by Tim Weaver
‘She found out what you did –’
‘Where is she?’ he screamed. He shoved the gun towards me again, further than before, so close I could see oil at the muzzle and scratches along the barrel.
But he wasn’t going to shoot.
‘If you tell me what happened up in the hills in 1987, I’ll tell you where Beth is.’ I tilted my head slightly, looking along the side of the gun at him. ‘That’s a promise.’
‘A promise?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Your promises aren’t worth shit to me.’
He spat the words out, but there was no venom in them. They were just words, just sounds his mouth was forming.
‘Tell me what happened, Jack.’
‘You expect me to trust you?’ he said.
‘No. But I’m not lying to you.’
‘How do I know?’
‘Because I’m not,’ I said with absolute conviction. He studied me, his eyes skirting mine, the lines of my face, looking for evidence I was a fraud – but the more he looked, the less he saw. I wasn’t lying.
His whole body seemed to hollow out.
‘Jack?’
He kept the gun directed at my face, but the rest of him seemed to evaporate, like tendrils of smoke vanishing into the darkness.
‘Did all of this start with the plan to take Caleb Beck’s money?’
‘There wasn’t any plan to take the money,’ he said. ‘There was no plan at all. We were just having fun. We never thought to take the money until after.’
‘Until after what?’
He glanced at me but didn’t reply.
‘After what, Jack? After you killed Caleb Beck and Selina Torres?’
‘You can’t even imagine.’
Four words that seemed to slice through the air – through the snow, and the wind, and the moans and creaks of the building. He swallowed and looked at me, and then the gun did drop, his hand falling against the bench.
‘You can’t even imagine how bad it got up there.’
68
The temperature seemed to drop and it had nothing to do with the weather.
Kilburn looked down into his lap, saying nothing. I watched snow build up on the curve of his back, on his legs, some of it melting into his coat and trousers, some of it forming into tiny patches, crystalline and delicate, like polished jewels.
‘We were all mates, I guess,’ he said finally, his voice barely a murmur now. ‘Me, Roland, Bill Presley, Jessop. We were different ages, but we got to know each other and just started hanging out. Roland was four years younger than me, and Bill had seven years on him – but it never seemed like it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that, Roland wasn’t like other kids I knew. He didn’t feel anything for anyone. Or if he did, it was because he thought they could give him something he needed, or could use. He was smart – so smart – but as cold-blooded as a fucking snake.’ A glance in my direction. ‘None of us saw it in our teens or our twenties. I mean, kids don’t notice that sort of thing, do they? We only saw it as we got older. Some of the things Roland would say to people, the way he treated them, it started to register. He was – what would you call it?’
Kilburn looked at me again, trying to find the word.
He shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know … dispassionate, I guess. I think he got it from his father. Old Man Dell was a diplomat, this miserable bastard who was governor of the islands in the eighties. He should have been rich, the job he had, but he wasn’t. Rumour was, the old man was in shitloads of debt. I think that’s why Roland ended up taking that money from Caleb Beck – because he didn’t want to be like his father.’
He’d gained control of himself again, his eyes fixed on the ground, the tails of his anorak flapping slightly in the wind.
‘Beck didn’t trust the bank on the island,’ he said.
I eyed him. ‘So he kept his money at home?’
Kilburn nodded. ‘He hid it under his floorboards in six holdalls. Fiona never knew about it.’
‘How much?’
‘Three hundred and fifty grand.’
Kilburn shifted his body and, in his eyes, I saw that same flicker of conscience, a tacit acknowledgement of his crimes.
‘Roland organized everything,’ he said. ‘That was what he was good at. He hid the money, or he sat on it, or he did whatever the hell he did to make sure that no one followed a trail back to us, and then thirteen years later, we finally withdrew the cash from accounts he’d set up for us at the banks here.’
But something wasn’t right. The more I thought about it, the more I was starting to think that Dell had lied about that too. In fact, I doubted if Kilburn, Presley and Jessop even realized how much money they’d taken from Caleb Beck that day. They’d handed the holdalls over to Dell and trusted him to divvy out their share once the coast was clear. He eventually did, giving them four thousand pounds each, every month, for twenty-nine months – but that was three hundred and forty-eight thousand. That was pretty much all of the money, and there was no way that Dell was ever going to walk away without taking his fair share. He’d want at least the same amount as the others. In reality, he’d probably want the majority of it. That meant Beck could have had at least twice that much in the holdalls.
I thought about telling Kilburn but stopped myself: he was talking now, doing it willingly, and I didn’t want to derail that.
‘There were a lot of times in those thirteen years,’ he said, ‘a hell of a lot of times when I’d look at Fiona, or I’d look at the girls, and I’d think, “What the fuck have I done?” I often thought about picking up the phone to Roland in London and saying, “Forget the money. I don’t want it any more. I can’t live with what we’ve done. I married Fiona knowing what we did to her husband.” But I didn’t. I loved Fiona and I guess, deep down, I wanted the money. But I also knew Roland would turn on me if I didn’t keep my trap shut.’ He stopped and I heard him swallow, as if the next words wouldn’t form in his throat. ‘There was this small part of me, this part I always hated, that was kind of relieved when Fiona passed away. I mean, I missed her so much – so much – but, at night sometimes, in the quiet, I’d think to myself, “I don’t have to look her in the face any more and pretend I don’t know where her husband went.” Eighteen years we were married – and I lied to her about what happened to Caleb the entire time.’
‘What did happen to him?’
He winced, and then finally rocked back on the bench, the snow falling away in a gentle avalanche.
‘Roland’s old man was friendly with Caleb Beck,’ he said, ‘and Roland heard the two of them chatting one night at the house. Beck started telling Roland’s dad that – way up on his land, way up in the hills on Strathyde – there was this tarn. It technically belonged to Beck, but he was thinking of opening it up to the public. Beck had all these grand ideas about getting foreign visitors in – he said it would be good for the economy. A lot of the mainlanders were like that. They arrived here thinking they were going to revolutionize the way of life down here. I mean, all that bullshit I fed you earlier about me being a mainlander, that was Jessop’s story, not mine. I was born and bred here, lived here all my life, it’s just I worked hard at not picking up the local accent. But Jessop, Beck, even Fiona – they were all different. Different mindset.’ The mention of his wife put a hitch in his voice. ‘Fiona pretty much built the new wing on the hospital here. She may not have laid a brick, but she raised the money. That’s not what people do a lot of here. That’s a mainlander thing.’
He was straying off course, but I didn’t press him.
Slowly, this was heading somewhere.
Somewhere bad.
‘The moment she came to the islands, I liked her,’ he said, his thoughts still snared on Fiona, his wife, on the ways he’d betrayed her over the course of nearly two decades, the way he’d done the same to Penny and Beth. ‘She was five years older than me. I married young, Fiona was married to Caleb and they had P
enny – I knew nothing was going to happen. But it didn’t stop me liking Fi. I got hitched in ’85, and it took me about six months to realize I’d made a big mistake. Sheila, my first wife, she was nuts, on my case the entire time we were together. Literally the only good thing I remember from three years with her is her handing me my daughter in the delivery room.’
Beth.
Kilburn cleared his throat, went to speak, and then stopped. He looked up from his lap, out across the lido. ‘She was beautiful,’ he said, so softly it was like the words had been carried in with the snow. He raised his trigger finger, away from the gun, straightening it. ‘I can still feel her on my skin; the way her entire hand went around the top half of this finger. I remember she made these noises when she breathed, these little squeaks; she made them all night the first night.’
His eyes began to fill.
He turned to me, wiping the tears away with his spare hand, but they kept forging new routes and pathways across the redness of his cheeks. ‘Please tell me where she is,’ he said, and raised the gun off the bench. He waved it vaguely in my direction, the muzzle passing across my face.
It was so hard watching him. Whatever he’d done, whatever terrible crimes he’d carried out, whatever he’d concealed and submerged in his past, in this moment he wasn’t any of that.
He was just a father.
‘You were telling me about the tarn,’ I said.
It was difficult to pretend he hadn’t got to me, or that the things he’d said about Beth didn’t resonate, but I kept focused on something he’d told me earlier.
You can’t even imagine how bad it got up there.
He was a father, but he was a murderer too.
He’d said there was no plan to take Caleb Beck’s money; that the decision to do that came later. After.
He glanced at me. ‘Like I said, Roland told us that he’d overheard Caleb Beck telling Old Man Dell about this tarn; he said he heard Beck talking about a cabin on the edge of it.’ He ran his tongue around his mouth, like there was something caustic on his teeth. ‘He said it was an old hunting lodge; some place that hadn’t been used for decades. Beck talked about it being too far into the hills to be of any real use to him – and Roland being Roland, that got him thinking.’
‘About what?’
‘About how he could use it.’
‘Use it for what?’
‘We were just kids, really.’
I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘That’s all we were,’ he said, like he hadn’t heard me, ‘just kids. Roland had just turned nineteen at the time. He’d left to go to sixth-form college in London three years before that, but he’d come back for the summer holidays, and – that year – the first thing he said was that we should all go up to the cabin one night.’
‘To do what?’
He sniffed. ‘I was twenty-two, Bill was twenty-six. I know I was married, I know Beth had just turned one; I know Bill was the same, married with a son – Richard was, what, four by then? That’s just what happened here. You married young, had kids of your own, got on with life. But that didn’t make us mature. I was a husband, a dad – same as Bill was – but I had no idea about the world. Roland had found out more in three years abroad than I’d found out in twenty-two years on the islands.’
‘What did you go up to the cabin to do?’ I repeated.
As he drew a long breath, I realized how cold it was. I could feel it right the way down into my bones, in the collagen, in the calcium, like an arthritic ache.
Kilburn looked at me. ‘Roland’s dad was a serial shagger. I mean, the way he told it to us, if that had been my old man carrying on like that, doing that to my mum, I’d have ripped his balls off. Roland, though, he thought it was great. He admired his dad. And his dad, he was clever, sneaky, because he knew this was a small community, that tongues would wag, so he never screwed anyone from the islands. Not ever. He went out on business trips. That was how he found Torres.’
Things snapped into focus.
‘Dell’s father used to fly her in from Argentina,’ I said.
Kilburn nodded.
‘Was she a prostitute?’
He shrugged. ‘She got paid, if that’s what you mean.’
‘And Dell flew her in that night in 1987?’
‘He went through his dad’s contact book and found the phone number for Torres. She wasn’t keen on the idea of coming over to start with, especially because Roland told her to keep it a secret from Old Man Dell, but then Roland promised her a shitload of money and she changed her mind. Like I said to you earlier, we were kids, really. No experience of the world. Getting a go on some hot Argentinian woman, playing poker, drinking beer, smoking weed until we blacked out, doing it all up in the mountains where no one would ever find out, where no one in the town would ever know – why wouldn’t we do it?’
‘Was Torres killed up in the cabin?’
‘Near it,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Because of Caleb Beck.’ He shook his head. ‘Fucking Beck. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near us that night. We went up to the cabin because no one ever went there.’ He stopped again, a thin smile edging his lips. ‘Beck liked the stars.’
‘What?’
He waved a finger towards the sky. ‘He was a stargazer. Turned out he’d found a spot about half a mile from the tarn where he used to take his telescope a couple of times a week.’
His telescope.
I remembered the story Beth had told me: how Richard had stumbled across a telescope and an orange anorak in a ravine near the tarn; how they’d been there so long they were covered in mud and moss. The telescope had been Beck’s too.
‘I read about it after,’ Kilburn continued. ‘I read about how we’re one of the best places in the world to see stars. In the middle of the ocean, hardly any light pollution. You can see the Andromeda galaxy, clear as a bell. You can see for two million light years –’
‘So Beck discovered you were all in the cabin?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he came to see what was going on?’
‘Yes.’
He must have dropped everything to go and investigate, thinking he would only be gone a short time. Instead, his telescope and anorak had never been retrieved; they’d ended up in the ravine, perhaps blown there shortly after by the wind and rain, and no one had ever found them until Richard went out into the Brink that day.
‘So you killed him because he came to the cabin?’
Kilburn had become distant.
‘Jack?’
‘It got out of control,’ he said.
‘Out of control how?’
His attention was fixed on the space beyond us, the walls of the lido, the ugly concrete, the grass banks leading down to the pool.
But then I realized something.
Somewhere beyond the snow and the wind and the groan of the building, I could hear a new noise. I’d been so engrossed in the conversation, so absorbed, I hadn’t noticed it.
It was an engine, idling.
A car.
As I twigged it, Kilburn did too, and he instantly gripped the gun tighter. We both turned on the bench and looked at the entrance, towards the direction from which the noise had travelled. As we did, the turnstile creaked into action.
Someone was entering the lido.
69
For a moment, Kilburn disguised the gun he was holding, pulling it in towards his body. But then a woman emerged from the turnstile and I saw him relax again.
It was the librarian.
She was swamped in a thick windbreaker, strands of hair escaping from inside the hood, breath balled in front of her face. Coming a little way in, to the edge of the covered foyer, she looked from me to Kilburn, neither surprised that we were here, nor that Kilburn was armed, and I remembered what Kilburn had said to me earlier, when he’d still been pretending to be Anthony Jessop.
You made a mistake going into the library.
&nb
sp; That’s Kilburn’s sister that runs it.
He’d told me plenty of lies today. He’d lied about who he was. Maybe he’d lied about the night at the cabin and what had happened there. But he wasn’t lying about this. She was his sister. I could see a physical similarity between them now. I could see her lack of surprise that he was armed, and the ease with which he stood – the gun at his side – expecting her to tell him why she was here.
‘They found her,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘They found her,’ his sister repeated.
He glanced at me. ‘Where is she?’
‘Grobb’s got her.’
My stomach dropped.
They were talking about Beth.
‘She’s on-board the boat?’ Kilburn said, disbelief in his face.
‘Yeah.’
He glanced at me. ‘How long’s she been hiding there?’
I wasn’t sure if he was asking me or his sister, but she came forward a step, the toes of her boots flattening the grass, and replied: ‘I don’t know. Grobb didn’t say. He just said they found an air vent near their office that hadn’t been reattached properly, and they went looking and found her in there.’
‘Does Roland know?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so – not yet.’
He didn’t want Dell to know.
He didn’t want a repeat of what had happened to Penny.
The wind suddenly cut across us hard. Kilburn rocked gently against its power, then swivelled to face me, the tears still evident on his cheeks. But his eyes – scorched from being rubbed – showed none of the emotion of before. I’d been able to keep him talking, to keep the story going, on the promise of revealing where Beth was. In truth, I’d been uncertain whether I would, ultimately, not because I didn’t believe he loved his daughter, but because it would put her in danger. If Kilburn knew, Dell would find out.
But now it didn’t matter either way.
‘Where’s the ship now?’ he said, looking at me, but talking to his sister. His expression had steeled.
‘It left an hour ago.’
My bargaining chip had gone and so had the ship. I had nothing to use and nowhere to go. I was seven thousand miles from home, totally alone, with no way out. I glanced beyond him, looking again at the curved concrete boundaries of the lido hemming us in like prison walls. I flicked a look left, to where the changing rooms were, and then back to the entrance where Kilburn’s sister was standing.