by Tim Weaver
She’d read the text about ten seconds after he’d sent it, but hadn’t replied. Travis imagined she was busy, maybe in rehearsals, maybe out tonight in Chicago having a good time before she flew home for Christmas, so he didn’t send her a follow-up. He didn’t want to annoy his kids, especially as he saw so little of them. Mark still hadn’t replied to the text that Travis had sent two days before, although, like his sister, he’d read the message. That wasn’t especially unusual: he’d always been more independent than Gaby, much more flighty even when he’d been living at home, so Travis tried not to take it personally.
Even so, if there was a worse invention than the two blue ticks in WhatsApp, he didn’t know what it was.
He put the play down, removed his reading glasses, and watched the snow fall outside on the street. It had been cold today, the city freezing in the chill, subway grates breathing, vents spewing. Travis hated winters in New York, despite having lived through fifty-nine of them, and as he thought of that, he again thought of his retirement, of how he had friends in the south who would help him set up down there if he wanted to. For a moment, he wondered what Naomi would think if he did something as spontaneous as that, if he called her one day from Charleston or Myrtle Beach and told her she’d been wrong about him. But then he looked to the nightstand, to the play, to his cellphone, his texts still unanswered, and wondered what would be worse: being lonely here, or being lonely there.
His attention switched: next to his phone was a file with pale covers that he’d brought home with him. It was a missing persons report.
Actually, it was two.
One for Johnny Murphy. One for his sister.
Today was 20 December. They’d been missing since 30 October. Seven weeks and two days, and there had been no sign of them at all. Travis reached over and picked up the file, flipping open the front cover.
They’d left early that morning to head to somewhere on Long Island, where Murphy had an interview lined up for a new book he was planning to write. His sister had decided to go with him only at the last minute: Noella Sullivan had told cops in the 68th Precinct at the time that Rebekah had needed a break from being a full-time mom, and had been looking forward to spending time with her brother.
Travis didn’t know whether to read anything into the sister’s decision to go with Murphy, especially because it had been last-minute. He flicked through the pages of the file again, knowing the answers weren’t likely to be there: the initial missing persons report was a box-ticking exercise, and the subsequent search had never got off the ground. The officer who’d taken the details had left the force two days after filing it, so the search instantly fell through the cracks. Neither Murphy nor his sister raised any red flags – they weren’t vulnerable, and didn’t have mental-health problems – so it had been treated as low priority from the go, and had only become less important over time.
Even basic due diligence hadn’t been done.
Before Travis had got involved, not a single interview had been conducted, other than the initial one with Noella. No requests had been made for cell records, and there’d been no attempt to contact any of the Long Island police departments to see if they might have something. Travis had set all of those things in motion, and while he’d hit some walls already, especially out on Long Island, he’d at least been able to narrow the search. He’d even got a warrant for Murphy’s house on 81st Street, where he’d found reference books and notes on the novel Murphy had planned to write, although no direct link to the person he’d gone to interview. There was no laptop, so Travis assumed Murphy had taken it on the trip to Long Island, which would make sense if he was researching a book. He’d found very little in the life of the sister, Rebekah, either. Her ex-husband gave Travis access to a brownstone in Brooklyn where they’d both lived before their split, and he’d been through her emails, using a laptop she’d left behind. He’d found nothing. If Rebekah and her brother had discussed the details of their trip, it was over the phone or in person.
That made it a dead end.
It was the same story with the lab.
Before Travis had got home, they’d called him. He’d swabbed toothbrushes for Murphy and his sister, but his contact at the lab said it could take up to twelve weeks to get DNA profiles completed for missing people, probably more. That meant three months, minimum, before their profiles could be compared to others in the system.
He didn’t have three months.
From tomorrow, he didn’t even have three days.
He put the file on the bed and thought about quick workarounds. He could call the Met again in London and ask if they had a set of fingerprints on file for Murphy that he could then compare with ones they might have on the local and national databases here. But he knew it was more than a long shot: Murphy was never charged, so that was one definite reason there would be no fingerprints retained on file; another was that Murphy had only been in the UK for a week – the week he’d spent with his sister – since the family had moved to New York, so there was no chance he’d been printed at some later date on another, similar trip; the last was that his arrest was over two decades ago, and the cop he’d spoken to at the Met had told Travis that the details of Murphy’s attack on the men was only on their system because the man Murphy had punched in the pub that night had a rap sheet going all the way back to 1995. It was the reason the man had chosen not to press charges against Johnny – he didn’t want the police looking too hard at his own life.
Travis tried to think and, as he did, reached to the nightstand for something else he’d been keeping there – a small red leather-bound journal.
Louise Mason’s.
He began flicking through the pages again, as familiar with what was written there as he was with the case file. He traced the lines of Louise’s hand, the quirks in it, the repetitions: she’d replicated all of this in her cellphone, all the meetings and social events, but her family had told Travis that she kept a physical journal in case she ever lost her cell, and because she loved to write. She was an old soul in that way, her mom had told him, tearful, unable to go more than a few sentences without crying, and when he’d walked the spaces of Louise’s studio, then the rooms and hallways of her apartment, he saw exactly that: hundreds of pens – as many pens as paintbrushes – including antiques in boxes. He took photos of a couple and searched for them online. Some were worth a thousand bucks.
His phone pinged with an email.
He picked up the handset, not expecting much, but then felt an instant charge of electricity as he saw the subject line: he’d been warned the cellphone records for Johnny Murphy and his sister might take three to five days.
They’d taken thirty-six hours.
He didn’t wait, didn’t try to transfer them to his laptop where he’d be able to see them better, he just opened them there and then.
Taking a cursory glance at the actual calls that had been made in the two weeks before the disappearances, he then went straight to the last page. That was the one he really wanted.
It was where the cell-tower pings were listed.
And it would tell him exactly where the Murphys had gone.
53
Rebekah’s recurring dream started to emerge from the dark in the week leading up to 1 April. It began in snatches, there and gone again, as she finally drifted off to sleep. She recognized the imagery but didn’t feel any of the dread. The dream was more like blinks of light, never quite fully formed, as if a part of it were still growing and taking shape in the shadows.
It didn’t help that, the closer she got to the first day of the season, the harder she found it to sleep. She would go to bed at night and lie awake for hours, listening to the creaks and groans of the hostel, plagued by images of failure, of not making it to the ferry, or of making it only to find Hain and Lima waiting for her inside. And when she did sleep, other nightmares filled her head, a torrid and dysfunctional stream she struggled to escape from: she saw Johnny, stumbling from the forest, bloodied and i
njured, and was never quite close enough to grab him; she saw Noella and Gareth lying in bed together, the sheets twisted around their bodies; and she saw her mother, little more than a blur except for a flash of red hair, and always running, even as Rebekah called for her to come back. One night, Rebekah dreamed she was in the house on 81st Street, a place her mother had never been to. She came in to find her at the kitchen table, talking to Johnny, and when they saw Rebekah, they stopped talking, and her mother, faceless, simply got up and left.
Rebekah would wake soaked with sweat and breathing hard, and the longer the dreams went on, the more they began to repeat, to merge with one another, then mutate into something else. And in the final few days before the ferry was due to return Rebekah finally knew what they were mutating into: something more familiar and more terrifying.
I think you should stay, Rebekah.
She was back in the high-rise building.
In Apartment 127.
Unable to escape.
The nightmare came on her last night.
Instantly, it felt more frightening than any version of the dream she’d had before. For a moment, Rebekah couldn’t understand why. She was in the same corridor as always, looking at the same cream walls and tan carpets.
But then she realized what was different.
This time, Roxie was at the end of the corridor, half concealed in the gloom. The dog was looking at her, and as Rebekah approached, as she got closer to the open door of the apartment, Roxie began whimpering. It was an awful sound, the same sound she’d made when Rebekah had locked her into the room hours earlier, and now here, in this place, it was even worse. Every whimper squeezed Rebekah’s heart.
I’m so sorry, Roxie, she heard herself saying. I’m so sorry.
But then Rebekah got to the door of the apartment. She glanced at the 127 on it, at the 7 that was askew, and she had the same thought as always, that seven was supposed to be a lucky number – and by the time she looked for Roxie again, she’d vanished. The corridor of the apartment block was empty.
Roxie?
Music started playing inside the apartment. She couldn’t tell what type it was, had never been able to tell, it was just there, but this time it seemed louder, more obscure, and way more painful on her ears. As she pushed the door wide and stepped in, she felt the fibres of the carpet under her bare feet.
They started to squirm and move.
They wrapped around her feet, binding her to the floor, climbing up her ankles, inching up her calves to the inside of her thighs. And then the voice behind her, genderless but ugly, started repeating those same words: I think you should stay. Except this time it wasn’t just words, it was a harrowing rasp.
I think you should stay.
She so desperately didn’t want to stay.
I think you should stay, Rebekah.
Please let me go.
I think you should stay.
Please let me wake up.
And then, finally, she did, gasping for breath, as if she’d just climbed from the bottom of the ocean. She looked around the bedroom, expecting it to be a trick, a second nightmare concealed within the first. But she was awake, her skin slick with sweat. When she caught sight of herself in the mirror, she could see her vest was soaked through and there were fine tear trails on her cheeks.
Light poured in through the window.
Rebekah looked across the hallway to the other door, to the room she’d put Roxie in. She wanted to call out to her, to see her and put her arms around her, but she didn’t. Instead, she planted her feet on the floor, her skin still tingling as it had in her dream. On her right hand, along her palm, there was an arc of tiny red gouges: she’d been clenching her fists so tightly, she’d drawn blood.
She closed her eyes for a second, breathing.
Relax, it’s over. It’s over.
She checked Stelzik’s clock on the nightstand beside her. It was 8.56 a.m. She’d set the alarm for nine. The ferry was due in at eleven and, on the practice runs she’d done the previous two days, it took thirty minutes to get from the hostel to the harbour on the bicycle. That meant she had at least an hour to ready herself, change and check she had everything she needed.
Switching off the alarm, she climbed out of bed and started to prepare, washing herself, dressing, making sure her hair was styled in exactly the way she’d practised. She’d gone for a side parting, moulded into shape with some hair paste Stelzik had kept among his things. She knew her features didn’t look particularly masculine, but the hairstyle disguised that just a little, and when she pulled on the men’s clothes, they helped blur the lines even further.
She stood in front of the mirror and stared at herself, fear like a ball in her stomach. She’d pictured her death so many times in the lead-up to this, she wasn’t certain if she was more frightened of dying on the island, before she ever got close to the ferry, or making it a distance, feeling a fleeting sense of success and of freedom, and having it torn away from her. There was even a strange part of her that was scared to leave the island: it wasn’t home, it never would be, yet she’d made something of it in the end, especially after she’d found Roxie. There was a kind of safety in the routine she had here.
But then she thought of her girls, and she began checking her hair again, her clothes, her backpack, laying the items inside it on the bed.
That was when she glanced at the calendar.
It was pinned to the wall. Before today, for weeks, it had been circled by scraps of paper, a trail that had led out into the corridor, a pathway she’d built to help her figure out the why and the how. All of that was gone now. She’d taken it all down, her suspect list, her string tethers, her attempts to connect all that she knew, had folded it and put it into her backpack.
All that remained on the walls was the calendar.
It was from the Museum of Natural History and had belonged to Stelzik, and each month was represented by an animal. She hadn’t turned the page to April yet, so it was still on March, a striped hyena. Except it wasn’t the animal that had caught her eye this time.
It was the dates underneath.
It was something printed next to 13 March.
She hadn’t noticed it nineteen days ago, not only because the print was so small, but because she’d been so deeply embedded in building her lists, in taping her pieces of paper to the wall, in moving string from area to area.
But as she stared at it now she froze.
Under 13 March were two words.
She glanced at the alarm clock and saw that it was 10.15 a.m. She should have had plenty of time to get to the ferry if she left now. She should have been able to get there well ahead of when Hain and Lima arrived on the island. But she’d made a mistake.
A terrible mistake.
She looked again at the two printed words.
DST starts.
Daylight Saving Time. She’d missed the switch on 13 March. And that meant it wasn’t 10.15 a.m. right now.
It was 11.15.
Hain and Lima were already here.
BOOK TWO
6
* * *
OPEN SEASON
54
Ahead of her, Helena was being stalked by sea mist.
Rebekah approached from the north, using a series of off-road trails instead of the easier, smoother asphalt of the Loop. She didn’t want to chance being seen by Hain and Lima. They were almost certainly at the forest by now, but she wasn’t going to take the gamble.
As she crossed to the open road of the town limits, she tensed. She could see two people on Main Street – but neither were the men who’d come back to bury her. One was pointing towards the front of the store, the door Rebekah had broken, and another was gesturing in the direction of the harbour. She tried to steer clear of them, conscious of being seen, but then one looked over and away again. He didn’t seem interested in her – probably assumed she’d come over on the ferry – yet every face she saw, every time someone glanced in her direction and made somet
hing as simple as eye contact, seemed like a huge moment. It felt like she’d been on the island for ever, trapped alone in this hinterland, silent, invisible, forgotten; a memory of a woman who went to Long Island one day and never came home.
She sucked in a breath, trying to focus on the only thing that mattered – getting home – and found a space on a sloping grass bank to the west of the town. She’d scoped it out in the days before: it gave her a clear, uninterrupted view of Helena, but it also had enough cover to step into, should she need to.
Her eyes fell on the harbourmaster’s shack.
She remembered, months ago, looking through its window in her search for a radio, unable to get inside. But now a man stood at its entrance, staring out at the docked ferry, the door propped open beside him. Rebekah followed his eyeline and glanced towards the ferry, its ramp open, its interior empty of vehicles, then back to the harbourmaster. He was in his fifties, silver-bearded, his belly resting on a belt that was holding up a pair of baggy denims. Then her eyes were drawn to his belt. Something was clipped to it.
She felt a flutter behind her ribs.
A cellphone.
She looked at the signs on the shack – IN CASE OF EMERGENCY CALL 911 and FIRST AID – and knew, even if he hadn’t had the cellphone on his belt, the harbourmaster would have access to a VHF radio. He’d have multiple ways of contacting the mainland, multiple ways of calling the cops, without delay.
No, stick to the plan, she told herself.