by Tim Weaver
What aren’t I seeing?
I went through the other pictures. The back of the house, the porch, the rooms, the unfinished kitchen, returning to that shot of the front, feeling that if there was something, it was here. I’d stood in the same position, in the rain, facing the house, earlier, and I’d got exactly the same sense that something was up.
A murmur of conviction.
A certainty.
So what the hell is it?
The old pipes creaked and shifted behind the walls of the cottage as the central heating fired up again.
The house is empty.
You didn’t miss anything.
‘The house is empty,’ I repeated quietly.
And then, in an instant, I saw it.
I’ve been looking at the wrong part of the picture.
As I’d stood there earlier on, I’d seen three paths beyond the back garden, carving their way through carpets of heather and bracken – almost parallel to one another – as the moor rolled on past the boundaries of the house. They were trails imprinted on the moor by walkers, by years of passers-by rounding the property as they skirted the tor. Except in the picture the Frankses had taken when they’d first moved in, there weren’t three trails.
There were only two.
In Craw’s photograph – two and a half years later – the third trail was less defined than the other two, still covered in a flat layer of bracken, but it was there nevertheless, bearing slightly right as the other two remained straight. I let rationality kick in, trying to convince myself of the reasons why: maybe walkers had begun to carve out a new path for themselves in the years in between, keeping to the gentlest contours of the slope as it dipped and then rose. An easier path. A tamer, less demanding route across land that could be craggy and hard.
Or maybe it wasn’t walkers who had made it.
Maybe it was Franks, after he moved in.
And maybe it led somewhere.
47
The weather got worse the moment I hit the moors. By the time I reached the house it was 10 p.m. and rain was coming down so hard it was like nails were falling from the sky.
I pulled as close to the house as I could get, headlights flooding the veranda, and kept the engine running. Everywhere else, the moors were utterly, perfectly black: there was no definition to anything, no sense of where its lines moved and fell. Outside of the headlights, it was a vast, endless void. As I got out, wind whipped in, pressing hard, rocking the car on its springs.
From the boot, I grabbed the extension lead I’d used earlier, connected it to the car and began unravelling it, moving across the front lawn – just a fenced-in continuation of rolling moorland – and up on to the veranda. I unlocked the house, grabbed a tatty lamp that had been left behind by Ellie, and plugged it in. Light spilled out across the living room and ran through to the kitchen. With no electrics to call on, it was as good as it was going to get. More importantly, it would help anchor the house in the darkness while I headed out into the night, following the third trail. After I was done, I returned to the veranda, immediately under attack from the wind and rain again.
Continuing around the woodshed, I swung my flashlight across the spaces beyond the back garden and found the three trails. In the months since Franks had vanished, the third trail had started to become less defined, fresh roots growing out of the trampled bracken, callow heather closing in from both sides. The other two – established over decades – remained flattened yellow pathways, clearly demarcated across the grass.
Rain came again and again, pounding my face and jacket. I stood at the start of the third trail and shone the flashlight along it. Behind me, the picket fence that the Frankses had used to segregate their land creaked and popped in the wind. To my left, somewhere in the darkness, and a third of a mile above me, was the tor. To my right, I could see the very faintest of lights – a square of window – from one of the houses in Postbridge.
Otherwise, except for the lamp in the house, there was only darkness.
Tilting the flashlight down, I started along the trail.
It was uneven and difficult to judge. When I almost turned my ankle in an animal burrow, I slowed down even further, and started to feel the toe of my boot hitting gashes in the earth, hidden beneath blankets of bracken. There were sudden, unexpected slants in the topography too, knocking me off balance and forcing me away from the path. When I got back on to it, I tried to concentrate on where I was stepping, but it became more and more difficult: not only was the path becoming less defined, the rain was getting harder, pelting against my face in pellets as hard as gravel. Finally I had to stop – adrift in a sea of total, impervious darkness – pull up the hood of my coat and zip it to my chin.
Now all I could hear was rain.
As it drummed against my hood, I pushed on. Ahead of me, mud trails – slick with rainwater – winked in the glare of the flashlight, and the path disappeared for a moment, overrun by bracken. I stopped again, raised the torch, tried to angle it beyond the growth – and then I picked up the trail on the other side, zigzagging slightly and bearing right.
I glanced over my shoulder, back towards the house.
It was why I’d used the lamp: to act as a beacon. Even so, it was like being out at sea in the middle of the night, the shore reduced to a pinprick of light. Except I’d gone further than I thought: I’d dropped about three hundred and fifty feet, the house above my eyeline, and I was a quarter of a mile away already. The light from the living room and the kitchen seemed to drift in and out as rain ran into my eyes.
I pushed on, down further and further across worsening terrain, until I realized I’d lost the trail. I stopped and swung the torch around, back up the way I’d come. Rain had turned the slope into a mudslide, but – among it – I could just about make out a line of trampled bracken. I traced it with the flashlight from about sixty feet back, following its movement in my direction. And then, thirty feet from where I was, I noticed something.
The path stopped.
It ended in a small clearing about three feet across, free of bracken or heather. As I got closer, I could see the clearing hadn’t been created by foot – it had been burned away, with something like weedkiller.
But too much had been used.
The grass had scorched.
Five feet from the clearing I saw it had a molehill in it, a flat plate of mud, sitting there like a cake. The wind whipped in through the valley again, funnelled by the incline of the hills either side, and I was forced into a sideways step, rain jagging into my hood. Then, as the light drifted across the molehill again, a sudden realization struck me.
It isn’t a molehill.
Someone had buried something.
I moved quicker now, dropping to my knees in the clearing, not caring about the wet grass soaking through my trousers, or the rain pelting against my face. With the torch on the ground, directed towards the hole, I started grabbing handfuls of dirt, throwing it aside, clawing at it, digging down into the moor. Half a foot down, I paused for breath, warm inside the coat, cold on my exposed skin. Then I started again, down further and further, until I was a foot in. Two feet into the earth, I started to wonder if I’d called it wrong, or misunderstood what this was.
But then my fingers glanced something.
It was loose in the hole.
I reached in, picked it out and held it up to the light.
A strip of plastic.
It was about two inches long and half an inch high, and – with a circle punched in the end of it – looked like it might once have been attached to a key ring. I turned back to the hole I’d dug, shining the torch into its corners, wondering if I’d managed to miss a set of keys buried in the mud. Then I stopped, a thought gathering pace.
The keys aren’t here, because they’ve been removed.
The tag was dropped by accident.
I turned the plastic tag over and looked at the other side.
Adrenalin fizzed in my guts.
So
mething was printed on it: the same thing I’d seen written on a scrap of paper, next to the map of Bethlehem, in Franks’s first Moleskine notebook; the same number he then doodled on to the bottom of a flyer, years later, when he met Murray for a drink.
It said, ‘BROLE108’.
48
I pocketed the plastic tag and started to fill in the hole. As I was finishing, beyond the glow of the torch, something shifted in the darkness.
I stopped.
Shone the torch out to my right.
Either side of me, the moor continued to slope away, its gradient getting sharper as it dropped further into the valley. The cone from the flashlight carried about forty feet, out to where a sea of ferns moved in the wind. When I shone it the other way, it carried an even greater distance: across a patch of moorland undisturbed by plants or trees, the gentle roll of the hill partly disguising the dots of light from Postbridge that I’d been able to see higher up.
Getting to my feet, I started the climb.
I kept the torch tilted downwards, trying to ensure I didn’t lose the path this time, but it was still hard going: the grass had become slick with rainwater, the mud moist and difficult to grip underfoot. A couple of times I slipped, the flashlight tumbling out of my grasp and rolling off into the undergrowth. By the time I retrieved it, I’d retreated another five or six feet. Halfway up, I stopped and looked towards the lights of the living room, to see how far I had to go.
Something moved inside the house.
Killing the torch, I let darkness settle around me, a flutter of unease passing through my chest. I scanned the area, trying to force myself to see, but all I could make out was the vague, grey shapes of ferns close by and tiny blobs of light from the houses in the village. As I turned and faced up the hill, my foot slipped on a band of mud and I had to reach forward, to a raised knot in the path ahead of me, and grab it. I stayed like that for a moment and closed my eyes.
Listen.
Beyond the pulse of the rain, the wind whined like an animal, making it hard to hear anything else. Any footsteps. Any approach. Anyone close by. When I opened my eyes again, I could just about make out the shape of the house, eighty feet further up the slope, its outline like a smudge of grey paint against the blackness of the moors.
Inside the light was still on.
At the front, my car headlights too.
I pushed on, more slowly this time, conscious of making a noise the closer I got to the house. When I finally reached the brow of the hill, the picket fence only a few feet in front of me, I could hear something: an uneven banging, loud, louder, then nothing at all.
The front door of the house.
I’d pushed it shut.
Now it was open.
Flipping the flashlight and gripping it like a weapon, I came around the edges of the property, as close to the house as I could get. Halfway along, I checked back the way I’d come: the garden, picket fence, everything that lay beyond it, had disappeared now. All I could see, feel and smell was what immediately surrounded me: the southern side of the house, against my back; the distant hint of Postbridge; the whiff of sodden bracken.
I edged to the corner of the property.
The veranda, built three and a half feet off the ground, was level with my hip. I peered past the woodshed, along the boards of the veranda, to the front door. It was slowly fanning in the wind, knocking against the frame. Someone had opened it and failed to close it again after they’d left. Or they’d opened it up, gone inside – and they were yet to come out.
I looked to my car.
The driver’s side door was pushed to, but not closed. Whoever it was had opened it up and had a look around inside. As I paused there, trying to think whether I had anything in the boot of the car I could use as a more effective weapon, the door flapped again in the wind, clattering against the frame and whipping back in my direction. This time – in the light spilling out from the living room – something caught my eye.
It was attached to the door itself.
A thin length of wire.
It snaked off from the underside of the door, all the way along the veranda, into the woodshed. I checked behind me again, making sure no one had approached from the back of the house, and then reached through the rails and grabbed the wire.
It was as thin as a thread of cotton.
Barely visible, but tough and unbreakable.
I leaned right into the woodpile.
In the darkness at its centre, hidden inside the criss-cross of logs, something red winked at me. Once. Twice. Three times. Something electronic. There was a small space on this side of the pile – enough for me to slide a couple of fingers into – so I fed my hand into the gap, trying to grasp at whatever it was.
I felt my forefinger brush a hard plastic shell.
This time I forced my fingers even further inside, feeling the jagged edge of a log prick the skin at my knuckles. Wind roared across the front of the house, carried down the side of the tor, rain pummelling my face and escaping into the hood. With my cheek pressed against one of the logs – the smell of damp wood forced into my nose – I tried again to grip whatever it was, and felt my fingers trace the bumps and indentations on it.
A series of LED lights.
A plastic grille.
It felt like a walkie-talkie.
But then, as I tried – and failed – to get at it a third time, my eyes returned to the length of wire, attached to the unit and connected to the underside of the door, and my mind spooled back to earlier in the day: as I’d been going through the house, I’d heard a series of clicks.
Shit.
I whipped my hand out of the woodpile. When I’d come up here earlier in the day, when I’d opened the door and walked through the house, I’d tripped it.
It was a makeshift alarm system.
49
I tried to force myself to hear movement from inside the house – confirmation I wasn’t alone – but the rain made it hard, suppressing and deflecting the sounds of the moor. In the centre of the veranda, the door flapped like a tongue, the wooden structure of the house creaking as the wind gathered pace. I watched for any change of light, any gentle flicker of a shadow, but the weather was the only thing that moved. The house was still.
At the rear, the picket fence groaned in the wind. When I looked back along the veranda, my eyes fell on the alarm system again, the wire snaking from left to right in the wind and the rain, like a beached fish.
It had been set up to let someone know when the house had a visitor.
Double-checking I still had the plastic tag on me, I moved around to the rear of the house. Fifteen feet along, attached to the back of the building, was the toolshed. On the other side of that was the rear door, leading through to the kitchen. I ducked beneath the first set of windows – light spilling out from the living room – and headed across the garden to the shed. At the door, I dropped to my haunches, below the padlock, looked both ways along the house and popped the lock. It fell away.
I caught it and set it down.
Easing the door out from the frame, as gently as I could to reduce noise, the smell of oil, old cloths and damp wood poured past me. I reached inside, grabbed a shovel and went to push the door shut again. But then I noticed something through the corner of my eye.
A disturbance in the light from the kitchen.
I brought the shovel towards me, pushed the toolshed door closed and clipped the padlock back through its loop. And then I watched. But there was nothing more: no sign of anyone inside. No shift in the light. No shadow.
Keeping the shovel low, clutching it midway down the shaft, I moved forward, across the garden, towards the door. A couple of feet short of it, I stopped and watched its glass panel again. Still nothing. Inching forward, I slowly rose to the lip of the glass and looked in. Despite the glow from the lamp in the living room, great swathes of the kitchen were still black, the edges of the units closest to me just about visible. Where the renovation hadn’t been finis
hed, there were shadows. On the wall I could just about make out a clock.
It was dead.
Tucking the flashlight into my back pocket and gripping the shovel with both hands, I carried on past the kitchen, to the corner of the house. At this side was a small, flattened strip of concrete on which Franks and Ellie had once parked their Audi.
Suddenly: movement.
At the periphery of my vision, I saw a flash of colour beyond the beam of the BMW’s headlights. Briefly, everything was shadow and darkness again – and then I saw the same flash of colour, moving off towards the treeline. Someone was heading away from the house.
They had too much of a head start.
I wouldn’t catch them on foot.
Dropping the shovel, I headed to the car, yanking open the door and sliding in at the wheel. Freeing the plug adaptor from the lighter, I slammed the car into reverse and whipped it around, the tyres briefly losing their grip on the wet grass before grabbing at the track and jolting me forward. Straight away, it felt like something was wrong, but as the headlights fanned right to left, carving through the darkness like a knife through a curtain, I saw the figure again, and focused all my attention on that. Grey hooded top. A blob of light shining on his shaved scalp.
Reynolds.
He looked back over his shoulder at me, sixty feet in front – and then, weirdly, began to slow up. As I closed in on him, I became aware of a heaviness in the steering, as if the car were being pulled right.
I had enough time to see the half-smile on his face – enough time to wonder why he’d chosen to run and not attack me – before I realized what he’d done.
He’d punctured one of my tyres.
I jabbed at the pedal – instinctive, desperate – pushing so hard it felt like I was kicking through the chassis. The car swerved, snaking off the mud track on to the grass, the treeline looming in front of me. When I realized it wasn’t going to stop in time, I yanked at the belt, drew it across me and clicked it home. A second later, the car hit a ridge in the track and smashed into a grass bank. As the belt locked like a vice, pinning me to the seat, the impact sent the car into a tilt and my head lashed sideways, into the window. The glass cracked, splitting against my face.