Never Coming Back (14 page)

As I got to the main road, about half a mile from the front gates of Farnmoor House, my phone started buzzing on the passenger seat. I scooped it up and put it in the hands-free.

“David Raker.”

“David, it's Spike.”

He was calling back with the information on the Lings I'd requested: financial history, phone calls, passwords for the e-mail addresses. “Spike. Good to hear from you.”

“Sorry it's taken me a day to get this over.”

“No apology needed. What have you got for me?”

I could hear the gentle tap of a keyboard. “Everything you asked for I've managed to pull together. Incoming and outgoing phone calls for dad, mum and daughter. Addresses for each of the callers. Passwords for their e-mails. And a full financial history. That's what took the time. These days, it's a pain in the ass trying to extract those things.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Hey, it's my job.”

“Anything leap out at you?”

“Not really,” he said. “It's all pretty standard stuff as far as I can tell, although I haven't gone deep into anything. You're the detective, I'm the criminal, remember.”

“I remember. You going to send it to me?”

“Already done. Separate PDF files for both the financial history and the phone calls, and then the passwords for the e-mail addresses in the actual body of the mail.”

I thanked him and killed the call, then pulled out on to the main road. A couple of miles further on, as the snaking coastal road narrowed, rising and falling above a series of beautiful crescent-shaped beaches, I stopped at a pub called The Church. It was a pokey one-room inn, with white walls and slate-gray roof tiles, perched on a mound of land—as the name suggested—behind an old Saxon church. I liked it a lot. It had character, log fires and cold beer, and—best of all, given south Devon's flaky 3G connection—it had free Wi-Fi. I flipped the trunk, grabbed my laptop and notebook, and went inside.

It was quiet. I headed over to the fire, placed my laptop down on the
nearest table, and ordered a beer and some food. After chatting politely with the landlord for a while, I connected to the Wi-Fi and logged on to my e-mail. Spike's message was waiting for me.

I dragged the two attachments on to the desktop—one labeled “Financials,” one “Phone Records”—but read through his e-mail first of all. He was basically just going over what he'd told me on the phone. At the bottom were the login details for each of the Lings' personal e-mail accounts. Paul had a work account too, and if I felt like I needed to go down that route, I'd have Spike hunt around in the hospital system for his details. But for now I concentrated on the three addresses I had.

There wasn't much to find in Paul Ling's account. Two pages of messages, forty-seven in total, suggested he got pretty aggressive with the Delete button. I went through the other folders—Sent, Drafts, Spam, Trash—and found nothing of interest. Going through each of the messages, one at a time, was like an echo of the life I'd seen on his PC desktop: discussions with other doctors, the submissions to medical journals, lighter conversations with friends and family.

I moved on to Carrie's account. There were about three times as many messages as I'd found in her husband's inbox, but as she'd been a stay-at-home wife and mum, most were conversations with friends and family. She was on Olivia's school committee, and looked to have taken part in a volunteer program on Mondays, where she went into the school and read to the kids. But otherwise, the same names came up time and time again: friends, fellow school committee members, extended family, a reading group she was involved in in Kingsbridge. There was one surprise, though: an e-mail thread entitled “Dissertation,” in which I discovered Carrie had been sixteen months into a two-year part-time MA in History at Exeter University. When I followed the thread back, I discovered that she already had a BA in History from Exeter, which I vaguely remembered once I'd read it, although she'd graduated years before I started dating her sister. Something else came back to me as well: the folder on Paul's PC marked “MA.” It hadn't been Paul's, it had been hers. She'd been the one interested in the Soviet Union after the Second World War.

Finally I moved on to Annabel's e-mail account. Somehow this felt more intrusive, wading through the messages a 24-year-old had been sending friends, potential suitors, and the teenagers she'd had in her drama class. But nothing stood out.

I closed the e-mail account, and moved to Paul and Carrie's financial history. Like everything else so far, it was black and white. Plenty of money in savings, none of it withdrawn in the time since they'd been missing. Manageable mortgage, insurance policies that had remained unchanged for three years, an ordinary list of direct debits—council tax, phone bills, satellite TV—no loans, no money on their credit cards. If they'd left of their own accord, they hadn't left under any kind of financial pressure.

Next were the phone records.

This was a mammoth job. Three phones and one landline, itemized bills for each one, with names and addresses for each of the incoming and outgoing calls in the last six months of 2011 and January of this year. Immediately I could see that no calls had been made from any of the phones after the family disappeared on January 7, which gave me a definitive full stop, but would ultimately make it harder to find them. Zero calls meant there was a clean break: either they'd done their homework, created a foolproof back-up and made their escape, knowing everything was in place; or it meant they'd been pulled out of their lives against their will, and whoever had done it had covered their tracks. I scrolled quickly through the July-to-December data, seeing if any names leaped out, but as I returned to the top of the first page—to the landline—my food arrived.

After I was done, I ordered a coffee and started over again, edging through the list of calls to their landline. They didn't use it much. That wasn't unusual: with so many free minutes in cell phone packages, fewer people used landlines these days. I was through the itemized bill inside twenty minutes, with little or nothing to stop me along the way.

Carrie Ling's cell was next. I cross-checked the names Spike had got me with the names in her e-mail account and noticed that, generally, the people who were calling her were the same people e-mailing. I doubted I'd find much at the school committee or in her reading group, but three-quarters of the way down was a landline for Exeter University. I'd already written down the name of her History professor—Robert Reardon—and, when I went to the university's website, saw that the main number for the History department was different from the one listed in Carrie's bill, suggesting this was Reardon's direct line. I dialed it, but hit a default BT answerphone message, so hung up again. The MA was interesting: Reardon was one of seven people she'd texted on
the day the family disappeared, but more than that, the course was the one part of her life where she was doing something for herself. Everything else was out of some wider commitment—to the school, to friends, to Olivia—whereas the MA was solely about her. It was a small, possibly meaningless anomaly, but it stuck with me all the same. In missing persons, changes in people's lives—however small—were often where the ripple effect began.

Annabel's bill was about twice as long as her mum's and about four or five times as long as her dad's, but seventy percent of the numbers were the same nine people. Ignoring the calls to Paul and Carrie, and to the landline at the house, I checked the names and addresses Spike had got me against the names of the people she'd been e-mailing and found there was a core group of friends that she spoke to three or four times a day, seven days a week. Nothing in the e-mails she'd sent to any of her friends set off alarm bells. The rest of the calls—to recruitment agencies, to local schools—seemed to back up the picture of Annabel I'd managed to gain already.

I took a break for a moment, finishing my coffee and clearing my head, and then pushed on. Paul Ling's itemized bill made up the last three pages, and—like his wife and daughter—many of the numbers married up with the people he was sending e-mails to.

But not all.

One, made in the week before the family went missing, was to a company called Carling Reid, based in Kingsbridge. He called them just once, and only for nine seconds.

They were a travel agency.

I googled them. It was a family-run business, specializing in Far Eastern travel.
Had he been thinking about going home?
I referred back to the first PDF, which included the bank statements for the months prior to their disappearance. No money had been paid to Carling Reid, or to a travel company of any kind. The fact the call lasted for only nine seconds seemed to suggest that even if Paul had phoned with the intention of booking something, he'd changed his mind. The question was why. Had he been thinking about getting the family out of the country, or just himself? Was he running from someone?

There were four numbers in his bill that weren't Devon numbers. One was for the
Lancet
—the medical journal he'd written for—based in central London. Another was a Cambridge number, which—via one of
his e-mail chains—I knew belonged to a friend of his who now worked in pediatrics at the CUH in Cambridge. A third entry didn't have a number
or
a physical address, just a series of question marks. It had come through four days before the family disappeared, and Spike had made a note next to it:
Not sure what the story is here. Think it might be a spoofing service or some kind of re-origination call.

A way of disguising the origin of a phone call.

Was this the reason Paul called the travel agent?

I moved on to the fourth number.

An 01822 area code.

There was no specific address attached to it, other than a road—Long Barn Lane, Princetown. That was in the center of Dartmoor. I brought the bill closer toward me, flipped back to the start of the records and pinpointed the three conversations Paul had had with whoever had called him from the 01822 number. They were all in the three weeks before he disappeared: one on Tuesday, December 20, for thirty-two minutes, the number calling Paul; one on Friday, December 23, for seventeen minutes, the number to Paul for a second time; and, finally, Paul to the number on Monday, January 2, the conversation lasting eight minutes. A day after that final one, he had received the re-origination call. Twenty-four hours later, he called Carling Reid.

I headed to Google Maps and found Princetown. It flipped to a satellite shot full of green hills and a series of yellow B-roads snaking in from different directions and meeting at the center of the village. To the north was the famous prison, its buildings fanning out like the spokes of a wheel. To the south, Google had dropped an “A” pin into a square mile full of dirt tracks, forested hillsides and walled-in farmland.

Long Barn Lane.

Switching to Street View, I landed myself at the end of it. The sun was low in the sky, a prism of color distorting the view, but, as I edged around, things became clearer. It was a short stretch of road, lasting for no more than a quarter of a mile, fields on either side. I moved along it. Initially, there were no houses at all, anywhere, but as I got toward the road's end, I spotted a turn-off into a thin, gravel driveway. I moved forward. The driveway wasn't mapped in Street View, so I couldn't go any further.

But I didn't have to.

It looped in, past a knot of fir trees, and then came back on itself,
stopping at the front door of a dilapidated house sitting forty feet back from the road. It hadn't been lived in for months. Maybe years. Which meant the phone calls hadn't been made from the house itself. But, in the distance, my eyes had already seen something else.

It was perched on a bank, about fifty feet further on, along the main road.

A red phone booth.

Two miles further on from the pub, the coastal road climbed to an apex, drifting closer to the edge than at any point during my journey home. Four yards to the left of my car, the world dropped away three hundred feet, down to the shingle beach that would go on to trace the rifts and hollows of the cliffs, all the way back to the village. Beyond the brow of the hill, as the road began its descent back to sea level, I glimpsed the Ley—a sprawling gray mass, utterly still from this distance, like a sheet of polished concrete—and, briefly, spotted Mum and Dad's cottage, nestled in the hills beyond, half disguised by old trees.

But, before all that, there was another village.

Miln Cross.

It was barely visible to passersby unless you knew where to look, the ghosts of its fourteen houses perched in the shadows of the cliffs and sitting on a platform of rock that had, over forty-four years, begun falling away to the sea. As the coastal road snaked right, taking me away from the edge, it disappeared from view, apart from the spire of its church, the tattered remnants of some kind of flag rippling in the breeze at its summit.

Signs for the village appeared a quarter of a mile further on, blistered and rusting, high grass disguising the
N
in Miln and the
R
and
O
in Cross. There were no tourist trips out to it, no reason to be there other than morbid curiosity, so when I pulled off the main road, the narrow lane almost seemed to close in on me, high hedges and overgrown grass whipping against the car all the way down to the bottom, where it suddenly opened out on to a crumbling square of concrete and a rickety wooden jetty. There were no boats.

I'd been here only once before—as a child—when my dad had brought me down, eight or nine years after the village had washed away. I didn't remember much about it, but I remembered the view: Miln Cross was elevated, built on a plateau of rock about thirty feet up from where I was standing, so all you could see were the first couple of houses and, across their rooftops, the spire of the church. Forty-five years ago there had still been a bridge connecting the village to the rest of civilization, but now there was nothing left: the middle of the bridge had fallen away to the sea, leaving two disconnected walkways.

I walked right to the edge of the concrete square, sea lapping at its edges, and then up on to what remained of the bridge on my side of the water. The gap was about one hundred and twenty feet. Too big to attempt a jump. I glimpsed more of the village: a gently curving main street, full of broken cobbles, and more buildings—mostly houses—looking like they were folding from the inside. Whole roofs were missing from some, the windows empty and dark like open mouths, and walls were perforated with holes where the sea had punctured them as the storm raged. There wasn't much evidence of the landslide externally, the mud and debris washed out to sea over the course of four and a half decades, but inside the houses hardened silt spilled out of the gaps, frozen like some kind of sculpture. On countless walls throughout the village,
DANGER—KEEP OUT!
signs had been pinned.

As I stood there, watching the rain drift through the walls of the village, I thought about the anonymous call police had received:
I'm calling about that family that went missing—the Lings. I saw the husband and wife at Miln Cross today. You should go down and take a look
. Nothing about that made sense. In order to even be in the position to see Paul and Carrie in the first place, the eyewitness would have had to make a specific journey down here—and why would anyone do that? Perhaps to take some photographs, as a tourist. I couldn't think of any other reason. And that didn't answer the real question: if Paul and Carrie
were
in Miln Cross, for whatever reason, how did they get across? The bridge was a memory, and the village's harbor—the place where the fishermen, who'd once lived and worked here, had moored their boats—was built into the rocks on the other side of the village, out of sight. You could launch a boat from the jetty I was standing next to, but if that had been the case, if the boat had been midpoint across the water between here and the village, and the Lings were on board, why not mention it?

I lingered there for a moment, trying to understand why or how the Lings might have been taken to Miln Cross, then I returned to the car and headed back up the hill.

•   •   •

After a quarter of a mile the coastal road opened out and there was a turnout, cut into the cliff, a high five-foot wall tracing its circumference to stop people falling off the side. I pulled in, got out of the car and went to the wall, trying to get a better view of the village.

Three hundred feet below, Miln Cross was like a child's play set, the
remains of fourteen homes, a pub, a shop and a chapel crammed together on a shelf of land no bigger than a football pitch. The main street ran from the broken bridge, in a gentle C-shape, all the way to the harbor on the other side, where a jetty had half collapsed into the sea, leaving the steps down, carved out of the rock itself, and some lonely planks of wood. It was possible the man who'd called the police had seen the Lings from here, but somehow I doubted it: you'd certainly be able to make people out below if they were moving through the center of the village, but it would be hard to identify them.
Unless you had a pair of binoculars
. That was a possibility, especially when there were such stunning views out across the water.
Or you knew who they were already
. I studied the village, turning that last thought over.
Maybe that was the reason he kept the call anonymous. He knew Paul and Carrie, knew what they looked like, even from three hundred feet away
. So if you were a friend or even if you only knew them in passing, why would you be reluctant to give your name?

I looked at my watch.

Three-forty-five. An hour until sunset.

I drove on five minutes to Strete, a village halfway between Dartmouth and home, where I remembered there being a general store. There was nowhere to park, so I bumped the car on to the pavement outside, stuck the hazard lights on and headed in. A woman was standing at the back of the shop, pricing up kids' bucket-and-spade sets.

“Can I help you, love?” she asked, turning to me.

I nodded. “What's the biggest dinghy you've got?”