Never Coming Back (27 page)

“We'll find him,” Rocastle said.

“I hope you do.”

“He can't have gone far.”

I watched Rocastle go, then looked down toward the sea wall, to where my car had been parked for the past three and a half hours.

No,
I thought.
Prouse hasn't gone far at all.

At the Ley, a mile out of the village, I killed the car engine and listened to the rain on the roof. The darkness was absolute. There were no more street lights until a small knot of houses another mile further on. Here, out on the edges of the lake, there were only sounds: water gently lapping on the shore; animals, out in the black, cawing and crying out; the constant, unceasing whine of the wind, and the gentle chatter of rain.

I grabbed a flashlight from the passenger seat and headed around to the trunk. Very softly, its noise deadened by high banks of shingle between the Ley and the beach, the sea crackled, its noise metronomic like a record stuck in a loop. I popped the trunk, lifted it up and a pair of eyes caught the light from the flashlight. Prouse—gagged, arms tied, ankles bound—looked up at me. There was blood all over his front: his stomach, his arm, on his cheek, matted like treacle in his beard. In his hand one of the nails remained, piercing the triangle of skin between his thumb and forefinger. I'd tied his hands together so that one set of knuckles was pressed to the other, making it impossible for him to remove the nail.

His eyes flicked past me, trying to get a sense of where we were. He'd know soon enough. He knew this area better than me. But for now, I enjoyed the sense of confusion in his face. His eyes moved left, right, over my shoulder and down past my hip, trying to understand where he was and how he'd got here. But then he had to start blinking away the drizzle as it drifted in at him, and I filled in the gaps in his memory: “You killed Lee Wilkins and you tried to kill me.” He eyes fell on me. “Now I'm going to find out why.”

I clamped two hands on his arm and heaved him out of the trunk.

He came halfway and then his clothes caught on something, the breath jetting out of his nose making him sound almost feral, like a muzzled dog. I pulled at him a second time, hauled him all the way out and dumped him on to the dirt track. He cried out again, the noise instantly washed away by the melody of the lake. I shone the flashlight back up the dirt track I'd come in on. It was a quarter of a mile long, overgrown and silent. On the edges of the water, this far in, all anyone would see from the road was a wall of reeds.

I'd be fine here for as long as I needed to be.

Bending down, I ripped the duct tape away from his mouth and stuck it to the car in case I needed it again. His breathing began to regulate. I didn't let on that my own head was still pounding: I'd hit the side of my skull before anything else when the chair had tipped over, and the paramedics who'd attended to me after I'd called the police, and lied to them about Prouse, told me I had mild concussion and gave me a dose of aspirin. I'd waited five hours after the police left, to make sure they weren't coming back and to try and clear my head, but it had made no difference at all.

“You're in some deep shit here, boy,” Prouse said.

He was hoarse from the gag, from trying to scream through it, from the lack of air in the trunk. I changed the settings on the flashlight so it switched to a muted yellow glow, and then set it down on the back bumper of the BMW, angled toward him.

“Where is the family?”

His lips peeled back in a smile. He tried to shift position on the mud, but with his hands and legs tied together he just slithered around like an eel caught on dry land.

“Where are the Lings?” I said again, in exactly the same tone.

“Why the fuck should I tell you?”

I reached around to the back of my trousers and removed the Glock 19 he'd been pressing to my head only hours before. His eyes narrowed when he saw it, as if he didn't think I'd have the balls to fire it. “Let me ask you something,” I said, placing the gun on the bumper, next to the flashlight. “Does it even bother you that you killed a man tonight?”

Prouse shrugged.

“That's all Lee gets? A shrug?”

He shifted against the ground, trying to find a more comfortable position. “He had a big mouth on him. You talk as much as he did, you gotta expect it to come back at you.”

“Who else have you killed?”

“What does it matter?”

“Did you kill the Lings?”

He looked around him, as if he'd figured out where he was. A bird squawked out on the water. “You brought me to the Ley. That's clever. Where did the police go?”

“The other way.”

A quick look toward the gun. “So now what? You gonna shoot me?”

“I don't know,” I said.

He tried to find some subtle giveaway in my face, a hint of weakness, but I kept my gaze fixed on him and I could see the first flicker of doubt pass across his eyes. I could use a gun. I'd grown up firing them in woodland only two miles from where we were, and I'd been forced to fire them since; not because I wanted to, but because if I hadn't I'd already be buried in an unmarked grave.

But I wasn't going to kill him.

If I did that, there would be nothing to separate the two of us.

“Where are the Lings?” I asked again.

“They're dead.”

I stepped away from him—a reflex action, as if some mechanical part of me was repelled by the idea of it—and as my legs hit the car, the flashlight rocked off the bumper and hit the dirt track. Darkness. I dropped to my haunches and felt around for it. When I had it in my hands again, I turned it in Prouse's direction and found him in the same place: on his back, looking along the water's edge at me, skin pale, eyes like lumps of coal.

“All of them?”

“The husband and wife I did myself.” There was nothing in his voice, just a cold efficiency. He sniffed and rubbed his chin against his shoulder. “I took them to the barn.”

“The barn?” And then I realized what he meant. “At Farnmoor?”

“Walked them out to the fields and shot them in the head.
Pop, pop
.”

He looked at me, his face like a mask: no attachment to the words, no feeling for what he'd described, just an abstract void.
Keep it together
, I said to myself,
keep it together
. But I could feel myself losing focus.
He murdered them both in cold blood
.

“You were the one Ray Muire saw Paul and Carrie with.”

“Muire,” he replied, almost spitting the name out. “Arsehole wasn't even supposed to be in that day.
No one
was supposed to be in that day. It was a
Sunday
. I planned it specifically because it
was
a Sunday. Then, next minute, he's singing to the coppers.”

“How did he even see you?”

“
Oh
,” he said, almost sneering, “because he was blind?”

“Are you saying he wasn't?”

“I'm saying he could see just fine.”

I frowned. “What?” He didn't reply. “What are you talking about?”

Suddenly, the rain started getting heavier. He slithered around on the ground, hands still behind his back, ankles looped together, trying to ease himself clear of the puddles.

“Prouse?”

“Muire dug his own grave,” he said. “He was a dead man the moment he started chirping to the coppers. The fact that he was a part-time drunk just made it easier.”

“You killed him too?”

“I gave him a little shove.” He was unaffected by anything he was saying. He wasn't even trying to get a reaction from me. This was just a cool, detached listing of the facts. “Followed him, watched him get pissed, put him in the river on the way home.”

“As easy as that.”

He shrugged. “I just do what I'm told—then I take the money.”

“From who?”

“From whoever's paying.”

“Who paid you to kill Paul and Carrie?”

He just stared at me. “Katie Francis.”

There was something blacker and more menacing about him now, as if he could see his answers were unbalancing me. Francis had looked me in the eyes when she'd talked about the Lings, about Ray Muire too, and I'd never glimpsed a hint of deception. Now Prouse was trying to feed off the uncertainty he could see in me.

“Why did she want them dead?”

He shrugged. “She was following orders too.”

“From who?”

“Shit runs downhill.”

“From
who
?”

Somewhere, out on the main road, a car passed. Automatically, I turned toward it to make sure it wasn't coming down the track, and then, when I turned back, Prouse was looking up at me, his eyes unlit, hostile. “I feel sorry for you, boy,” he said quietly. I didn't reply, my mind racing. “There you are, running around trying to find a family that no one gives a shit about, and all the time you ain't got one fuckin' idea who you're up against here. How can I make this clear to you? Your precious Ling family—they're dead.”

He said it so quickly, without a single flicker of emotion, that it felt like I'd been knocked off balance again. Then the anger started to build.

“Now you can stop running around like an arsehole,” he said, flatly.

Without thinking, the rage burning a hole in my chest, I bent down, grabbed his collar and hit him with everything I had. I broke his nose instantly, could feel it turn and buckle, and just as I drew back again, his body already limp and unresponsive, blood all over his beard, I managed to stop myself. I took a woozy step back toward the car, clenched fist ringing with pain, Prouse lying unconscious on the dark of the track.

“Shit
.
”

I checked the time on the phone. 5:57 a.m.

The sun was going to be up in an hour.

Kneeling down at Prouse's side, I shook him awake. He was struggling to breathe, his nose a twisted mess of bone and blood. I waited for him to come round and look up at me, then dropped him to the ground, grabbed the gun and pressed it against his eye.

“Who was giving the orders to Katie Francis?”

He moaned gently.

“You've got three seconds.”

His other eye widened, as if he was trying to focus.

“One.”

He moaned again, blood bubbling at his nose.

“Two.”

He hacked up a glob of saliva.

“Thr—”

“Okay, okay,” he said, slurring his words.

“Who was giving the orders to her?”

“There's someone in the States.”

I pulled the gun away. “Cornell?”

He nodded.

Lee had talked about him having local help. Prouse was that help; Katie Francis was. He looked up at me, eyes glazed and empty. “They just tell me what I need to know. Cornell told Francis to split the family up: I'd take care of the husband and wife here, Cornell would take care of the girls.”

“The girls are dead too?”

He just looked at me, distant, drifting.

I grabbed him by the throat.
“The girls are dead too? ”

He nodded—and then blacked out.

I shoved him back against the dirt and walked away, huge,
thunderous swells of anger tremoring through my chest.
They're all dead. You failed them
. But then, against the sounds of the Ley, Prouse was talking again, mumbling something else. “What?” I turned and moved back toward him. “What did you say?”

“. . . a marked man.”

“What did you say?”

He rolled his head against the dirt track and looked at me. “The photograph.”

“What about it?”

“Carter Graham's a marked man.”

“Graham's next?”

He didn't respond.

“Is Cornell coming for Graham?”

“He's coming for everyone.”

“
When
is he coming for Graham?”

“Run, boy.” His eyes widened. “Just . . . run.”

“What's Cornell protecting? What's in the photograph?”

“I took him out in that box,” he said, words bleeding into one another. I tried to figure out what he was talking about. He looked disorientated and couldn't focus. I'd hit him hard. Maybe too hard. I hadn't cared at the time, but I cared now.

“What are you talking about, Prouse?”

“They said to put him in Haven.”

“Haven?”

“They said, put him in Haven, the same place I'd put the husband and wife. So I took the boat out . . .” His eyes rolled up into his skull, like he was about to pass out.

Husband and wife
. He meant Paul and Carrie.

“Prouse,” I said, slowly, evenly, “where's Haven?”

He came back, blinking, trying to focus on me, even though I was only a matter of feet away from him. “I wedged that box in tight . . . but I didn't lock it properly.”

For a second time I heard a car approaching on the main road. I looked up, unable to see it from behind the reeds, then turned back to Prouse, trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
He'd put someone's body in the same place he'd put Paul and Carrie.
“Where's Haven?” I asked again, trying to temper my irritation.

“Where I was supposed to put him.”

“Who?”

“The beach.”

“The beach?”

“The body.”

That stopped me. “The man you found on the beach?”

“Cornell told me to put his body where I put the others,” he continued, like he hadn't even heard me, and then he started to drift.

“
Listen
to me.” I shook him awake. “Where's Haven?”

“The water,” he said softly.

“
What
water?”

“I hit a wave, and the freezer box toppled over, and everything went overboard.” His eyes rolled. It was like he couldn't even hear me now. “Everything went overboard.”

“Are Paul and Carrie buried in Haven?”

He just looked at me.

“Prouse?”

“I couldn't do anything about the body,” he said, eyes blunt and impassive. “The tide took it too quickly. But the coppers wouldn't be able to identify him. I knew that. That's why, when that boy found the body, washed up there on the beach, I thought, ‘If I report it, if I go and speak to that ex-copper, your mate Healy, on the lad's behalf, the other coppers won't think I was the one that done it.'”