve just got to prove it, so I’m speaking to the DA later.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hayesfield said. ‘So that’s one down, two to go.’

  Jo glanced at the map.

  ‘I need those other two closed, Kader.’

  ‘I hear you, LT.’

  ‘I hope so, because I’ve got Santos crawling up my ass about our clearance rate while I’m dealing with the biggest manhunt in the history of the department.’

  This time, Jo just nodded.

  ‘Something on your mind, Kader?’

  She switched her attention back to Hayesfield and saw that he’d come forward at his desk, pushing his cup aside, his eyes fixed on her.

  ‘Actually, I think it might be one down, three to go, LT.’

  Hayesfield searched the map for a case of hers he’d missed.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The murder I caught last week at the motel.’

  He frowned. ‘The body in the tub?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We already cleared that.’

  ‘Well, we found out who handled the acid.’

  ‘Like I said, we filed on it already.’

  ‘Klein was in that motel room when it happened; he almost certainly emptied the acid into the tub, because his prints are all over the containers. But he was there under duress. I’ve got together a working theory that, whoever was with him, was threatening to hurt Donald Klein’s mother as a way to force Klein to –’

  ‘Are you kidding me, Kader?’

  She paused. ‘His mother’s got type 1 diabetes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they’re close. He really cared for her.’

  ‘So? So what?’

  ‘So that, combined with his personality, makes him easy to manipulate –’

  Hayesfield held up a hand, stopping her.

  ‘I want you to think carefully about what you say next.’

  Jo looked at him, confused.

  ‘LT, I’m not sure I underst–’

  ‘I want you to think really carefully about what you’re going to say, okay?’ He returned his hand to the desk. ‘Because I promise you, Kader: if I don’t like the sound of
what comes out of your mouth next, you’ll be clearing your fucking desk.’

  30

  It was late, the clocks in the cottage reading 11 p.m., the windows showing nothing but absolute darkness. Upstairs, I collapsed on to the bed, my laptop still in my hands. I was tired, fried from hours of sitting in front of a screen and staring at the collage of photographs, cuttings and theories I’d tacked to the walls of the living room. But I wanted to finish going through Beatrix Steards’s casework before I tried to sleep, because I knew, if I didn’t, I’d never drop off.

  The background information on Adrian Vale in Beatrix’s file was thin on the ground, the result of a phone call that DS Smoulter had made to the Home Office – and then to King’s College – five days after the disappearance, but it managed to fill in some gaps. He discovered that Vale had been born on 2 November 1964 and that his parents were both from Honduras: it meant his first name was pronounced Adri-ahn and his surname Vah-lay, but from what I could tell, no one, including him, appeared to have bothered correcting people in the UK who assumed Adrian was the anglicized version and Vale rhymed with male. He’d grown up as an only child in a house on St Louis Street in Boyle Heights, which, I found out via the web, was a 1.2-mile road, running north to south, from the I-10 to the bottom of Hollenbeck Park in central Los Angeles.

  Los Angeles.

  I looked at the wall, at a photograph I’d pinned up of Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson pointing at the Hollywood sign. Was it simply coincidence that, for one of the only long-haul holidays they’d chosen to take, they’d opted for the same city that Adrian Vale had been born and brought up in?

  Or was there something worth looking for here?

  On the wall next to the shot of Randolph and Emiline was a picture that Patrick Perry had taken of the moors, presumably on one of the unaccounted-for ‘hikes’ he’d made. I thought again about the idea of him having an affair with Emiline, even floated the possibility that I might have called it wrong and that it wasn’t Emiline but Freda Davey he was seeing, despite her health issues, and then I looped back around to the LA link and felt no closer to an answer for any of it.