Never Coming Back (30 page)

About halfway up, something made a noise—a dull thud—and I paused there. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. After twenty, I began moving again and, at the top step, reestablished my grip on the knife. It was big and weighty, and would be fine up close. But the assailant had a gun. Unless I could surprise them, I might as well have had nothing.

I stood there and listened.

The only noise now was the rain at the windows.

Along the hallway, at the end, was the library. To my right were two function rooms, mostly empty of furniture. Further down on the opposite side were the same doors that had been closed the day before. Graham's bedroom. Maybe his study. I started down toward them, flicking a look toward the library, my mind racing. Why wasn't there any sound?
Because the killer's waiting for you, drawing you in.

Or everyone's already dead
.

I'd gone about twenty paces when I saw more blood on the walls. I could make out finger smears, as if someone had reached out for support and then toppled to the ground. There was a trail of it in the carpet, from the point the finger smears ended, all the way along the hallway, to the first closed door.

I headed for it.

And then stopped again.

Immediately to my left now was Katie Francis's office, the edge of her desk visible and part of the window behind it. There was blood on the door, around the door handle, a handprint on one of the panels. Something mechanical moved in me, a thick, desperate sense of inevitability, and then, gripping the knife, I pushed at the door with my sleeve.

It inched back.

Katie Francis sat upright in her chair, but the chair had drifted out from under the desk on its wheels. Her arms looked like they were reaching down for the floor, fingers grasping at the floorboards; her body was tilted slightly to the left, her head angled in the same direction, but resting against her shoulder. One of her shoes had spun off and away.

Her killer had put a single bullet through the center of her forehead. Her blood was all over the wall behind, her life painted there in one grotesque arc, but her eyes were the worst part. They were wide open,
looking right at me, and even while the light had gone, you could still see the echoes of her last moments: all the fear, all the desperation.

I quickly backed out, immediately zeroing in on the closed door along the hall. The blood trail leading to Graham's bedroom had begun in Francis's office. My heart pounded against the inside of my ribs like a ball of rock, even though I already knew what I'd find.
Graham. Dead.
I knew as well, intuitively, that the killer was gone.

This hell was their aftermath.

At the door, I hesitated, sleeved fingers wrapped around the handle, wondering if I even had the stomach for what was on the other side. Memories flashed in my head like a strobe: the evil I'd faced down before, the devils and executioners, the innocent people they'd tried to bury and the carnage they'd left in their wake.

I stepped closer and opened the door.

Graham's bedroom was long and simple. Against the far wall was a king-sized bed, three standalone wardrobes to its right and a wall-mounted TV. Closer to me, at the other end, was a desk with a laptop on it and a lamp.

There was so much blood it was difficult to imagine what the room might once have looked like. It was on the walls, on the windows and across the laptop. On the floor, sprawled between the desk and the bed—black T-shirt, shaved hair—was one of Graham's security detail. I recognized him from being at the house the day before. He'd been shot through the back of the head. Blood washed out from under him, suggesting he'd taken one in the stomach too, but it was hard to tell for sure.

Because next to him was another corpse, awash in blood.

This one was Carter Graham.

His face was pressed right into the skirting board, as if he'd been smashed into it—pushed there by the power of his attacker—and there was a horrible contortion to his body, neck angled one way, body the other. He lay stomach down, knees to the floor, and a pool of blood was clawing its way out from under him, slipping into the gaps between floorboards and running across the room toward me. He'd been shot in the chest. I took an involuntary step forward, drawn to him, drawn to help him, then stopped and looked down: my feet were in his blood, in the blood of his security guard, and reality kicked in.
What had I touched with my hands since I'd been here? What had I left my prints on?

I backed up, the pool of blood following, and then kept going all the way to the door. Walls, door frames, handles, I couldn't remember anymore. I'd been on edge—and I'd been sloppy. I hadn't been thinking. In my pocket, I felt my phone start to buzz. I didn't answer it, my attention drifting back to Graham: eyes closed, nose pressed to the wall, mouth open, body twisted horribly.
Something isn't right.
My phone continued to vibrate, a series of gentle purrs in the silence.
Something isn't right about the way he died
.

He'd said he'd had seven men in his security team.

But there was only one here.

After lingering on Graham for a moment more, I headed out into the hall and along to the other closed door. It wasn't a bathroom or a study, it was a room full of filing cabinets, stuffed with paperwork. I checked the other rooms, rooms whose open doors I'd passed in the days before—but there were no other bodies. There was no more death.

So, where the hell are the rest of the security?

For a second I stood there, frozen, my head full of noise. Then I became aware of the phone again, buzzing. I took it out and looked at the display. Caller unknown.

I answered, the signal drifting. “David Raker.”

“Let me tell you how the past twenty-four hours has been for me, shall I?”
Rocastle
. He came straight out of the traps. No greeting, no introduction. The reception was terrible, but marginally better than outside. “Late last night I have to sit and listen to your bullshit about not being involved in my case. I'll give you your dues, Raker, you spin a
convincing tale, even for a suspicious old man like me. You told me Prouse took off across the hills. Do you remember that?”

“That's where I saw hi—”

“Right. That's where you ‘saw' him. So, tell me: if he headed out across the hills, why the
fuck
was I standing next to his cold, hard corpse at the Ley this morning?”

“I don't know,” I said, keeping my voice even.

“You don't know. Right. Are you even
remotely
familiar with the geography in this part of the world?
Are
you? Because the hills you talked of are in completely the opposite direction to the Ley.” His voice had taken on a different tone now: he'd dropped to a hushed, caged fury. “Which must have meant he double-backed on himself. But
that
can't be right because my search area was
two fucking miles across
! If he came back to the village, we would have got him. Instead, some couple finds him down by the lake!”

“I don't know what to say. I thought I saw—”

“I don't give a shit what you saw. In fact, I don't give a shit about a single thing that comes out of your mouth.” He paused. I could hear him breathing, almost wheezing, as if he couldn't get on top of his anger. I'd slowly moved back along the hall and paused outside the bedroom, looking in at the bodies. It was such a mess, so much blood between Graham and me, it was hard to tell exactly what his injuries were—not without getting close, without turning him on to his back and leaving myself all over the crime scene. I'd thought chest, but it could have been gut. He'd bled a lot, and it was still coming.

“Now I've got this bullshit at Farnmoor to deal with.”

That brought me back into focus. “What?”

“Carter Graham called me an hour ago.”

So he
had
called Rocastle, just as I'd told him to. I looked into the bedroom again. What did I say? That I was here, standing over Carter Graham's body? That I'd walked all over a crime scene without even thinking about it? I was already in deep shit with Rocastle. If I told him what had happened, I'd be signing my own death warrant.

“What did Carter say?” I asked.

“Carter?
Carter
said he thought ‘they' were coming for him.”

I looked at the body. “He's right. There's—”

“Oh, I
see
. This is another one of your fantasies.”

“Listen
—
”

“No, you listen, you lying bastard. I just had to leave a murder scene for this pile of shit because you know what my super will say if we don't drop our drawers for Carter Graham?
Do
you? ‘You've got to get down there, Colin, because this guy pays fifty grand a year into our police community fund.' Sod the stiff lying on the shores of the lake with half his brain slopping out the back of his head. Who cares about him? He's just a fisherman. Much better that I go to the house and babysit millionaire Carter Graham.”

My eyes lingered on Graham for a second more, on all the questions that would go unanswered, and then I headed off along the hallway. I didn't stop to look in at Katie Francis again. She'd made bad choices, and she'd sided with the wrong man, but she didn't deserve what had been visited upon her. I couldn't bear to look at her again.

I headed through to the library, eyes gliding over every surface, trying to find anything that might connect Graham, connect any of this, to Kalb; anything at all that might give me an idea of who he even
was
. Pulling my sleeve down to cover my hand, I opened and closed drawers and pulled books out of shelves. But there was nothing.

Rocastle was still swearing at me.

I cut in. “Just listen to me for two seconds, okay?”

“No.”

“There's someone here in Devon. I think they've been sent by a—”

“
No
,” he said again, almost screaming it down the phone. “I'm going to make this very simple for you. Wherever you are at the moment, you're going to head home. There, DC McInnes and two uniformed officers will be waiting to arrest you.”

I sighed. “There's no time for this.”

“You had us wasting hours yesterday searching a
barren fucking hillside
, so don't talk to me about having no time!”

Rain swirled in as I got down to the front steps of the house.

“Raker?”

“Do what you have to do,” I said—and then hung up.

As soon as I got back on to the main coastal road, I took the first turning back off it and followed a series of ten-foot-wide lanes west, in the vague direction of the village. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I knew I didn't want to pass Rocastle as he came the other way, toward Farnmoor. I needed time to think, to plan out my next move.

If I thought my home was off-limits before, the likely destination for a killer looking to finish the job, then it definitely was now. If I let myself get arrested, nothing got solved: the Lings wouldn't be found and Cornell would disappear, having closed the loop. I was the only one left now, the only one with any kind of connection to the photograph, to whoever Kalb was and why he represented such a destructive risk to Cornell. And yet, basically, I knew nothing. I didn't even know Kalb's first name. We were miles apart.

Suddenly my phone started buzzing in my lap. I glanced at it, expecting it to be Rocastle. But it wasn't. It was a number that I didn't have logged. An Exeter area code.

Reardon
.

Carrie's university lecturer.

I jammed it into the hands-free and pressed Answer.

“David Raker.”

“I've got three messages to call you.” He was so indignant, he didn't even introduce himself. I'd decided against mentioning Carrie in any of the voice mails—it was a risky strategy, but I wanted to come at him cold. Using Carrie as bait would have given him time to gather his thoughts before phoning. “What exactly is it you want?”

I felt underprepared for this phone call—my mind still turbulent—but I didn't want to lose the opportunity to speak to him.

“I want to talk about Carrie Ling.”

There was a brief hesitation. “Oh. Carrie. What about her?”

“I don't have much time, Robert, so I'm going to cut to the chase: her family have asked me to find her, and I think you can help. You ever heard of a man called Kalb?”

“I don't think I—”

“He was part of her MA.” I left that hanging there, rain lashing
against the roof of the car, the cold, barbed winter air crawling its way inside. “Robert?”

“I can't discuss private matters—”

“Look, I haven't got time for this dance. I want to know what her MA was about and I want to know who Kalb is. And you're going to tell me.”

“You can't talk to me like that.”

“Are you listening to what I'm saying?”

“I heard—”

“It's the
reason
she and her family disappeared.”

“I don't know . . . You can't . . .”

“Would you prefer it if I didn't find her?”

“That's ridiculous. No, of course not.”

“Do you want that on your conscience?”

“I have a clear conscience, thank you.”

“What about if they're dead?”

No answer.

“Robert?”

“Do you think they're dead?”

He sounded different now—his bluster gone—and I knew where the question had come from: the point, probably a few months after they went missing, when he started to realize Carrie and her family weren't coming home again, and he began to wonder why.

“Do you think they're dead?” he said again.

“I think there's a good chance of that, yes.” I let that soften him up even more. Then I went at him again. “Did Carrie ever show you a photograph of a man named Kalb?”

He seemed unsettled by the change of direction.

“A photograph?”

“It would have been taken in about 1971.”

A pause. “She said she had one in her possession.”

“You never saw a copy of it yourself?”

“No.”

“Did you request one?”

“I told her I'd like to see it. She said she'd send it to me.”

“But she never did?”

“No. I don't know why.”

I thought I could take a pretty good guess: Lee Wilkins would have
been telling Paul that the photograph could land them in trouble; Paul would have told Carrie the same. She was wrestling with her conscience.

“Did she tell you where she found the picture?”

“No.”

“She only described it to you?”

“Yes. We only ever talked about Kalb over the phone.”

That had probably saved Reardon's life. Cornell and his people would have been through Carrie's e-mails and found no mention of Kalb. There was no mention of him in the dissertation notes she'd left on Paul's PC either. If she'd referenced him even once in an e-mail correspondence with Reardon, the professor would have been in the ground like everyone else. He couldn't begin to understand how lucky he was.

I moved up through the gears.

“So who's Kalb?”

A long, deep breath came down the line, sounding like a burst of static. He was still hesitant, a man brought up on traditional values, on the protection of people's privacy, their ideals, their integrity. But those values were worthless when you were already in the trough with the pigs. We weren't dealing with incorruptibility.

We were dealing with killers.

I heard a door close. “What is it you want to know about him?”

“Let's start with Kalb's first name.”

“Daniel.”

Daniel Kalb.

D.K
.

“He was going to be the subject of Carrie's dissertation,” Reardon continued. He sounded different now, forlorn. “Are you familiar with the Yalta Conference?”

“I probably need a refresher.”

“Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met there in 1945, on the shores of the Black Sea, along with about seven hundred other diplomats, to organize the postwar makeup of Europe. They discussed a range of things, but arguably the most complex debate was over Poland's future. Churchill wanted free elections for the Soviet-liberated countries of Eastern Europe; Stalin wanted to maintain the USSR's power in that part of the world and argued that twice in the preceding thirty years Germany had used Poland as part of an, if you like, ‘invasion route.' Roosevelt was
somewhere in the middle, but basically needed Stalin because he needed the Soviets' military help in the war against Japan.”

“And Carrie was interested in the postwar Soviet Union?”

“Yes. Especially Poland.”

That tied in with the notes I'd found on Paul's PC.

“She wanted to use Yalta as a springboard for her dissertation,” Reardon went on. “At that stage—the stage when she first started talking about it—she didn't have much more than that. She indicated she was interested in the seven years between the end of the Second World War and the moment the People's Republic of Poland came into being in 1952; essentially, a Soviet puppet state. I told her that it was too broad a canvas, that she needed to pare it down. She went away and I didn't hear from her for a few months.”

“Did those couple of months coincide with her trip to the States?”

“Yes.”

“And when she got back from the U.S., things had changed?”

The line drifted slightly. Reardon said something, but the reception dropped out. I was coming into a black spot. Rainwater washed across the narrow lanes, spraying everywhere. There were no turnouts and I couldn't stop—if I did, no one would be able to pass. Instead, I took my foot off the accelerator and slowed to a crawl, trying to prolong the signal for as long as I could.

“. . . the photogra . . . entire course . . .”

“I lost you for a second. Can you repeat that? You were saying that things changed after Carrie got back from the States—they became more focused on Kalb?”

“Correct.”

“Which meant what?”

“Which mean . . . changed the entire cour . . . of her MA. Her outline used Yalta as the pivot still, but she turned . . . on its head.” I leaned toward the phone, trying to pick up on the words that kept dropping out. “From the end of May, maybe the start of June, her dissertation didn't become about the years
after
Yalta, it became about the years
before
it. Specifically, she beca . . . terested in the seventeen months between . . . and . . .”

“Wait, what dates?”

“. . . and Carrie had done a hell . . . lot of reading: Polish history, Soviet history, the major beats of the Second World War. All of it. By . . . she was . . . and was knowledge . . .”

“Can you repeat that?”

“. . . so she already knew about So—”

And then the line died.

Damn it.
I reached forward and pressed Dial again. It rang three times and then stopped. I heard a snatch of Reardon's voice, the vaguest sense of a
hello
, then nothing.

I tried again and he came on a little clearer this time. I looped the conversation back round to where we'd left off, but then he started talking about something else: “Carrie sent me a very strange text on the day she disappeared.”

That rang a bell. I remembered Reardon had been one of seven people—the rest, friends and family—that Carrie had texted on the day she'd disappeared.

“Strange how?”

“I don't know. It just said, ‘Dissertation is in the laptop.'”

“Laptop?”

“That's . . . she . . .”

He was breaking up again.

“
Her
laptop?”

“. . . don't know.”

And then the call bombed out again.

Dissertation is in the laptop
.

As far as I could tell, Carrie didn't
own
a laptop—certainly she hadn't left one in the house—and when I'd been through Paul's PC, I'd found only some vague, typed-up notes about life in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. I'd always assumed she'd used his PC, most likely during the day when he was at work.

Clearly, Reardon had no idea what she was talking about either and, in the police investigation, no laptop had ever been recovered and attributed to Carrie. McInnes's team hadn't interviewed Reardon in any formal capacity, but they would have seen the text sent from Carrie's phone on the day she disappeared, and he would have told them the same thing he just told me, that Carrie had sent him a weird text.

Dissertation is in the laptop
.

I looked at the clock. Midday.

I needed to get a signal on my phone and spend some time finding out who Kalb was. But, more than that, I needed to stay hidden—and I needed to work fast.