Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  As I’d scrubbed down the walls, trying to erase my part in the carnage, I’d thought of Emily, of my worst nightmare coming to pass: telling her that Paul and Carrie were dead. I didn’t even know about the girls; didn’t really know what to tell her. There was no way I could go chasing around America trying to find the location of their bodies. But equally I couldn’t tell police here in the UK what I knew without revealing that I’d been there as Rocastle and Cornell had met their end. Then, finally, when I’d moved out into the night, into the last of the wind, into rain that had gradually turned to drizzle, I had looked down into Cornell’s boat and seen yet another body from Farnmoor.

  Carter Graham’s murder had gone unreported once when Rocastle had cleaned up Farnmoor after I’d been there. But it wouldn’t go unreported again. And as I’d thought about making the anonymous call to the police, I’d realized that was exactly what I’d have to do about the girls: dial into Las Vegas Metro, try to persuade them to instigate a search for Annabel and Olivia, give them everything I had – including Firmament – without compromising my anonymity. Then hang up and hope that was enough information for the police.

  That, with that, the rest of the Ling family would be found.

  After a while, I didn’t know what else to say to her. Emily sat there at the kitchen table, sunlight on one side of her face, and cried. When someone’s world has fallen apart, there aren’t the words to rebuild it, so I didn’t waste her time with meaningless platitudes. I just took her hand, and I held it, and I let her grieve for the family she loved above all else.

  Her tears went on for so long, she seemed to shrink in on herself, like all her air had escaped and wasn’t coming back. Eventually, her hand began to slip from mine.

  I got up and walked across to the sink, filling the kettle and setting it going again. On the shelf to my right, above the worktop, sat a brown A6 envelope with an ATM card in it and Carrie’s memory stick. I hadn’t decided what to do about either of them yet. If the three hundred and forty-five thousand pounds had come from Cornell, if that’s who Rocastle had taken the cash from, then it was blood money. He was financing his kids’ future with earnings that had cost people lives. But that wasn’t the fault of his children.

  ‘What about Annabel and Olivia?’

  I nodded. I hadn’t told her about Cornell, about anything to do with Kalb. I hadn’t had the chance to even get that far before her tears had ended the conversation. But she knew the basics: they were all dead, taken by a man who had stopped at nothing to disguise the identity of a mass killer; that the family had been separated early on; and that now, ten months later, their bodies were on different sides of the world.

  ‘I’m going to call the police in Las Vegas.’

  ‘You’re …’ She paused, wiped her eyes. ‘You’re not going to go over?’

  ‘I’m not sure what that would achieve,’ I said to her softly. It would be a journey without a map. I’d looked ‘Firmament’ up when I’d got home, and there wasn’t a town in the entire United States with that name. I had no starting point. I hadn’t been to Vegas for five years, had only been to Nevada three times in my entire life. ‘The police might have heard that name before somewhere. They’ll know the area. They’ll know where to look.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve got to go.’

  ‘I can’t, Emily. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’ve got to,’ she said, and then a fresh wave of tears came. I didn’t come back at her again, just let her anger, the sense of helplessness, slowly ebb away.

  ‘They’ll find them,’ I said, the words sounding hollow in my mouth.

  ‘Please.’

  I wasn’t flying out to the States, no matter how many times she asked, but I didn’t say anything this time, hoping my silence would act as my answer. Beside me, the kettle started whistling, steam taking flight into the spaces above our heads. She began sobbing again. I filled the percolator with fresh water and then added two spoons of powder.

  ‘Paul and Carrie’s …’

  I turned back to face her. ‘Sorry?’

  She looked up, cheeks strewn with tears like tyre tracks on a battlefield, and I saw something familiar: the same look she’d had when I’d asked her about why Paul and Carrie had waited so long to have Olivia; the same sense she was holding something back.

  ‘Paul and Carrie …’ She stopped again. Sniffed. Wiped her eyes. ‘When you asked me why they waited so long to have Olivia, to have a second shot at IVF, I …’ She paused again, but I knew what was coming. She’d lied to me. ‘I didn’t know how to tell you.’

  ‘Tell me what?’ I heard the change in my voice, the undercurrent of anger – but I didn’t care. ‘If you’ve held something back about them, all this time …’

  ‘It’s not about their disappearance.’

  I frowned at her. ‘Then what’s it about?’

  ‘You wanted to know why there was such an age gap.’ She looked down at the table in front of her, her hand flat to it, fingers spread. She can’t make eye contact with me. ‘I lied to you,’ she said softly. ‘Olivia was IVF. But Annabel wasn’t.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Everything I told you, about them not being able to find an Asian sperm donor, about the process not being as advanced in the eighties, I was making all that up.’

  ‘Why?’

  Finally, she made eye contact again. More tears, but not born out of the loss she felt for her sister. Not this time. ‘At the time they were desperate for kids,’ she said, voice taut, rubbed raw by the tears, ‘but Paul had his problems and the IVF wouldn’t take for them. It just wouldn’t take. They did it, over and over – like, seven or eight times – and every time it failed. They thought they were never going to have kids.’

  She swallowed, the light in the room changing as cloud blew across the sky.

  ‘And then I got pregnant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was a stupid mistake. Stupid. I was on the pill, and it became an instinctive, mechanical thing. I took it without thinking, same time every day. But then … I forgot.’

  Suddenly it fell into place: why she always referred to the family like they were her own, as if she was part of it, their day-to-day routine, their DNA; and the way she talked about Annabel’s accident. We were all just stunned. It’s hard to put it into words. It was all I could do not to constantly cry. On and on, talking like a mother about her daughter. It explained, too, why Annabel looked nothing like Paul.

  It explained it all.

  ‘I was doing my exams. It was getting on top of me – that’s why I forgot to take the pill. You probably remember how I used to put myself under so much pressure when I was studying. But I knew, if I got the right grades, I was going to Cambridge.’

  I looked at her. ‘Wait, this was before university?’

  She nodded again, and – slowly – her expression shifted, as if she was preparing the way for what was to come. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I was seventeen,’ she said.

  A sudden, powerful realization took flight in me.

  ‘You’re Annabel’s father, David.’

  Part Five

  65

  The flight started its descent into McCarran at two o’clock, local time. I’d been in the air ten hours, sleeping fitfully, unable to clear my head. Once I landed, I needed to be lucid. I didn’t know where I was going, or even where to start, but I knew I needed to be smart and reactive. And yet I felt overwhelmed. Any moment of joy I managed to draw from the shock of what Emily had told me two days before was instantly tempered. I’d look at the pictures of Annabel I was carrying, the pictures of Olivia too, and knew that, if I found them, I’d find them like I’d found Paul and Carrie. There was a biological link between Annabel and me – but that’s all it had ever been. Only Emily, Paul and Carrie had ever known the truth, and only Paul and Carrie could ever claim to have been her parents. So when I thought of Annabel, of what I might find of her, I didn’t feel the visceral, organic pain o
f a father. I’d never been that to her. I never would be that. But what I felt, instead, was an intense, wounded sorrow. A grief. A regret that I would never get the chance to sit down with her, even to tell her who I was and why she should care.

  Because she was gone.

  And she was never coming back.

  The room at the Bellagio looked out across CityCenter, a seventy-six-acre, nine-billion-dollar copse of skyscrapers that hadn’t even existed when I’d last been in the city. It rose out of the early evening dusk, glass and neon shimmering against the fading desert sky, and by the time I’d showered and returned to the window, Las Vegas had changed again, the huge, overblown theme park replaced by a symphony of artificial light. I raided the minibar, opened a bottle of bourbon and watched it all from the shadows of my room.

  A couple of hours later, I roused myself and took the lift down to the casino floor, men hunched over craps tables, old couples sitting next to each other at slots. Off to my right were hundreds of video poker machines, none of them being played, screens blinking, speakers blaring. Off to my left was a bar, fenced in on a raised platform behind a curved mahogany bannister. I headed up there, ordered a beer, then grabbed a seat adjacent to the main corridor through the casino. I watched tourists wandering past in shorts and T-shirts, some dragging suitcases on their way out of town, some counting chips as they made their way in. When my beer arrived, I started to realize how tired I was. I hadn’t slept properly for five days – and now I was jet-lagged and on my way to being drunk.

  I tried to focus my mind on what I was here to do, removing a map I’d bought at the airport and opening it out across the table. If Firmament was where the girls had been buried, it wasn’t the name it was officially known by. In the morning, hopefully on the back of some sleep, I’d hire a car and head up to the main Las Vegas Metro building on Sunrise Avenue, about ten miles north-east. I seriously doubted I’d get much in the way of help, but, if I could get someone to talk to me, I might be able to get some sort of steer on where to go looking. Maybe someone had heard the name before. Maybe Firmament had come up in conversation. Maybe, if I was lucky, it might be related to a crime.

  Or maybe it’ll lead nowhere.

  I pushed the thought away and went back to my beer, looking around the casino. This was the only place to start. This was where the high rollers had come, where they’d been as recently as a couple of days ago. This was where Cornell had made his money; the very centre of his universe. If there was a trail, I knew it would start in the Bellagio.

  I just had to find out where.

  I dreamed of sitting at the windows of a hotel I didn’t recognize and looking out across a desert. There were no hotels, no buildings, no roads. It was just a vast, unending swathe of scorched land, cracks carved into it, cholla scattered like they’d fallen out of the sky. In among them, shimmering in the heat, were two crosses, planted into the earth, each constructed from lengths of whitewashed wood. Their names were on them.

  Annabel.

  Olivia.

  As I got to my feet and went to the window, fingers pawing at the glass, trying to go through it, desperately trying to reach them, I felt a hand on my shoulder and a voice – small and comforting – at my ear. It’s okay. They’re fine. They’re in a better place now.

  It was Derryn.

  But when I looked behind me, she was gone.

  And then so were the graves.

  66

  The next morning I woke just before seven. I’d only slept for five hours, but I’d done it in a single stretch and immediately felt better, despite the tug of jet lag. I showered, changed and headed downstairs to the Pool Café. It was early and only thirteen degrees, so there was no one in the water yet, and no one on the sun loungers either. But the sun was out and there was a high of twenty-three later, so it was unlikely to stay that way for long.

  I ordered some steak and eggs and some extra toast, then finished my first cup of coffee while looking at a picture of Annabel. I had pictures of both the girls inside my wallet now, cut down to passport-photo size. Olivia was next to her sister, clutching the Mickey Mouse that Barry Rew had seen her with as Prouse had been driving them both to London City Airport. I’d put their photos in as a reminder of why I was here. I didn’t need the motivation, but I needed the fortitude. I didn’t know how long this would go on. It might be a day. It might be a month. I might leave without ever having found them.

  After my breakfast arrived, my appetite began to wane, moments flashing in my head, imagined images of their final days, and when I’d ripped those away, echoes of what Cornell had said to me. I cut them both into pieces and buried them in the desert.

  I got out the map I’d bought the day before, and opened it out. It was the greater Las Vegas metropolitan area, east as far as Lake Mead, north as far as Gass Peak, west to Red Rock Canyon state park and south to Sloan Canyon. The Mojave desert ran through to California, Utah and Arizona beyond that, but this was going to be ambitious enough for now: about seven hundred square miles of relentless, alien terrain I didn’t know.

  I buried them in the desert.

  Something vaguely resonated with me, something in what Cornell had said, but as I tried to pull it out of the dark, it seemed to slip further away.

  ‘How are you doing today, sir?’

  I looked up.

  A man was standing next to my table, nodding at my unfinished plate of steak and eggs. He was about forty, slim and well dressed in a green check shirt, denims and a pair of brown shoes. He was wearing sunglasses, but the sun was arcing in behind him – along the edge of the hotel’s thirty-three-storey south tower – and down through the lenses; so, even as they wrapped around his head, his eyes were visible, his gaze moving from my breakfast to the map and then, finally, to my wallet, open on the pictures of the girls.

  I flipped it shut.

  ‘I’m doing fine, thanks.’ I looked around, spotting waiting staff serving at other tables. He wasn’t one of them. ‘How are you?’

  Behind him, the three curved arcs of the Vdara hotel clawed at the sky, sun winking in its windows. ‘I’m good,’ he said. ‘Do I detect an English accent?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Cool. So, are you over for a convention?’

  I started folding up the map. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Sounds mysterious.’

  ‘Not really. I just have some business to take care of.’

  ‘Of course you do.’ But he didn’t attempt to move. ‘You’ve got your map and your photos, now all you need is the location.’

  I shot a look at him. He’d shifted slightly and turned to his left, the sun arrowing past him at a different angle, his sunglasses dark and opaque. I couldn’t see his eyes now.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He looked around him, as if he was making sure no one was close enough to hear, then pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘You’re a long way from home, Mr Raker.’

  He knows my name. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘An interested party.’

  ‘Interested in what?’

  ‘You know,’ he said, ignoring the question, ‘this isn’t your backyard now. This tough-guy thing you’ve got going on, it won’t work here. I don’t know how things play out over in England, but here we don’t go sticking our noses in where they’re not wanted.’

  ‘It’s America. Everyone sticks everything everywhere.’

  He smiled for the first time. ‘Very good.’

  ‘Do you work for Cornell?’

  He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t seem confused by the name.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ I pushed the plate of steak and eggs to one side and leaned across the table towards him. ‘I wouldn’t go expecting a call from him any time soon.’

  A frown formed on his face.

  ‘In fact, about now he’s probably having his heart weighed.’

  As the man remained still the hotel continued its forward rhythm, like a heartbeat: women on hen weekends,
couples hand-in-hand, businessmen checking their phones.

  ‘It’s over, my friend,’ I said to him. ‘Your boss isn’t coming back. Your wages aren’t going to get paid this month. So, why don’t you tell me where the girls are buried?’

  For the first time he moved, reaching up and removing his sunglasses. He looked to have regained some of his composure, his dark eyes impassive, not betraying a single thought in his head. He placed the glasses on the table and then looked off, out across the pool area, towards the southern limb of the main hotel tower. I could see he was thinking about his next move. The king was dead, now his jesters were running around in a panic.

  ‘You’re going to tell me,’ I said to him, and he seemed to flinch when I spoke, as if all the noise around us – the people having breakfast, the whine of planes in the sky, the drone of cars on the freeway – had all faded into nothing. ‘One way or another.’

  Finally, he looked back at me. ‘You’re just one man.’

  ‘But I’ve got all the motivation I need.’

  ‘What are those girls to you?’

  ‘Since two days ago, they’re everything.’

  He nodded, staring at me, an acquiescence moving across his face. I thought I saw a moment of conscience play out, a flicker of self-reproach, as if he saw – in that second – all the torment he’d brought to his victims’ lives, on the orders of a man out of control.

  But it wasn’t that.

  Because he didn’t work for Cornell.

  ‘Mr Raker,’ he said. ‘I’m Carlos Soto.’

  67

  I followed him out of the city in a Dodge Challenger I’d hired from an Avis in the lobby. We wound north along Las Vegas Boulevard, through a canyon of monolithic casinos, until the tourist brochure fell away and all that remained were the faded wedding chapels, single-storey malls, and strip clubs most people never came far enough to see.