Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  ‘Did the team head down to Miln Cross?’

  ‘Yep. Nothing doing. I think the reason they liked this one more than all the other calls was because it mentioned just Paul and Carrie – same as Ray Muire had done.’

  Finding nothing at Miln Cross didn’t surprise me. Which just left the motivations of the caller.

  ‘Is there an audio file of the phone call?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll send it over.’

  ‘So, 8 January, Paul and Carrie are seen with an unidentified third person, at Farnmoor; 9 January, they’re seen at Miln Cross; 10 January, the girls are spotted in a red Ford near the ExCeL in London with an unidentified white male.’

  ‘That about sums it up.’

  My mind was already racing ahead: if I placed any sort of faith in the sightings, it meant I had to work from the possibility that Paul and Carrie, and Annabel and Olivia, were taken to different places. The question was why.

  And whether any of the witnesses could be believed.

  19

  By the time Healy got back to the village he was numb from the cold, soaked through to the bone and burning with anger. He’d destroyed the phone box, left glass in glittering mounds at its base, the phone swinging by its cord, the casing chipped and broken from being smashed against the dial box – but the rage hadn’t died down. Sampson’s words still pricked at him; the snide insinuation that Healy couldn’t cut it as a cop any more. I can cut it, he thought. I’m still a better copper than you’ll ever be, you patronizing prick.

  An icy blast of wind carved in off the water, bringing him out of his thoughts. Late afternoon light was beginning to dwindle, and further along the beach he could see spotlights being readied for another night. A man and a woman, both in forensic suits, were standing either side of the first light, making minute adjustments to its position. The body would have long since been shipped off to the morgue, so this was the endgame, a final search for anything they’d missed. As he moved adjacent to the sea wall, Healy watched both the techs. If he could have got the inside track on who they’d found in the cove and what the coroner had discovered, he knew he’d have Sampson choking on his words. He’d have them all choking. What got to him more than their refusal to help was the thought of what they were saying about him: the talk in the office after Sampson put the phone down, the laughter, everyone joining in to paint him as some kind of a flake.

  You’re not a cop any more.

  That’s what Raker had told him a couple of days before. Maybe it hadn’t hit home then, but it was hitting home now. The Met, the people he’d worked with and trusted, every case he’d ever put to bed, any family he’d ever been able to bring any kind of peace to, it was all ancient history now.

  None of it meant anything.

  On his right, the thatched roof and whitewashed walls of The Seven Seas came into view. The day was foul, a mix of rain and wind and bitter cold, but at the side, in one of the alleyways that ran between the buildings at the sea wall, he spotted a solitary figure huddled under the overhang of the roof, smoking. For a while, all Healy could see was the person’s outline and the slow, rhythmic glow of a cigarette, but as he got closer the figure shifted slightly and some of the light from the pub washed out across him.

  It was the fisherman.

  The one who’d found the body.

  Healy looked up into the hills beyond the pub, towards Raker’s house. There were no lights on, but he was up there somewhere, looking at pictures of the family, trying to figure out where they’d gone. You’re not a cop any more. Healy’s eyes flicked back to the fisherman. He was still dressed in his blue bib and brace trousers, unzipped yellow jacket over the top and matching boots, and his sou’wester hung from his neck by the chin strap. He must have come straight from the boat. He eyed Healy for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘How’s it going, pal?’ Healy said.

  The fisherman shrugged. ‘Can’t complain.’

  ‘Mind if I join you?’

  The fisherman shrugged a second time. ‘Free country.’

  Healy stepped in, under the overhang, propped a cigarette between his lips and went hunting around in his pockets for a light. ‘Good day out on the boat, then?’

  The fisherman took a drag. ‘Decent enough.’

  ‘Where’s the trawler moored?’

  ‘Brixham.’

  Despite Healy not being able to locate his lighter, the fisherman just watched, not offering the use of his. ‘What’s your name, pal?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m just interested,’ Healy said casually. ‘Been here a while and I feel like I don’t know enough about people. I’m Colm Healy.’ He offered his hand.

  Eventually, the fisherman took it. ‘Prouse.’

  ‘That your first name or your last?’

  ‘Last.’

  Healy finally found his lighter, cupped one of his hands around the cigarette and lit up. He took a long, deep drag. ‘How’s it going with this beach thing?’

  Prouse’s eyes fixed on him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The body you found.’

  He studied the fisherman in the shadows of the overhang, watching for anything in his face. This was as close as he’d got to Prouse since the fisherman had come up to him in the pub. In the silence, Healy’s mind spooled back to a conversation he’d had with Rocastle, a couple of hours after finding the body. He wasn’t surprised by what we found there, as if he’d already had the time to process it. Maybe it wasn’t the second time he’d been down there. Maybe it was the third, or the fourth, or the … Rocastle had cut him off, not interested in hearing the rest of the theory, but the theory had legs, Healy felt sure of that: even some detectives would baulk at the sight of a victim left like that.

  And yet the fisherman’s face had shown nothing.

  ‘So what’s the verdict?’

  Prouse looked at him. ‘About what?’

  ‘About the body. You heard anything?’

  ‘Look, I did my interview, I told them what I found down there, and that’s all I’ve heard from them.’ Prouse took a last drag on his roll-up. ‘If that’s the last I hear of it, that suits me just fine. I feel sorry for the poor bastard who they found down there, but I ain’t interested in finding out anything more than I have to.’ He flicked his cigarette out into the night and they both watched it burn out and die in the rain. ‘I don’t know if you’re working with the police or what. If you want me to talk on record, I will do that – but I ain’t doing some impromptu interview, here in the pissing rain. That all right with you?’

  ‘I was just interested.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I ain’t.’ The fisherman pulled up his sou’wester. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d better get home.’

  Healy nodded.

  Prouse nodded back, zipped up his jacket and headed out into the night, following the sea wall past the pub, towards the cottages at the far end of the village. As he watched him go, Healy wondered if he’d called it wrong. The fisherman was quiet and stoic, but that didn’t make him guilty. People tended to be like that down here, enduring and reserved, hewn from a tradition of speaking their minds only when they needed to.

  You’re not a cop any more.

  Taking a last drag on his cigarette, Healy stubbed it out on the wall of The Seven Seas and headed inside the pub.

  20

  Healy arrived back at the cottage just after nine. I knew he’d been drinking even before he stumbled into the living room and collapsed on to the sofa. He looked between me and the two computers – Paul and Annabel’s – still sitting on the table in the corner, and then to the laptop perched on my knees. As his eyes moved around the room, they shifted in stages, like they were dragging on something. He was finding it hard to even focus.

  ‘Fun night?’

  He shrugged. ‘Same old.’

  I went back to what I was doing. After getting off the phone to Task, I’d googled Carter Graham. Sixty-seven. Divorced. Born in south Devon – hence him having a home at Farnmoor
, about seven miles east, along the coast – but in pieces I’d read in Forbes and Business Week, and a profile in the Financial Times, it sounded like he spent most of his time eating plane food. His company, Empyrean, provided what they called ‘investment opportunity analysis’, and had offices in London, Frankfurt, New York, LA, Sydney and Tokyo. According to the FT, Graham toured them almost constantly for ten months of the year, looking for gaps in the market – start-ups, small businesses with big growth potential, and upcoming industries. Staff in his regional offices were scouring the local markets the entire time; when they found something, some business or technology they thought represented a potential money-maker, Graham flew in, listened to the pitch and decided whether to get his chequebook out or not. ‘He’s seen as something of a white knight,’ the FT added, and it was hard to argue with the business model: the company goes stratospheric, he creams off a chunk of the profits, everybody makes lots of cash.

  In the Forbes piece, it said Graham had started Empyrean in Dartmouth in 1967 at the age of just twenty-two, before shifting the whole operation to London shortly after – then things really started taking off. In 1971 he opened his first international office in Los Angeles. He didn’t talk much to the media, Forbes describing him as ‘a very private man’, and he was particularly protective of his personal life, which meant the same basic information got trotted out time and time again: divorced once, but ‘still on good terms with’ his ex-wife, and no children. There was almost nothing else, bar a small mention of when his parents had passed on: his mother in 1962, and his father in 1968. If he’d vowed to keep his private life out of the media, he’d done a pretty decent job.

  ‘I’m going back to London.’

  I looked up at Healy. He’d wriggled his jacket off and was sitting – legs spread, hands resting on his belly – in the middle of the sofa. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve had enough of it down here,’ he said.

  ‘You’d had enough of it in London.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘What’s brought this on?’

  He shrugged again. ‘I don’t belong here.’

  ‘And you belong in London?’

  ‘What, you cut up I’m leaving?’

  His defences were up, which normally meant he was reacting to something. Either something he’d done, or was about to. ‘You do whatever you want to do,’ I said to him.

  ‘There’s nothing left for me here.’

  I went back over all the conversations we’d had over the past seven days, trying to pinpoint the origin of this moment.

  ‘Where are you going to stay?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got a few mates up there.’

  I nodded. Not too many any more.

  Then I remembered what I’d said to him outside the Lings’: You got fired from the police. Those people there you call friends, colleagues, whatever they were to you – they aren’t going to go out to bat for you, because they don’t want to end up like you.

  ‘Is this about earlier?’

  He flicked a look at me and then away again, and I had my answer.

  ‘I just like to run my cases a certain way,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘We’re trying to have a conversation here, Healy.’ He shifted on the sofa, slow and lethargic, and I suddenly remembered he was drunk. ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’

  ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘We’ll talk in the morning,’ I said again.

  He eyed me, like he suddenly realized I’d worked him out, and then he got up, stumbling slightly, and headed upstairs without saying another word.

  After he was gone, I returned to the sightings of the Ling family, booting up both Paul and Annabel’s computers for a second time. I went through them, folder by folder, program by program, looking for any connection to Carter Graham, to Farnmoor, to Miln Cross or to London ExCeL. There was nothing. By eleven, as the wind started to gather momentum outside, nearby branches scratching at the windows, I shut both computers down and headed up to bed.

  Two hours later, I was still awake.

  The next morning, Healy emerged just before eight. I was sitting at the kitchen table, cup of coffee in front of me, looking down towards the beach as the tide rolled in. He shuffled in, dressing gown on, half squinting as if bright sunlight were arrowing in towards him. In reality, the sky was a perfect ceiling of granite-grey cloud and it was drizzling.

  I watched him pour himself a coffee and then, when he was done, he stood at the counter and looked across the room at me. Immediately on the defensive. He might have been hungover, but he obviously remembered enough of what we’d talked about the night before. I didn’t play up to it. On the table in front of me was the local paper – the body on the beach still the hot ticket, even though the crime scene was now just a distant memory – and, as he remained standing, I started flicking through it again.

  A couple of minutes passed, both of us silent, and then he disappeared back into the living room. I carried on reading the sports pages. Twenty minutes later, shaved and showered, Healy returned to the kitchen, pulled out a chair and sat at the table with me.

  ‘You were right – is that what you want to hear?’

  I flipped the paper shut. He was eyeing me like he was waiting for a comeback, some sort of put-down. ‘It was never about that, Healy.’

  ‘You think I haven’t got anything left in the tank.’ That last part seemed to hang in the air, as if he were processing it for the first time too. ‘Everyone thinks I’m done.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re done.’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe you’re all right.’

  ‘Who’s “all” of us?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ His fingers rubbed together, like he wanted a cigarette. ‘I need to get back to London, get some normality back in my life. This isn’t a real existence.’

  ‘What have you got back in London?’

  He looked out through the window, and for a second it was like he was thinking out loud. He was watching the beach, the sweeping arc of the hills, the crashing waves. He was wondering if he really did want to leave all this behind for a city that had rejected him, for work colleagues who placed no trust in him, for the memories of a daughter he no longer had. But then he probably realized that if he had little left in London beyond his two boys, he had even less here. I had physical and emotional ties to the village, ties to this house, to the place where I’d grown up. Basically, the only attachment Healy had was me.

  ‘I need to get back into work,’ he said. ‘Some shitty security job signing people into a building.’ He paused, the faintest hint of a smile on his face. ‘Something to forget about what I used to do. Something to help …’ He stopped a second time, but I got what he meant: Something to help me forget I was once a cop. There was a sadness in his face as that dawned on him, and it felt like I glimpsed the origin of this moment: maybe a phone call to the people he’d worked with, trying to prove to me and to himself that he was still important; maybe nothing in return but a wall of silence.

  ‘You’re a good cop, Healy.’

  He looked at me.

  ‘No one can take that away from you.’

  ‘If I was so good, why did I get fired?’

  ‘You did the wrong things for the right reasons.’

  He shrugged again. ‘You ever coming back to London?’

  On the table, beside the newspaper, were my notes. I pulled them towards me. ‘I want to take care of this first.’

  ‘Then I guess I’ll see you on the other side.’

  I nodded. ‘I guess you will.’

  Two hours later, his car was packed. He hadn’t come with much in the first place. We’d both escaped London for different reasons, but we’d both escaped fast.

  We shook hands in the rain, and I told him to call me once he was settled in, and then I watched his red Vauxhall take off down the hill, chugging along the lane that snaked towards the beach. At the b
ottom, a bright red speck against the concrete of the sea wall, the car seemed to pause, as if Healy was unsure whether to commit to this.

  And then, a second later, he pulled away and was gone.

  Part Three

  21

  Farnmoor was a huge, seventeenth-century manor house buried in a crinkle of coastline two miles south of Dartmouth. The single-lane approach was beautiful. Framed by high trees, it gradually opened out on to a patchwork of rolling hills and sweeping sea views. The house itself remained hidden virtually the entire way down until, about a quarter of a mile short of the front gates, it emerged from a curve in the earth, its manicured front lawn flowing into a bank of craggy coastal rock and finally dropping away to the sea.

  Beyond the gates, two hundred yards along an arrow-straight driveway, eleven cars were parked in a line, as well as a van with DART GARDEN SERVICES on the side. I pulled the car up outside the gates, buzzed down my window and pushed the intercom. A short, sharp squeal, then silence. As I waited for an answer, I listened to the sea crashing on to the shore somewhere below.

  Bzzt. ‘Yes?’

  I turned back to the intercom. ‘Hi. My name’s David Raker. I’m doing some work on the Ling family disappearance. I was hoping I could speak to someone about it.’

  I left it at that. Carter Graham wasn’t home – I’d already called his London office and talked the receptionist into revealing he was out of the country – but, judging by the number of cars parked out front, someone other than the gardener had to have been working here on at least a semi-regular basis. Graham might have been rich, but no one had eleven cars unless they were collecting them; and if he was a collector, he wasn’t going to be buying beige Vauxhall Vectras.

  A pause. ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘David Raker.’

  ‘Okay. Hold on a second, please.’

  The intercom went dead again. About ten seconds later, the same woman came back on: ‘I’ll buzz you in and meet you out front.’