by Tim Weaver
My dear Robert,
Happy birthday! (I hope this is the one you asked for!)
L x
February 1983
Egan must have gone to the house in the days after Korin went missing and taken the photograph and the book. I stared at Korin’s dedication, at the coffee-stained, dog-eared book, the whiff of cigarettes and mildew coming off the pages. But why take them at all? Was it something to do with the messages on them?
I began leafing through the book and, on the copyright page, saw that it had been published in 1982. I turned to the title page, where the name of the book – Criminal History – was revealed, and then stopped at the contents page, rust-brown and creased, the bottom half of it missing. Not knowing what lay in store didn’t make much of a difference in terms of surprises: the book was filled with the stalwarts of true-crime literature – the Manson Family, Bonnie and Clyde, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer, John Wayne Gacy, the assassination of JFK.
But then I got to the fifteenth chapter.
It took a couple of seconds to register with me before I realized what had happened. The book had made a twelve-page leap from the last page of one chapter on the killing of John Lennon, to the last page of the next one on some unspecified case. The entire chapter was missing, bar the last three lines.
where he died in San Quentin State Prison, aged thirty-nine. It remains one of the most brutal and controversial cases in a long history of notorious Los Angeles crimes.
I reread the remaining lines again. Had Egan taken the other pages out himself? If so, why? I looked around the room for any sign of them, couldn’t find anything, and turned my attention to the book again. The contents page was torn, so I flipped to the back, hoping to find an index or a bibliography, an author’s note – anything that might help me to pinpoint what case the missing pages related to. But there was nothing. I went to my phone and put in a search for the book title, hoping to find it on sale somewhere online, or – if I really lucked out – uploaded to Google Books in its entirety. But the book was thirty-three years old. It was out of print. It was gone, forgotten.
But not by Billy Egan.
I put in a second search, for ‘San Quentin prison 39 years of age’, but the term was too vague. There were too many results, tens of different names and dates, so I dumped the book into my rucksack along with the photograph and made sure everything else in the cellar was exactly as I’d left it.
Upstairs, the house was silent, street light seeping inside via the glass panels on the front door. Switching off the torch, I moved into the hallway and looked out through the living-room windows to the vacant driveway, to the road beyond. It was well after midnight now. Most of the houses were dark.
Returning to the location app, I saw Egan was about fifteen minutes away. I wasn’t about to take any more chances, either here in the house, or with the phone stuck to the underside of Egan’s Mercedes. If he discovered the mobile, the first thing he’d do was try to get into the handset. It was password-protected, but that wouldn’t keep him out for very long if he – or anyone he knew – had any sort of expertise with technology. It wouldn’t take much imagination for him to start looking in my direction when he found it either, even if I remote-erased everything on it, which I planned to do. But minus any of my information, he couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure the phone was mine.
I set the remote-erase going.
Outside, the night was cool and, for the first time in days, it felt like rain might be in the air. Pulling the door shut, I made my way back along the edge of the property, close to the wall, staying out of the sightline of the house next door. Slipping the torch into the rucksack, I zipped it up and turned the corner.
Then it felt like I got hit by a train.
It took me a second to realize what had happened and, by the time I did, I was on the floor, flat on my back, blood running out of my nose. I looked up, slightly dazed, my vision blurring, and saw a figure loom over me, fists clenched.
It was Billy Egan.
I tried to scramble to my feet, but – in one swift, powerful movement – he’d pushed me down at the shoulder and jabbed me in the neck.
He’s injected me with something.
‘Nighty night,’ he said softly.
I blacked out.
00:09:03
Silence, except for the whir of the camera.
There’s a moment more of quiet, and then – somewhere beyond the office windows – a car horn blares and it’s like the volume snaps back to normal: engines, sirens, music, shouting, the hum of four million people living inside five hundred square miles, travelling sixteen million miles of road. Ray Callson leans forward for his glass of water, takes a sip, then places it down in exactly the same spot as before. There’s a reluctance to him now, wedded to the lines of his face.
‘Are you okay?’
He shrugs. ‘Sure. I guess.’
‘You were telling me about what happened in the Pingrove.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Room 805.’
‘You and your partner went up in the elevator?’
He runs his tongue around his mouth. ‘Yeah,’ he repeats, then heaves a long sigh. ‘Yeah, Luis and I rode the elevator up to the eighth floor and the whole time the manager was just talking at us, trying to fill the air with words. He was talking about absolutely anything except what he’d found up there. I mean, it was like I said. He’d sweated through his shirt. He was frightened. He didn’t want to be there. He just wanted us to go in there and do what we do and make it all magically go away.’
Callson pauses, frowning to himself. ‘I’m trying to remember exactly how it all went down after that. I remember, on the eighth floor of the hotel, they had these expensive penthouse suites. Couldn’t even tell you how much they cost a night, but it was a lot. Gold handles on the door and what have you. And there was definitely a maid outside the room. She’d been crying. There might even have been another manager there too – the maid’s boss. I don’t recall. But Luis was kind of like the junior partner at the time, so I told him to wait outside with everyone. Once I went inside the room, I didn’t want the manager or the maid or whoever bursting in and disturbing my train of thought. At crime scenes, I always liked to have space to think. I liked quiet. I needed time to interpret everything. That’s just how I was. Anyway, the manager had locked the door from the outside, so he handed me the key, and I unlocked the room, and I went in by myself.’
Callson reaches for his water again, but this time, after taking a mouthful, he doesn’t put it down. He just cradles it in his lap, sniffs, clears his throat.
‘It’s crazy,’ he says. ‘Do you know the first thing that came into my head when I opened the door to that suite? It was totally irrational. I thought to myself, “This’ll be the first and only time I ever get to set foot in a place as expensive as this.” ’ He smiles. His eyes aren’t on the camera at all now. They’re on the floor. The smile fades. ‘Like I said, before we went up, the manager had explained to us what the maid had found when she’d gone to clean the room, so I guess – in my head – I’d built up a picture of what to expect in there. And you know what? I’m not sure I felt any different about going into that room than I felt about going into other places I’d been into as a cop. Even by that time, I’d seen my fair share of repugnant shit.’
‘So what you’re saying is, you weren’t scared?’
He shakes his head. ‘Not at first.’
‘But after you went in?’
Callson is still staring into space.
‘Mr Callson?’
‘What he’d done didn’t frighten me,’ Callson says, ‘if that’s what you mean. Why would it? He was just sitting there, on the edge of the bed, crying like a baby. Minute I come in, he looks up and starts saying to me, “I didn’t do this, I didn’t do this,” and I’m thinking, “Sure you didn’t, buddy.” ’
‘Are you saying you didn’t believe him?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he stank of booze. Because he had her blood all down his shirt, his pants, all over his face. And because I could see he had these long strands of hair between his fingers that he’d torn out of her fucking scalp.’ A beat. Callson glances at the camera. ‘I’ve seen that sort of thing – and a lot worse – a million times over. I was seeing them, every day, right up until I retired. One person killing another? That stopped scaring me about a minute after I joined the department. No, it wasn’t what he’d done that frightened me. It wasn’t the act itself.’
‘So what was it?’
‘It was who he’d done it to.’
PART THREE
* * *
39
I opened my eyes.
It took me a couple of seconds to get a sense of where I was, and then my surroundings began to shift into focus. I was in a Portakabin, brushed aluminium blinds at windows either side of me. They were closed most of the way, but I could see that it was still the middle of the night, the dark absolute beyond the glass, except for a single lamp, somewhere outside, that burned yellow. It sent shallow sheets of light into the Portakabin, layered one on top of the other.
I’d been left on the floor at one end of the room, and one of my boots had been taken off and dumped out of reach. It didn’t take me long to work out why: my left ankle had been handcuffed to an old metal radiator. As I tried to move my leg, the cuffs seemed to lock even tighter, the radiator not shifting an inch. It was screwed to the wall with bolts the size of pound coins. There was no give and no escape unless the whole radiator – and probably the wall itself – came with me.
I looked around the Portakabin. It must have been twenty-five feet long. At my end of the room, there was a big desk, substantial and heavy, that had been cleared of anything I might be able to reach and use. I could see the stationery that had once been on it, plus the computer and in tray, on a second desk at the other end. In between were the windows either side of me, the door, and a series of wood-veneer shelving units. Everywhere had a slightly untidy, dishevelled look about it. The paint was peeling and the carpet was dirty. There was a sink stacked with dirty coffee mugs and old, food-encrusted plates. I could smell the toilet from where I was, a mix of stale urine and toilet spray.
I shifted from side to side, checking my pockets, but my wallet was gone, my phone and my car keys as well. My rucksack was nowhere to be seen. Even my watch had been removed. I couldn’t see a clock on the wall, so I had no idea how long I’d been out, or what the time was now – only that it had to be before 6 a.m., because the sun wasn’t up yet.
Leaning forward, I started fiddling with the handcuff at my ankle, trying to see if there was any give in it, but it was secure. I looked around for anything I might be able to repurpose into a makeshift pick, but Egan had done a good job of neutering me here too: there was nothing usable within at least fifteen feet.
I leaned back against the wall, rolling my neck, trying to ease some of the stiffness out. Egan had caught me totally on the hop at the house. I’d been watching his car almost the whole time and, according to the location app, he’d still been fifteen minutes away. The fact that he wasn’t suggested that he’d spotted the phone on the underside of his car some point after he’d left. He’d either moved the phone to another vehicle, or it had just remained there on the Mercedes as a new driver took over, and Egan returned to the house on the Tube. Whichever it was, I felt angry at coming off second best.
But then, after a while, the anger started to become exhaustion – my eyelids struggling to stay open, like the wings of a doomed butterfly – and whatever Egan had injected me with began to take hold again. Slowly, I could feel it dragging me down.
Sometime after that I drifted off to sleep.
It felt like only a few seconds passed, but when I woke, I saw sunlight squeezing past the blinds at the windows. To start with, I wasn’t aware that anyone else was inside the Portakabin with me – but then I felt hands slide under my armpits and lift me roughly off the floor. When I tried to move my hands, to bring them around from behind me, I realized they were now bound with duct tape.
My ankle, still attached to the radiator, sparked with pain – the handcuff gripping tightly – as I was dumped into a chair. I had to sit on the edge of it, with my leg straight and at an angle, or the joint felt like it might pop from its socket. A moment later, a roll of tape wheeled off across the floor of the Portakabin, in the direction of the other desk.
‘Wakey wakey, asshole.’
Egan came out from behind me.
At the Comet, from what I could remember, he’d had a hard south London accent. But it had all been an act. He wasn’t from London. He was American.
His name probably wasn’t even Billy Egan.
He took a couple of steps back until he hit the edge of the sink, then stopped, china coffee mugs pinging and rattling against the surface of the draining board. He studied me for a moment, his mouth turned up in a hint of amusement, before reaching to the back of his jeans. He pulled out a long hunting knife.
I tried to conceal my alarm by turning to the windows, to see if – with daylight – there was a view beyond the blinds, but Egan had closed them even more, only the tiniest slivers of light escaping through.
He laid the knife down on the edge of the sink, the blade catching a finger of sunlight, and removed his beanie. His shaved head glistened with perspiration. I’d put him in his late forties when I’d seen him before, but it was harder to be sure now. Grey stubble dotted his jawline, yet the destructive bent that lingered in his face and eyes seemed to smooth away some of the evidence of age. He watched me for a moment more before reaching into his jacket pocket and taking something else out. It was the mobile phone I’d taped to the underside of his Mercedes.
‘Very clever,’ he said. ‘What’s also clever is that you had the brains’ – he tapped his head with it – ‘to wipe it clean.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Oh. You’re smart, is that it? Is that your thing? You think you’re smarter than me?’ He held up the phone again. ‘I found out about this fifteen minutes after I left the house. Does that make me smart too?’ This time he paused, watching from under his brow, his eyes small and dark. ‘So, if you’re so smart, how come you’re in the corner of the room, chained to that radiator like a fucking dog?’
He tilted his head as he studied me.
‘Look, I’ll make this easy. What’s going to happen is that I’ll ask you some questions, and you’ll give me some answers, and if you don’t do that, I’ll start carving pieces off your body.’
He grabbed the knife, turning it so I could see both sides of the blade. I did my best to suppress the panic that was building in me, at the idea of being chained up in a room with one exit, facing down a man on the fringes of losing control.
‘Where’s Lynda Korin?’ he asked.
So they don’t know where she is either.
His eyes were fixed on me, his body becoming still as he waited for an answer. I looked at him. He must have guessed that I didn’t know where she was, otherwise I would have already closed the case. What he was really trying to find out was how much I knew – about Korin, about him, about what I’d found in his cellar.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the truth.’
He studied me, sniffed. ‘What did you find in the cellar?’
‘You know what I found.’
‘You found that photograph of the angel.’
‘Yes,’ I said, watching his face.
But Egan gave nothing away, just carried on rolling the knife against his hand. In between us, as the sun got stronger outside, a sea of dust emerged.
‘What’s so important about the angel?’ I asked.
‘Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? You and me, we’re both trying to figure that out. And you know who might have the answer?’ He stopped turning the knife. ‘Tha
t stupid bitch you’re trying to find.’
I processed that for a moment.
The angel mattered. It mattered to this case. Korin had taken it with her, but Egan didn’t know why. Neither did Zeller. Neither do I.
I thought of something else. ‘Why take that true-crime book from her house? Why tear those pages out? What case is it that you –’
‘Enough.’ He moved towards me; his legs were either side of my knee, the point of the knife about an inch from my throat. It all happened so quickly. ‘Let me ask you something,’ he said.
I swallowed.
‘I’ve been going through the notes you’ve made, through your phone, and I’ve found a few things. Names, items of interest … well, that makes me a bit nervous.’ With his spare hand, he reached into his pocket and took out a scrap of paper, his eyes pinging between me and what he’d written. ‘Who’s Rafael Walker?’
Microscope.
In my notes, I hadn’t directly attached Walker’s screen name to his real name, so Egan wouldn’t make that connection. But Walker was innocent. He didn’t deserve to be sucked into this mess.
‘He’s just a film historian I was going to speak to.’
‘About what?’
‘About Korin and Hosterlitz’s films.’
Egan eyed me for a second, looking for a trace of a lie, then – presumably unable to see one – glanced at the scrap of paper again. ‘X-C-A-D-A-A-H,’ he read, referring to the Post-it note I’d found at Korin’s house. ‘E-O-E-C-G-E-Y. Kill, one-H-one-nine-M-seven-S. Now I’m assuming that last part is a reference to the film Kill! – to a specific point in it. One hour, nineteen minutes, seven seconds – right?’
I nodded.
‘Is that a yes?’
‘There aren’t any copies of the film left to check.’
He nodded again, clearly up to speed on which of Hosterlitz’s movies were available and which weren’t. ‘And all this other shit above it? All these letters?’
‘I don’t know.’