by Tim Weaver
She calmed herself, tried to get her thoughts into some sort of order.
It had to be through Johnny, surely, although she was uncertain of how. He and Gareth had never been close, even during the best times Rebekah had had during their relationship, and that had been exacerbated after Gareth had turned up late to their father’s funeral. They definitely hadn’t been in touch since the split.
That you know about.
She tried to shake her head free of interference. Could Johnny and Gareth really be working together? Why would either of them want to see harm come to Rebekah?
And what about the message?
It was empty.
There was no message.
So what was it? A test to see if Stelzik’s email worked? What did that mean – that Stelzik was involved too? The day Lima had tried to kill her and Johnny, he’d told Rebekah that Stelzik was just a ‘loose end’. That suggested Stelzik was ancillary to all of this, not central to it.
Or maybe it didn’t.
She stared at the email again, then snapped the laptop shut. She didn’t know what was going on.
But she was going to find out.
47
Over the next few days, while Roxie lay next to her, or roamed the empty corridors of the hostel, Rebekah wrote everything down on the pad she’d found in Stelzik’s room. She put hours of effort into finding direct tethers between Gareth and Stelzik, but she could only get from Gareth to Stelzik via Johnny. She couldn’t figure out if Stelzik and Johnny had been working together to lure her to the island – and, if so, why? – or whether Johnny and Gareth were plotting, and Stelzik was some sort of patsy. But that raised just as many questions, given the relationship between her brother and her ex. So if she discounted Johnny, Gareth was the person she should be looking at, which returned Rebekah to an idea she’d already had: that Gareth wanted her out of the way and Noella might even have been the reason he had invented the name Willard Hodges.
But did she really believe that?
Her husband was capable of deceiving her, that much was true, but did she really believe he wanted her dead? Did she believe Noella, her best friend, basically her sister, would be complicit in an affair with her husband and in a plot to get rid of Rebekah for good? And what about Johnny? Something held on inside her – a tiny flicker of light: a certainty that the man she’d grown up with, even the man she’d glimpsed in London that night, simply wasn’t capable of something as insidious as this. And if she believed that about him, she must believe it about Noella too. So that just left Gareth.
That was when she saw her mistake, when she saw she’d overlooked two people in this jigsaw who were definitely involved.
Hain and Lima.
As soon as they pulled back into focus, she started to find a logical path through some of the questions, particularly the lack of emails to Stelzik from Johnny. Although a whisper of doubt about Johnny wouldn’t leave her, two nights later she had paper all over the room, stuck to the walls, the front of the closet, even to the door when it was closed, and she could see clearly: it was far more likely that Hain and Lima had deleted Stelzik’s email chain with Johnny, not her brother.
Stelzik had been dead for at least a day by the time she and Johnny had found him. And she remembered something else: as he’d pointed his gun at them both, Lima had said, I’ve been trying to find that friggin’ dog since I offed Stelzik. If Rebekah was right, and Stelzik’s body had been twenty-four hours old, it meant Roxie must have been loose in the forest for at least the same amount of time, and that Lima had been on the island the day before Rebekah and Johnny arrived. He must have come to take care of Stelzik first.
She looked at one of the notebook pages she’d mounted. It had a solitary question written on it, the question her father had always said was the starting point for every case he’d ever worked.
Why?
Number one, coming a day early gave Lima time to take care of Stelzik, the ‘loose end’. If Stelzik had been left alive and was then questioned by cops looking for Johnny and Rebekah, he could have discussed the fact that he’d been in contact with Johnny. But there was more to it than that: after spending hours opening and closing different files and applications, Rebekah stumbled across an activity log on the laptop. It took her some time to figure it out – she was a long way from being any kind of expert – but she soon started to notice a regular pattern in it: Stelzik’s IP address kept changing.
The reason landed hard.
His laptop was being accessed remotely.
He was being spied on.
And if Hain and Lima were watching emails between Johnny and Stelzik, it was just as likely – in fact, certain – that they were watching all of Johnny’s emails. Perhaps even more disturbingly, they not only knew that Johnny had agreed to come to Crow Island to meet Stelzik on 30 October, they knew that Rebekah was coming too. And the fact they’d known that meant they’d been keeping as close an eye on Rebekah as they had on her brother, because she hadn’t even suggested accompanying Johnny to the island until a day and a half beforehand. It had been a last-minute decision, and Hain and Lima had been able to react to it immediately. Even scarier, Rebekah had agreed to go with Johnny during a telephone call, not in an email. It meant that Hain and Lima hadn’t just been looking at her Inbox. They’d been listening to her phone calls too.
On another piece of paper that she’d stuck to the closet doors, she’d written the words perfect combination and underlined them. That was what Rebekah’s decision and Crow Island had turned out to be: Johnny’s interview, and her offer to drive him out to it, had brought them to an island that was not only almost entirely unpopulated but more than a hundred miles from the mainland, and dominated by a forest – this dense, sprawling burial site – where they could easily be disappeared without anyone noticing.
And yet there was still the solitary question: why?
Roxie jumped onto Rebekah’s bed, disturbing her train of thought, and nosed her way under the blankets. Since the middle of December, it had been bitterly cold, so Rebekah let her come in and returned her attention to the walls. For the first time, her gaze didn’t land on the Why? but instead on Stelzik’s calendar.
She looked at the days she’d marked off, at what day it was today, and everything else fell away. Instantly, she stopped thinking about why anyone would watch her and Johnny, much less try to kill them. In its place came a powerful, overwhelming and paralysing sense of loss.
Christmas Day.
In her head, she saw images of her girls around the tree, giggling with excitement, their new toys scattered around them – and, as she did, she crumbled. She was overrun by rapid, aggressive flickers of life at the brownstone, and all the doubts about Gareth, about Noella, flooded back.
She curled over, sank into herself. She sobbed, saying the names of her girls out loud, as if it would draw them closer, as if she was back home with them again, as if none of this had ever happened.
As if no one had tried to murder her.
And as if she’d never had to ask why.
Before
‘Why?’ She shook her head. ‘Why?’
They were standing outside the gates of Rebekah’s boarding school, a tube train rumbling across a series of empty railway arches further along the street. There was a charge in the air that had nothing to do with the rain.
It was the morning after Johnny had been arrested.
‘I’m so sorry, Bek,’ he said, head down.
‘You and me both.’
‘I know I embarrassed you.’
‘You embarrassed yourself, John.’
He nodded, looked up at her, didn’t say anything.
‘I didn’t even know you were capable of that. Is this who you are?’
He frowned. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Then how the hell do you explain what happened?’
He looked at her, then away, as if he didn’t know how to articulate himself. The train disappeared from view.
‘Do you reme
mber my freshman year?’
Rebekah stared at him. ‘What?’
‘My freshman year.’ He stopped and took a breath. ‘When those kids at school picked on me. Do you remember I told you, Mike and Dad about it?’
‘What has that got to do with anything, John?’
‘The type of person I am,’ he said, ‘was forged in those moments. I told you guys some of it, but not all. Most of it I tried to forget. I was fifteen, with this dumb accent I’ve never been able to shake off, not American, not English, not one or the other. I came to hate it.’
His eyes flashed. He was hurting.
Why was he telling her this?
‘You’d have been all right if you’d been in America, at school with Mike and me. Kids would have heard your accent and thought, She’s English, and that would have been the end of the story. Maybe it would even have marked you out as cool. Mike, he always did fine because he sounded like he was born and bred in New York. But me, my accent got me noticed. Kids would accuse me of being a fake, of trying to put on an English voice or an American one. It got so bad, I stopped speaking some days. I kept my mouth shut and walked around school in total silence. But that got me noticed too. The things I loved doing – not sport, not math or science, but reading, writing, art – they became another difference. All I tried to do was fade into the background in everything I did – from the second I got into school – and none of it worked.’
He glanced at her, his eyes wet.
‘Johnny, I –’
‘It was just utterly relentless,’ he said, the words catching in his throat. ‘I got cornered in the bathrooms, I got pushed around at the lockers, I got my books stolen and ripped up, or they tossed them in the trash, or they flushed the pages down the can. I’d be walking home and they’d throw garbage at me. They’d dance around, mimicking my accent, calling me a “retard” and a “fag”. It got so bad, no one wanted to spend time with me. I was a contaminant. If you ever got caught with me …’ He faded out. ‘I didn’t really want to talk about it at home. I just wanted to be home. I wanted to be somewhere safe. So last night at the pub … it all just came out. There were so many times I wanted to do that, so many times I dreamed about it. I always backed down. I was always Johnny, the kid who took it on the chin. Johnny, the quiet one, or the arty one, or the lonely one, or the pathetic one.’ He looked at her. ‘Those two assholes, Bek, I didn’t want to take it any more.’
‘Johnny …’ Rebekah stopped. ‘I didn’t …’
‘You didn’t know because I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want any of you to know how bad it got for me.’
‘Why?’
‘I felt weak, I guess. Alone. The only times I ever felt normal was when I was with you, Dad and Mike, when we were a family. I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to treat me differently. The normality kept me sane. But as weird as it sounds now, I think a part of me … I was jealous of you, Bek.’
‘Of me?’ She frowned. ‘Why?’
‘You know what the difference is between you and me?’ He waited for an answer, but she couldn’t think of one: she had no idea why he would ever be jealous of her. ‘You don’t survive and flourish through luck, or some vague hope that it’ll get better, or the occasional big idea paying off, like I do – you do it through logic. You get a problem, you work it out, you succeed, and you move on. You’re so much like Dad, it’s kind of scary. I think he was right: you would have made a good cop.’ He forced another smile, but it was like it pained him to do it. ‘So, you want to know why I’m jealous of you, Bek?’
The rain was getting heavier.
The city was louder than ever.
But all of it seemed to fade away.
‘It’s because you know how to fight back.’
48
It’s because you know how to fight back.
She remembered Johnny’s words just before she went to bed on New Year’s Eve. By the time she woke up the next day, something had changed in her. It was subtle, but there: a determination she hadn’t felt in a long time.
I need to be ready.
January was so cold she didn’t go outside unless Roxie needed a toilet break. It barely crawled above zero for weeks, frosts and sleet almost every day. She used her time indoors to lay everything out, expanding into the first-floor corridor, sticking pieces of paper to the wall there as well. Every piece was a slightly different size, most taken from Stelzik’s blank pad, but she found some coloured card downstairs too; when that ran out, she started using old pages from browning newspapers and magazines that had been left behind. She used the card originally in an attempt to colour-code her thinking but her system soon fell apart: there wasn’t enough card and nowhere near enough colours, so she just wrote in big letters using the thickest pen she could find, so she could see everything clearly and precisely, even at distance.
In February, the skies brightened, but it was still freezing, the hostel like an icebox during the day and even worse at night. That was when it finally dawned on her why people abandoned the island during the winter: the caustic cold, the relentless wind, the storms that would roll in three or four times a week and feel as if they were about to lift the entire hostel from its foundations. It was brutal and ferocious. But the weather didn’t stop her working.
If anything, being indoors so much helped her.
By the end of February, she’d filled one side of the corridor, end to end, with all the things that needed doing before the first day of the season. Most days, after supply runs, after she’d ensured they had enough food for another week, her focus would shift: she’d drag a chair out into the corridor, swathe herself in blankets, and go over the question of how. How was she going to get off the island on 1 April? How would she do it without being noticed? How far away should she get before calling the cops?
The idea of calling them straight away – of finding someone on the ferry who’d brought a cellphone with them – and not trying to make it off at all was magnetic. She kept coming back to it. And many nights, she’d wonder if she even needed a phone. After Hain and Lima had headed out to the forest to try to find her body, she could make a scene in Helena, scream and head to whatever passed for the authorities on the island. The way the two men had talked when they’d come back to the island together, it was obvious they didn’t want anyone to know what they were up to. And yet she couldn’t quite let go of the doubts.
What if they weren’t working alone?
The idea that Hain and Lima had someone on the island they knew and worked with wouldn’t dislodge once it had entered her head. If there was even a remote possibility that it was true, it meant asking for help was a risk.
So, in the end, she decided to stick to her original plan.
Get off the island.
Raise the alarm on the mainland.
Except, even then, even when it was clear in her head, she still couldn’t relax. It wasn’t just that two murderers were coming back to the island for her. It wasn’t that she was so scared of their return she could barely breathe. It was that there was only one way to flee the island, and that was on the ferry.
When it left at five o’clock, Rebekah would be on it.
And, once they failed to find her body in the forest, once they knew she wasn’t dead, so would Hain and Lima.
49
The corridor of paper wasn’t Rebekah’s only project.
She also started running again.
She used a pair of jogging pants that Stelzik had brought with him, one of his T-shirts, and the old woollen sweater she’d found in the gas station.
To begin with, she could manage a mile and a half, which wouldn’t even have been a warm-up for her in her youth. But gradually, as the days and weeks passed, she got faster, going longer distances, running on the deserted, frost-peppered roads, knowing she had to get faster and stronger.
At the beginning of March, she cut her hair short, sitting in front of the mirror in Stelzik’s room with a blunt pair of
scissors she’d found in one of the kitchen drawers. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. It made running easier because her hair no longer got in her face when the wind picked up, and from there, she pushed herself further: on Sundays, she would run the entirety of the Loop – all twenty-three miles of it – because it made her feel in control of something, powerful and purposeful. For three and a half hours, she wasn’t thinking about anything else. When she ran, she was just moving forward – and with one solitary goal in mind.
She needed to be unbreakable once the island reopened.
Sometimes, when she got back to the hostel, she could hear the echoes of her father, as if his voice were in the wind; she could picture her and Mike in the front yard of their place on 81st Street after they’d finished a run, and see their dad standing on the porch repeatedly telling Mike to stretch properly. ‘If you don’t stretch,’ he would say, ‘I promise you’ll be walking like John Wayne in the morning,’ and then Mike would stretch half-heartedly, and the next day, like clockwork, he’d come down to the breakfast table pretending everything was normal, even though he could barely move.
She upped her running again in March, going even further, making use of the milder weather, and the candy bars in the store for energy. She knew she needed to change herself, and prepare for what was coming. And the more she ran, the more it helped her focus when she returned to the hostel. Her heart pounding in her chest, her clothes soaked with sweat, she would sometimes sit and look at the paper she’d stuck to the wall of the corridor – mismatched and overlapping, sticky tape everywhere, scrawled, untidy writing that only she could understand – before she did anything else, including stretching. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ she’d say quietly, her routine pushed aside so she could study everything she’d collated.
Very quickly, the ‘why’ became the most important part of the corridor, the area she spent most time in, and the area she continued to add to. And within the ‘why’ section was the area she focused on most of all.