Never Coming Back (34 page)

There were three pictures left. As I moved to the next, an old color shot of a woman in her forties sitting on a wall, my phone started buzzing. I'd forgotten to turn it off again after talking to Reardon. Now Rocastle was calling. He would have been at Farnmoor for a couple of hours by now. He'd have seen what carnage Cornell's men had caused. Now he was looking for someone to blame. I watched the phone moving toward me, its purr loud in the silence of the room. Outside, the sky was darkening above the treeline.

What I should have done was turn the phone off.

But he needed to hear some things.

So I pressed Answer.

“I don't know where you are or what you're doing, but I'm going to find you,” he said, immediately on the attack. “Have you even got one
clue
what I just stumbled into?”

He meant Farnmoor. I played it safe: “Is Graham all right?”

“Is he
all right
?” A snort. “I think he's pretty far from all right.”

“What happened?”

“Don't feed me that shit, Raker.”

He'd already made up his mind that I had something to do with what happened at the house. That's how I'd thought it might go. “You're angry. But you need to listen to me.”

“I'm going to work night and day picking away at this fantasy you're building,” he continued, as if I hadn't even replied. “I'm going to prove you lied to me. I'm going to find out about all the horseshit you've probably fed me on the Ling family, on Prouse, on what happened here. I'm going to get the files for every case you've ever worked and I'm going to pick them apart one by one until I've got enough to send you down.”

“Are you finished?”

“Am I
finished
?”

“This has nothing to do with me.”

“Really?”

“The man who did this is the same man who killed Prouse. He's the same man who took the Lings. His name is Jeremy Cornell. He's protecting—”

“Doesn't it ever end?”

“—a guy called Daniel Kalb who—”

“Doesn't it ever end with you?” he said again. “Huh? It's always someone else's fault; it's always someone else who told the lie. This is
your
fault. You think we had any of this down here before you arrived? This is the fucking
countryside
, not some inner-city ghetto! Everyone here was doing fine until you rocked up.
Now
look at what we've got.”

“He's white, early forties, has black hair and—”

“Where are you?”

“Rocastle—”

“Where
are
you?”

“You need to find this man.”

“I don't
need
to do—”

“
Listen
to me. You find this man and it ends. Understand? I can
prove
this arsehole is behind everything, and I'm willing to meet you and give you everything I have. But I'm not turning up to any meeting where all you care about is putting me in handcuffs.”

“You're unbelievable, you know that?”

“Is that a no?”

“What do you think?”

“Then this conversation is over.”

I ended the call, shut my phone down, and removed the battery and the SIM. Then my eyes returned to the old color shot of the woman sitting on the wall. Next to her was a garden full of flowers, beautiful roses in full bloom. Beyond that was a rock face of some kind, rising up and beyond the top of the frame. Like the pictures of modern-day Sobibór, this one had a stamp in the corner too:
© Devonshire Historical Society
.

I tabbed through to the next one.

It was an old black-and-white picture, seemingly taken about the same time as the last photograph: a big group of people gathered together in a street. Men were in the back row, women in the middle, kids knelt at the front. They were all smiling for the camera.

Same stamp in the corner.

I counted up the faces: forty-one. Twelve men, thirteen women, sixteen kids. That made forty-two if you threw in the photographer. Around them were indistinct buildings, difficult to make out. I cast my eyes along them, trying to see if any of the men were Kalb. They weren't. There was a wide age range among the adults—some looked in their early twenties, some were probably touching ninety—and by their
fashion, by their hairstyles, which was all I had to go on again, I'd have put the period as late 1960s.

Then I saw the same woman from the previous picture.

She was right on the end of the line of women, smiling broadly. I would have definitely put her in her late forties now. She was plump but dressed smartly, like she'd just come from work, in a cream blouse and a matching navy blue skirt and jacket. There was something sewn to both shoulders of her jacket, some kind of embroidered patch.

I clicked through to the last picture.

It was a shot of the same woman, again dressed in the same clothes, but this time with a dark coat over the top. She was back on the wall I'd seen her on in the first photo. The roses were gone, but, judging by the coat and the trace of breath in front of her face, this was because it was winter. Off to her right was the cliff face I'd seen in the first shot of her, rising up and out of the frame; off to her left was a building, a house, with a brass nameplate on it.

I've seen the house before
.

Not here. Not in these pictures. But I knew it. Around her was a vast swathe of blue.

It wasn't sky.

It was sea.

I knew who this woman was now. I didn't know her name, but I knew what the embroidered patches on her shoulders were: she was a harbor mistress. She was sitting on the wall of her garden watching boats coming in, because that was her job. That was the role she served in the village she lived in. All the others, all the people in the previous shot, were her neighbors. The pub landlord. The minister at the chapel. The manager of the general store. And all forty-two of them were dead by October 1968.

This was Miln Cross before the storm.

I wondered for a moment about the photographer. Most likely, they were someone visiting for the day. A friend. A relative. But even while I saw the logic in that, I couldn't quite dispel another thought: that the Miln Cross pictures were in with the shots of Kalb, of Sobibór, of its awful, barbaric history, because Carrie had found something else out.

That Kalb had been here at some point.

That, before he went to the States, he might even have called it home.

And the reason he wasn't in the shot, the reason he insisted on taking
the picture himself, was because he never wanted to be. The villagers might not have known who he was—but, if he got photographed, if he got caught on film, someone, somewhere might.

Now, almost forty-five years later, Miln Cross was just a tomb for the people who'd died in the storm.

And, I realized, for Paul and Carrie Ling.

As I looked at the house behind the harbor mistress, I remembered going inside it. I'd been all the way through to its extension and I'd stood and looked out to sea only feet from where Prouse must have buried them.
I was supposed to put the old man in Haven, the same place I'd put the husband and wife
. My eyes drifted over the woman's shoulders.

To the name on the brass plate.

Haven.

As I reached the other side of the water, a shaft of moonlight pierced the clouds, arcing down out of the sky and hitting the middle of the village. I climbed up, out of the boat, on to the rocks, and paused there; one hand clinging to the raft, the other gripping what was left of the bridge on this side. Ahead of me, the main street in Miln Cross was temporarily lit, its broken cobbles, its collapsed roofs, its lonely, decaying buildings. But on the edges of the moonlight, in the places it didn't reach, there was only a thick, impenetrable dark.

I looked at my watch.

Seven-thirty.

I secured the boat in the same place I'd done the first time, then hoisted myself up on to the main street. Below the plateau the village was on, waves sloshed and gurgled, massaged by the cold wind that swept in across the bay. I was chilled already, my hands frozen from the rowing, my clothes dotted with seawater, but I pushed it from my mind.

All I was focused on was the house.

Haven.

I'd brought a rucksack with me, so I unzipped it, got out a flashlight and flicked it on. The beam arrowed ahead of me, between the buildings and into the curve of the street. Beyond the edges of the moonlight, beyond the bend, the house was hidden from view.

As I started walking, I felt cobbles move under my feet, shifting and sliding like I was on a bed of tennis balls. It didn't help that it was slick with rainwater. Off to my left, I passed the first of the houses, segregated slightly from the rest. I directed the light inside. Not all the homes had been the same design: this one had two floors, its second now fallen away, along with the roof. The only thing left was a staircase, stopping midway, as if waiting to be completed. As the wind rose and fell, drawn through the open windows, the holes in its walls, I heard a soft whine, like an echo from a different time.

Then it started to rain again.

It was soft at first, a gentle drumbeat against what was left of the houses, but as the clouds were drawn together, and the moonlight began to die away, it got harder.

All I had now was the flashlight.

Caught in the beam, rain became needles dropping out of the sky. I directed the flashlight right, to where the houses on that side, built on the edge of the sea, began to emerge from the dark. It was hard to see them as homes now, as places people might once have chosen to live in. Illuminated by the flashlight, they were gnarled and rotten, decomposing, the village a graveyard of bodies, and of memories, and of secrets. As the road dropped away, feeding into the curve, the buildings seemed to close in, their size and shape disguised by the oil-black of the night, shadows encasing them so that all I could see were the holes in their front: doors and windows open, apertures drawing you in. But nothing beyond that.

Nothing but darkness.

Midway down the street, the toe of my boot hit a dislodged cobble and I stumbled forward, dropping the flashlight and reaching out to the nearest wall. With a rhythmic clatter, the flashlight continued rolling away, hitting a ridge where a pavement had once stood, before stopping dead. When I looked back, trying to find the loose cobble, I couldn't see it; not because of how black it was, but because there wasn't a cobble. I'd tripped myself.

I was burned out.

As I stood there, hand against the wall, I could suddenly feel it everywhere, in my muscles, in my bones, thumping behind my eyes. Even adrenaline couldn't carry you after forty hours. I reclaimed the flashlight from the ground and took a moment.

I shouldn't have come here.

I should have waited until morning.

I should have slept.

When I took my hand away from the building, I felt a residue cling to my fingers; gluey, like an adhesive. It was sea salt, years of it having blasted the remains of the buildings. But in my exhaustion, among the ghosts of this place, it felt like something worse: an unpleasant, rotting corruption. A reflection of the man who might once have lived here.

Dum. Dum
.

A noise.

A memory flickered in my head of standing in the harbor mistress's house and hearing the same sound the last time I was here. I lifted the light away from the cobbles, up to my eyeline, trying to see what lay beyond the curve. But it was like shining it into a wall. At a certain point,
about thirty feet on, nothing came back. Edging further, I kept to the left, passing what remained of the chapel, its walls destroyed by the landslide, a wave of hardened mud forming a new floor—about six feet off the ground—inside the church. More houses. The shop and pub on the opposite side.

And then I was around the bend.

Dum. Dum
.

For a moment, the wind dropped away and all that was left was the rain, tapping against the bricks and mortar, its noise like a lament from the heavens. Haven was about two hundred feet further along, on the right, the harbor obscured behind that. I swung the flashlight from side to side, trying to see what was down there. Everything suddenly seemed still: no wind, no moan as it moved through the village seeking out its injuries, its blemishes, the holes ripped from it by the storm. I took another step, an unthinking hesitation in my stride, one I didn't recognize until it arrived. Then I understood: something wasn't right.

I dropped the flashlight down to my side.

And that was when I saw him.

He came up the steps from a boat moored, out of sight, at the harbor. There was a thin flashlight clenched between his teeth, and he was wearing an army-green apron.

In his arms was the body of a woman.

Goosebumps scattered across my skin as her face, eyes still open, caught the dull glow from the light. The rest of her seemed to be wrapped in some kind of tarpaulin. The man paused briefly, a momentary glitch in his stride, as if sensing he was being watched.

I flicked the flashlight off.

And Cornell looked up the street toward me.

He paused there. Even submerged in the dark, in the doorway of an empty, lightless house, there was a moment where it seemed like he was looking right at me. He had a calm, measured expression on his face, despite holding a body, despite the blood down his apron, inky-black in the soft light of his flashlight. He tilted his head slightly to one side, a bird-like movement that I recalled with such clarity it seemed impossible that it was five years since I'd seen him in the flesh; then he rocked forward, readjusting the body in his arms. As he moved, the shadows reset themselves, filling his eye sockets until they were just black discs, then carving down across his tanned, hairless face in short, sharp angles. Even so, something about him registered with me; a recollection, a feeling I'd seen him before somewhere. Not just in Vegas half a decade ago.

Somewhere else.

I retreated further until my back was pressed against the wall of a house and damp was soaking through my jacket, on to my shirt. It was freezing cold. The chill air. The wind. The rain. Ahead of me, Cornell tilted his head the other way, as if trying to force himself to see further, and then he turned—flashlight still in his mouth—and headed inside.

Moving quickly, I shrugged off the rucksack and propped it against the house. I'd brought the flashlight, a penknife, my phone, some rope and a foot pump for the dinghy. I also had a wetsuit. I laid the flashlight down next to me, removed the penknife and left the rest where it was. There was no signal here, so the phone was worthless; I'd brought it for after, once I got back up to the coastal road. The rope was for the bodies—or what was left of them. Prouse had talked about them being in Haven, but also in the water. He'd been confused, but I hadn't taken any chances. That was what the wetsuit was for.

But it was a plan conceived before Cornell.

Before I knew he was here.

I flicked the blade out of the penknife. It was three inches long, about half an inch wide. It would put a delay in his step, but nothing more. There was no light around me, none close to Haven either. I looked up, to the cliff edge three hundred feet above. Dark cloud was stitched together like a quilt. I'd have to approach him slowly, and I'd have to approach blind. Using the flashlight would give him my position.

Sliding the penknife into my back pocket with my left hand, I used my right to guide me down the road, toward the harbor. I didn't move as fast as I could have done, wary of hitting an uneven spread of cobbles, of making a noise, but as I worked my fingers along the walls of the buildings, the stone seemed to fall away, like the structures were just ash.

Fifty feet from the front of the house, I stopped.

Dum. Dum
.

The same noise again, even clearer.

The rain was heavier now, running under my boots in streams, between cobbles, into the pockmarks pounded out of the earth by the waves. I could hear it slopping past, but I couldn't see it. I couldn't see anything. All I had was what I could hear and what I could feel. When the wind came, it was biting, and an uncontrolled shiver passed through me. I was soaked to the bone, shirt and jacket like a second skin. I edged forward, careful where I was putting my feet, the houses on my right disappearing from my grasp, rising up on to a higher portion of the plateau. But the road down kinked to the left. I couldn't use the buildings for support anymore, so I'd have to go it alone. Unsupported. Unguided. As I got closer to the house, the wind came again, even colder than before, a gentle, childlike murmur following in its wake.

Movement.

A brief glimmer of a flashlight inside the house.

If he was still moving around in there, he hadn't seen me. I moved faster down the road, letting the soles of my boots skim across the cobbles, trying to ensure I had time to stop myself when I hit uneven patches. As I approached, the light came again and again, drifting left to right inside what had once been the living room. When I was twenty feet away, I could see the plateau drop off, and I remembered that Haven was built on a bed of rock about six feet lower than the rest of the village. As the light spilled out again, I recalled more of the house: a garden running from the front, all the way around the side to the back, penned in by a crumbling stone wall; the collapsed extension on the back, falling away to the sea; the direction of the house, different from the others, its windows facing off to where the trawlers must once have docked. Now there was only Cornell's boat, or the boat Cornell had borrowed: a mini trawler, thirty feet long, with a ten-foot deckhouse and a high-powered lamp bolted to the front of the cockpit.

Inside, the light came again: left to right, left to right.
Is he digging in
there?
Moving even closer to the wall, I tried to see in through one of the empty spaces that had once been a window—but all I could see was the ridge that had once been the second floor, and huge wall punctures, some going all the way through, some only as far as rotting cavity walls.

Dum. Dum
.

It was coming from somewhere at the side of the house.

Perching myself on the wall, I swung my legs over and dropped on to the lawn. It squelched beneath my feet, the soles of my shoes sinking into the mud. The other houses, six feet above, were spared this: half an inch of water that never left, soaking into the house and the garden, and then coming again, daily, as waves broke—over and over—against the rubble of the house. I stood, feet sinking further, and gripped the penknife.

He was still shifting around in there. Still working on something.

Light swinging, left to right, left to right.

At the edge of the door, I paused, my back to the wall of the house. I could smell the damp now, rolling out of the house like an ocean swell. Then, slowly, I leaned in.

Looked around the door frame and into the house.

The inside was just as I remembered: debris—dust, glass, plaster, brick—scattered across the floor; the interior partitions that had once divided the living room, kitchen and back bedroom all gone; hard mud from the landslide matted against the walls, an old fire grille half-submerged in it, like a statue rising from its plinth; the skeletons of the counter and the appliances, rusted through, in the kitchen; then the door through to the extension.

Hanging from the rafters, under a roof that was mostly a memory, was a length of rope. It hadn't been there last time, which meant Cornell had added it tonight. At the end of the rope was the flashlight he'd had in his mouth, secured with a knot. He'd set it rocking gently, its soft glow rhythmically painting the walls, so it would look like movement.

It was a trap.