by Tim Weaver
We watched each other.
Finally, he said, ‘Kilburn runs the town, and Presley runs the police. Who’s going to call them out?’ He shook his head. ‘No one. Same with Dell. He pumps a lot of money into Sophia. It might not look like it, but he does. This place’ – he waved an arm at the lido, at the pool, its surface rippling in the wind – ‘he basically put up the money to keep it open.’ His eyes shifted to the entrance. He had the look of a man who was way past paranoid. ‘If you came all the way here, I’m thinking it’s for the truth, right?’
‘Right.’
Jessop wiped some snow from his face.
‘Then I guess we’d better start with Caleb Beck.’
65
We were sitting at either end of a stone bench, partially sheltered beneath the roof at the lido’s entrance. Jessop suddenly seemed smaller, hunched, his elbows against his knees as he leaned forward. His hood was up, but its fur-lined rim had inched out beyond the edge of the concrete canopy, his hands, his feet as well. Snow gently landed around him, melting against his jacket.
‘How much do you know about Beck?’ he said.
‘Assume I don’t know anything.’
He looked across at me, breath forming in front of his face. It was hard to tell whether he didn’t like my tone or was just frustrated at having to go back to the beginning, but he nodded, dropped his eyes to the ground again, and said, ‘He was a mainlander too. Came over from London in 1984 as part of the same drive that brought me here. The promise of a better life. Sea, beaches, wildlife. Lots of land – as much as you could afford, basically. Relocation all covered, subsidies, generous financial terms.’ Jessop shrugged. ‘I mean, what was there not to like?’
He kneaded his hands together.
‘Thing is, Caleb Beck was already doing well,’ Jessop said. ‘He was rich. Not mega-rich, but rich enough. I moved over a year after him and used to chat to him in the pub a couple of times a week – at that stage, I was just trying to get to know people on the island. He didn’t talk much about his life in the motherland, other than he’d grown up on a farm, gone to London and got an office job, and then – sometime after Penny was born – he started to realize he missed farming, and that he wanted out of the city. Some of the guys said he was in banking – that that was how he’d got all his money – but he never talked about it, and I never asked. It had to be something like that, though. Most of us, when we came here, we were in smallholdings, these starter kits with a hundred acres. He bagged himself eighteen hundred acres right off the bat. This whole chunk of Strathyde was his too. We used to joke that every single sheep on the mountain belonged to him. But it wasn’t really a joke.’
‘So Beck was murdered for his money?’
Jessop looked at me.
I could see he was surprised, could see from his face that if I wasn’t exactly right, I was close enough. ‘Is that what happened?’ I said. ‘Dell got a whiff of Beck’s wealth, just like all the rest of you did – and Dell killed him for it?’
‘Yes,’ Jessop said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him. He looked at me and swallowed, then again, the guilt like ash in his mouth.
I thought about the money, about the trail that had led Penny to her death. It started with Jack Kilburn buying himself a new Land Rover in 2000, when the cash first started coming across from Dell in the UK. A light had gone on in Penny’s head, a memory of a conversation she’d had with Beth as kids, about how her family had been wealthy – except Fiona never had any money. None of them had growing up. So Penny, already mistrusting Kilburn, started looking into her stepfather’s finances, and from there she eventually ended up in the security suite at the Red Tree, thousands of miles away, in front of all the proof she needed. The only question was why Dell had waited so long to start shifting the money. Beck disappeared in 1987, his money was stolen then too, but it didn’t start moving until 2000.
But then I remembered what else had happened in 2000: Dell had become headmaster of the Red Tree by paying off the school governors.
‘So after Caleb Beck was killed,’ I said, thinking it through aloud, ‘Dell hid his part in Beck’s murder, he hid the fact that he’d got his hands on Beck’s money, and he sat on the cash. And after thirteen years, when he finally thought the coast was clear, and everyone had forgotten, he finally started to spend it. Is that about right?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘And you were a part of this?’
He shrugged.
‘So where’s Beck’s body buried?’
This time he looked at me. ‘You don’t know?’
‘Is he out in the Brink?’ I said.
He didn’t move, didn’t react at all, until snowflakes sprayed across the space between us, whirled and fanned by another blast of wind, and he was forced to wipe them from his eyes. He turned, looking out across the pool, out to the coliseum of concrete that encased us. I couldn’t see his face any more.
‘What do you know about the Brink?’ he said.
‘Enough.’
He cleared his throat, as if about to speak, but stopped himself.
‘So is he buried out there?’ I repeated.
He said something I couldn’t hear.
‘What?’
‘No.’
‘Speak up, Anthony.’
‘I said no.’
‘So where’s his body buried?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Anthony, where’s Caleb Beck’s body buried? Is it at the cabin?’
He seemed to flinch, as if jolted.
‘The cabin?’ he said softly, eyes still on the pool.
This time, I got no sense that he was deliberately holding back on me. Instead, he looked reluctant to answer; worried about doing so. And the longer I looked at him, the more I started to think it might not be deceit, but mistrust, a disinclination to hand me everything on a plate just in case he needed something to use in return. A chip to bargain with.
‘You ever heard of Selina Torres?’ he asked.
The change of direction threw me.
I came forward on the bench and said, ‘What?’ I’d heard him, I just wanted him to face me. I wanted the chance to look him in the eyes, to get a read on him.
‘Have you?’ he said, and finally turned to me.
His eyes carried something else now. I couldn’t decide what it was, couldn’t even decide if it was something I could use or something I should be concerned about.
‘Torres,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I’ve heard the name.’
He looked out across the lido again. Directly above his hood, over the roof of the building, I could see most of Mount Strathyde. I remembered all the stories I’d been told and, as I watched Jessop in the silence of this old building, my nerves fired.
Something isn’t right about this.
‘Torres was an Argie,’ Jessop was saying. ‘This air hostess from Buenos Aires who flew across in July 1987.’
‘Did she?’
Jessop frowned.
‘I read that she never arrived.’
He smirked. ‘You believe that?’
‘No, not really.’
‘She arrived all right,’ Jessop said.
‘You just made it look like she hadn’t.’
‘Right.’
‘You and who else?’
‘Kilburn, Presley. Dell too. He was the one that paid the hush money before he pissed off back to London. That was when he first got hold of Beck’s cash and, in a place like this, a little cash goes a long way. It can buy you all sorts of things. You can get people to look the other way at passport control; maybe they don’t log your arrival in their computers. You can get them to organize a power cut on one of the surveillance cameras so it doesn’t show you entering the terminal. You can get them to keep their mouths shut when a bunch of Argie coppers call up, asking questions about a missing woman – and then you can do it all over again ten years later when they reopen it as a cold case.’
‘What’s Selina Torres got to do w
ith Beck?’
‘What’s she got to do with him?’ He swivelled his head towards me, his body still, and ran a hand across his stubble. ‘Everything.’
‘Which means what?’
‘Which means we killed Beck. And then, because we killed him, we didn’t have any choice: we had to kill her too.’
66
Beck and Torres were murdered on the same night.
Instantly, my thoughts caught on something else: the leg bone found in the hills by the dog and its owner in 1992, five years later. It had belonged to a woman.
It had belonged to Torres.
I remembered other things: how her brother didn’t think Torres had been an air hostess, that she’d been lying to him; about a moment in my conversation with Annie on the Olympia, when she’d talked about the reaction to No Ordinary Route in Sophia. Some people reckon that, if you get seen with a copy of that by the police in Sophia, they’ll confiscate it. She’d said it was down to the weirdness of the town, its intolerance and insularity. But it wasn’t really that: Bill Presley was running the police, Jack Kilburn was running the town – and they didn’t want anyone to look into who Selina Torres was.
‘Why did they both have to end up dead?’ I said.
Jessop’s head dropped, his chin against his chest. I couldn’t see his face at all now, could hardly hear him. The only thing I could see was his hands, cupped together in front of him like he was about to drop to his knees in prayer.
‘Anthony?’
Jessop glanced at me. ‘What else do you know?’
It felt like the third or fourth time he’d asked me a variation on that same question. But before I could say anything, my phone burst into life.
To start with, it didn’t even register that it might be mine, but then Jessop looked from me to my pocket, as if this might be a trap, some ruse to corner him, and I started to feel it buzzing gently against my leg. I held up a hand to him, telling him to calm down, and when I got out the phone, I saw a UK number.
Richard’s mobile.
I decided to ignore it for now, pocketing the phone again, and turned my attention back to Jessop. The wind whipped across us.
‘Tell me more about Selina Torres,’ I said.
Jessop didn’t appear to have heard me.
‘Why did she come to the islands?’
My phone started buzzing again.
Damn it.
I grabbed my phone from my pocket and looked at the display. It was Richard again. I glanced at Jessop, who was looking from the phone to me.
‘Let me just deal with this,’ I said, and pushed Answer.
The line hummed and buzzed.
‘David?’ Richard said.
‘Can I call you back?’
‘Uh, well, I think you need to hear this.’
I glanced at Jessop. He lowered the hood on his coat, his beanie quickly dotting with snow, and turned away from me, his eyes on the ground. He was completely still, as if thinking. But he wasn’t thinking. He was concentrating. He was listening to my side of the conversation.
‘What is it?’ I said into the phone.
‘I found out something about this Jessop guy.’
Any anger, any frustration I felt at Richard interrupting me, instantly died. I glanced at Jessop again. He was in exactly the same position as before.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Jacob let me use his laptop.’
‘Okay. So what’s up?’
‘I wanted to find out who you were meeting.’
I looked at Jessop.
This time, he was looking back at me.
‘Did you find something?’ I said, trying to keep my voice even.
‘Yes,’ Richard said.
The wind ripped in again.
‘I found out that Anthony Jessop’s been dead for ten years.’
67
The man sitting next to me shifted on the bench.
He could sense something was up.
Richard continued to talk at me, telling me about how he’d found stories about Jessop online: an archived page from the Wigan Evening Post about how Jessop had opened a farming supplies store in 2001 after returning to the UK from the Empress Islands; an obituary for him in the same newspaper when he died of liver failure five years later. My mind spun back to the photograph of the three men in the Express. I’d recognized Presley, but only because I already knew what he looked like: his shape, his key features. The other two, Kilburn and Jessop, had been blurs, disguised by the poor-quality shot and the smudged ink of the newspaper page.
Kilburn.
I had no idea what he looked like.
‘Hang up the phone.’
As he spoke, something curdled in my guts. His expression was different, his voice harder. At his belt was a holster with a gun in it, his coat hitched up above it now, resting on it.
I looked from the gun to him.
‘David?’
I could hear Richard’s voice: small, tinny, distant.
‘David, are you there?’
‘Hang up the phone,’ Kilburn said again.
I ended the call and powered off the mobile.
Silence.
He hadn’t reached for the gun, had hardly changed position at all, his body still weighted forward as if he were frozen midway to getting up. For a moment he said nothing, the lull filled by the whine of the wind as it funnelled through the doorways of the lido. Snowflakes crackled against the nylon of our jackets. There was, for the briefest of moments, a bird call – far off, as if it had travelled here as an echo – and then he finally did move: he popped the clasp from his holster, slid out the gun and gripped it hard, his knuckles red from the cold. I watched the gun, not him, even as he kept it pointed towards the ground.
‘You were supposed to be dead,’ he muttered quietly, almost as if he were talking to himself, his eyes on the grass in front of us. ‘Everything was supposed to have been taken care of, and now look.’
His gaze switched from the grass to the weapon.
‘Now look at what I’m having to do.’
I tried to stay calm.
He turned the gun in his hand, looking along the line of the weapon, all the way from the hammer to the muzzle. I kept my body absolutely still but used my eyes to scan the lido, looking for ways out, an escape plan, a survival strategy. If I did nothing, he was going to put a bullet in me. I could make a leap for him – we were only five feet apart, at either end of the bench – but he already had the gun out, his finger on the trigger. It was too risky.
He glanced at me and smiled, but it was one that looked serious, pained. ‘Having to scramble around and do this,’ he said, ‘acting, lying, bullshit. I hate it. I had no idea if you knew what I looked like, but once you swallowed the Jessop stuff, I realized you didn’t and I could use it to get you all the way out here with the promise of the truth.’ Another smile, even more distressed than the last. ‘The truth. Whatever the fuck that means in this place.’
I looked again for a way out.
Doorways. Entrances. Gaps.
When I turned back to him, he was wiping snow from his face, blinking it free of his eyelashes. ‘I could tell you were getting suspicious,’ he said. ‘You were starting to twig, thinking, “Why’s this guy constantly asking me how much I know about Beck and Torres and the money? He’s supposed to be telling me.” ’
He was right: after the third or fourth time of him asking me what I knew, how many details I’d managed to gather myself, and the way he withdrew into his shell the longer we talked, it had begun to seem as if, rather than simply being interested, being curious, he had been actively mining me for information.
‘So,’ he said, ‘I need to know who else you’ve told.’
He was doing exactly the same thing as Dell had done on the boat: he was trying to see who else I’d spoken to; how far the damage had spread.
‘Who else have you told about us?’ he said again, waiting for an answer that never came. After a while, he glanced
at the phone, still in my hand. ‘The person on the line – who was that? They know, don’t they? I could see your face when you took that call. So there’s whoever you spoke to. That’s one. Who else is there?’
The wind picked up again, the surface of the pool flickering, the concrete walls of the lido making a heavy moan.
‘Who else?’ Kilburn repeated, his voice thickening.
I need something to fight back with.
‘Who else?’
He clenched his teeth, his chin pinched, his jaw tightening, and raised the gun for the first time, extending it out in front of him. The muzzle stopped a foot from my face. I tried not to show my fear, but my heart was so loud in my ears, it was like a noise from inside the lido itself.
‘Who else?’
I need to knock him off balance.
‘I know where Beth is,’ I said.
‘What?’ He leaned into me. ‘What did you say?’
‘I know where Beth is.’
Confusion, then anger, then uncertainty: he dropped the gun away slightly, so he could see my face, read me, try to see the truth in my expression.
‘Beth,’ he said, repeating her name.
‘I know where she is.’
‘Where?’
‘She can’t forgive you, Jack.’
He frowned.
‘She can’t forgive you for what happened to Penny.’
An aftershock passed through him. He blinked and I could see him struggling to retain control of himself. I’d sandbagged him. I’d changed the entire direction of the conversation.
The gun dropped a fraction more.
‘Beth,’ he said quietly. ‘You know where my Beth is?’
I hadn’t wanted to use her as some sort of bait, but it was his daughter. He’d betrayed her, lied to her, looked the other way as Penny, the girl he’d brought up as his own, was murdered. I didn’t know the whole story, not yet, but I could see enough already: he carried the weight of Penny’s death in him, a burden on his heart; and he missed Beth so much it was eating him from the inside out. Fiona was gone. Beth was too. All he had, all he went home to, was this: what he’d done, the choices he’d made.
‘Where is she?’ he said.