Never Coming Back (23 page)

I started by asking him about the day Ray Muire claimed to have seen the Lings. “The first I heard of it was when Katie called me and told me the police wanted to talk to me.”

“What was your reaction?”

He shrugged. “I can't remember. As I said to you before, honestly, at that stage, I probably wasn't taking it too seriously. We get a lot of people crossing our land, plus I didn't know the family at all. Of course, I was willing to cooperate with police, but it wasn't until the detective . . . uh . . .”

“McInnes.”

“McInnes, right. It wasn't until McInnes mentioned Ray's name that I guess my ears pricked up.” That tallied with the interview transcript I'd read: Graham seemed genuinely taken aback when McInnes named Muire as the eyewitness. “Like I said, I'd known Ray a long time and I trusted him. I told the police the same thing.”

“What did you make of Ray's death?”

“‘Make of it?'” He frowned, sitting forward in his seat, a smooth, mottled hand wrapped around the mug. “What do you mean?”

I paused for a moment, studying him. He looked like I'd just danced on the grave of his friend. Maybe he could see the subtext in my question, and maybe he didn't like the idea of dredging up old memories that were better left buried. I didn't believe Ray Muire ended up in the river because he was drunk, not after talking to Lee, but Graham did—and he didn't want to be reminded that one of his two best friends was an old soak.

Conscious that Graham might back away from the conversation if he felt I was being disrespectful, I opted for bland: “It must have been hard for you.”

He nodded. “Very hard.”

“Katie said you made it back for the funeral.”

“Yes,” he replied, a sad, flat smile etched across his face. “I was in the middle of a tough negotiation in Tokyo, but I wasn't going to miss out on paying my last respects.”

“Did the police come to the house?”

“After the sighting? Yes, I think so. I was in New York but Katie said they came to the house—as I would expect them to. If that family was
here, or out in the grounds, for whatever reason, I wanted to know why as much as they did. I made it clear to her that she was to assist DCI Rocastle in any way she could.”

“But you said McInnes conducted the interview with you?”

“He did. Rocastle seemed to be in charge, and he was the one that initially got in touch with me—via Katie—to arrange the interview by video conference. I spoke to him briefly a couple of times over the phone, and he explained about the family being seen just outside here. He didn't mention Ray, which was why I never realized he was the eyewitness until we conducted the VC. By then, McInnes was running the show.”

Again, that tallied up. Rocastle had lasted three days on the Ling disappearance so it made sense that he would have been the one to call Graham initially. “I wonder why DCI Rocastle didn't mention that Ray was the eyewitness when he called initially?”

Graham shrugged. “You'd have to ask him, I suppose. If I was to take a guess, I'd say he either didn't have all the facts at that stage, or he was trying to avoid coloring my view of what happened. Maybe he thought I'd be mad at Ray or something.”

My mind rolled back to the first conversation I'd had with Katie Francis at the house.
Do you think he might have been embarrassed about saying something to you? As if, by doing so, he was accusing you—and, indirectly, Mr. Graham—of being involved in something you shouldn't have?
She'd seemed confused by the question, as if she'd never thought of it that way.
I don't know
, she'd said.
Maybe
.

“Were you disappointed Ray didn't come to you directly?”

Graham pursed his lips, as though trying to be diplomatic. “It hurt a little. I guess he must have had his reasons. I was out of the country at the time, but if I'd been here, at the house, maybe it would have been different. He liked Katie, and she liked him, but she hadn't known him for fifty-odd years like I had. That makes a difference.”

I flipped to a fresh page in the pad. “Did you know that Annabel and Olivia Ling were spotted near ExCeL in London a couple of days after they disappeared?”

“That's what DC McInnes said, yes. That obviously didn't lead anywhere?”

“No. You ever heard of a guy called Barry Rew?”

“R-E-W?”

“Yes.”

“No. I haven't. Sorry.”

I pushed on. “What can you tell me about a man called Jeremy Cornell?”

It took a couple of seconds for the name to register with him and it was the first time I'd glimpsed a man in his late sixties: the slight delay as he searched for the memory; the brief confusion as the conversation moved from one side of the world to the other. But, quickly, the cool, sparky brightness returned. “Cornell,” he said, nodding his head, and it was immediately obvious how he felt. “How do you know about
that
guy?”

I had a duty to protect Lee, even if Graham wasn't the threat, but there was no way to lie my way through this without admitting that Lee was the thread that knitted the Lings and Cornell together. “Paul and Carrie Ling were good friends with a guy called Lee Wilkins. I think you know him.”

His face lit up again, a mirror image of earlier, when I'd mentioned Ray Muire. “
Lee
? Yes, I know Lee very well. How is he? I haven't seen him for months.”

“I don't know,” I lied. “I don't know him. I'm just getting all this secondhand from Emily, Carrie Ling's sister. She said Lee and the Lings were close.”

“I didn't know that.”

“She said Lee had told them a lot about you.”

“Me?”

“She said Lee really liked you.”

Graham smiled; he seemed genuinely touched. “Well, that's very nice of Lee. I liked
him
very much. Ray may only have been his stepdad, but Lee had a lot of Ray's qualities and he was a damn talented entertainer too. I helped get him some work in Las Vegas.” Then, gradually, the smile turned into a frown. “It was going so well for him, then he just upped and left. I don't know where he went, or why he left town, but I called Martha a few months back to find out where he'd gone, and she said he was out in Dubai. He just upped and left the job I got him. I mean, that's fine—he's a grown man, he can do what he wants—but I think Martha was a bit worried about him because she was only hearing from him once a month. You can understand. Does this Emily girl know any more?”

“No. She hasn't spoken to him for months.”

He shook his head. “I really don't understand it.”

“Did you see much of him there?”

“In Vegas? Yes, we had a kind . . . I guess, a kind of club going.”

“Club?”

But I knew he was talking about the high-rollers group.

“We'd get together once every quarter, this big collection of us, and we'd gamble and have a few drinks. It was part social, part business. I used it as an opportunity to network, to talk to CEOs and chairmen and see if I could drive some business, but I made some good friends there at the same time.”

“How did Lee get involved?”

“Ray told me Lee was out in Vegas, so the next time I flew out, I went to see him and thought he was fantastic. I suggested to Cornell that it might be fun to get him in for the evening, not expecting him to agree. But the next time I was in town, Lee turned up, did his routine and all the guys loved him so much, he ended up staying.” He shrugged. “Most of us brought in a few trusted outside friends as time wore on, so it wasn't like it was unprecedented for Lee to stay. But it probably helped that everyone liked him.”

“You brought in friends too?”

“Yes. Lee, of course, and an old doctor friend of mine.”

He was talking about Eric Schiltz. Lee had survived by the skin of his teeth, but Schiltz hadn't been so lucky. I had to find a way to get Graham talking about him.

“So who is Cornell?”

Graham took a deep breath, like it was a question he'd wanted to know the answer to for a long time. “Honestly? I don't know for sure. He's English but he's been out in the States a long time. He told us he used to work for the Bellagio, in their security team, but now he has his own company. He's done pretty well off it, I think.”

“How did he get to be the one that organized your get-togethers?”

“Through the contacts he made at the Bellagio, I guess.”

I made a note to call the casino. “Go on.”

“Anyway, he phoned up a bunch of us, told us the Bellagio would cover the cost of travel and accommodation, and that we could use one of the villas as a base. I think we all saw it the same way: a chance to network, to talk to other business people, to have a little fun. There were
ten of us to start with, then it got bigger and bigger. Nowadays, we're doing it every three months and there are maybe thirty, thirty-two. I suppose, even though he works for himself, he probably gets a nice little kickback for bringing us in. I dread to think how much money the casino is making off us.”

“What do you make of him?”

“Of Cornell?” A snort. “A creepy asshole would probably sum it up.”

“You don't like him?”

“No one really likes him.”

“What does he do when you all get together?”

“Do? Nothing. Mostly he just watches. I mean, you can have a conversation with him, but it won't exactly be one for the ages. Occasionally he joins in, but mostly he prefers just watching from the sidelines. It's all a bit weird—certainly for my tastes.”

“Do you ever get the sense he's hiding something?”

Graham frowned. “Like what?”

“I don't know. Doesn't it strike you as odd that Lee just upped and left?”

He was about to reply, then stopped, his eyes fixed on a space over my shoulder. I sat back and hoped I'd played it right, hoped I'd managed to predict his train of thought. He blinked, once, twice, a distance to him now. I wanted him thinking about Lee's sudden departure, and then—like pins being knocked down by the same ball, one after the other—the fact that Schiltz had also been absent from the group for a year. He definitely would have noted Schiltz's absence but maybe something had taken place that meant he hadn't looked any deeper. I could really only see two reasons for that: either, somehow, he'd been convinced that Schiltz was fine, or he'd been scared into silence. Men like Graham didn't scare easily, especially this late on in life, but everyone was frightened of something.

Maybe the thing he feared was Cornell.

After about ten seconds he blinked again and it was like switching channels: the static cleared and he was back in the conversation. He looked at me. “Are you suggesting that Cornell might be the reason Lee suddenly left Vegas?”

Bingo
. “I don't know. Do you?”

It was like reading a road sign now: I could almost see him making
the connection between Lee and Schiltz. “My other friend, the doctor, he also stopped coming.”

“Stopped coming when?”

“About the same time.”

“What was your friend's name?”

“Eric. Eric Schiltz. I mentioned him earlier when we were talking about Ray. The three of us—me, Ray and him—grew up here. Ray stayed here in Devon, but Eric fell in love with the idea of the American dream. I guess I was somewhere in between: my roots are very important to me, but I always wanted to go to the States, from early on.”

I paused, letting him gather his thoughts again.

“Did you ever ask Eric why he stopped coming to the group?”

“No. We had a get-together a year ago, last November time, and about two weeks later he sent me an e-mail to tell me he probably wasn't going to come along anymore.”

“Did he say why?”

“He just said he didn't enjoy it very much anymore.”

“Did that surprise you?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “Eric loved the get-togethers. After his wife—Nancy—died, he was always out and about being social. He kept very active. I'd never met a man who hated being alone as much as him. So, yes, it did surprise me.”

“You, Eric and Ray were close?”

“Oh yes.” He shifted forward in the sofa and got to his feet, then walked past me toward the door. At first I thought he was about to leave, then he pulled the door open to reveal the series of twelve photographs behind it. “Come and have a look at these.” I got up and walked across to the pictures, pretending to study them for the first time. “I'd been living out in California for almost a year,” he continued, “desperately trying to get investors interested in Empyrean. But I was just getting nowhere. So Eric took me down to Wilshire Country Club while he was studying at UCLA, and introduced me to all these movers and shakers, all these people he'd met at the golf club, at the hospital, just in the short time he'd been out in LA. They were the difference. It's him I've got to thank.”

“So this is your first international office?”

“Yes. I remember Eric and I were down there a lot, just watching it
all take shape. We clubbed together and flew Ray out a couple of times too. They were good days.”

I let him feed on the memories for a moment.

“Have you tried phoning him at all?”

“Eric? Do you mean recently?”

“Since you received that e-mail from him.”

“I tried a couple of times, but he never returns my calls. I wanted to arrange to go down and see him when I was last in the States, but I never managed to get hold of him.”

“You didn't think that was strange?” I asked. “A man you've known for all that time, one of your best friends, suddenly stops returning your calls?”

“His calls stopped, but his e-mails didn't.”

“You kept getting e-mails from him?”

“Every so often, apologizing for not getting in touch.”