by Tim Weaver
A pseudonym.
‘Sorry, my mistake,’ I said, and then wheeled back to when I’d first found the box at Korin’s house, and the business card inside for Tony Everett at Roman Film. Korin had told him her name was Ursula Keegan. ‘Sorry, I meant Ursula.’
‘Ursula?’
I heard movement, the line crackled a little, and then there was the ping of metallic blinds being parted.
‘Nah,’ he said.
‘Ursula’s not there?’
‘Nah, it’s not that she ain’t here,’ the man said. ‘It’s just it looks like the blinds are down on the caravan. I don’t think she’s even up yet.’
PART FIVE
* * *
64
Sun briefly peeked through the clouds, rinsing the slopes of Wasdale gold. The valley was a breathtaking sweep of summits and hollows, its vast peaks forming a rugged amphitheatre around Wast Water, a three-mile stretch of lake that sat like a sheet of grey glass at the bottom of scree-covered slopes. When the wind roused itself, ripples scattered across the surface of the water like a delicate and deliberate work of art; and yet there remained something bleak about the lake, a strange, indefinable darkness. In the winter, when the tourists had gone home and the routes into here had become impassable, I imagined the valley might feel like the loneliest place on earth.
The farm sat on the slopes of Buckbarrow, part of the southern ridge of Seatallan, a mountain to the north of the lake. It was a large cream building, enclosed within moss-covered drystone walls, and had two huge corrugated-iron barns at the back of it. I’d driven past and seen tractors and the rusting bones of old machinery in one, and on the way back, I saw pigs in the other, feeding at a trough. There were cows too, but they were out in the fields to the left of the farm, wandering the grassland with their heads down. Immediately behind the barns, the contours of the valley began to change, sloping gradually into a wall of scattered scree and burnt orange fern.
The grid reference was for a location in a field on the opposite side of the road to the farm itself. On the web, the satellite photography hadn’t shown anything but more grass and more walls, but that imagery was four years old – and things had changed since.
There was a caravan there now.
It sat alone in the field, like a ship drifting out on an emerald sea, blinds dropped at its windows.
It had been that way since my arrival.
I’d hired a car in Ealing and had left London at just after 9 a.m. It had been a six-and-a-half-hour drive, slow around the cities and slower once I’d left the A road and started the climb into the National Park. On the radio, I’d been listening to my name repeated all the way up. It had escaped into the wild, my photograph too. It wouldn’t be long before the Met discovered that I’d hired a car. Shortly after that, they’d find me on surveillance cameras, and be able to track me all the way north. I might have five or six hours. The fact that they’d have to coordinate with Cumbria might give me until the morning.
But, one way or another, they were coming.
That was why I was playing it cautiously for the moment – because maybe Lynda Korin knew they were coming too. Maybe the farmer had told her about my call. Maybe she’d heard about me on the radio or seen me on TV, and knew I was on my way. Or maybe this was all a trap. I didn’t know what Korin’s motivation might be for trying to trap me – and I wasn’t sure I really believed that was the case – but she’d been gone ten months, hiding out here while Zeller and Egan had tried to track her down and kill her.
I wasn’t about to underestimate her.
Sixty minutes later, I reassembled my phone and powered it on for the first time in eighteen hours. Messages and missed calls poured in. I swiped through them.
There were only two I was looking for.
Annabel had texted from her holiday in Spain, clearly up to date with the news back home. I told her everything was okay, and that it would get sorted out in a few days. I wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but that was what she needed to hear. The other was a text from Melanie Craw, sent yesterday evening.
We keep missing each other.
CALL ME.
Part of me wanted to speak to Craw, to find comfort in a voice I knew, to tell her the same things I’d told Annabel: everything was all right, I’d get out of this because I’d done nothing wrong. But another part of me saw the reality – that calling her would only lead to an argument. She wouldn’t understand. She was built like a cop, thought like one, acted like one, even as our relationship had become more serious.
I fixed my eyes on the caravan, its door, its blinds. It looked lonelier than ever in this place, with just the farmhouse for company and the scree and the ridges of the slopes. The next property was a mile and a half back. There were more vehicles than buildings here – and, as evening drew in, even the vehicles were drifting away. Pretty soon, I’d be the only one left.
I’d be alone again.
That thought lingered and grew louder, and the more time I allowed to pass, the more disturbed I became by it, the more I hated the idea. So I pushed Dial.
Craw answered after four rings.
‘What the hell have you done, Raker?’
I thought about hanging up straight away – but I stopped myself. Instead, I kept my voice even and said, ‘The media don’t know what happened.’
‘So what happened?’
I watched a Camper van chug past.
‘I didn’t kill Cramer. You know I didn’t.’
‘Then why are you acting exactly like someone who has?’ She sighed. ‘Why are you doing this again? We had this same conversation ten months ago. You remember that? You called me up to tell me you hadn’t done it back then too. How many bloody times is this going to happen?’
This was a mistake. Hang up.
‘It’s a two-way street,’ she said. ‘You get that, right? It’s not you and you. It’s you and me. They’ll go through your phone and see conversations between us. They’ll see this one, Raker. They’re going to crawl up my arse and –’
‘I get it.’
‘Do you? Because what you do affects me.’
‘It affects your career.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You know exactly what it means. Everything I do, every decision I make, you’re not measuring it against what impact it will have on you as a person, or even us as a couple, you’re measuring it against how much impact it will have on your promotion prospects – and what everyone else at the Met will think.’
‘So what if I’m ambitious?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with ambition, Craw. You haven’t even told anyone there that we’re going out – that’s why it’s a problem for you.’ I let her chew on that. ‘No one you work with has a clue we’re actually seeing each other, do they?’
She didn’t respond.
‘Do they?’
‘No,’ she said quietly.
We both took a moment.
‘I didn’t do this,’ I said calmly. She didn’t respond. ‘I know you think I’m reckless, and maybe you’re right – but I didn’t do this. The thing that can’t keep happening, though, is you pretending that I don’t exist during the day, then expecting me to forget all about it once your shift is over. You were right earlier: it’s you and me. But when I’m in a hole like this, I need you to stand up for me. I need your help.’
‘I can’t go giving you details about –’
‘I’m not talking about procedural support, Craw. If I need something from the police database, I can get it. I’m talking about us actually acting like we’re a couple, not some part-time sideshow.’
Rain spotted against the windscreen.
‘This is why I wanted to talk to you at the weekend,’ she said to me, her anger starting to dissipate. ‘This is why I’ve been trying to get hold of you for three days. I needed to make a decision by yesterday morning.’
‘A decision about what?’
She paused. ‘At the end of
last week, the chief super pulled me into his office. He said an opportunity had come up for me.’
‘A promotion?’
‘Yeah, to a superintendent role.’
‘Okay. Well, that’s a good thing.’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, sincerely. ‘Yeah, it is. The thing is, though, to start with, it’s for two years – but with a view to extending the contract if things go well.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘It’s a secondment.’
I frowned. ‘A secondment? A secondment to where?’
‘To Glasgow.’
Both of us paused on the line, as if waiting for the other one to speak first, and then the rain started getting harder, popping against the body of the car like a shower of pebbles. I looked across the fields towards the caravan.
‘I accepted the position,’ Craw said, and then didn’t say anything for a long time. ‘Me and the kids are moving up to Scotland next month.’
But I was only half listening now.
Lights had come on inside the caravan. The door was open too – fanning open and closed as a breeze massaged and swirled the rain. A woman stood in the doorway in a red anorak, the hood up, blonde-grey hair matted to her face by the rain. A knife was in her right hand, pressed against the flat of her thigh, her fingers readjusting at the grip as if she was about to attack something.
She was staring right at me.
It was Lynda Korin.
65
As soon as I got to the gate at the top of the field, she disappeared back inside the caravan and the lights went out. Rain was lashing in hard now, drumming against the field, the parched soil so compact, puddles instantly formed in among the grass.
I opened the gate, its steel pins moaning, and paused there, water running off my face, my coat, my clothes. The door to the caravan remained open, shifting gently back and forth in the wind, but the only thing I could see inside it now was darkness. Without me even noticing, the whole valley seemed to have gone that way: shadows and flickers of light, everything oppressive and ominous, as if the mountains were falling in on me.
I crossed the field quickly, following the gentle slant as it dropped in the direction of the lake. There was so much rain, and it was coming down so hard, the surface had become slick underfoot, streams of crumbling, uprooted earth snaking through the grass like strands of hair. In front of me, wind erupted from the direction of the shoreline, savage and cold, ripping in as if it were a warning signal. The flanks of the caravan popped and bent against the force of it.
The door slammed shut.
I stopped short of it and reached out for the handle, looking along the side of the caravan. The blinds were still pulled. They hadn’t moved an inch. There was no movement from inside either: no creaks, no subtle shift as she moved around.
Did I knock? Did I burst in?
I thought of the knife she’d been holding and then decided to play it safe. I opened the door and swung it all the way back until it locked into place on its clasp. The rain drummed a beat on my jacket, against the side of the caravan, on its windows, on the ground. Distantly, there was what sounded like the low rumble of a lorry, and then I realized it wasn’t that at all. It was thunder.
‘Lynda?’ I said.
My voice got lost in the rain. I stepped closer.
‘Lynda? It’s David Raker.’
Lightning flashed across the sky.
‘I followed your grid reference.’
For the first time, I felt a delicate shift in the caravan’s axis; the slightest movement from back to front as if she’d gently changed position. I waited, seeing if she came to the door. When she didn’t, I inched on to the steps and placed a foot inside the caravan. It creaked beneath my weight, tilting fractionally in my direction.
And then I was inside.
The caravan was about twenty feet long. There was a toilet immediately opposite me and a bunk bed to the right of the door where Korin had obviously been sleeping. Sheets lay crumpled, a blanket, a pillow. To my left, there were cupboards and drawers. Dishes were in a sink. Alongside that, a heater pumped out warm air.
At the other end of the caravan, everything was different.
The seating ran in a U-shape, with windows on all sides. Not that I could see them. Looking at the caravan from my car, and on the approach across the field, I’d thought it had been blinds at the windows. But it wasn’t blinds at all.
It was sheets of grey cardboard.
All across the cardboard, things had been pinned and taped: photographs, itemized phone bills, email printouts, newspaper cuttings, colour reproductions of satellite maps. They spilled from the sheets of cardboard on to the walls, all over them, like a river breaking its banks. She’d even duct-taped printouts and cuttings to the ceiling, some of them peeling away and flickering where the air from the heater circulated. As I continued to look, I saw two clocks next to one another, one set to GMT, one to Minnesotan time, and then pages from a book in another corner – twelve of them, lined up next to each other. They’d been torn out of the true-crime book.
It wasn’t Egan who’d removed them.
It was Korin.
There was so much to take in it was almost impossible to process it all. Things were untouched, or they’d been covered in pen; they were new and clean, or they were old and yellowed and damaged. Documents ran in patterns, in clear lines and spirals, or they ran in no pattern at all, entirely divorced from what was around them.
My eyes dropped to the seats.
Korin was sitting right in the middle of the U-shaped sofa, leaning forward so that her elbows were against her knees. She had a kitchen knife. She’d tilted her wrist so that the tip of the blade was directly pointing at me, and she was still wearing the red anorak I’d seen her in outside. Beads of rain clung to the coat, but most had already fallen away, gathering on the seat around her, soaking through the material so that dark patches formed on either side of her legs.
Her hood was still up, and it was hard to see her clearly, shadows at the corners of her eyes and mouth making it look like her face was being pulled at. Yet I could see her blue eyes, the lines of her jaw, the last ten months leaning heavily on her but not heavily enough to erase her extraordinary beauty.
She glanced at the knife she was holding, and then up at me.
‘You found me,’ she said.
66
‘You finally found me.’
Her voice was quiet and it sounded old, and for a minute it broke the spell. She was a 62-year-old woman who had been on the run for almost a year. She’d spent that time in a caravan in the middle of nowhere sticking pieces of old paper to the walls of a home twenty feet long. She looked exhausted and scared.
I glanced at the knife.
She hadn’t lowered it yet, as if she wasn’t prepared to believe it was me even as I stood in front of her. ‘It’s okay, Lynda,’ I said gently, showing her the palm of my hand. ‘You asked me to find you, and I have.’
She nodded once, and then a second time, hesitating – but then, finally, she put the knife down. As she did, her body seemed to sag: drained, overcome.
‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered. ‘I’m so sorry I had to lie to you.’
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Her lie had almost got me killed, and yet I felt no antipathy towards her. Standing here now, none of it seemed to matter.
‘You figured it out,’ she said.
I looked around the caravan. ‘Most of it.’
She nodded; a half-smile. ‘It’s the small stuff that takes the most thought. Like how to make it look as if I was calling from Minnesota.’ She shrugged. ‘I found this app that lets you disguise your number and replace it with another. If you’d dug deeper, you’d have seen something wasn’t right – but why would you?’
She was right. Why would I? I thought of the calls we’d had, her number prefixed with 001 and followed by 952 –
the area code for Lakeville, Minnesota.
‘I knew the video call would be where it either began or ended,’ she continued. ‘The farmhouse here has the Internet but it’s slow as hell. Joe, the guy who owns the farm, he lets me use it – so I chose a day when he was out, because I thought, “David will want to Skype as soon as possible. He’ll want to get me on video to get a read on me.” I knew the poor connection would help me. In truth, I hoped it would bomb out altogether and we could just do what we had to do on the phone. But I knew if I could get through the Skype call, if you still believed I was Wendy by the end of it … I knew you would help me.’
‘But why? Why get me to find you?’
‘Like I said, I needed your help.’
‘With what?’
She eyed me. ‘The angel.’
‘The wooden angel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then it’s been a wasted journey,’ I said to her, ‘because I thought you had it. I don’t know where it is. All I’ve found are photographs of it.’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you don’t understand.’
She got to her feet and opened up a cupboard above her head. A moment later, she brought something out, cupped in her hand.
It was the angel.
I frowned. ‘You’ve got it already.’
‘Yes,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘I took it when I left.’
It was about eight inches high and beautifully carved, the craft obvious up close, even six decades on. The wood was discoloured in places and there were chips in it, especially along its edges, hairline cracks all over it too. But it was the angel in the photographs. The damage I saw now matched up with the damage I’d seen in the pictures – and it had the crucifix, marked on its neck in faded black pen.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, holding it up to her. ‘How can I help you when you already have it?’
‘There’s something about it.’
I looked at the ornament. ‘What do you mean?’