Never Coming Back (17 page)

The list had just three words.

Parker. Cathedral. Dicloflex.

I grabbed my phone. “Parker” got me eighty-five million search results in Google, and nothing I found on the first three pages seemed to connect with the family. “Cathedral” gave me twenty-five million results, and just as little to go on. When I flicked forward to the investigating team's findings, I discovered they'd been back through every aspect of the Lings' lives on discovering the list, trying to find some kind of connection: companies called Parker the Lings had used, worked alongside or been in contact with; then anything in their life that vaguely connected them to a cathedral of any kind. They found nothing. Trying to narrow it down would have been long, arduous and futile work, and eventually the line of inquiry dried up completely.

The third word, however, was different.

Dicloflex was a prescription painkiller.

To treat what, though?

I turned the question over in my head as I moved through to the living room and switched on my Mac. Emily hadn't mentioned any illnesses in the family—but then I'd never specifically asked, and maybe she hadn't thought to say. I made a note to call her.

Now the only thing I had left was the audio file.

I dragged it out of my e-mail and on to the desktop.

Then I hit Play.

It started with a jet of static before settling down into silence. One ring. Two. Three. Then a 999 operator picked up. The person on the line asked for the police. I paused the audio, dragged it back a couple of seconds and played his voice again. “Police.”

That was it. One word only.

Six seconds later, a police operator answered. “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.” And then he hung up. I dragged the slider back to the start of the call and listened again. The person's voice was muffled, as if they were pressing the handset too close to their face. In the background there was virtually no sound. Maybe a faint buzz that was probably the line. Only that. I went back through to the kitchen and grabbed the case file to see what forensics had made of the call. They'd been into it and ripped it apart looking for low-level sounds, and came back with a short list: the ticking of a clock, the buzz of a TV. But as I read further down, something else caught my eye.

Police had been unable to trace the location of the call, even retrospectively, and by way of explanation a forensic tech had written:
Substituted CLI
. Caller line identity. By substituting the CLI during the call's journey, you disguised its origin.

Six days earlier, Paul Ling had received the same type of call.

Maybe even from the same person.

There were no medical records for any of the family in the case file, but it was safe to assume that, on finding mention of Dicloflex in Paul Ling's wallet, police would have secured a warrant for them. Again, the lack of progress on the case since the discovery of the list suggested that, even if they'd matched the drug to an illness one of the family may have had, it hadn't led them to anything worthwhile. The other two names on the list were probably the reason police had held on to the wallet for so long: they'd been trying to find out if there was a connection between whatever or whoever Parker and Cathedral were and the mention of the painkiller. When I tried to second-guess the police, I kept coming back to the only theory that made sense: one was the name of a doctor, and the other was a medical insurer, or perhaps a clinic. There was no way of knowing for sure, though. I'd found no indication of a private medical scheme in any of the Lings' financials.

I grabbed my phone and scrolled through the address book until I found Emily's landline. It was Saturday, so there was a good chance she'd be at home. Once she answered, we chatted for a couple of minutes about how things were going, but I danced around much of what I'd learned so far. I wanted her as clearheaded as possible. She hadn't mentioned any of the family as having been seriously ill, probably because—if they had—she'd never seen the relevance, or none of them had been sick in the recent past.

“Let me ask you something,” I said to her eventually. “Have any of the family suffered any kind of serious illness over the past two to three years?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Something came up.”

A pause.

“Emily?”

“Yes.” She sounded in pain. “Annabel.”

“What happened to her?”

“Almost two years back . . .” A pause. “She was involved in this car accident. It was awful. Some idiot was going too fast, lost control of his car and drove right into the side of her. We were all just . . .” Another pause, longer this time. “We were all just stunned. I remember feeling . . . it's hard
to put it into words. Just numb. The worst bit was having to watch her in the days after. The fear in her face. She thought she was going to lose her leg. I mean, that's what they told her. It was all I could do not to constantly cry.”

“I guess Paul and Carrie took it even harder than you.”

She didn't seem to hear me.

“Emily?”

“They were upset as well. I mean, obviously. It was their daughter. Paul was the stronger of the two, I suppose—he was a medical man, he dealt with this sort of thing all day. I don't mean he was unfeeling—definitely not. But I think he decided he was going to try and remain strong, because Carrie and I, well . . . we were just a mess.”

“So what happened?”

She didn't respond, as if her mind were elsewhere, and then a memory came to me: standing in Paul Ling's study with her, asking her about why the Lings had waited so long to have Olivia. “Emily?”

“Sorry?”

“What happened after that?”

“I don't know. Things kept changing all the time. Some days doctors would seem more positive—though, to be honest, most days they weren't. They pinned her leg, reset it, restructured it somehow, but after a couple of weeks they were still telling her it was a fifty-fifty chance whether surgery would take properly or not.” She sighed. “The idiot driving that car had basically flattened her entire leg. It was horrendous.”

I recalled seeing pictures of the family that had been taken in the last six months before they disappeared, and both of Annabel's legs were intact then. “But the surgery took eventually?”

“Yes. Eventually.”

“That's good. So this was when?”

“The accident was at the start of December 2010.”

Almost two years ago. It was why she thought it hadn't been relevant.

“And how long was her rehab?”

“A year. But things were instantly much better once she got back.”

I frowned. “Back from where?”

“Oh, they went to the States for more surgery in February 2011. Paul and Olivia stayed out there for a month and then came back. Paul had his job; Olivia had missed a month of school and couldn't afford to miss
any more. But Carrie stayed behind with Belle, for the surgery, the recovery, everything else. They came back at the beginning of May.”

“Why did they go to the U.S.?”

“They were offered a second opinion: consultation, tests, surgery, the works—all inside a week. Here, they couldn't get in to see the specialist for a month and a half. She was in so much pain, she could hardly even walk.” Emily stopped. She sounded on the verge of tears. “We all just wanted it sorted.”

I was about to ask her who had offered them a second opinion when that last bit struck a chord with me:
We all just wanted it sorted
. I'd thought originally that it was the tone in her voice that kept registering with me. I'd become so used to people lying to me, I'd been searching her quieter, more uncertain moments for whatever it was she was keeping back. But maybe it wasn't that at all. Maybe there was no deception. Maybe it was as simple as the way she spoke about the Lings: as if she were a part of their family unit, involved intimately in their decisions, their doubts, their fears.

“Who was it who offered them a second opinion?”

“A doctor they found via one of Paul's friends.”

“What was the name of the friend?”

“Do you remember Lee Wilkins?”

The name made me pause.

I remembered him well. We'd grown up in the village, gone to the same school, and then Lee and I left home and never spoke for nineteen years. In an odd footnote, I'd bumped into him in a casino in Las Vegas at the end of 2007. I'd been on what turned out to be my last foreign assignment. He'd already been living in America for seven years, trying to make the break as an actor. I remembered our conversation that night, though not with absolute clarity. We'd been getting on well, enjoying reminiscing—then he'd gone to the toilet and never returned. There was some other guy with him too.

What was it the guy had said to me?

“David?”

“Sorry. Yeah, I remember Lee. I ran into him a couple of years ago, actually. Do you still keep in touch with him?”

“No. But he and Paul became very good friends. This was before Lee moved to the States in 2000. His sister got pregnant with her second child and there were all sorts of complications while she was carrying, and then even more after the baby came along. The baby ended up
becoming Paul's patient, and he was just amazing with Lee's sister and the little girl. Lee was down here all the time from London when this was going on, because his sister's husband just upped and left and never came back when he found out she was pregnant. Lee's mum was struggling to cope with the stress of watching her daughter go through all that, so Lee really stepped up to the plate. He and Paul hit it off, first at the hospital when Paul was treating the little girl, then afterward. Lee asked Paul out for a thank-you drink, and from there they developed this really close bond.”

“So, what, Lee acted as a liaison between Annabel and the U.S. doctor?”

“I only know what Carrie told me.”

“Which was what?”

“That Paul was talking on Skype with Lee—this was after Annabel had been told she'd have to wait six weeks here to even see the specialist, let alone get it sorted out—and he was telling Lee how desperate they were. I think Paul was trying to keep it together but at the end of the day, well . . . it
was
his daughter.” She stopped for a moment. “Anyway, Lee mentioned to Paul that he knew this brilliant orthopedic guy through his job.”

“So Paul made the decision to fly the family out?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lee offered to pay.”

“For the flights?”

“For all of it.”

“The surgery too?”

“Yes. By that stage he was earning a lot of money. Carrie said he was some kind of entertainment director at a bunch of casinos in Vegas—he was responsible for booking all the acts. I think he had his own show, I don't know. I guess he could afford it.”

“Even so, that's a pretty big gesture.”

“Huge.”

“And they obviously accepted?”

“Paul took a little more persuading, but I remember Carrie telling me about it the next day, and it was the first time I'd seen her smiling in a month. They had to take up the offer. Not to do it would have been insane. So, a couple of days later, they flew out.”

“Where did they fly into?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Is that where the doctor was?”

“I don't know. It all happened so fast.”

“They didn't tell you when they got back?”

“They kept quiet on a lot of the details.”

“Why?”

“Carrie just said Lee was keen to keep things on the QT, that he wasn't one for big gestures and that he'd asked them just to accept the gift and not worry about the details. To be honest, that was good enough for me. All that mattered was Belle.”

I looked down at the list on the table in front of me.
Parker. Cathedral. Dicloflex
. “So they never told you what the doctor's name was?”

“No, they didn't.”

“That didn't bother you?”

“Why would it? Belle got better. That's all I cared about.”

“Ever heard the name Parker?”

“No. No, I haven't.”

“What about Cathedral—maybe the name of a clinic?”

“No.”

“Do you know if they took any pictures while they were out there?”

“I don't think so,” she said. “I didn't see any, anyway.”

I hadn't found any in the house either; nothing relevant on any of the computers. I was hoping there might be some evidence of where they'd gone—the clinic, the doctor, anything. But it was a long shot. The trip out hadn't been any kind of a holiday, and Lee Wilkins had, for some reason, asked for discretion. I made a note to go through their phones again to see if there were any pictures I'd missed.

“A couple of final things: what were the actual dates of their trip?”

“I can find out. Hold on.”

I heard her put the phone down and walk away. While she was looking, I retraced my steps, back through the conversation. The list must have been one Paul made prior to the trip. I wondered if it was part of a conversation he'd had with Lee Wilkins, or maybe even with the specialist himself. I walked through to the living room, woke my Mac from its sleep and googled Parker, adding “orthopedics” and “Los Angeles.” There were four possible options, all with the surname Parker. When I did the same search, replacing Los Angeles with Lee's hometown of Las
Vegas, I got three more. I did the same with the search term “Cathedral,” adding “Los Angeles clinic.” Zero hits. The same in Las Vegas.

A couple of seconds later, Emily returned.

“Sorry about that. I had to dig out last year's diary. Luckily, I'm a hoarder, so I always keep these things.” She paused. I heard pages being turned. “Right. So. They flew out February 3, and Carrie and Belle came back . . .” More pages being turned. “May 6.”

I wrote down the dates. With a flight there was a paper trail, at least as far as LA. If they'd taken an internal connection from there—possibly to Las Vegas, where Lee was based—that would be an added bonus. Finding out where they'd gone once they landed would be harder without an idea of which doctor they were seeing, or even where he was based. I could, in principle, get Spike to hunt through hotel records in LA or Vegas for the time they were out there, but it would be a forlorn task. If Paul had noted down the painkillers Annabel was going to be taking in recovery, it was just as likely that the other two names were connected to her operation too—which meant my best hope of picking up a trail was to find out which Parker had done the operation, and what Cathedral was.

“How did they seem when they got back?”

“From the States? Ecstatic.”

“They all seemed exactly the same as always? You didn't notice any changes in them in the eight months between them getting back and going missing?”

“No. Why?”

“I don't know. I'm trying to look for reasons they might have left.”

“No, they were fine,” she said. “Better than fine, in fact, because everyone was firing on all cylinders. Belle was healthy, so everyone was happy.”

“Did the police speak to you about this?”

“About the trip to the States? Yes.”

“What did they ask?”

“Pretty much the same questions you did.”

Which meant they'd failed to find the doctor. Or if they'd found him, he'd been able to provide a full account of the Lings' trip out to see him. If I had to take a guess, I'd say it was more likely to be the second: Annabel went out with a serious leg injury and came back healthy, suggesting the specialist had lived up to his reputation. The best way to find him,
and to close off that line of inquiry, was going to be through Lee Wilkins. I'd have to try to get in touch with him in the U.S. somehow.

“Okay, last question,” I said to her, and thought about the Dartmoor phone booth that Paul had received three calls from in the weeks and days leading up to the disappearance. “Did you ever hear Paul—or maybe Carrie—talking about having a connection to anyone on Dartmoor? Specifically, Princetown. Maybe they had a friend there, or some sort of business associate? Maybe they were getting calls more regularly in those final months?”

“Dartmoor?” She sounded confused, which was all the answer I needed. “The police also asked me that. Do you think that's where they all went—Dartmoor?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Then what's the relevance?”