I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  She faded out, the rest written on her face.

  The chance to say I’m sorry.

  Beth dropped her head, pressing a thumb and finger to her eyes, and it took her a long time to recover, before it felt right to gently steer us back to Richard Kite.

  ‘What was Richard’s surname?’ I asked.

  ‘Presley.’

  Richard Presley.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting – perhaps after waiting so long for an answer, no name would feel right.

  ‘Do you know if his parents are still around?’

  ‘His dad is.’

  ‘But not his mum?’

  ‘She’s around – or, at least, she was before I left the islands – but she had a stroke. She can’t talk. She can’t really communicate at all.’

  ‘What are their names?’

  ‘His dad’s called William. Bill. Bill Presley.’

  ‘And his mum?’

  ‘Carla.’

  I got out my notebook, a pen clipped to one of the inside pages, and wrote their names down. ‘Did he have any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  So it was just the three of them.

  ‘Did you know his parents well?’

  She nodded. ‘His dad used to be friendly with mine.’

  ‘What’s your dad’s name?’

  ‘Jack Kilburn.’

  I realized I hadn’t known Beth’s full name until now.

  ‘How come your dad and Bill Presley were friendly?’

  ‘My dad’s a farmer, but he also chairs the town council. Rich’s dad was on the committee for a long time too. They got to know each other through that.’

  ‘Is Richard’s dad also a farmer?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s a superintendent.’

  ‘In the police?’

  She nodded. ‘He runs the station in Sophia.’

  I stopped, pen poised, and thought of something Annie had said to me out on the deck when I’d interviewed her: If there was something going on, and the town wanted to keep it a secret, I guess the Sophia police could do that, right? She’d been talking about body parts being found up in the hills around the town, about whatever existed beyond the fence. I didn’t believe there was some monster hunting people in the foothills of Mount Strathyde any more than I believed there were vampires or unicorns waiting for me at the docks. But it was getting hard to deny that there was something going on in Sophia.

  ‘I don’t think Penny disappeared.’

  I looked up at Beth. ‘What?’

  ‘Penny. I don’t think she disappeared.’

  ‘What do you think happened to her?’

  ‘I think she was killed.’

  I tried not to show my surprise.

  ‘Why would someone kill her?’ I asked.

  I knew why, and I knew that Beth was right, but I needed to be delicate. If she didn’t know the full extent of what had happened to her sister, telling her was going to feel like a shotgun blast. She swallowed, shifted against the wall, the noise of the air con like a swarm of flies as she gathered herself.

  ‘I told her I hated her.’

  Beth’s voice roused me from my thoughts again.

  ‘I told her I hated her,’ she repeated. ‘Fifteen, sixteen years ago, I don’t know. I try to forget when it was and what I said, I try so hard to do that, but the trouble is, I can’t. I can’t forget what I said. I remember that night so clearly. I was such a bitch to her. In my teens, I just went totally off the rails and, by the time I realized what I was doing, what I’d done, she was on the other side of the world.’

  I wondered how this was relevant, how it connected back to what Beth may or may not have known about her stepsister being murdered, but I didn’t try to redirect her for now.

  ‘Didn’t you ever think about going to the UK yourself?’

  ‘It was all I ever thought about growing up, but I messed up at school. My exam results were a joke. I failed everything, across the board, because I was too busy getting pissed and sleeping around. I ended up working at a petrol station on the road between Sophia and St George. The only way to get off the islands is to go on to sixth form college and university, and you need funding for that, and you only get funding if you get good results. I guess I could have tried to apply for a job in the UK somewhere – but who’s going to offer someone like me a job? I had no qualifications. I had nothing anyone would want.’ A sad smile skirted the corner of her lips. ‘Irony is, back when I was in junior school, everyone used to say I was destined for the top. “You can be anything you want to be, Beth.” Now look at me. Look at what I’ve made of my life.’

  Her voice faltered on the last few words. I waited for her, using the opportunity to take a long drink from the bottle of water she’d given me. It was hard to take my eyes off her, though: her expression was neutral and difficult to read, which was exactly what it needed to be in order for her to survive. But there were other moments too, little flashes where I glimpsed the person hidden beneath the armour: wounded, repentant, frightened.

  ‘In my early twenties,’ she said eventually, and I had to shift closer to her in order to hear her, ‘I settled down a bit, but it was too late by then. The damage was done and I was stuck in that bloody town. I moved from the petrol station to one of the boatyards in Blake Point. It was run by a bunch of fishermen who my dad vaguely knew, and they had this kind of sideline, this tourist business, where they ferried people out to the eastern islands, to the breeding grounds.’

  She stopped and, again, something moved in her eyes.

  ‘Richard worked in the boatyard,’ she said. ‘That was where I first started talking to him properly, where I basically got to know him.’ She stopped again briefly, almost looked hurt. ‘That was where everything began.’

  51

  ‘He didn’t actually go out on the boats,’ she said, ‘although he was a good sailor. He just fixed the trawlers. He was quiet, but we used to chat when he was having lunch, and after a while we started going for walks after work. That was what you did in that worthless town. There was nothing else to do. No coffee shops. No restaurants. No cinema.’

  Her gaze came back to me.

  ‘Like I said, our families sort of knew each other – or, at least, our dads did – so I’d seen him around. I knew of him, even if I didn’t know much about him. If I’m honest, I didn’t fancy him much to start with, but he kind of grew on me. He was strange. Even though he fixed boats, even though he was so good with his hands, he spoke like an academic: all he’d talk about were books he’d read – he loved science fiction and history, and he’d go to the library when copies of the UK newspapers came in. They were about three weeks out of date by then, but he still read them cover to cover.’

  This was the Richard I’d got to know: quiet, articulate, schooled. I remembered the way he’d talked to me about sports and politics as we’d driven out to Coldwell Point, the way he tried so hard to recall details of his life for me, the books he loved to read, the intelligence and perception he showed. For a smart guy, it must have been torture: all the things he’d learned, all the stuff he’d soaked up in his lunch hours, after work, in the library, and he couldn’t grasp hold of any of it.

  ‘After a while, we used to drive out of town in his car,’ Beth said, ‘this old Ford he had, and we’d cross the bridge into St George and head north to this big abandoned whaling station. It’s quiet out there.’ She looked at me and shrugged. ‘Sometimes when we drove there, I used to joke with him and tell him to keep going, that we should escape and get as far away from Sophia as it was possible to get. But the weird thing is, for a long time, he never wanted that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He always said he didn’t mind it there. He liked working with boats; he said he couldn’t survive in a big city, that he wouldn’t even know what to do with himself there. To start with, I thought the isolation appealed to him, not because he was antisocial or didn’t like being around people, but it was kind of
…’ She stopped, grimaced a little, as if she couldn’t find the right words. ‘It was kind of reflective of him as a person.’

  ‘But that wasn’t the real reason he stayed on the islands?’

  ‘No. The real reason was that he was scared of what would happen if he left.’

  I looked at her. ‘Scared?’

  ‘Things happened to us on the islands.’

  She looked at me like she wasn’t sure whether to trust me with whatever she was going to say next. But in the silence I’d already skipped ahead of her, making the connection to the conversation I’d had with Annie, on the second day at sea.

  ‘Are you talking about what’s beyond the fence?’

  A flash of surprise in her face.

  ‘This “monster”?’

  She eyed me with suspicion. ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are no such things as monsters, Beth. Not like the ones you’re talking about.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I don’t care how impossible you think it is, it’s a fact: there was something out in the Brink.’

  I studied her. ‘The Brink?’

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘Beth?’

  ‘It’s an area they fenced off in the hills,’ she said quietly.

  I remembered Annie saying the same thing, about some marshland that was fenced off on one of the hiking trails. I’d read something about it in No Ordinary Route too. But it didn’t matter how many times it got repeated, the idea of a monster running around didn’t make a lick of sense, even if some of the islanders – including smart ones like Beth – had bought into it.

  ‘So are you saying Richard knew about this monster too?’

  ‘Everyone in Sophia knew about it.’

  ‘Everyone believed it?’

  ‘I don’t know if everyone believed it, because sometimes you need to see something with your own eyes before you can believe it. But everyone knew you didn’t go out there. Some still believed it was because of the landmines. Others, I told them what had happened to Penny and me, or they heard about it from someone else. They knew the real reason.’

  ‘This monster?’

  Another flash of anger. ‘What’s out there, beyond the fence, that’s the reason I fell out with Penny,’ she said, her voice harder now. ‘After they left us up there, I started wetting the bed again. Wetting the bed at twelve. I couldn’t cope with what I’d seen up there, I couldn’t –’

  ‘Slow down, slow down. You were left up there?’

  ‘Yes.’ She swallowed. ‘For five hours. At night.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We broke the rules. We got over the fence.’

  ‘On to the other side of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘There was something out there.’

  ‘You saw it?’

  A pause. ‘Enough of it.’

  ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘it was a blur. I was running for my life at the time. But someone saw us up there that night – saw us on the other side of the fence – and that was how Dad found out.’

  ‘So you were punished?’

  ‘They told us we had to see for ourselves why people weren’t allowed up there. They made an example of us. Dad was crying when he left us there; kept telling us he was sorry. But he said it was the only way we’d understand – and everyone in town would understand – why we didn’t go beyond the fence.’

  I stared at her, uncertain what to say.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said. ‘Don’t look at me like I’m crazy. I know what I saw. I know what I heard out there. When they tied us to the fence, I could feel its breath on my neck. I could hear it breathing in my fucking ears.’

  I held up a hand, trying to calm her down.

  ‘So Richard saw this monster as well?’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘But not only that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, he got over the fence, just like Penny and I did. Not at the same time as us – it was after us – but he got punished in exactly the same way that we did. When I realized we were the same, when we first started talking about what we’d seen and heard out there, that was when I really did start falling for him. It was the first time, after Penny left, that I found someone who actually understood me. Except the difference was, Penny and I, we went over at night. He went over during the day.’ She sniffed, looked at her hands. ‘That was the reason he was so scared about leaving the islands.’

  I studied her, trying to work out what she meant.

  ‘Are you saying he found something else out there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As well as this … monster?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did he find?’

  She looked away again, the first glimmer of tears in her eyes.

  ‘Someone who’d been gone a very long time,’ she said quietly.

  The Tarn

  The old whaling station lay at the northern tip of Victoria Island, five miles from St George. It was at the end of a narrow, winding two-track road that snaked a path down a steep hillside called the Bluff. Most of the people who drove out this far just stayed at the top, where there was a small bed of concrete – a makeshift car park – and a viewing platform, which some of the tourists were brought to. On clear days, you could see right the way across the spine of the islands: west towards Sophia; east towards the breeding grounds and bird colonies.

  Beth Kilburn and Richard Presley went all the way to the bottom.

  The station was made up of seven different buildings, a mix of power plants, warehouses and dormitories, and there were three gigantic whale-oil tanks as well, each thirty feet across by forty feet high. Everything was broken, decayed, brutalized by the ferocious winds that ripped in off the South Atlantic. There was so much rust – on chimneys, on walls that had been torn clean open, on the roofs that had fallen in – that it was like the entire place had been blanketed in a layer of orange dust.

  They parked on the edge of the sea, to the left of the buildings, where there was a small loading area full of abandoned machinery too corroded to identify. When Richard turned off the engine, the rumble of the vehicle was instantly replaced by the scream of the wind, by the flapping of corrugated-iron sheets on some of the buildings against their fixings. They could hear doors whipping open and slamming shut, groans and chimes from loose components in the empty processing plants. Through the windscreen, trawlers lay beached, welded to the slipways by oxidation and sea salt, their hulls speckled red with rust, and pearlescent with limpets.

  ‘This place gives me the creeps,’ Beth said.

  Richard smiled and grabbed her hand, and they sat there in silence for a moment, the light dying in the sky as afternoon gave way to evening.

  ‘How come you don’t talk much about your sister?’ he said.

  Beth turned to face him, surprised by the question.

  ‘Where did that suddenly come from?’

  He glanced at her and then outside again. Beside them, breaking from the ground, almost clawing out of it, were the remnants of harpoons and old whale bones.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to be sorry.’

  ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘Of course it’s your business,’ Beth replied, and squeezed his hand.

  ‘I just wondered about her, that was all.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘She lives in London, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Do you ever talk to her?’

  Beth gave a weary sigh. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘We don’t talk any more.’

  ‘When was the last time you talked to her?’

  ‘When she left fifteen years ago.’

  They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the wind, and then Richard said, ‘When you went up to the Brink, you went with Penny, right?’

  ‘Yes.
We always went up there together.’

  ‘And you went over the fence?’

  Beth watched him for a moment. ‘I’ve already told you all this.’

  ‘I know. I know you did.’

  ‘Is everything okay, Rich?’

  He let go of her hand and put both of his on the steering wheel, looking out through the windscreen. It was gradually steaming up, their breath and the cold of the evening creating an opaque cloud across the middle of the glass.

  ‘What happened to Penny’s dad?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Her dad?’

  He looked at Beth. ‘Caleb Beck. I heard he disappeared.’

  ‘Yes. In 1987, when Penny was three.’ Beth frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Did they ever find any trace of him?’

  ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘Never.’ The frown was now etched into Beth’s face, like concrete that had set. ‘Rich?’ she said. ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’

  ‘It was just … I just …’

  He stopped.

  ‘Rich?’

  ‘See, you and Penny, you were the first,’ he said, his eyes not on Beth, but on a patch he’d wiped clear on the window. ‘You were the first kids in the town to go over the fence. I didn’t know you then, not really, but this town’s small, the school was small, and I heard about what happened, and I saw the way that people treated you. I heard the things the other kids would say. It was just fear. I think they were frightened by what you did, maybe jealous of how brave you both were, but mostly I think they were scared of having to face the same things as you. They didn’t want to be left up there with that … that …’ He paused, cleared his throat, unable to form the words. ‘That thing.’

  As the wind carved in again, battering the hollow buildings of the whaling station, Beth tried to work out where this was going.

  ‘I was like you,’ he said. ‘I was never really taken in by the stories. I mean, if there are landmines out there, why have we never heard them go off? There are sheep wandering all over those hills. They should be setting them off all the time. But I wasn’t taken in by the idea that there was some monster up there either. I didn’t believe in monsters.’