Never Coming Back (16 page)

Friday, August
26, 2011
| Fifteen Months Ago

Destiny was on her second Martini and thinking about leaving the MGM and going somewhere else when the man sat down on the stool next to her. She'd always been bad at guessing ages, but she'd have put him in his forties. He was clean shaven and well groomed; a little thin for her tastes—but it was never about her tastes.

That was the last thing that mattered.

She turned away for a moment, trying not to get his attention—not yet, anyway—then stole a second look. Tailored black suit jacket: tick. Black shirt, Armani stitched into the breast pocket: tick. Gucci jeans: tick. Silver Rolex peeking out from under the shirt sleeves, and a gold wedding band: tick, tick. Men were weak, married men even more so, and that just meant less work for her: if they were here for the conferences and weren't getting much back home, she could have them eating out of the palm of her hand inside thirty minutes. If they'd come just for the sex, it could take less than ten.

As he ordered a beer and picked at a bowl of nuts on the counter, she started to adjust herself in the mirror on the back wall of the bar. Most people would have pegged her for older than thirty-nine if they'd bothered looking at her properly, but as the way to a man's heart was through his dick, it never really mattered that the drugs and the jail time had started to catch up with her. She took off her coat, laid it on the counter, straightened her skirt and undid the top buttons of her blouse. She had to be careful about what she came dressed in. Too slutty or even too classy and the managers would zero in on her, and the really officious ones would call the cops. Prostitution inside the city limits meant facing another misdemeanor, and that meant more time behind bars. So the choice of clothes was important, which was why she stuck to the same routine: knee-length skirt, pumps, white blouse, plenty of cleavage. Men generally didn't need much more than the last one.

When she was ready, Destiny drained the rest of her Martini and then gestured for the woman behind the bar to come over. Out of the corner of his eye, the man next to her must have seen the movement and looked around. Destiny glanced at him, back to the woman behind the bar, then at the man for a second time—it was a fabricated double take, as if she hadn't noticed him take a seat at the bar, but now she had she liked what she was seeing. The man smiled. Destiny smiled back. And then he said hello.

Gotcha, she thought.

•   •   •

The guy's name was Hank; he was from Texas and was in town for a conference at the MGM. After about thirty minutes he'd given Destiny his entire life story. Married. Two kids. Dentist. Liked golf, fishing and football. Big blackjack fan, which was why he was so excited to be in Vegas. “This is my first time here,” he told her after buying the fifth round of drinks, not noticing she'd switched to soda, “and I kinda expected the people to be . . . I don't know
 . . . unfriendly, I guess. I mean, I come from a small town and when you hear about the big city, you hear about crime and drugs and all that kinda stuff. But, honestly, everyone's been really great. Even the kids serving in McDonald's are nice!”

Destiny nodded, then thought, Wait an hour, honey, then we'll see how you feel.

“Anyway, sorry. You must be bored.”

“Not at all,” she said, gazing into his eyes.

He colored a little as she looked at him, and if she needed anymore persuading that this was already a done deal, he shivered with excitement as she touched his leg.

“Listen, hun, why don't we get out of here?”

He swallowed.

“My car's parked just around the corner. We can go back to mine. It's a twenty-minute drive.” She paused deliberately. “In the morning, I can drop you back here.”

In the morning. She could see the effect that had.

Five minutes later, she was leading him out.

•   •   •

He was pretty drunk, which would make it even easier. They turned left out of the casino and headed north along the Boulevard. Her car, a crappy Honda Civic, was in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant on East Flamingo. It had been closed for almost a year. Vegas had gone down the toilet since the recession—businesses going to the wall, houses being foreclosed, highest unemployment rate in the country—so there were empty spaces everywhere. She used the parking lot all the time. Close to the lights of Flamingo it was safe enough for Hank the dentist, but the further across the lot they got, the thicker the shadows became, and right at the back, hidden from view, was her Civic.

And somewhere near it was Carl.

“Wheressshhh your car?” Hank slurred.

She smiled at him, but he could barely even focus on her and that suited her fine: she could drop the act. “Just down here,” she said, not even bothering to look at him this time, eyes fixed on the sidewalk, scanning her surroundings for potential witnesses
or, worse, cops. They were about a block from the Chinese restaurant, its sign still standing at the furthermost edge of the lot. There were fifteen thousand miles of lights in Vegas, but none of them burned here. She grabbed Hank by the arm and yanked him along, half listening to him as he began talking about blackjack again. “Fucking blackjack,” Destiny muttered, “Who gives a shit?”

Finally, they got to the parking lot.

“Here we are, hun,” she said, talking over him as she started marching him away from Flamingo and toward the shadows. Slowly, out of the darkness, came her Civic, its battered fender, its smashed front headlight, and after a couple of seconds she spotted Carl in his usual place, in a doorway that had once been a rear entrance for the restaurant. He nodded at her, a movement that said she'd done good. She nodded back and pulled Hank the rest of the way toward the Civic. When they got there, swathed in night, she propped him against the passenger door so that he was facing in the opposite direction from Carl. “You stay there a second while I unlock it, okay?”

But Hank was still mumbling about blackjack.

This is going to be simple, she thought, coming around the car to the driver's side and then stepping back from the Civic as Carl made his approach. She glanced at him, at the gun in his hand—a Glock 22 he'd bought for a hundred bucks in North Las Vegas—and then back at Hank. “You doe ever wanna ssssix,” he was saying to himself, words slurred, head lolling from side to side, “thas the worss card you can ged. You know why a six is the worss possible card you can ged? Cos there's way more chans of bustin out.”

“Is that a fact?” Destiny said, eyes on Carl.

Carl emerged to her left and paused for a moment, sizing Hank up from the other side of the Civic. He was twelve years older than Destiny, graying and overweight, but he was strong and wasn't scared of anyone. That's what she liked about him: she felt safe around him, and he always looked out for her. They'd met at a bar on East Sahara five years before, when she was fresh out of a nine-month stretch for soliciting an undercover cop and he'd just moved down from LA after doing four years for assault. Most of the men she'd been with had used her. Carl used her too—but she got to use him back.

“The sigs ish a bad cart,” Hank was mumbling.

Carl moved around the Civic. “Shut the fuck up and give me your wallet.”

Carl emerged from the shadows to Hank's right. Hank looked up at him, at the gun being pointed at his head. A split-second delay, massaged by the alcohol—and then he fell apart. “Oh shit, oh shit,” he said, backing away automatically, one hand trying to find the trunk of the Civic behind him, the other up in front of his face. “Don't hurt me.”

“Gimme your wallet, your watch and your hotel keycard.”

“Please don't hurt me.”

“Gimme your wallet!”

“Okay,” Hank slurred. “Okay. Okay.”

He began feeling around in his pocket for his wallet, but—in the panic—his hand slipped from the car and he stumbled back and landed hard on the ground.

Carl stepped forward, jabbing the gun at him. “Gimme your fuckin' wallet!”

Destiny looked out, back on to Flamingo. A few people were walking past, but no one had looked in their direction. “Hurry up, Carl,” she said, unlocking the Civic. As soon as they had the wallet, the watch and the keycard, and Hank was out cold, they could go.

“You fly in or drive?” Carl said, leaning over Hank.

“Drive,” came the feeble reply.

“Where d'ya leave it?”

“It's a rental.”

“I don't give a fuck what it is! Where is it?”

“In the parking”—he waved his arms around desperately in front of him as if he'd forgotten the words
—
“parking garage! The parking garage at the MGM.” He held up his wallet, Carl snatched it from him and Hank started to take off his watch.

“Gimme that fuckin' watch.”

“I've got a family. I've got kids.”

“I don't give a shit what you got.”

Destiny flicked a look at Flamingo and then back across to the other side of the Civic. Hank seemed more sober now. That's what a gun in the face does, she thought.

“Have you got a valet ticket for the car?”

“Yes,” Hank said, his voice breaking up. “In my wallet.”

“Is your room card in here too?”

“Yes.”

Carl flipped open the wallet and checked.

Destiny opened up the Civic, got in and started up the car, keeping all the lights off. No head lamps. No internal light. Nothing to draw attention. In the hotel bar she'd got a glimpse of Hank's wallet. He'd had about eight hundred bucks in it. He probably had more in the safe in his room. Maybe some other stuff in the car. Maybe not. It didn't matter. As Carl opened up the passenger door and got in, she knew he'd be thinking the same as her: even if they didn't get anything else, they were still eight hundred dollars better off.

“Ready to go, baby?” she asked.

Except when she looked around, it wasn't Carl sitting next to her.

It was Hank.

“What the fu—”

He moved so fast, it was like being hit by a train. In a split second he'd clamped a hand over her mouth and pulled her across the car toward him. She tried to fight back, tried to kick out her legs, but they were caught beneath the steering column. He second-guessed her next move, using his other arm to lock hers to the sides of her body and pull her in even closer. She couldn't bite. Couldn't scratch. Her screams came to nothing. The only noise inside the car was her desperate breathing, jetting out of her nostrils.

Her eyes swiveled out through the passenger door. In the darkness she could see Carl, face down on the floor, the gun on the ground about six inches away. There was a single puncture wound to his neck: a dark spot, slowly expanding, running off on to the concrete of the parking lot. “Your boyfriend is dead,” Hank said to her quietly. He was totally different now: his demeanor, his physicality, even his accent. He'd spoken in a flawless Southern drawl before. Now she realized that was just a lie: he was English.

“You stole something that doesn't belong to you.”

She shook her head. No. No, I didn't. No, I didn't.

“Yes, you did.” Quickly, efficiently, he shifted his arm from her face to her throat and started choking her out. “And you know what that means, Destiny?”

Her vision started to blur.

“It means you just got dealt a six.”

When I woke up, the rain had stopped and the wind had died away. In its place was the gentle warmth of autumn sun coming through the gaps in the curtains and falling across the bed. I lay there for a while thinking about how things had been left with Liz the night before, wondering if that really
was
it. Then, finally, I got up and headed downstairs.

The kitchen was like a greenhouse, sun streaming in through the rear window as it rose above the hills on the far side of the cove. I looked out. The beach was deserted, the sea calm, the sky pale but markless. I flicked on an old portable TV—the only one in the house—and then made a coffee and sat at the window, thinking about Liz and the Lings.

“. . . body dumped on the beach . . .”

I tuned back in.

On the TV a reporter was standing on the edge of a winding coastal road, a block of gray-blue sea bleeding into the sky behind her. On her left was a metal barrier, tracing the turn in the road; on her right, a length of blue and white police tape snapping gently in the wind. She had a stern expression on her face: “. . . yet to confirm anything about the victim, other than to say it's a white male. However, a source we spoke to suggested that identification of the victim could still take weeks owing to the fact that—and I quote—‘There are some unusual aspects to the case.' Currently, it's unclear what that means.”

It means they haven't got a clue who he is.

If police really
were
saying identification of the body could take weeks—and not just feeding the media a line to keep them occupied—then that almost certainly meant the victim's prints hadn't led anywhere. There were two possible reasons for that: one was that they'd lifted prints but couldn't find a match because the victim wasn't on file; the other was that they'd failed to lift prints due to decomposition. It was more likely to be the first. Healy reckoned the body had been frozen, which would have helped preserve it, and when Rocastle had come to see me at the house, he'd inadvertently said that police believed the body had been dumped the day before, on Monday. That wouldn't give it enough time to decompose. Separation of the skin from the digits generally didn't start until the second week, and even then a good forensic
tech would still have been able to lift prints from the skin, whether it was detached or not. The race of the victim was interesting, though.

A white male.

That, at least, discounted any of the Ling family. In the back of my mind, I hadn't been able to let the possibility go that the body on the beach and the disappearance of the family were linked. It seemed a compelling reason for Rocastle to have been involved in both cases and to have come to the house to talk to me himself. Now, though, I could forget about that—and I could forget about the body on the beach.

•   •   •

Thirty minutes later, a package arrived. It was printouts of the police file on the Lings. Ewan Tasker hadn't left his name anywhere near it, no details, no indication of who had sent it or where it had come from—but in the right-hand corner of the opening page, he'd scribbled a note:
Hope this helps. E-mailed audio file of anonymous call to you.

Sitting at the kitchen table, I spread everything out and started going through it. A lot was a repetition of what Task had told me over the phone two days earlier, and the police interviews with Emily echoed exactly the account she'd given to me. I was pleased about the second part: too often in cases the families of the missing would neglect to tell me things, sometimes by mistake, more often because they were trying to paint a picture-perfect portrait of their loved one, believing that lifestyle or relationship choices might impact negatively on how hard I worked the case. It didn't necessarily mean Emily had told me everything: I remembered a fleeting look, inside Paul and Carrie's house, when I'd asked her why they'd waited so long to try for a second child, a look that suggested she hadn't been completely honest with me. But until I saw a direct connection to the disappearance of the family, I was prepared to let it go. Sometimes, when so much of a life was laid bare, you felt you had to cling on to small secrets in order to retain something of the person you loved. They weren't Emily's secrets, but she was their keeper now.

I skimmed the file from start to finish, then turned back to the beginning and started going through it more methodically, writing down key events in chronological order:

January
7

—Family goes missing.

January
8

—Emily files missing persons report.

—Ray Muire thinks he sees Paul and Carrie at Farnmoor.

January
9

—Ray Muire calls police to report sighting.

—DCI Colin Rocastle and DC Stuart McInnes, plus forensics, go to Lings' house. Take DNA samples, fingerprint lifts, etc.

—Anonymous call made to police re: Miln Cross.

—Story gets released to the media.

January
10

—Barry Rew calls police to tell them he thinks he's seen Annabel and Olivia close to ExCeL. (HOW DID REW KNOW ABOUT THEM/KNOW WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE? NATIONAL MEDIA COVERAGE WAS THIN ON THE GROUND, EVEN AT THE START . . .?)

January 11

—McInnes takes over as lead and calls in Missing Persons Bureau (BECAUSE THEY've ALREADY HIT A DEAD END AT THIS POINT IN THE INVESTIGATION?).

—Rocastle ends interest in the case (WHY?).

January
17

—Police interview Carter Graham about sighting at Farnmoor.

 

I found the answers to my initial questions quickly enough. Despite there not being a lot of national media coverage of the case—at that point, police hadn't released any information about the way the house had been left, which would have been the angle that got news editors interested—I soon found out how Barry Rew had recognized the girls. In two separate interviews, first over the phone with McInnes, then—thanks to the cooperation of the Met—with McInnes a second time at a station in west London, Rew talked about how his family had come from south Devon, and he still tried to keep up to date with local news. He'd read about the Lings on the internet.

It was difficult to get a sense of him from the interview. His record was attached, and it didn't make for pretty reading, yet he spoke lucidly throughout, recalling the same details and articulating them in roughly the same way both times McInnes talked to him.

One section in the second transcript particularly stood out:

MCINNES:
How did you know it was Annabel and Olivia?

REW:
It looked like them.

MCINNES:
How can you be sure?

REW:
I guess I can't be, not one hundred percent.

MCINNES:
But?

REW:
But I'd only been reading about them on the internet that morning. My sister used to live down in Kingsbridge, so I know the village they lived in. What happened to them, all of them just disappearing like that, it stuck with me. You don't hear much about whole families going missing like that. Like . . . not together, and definitely not down in south Devon. That place is so safe. It's like a theme park. So when I saw them, I just knew.

MCINNES:
You knew it was them?

REW:
I was pretty certain, yeah.

MCINNES:
So who was with them?

REW:
Some guy. A white guy.

MCINNES:
Age?

REW:
I don't know. I didn't get a good look at him.

MCINNES:
Anyone else?

REW:
No. Just the guy. He was driving. From my angle, I could mostly see the girls. The little one had a Mickey Mouse doll.

In both interviews, McInnes subtly pushed a parallel line of questioning, where he tried to figure out what Rew's play might be, and why he might lie about seeing the girls. But both times it went nowhere. Nothing in Rew's record, as checkered as it was, pointed toward any kind of relationship with the Lings, or with anyone else connected to the case. So that only really left one option: he genuinely believed he'd seen them.

Ultimately, though, it was a dead end. The car had never been traced, because Rew had never been able to get the police even a partial plate. The temporary roadworks had been set up close to Connaught
roundabout, at the eastern end of Victoria Dock Road, where there was no street-based CCTV. There were no other eyewitnesses. And then, as I searched the file for any other interviews with Rew, any other contact the police might have had with him in the months after, I found something else. In some paperwork immediately after the transcripts, McInnes had included copies of some daily reports on the status of the investigation, which he'd e-mailed across to Rocastle. One, dated Tuesday, March 20, stood out:

No new leads. Figured it might be worth going back to the eyewitnesses, so I called Ray Muire, left a message on voice-mail, and am still waiting for him to call back. Barry Rew's a bit of a shocker, though: couldn't get him on the phone, and no one answered when I drove down to his house. He doesn't have any family, so I put his name through the computer—turns out he died on Feb 17 from a drug overdose.

That stopped me.

So, Rew and Muire were
both
dead.

Ewan Tasker had failed to mention that over the phone, probably because he'd been looking to give me the headlines rather than the detail. But clearly there was a pattern: Rew ODs on February 17; Muire falls into a river eight days later. As I read over McInnes's e-mail again, a hint of unease took flight in me. And yet investigators—and an autopsy—didn't find anything suspicious about either of the deaths.

Included in the file were contact details for Ray Muire's wife, Martha.

I noted them down and moved on.

Next were the transcripts of the interviews with Muire and Carter Graham. Task had been right about Muire's: he came across as well intentioned, but while both interviews he'd done started out well enough, building a very clear, very precise picture of his day at Farnmoor up to the point at which he'd apparently seen Paul and Carrie, his answers soon became long and difficult to follow. There were inconsistencies too. First, he claimed to have seen Paul and Carrie in front of the barn in the fields outside Farnmoor, but then in the second interview he said they'd been on the other side of it; in one interview he said the person who'd been with them looked like a man, in the second he said he wasn't sure anymore. Rocastle had done both interviews with Muire before he'd passed the case on to McInnes, and from his line of questioning it
was obvious that, midway through both, he'd dismissed Muire as a witness they could rely on. Even so, it was easy to see why police hadn't dismissed him completely. I'd rarely seen such a disconnect in an interview: in one half of it, Muire was as articulate and resolved as you could hope a witness to be; in the other, it was like he was a completely different person.

Carter Graham was different. He'd talked to McInnes from New York, via video conference, having been in the States since Monday, January 2, after spending Christmas at Farnmoor. Graham spoke eloquently, answered all of McInnes's questions without hesitation and became more concerned when he heard Ray Muire was the eyewitness:

GRAHAM:
Ray
said he saw them?

MCINNES:
Yes, sir. Do you know Ray Muire?

GRAHAM:
He's a very old friend of mine. A dear friend.

MCINNES:
So you believe him?

GRAHAM:
I trust Ray implicitly.

MCINNES:
He's saying he saw that family on your land.

GRAHAM:
That's what I understand you to mean, yes.

MCINNES:
Why would that family have been on your land?

GRAHAM:
I don't know. I mean, some of it's a public right of way, so it's hard for us to police everyone who comes and goes, but I don't know . . . I've no idea why they would be there.

MCINNES:
So you're saying they could have been there?

GRAHAM:
I'm saying it's perfectly possible, yes. Look, I'm not home for long periods of time, and I wasn't at home at the time of the sighting, but if you speak to my PA—her name's Katie Francis—she'll know the comings and goings there. If you find any of her answers unsatisfactory, I'd be happy to get involved.

I was impressed by Graham's statement. When you had as much money as he did, things tended to lose their value quickly—including friends and family—but there was no sense of that with him. He seemed genuine, was courteous to McInnes and frequently repeated the same offer of help. Despite that, there was nothing of any real substance in the interview. It was getting easier to see why the investigation had hit a wall so quickly.

The evidence inventory listed everything—computers, paperwork,
even clothes—that forensics had taken from the Lings' house in the days after they went missing. None of it led anywhere, just as Ewan Tasker had said the day before. Trace evidence, fibers, prints, were a similar dead end. I went down the list again, seeing if anything leaped out.

Halfway down, I found something: Paul's wallet.

I flipped back through my notes and found the conversation I'd had with Emily a couple of days before.
Paul's wallet—last thing to be returned in July/August.
I'd asked myself at the time why police had held on to it for so long. Most of the rest of the Lings' possessions were returned to them inside the first couple of months.

The wallet took seven.

According to the entry, something had been found inside the wallet alongside the usual array of cards, money and receipts: a list—or, at least, the beginnings of one—on a page torn from an A6 notebook. Forensics had quickly matched it to Paul's handwriting.