Never Coming Back (37 page)

London City Airport
.

Suddenly, something else fell into place.
That's why Barry Rew saw the girls at ExCeL. They were on their way to the airport, less than two miles down the road
.

“Cornell split the family up because he found Carrie and Annabel upstairs in their house the night he came for them,” Rocastle went on, “and he became convinced they'd talked to one another about Kalb. He wanted them separated, so he could go at them one after the other. He did Carrie first. It was terrible. Him and Prouse, they just . . .” He stopped for a long time. “I couldn't let him do that to the girls, or at least, I had to
try
to prevent it. So, after they'd finished with Paul and Carrie, after Prouse had taken them to the barn, I pretended to Cornell that the police had picked up his scent and that he should get the hell out. I told him to fly back to the States and leave the girls with me for a couple of days, and I'd send them on if he wanted. But he didn't trust me.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Maybe he could see it in my face. Having kids changes things in you.” A flash in one of his eyes. “So he flew back to the States, thinking the cops were getting suspicious, and he left Prouse orders to put the girls on the next available flight. That's who Barry Rew saw driving them to the airport. That
fucking
fisherman. But before they left . . .” He touched a finger to his eye. “I told Annabel I'd make it right.”

I looked at him. “Make it right how?”

“It doesn't matter now.”

“Make it right how, Rocastle?”

“It doesn't matter anymore.”

“Of course it matt—”

“I failed them!” he screamed at me, and then immediately bowed his head, looking down at the floor. “I failed them both. I couldn't make it right. Now they're both dead.”

I gave him a second. “Do you know where they're buried?”

All I could see was the top of his head, his face vaguely reflected in the water. He didn't reply for a long time, then—quietly—he said, “Firmament.”

“Firmament? What's that?”

“Where they're buried.”

“Is it in the desert, like Cornell said?”

He nodded again.

“Is it a town outside Vegas?”

“I don't know.”

“How do you know about it then?”

“I overheard them.”

“Who?” I said. “Who's them?”

Then he looked up—and raised the gun.

“I'm not jeopardizing my kids' futures.”

He aimed it at my chest. I stopped and held up my hands. Instinctively, I went to reason with him, knowing he was caught midway between guilt and acceptance, knowing I could use his vulnerability to turn him around. I started moving a hand toward him.

“Your kids are going to be fine, I promise.”

He started shaking his head. “No one can know that I told you. I don't want to give anyone a reason to come after my kids. Do you understand?
You
have to find out.”

“Find out what?”

One more step and I was on him.

“Find out what, Colin?”

“It's over for me,” he said.

“It's not over.”

“It's
over
!”

He moved the gun right and fired past my left shoulder. It passed so close, I felt the air shift around my head. I staggered back, my body automatically tensing for the second shot. But nothing came.

And when I looked at him, I saw tears filling his eyes.

“It's over,” he repeated, all his fight gone. He wiped away the tears, even as more came, lowered the gun and then looked across the room at me. “This morning I deposited three hundred and forty-five thousand pounds into a bank account. The pin code is four-oh-four-seven. The card is in an A6 envelope. I posted the envelope through your door.”

“Is that why you wanted me to go home?”

He nodded.

McInnes wasn't waiting for me. The card was
.

“I know you don't owe me anything,” he said, more tears starting to form in his eyes, “not after everything I've done, but my kids . . .” He tailed off, unable to speak, tears running in trails down his cheeks. I
started to realize what was going on, why he'd left me the card. “My kids don't deserve to suffer because I fucked everything up.”

“Colin,
listen
to me: we can sort this out.”

“Give the card to my wife. Tell her I'm sorry.”

“Rocastle!”

I moved quickly across the room, flashing-forward to what was about to happen. And as he looked at me, tears spilling down his face, there was a moment that moved in slow motion; a silent conversation, as clear as if he'd spoken the words aloud to me:
I'm begging you, if you do this for me, tell my kids I was everything they wanted me to be.

And then he placed the gun in his mouth.

And he pulled the trigger.

Emily locked up her car and then crossed the driveway to the front door. I'd left it open so she could come straight in. I glanced out of the kitchen window, out across the beach, bathed in the watery light of a clear autumn day. In front of me, on the desk, was my pad, but I knew everything already. I'd seen their bodies with my own eyes. It was all burned into my memory: pulling the wall panel down, their corpses inside, the smell finally hitting. I'd watched flies escape into the dark and insects spill out, dying the instant they hit the standing water. I'd rolled the bodies out of the wall cavity and torn away the plastic. And when their faces looked up at me, I knelt there, next to them, as a deep sadness throbbed in my chest. It felt like I'd let them down. Even though I'd found Paul and Carrie, just as I'd promised Emily I would, all that moved through me was a sense of failure. If the search for them had already become a wake, now, finally, at the end, it was a funeral.

As I'd scrubbed down the walls, trying to erase my part in the carnage, I'd thought of Emily, of my worst nightmare coming to pass: telling her that Paul and Carrie were dead. I didn't even know about the girls; didn't really know what to tell her. There was no way I could go chasing around America trying to find the location of their bodies. But equally I couldn't tell police here in the UK what I knew without revealing that I'd been there as Rocastle and Cornell had met their end. Then, finally, when I'd moved out into the night, into the last of the wind, into rain that had gradually turned to drizzle, I had looked down into Cornell's boat and seen yet another body from Farnmoor.

Carter Graham's murder had gone unreported once when Rocastle had cleaned up Farnmoor after I'd been there. But it wouldn't go unreported again. And as I'd thought about making the anonymous call to the police, I'd realized that was exactly what I'd have to do about the girls: dial into Las Vegas Metro, try to persuade them to instigate a search for Annabel and Olivia, give them everything I had—including Firmament—without compromising my anonymity. Then hang up and hope that was enough information for the police.

That, with that, the rest of the Ling family would be found.

•   •   •

After a while, I didn't know what else to say to her. Emily sat there at the kitchen table, sunlight on one side of her face, and cried. When
someone's world has fallen apart, there aren't the words to rebuild it, so I didn't waste her time with meaningless platitudes. I just took her hand, and I held it, and I let her grieve for the family she loved above all else.

Her tears went on for so long, she seemed to shrink in on herself, like all her air had escaped and wasn't coming back. Eventually, her hand began to slip from mine.

I got up and walked across to the sink, filling the kettle and setting it going again. On the shelf to my right, above the counter, sat a brown A6 envelope with an ATM card in it and Carrie's memory stick. I hadn't decided what to do about either of them yet. If the three hundred and forty-five thousand pounds had come from Cornell, if that's who Rocastle had taken the cash from, then it was blood money. He was financing his kids' futures with earnings that had cost people lives. But that wasn't the fault of his children.

“What about Annabel and Olivia?”

I nodded. I hadn't told her about Cornell, about anything to do with Kalb. I hadn't had the chance to even get that far before her tears had ended the conversation. But she knew the basics: they were all dead, taken by a man who had stopped at nothing to disguise the identity of a mass killer; that the family had been separated early on; and that now, ten months later, their bodies were on different sides of the world.

“I'm going to call the police in Las Vegas.”

“You're . . .” She paused, wiped her eyes. “You're not going to go over?”

“I'm not sure what that would achieve,” I said to her softly. It would be a journey without a map. I'd looked “Firmament” up when I'd got home, and there wasn't a town in the entire United States with that name. I had no starting point. I hadn't been to Vegas for five years, had only been to Nevada three times in my entire life. “The police might have heard that name before somewhere. They'll know the area. They'll know where to look.”

She shook her head. “You've got to go.”

“I can't, Emily. I'm sorry.”

“You've
got to
,” she said, and then a fresh wave of tears came. I didn't come back at her again, just let her anger, the sense of helplessness, slowly ebb away.

“They'll find them,” I said, the words sounding hollow in my mouth.

“Please
.
”

I wasn't flying out to the States, no matter how many times she asked, but I didn't say anything this time, hoping my silence would act as my answer. Beside me, the kettle started whistling, steam taking flight into the spaces above our heads. She began sobbing again. I filled the percolator with fresh water and then added two spoons of powder.

“Paul and Carrie's . . .”

I turned back to face her. “Sorry?”

She looked up, cheeks strewn with tears like tire tracks on a battlefield, and I saw something familiar: the same look she'd had when I'd asked her about why Paul and Carrie had waited so long to have Olivia; the same sense she was holding something back.

“Paul and Carrie . . .” She stopped again. Sniffed. Wiped her eyes. “When you asked me why they waited so long to have Olivia, to have a second shot at IVF, I . . .” She paused again, but I knew what was coming. She'd lied to me. “I didn't know how to tell you.”

“Tell me what?” I heard the change in my voice, the undercurrent of anger—but I didn't care. “If you've held something back about them, all this time . . .”

“It's not about their disappearance.”

I frowned at her. “Then what's it about?”

“You wanted to know why there was such an age gap.” She looked down at the table in front of her, her hand flat to it, fingers spread.
She can't make eye contact with me
. “I lied to you,” she said softly. “Olivia was IVF. But Annabel wasn't.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Everything I told you, about them not being able to find an Asian sperm donor, about the process not being as advanced in the eighties, I was making all that up.”

“Why?”

Finally, she made eye contact again. More tears, but not born out of the loss she felt for her sister. Not this time. “At the time they were
desperate
for kids,” she said, voice taut, rubbed raw by the tears, “but Paul had his problems and the IVF wouldn't take for them. It just wouldn't take. They did it, over and over—like, seven or eight times—and every time it failed. They thought they were never going to have kids.”

She swallowed, the light in the room changing as cloud blew across the sky.

“And then I got pregnant.”

“What?”

“It was a stupid mistake.
Stupid
. I was on the pill, and it became an instinctive, mechanical thing. I took it without thinking, same time every day. But then . . . I forgot.”

Suddenly it fell into place: why she always referred to the family like it was her own, as if she was part of it, their day-to-day routine, their DNA; and the way she talked about Annabel's accident.
We were all just stunned. It's hard to put it into words. It was all I could do not to constantly cry
. On and on, talking like a mother about her daughter. It explained, too, why Annabel looked nothing like Paul.

It explained it all.

“I was doing my exams. It was getting on top of me—that's why I forgot to take the pill. You probably remember how I used to put myself under so much pressure when I was studying. But I knew, if I got the right grades, I was going to Cambridge.”

I looked at her. “Wait, this was
before
university?”

She nodded again, and—slowly—her expression shifted, as if she was preparing the way for what was to come. Her eyes filled with tears. “I was seventeen,” she said.

A sudden, powerful realization took flight in me.

“You're Annabel's father, David.”

The flight started its descent into McCarran at two o'clock, local time. I'd been in the air ten hours, sleeping fitfully, unable to clear my head. Once I landed, I needed to be lucid. I didn't know where I was going, or even where to start, but I knew I needed to be smart and reactive. And yet I felt overwhelmed. Any moment of joy I managed to draw from the shock of what Emily had told me two days before was instantly tempered. I'd look at the pictures of Annabel I was carrying, the pictures of Olivia too, and knew that, if I found them, I'd find them like I'd found Paul and Carrie. There was a biological link between Annabel and me—but that's all it had ever been. Only Emily, Paul and Carrie had ever known the truth, and only Paul and Carrie could ever claim to have been her parents. So when I thought of Annabel, of what I might find of her, I didn't feel the visceral, organic pain of a father. I'd never been that to her. I never
would
be that. But what I felt, instead, was an intense, wounded sorrow. A grief. A regret that I would never get the chance to sit down with her, even to tell her who I was and why she should care.

Because she was gone.

And she was never coming back.

•   •   •

The room at the Bellagio looked out across CityCenter, a seventy-six-acre, nine-billion-dollar copse of skyscrapers that hadn't even existed when I'd last been in the city. It rose out of the early evening dusk, glass and neon shimmering against the fading desert sky, and by the time I'd showered and returned to the window, Las Vegas had changed again, the huge, overblown theme park replaced by a symphony of artificial light. I raided the minibar, opened a bottle of bourbon and watched it all from the shadows of my room.

A couple of hours later, I roused myself and took the lift down to the casino floor, men hunched over craps tables, old couples sitting next to each other at slots. Off to my right were hundreds of video poker machines, none of them being played, screens blinking, speakers blaring. Off to my left was a bar, fenced in on a raised platform behind a curved mahogany bannister. I headed up there, ordered a beer, then grabbed a seat adjacent to the main corridor through the casino. I watched tourists wandering past in shorts and T-shirts, some dragging suitcases on their
way out of town, some counting chips as they made their way in. When my beer arrived, I started to realize how tired I was. I hadn't slept properly for five days—and now I was jet-lagged and on my way to being drunk.

I tried to focus my mind on what I was here to do, removing a map I'd bought at the airport and opening it out across the table. If Firmament was where the girls had been buried, it wasn't the name it was officially known by. In the morning, hopefully on the back of some sleep, I'd hire a car and head up to the main Las Vegas Metro building on Sunrise Avenue, about ten miles northeast. I seriously doubted I'd get much in the way of help, but, if I could get someone to talk to me, I might be able to get some sort of steer on where to go looking. Maybe someone had heard the name before. Maybe Firmament had come up in conversation. Maybe, if I was lucky, it might be related to a crime.

Or maybe it'll lead nowhere
.

I pushed the thought away and went back to my beer, looking around the casino. This was the only place to start. This was where the high rollers had come, where they'd been as recently as a couple of days ago. This was where Cornell had made his money; the very center of his universe. If there was a trail, I knew it would start in the Bellagio.

I just had to find out where.

•   •   •

I dreamed of sitting at the windows of a hotel I didn't recognize and looking out across a desert. There were no hotels, no buildings, no roads. It was just a vast, unending swathe of scorched land, cracks carved into it, cholla scattered like they'd fallen out of the sky. In among them, shimmering in the heat, were two crosses, planted into the earth, each constructed from lengths of whitewashed wood. Their names were on them.

Annabel.

Olivia.

As I got to my feet and went to the window, fingers pawing at the glass, trying to go through it, desperately trying to reach them, I felt a hand on my shoulder and a voice—small and comforting—at my ear.
It's okay. They're fine. They're in a better place now
.

It was Derryn.

But when I looked behind me, she was gone.

And then so were the graves.