by Tim Weaver
‘Debt?’
Jo shrugged. ‘I used to see a shrink in the nineties, after your dad died. She kind of became this sounding board for me. She coined that phrase, and she was right. The main reason I moved to the LAPD was because of you. I needed to make sure I had enough time with you, that I got to see you growing up, that I wasn’t some spirit passing through your life. But there was another reason as well. I thought, by getting a promotion, by chaining myself to a desk, I’d be able to shake off this feeling I had.’
‘The sense of debt.’
She smiled. ‘Right.’
‘But you haven’t?’
‘No,’ she said, and thought of the notebook she’d dug out at home, of the two names written in the middle. Gabriel Wilzon. Donald Klein. They weren’t the only unsolved murders in her career as a cop, they weren’t the only case of hers that had hit the skids, but they were the first, and they’d always stuck the hardest, and she’d always known that there would only ever be one way to shift the weight of them.
It was the same way you shifted the weight from any case.
You found the killer.
‘Mom?’
She tuned back in.
‘Do you think we should get going?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘Of course.’ She laid out some bills on the tray and then flashed her son a big smile, telling him everything was fine. ‘Let’s get my little boy to college.’
Jo didn’t get back home until after 9 p.m.
At the screen door, she froze, her key in the lock, as if there were something bad waiting for her on the other side, and then she opened up and moved through to the hallway. The silence of the house crashed past her. She went further in, to the door of Ethan’s room: back when she’d been at the LASD, standing here had been the thing she’d done – the goodbye she’d given – as her baby had slept. Now the crib was long gone, and so was the LASD; so was Ira, so was Ethan. She took in the emptiness of the space, hated how unnaturally clean it was, from the perfectly stacked bookshelves to the flawless bed linen. And then her eyes were drawn to the other side of the room, to his desk, where – in a frame – there was a picture of him and Ira. It was taken on Ethan’s fifth birthday.
It didn’t matter how much you loved a person.
Eventually, you had to let them go.
Jo burst into tears.
Part Seven
* * *
THE DIPLOMAT
51
Robert Zaid lived at the end of a winding cul-de-sac, the entire road cut off from the outside world by a pair of five-foot-high security gates. At 7 p.m. I pulled up in front of it and pushed the buzzer on an intercom. From this side of the gates, the cul-de-sac looked quiet, and the road I’d come in on had little in the way of through traffic, but I could still hear vehicle noise from Highgate High Street, the wail of sirens, the low drone of planes in the sky. London was never silent. It made me think of how different it was from Black Gale.
‘Yes?’
The intercom crackled into life.
‘Mr Zaid? It’s David Raker.’
‘Oh yes, of course.’
With a clunk, the gates began to open.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’m down at the end.’
Either side of me, hedges became thicker and higher as I made my way down, but intermittently driveways would appear and, when I looked along them, every building was huge, a series of vast, pristine properties with broad, sweeping gardens, the grounds supplemented with tennis courts and outdoor pools. The further down I got, the bigger the houses became, until eventually Robert Zaid’s drifted into view, the gates already open. The house itself was a faux-Victorian mansion with pillars either side of the front door, and gabled windows on the top floor.
Zaid was standing in the doorway, waiting for me.
I nosed the Audi through the gates and up the driveway, and thought again of what I knew about him. Born in London to an Iranian father and Hungarian mother. Educated at a private school in Gloucestershire, and at King’s College where he’d got a BA in History and an MA in Politics. A diplomat at the Foreign Office and a hugely successful investor and entrepreneur in his own right. Seventy-second on last year’s Sunday Times Rich List. I pulled in next to a year-old Aston Martin. A Porsche and a Land Rover were parked next to it.
He knew Beatrix Steards.
Knew Adrian Vale too.
I switched off the engine.
Still works for the government, despite his vast wealth. Hard to find online, except for the blandest of profile pieces. Protects his privacy vehemently. Yet I’d called his PA early this afternoon and he’d immediately agreed to meet me.
He started coming down the driveway in my direction, and behind him I saw two other men fanning out on either side, heading in the direction of parked cars – much less lavish than Zaid’s – as if getting ready to leave. They were big and brawny, wearing the same black suits; one of them was yanking an earpiece out, the wire snaking under the collar of his jacket; the other glanced at me but didn’t seem particularly interested, apparently already briefed on who I was. They must have been Zaid’s home security team. He was letting them go for the evening.
I watched them for a moment and then got out of the car, still going over what I knew about Zaid: No obvious links to Jacob Pierce. No links to Isaac Mills either. But he spoke to Patrick Perry in a Skype call in October 2015, when Patrick had come asking about Beatrix Steards, and, in a reverse of my experience, it had taken Patrick a couple of days to arrange a conversation with him.
So why had Zaid made himself available so quickly for me?
Not knowing the answer put me on edge. The fact that, a week or so after that Skype call, Patrick was gone, and eight others along with him, put me on edge too.
I was anxious and tired, right down to my bones.
But I was clear-headed enough to see what I needed to.
Something didn’t feel right.
52
Robert Zaid’s home was every bit as beautiful on the inside as it was out. Polished wooden floors led from a foyer into a sunken living room – modern and airy, the furniture a mix of homely and contemporary – that, in turn, swept through to a huge, all-glass garden room. Beyond that was a tiered lawn, dotted with lights, and an outbuilding with a slate roof that appeared to house a swimming pool. I could see the reflection of the water on the walls, shimmering softly.
Outside, I heard the crunch of gravel as Zaid’s security team headed away, the sound of their vehicles quickly swallowed by the night. Once they were gone, Zaid used a sensor to close the gates and pushed the front door shut, cranking one of its locks. The moment he did, I heard a long beep from somewhere deeper in the house, and realized every entrance, every lock and every latch, was wired into an alarm system. There were clearly significant advantages to being as wealthy as Zaid was – but having to live like a prisoner wasn’t one of them.
I followed him further in.
‘Can I get you something to drink?’ he asked, and stopped at the edge of the living room, where three steps descended towards a low coffee table surrounded by a white rug.
He was in his early fifties, olive-skinned and dark-haired, with a neat beard. I’d managed to find a limited collection of photographs of him online, taken over a decade before, but there were more recent ones on the wall to my left, shots of him that hadn’t ever been publicized, and the one pattern I’d noticed was how much Zaid’s weight had fluctuated over time. In some of them, he was well-built and lean, muscular, strong, and in others, he’d totally gone to seed, the heft gathering around his face and in a band along his midriff, his belly straining against his shirt or lifted away from his beltline entirely by the sphere of his stomach. Right now, though, he was strong and angular, dressed in a pair of tracksuit trousers and a training top, and, as I looked at him, I had the weirdest sensation that we’d met before.
‘I like to box,’ he said, and gestured to the wall. ‘It’s why my weight goes up and down. I could se
e you were wondering, but you’re too much of a gentleman to say. It looks like you’ve been in the ring yourself.’
He was talking about the bruise on my cheek. ‘Just a little accident,’ I said, returning the smile. ‘So are you prepping for a fight now?’
‘Next week. When I work with my trainer, I always scrub up pretty well, but my body – if I don’t work hard in the gym and don’t eat properly all the time – packs it on quickly. Sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation to live the perfect lifestyle twenty-four seven.’
I nodded. ‘I can imagine.’
‘Now, that drink?’
‘Just water would be great,’ I said.
I followed him through to the kitchen and stole a look to my right, along one of the two corridors that led from the living room: in this one were more glass walls, segregating the hallway from a gym – a running machine visible – and what looked like a shower and sauna. There was steam on the glass next to the shower, and I could see a pair of dumbbells on a mat in the gym. He’d obviously just finished exercising.
He handed me a glass of water.
‘I appreciate you seeing me so quickly, Mr Zaid.’
He waved me away, as if it had been no trouble at all. ‘Robert’s perfectly fine.’ His accent was elegant, his words refined. ‘Today is one of the rare days when I’ve been relatively unencumbered by meetings, so when Jackie told me yesterday that you’d called and asked to see me, I confess I did spend a moment Google-stalking your name to see if it was a meeting I should take. But as soon as I saw what you did for a living, I was intrigued as to how I might be able to help. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a missing persons investigator before.’
‘Well, this is what we look like.’
He smiled again. ‘So I see.’
He directed me to the sofas in the living room and, as I sunk into one of them, I could see along the opposite hallway. There was a bedroom at the far end.
‘You’ve got a beautiful place here,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’ He looked around the room, out to the garden and the swimming pool. ‘I’ve been very lucky, I know that. My father was wealthy, I was fortunate to get an extremely good education, I’ve had a very interesting and varied career at the Foreign Office – those things shouldn’t be underestimated. But I like to think I’ve not relied on the fact that I was given certain assistances. I hope that what I’ve done with my advantage is to help people from less auspicious backgrounds than myself.’
In the profile piece I’d read about him, it said he’d done an enormous amount of work with charities and had ploughed millions of pounds into a state-of-the-art cancer research facility in south London, neither of which it was even remotely possible to criticize him for. Otherwise, his comments didn’t entirely ring true. Most of his wealth – not including the property portfolio he inherited from his parents, who died a year after he finished his Politics MA – was accumulated via his father’s stakes in two vast multinational oil companies, and in a media group that went on to create the world’s largest video-sharing platform. He’d made money of his own by funding Internet start-ups, some extremely successful, but all of it was built on the mountains of cash he was still making from his father’s old investments.
‘Ever think about giving up the day job?’ I asked him.
‘You mean, at the Foreign Office?’ He pursed his lips. ‘I’ve thought about it.’
‘But Whitehall is just too much of a pull?’
This time he laughed. ‘I wouldn’t say that exactly. It’s not really a day job in the proper sense of the word. I have a desk and an office there, I do a couple of days a week most weeks, and, yes, in the 1990s and early 2000s I chose to spend a lot of time abroad, working in various roles for high commissions and embassies – so, in that respect, I have been a bona fide diplomat. But I have lots of other business interests, more now than ever, and they suck up a lot of time, so over the past ten to fifteen years I’ve had a much looser brief with the FCO. I turn up at events, I wine and dine, and I leverage my contacts in order to advance the UK’s standing.’ He stopped, frowning, as if realizing how that came across. ‘That sounds terribly boastful. What I mean is, I do what I can to help them.’
It was hard to know if that was any less immodest.
‘I actually think a day job, a proper day job, can give you purpose,’ he went on. ‘My parents always said it was important to have a routine – something to get up for and something to come home from – otherwise you risk becoming lazy. And, as we all know, you should always listen to your parents, especially ones as remarkable as mine.’ He smiled again, glancing at a picture of his mother and father on the wall behind him. ‘But, seriously, working at the FCO, it’s not to everyone’s tastes, I understand that, and not everyone understands why I still do it, but my work as a diplomat has been so interesting. I’ve been to places I wouldn’t have even thought to go to otherwise. In the nineties, I was posted to Hong Kong for a while, after that I spent three years in Jakarta, and then another two in Muscat – I mean, Muscat; why would I ever have gone to Oman if not for this job? – then Moscow, Nairobi, Pretoria …’ He opened out his hands. ‘I loved all of those places. The FCO, it’s full of boring politicians – but sometimes, and I know it’s a cliché, there really are things money can’t buy.’
I looked around the room and out to the garden.
But it can still buy a lot.
‘So what is it I can help you with, Mr Raker?’
‘David,’ I said, taking out my pen and pad and setting them down. ‘I was hoping to talk to you about a woman who was on the same Politics MA as you back in 1987.’
I watched for any sign that he knew what was coming.
I didn’t have to look hard.
‘You want to talk about Beatrix Steards,’ he said.
‘You remember her?’
Zaid frowned, as if the idea of forgetting her was offensive to him.
‘Of course,’ he responded. ‘I remember her very well. I remember the day she went missing, the aftermath of her disappearance. But, mostly, whenever I think of Beatrix, I remember the man who murdered her.’
Retirement: Part 1
2015
Los Angeles | Friday 30 October
Her retirement party was at a Mexican place in Irvine. The university staff had hired a room at the back and decorated it with balloons and banners, and while a part of her had worried no one would turn up – an irrational fear given how many friends she’d made during her twelve years of teaching at UCI – it was packed. So she drank too much and ate too little, she danced to songs that she’d thought she’d forgotten a long time ago, and then she left just after midnight in an Uber one of the staff had organized for her.
The drive back to her apartment had taken thirty minutes, the driver apparently not big on conversation, but Jo welcomed the silence. She’d enjoyed watching the city pass at night, the lights blurred, the windows lit; she knew she would probably be back in Irvine again at some point for lunch, perhaps back at UCI for a one-off lecture, but she wouldn’t be doing this journey every morning and evening. For the first time in almost half a century, she wouldn’t have any commute at all.
She thought about the first job she’d had, straight out of college, doing basic administrative work for the clerk at the federal courthouse; about her first day at the Sheriff’s Department as a deputy; about when she moved to the LAPD as a lieutenant in 1993; and finally, she recalled the day she’d left law enforcement for good, after twenty-eight years.
That day had felt similar to this one.
Similar, but not the same.
She’d known it was the right thing to do then, just as she knew now, but twelve years ago she hadn’t been tired of it all. Now she was exhausted. For the last six months she’d been waking up every day feeling like she was done. After forty years, she didn’t want to have to talk about crime or criminals any more, whether it was purely theoretical and in front of a lectern, or out on a sidewalk as
she stood over a body. She was still fit and healthy, still felt as good now as she’d ever done, but emotionally she had nothing left to give.
She wanted a vacation.
She wanted to go and visit Ethan and Claire in San Francisco.
She wanted to sit and hold her granddaughter.
After the driver had dropped her off, she let herself in and dumped her bag on the couch, then went to the kitchen and got herself a glass of water. She noticed the answer machine was blinking red, its display showing one message waiting.
It could wait until morning.
She woke with a crashing headache at 8 a.m.
As she stumbled through to the bathroom with one eye squeezed shut, she tried to remember the last time she’d felt as terrible as this. It could have been twenty years ago. It could have been more than that. She’d pretty much given up drinking after Ira had died, except at the occasional social event: she’d stopped out of grief to start with, and then stayed that way because of Ethan. She’d been a single mom with a young kid, and she’d had a career that had taken every ounce of whatever she wasn’t giving to her son.
And whatever she wasn’t giving to Ethan never felt like enough.