Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  Turning off the engine, I grabbed my phone and my notebook and opened the door of the BMW. Then stopped. That’s probably why everyone at the Met hates you. Rocastle had been talking about the enemies I’d made at the Met: cops I’d had to cross in order to get to the missing, the laws I’d had to bend so I could do what I felt was right.

  But how did he know they hated me?

  None of the cops I’d dealt with would have put their personal feelings about me into a file. So he was either making a claim based on an assumption or he’d put in a call to them before he’d come to the house to speak to me. Or there was another reason.

  He hasn’t always been based in Devon.

  I pulled the car door shut again and went to my phone’s address book. A couple of seconds later, I found the name I wanted: Terry Dooley.

  Dooley was a name from my old life, a cop I’d snared as a source after a tip-off about him and three of his detectives landed on my desk. In a moment of madness, they’d visited a south London brothel, got wasted on cheap booze and then one of them had started throwing punches. I’d called Dooley with an offer the next day: I kept him out of the papers if he got me information when I needed it. He was married with two young boys and didn’t fancy the idea of only seeing them on weekends, so he took the deal. I didn’t use him as much as Ewan Tasker, because he wasn’t as discreet or reliable, but while Task was already in semi-retirement, Dooley was still there at the coalface, working murders and making other people’s business his own. He was difficult, snide and arrogant, but that was exactly why he was so useful. He went out of his way to know things about other cops at the Met, in case he ever had to use those things against them.

  As I waited for him to pick up, my eyes drifted over the house and I noticed a flash of colour at the top window. Lee was watching from the spare room. He waved once, I waved back, then he retreated into the darkness.

  Finally, Dooley answered. ‘Oh joy.’

  ‘I thought you were ignoring me.’

  ‘If only it was that easy.’

  ‘How you doing, Dools?’

  ‘Probably better than you.’ He didn’t say anything else, but I understood. He always liked to give the impression he was dictating terms, that he had some kind of control over the way our working relationship moved. If he started pandering to me, in his head it would be a sign of submission. So he didn’t ask about my recovery, except in the most evasive way. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’

  ‘I wanted to ask you about someone.’

  ‘There’s a surprise.’

  ‘You ever heard of a Colin Rocastle?’

  ‘Doesn’t ring any bells. Can I go now?’

  ‘Just think about it for a minute.’

  A grunt of contempt. ‘Think about it? Yeah, sure. Why don’t I put my feet up on the desk and crack out the cigars, because working murders is like a Buddhist retreat.’

  I got his frustration. Every time I called it was like a reminder of what he’d done: a drunken night out, a bad mistake, the thin line between a secret staying buried and his wife getting an anonymous call. The truth was, I would never make that call, even if he refused to help me, because I wasn’t in the business of breaking up families. But Dooley didn’t have to know that.

  ‘I think he might have worked at the Met.’

  A moment of silence, as if he was taking it in.

  ‘Dooley?’

  ‘So what? A lot of people work at the Met.’

  ‘If I had to take a guess, I’d say he knew about me through people like Phillips and Craw.’ Phillips was the lead on the case that had first brought me into contact with Healy; Craw was the SIO on the case that had almost killed me. ‘Maybe he was involved in those cases, maybe he wasn’t, but he knows who I am. Now I want to know who he is.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Specifically, you’re going to tell me.’

  He sighed. ‘I’m sick of this garbage you bring me.’

  ‘Yeah, well, lap it up, Dools.’

  No response. Then: ‘What did you say his name was?’

  ‘Rocastle. Colin Rocastle.’

  ‘Gimme a sec.’

  He put me on hold. I guessed he was probably checking the computers or asking around. About half a minute later, he came back on. Another long silence on the line. Dooley didn’t give any indication as to whether he knew Rocastle or not, but the silence didn’t worry me. This was all a part of his game. ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’

  ‘So you’ve heard of him?’

  Another pause. His brain was probably skipping ahead about now, trying to figure out what I wanted with Rocastle. ‘Yeah, I remember him now. You were right.’

  ‘He used to work at the Met?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I knew it. I pulled my notebook across to me, opened it up and wedged the phone between my shoulder and my ear. ‘When was he up in London?’

  ‘Seven or eight years ago. Maybe more.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘He started out as a rubber heeler.’

  ‘He worked for the DPS?’

  ‘It was the plain old CIB back then. CIB3 would have been the one Rocastle was in. They were the extra-special arseholes who worked out of Scotland Yard investigating Scotland Yard officers. Bunch of half-cops and circus freaks, but the Met poured a shit-ton of money into it after some bent coppers dropped their guard and got weeded out by the tabloids. When it was set up in ’98, it had fifty officers working for it. Fifty. We wouldn’t get that now, even if Jack the Ripper crawled out the fucking ground.’

  I wrote down the gist of what he’d said. The Complaints Investigation Bureau was the precursor to the Directorate of Professional Standards, the UK equivalent of internal affairs. The term ‘rubber heeler’ was old-school cop slang: when, in 1971, the Deputy Commissioner Robert Mark set up A10, an anti-corruption branch, cops took to calling the officers that worked for it ‘rubber heelers’ – because you could never hear them creeping up behind you.

  ‘Did Rocastle make himself unpopular?’

  ‘He was eyeballing his own people – what do you think?’

  ‘Yeah, but did he do anything to stand out from the crowd?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dooley said. ‘Never knew him personally. I just remember a few guys saying he was an arsehole. Stiff, humourless, took a bit too much pleasure in nailing cops to the wall. He probably pretended he really loved exposing all the Met secrets.’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t pretending.’

  ‘What, are you a fan of his?’

  ‘Maybe he just didn’t like dirty cops.’

  Laughter on the line. ‘You’re a naïve prick, Raker, you know that? We’re talking about a guy who took down good investigators here. You think you walk in off the street with a talent for catching bad guys? You don’t. It takes years. I’m not defending corrupt cops, but there’s a difference between a guy who’s tampering with evidence and someone who gets a bit too aggressive in an interview because some lying piece of shit won’t admit to what we all know he’s done. You ask me, cops like Rocastle are pond life.’

  ‘So, what did he do after he left the CIB?’

  ‘Spent a couple of years working for Sapphire.’ That was the Rape and Serious Sexual Assault command. ‘Career went a whole lot of nowhere.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do you think? No one liked him. No one wanted him on their team. You can’t trust a guy who stabs his own people in the back.’

  ‘What if he was just doing his job?’

  A snort. ‘Unbelievable. Aren’t you listening to anything I’m telling you? Who gives two shits about Rocastle? He’s a weasel. The way the guys tell it, the best thing that ever happened to him was when he had his existential “What the fuck am I doing here?” moment and realized everyone hated his guts. Now he gets to spend his days down in Trumpton chasing his tail because the local corner shop ran out of toothpaste.’

  I saw Lee come to the top window again and look down at me. In t
he moonlight, he looked pale and alien, half covered by the shadows of the house.

  ‘All right, Dools. Thanks for that.’

  ‘No problem. Don’t call again.’

  I hung up, got out and headed into the house.

  40

  The kitchen was dark, only the pale readout from a luminescent wall clock casting a glow inside the room. Outside, the moon drifted in and out of cover, but when I kicked the door shut and put my notepad and phone down on the counter, a thick blanket of shadow settled around me.

  Automatically, I reached for the lights inside the door.

  They didn’t come on.

  I tried them again, once, twice. Nothing. Moving across the kitchen, I glanced out of the window, down towards the beach, and could see small dots of colour everywhere: lamp posts standing sentry along the sea wall, cars passing through the village, buildings casting out watery yellow light from their windows and doorways. Up here, in the hills, there were no street lamps and the nearest house was four hundred feet down the slope.

  Everyone in the village had light.

  Everyone except me.

  On the other side of the kitchen was a larder that I kept some old missing persons files in, with two switches on the wall next to it. One for the kitchen, one for the larder.

  I tried them both.

  They were dead too.

  ‘Lee?’

  My voice carried off into the house, the stillness and silence amplifying it, like I was shouting into the mouth of a cave. Lee didn’t reply. I looked through to the living room. The DVD and stereo were off – no display, no faint buzz of electricity – my laptop had no light on, even though I’d left it charging, and Annabel’s MacBook lay dormant. Next to it, Paul’s PC was off, even though it had been on when I’d headed out.

  ‘Lee?’

  Silence for a second time.

  I glanced back across the kitchen, in the direction of the microwave and the oven. Both of those were off too. Slowly, as I stood there in the dark, a sense of unease crawled its way through my system, cool in my veins, blooming beneath my ribs, my heart getting faster, as if, somehow, my body was confirming what I already knew.

  The electricity had been cut.

  Lee was upstairs but not responding.

  Something’s wrong.

  Just inside the door of the larder was Dad’s old cricket bat, leaning against the wall. It had been in the same place when I’d returned to the cottage months back, and I’d never moved it. I reached into the shadows and lifted it out. The rubber grip had long since unravelled, but while the willow had gone soft at the edges, the meat of the blade remained hard.

  Gripping it, I edged forward, into the living room.

  The cottage was a century old, so the layout didn’t conform to modern design. It ran in a kind of spiral: kitchen through to a dining room, past a pair of blistered French windows, and then on to a single, narrow staircase that took you up. I moved across the living room, eyes everywhere, trying to see if anything had moved.

  At the stairs, I paused.

  Listened.

  There was no noise.

  ‘Lee?’

  Briefly, a floorboard creaked.

  I looked up the steps, into the darkness. The house was an antique, weary and old, and every footstep through it would be mapped by a succession of groans. At the top, I could make out vague shapes I’d come to know well: a long, cylindrical window on the right, cut into the outside wall; then the first of three bedrooms – the one at the top of the stairs being mine – the tiniest fragments of light coming in through its window and spilling out on to the landing.

  Nothing else.

  I re-established my grip on the bat. Even in the dark, I could make out my hands: blanched white, like sticks of chalk, veins slithering through from wrists to knuckles. As I paused there, I heard faint, indistinct noises and I became uncertain as to whether it was coming from inside or outside the house. The wind could easily have been a whisper. The gentle fall of rain on the roof could have been someone softly padding around.

  Raising the bat, I slowly started the ascent.

  Even as I tried to rein in the impact of my full weight on the stairs, they groaned and shifted. I kept to the right, my back against the outside wall, and as I got halfway I paused and looked through the railing, along the landing, into the bathroom and the other two bedrooms. The bathroom was small: a bath, a toilet, a basin, white enamel and tiles that reflected back whatever dull glow was seeping in through a thin slice of window.

  Then there were the two bedrooms.

  One had remained empty from the time I’d moved in, just built-in wardrobes and old carpets. The other was the spare bedroom that looked out over the front driveway. The one I’d seen Lee in.

  I edged up the rest of the stairs and stopped again at the top. There was another set of switches about a foot to my right. One was for the landing, the other for the stairs.

  I reached out and pushed them both. Click. Click.

  Nothing.

  As I took a couple of steps further, a floorboard shifted beneath me and I paused, waiting for any kind of reaction from any of the rooms. But all that echoed back was more silence. Quickly, I took a sidestep, into my bedroom. It was packed with my stuff: suitcases and holdalls stacked in the corner, toiletries on top of a chest of drawers, more missing persons files in a pile on my bedside cabinet, clothes laid across the bed.

  Then: a noise.

  I backed out and looked across to the spare room; the same one Healy had stayed in for four months. That’s where it came from. Inside – not visible from where I was – I knew there was a spare bed, two standalone pine wardrobes and, next to the window, an old, discoloured swivel chair, brown leather on a chrome base.

  The sound was the chair turning on its base.

  Someone was sitting in it.

  My heart started pumping faster. I took two big steps and I was at the entrance, firming up my grip on the bat, peering through the gap between door and frame. For a moment there was nothing but shadows. But then things began to emerge: the edges of furniture, the wardrobes, the lights of the village – like the tiniest specks of paint – beyond the glass. And then the swivel chair.

  Lee was slumped in it.

  Eyes closed. Arms either side of him.

  Quickly, I moved past the door and into the bedroom and by the time I did, his eyes were open and he was staring at me. There was something different about him now. His face was stiff and unmoving, but even in the darkness I could see the expression in his eyes. He looked at me like he was hurt or wounded – or full of remorse.

  ‘Lee?’

  ‘I’m sorry, David,’ he said quietly.

  There was a creak behind me.

  And then my head felt like it exploded.

  A second later, everything went black.

  41

  There was sound before anything else. Voices. Two men – one I recognized as Lee; the other I recognized but couldn’t place – talking in strained, irritated tones. On the dazed edges of unconsciousness I struggled to make out what they were saying, but with sound came sensation and, as my nerve endings fired into life, the voices shifted into focus, like a tuner finding its station. ‘You knew what you were doing by calling us,’ said the other voice. ‘I knew,’ Lee responded. ‘I just don’t want to have to be here when it’s done.’

  My head pounded, the gathering clouds of a migraine, and I could feel wet blood all over my face: around my ear, under my chin, in my mouth. I wanted to spit it out. But I didn’t. I didn’t move an inch.

  I sat there, chin against my chest, eyes closed.

  Immediately, I knew I was in the living room. There was the smell of ash from the fireplace and, softly in the background, the whine of wind as it crept through the gaps in the French windows. They were old, no longer sitting flush to their frames, and I knew the sound well now. I couldn’t tell in which direction I faced – off to the doors, or the other way to the kitchen – but I knew what I w
as sitting on: a wooden chair, once belonging to my grandparents, that always stayed in the corner of the room. Its legs, to which my ankles were tied, were rickety, wobbling even as I sat motionless; my wrists were bound together behind me, where the back of the chair curved slightly and was much stronger.

  ‘Who are you calling?’

  It was Lee. The other man didn’t reply.

  ‘Who are you calling?’ Lee said again, desperation in his voice now. Desperation and fear. I wondered, briefly, whether he’d been leading me on the whole time, whether this was all some elaborate ruse to get me to this point – but then immediately dismissed it. When I’d looked into his eyes in the decaying ruins of the old farmhouse, I hadn’t seen a liar. I’d seen a man haunted by ghosts: the Lings, whose lives he’d probably cost; the doctor, Schiltz, who he’d been willing to sacrifice for them; then the shadow, Cornell.

  But if Lee wasn’t the one that had led them here, how had they found him? No one knew I’d brought him to the house. No one even knew he was back in the country.

  I’m sorry, David.

  His words from earlier emerged from the back of my mind – You don’t know what Cornell is like … The second he looks at you, you see what he’s capable of. He’s like a vessel carrying around all this violence and misery – and then, on the back of that, what I’d overheard when I woke moments ago: You knew what you were doing by calling us.

  Instantly, I understood: he’d tried to cut a deal with Cornell’s people. He’d got scared while I was out, quickly working himself up into a frenzy. He’d started to believe I couldn’t protect him. I’d seen it as we’d driven back from Dartmoor; not the decision he was going to make, but the slow realization. If he was returning to the open, he had to come down on the side of the fence that would keep him alive. He was petrified of Cornell, not me. He knew Cornell was a killer and I wasn’t. So he re-established contact because he thought it was the best way to save himself. He begged for their forgiveness.

  And then he painted a target on my back.

  ‘Yeah, it’s me,’ the other man said. Whoever he was calling had picked up. ‘He’s here.’ A pause. ‘I’ve tied him up. Do you want me to wait?’ Another pause, much longer this time. Somewhere off to my left, I heard Lee moving, heard the wheeze of the sofa as he sat down, and I realized I was facing back across the living room, towards the French windows. ‘Are you sure?’ He waited for the answer. ‘Okay.’ Then he hung up.