Never Coming Back (18 page)

I paused, readying the lie. “It's just a loose end.”

A loose end that could be the key to finding them.

“No,” she said. “They never mentioned anything.”

It didn't change much: I was still going to head up there.

As I thanked her and hung up, something suddenly came to me: I'd been trying to recall the man who'd been with Lee; the man who'd come up to me at the bar in the Mandalay Bay, five years ago. And I'd been trying to remember what he'd said.

Let me give you a piece of advice
. He'd been in his forties, thin and wiry, with a smooth, hairless face.
Someone will always have the edge over you, David.
He'd known my name.
You're just flesh and bones like everyone else.
He'd known who Derryn was too.
Do both of you a favor and stay out of our business.

I'd tried to tell him that I didn't even know him. But then I remembered his response as clearly as if no time had passed at all.

No
, he'd said.
But you know Lee Wilkins
.

Martha Muire lived in a village on the eastern fringes of Torquay, in the other direction from Dartmoor, so, as I traced the circumference of the national park, I decided against doorstepping her. It wasn't just that it was miles out of my way, or that I needed to be up and back as soon as possible in case Katie Francis called to say Carter Graham would see me. It was that she was an old woman—at seventy-two, almost five years older than Ray Muire would have been—and generally people of that generation thrived on routine. If I turned up, out of the blue, it would either confuse her or antagonize her. But if I called her first, it gave me the chance to lay the groundwork for a visit—if it even came to that.

As soon as she answered the phone, I knew it was the right decision. She sounded older than seventy-two, reading her phone number out, then stumbling halfway through, then repeating it all over again. When she'd finished, I said to her, “Mrs. Muire, my name is David Raker—I'm an investigator looking into the disappearance of the Ling family, here in Devon, back in January. I'm not sure if you remember that case from the news?”

“No.” She had a gentle Devonian twang to her accent. “No, I don't.”

“Well, one of the people who claimed to have seen that family in the days after they went missing was your husband.”

A pause. “Ray?”

“Yes. He said he saw them at Farnmoor House.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“David Raker.”

Another pause. “Have we talked before?”

“Before?”

“Have you called me before?”

“No, I haven't.”

A strange question.
I filed it away and moved on.

“Mrs. Muire?”

“Yes?”

“Would it be okay for me to ask you a couple of questions?”

At first she seemed reluctant, perhaps a little suspicious, as if she'd answered all the questions about her husband she ever wanted to, and couldn't think who might want to know more. But, slowly, as I gently
started to steer her in the right direction, she began to warm up. We spent ten minutes talking about Ray and how much she missed him, and I didn't interrupt, letting her answers build a picture for me: most of the time she was lucid and self-deprecating, playing on the fact that she was getting old, but occasionally she didn't have to play on it. She'd lose the tail of the conversation, allowing it to wander off into other areas, and every time it happened I gently steered her back toward Ray.

“So, what about Paul and Carrie Ling?”

“What do you mean?”

“He was convinced he saw them?”

“There was no doubt in his mind.”

“Do you remember what he said to you?”

She'd struggled throughout to recall precise details, so I wasn't holding out for any revelations—and I wasn't disappointed. “No,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“But you believed him?”

“Oh, definitely. He was my husband, of course, so I suppose your first instinct is to always support your partner. But even if that hadn't been the case, it would have been hard to dispute him. I don't remember the details, but I remember he was sure about what he'd seen.” She stopped. “I mean, why would he lie about something like that?”

“Maybe he wasn't lying. Maybe he was just mistaken.”

“He knew what he saw. I'm sure of it.”

I didn't bother fighting her on it. She'd fallen in line behind her husband and she remained true to him, a stance that would only have hardened in the months after his death. The facts seemed less romantic, though: Muire's eyesight was declining rapidly, and he liked a drink. At best, those two things clouded the picture; at worst, they discredited Ray Muire as a witness altogether. Certainly, his interview with Rocastle didn't paint him in the kind of posthumous glow his wife was clinging to.

“He saw Paul and Carrie on a Sunday—is that right?”

“I don't really remember, I'm afraid.”

“Did he often work Sundays?”

A long pause. “I think it used to depend on what was going on at the house.” She paused again. “Carter, well, he would hold a lot of parties and, you know, social . . .”

She'd lost her train of thought. “Social events?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“Did you and Ray ever attend any?”

“A few.”

“That must have been fun.”

“Oh, it was. Back when I didn't have the turning circle of the
Titanic
, I used to like a little dance.” She chuckled to herself. “But about ten years ago, I became unwell and I had to, you know . . .” She stopped. “Scale back. It was a shame, but it didn't bother me as much as it bothered Ray. He was a very social animal; loved being out and about.”

I saw my chance: “So did he then start going out on his own?”

“Yes.”

“Where was his local?”

“We have a pub just down the road here, but mostly he used to like going back to Totnes. That's where he spent a lot of his twenties, so he still had lots of friends there.”

“How often did he go out?”

“Oh, I don't know. Two or three times a week.”

“Did it ever bother you?”

“Not really. He'd only ever go for a couple of pints.”

“But he obviously had more than that the night he died?”

She didn't respond, but her silence spoke volumes: he liked more than just a pint or two, and it was clearly something she'd never fully managed to get a handle on, maybe at any stage of their marriage. “He never got out of control, though,” she added quickly, as if assuming I'd think the worst. “He was a lovely, kind man. His father had been a drinker, and he'd just grown up in that kind of environment. When he went out, he
really
went out if you know what I mean. But he always got soppy when he was drunk. He definitely wasn't the aggressive type. I think, if he'd been like that, I wouldn't have let him do it.”

If you'd ever even had a choice.

“Did you ever worry about him before then?”

“Worry about him?”

“That the combination of the drink and his eyesight might be a problem?”

“We're old, David, but not
that
old.”

It seemed another weird answer, but before I had the chance to follow up on it, she said, “I'm sorry to be rude, but I'm meeting a friend in twenty minutes.”

“Of course.”

“If you want to know anything else, you can call me again.”

“I appreciate that, Mrs. Muire. Thank you.”

“It's been a pretty terrible year what with one thing and another.”

“I can imagine.”

“Ray going like that, then the house . . .”

“House?”

“Oh,” she said, “I was burgled a month after Ray died.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.” But my mind was already ticking over. “What was taken?”

“That was just the thing. Nothing, really. They smashed the front door in, left the house in an awful mess, but the only thing they took was a photograph from a frame.”

“A photograph of what?”

“A photograph of Ray.”

Once I got on to Dartmoor, the weather changed. Clouds rolled in, coming fast over the hills, as I followed a lonely B-road into the heart of the park. After about ten minutes it started to spit with rain. After twenty, the roads were awash with rivers of water as big, gnarled stormclouds opened in the skies above. Through the heavy rain it was hard to see the phone booth initially, but—as the rooftops of Princetown came into view in the distance—it emerged from behind a bank of trees that had already been stripped of their leaves for winter.

Beyond it was the farmhouse, empty in the pictures I'd seen of it on Google. As there was nowhere to park on the road, I turned off and headed up the dirt track toward the house. The road up was like the building: broken, pockmarked, and in desperate need of repair. Out front there was the space for three cars, but there were no vehicles—save the rusting skeleton of a tractor in an adjacent barn—and no sign of life. If anything, the house looked in an even worse state than it had online. A door. Two windows. Two more on the first floor, one of which was missing a small pane of glass and part of its shutter. A cluster of roof tiles were ripped off too. Everything around the house was overgrown.

I killed the engine and looked back across my shoulder, to the B-road I'd come in on, then down to the phone booth. I wasn't exactly sure what I'd been expecting. Maybe, in my more hopeful moments, some kind of marker; an idea of why someone would choose this phone in particular. But, in reality, I hadn't been expecting a revelation, and I knew why the caller had chosen this place: it was a public pay phone on the edge of a village in the most remote part of the county. No CCTV. No onlookers. No chance of being caught.

A couple of seconds later, my phone started buzzing.

Number withheld.

I pushed Answer. “David Raker.”

“Raker, it's Healy.”

I hadn't been expecting to hear from him, and as I tried to imagine why he might be calling I knew, instinctively, it wouldn't be a social call. That wasn't how Healy was programmed. I couldn't remember a single time in the year we'd known each other when he'd picked up the phone to see how I was. So that really left only one possibility.

He needed something.

“Healy. How are you?”

“Fine.”

He didn't say anything else.

“What's it like being back in the big, bad city?”

“Same as it ever was.”

“Where are you staying?”

A pause. “Just a place I know.”

Terse, guarded answers. This was a conversation we'd had countless times—and usually in the days before I had to dig him out of the mire. “What's going on, Healy?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

A long silence on the line. In the background, I could hear the faint sounds of the city: endless cars, buses wheezing into action, distant police sirens. “I've got a question.”

“Which is?”

A moment of hesitation. “You heard anything about that body?”

Here we go
. “Why?”

“I'm just interested.”

“Why?”

“I told you, I'm just interested.”

“Come on, Healy. We both know that's not true.”

Silence.

“That body doesn't matter anymore,” I said to him.

“What, a murder victim doesn't matter to you?”

“You know I didn't mean that.”

“Then what
did
you mean?”

I felt my hackles rise, but this time didn't bother reining myself in: “I haven't got time for another argument, okay?” I stopped, letting that hit home—but not long enough for him to cut in. “It's irrelevant, Healy. I told you that. You aren't a cop anymore. The whole point of moving back to London was to make a fresh start.”

“Was it?”

“You said it yourself.”

“No, I didn't.”

“You
did
.”

“Don't tell me what I said, you patronizing prick.”

“I'm not
patronizing
you, Healy. Don't you get that? I'm trying to save you from yourself. Have you ever stopped to think about what would happen if Rocastle, or one of the others on that team, found you snooping around an active case?”

No response.

“Healy?”

“You think I'm cooked, is that it?”

And then it all fell into place.

I remembered he'd said the exact same thing to me before he'd left:
You think I haven't got anything left in the tank. Everyone thinks I'm done
. Suddenly, I could read between the lines: while he was still in Devon he'd tried to prove me wrong, tried to get back in touch with his old colleagues at the Met to show me his sources were as good as mine. But they'd turned him down flat. Now the embarrassment and anger burned in him.

“Just let it go, Healy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Forget the body. Forget everything. Start over.”

Nothing.

Then, finally, he said, “I'll see you around.”

And the line went dead.

Getting out of the car, rain drifting in toward me, I headed to the front door of the house. It was locked. So were the windows. Shutters, not clipped to the walls, swung in the wind, moaning gently as they moved. I walked around to the sides of the house to see whether I could get through to the back. On the right, it was overrun: knee-high grass crawled out of the broken concrete path, while a waterfall of brambles and ferns cascaded down from a patch of raised vegetation above. When the house had been lived in and cared for, the fact that it was carved into the slope of the hill would have made it attractive. But, after years of neglect, the moors had started to claim it back: bleak and lifeless, it had no heartbeat anymore—and, gradually, it was being returned to the earth.

On the left, I managed to find a narrow path through more vegetation, helped by the fact that the barn was directly adjacent to the property on this side, acting as a barrier between the moors and the house. I took a look through both downstairs windows before heading around. The first, to the left of the front door, was smeared with grease. It was difficult to see anything other than two vertical blobs, which I assumed were patio doors at the other end. The second window looked into a room with nothing in it. No carpet, just floorboards. No furniture. No light fittings. The only hint the room had even been occupied at one time were square marks on the faded wallpaper—like echoes from another time—where pictures had once hung. I headed around to the back garden.

Except there was no garden, just a small paved area, broken slabs sitting awkwardly in their beds, grass and weeds coming through between them. A stone wall, gently curving from one side of the house to the other, rose up twelve feet, enclosing the patio. Ferns and grass spilled over it, clawing their way down from the slope of the hill.

On the ground floor there was a back door—originally painted blue, but bleached by age and weather—a long window, and the patio doors I'd seen from the front; on the first floor, two windows, both boarded up. Cupping my hands to the glass of the patio doors, I looked inside. It was a living room, running all the way along to the window I'd been
looking through minutes before. No carpets, nothing on the walls, no furniture.

Through the rear door, I could see a poky kitchen. Old-fashioned cabinets. A sink with nothing in it. No appliances of any kind. In the space where the washing machine should have been, the outlet hose snaked off across the room; where a fridge had once stood I could see four impressions—carved into stained, beige-colored linoleum—where its feet had dug in. I tried the door, expecting it to be closed.

Instead, it swung away from the frame.

I stood there for a moment, fingers still around the handle, paused in the open doorway. Then, finally, I stepped into the house and pushed the door shut. The sound of the rain dropped away instantly, reduced to a gentle background chant. Inside it was silent. Even in empty homes there was usually noise: the hum of the refrigerator, the soft tick of a clock, but here there was nothing.

The kitchen had been completely stripped back. Anything not nailed down was gone. I pulled out drawers, slowly, quietly, looking over my shoulder the whole time, into the hallway that led off this room. I expected to find some forgotten utensils, old cans of food, reminders that this place had once been lived in, but everything had been removed. Perhaps whoever had once lived here could see what was happening. The walls were decaying, blackened by damp, moisture running in trails from the coving; the cabinets were uneven, sinking in on themselves, rotting from the inside out. The whole house was dying, slowly and painfully, as if it were a real, living thing.

When I was done, I walked to the hallway door and stopped. The living room was off to the right. Stairs to the left. The empty, smaller room at the front of the building was beyond the stairs. More walls infected with damp. No furniture. No carpets. I carried on along the hall to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. I could see only two doors, but I knew there were four rooms. Two at the front. Two at the back.

I made my way up. At the top, the house suddenly got darker. The two rooms at the front—empty and stripped of furniture—both had windows, but the two at the back were boarded up. There was no light anywhere inside them. Chips of glass lay on the floor beneath the windowsill in the first, and an old dark-wood fireplace, gradually losing its color, was cut into the wall. As I took another step in, I felt floorboards
bend beneath my feet, and the gentle suck of moisture. More rot. More decay.

Then a noise.

I listened for a moment. It sounded like it was coming from outside, although it was hard to tell for sure. Upstairs, the rain was louder, drumming hard against the roof and coming through to the ceiling itself where the tiles had fallen away. I backed out and edged along the hallway to the second, darker room.

This one wasn't empty.

Pushed up against the far wall was a bed: it had an old metal frame, flecked with rust, its springs on the point of collapse. On top of it was a thin, blow-up mattress.

On top of that was a sleeping bag.

I stayed in the doorway but leaned further in, just in case I'd missed someone in the shadows. But there was no one waiting. When I edged further forward, my eyes started to adjust and I made out a wooden storage box—about five feet long by three feet wide—next to the bed. I dropped to my haunches in front of it and flipped the lid.

There were three separate sections. In the first was tinned food: processed meat, vegetables, fruit, rice pudding, stacked up three tins deep. In the second was a box of teabags, packets of biscuits, crisps, some fresh fruit, a tin of powdered milk and some cereal. In the third was a portable gas stove, with a green aluminum kettle sitting on top. Basically, nothing that required refrigeration or electricity.

Then the same noise again.

Closing the box, I moved out to the landing, then down the stairs to the ground floor. At the bottom I paused, trying to pinpoint the noise. For a moment, all I could hear was the rain, sweeping in against the house. But then, briefly, I heard the same sound again; a split second of it. Shrill. Mechanical.

Is it a car engine?

Quickly, I made my way back through to the kitchen. The rain was heavier than ever, drumming against the windows. I stepped out, into the storm, closing the door behind me, and moved to the corner of the building. Peered around. Tried to see if anything had changed. There was no one approaching and my car was still where I'd left it.
But if someone's staying here, they'll be back
.

I was already soaked—clothes plastered to me, water running down
my face, hair matted to my scalp—and the weather was only getting worse. Clouds were darkening. Wind was picking up. Inside five minutes the roofs and spires of Princetown—only half a mile away—would disappear behind a wall of rain. Inside ten, I'd be struggling to see the road. That meant I wouldn't see anyone approach—but, with the car still in front of the farmhouse, they'd be able to see me. It was time to get the BMW somewhere else.

I hurried across to it, mind ticking over, trying to remember any places on the way in that I could leave it. A turnout. A side road. Somewhere I could walk in from. I looked in at the empty barn, past the rusting machinery, mud and hay caked to the floor.

And then I stopped again.

Suddenly, I could hear the noise more clearly than ever. Beyond the rain, beyond the sound of it beating against the corrugated iron of the barn. I swiveled and looked back at the house. It lay dormant, dark, the undergrowth either side of it swaying in the wind, massaged by it; a sea of ferns, grass and thorns, rising and falling like waves.

But it wasn't coming from the house.

It was coming from the main road.

Someone was calling the phone booth.