Never Coming Back (25 page)

The kitchen was dark, only the pale readout from a luminescent wall clock casting a glow inside the room. Outside, the moon drifted in and out of cover, but when I kicked the door shut and put my notepad and phone down on the counter, a thick blanket of shadow settled around me.

Automatically, I reached for the lights inside the door.

They didn't come on.

I tried them again, once, twice. Nothing. Moving across the kitchen, I glanced out of the window, down toward the beach, and could see small dots of color everywhere: lamp posts standing sentry along the sea wall, cars passing through the village, buildings casting out watery yellow light from their windows and doorways. Up here, in the hills, there were no street lamps and the nearest house was four hundred feet down the slope.

Everyone in the village had light.

Everyone except me
.

On the other side of the kitchen was a larder that I kept some old missing persons files in, with two switches on the wall next to it. One for the kitchen, one for the larder.

I tried them both.

They were dead too.

“Lee?”

My voice carried off into the house, the stillness and silence amplifying it, like I was shouting into the mouth of a cave. Lee didn't reply. I looked through to the living room. The DVD and stereo were off—no display, no faint buzz of electricity—my laptop had no light on, even though I'd left it charging, and Annabel's MacBook lay dormant. Next to it, Paul's PC was off, even though it had been on when I'd headed out.

“Lee?”

Silence for a second time.

I glanced back across the kitchen, in the direction of the microwave and the oven. Both of those were off too. Slowly, as I stood there in the dark, a sense of unease crawled its way through my system, cool in my veins, blooming beneath my ribs, my heart getting faster, as if, somehow, my body was confirming what I already knew.

The electricity had been cut.

Lee was upstairs but not responding.

Something's wrong
.

Just inside the door of the larder was Dad's old cricket bat, leaning against the wall. It had been in the same place when I'd returned to the cottage months back, and I'd never moved it. I reached into the shadows and lifted it out. The rubber grip had long since unraveled, but while the willow had gone soft at the edges, the meat of the blade remained hard.

Gripping it, I edged forward, into the living room.

The cottage was a century old, so the layout didn't conform to modern design. It ran in a kind of spiral: kitchen through to a dining room, past a pair of blistered French windows, and then on to a single, narrow staircase that took you up. I moved across the living room, eyes everywhere, trying to see if anything had moved.

At the stairs, I paused.

Listened.

There was no noise.

“Lee?”

Briefly, a floorboard creaked.

I looked up the steps, into the darkness. The house was an antique, weary and old, and every footstep through it would be mapped by a succession of groans. At the top, I could make out vague shapes I'd come to know well: a long, cylindrical window on the right, cut into the outside wall; then the first of three bedrooms—the one at the top of the stairs being mine—the tiniest fragments of light coming in through its window and spilling out on to the landing.

Nothing else.

I reestablished my grip on the bat. Even in the dark, I could make out my hands: blanched white, like sticks of chalk, veins slithering through from wrists to knuckles. As I paused there, I heard faint, indistinct noises and I became uncertain as to whether it was coming from inside or outside the house. The wind could easily have been a whisper. The gentle fall of rain on the roof could have been someone softly padding around.

Raising the bat, I slowly started the ascent.

Even as I tried to rein in the impact of my full weight on the stairs, they groaned and shifted. I kept to the right, my back against the outside wall, and as I got halfway I paused and looked through the railing, along
the landing, into the bathroom and the other two bedrooms. The bathroom was small: a bath, a toilet, a basin, white enamel and tiles that reflected back whatever dull glow was seeping in through a thin slice of window.

Then there were the two bedrooms.

One had remained empty from the time I'd moved in, just built-in wardrobes and old carpets. The other was the spare bedroom that looked out over the front driveway. The one I'd seen Lee in.

I edged up the rest of the stairs and stopped again at the top. There was another set of switches about a foot to my right. One was for the landing, the other for the stairs.

I reached out and pushed them both.
Click. Click
.

Nothing.

As I took a couple of steps further, a floorboard shifted beneath me and I paused, waiting for any kind of reaction from any of the rooms. But all that echoed back was more silence. Quickly, I took a sidestep, into my bedroom. It was packed with my stuff: suitcases and holdalls stacked in the corner, toiletries on top of a chest of drawers, more missing-persons files in a pile on my bedside cabinet, clothes laid across the bed.

Then: a noise.

I backed out and looked across to the spare room; the same one Healy had stayed in for four months.
That's where it came from
. Inside—not visible from where I was—I knew there was a spare bed, two standalone pine wardrobes and, next to the window, an old, discolored swivel chair, brown leather on a chrome base.

The sound was the chair turning on its base.

Someone was sitting in it.

My heart started pumping faster. I took two big steps and I was at the entrance, firming up my grip on the bat, peering through the gap between door and frame. For a moment there was nothing but shadows. But then things began to emerge: the edges of furniture, the wardrobes, the lights of the village—like the tiniest specks of paint—beyond the glass. And then the swivel chair.

Lee was slumped in it.

Eyes closed. Arms either side of him.

Quickly, I moved past the door and into the bedroom and by the time I did, his eyes were open and he was staring at me. There was something different about him now. His face was stiff and unmoving, but
even in the darkness I could see the expression in his eyes. He looked at me like he was hurt or wounded—or full of remorse.

“Lee?”

“I'm sorry, David,” he said quietly.

There was a creak behind me.

And then my head felt like it exploded.

A second later, everything went black.

There was sound before anything else. Voices. Two men—one I recognized as Lee; the other I recognized but couldn't place—talking in strained, irritated tones. On the dazed edges of unconsciousness I struggled to make out what they were saying, but with sound came sensation and, as my nerve endings fired into life, the voices shifted into focus, like a tuner finding its station. “You knew what you were doing by calling us,” said the other voice. “I knew,” Lee responded. “I just don't want to have to be here when it's done.”

My head pounded, the gathering clouds of a migraine, and I could feel wet blood all over my face: around my ear, under my chin, in my mouth. I wanted to spit it out. But I didn't. I didn't move an inch.

I sat there, chin against my chest, eyes closed.

Immediately, I knew I was in the living room. There was the smell of ash from the fireplace and, softly in the background, the whine of wind as it crept through the gaps in the French windows. They were old, no longer sitting flush to their frames, and I knew the sound well now. I couldn't tell in which direction I faced—off to the doors, or the other way to the kitchen—but I knew what I was sitting on: a wooden chair, once belonging to my grandparents, that always stayed in the corner of the room. Its legs, to which my ankles were tied, were rickety, wobbling even as I sat motionless; my wrists were bound together behind me, where the back of the chair curved slightly and was much stronger.

“Who are you calling?”

It was Lee. The other man didn't reply.

“Who are you calling?” Lee said again, desperation in his voice now.
Desperation and fear
. I wondered, briefly, whether he'd been leading me on the whole time, whether this was all some elaborate ruse to get me to this point—but then immediately dismissed it. When I'd looked into his eyes in the decaying ruins of the old farmhouse, I hadn't seen a liar. I'd seen a man haunted by ghosts: the Lings, whose lives he'd probably cost; the doctor, Schiltz, who he'd been willing to sacrifice for them; then the shadow, Cornell.

But if Lee wasn't the one that had led them here, how had they found him? No one knew I'd brought him to the house. No one even knew he was back in the country.

I'm sorry, David
.

His words from earlier emerged from the back of my mind—
You don't know what Cornell is like . 
. . The second he looks at you, you see what he's capable of. He's like a vessel carrying around all this violence and misery
—and then, on the back of that, what I'd overheard when I woke moments ago:
You knew what you were doing by calling us
.

Instantly, I understood: he'd tried to cut a deal with Cornell's people. He'd got scared while I was out, quickly working himself up into a frenzy. He'd started to believe I couldn't protect him. I'd seen it as we'd driven back from Dartmoor; not the decision he was going to make, but the slow realization. If he was returning to the open, he had to come down on the side of the fence that would keep him alive. He was petrified of Cornell, not me. He knew Cornell was a killer and I wasn't. So he reestablished contact because he thought it was the best way to save himself. He begged for their forgiveness.

And then he painted a target on my back.

“Yeah, it's me,” the other man said. Whoever he was calling had picked up. “He's here.” A pause. “I've tied him up. Do you want me to wait?” Another pause, much longer this time. Somewhere off to my left, I heard Lee moving, heard the wheeze of the sofa as he sat down, and I realized I was facing back across the living room, toward the French windows. “Are you sure?” He waited for the answer. “Okay.” Then he hung up.

“What's happening?” Lee said.

“Shut up.”

“I want to know what's happening.”

“Shut your fuckin' maw.”

The other man was local: he had a strong south Devon accent and sounded in his forties or fifties. His voice had a gristly, coarse kind of twist to it. I listened to him come around to my right and drop down, below my shoulder line. The next moment I felt rope tightening at my ankles, and then at my wrists, as he made sure the knots were strong.

I waited for him to get to his feet again and come back round in front of me, and then gradually I lifted my head and opened my eyes. Neither of them noticed at first.

Lee was still on my left, slumped on the sofa, staring down at the floor. He looked distant and broken, and I noticed two fresh bruises and a deep cut on one side of his face, where he'd been hit with something. His second chance was already going south.

On the far side of him were three big candles set in a line, their light casting out into the center of the room. Shadows danced on the walls.

I turned to the other man. He was removing his coat.

A dark blue oilskin.

I knew then why I recognized his voice.

It was Prouse, the fisherman.

A second later, they both noticed I was awake. Lee swallowed and said nothing, but came forward to the edge of the sofa. Prouse let his coat fall away from his body, like he was shedding his skin, and it dropped to the floor behind him. I tried to draw the link between Prouse and Lee, between Prouse and
anything
, but I couldn't see the connection.

He found the body on the beach.

What did that have to do with Lee?

With the Lings?

Briefly, as he came across the living room toward me, I thought of Healy, of the two of us sitting in The Seven Seas, Healy's eyes fixed on a man at the bar behind me.

Prouse.

“Finally,” he said, a smile parting the untidy tangle of his beard. The smile was small and menacing, and faded as quickly as it formed. He stopped in front of me, and we stared at each other for a moment.

Then he punched me in the jaw.

It came quick and fast, before I'd even had a chance to brace myself, and as the chair rocked from side to side, one leg to another, pain rippled through my skull. His jab was like concrete: rigid and fibrous, his knuckles as hard as rocks. Once the chair settled again, I could feel the imprint on my chin: the grit from his bunched fingers, and the smell—fish and oil and sweat—from his skin.

I rolled my jaw and looked at him.

“How you feeling, boy?”

“I've been better.”

Prouse smiled. “I bet you have.”

I glanced at Lee. He couldn't even meet my eyes. Prouse looked from Lee back to me and mockingly puckered his lips. “Aw, are the two of you having a lovers' tiff ?”

I fixed my gaze on Prouse. “What do you want?”

“I want a photograph.”

The photograph
. I decided to play it dumb. “What kind of a photograph?”

“You trying to trap me, boy?” he said, wagging a finger at me.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Out of nowhere, he punched me again.

He was fast and strong, and this time the chair toppled all the way over. I hit the carpet hard, head first, and the impact reverberated through my body like a wave. Lee got up from the sofa. “Is this really necessary?” His voice was doughy and weak, and Prouse just had to look at him before he backed down. As the two of them faced off, I tried to loosen my binds from the floor. But Prouse was a fisherman. If there was one thing he knew how to do, it was to tie a good knot. Yet, while there was no give in the rope, I could feel the chair wheezing with age beneath me.

“Where's the photograph?” he said, standing over me.

“If you told me what it was of, I might know.”

“Don't play smart with me, boy,” he said. “That little bastard over there has been whistling like a canary, so you don't need to know what the picture is
of
to know what I'm talking about.” He paused, and dropped to his haunches. “Where'd she put it?”

“Who?”

“That bitch you're trying to find.”

“Carrie?”

“Where'd she put it?”

“Put it?” I looked at Lee. He'd have told Prouse about the notebook, assuming Prouse didn't know already. I turned to the fisherman. “The picture's in her notebook.”

He didn't seem surprised. “No shit.”

“You knew that already?”

He didn't answer and instead reached down, one hand gripping the back of the chair, one gripping the leg, and hoisted me up. I could feel fresh blood on my lips, and bruising forming along the lines of my jaw. He headed across to the other side of the living room, to where he'd left his jacket, and for the first time I noticed there was a holdall next to it.

He unzipped it and started going through it.

I glanced at Lee. He was a mess. Eyes downcast, face pale and sickly. He looked small and damaged, a shadow even of the man I'd found hiding in the farmhouse. I tried wordlessly to force him to look at me as Prouse went through his holdall, but he refused to meet my eye. Then Prouse got to his feet and turned around.

He was holding a gun.

My heart stirred.

Muscles tensed.

He walked up to me and stopped a foot short of my knees, arm at his side, huge hand deliberately covering the weapon. It looked like a Glock, but it was difficult to tell.

“What are you doing?” Lee said from behind him.

Prouse didn't answer. He eyed me, brow furrowed, as if he'd never taken the time to look before. Then he turned the gun in his palm, pushing it forward to the front of his hand, and raised it to my eyeline. He held it there. Steady. Certain. It was so close to my face I couldn't focus properly, but I didn't shrink away, even as fear bled through every pore. I just sat there, staring down the barrel, trying to keep my head clear.

Form a plan. Any plan
.

“Lee says he told you what was in that picture,” Prouse said.

“That's not true.”

He moved the gun forward. “You saying he's lying?”

“I'm saying, he didn't know either.”

I switched my gaze, up above the ridge of the barrel, to Prouse's eyes. They were small and dark, even against the black of his beard, but they had no shine to them. There was no light in them at all.
Healy was right about you. You aren't just a fisherman
. I was angry that I hadn't seen the same things as Healy. I just thought he was being paranoid.

“You know what?” he said, finger wriggling at the trigger. “I don't know which one of you bastards to believe anymore. So I'm just gonna have to beat it out of you.”

“Look, I don't know who's in the photogr—”

Prouse swatted the gun across my face, opening his hand so as much of the weapon was exposed as possible. The metal hit like a hammer. The chair rocked, teetered, then finally fell back into place.

“Just tell him what you know, David!”

I tried to focus on Lee, to my left, somewhere on the edge of the sofa, but I suddenly felt nauseated. A second later, as my head rolled forward, I completely blacked out. Briefly, in the darkness, I saw a frozen moment in time: Healy and me in The Seven Seas, my face a picture of disbelief.
What, you think the fisherman's involved?
And then I was awake again, my head a fluid, swelling mass of pain, thumping like rolls of thunder.

“I got other questions for you,” Prouse said, leaning in. I could feel his breath on my cheek, smell the tobacco on his teeth. “You're gonna answer them.
All
of them.”

I looked at him. “I got some questions for you too.”

He smiled. “You a joker, boy?”

“How about we trade? You answer mine, I'll answer yours.”

The smile didn't fade from his face as quickly this time, but there was no humor in it. He had a far-off look in his eyes, like a thought had come to him, and while he was mulling it over, everything else had frozen in time. But then the smile finally did go and he turned to Lee. “Come here, Lee,” he said, almost a softness to his voice now. “Come.”

Lee got up, warily.

“Lee, don't trust—”

“
Shut up!
” Prouse screamed into my face. He turned back to Lee. “Son, come here. It's okay. I want to show you something.” Lee edged toward him. “Don't be frightened.”

Lee stopped just behind Prouse.

“I want to show you what happens when someone doesn't play by the rules.” The fisherman looked from me to Lee and then back again, and I steeled myself for whatever was coming next. But then Prouse turned to Lee. And he shot him in the leg.

The noise was immense, ripping through the house before being swallowed by the groans of the wind. For a split second, Lee didn't seem to react, even though the bullet had propelled him back across the living room and into Paul Ling's computer. But then blood erupted out of the top of his thigh, the computer monitor fell to the floor, and Lee collapsed on to the sofa, face white, words lost in the agony.

Prouse looked at me. “Is that what you wanted?”

There was blood all over the sofa now.

“Is that what you
wanted
?” he shouted.

“
Listen
to me,” I replied, keeping my eyes on him and my voice steady. The pain in my head was starting to make me feel dizzy, but I pushed back a fresh wave of nausea. “Whatever you want to know, I will tell you. But if you hurt him again, you get nothing.”

Prouse laughed. “You got balls, boy, I'll give you that.”

“Are we clear?”

“You know what that little bastard did, right?” Prouse studied me. “
Right
? He
betrayed
you. He called us up and begged for his life.” Prouse started talking like a whining child: “‘I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry for what I've done, please can we start again. Don't hurt me, don't hurt me, don't hurt me.' I didn't hear him begging for
your
life.”

“It doesn't matter.”

The fisherman snorted.

Lee was sobbing now. Prouse glanced at him, contempt in his face. “You want me to put another one in your balls?” he said, taking a step closer to Lee. Lee shook his head, desperately trying to rein in his sobs, and his whole body seemed to fold in on itself.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

He turned back to me. “Lee told you some things.”

I nodded.

“So I want to know where the photograph is.”

“It's in the notebook.”

“I know it's in the fuckin' notebook!
”

My head was on fire, but at the same time I was trying to work out what the hell Prouse was doing here, where he fitted in and what he was talking about. He already knew about the photograph, and he knew it was in her notebook. So why was he asking where the picture was? “Listen to me,” I said. “The photograph is in Carrie's notebook.”

“We've got the notebook. Where's the photograph?”

I frowned. “It wasn't in the notebook?”

He leaned in to me. “Where's the other one?”

“Other one what?”

He smirked, didn't say anything.

“Look, I only know about Carrie Ling's notebook and that there's some kind of a photograph, and it's important to you and your . . .”

“My what?”

I made the leap. “Your boss. Cornell.”

For the first time, something moved in the black of his eyes; a predator remembering there was an animal even worse than him. “That about the sum total of it?”

“That's all I know.”

He fumbled around in the pocket of his trousers and brought out his phone again. I glanced at Lee: he was doubled over, a hand on his wound, blood leaking out over his fingers. Prouse's eyes stayed on me as he auto-dialed a number. “It's me,” he said, when the person on the other end picked up. “He doesn't know where it is.” Prouse shook his head. “No. But he's clever. He'll find out. If we let him, he'll find out about everything.”

I flicked another look at Lee. His eyes were closed, and he'd quietened.
His hand had slipped away from the wound and was flat to the sofa. There was blood everywhere.

“You want me to wait?”

Prouse's voice brought me back. I looked at him. He was studying his watch, gun still clutched in the same hand, listening to whatever was being said.

Then he hung up.

Pocketing the phone again, he raised the gun and moved toward me. There was a purpose about him now. “This is where you and me say good-bye, boy.”

He pressed the gun against my forehead.

“Wait a sec—”

“Sorry it won't be an open casket.”

Then, in my peripheral vision, I saw Lee move.

“Where are the Lings?” As I asked, I could see Lee pause on the edge of the sofa, a grimace on his face. I kept my eyes on Prouse. “I just want to know where they are.”

The corners of the fisherman's mouth turned up.

“Please,” I said. “Give me that, at least.”

“What difference does it make?”

Lee hobbled off the sofa and looked around him hazily, as if he didn't know where he was or what he was doing.
Help me, Lee.
There was an iron poker lying across the hearth that I willed him to grab. But he didn't. He didn't even seem to see the poker. He didn't seem to be focusing on anything. He looked bewildered, punch-drunk, blood all over him. He limped across to the middle of the room and fell in behind Prouse.

Prouse noticed him, turned. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Then, instinctively, I moved.

With every last atom of strength, I rocked the chair back, and then—as it shifted forward again—launched myself at him, wrists tied behind me, ankles locked in place, chair glued to my back. It was clumsy, but I managed to turn enough in the air so the weight of the legs clattered into Prouse first. All three of us hit the floor, Lee spinning off toward the fireplace. I landed on top of Prouse, something on the chair snapping, and heard his gun fall away somewhere else, hitting the carpet with a metallic rasp. My head started swimming, I felt myself drift, then I was back in the moment and Prouse was heaving me off him. I made a half-turn, the chair halting my movement.

Prouse scrambled away, looking for the gun, eyes scanning the room. Lee was on the floor beyond, moaning gently.
He's losing too much blood. He'll be dead inside ten minutes.
I took in as much of the room as I could see, trying to get a location on the gun.

Then, beneath me, the chair collapsed completely.

I rolled further away from Prouse, my arms still tied behind me, and used the wall to shuffle to my feet. He was already up, eyes desperately searching the floor for the gun.

I charged him.

He absorbed the impact, coming as hard at me as I came at him, and we stumbled sideways, toward the French windows, unable to stop our momentum—and crashed right through them. Glass shattered. Wood splintered. And then we were on the grass outside.