Never Coming Back (32 page)

“It's me.”

“Is everything okay?”

Carlos looked back, out through the rear doors to the rubber ring. “It's Cornell,” he said. “I think he might have broken into my house.”

Emily had given me a spare key for the Lings' place back at the very start, so I headed north to their home at Buckfastleigh. I wanted to give the house another sweep in light of the conversation I'd had with Reardon—but, also, I wanted to get away from the coast.

I used lanes instead of main roads, and it took me about three times as long, but as the house finally came into view, I pulled into a turnout half a mile further on and waited. In the silence, I thought of Kalb again and pulled my phone out of the hands-free. There was a regular signal, but no 3G. I wasn't going to be getting on the internet anytime soon.

After five minutes, not a single car had passed me and there was no sign of a tail; and as my eyes drifted back toward the house, I knew it would also be too cold and too wet for people to be walking around. That could work to my advantage. Once I was out of the car and inside the house, any voices or cars close by would act like an alarm call.

Firing up the BMW, I drove on past the house and left the car on an old, disused farm track behind a line of oak trees. They were gradually being stripped of their leaves for winter, but although the car wasn't completely hidden from view, it was better than leaving it in the open. I locked up and headed back to the house.

In the entrance hall, under the glass-domed roof, I paused and took in the emptiness of the place—the kitchen in front of me, the stairs to the left, the door into Paul's study and the living room beyond it—and tried to visualize the night the family had been taken. Cornell was careful. Even if he hadn't come himself, he would have made sure he sent men he could rely on. They might have surprised the family and wanted to get them out of the house as quickly as possible, but one of them—maybe more than one—would have stayed behind to clean everything down, to make sure there was nothing left for police.

Except maybe they still missed something.

I placed my mobile phone down on the telephone table in the hall. I'd removed the battery and the SIM card and turned it off. If Rocastle wanted to find me, if he tried to track me through my phone, he'd have to work for it. Being in this part of the world would help: there was greater distance between base stations, making any signal I gave out much more difficult to pinpoint. But, for now, I was choosing not to give any.

I focused on what I was here for.

Dissertation is in the laptop
.

Paul's PC and Annabel's MacBook were still at my house, and there was no going back for them—but while it was possible that when Carrie talked about her dissertation, she meant she'd put it on to Annabel's MacBook, somehow I doubted it. I'd been through it and found nothing; just two weeks in the life of a 24-year-old.

Searching the ground floor again, I opened every cupboard and drawer, looked in every corner of every room. I opened books, flicked through them in case something, some clue, had been left inside. I took photo frames off shelves and flipped off the backs, looking for hidden messages or hints at what had happened on January 7. I worked my way through the kitchen, into the living room and back around to Paul Ling's study.

Nothing.

Upstairs, the house felt colder and emptier, like an emaciated mirror image of the ground floor. I wondered if it was because this was where they'd slept, where they spent the majority of their time; the place where—like a graveyard—they came to rest.

I moved through Paul and Carrie's room, their wardrobes, their drawers, under the bed, into the connecting bathroom. In Annabel's room, as I passed in front of her bookshelves, in front of books that spoke of her future, of a career, of a life, I had a sudden distressing sense of clarity. This wasn't a missing persons case anymore, at least not in the sense I had any hope for them. It was a search for bodies; for the final resting places of a scattered family.

Maybe not even a search.

A wake.

It became even harder to keep a lid on my emotions as I moved to Olivia's room, every surface recalling her innocence, every space a reminder of her brief eight years. I looked around, at the boy bands plastered to the walls, at the Disney Princess clock and the
High School Musical
duvet, at the cabin bed with stickers dotted along it. Underneath the bed, on a pull-out desk, were the things I remembered seeing the first time: a lineup of tiny plastic dogs, two Barbies, a 3DS, a tin full of pencils, and then a toy computer—a big chunk of red plastic—with a camera on a stalk, molded to look like a caterpillar.

A toy computer
.

I took a step closer to it.

No. This is ridiculous.

But I reached down anyway and pulled it across the desk toward me, flipping the lid to reveal a yellow keyboard embedded in a white surround, and a twelve-inch screen.

I booted it up.

It made a series of chirping noises and, thirty seconds later, a functional desktop appeared. On the right were three folders: “Movies,” “Games” and a painting program. Nothing else. You couldn't even create a new folder, so you certainly couldn't import anything to it. I used the trackpad and went to “Movies,” knowing there was no way Carrie could have got her dissertation on to here. Inside the folder were seven videos.

I clicked on the first one. A movie of Olivia came on: she was dancing around her room, hair done up, singing into an empty tube of Pringles. It felt somehow intrusive watching her, and I thought again how desperate this move had been. When one video ended, the next one started up automatically: Olivia again, taken moments after the end of the last video, same clothes, same Pringles tube, a different song. I watched her, anguish mixed with frustration, and then got up and went to the window. As I looked out into the road, one video stopped and another began. Olivia again, a third different song.

Where next?

The road was still quiet. No cars. No people. Beyond, out on the lake, small boats—smudged and indistinct—drifted across its surface. All the time, rain continued falling.

Behind me, Olivia had stopped dancing and was talking to the camera. “When I get older, I'm going to have twenty-five dogs and they're all going to run around the garden chasing each other.” Listening, I felt a deep, pervading sadness. “I'm going to call one of them Lexy, and she's going to be the mummy, and look after all the pups.”

As Olivia's voice played in the background, I tried to get everything straight in my head. Things had quickly gone bad. All three men, anyone who knew who Daniel Kalb might be, were dead. The police were going to come at me for lying about Prouse. The trip up here had been wasted. There was a dissertation on a laptop that didn't exist.

Where the hell do I go next?

“What's going on?”

“Shut up. Just shut up.”

I turned back to the laptop.

Olivia was gone.

“But, Mum—”

“Just
shut up
.”

The next movie was a shot from the landing, down through the slats in the bannister, in the direction of the kitchen. The quality of the footage was poor, everything blocky and pixellated. But then I realized what I was seeing: Paul Ling being filmed from upstairs, backed up against one of the kitchen counters, the fridge door open next to him. There was a four-pint bottle of milk on the floor, slowly emptying out across the lino.

Spreading around his feet.

And around the feet of the man who had come for him.

Next to Paul Ling was a man, dressed head-to-toe in black, a balaclava on his head with the eyes, nose and mouth cut out. He was holding a gun. For a moment, everything was still—and then, like an animal trap snapping shut, the man grabbed Paul by the arm, spun him around, clamped his other, gloved hand to Paul's mouth and put the gun to his head.

“Quiet.”

“But Dad is—”

“Quiet
.
”

Carrie and Annabel
. They'd been upstairs when the man had come for them. A couple of seconds later, another voice, off camera: “Daddy!” It was Olivia. “Daddy!” She sounded distressed. The camera rocked a little, and I heard a sharp intake of breath from Carrie—the helpless cries of her eight-year-old were like a knife twisting in her guts.

“They've got Liv now,” Annabel whispered, tearful. “Who are they, Mum?” Her voice was painful to listen to: she was so utterly terrified, it was like she'd regressed.

Ten years old again.

“Mum?”

“I don't know.” There was a degree of control left in Carrie's voice, but slowly it was starting to slide away. Her voice wobbled briefly. “I don't know,” she said again.

“Why are you filming?”

“Because someone needs to know.”

“Needs to know what?”

Carrie didn't reply this time. She shifted the camera right—along the slats of the stairs—and Olivia came into shot. Both women audibly gasped, and the sound distorted in whatever feeble microphone Olivia's computer had. Standing in the doorway of the living room was Prouse, looking toward the kitchen. He also had a balaclava on but I could see the remnants of his beard and recognized the blackness of his eyes. He'd lifted Olivia right off the ground, and though her legs were kicking furiously, she made little sound. His big, gloved hand covered her mouth, reducing her cries to a soft muffled moan.

“What are we going to do?” Annabel said.

From the left of the shot came the other man, dragging Paul along the hallway. Paul was now limp, unconscious. Again, the women made soft, suppressed sounds, fear caught in their throats. “The others must be upstairs,” Prouse said. Somewhere close to Carrie, I could hear Annabel starting to cry properly now, unable to stop herself.

The other man dropped Paul on to the hallway floor.

A dead weight.

“Do you want me to go and get them?” asked Prouse.

The other man didn't reply, his hands wriggling in his gloves. His eyes scanned the hallway, the living room, the study, and as they drifted up toward the camera a memory took flight in me, a flash of déjà vu: five years ago, in a bar in the Mandalay Bay.

That same look.

It was him.

Cornell
.

He'd come for the Lings himself; flown over from the States to make sure it was done properly. And, immediately, I felt certain he was here again. The man who'd come for Prouse. The escape route through the grass. The massacre at Farnmoor. He'd come over, ready to finish things once and for all. Now the only one left was me.

“Come on,” Carrie said to Annabel.

I heard Prouse say something else, but then his voice was gone. For ten seconds the footage descended into a blurred, pixellated mess. When it settled again, I could see where we were: in Olivia's bedroom, exactly where I was. Carrie placed the computer down on the pull-out desk. Behind her was the door, the posters of the boy bands, and—in the shadows of the room—Annabel, glancing from Carrie to the door, from Carrie to the door, over and over. For a few brief seconds I watched the living, breathing versions of them, not the ones I'd seen in photographs, not the ones Prouse had talked of. In that moment, even as the shadows of their deaths began to form, they were very much alive.

“I think this has to do with Kalb,” Carrie said, leaning in to the caterpillar camera. I could hear her breath, short and frightened, Annabel wide-eyed behind her. “Paul was right. He said we were in danger. He said it had something to do with the notebook. But I didn't believe him.” She paused, tears shimmering in her eyes. “I didn't believe him.”

Then she got out her phone.

“What are you doing, Mum?”

Carrie didn't respond. She was making a call, concentrating on the phone, looking down at it, as she held it in her lap. Then I realized something. She wasn't making a call.

She was sending a text—to Robert Reardon.

Dissertation is in the laptop
.

“Are you calling the police?” whispered Annabel.

“There's no time for that now.”

“What are you doing then?”

“Leaving a trail.”

“Mum!”

Carrie looked behind her, still operating the phone, and I realized then what she must have been doing: deleting any evidence she'd sent the text to Reardon. It occurred to me again how fortunate Reardon had been: whether she'd meant to or not, Carrie had left no route back to him.

Out on the landing, a floorboard creaked. She threw the phone off to the side, and I heard it hit the wall with a dull thud. Then she leaned in, all the way up to the microphone, until only her chin and her teeth were visible on camera. She stayed like that for five or six seconds. The camera shifted to the right as her chin brushed against it. “The dissertation is in the laptop,” she said, a low whisper now. “Please. Somebody help us.”

Then it cut to black.

For a moment, I sat there stunned.

But then my brain started to fire again.

Dissertation is in the laptop
.

I looked down at it, its red plastic case, its caterpillar camera. It was the perfect hiding place. Cornell had been through their machines, phones, through anything Paul, Carrie or Annabel would have used to communicate—but who would have thought to have checked Olivia's toys? The hiding place was too good, though,
too
effective: not only had Cornell failed to find what Carrie had hidden inside it, but so had the police.

Slowly, I started going through it, checking the other movies on there: they were all of Olivia playing around in her room. There was a ninety-second limit on files, and the maximum resolution was 352 x 288 pixels. If I somehow got them off the laptop and blew them up, they'd be unwatchable. But none of them was her dissertation. There were no USB
slots on the machine, no e-mail function, no way of getting anything on to it.

So I played the movie again.

There was a sickening inevitability to it the second time, like watching a death in slow motion, and the moments with the girls—Olivia screaming for her dad; Annabel's tears shining in the half-light of the bedroom—were even more affecting somehow. Both of them were so young, even Annabel, and neither had any remote understanding of why this was happening. I watched those last ten seconds again: Carrie coming in close to the camera, whispering into the microphone, her voice cleaved through with so much fear.

Then the camera shifted to the right.

Dissertation is in the laptop
.

In
it.

I picked it up and turned it over. On the bottom were four screws, fused to the plastic. There was no way Carrie, or anyone else, would have been able to open it up with a screwdriver. But in the middle was a slot for four D-size batteries. I flipped it off.

Inside was a memory stick.

I felt a charge of electricity pass through me, a buzz in my veins. It was about four centimeters long and a quarter of a centimeter thick, just a plain red casing with a slimline USB connector. If it was any thicker, it would never have fitted in front of the batteries. But Carrie had thought it out.
Paul was right. He said we were in danger. I didn't believe him
. Except a part of her believed him enough, even as she'd told him he was overreacting, to copy her dissertation across to the memory stick and hide it inside her daughter's laptop. And now I had what Cornell was looking for. The thing that had cost countless people their lives.

Now I had the thing that could bring him down.