by Tim Weaver
Another knock at the door.
‘What do they want?’ Reynolds hissed.
‘They always cook a big stew on a Friday night.’
‘So?’
‘So they always bring some down for me.’
‘Charlie?’ the voice repeated. ‘Are you there?’
Reynolds grabbed her by the throat, pinning her against the wall. His fingers felt as hard as bullets. ‘Answer it. Get rid of them.’ He pressed harder. ‘Don’t fuck with me.’
She didn’t react.
‘Are you listening to me?’
She nodded this time.
‘If you warn them, if you shout out, if you run, I will kill them all: him, her, their girl. And I will do it all in front of you.’
He held her there a moment more.
‘Are you listening to me, Casey?’
She nodded again.
His eyes narrowed – and then he let go.
Casey hurried across the kitchen, heart pounding, stomach knotted, but then hesitated in the doorway, looking along the hall to the front door. She could see the silhouette of the man from upstairs.
Anthony.
A nice guy. A nice couple.
A nice family.
They’ve got a little girl, Casey thought. I can’t let Reynolds hurt her.
As she hesitated, as Anthony knocked on the door again, Reynolds came forward a step, fists at his side. ‘Answer it,’ he snarled. ‘And get rid of him.’
She turned back to face the door.
‘Charlie?’ Anthony said again.
She walked along the hallway.
‘I’m coming,’ she said softly, her voice betraying her fear, tears slowly filling her eyes as she realized this was the end. She’d never been scared of dying. Not after Lucas.
But she was scared now.
And, in those final moments before she answered the door – before she took the food from her neighbour and closed off the outside world for ever – she thought of how Len wouldn’t get a voicemail message from her tomorrow.
How he would realize something was wrong.
Realize Reynolds had forced her to confess everything.
And realize – inevitably – that the end had finally come for them both.
70
It felt like the room had grown roots, pinning me to the floor. I looked up at the blank card, a letter from Franks to Bullock saying how much he missed his son, and then to the picture of the three of them: in 1997, Franks would have been forty-six, Bullock would have barely been twenty-two. I thought of her husband at the time, Robert Collinson, and wondered if he, even for a minute, had suspected that the boy wasn’t his. I doubted it, otherwise their marriage surely wouldn’t have continued for three years. From what I’d read, it had been the death of their son that had split them up. Except his son, the boy he spent two years bringing up as his own, had never been his.
He had been Franks’s.
It all started on the Pamela Welland case.
Franks was the lead. Bullock was the witness in the bar. They’d come together by chance, by fate, whatever it was they believed in – and then I saw now that it became something more. But the pregnancy had to have been a mistake. She was already married to Collinson by that time, Franks had been married for twenty-six years to Ellie, and their kids – their son, their daughter – had flown the nest: Carl was twenty-three, Craw was twenty-five.
Even older than Bullock.
My thoughts shifted to Craw, to whether she’d had knowledge of her father’s secret life, to why she’d asked me to find him in the first place if that was true. And then I felt a pang of sadness for Ellie. She had no clue that the last seventeen years of her marriage had been built on a lie; that her husband’s reasons for moving down to Devon might not have been because he loved the wide-open spaces of the county, like he’d told her – but because he loved another woman.
He wanted to be closer to her.
To the memories of his son.
She said he made her worried, Garrick had told me on the phone. That was her choice of words. But I understood now: Bullock wasn’t worried about what Franks would do to her. She wasn’t scared of him. She was worried for him. She was worried about their secret coming out. She felt no fear of him, and she never had.
She loved him back.
There were so many questions now, one after the other, that I realized I’d tuned out all the other sounds in the room. The mechanical buzz of the generator. The soft purr of the video and the television. The gentle crackle of the light bulb above me.
And something else.
I reversed away from the wall and looked back along the storage room. The noise had stopped now. Tightening my grip on the flashlight, I returned to the false wall, to the hole in the cavity, crouched and shuffled through.
The day room was lighter than before: the sun was up, passing through the only window, washing in from the corridor, from the windows on the eastern wall.
I moved through the disturbed dust, to the double doors of the day room, and looked out. In both directions, it was quiet: a breeze passed me, from one end of the hallway to the other, coming in through the broken holes in the windows and drawing itself deeper into the hospital. To my left, the corridor carried on, one of the doors flapping back and forth. Twenty feet further along was the proper entrance to the storage room I’d just been in: as I’d expected, the doorway had been secured shut with a thick metal plate, making the false wall the only way in and out.
Slowly, I kept going, checking behind me every ten paces. I passed identical rooms, some closed, some open, some with furniture, some with none. The light seemed to change a little more every second, sun spilling in from everywhere, through the glass, through skylights, through breaches and schisms in the structure itself. A mesh of streams emerged in front of me, sunlight criss-crossing like laser sights, and then I got to another corridor, heading left in the direction of the island’s southern tip.
I know this part.
The corridor had windows on either side, each of the windows made up of twenty separate glass blocks. The walls and ceiling were discoloured, peeling, paint marbled as it shed like a skin. And at the end was an open door, flanked by two stained-glass windows.
Just inside, an IV stand stood, covered in cobwebs.
Reynolds’s photograph.
I moved towards the open door, pieces of old tile, of dried paint, scattering against the toe of my boot. At the door, I stopped, looking through the gap. The benches I’d seen in Reynolds’s photograph were still in place, just like the IV stand. To the right of the room was an elevated platform, with a lectern on it. Above that was a circular window, entirely stained glass, with an image of Christ being tempted by Satan.
It was a chapel.
I placed a hand against the door and pushed. It was made from thick oak, similar to the one at the front entrance, and wheezed gently as it fanned back to reveal the rest of the room. But, as I started thinking about the reasons Reynolds might have chosen to take a picture of the hospital’s chapel, I heard something behind me.
A soft crunch.
I went to turn – but then a hand locked in place at the back of my neck, and a knife slid in against my throat. The blade was so sharp it nicked my collarbone.
‘Don’t move a muscle.’
I held up my hands either side of me.
‘You going to give me trouble?’
I shook my head, trying not to get my throat cut. But I was already moving ahead: I knew the voice.
And it wasn’t Reynolds.
This man had a London accent.
The rasp of an old man.
I’d heard the same voice – before this, before everything that had happened since – in the home movie Ellie had shot of her husband knocking down a wall in their Dartmoor home.
I’d found Leonard Franks.
71
‘Leonard, I’m not your enemy.’
The knife dropped away a fraction.
He d
idn’t reply, his hand still locked in place at the back of my neck, but as I said his name a second time, trying to soften my expression even more, I felt the knife drift even further out from my throat. An instant later, he shoved me forward.
I turned.
In front of me stood a pale reflection of the Leonard Franks I’d seen in photos, the ghost of the person I’d watched knock a wall down with a sledgehammer. The muscle he’d maintained into his sixties had gone; he was now a bleached, haggard old man, his clothes hanging off him, his skin drawn tight against the bones of his face. His silver-grey hair, so immaculately styled before, had grown out into an untidy, straggly mess.
He was an apparition, sallow and anaemic, even his tall frame giving way to a hunch, as if he’d spent the last nine months crouched in the darkest corner of the darkest part of this place. I thought, briefly, of the storage room, of the history on its walls, and realized maybe that was what he’d been doing. But then he raised the knife, almost jabbed it at me, a flash of steel returning to his face, and I could see not everything had gone. He was still smart.
He could still fight.
He could survive.
I held up a hand. ‘Leonard, I can help you.’
‘Who have you brought here?’
‘No one. It’s just me.’
‘Don’t lie to me, son.’
‘It’s true.’
He tilted his head slightly, as if trying to draw the real truth out of me, and then he waved the knife back along the corridor. ‘Have you even looked outside?’
I frowned at him.
‘Go.’
He waved the knife at me, gesturing for me to pass him and head back down the corridor. I did as he said. When I got to the hallway with the wards on it, I looked back at him, and he used the knife to tell me to head right. The whole time I was trying to figure out a plan. How to bridge the gap between us without getting a blade in the ribs. How to convince him I wasn’t his enemy. How to get the answers I needed out of him.
‘In there,’ he said.
He was pointing to one of the rooms on the eastern wall. I made my way in, over more debris, past a rusting metal bed frame, to a window looking out across the water.
Down at the jetty was another boat.
Shit.
Someone had arrived after me.
I turned. ‘I didn’t come with –’
But he was gone.
Quickly, I moved out of the room and into the corridor, and – to my left – I caught a glimpse of him taking the stairs back down to the ground floor.
The shadows swallowed him up.
I headed after him. ‘Leonard, wait.’
Taking the steps two at a time, I sprinted back to the split in the corridor. The sun had made it down in patches – enough to create a low grey light; enough to see him take the corridor south, towards the back of the hospital – but the night still ruled here. Thick, unyielding shadows clung to pillars, coves and doorways, to sudden changes in the layout of the building as corridors fed off into different parts of the maze. I upped my pace and followed, watching Franks move from dark to light to dark again – then fail to reappear.
Now all I could hear were footsteps.
Countless doors whipped past as the corridor started to bend, drifting away from the eastern and western sides of the hospital, and ploughing its own furrow south, across the island. I caught another glimpse of Franks ahead of me, there and gone. Mostly, all I could hear were the echoes of his movement inside a tunnel of doors that never ended. The deeper I got, the more oppressive the darkness became, the grey becoming clouded and murky, the walls closing in around me. With it came a smell: decrepit and stale, like old paper – and then something more ripe and overpowering. The stench of compost.
Soon, I realized why.
Without warning, it began to get light again, colour rinsing into the corridor via a pair of double doors directly in front of me, glass panels in each. As I closed in on them, I saw they were still swinging gently. Franks had gone through them.
I slowed up.
Through the glass panels, I could see the greenhouse, the distinctive triangular kink on the western wing of Bethlehem’s layout. Sun streamed in, illuminating it, empty flower trays lined up in the middle. A gardening stool sat on its own, between two of them. Next to that were five chairs, stacked up. The greenhouse was forty feet from end to end, glass ceiling about thirty feet high.
I went to push open the door. Stopped.
There was no noise down here, no wind, no broken windows to pass through. It was silent. And yet I thought I’d heard a voice behind me.
I turned and looked back into the dark.
Nothing.
Glancing through the glass panel again, I saw only one way for Franks to go: at the opposite end, down a flight of steps. Above the door was a rusting sign that said, STAFF ONLY. It must be the kitchens.
The same noise again.
What the hell is that?
Stepping away from the door, I moved a few paces back along the corridor, still gripping the torch. I couldn’t switch it on. Not any more. It let Franks know where I was.
And whoever else was here.
I kept going for another twenty feet, then stopped. Listened. Nothing. The hospital was so muted, the only thing I could hear was the soft buzzing in my ears.
But then it came again.
Louder. Closer.
A voice.
‘David?’ it said again, the word echoing towards me.
And then I realized who it was: Melanie Craw.
72
The light from the greenhouse passed through the glass panels of the double doors and cast long, parallel rectangles across the floor in front of me. Beyond that, the corridor was opaque.
I heard her before I saw her.
She didn’t speak again, didn’t call out for me, but – gradually – I could hear her footsteps getting louder, rhythmic, steady, and then she appeared on the edges of the light, right at the apex of the rectangles. She stopped, half her face visible, her feet, some of her trousers. Everything else was still a part of the corridor, covered by the blackness.
‘Hello, David,’ she said.
I checked her hands. They were at her side, no weapons in them, one of them out flat against her thigh, the other balled into a fist.
‘Craw. What the hell’s going on?’
She nodded, as if she’d expected the question. Her skin was the colour of chalk, her hair a mess. She looked different, unexpectedly shabby.
She swallowed. ‘Reynolds said you would be here.’
I felt a twist of betrayal. Deep down, a part of me had still clung on to the idea of her not being in on this; of her not working with Reynolds, but against him. But then I remembered what I’d seen in Franks’s room upstairs: years of secrets, of duplicity. Craw was his daughter. They shared the same genes.
Anger burned in my throat, and the words were out of my mouth before I’d even processed them: ‘You fucking liar. You said you weren’t working with him.’
She blinked; said nothing.
‘Where’s Reynolds?’
I couldn’t still the rage, or the disdain I felt for her. It was pooling in my chest, forcing me towards her. Even as I tried to regain my composure, told myself she didn’t have any weapons, nothing to come at me with – that I didn’t have to get angry to get the answers I needed – I couldn’t suppress it. In that moment, I hated her for what she’d done.
She’d made me doubt myself.
Worse, she’d stabbed me in the back.
‘Is Reynolds here?’ I repeated, teeth gritted.
She seemed to start, as if jolted from a memory, coming forward half a step. ‘You tripped the alarm an hour ago. But he’s been on to you for a while now. He put a tracker on your mobile phone two days ago – after you crashed your car.’
A sudden realization hit me: I’d replaced my mobile once, when he’d managed to lose me on the Tube – but not a second time. In the hours a
fter he’d cut my tyre, after I’d crawled out of a hospital bed with stitches in the back of my head, I’d lost my focus. I’d forgotten myself. I’d got sloppy. I never returned to those moments on Dartmoor. I woke from unconsciousness, watched him leave Franks’s house, got my injuries repaired, slept them off and changed my car. But the case just kept coming and coming – and I never stopped to think about what he might have done in the time that I was out cold.
I thought I’d been smart keeping my phone off, removing the SIM, reducing the amount of calls I was making – but they were on to me from the moment I’d woken up after the car crash. Every time I switched on my phone, they had my location again. And when I’d used it that last time, in the post office, they knew I was in Brompton Lee – and they guessed I was about to cross the causeway. Tripping the alarm just confirmed it. Reynolds had always known there was a secret hiding in Bethlehem: it was why he’d taken the photos of the outside, of the chapel; why he’d set up the alarm in the first place.
The irony was, in the end it had gone exactly as I’d predicted: he waited until I was close enough to the truth about Franks’s disappearance – and then he came for me. He needed a fresh perspective. He needed someone else to figure it out.
They both did.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I said to her.
She didn’t react. She didn’t do anything. Instead, she muttered, ‘Have you found out what happened to him?’ There was no expression in her voice at all: it was colourless, almost robotic. ‘Have you found out what happened to Dad?’
I shook my head. ‘Is that a joke?’
‘I need to find him.’
For the first time, something registered with me. I looked at her hair again, messy and out of place; her clothes, dishevelled and spattered with mud; and then, finally, at her face. Had she been crying?
As if she’d read my thoughts, fear flashed in her eyes.
‘Craw?’
‘I’m not working with him!’ she said quickly.
Momentarily confused, I took an instinctive step towards her. But then she jolted again, more violently this time, and staggered out of the darkness.