Never Coming Back (6 page)

Healy arrived back a couple of minutes later, at twelve-thirty, rain running off his jacket, hair matted to his scalp. When he saw Emily he paused at the doorway, as if he wasn't sure whether he was intruding on something. Then he seemed to realize it would now look even stranger if he backed out and closed the door, so he came in, shrugged off his coat and hung it up. He stank of booze and cigarettes, which meant he'd been at the pub since it opened. As far as first impressions went, it wasn't going to win any awards.

“Colm, this is Emily.”

He came over, his eyes switching between us.

“Colm's a homeless Irishman I found wandering the streets.”

“Ha ha,” he replied, and shook hands with her. “Lovely to meet you, Emily.” There was warmth in his voice, and it was probably fake, but she wouldn't have been able to tell. That was the thing with Healy: he could play the game with the best of them.

“Are you visiting?” she asked him.

“David's been kind enough to rent me a room for a while.” He gave me a fleeting look. He'd offered to pay me rent countless times, but I'd always refused. Part of him, I'm sure, hated being a charity case, but he was realistic: he had no job, no savings, and he needed somewhere to stay. And, ultimately, if it wasn't for Healy, I'd already be in the ground. “How do you two know each other?” he asked.

I glanced at Emily.

“We were friends growing up,” she said.

But he must have read something in her face—must have seen the real answer—because he made an
oh
with his mouth and started patting himself down, searching for his cigarettes. “Well, I'm going to leave you both to it,” he said, and when he looked at me I could see a trace of guilt in his eyes; some hint that he'd been doing something he shouldn't have. I wondered what it was, wondered where he'd been since I'd got up, but let it go. I'd find out soon enough. Healy was a good liar, could evade and avoid, but I could read him better than anyone. I'd get to the truth.

He shook Emily's hand a second time and disappeared upstairs.

“He seems nice,” she said.

Nice
wasn't a word that got used much around Healy, but I agreed
with her and moved the conversation on. “So, did the police have any leads?”

“None they talked to me about.”

“No sightings of the four of them?”

“They said there were lots, but none that led anywhere.”

“Who was your point of contact?”

She paused, opened up her bag and started searching around inside, taking out a small, brown leather diary. “To start with, it was . . .” She found it. “Colin Rocastle.”

I went to write it down and then stopped, pen hovering above the piece of paper.
Rocastle
. He was the detective leading the investigation into the body on the beach. I remembered Healy mentioning him the day before, when he'd called to say the cops wanted to speak to everyone in the village. Rocastle probably worked out of Totnes—there was no CID department in Dartmouth anymore—which explained why he was at both scenes. Then a second thought emerged: what if they sent Rocastle because they needed someone experienced at the Lings' house, because there was something that required his nous? A family going missing was unusual, worrying, but until it became a kidnapping or a murder—and this disappearance never had—it wouldn't require a DCI.

I set the pen down. “You said the family lived in Buckfastleigh?”

“Just west of it, yes. A development called Harbourne Lake.”

She gave me their address. I didn't know the area all that well, but I knew it was about twenty miles away, along some slow, narrow roads. Maybe not quite an hour, but close to it.

“Okay.” I paused for a moment, staring down at the notes I'd made. Five months ago I was lying dead on a trolley. Now I was on the brink of returning to my old life, to the world of the lost. Somehow I expected to feel conflicted about it; instead all I felt was a subtle, magnetic pull. “Okay,” I said again. “I'll take a look at the house tomorrow.”

A smile broke on her face. “
Thank you
, David.”

I held up a hand and the smile immediately dissolved again. “I'm not in the kind of condition you need someone to be in when they're finding the person you love. It's only been four weeks since my bandages came off.” I paused, looked at her: she'd bowed her head slightly, perhaps because she thought this was all about to end in rejection. “I'll do some asking around,” I said, and she looked up at me again, hope sparking in her eyes. “I'll find out as much as I can about what happened to Carrie,
Paul and the girls. But five months ago, doctors were busy reviving me. I'm still recovering. And if things go . . .”

I stopped.

If things go bad.

Emily was frowning at me, trying to figure out what it was I'd been about to say, and for a second I realized how much I'd changed in the four years I'd been doing this, how much I'd come to learn about the darkness in men. In her weakest moments she probably saw her sister's family dead in a ditch somewhere, inside a car that had never been found. Victims of an accident. Victims of fate, destiny, or whatever she believed in.

But I didn't see any of that.

I saw devils and executioners, men who felt nothing for the people they took, and even less for the families left behind. And the thing that frightened me the most was that I didn't even have to try hard to remember them.

I just had to close my eyes.

Tuesday,
3 May 2011 | Eighteen Months Ago

The taxi came up the road, sun glinting in its windshield, a silver crucifix dangling from its rearview mirror. The doctor sat on the porch and watched its approach. At first he couldn't see the women inside, both of them hidden behind the gray tint of the windows. But then, as the cab bumped on to the sidewalk at the bottom of the driveway, he spotted them, side by side in the backseat, and recalled again how different they both were.

Getting to his feet, he walked down to meet them, sun pressing against his back, beads of sweat instantly forming along his hairline. The day was hot—as hot as it had been all year—without even a hint of a breeze. Somewhere further out, in another part of the city, he could hear the distant wail of police sirens, but otherwise the only sound was the unending buzz of insects coming from the folds of the mountains behind the house.

As he got to the car, the rear doors opened on both sides and the women got out. On the side closest to him, Carrie Ling emerged from the cab, smiling at him. “Good morning,” she said brightly and, as he greeted her back, the doctor moved around and opened the door for her daughter. Annabel Ling, crutches already in her hands, slid out of the car, smiling at him. He smiled back, held an arm out for her, and she used it to hoist herself up and out of the car, readying her crutches for the journey up the drive.

“And how are you ladies today?”

“We're good,” Carrie said. “How are you, Eric?”

Eric Schiltz, temporarily distracted, watched Annabel move around the car: she barely needed her crutches to walk now. Her gait was a little stiff still, but she had good basic movement and her weight was being transferred evenly between legs. “I'm fine, thank you,” he eventually said to Carrie, and then his eyes fell on Annabel again. “Even better seeing your daughter like this.” When Annabel stopped at the bottom of the drive and looked back at them both, he said, “Why did I give you those crutches again, Belle?”

Annabel laughed. “It feels almost normal now.”

“It looks almost normal too.”

“Thank you, Eric,” Carrie said to him, touching a hand to his arm.

He nodded. “Come. Let's get into the cool.”

They headed inside, into a marble-floored foyer, where an air-conditioning unit,
high up on one of the walls, hummed gently. Ahead of them, in the middle of the room, the stairs wound up and around to the second floor in a spiral; on the ground floor beyond, doorways led into a living room, kitchen and bedroom, then left into Dr. Schiltz's study.

“Wow,” Carrie said. “What a beautiful home you have.”

“Oh, that's very nice of you.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Here, in this house? About ten years. But I've been in the city for almost twenty-five. A lot of people don't like it here, especially in the summer—it can get up to one hundred and ten, one hundred and fifteen degrees in July and August.” Schiltz gestured toward the air-conditioning unit. “But that's what they invented that thing for, right?”

He closed the front door.

“Okay. Let me give you the guided tour.”

He led them around the house, first into the living room, which—via a set of wall-to-ceiling folding doors—opened out on to a deck and a swimming pool, and then into the adjoining kitchen, open plan, finished in marble and oak. All four bedrooms—one on the ground, three upstairs—were variations on the same color scheme, subtle pastels, with striped accessories, and then finally they all ended up back in the ground-floor foyer.

“And this is my study,” he said.

Inside, a desk sat in front of a huge window, looking out over the foothills of the mountains. Like every other room, it was beautifully finished, although it felt less like it had been torn from the pages of a magazine, the walls lined with medical certificates and photographs, the desk home to an untidy in-tray, and a series of trophies earned out on the city's golf courses. “Sorry about the mess,” he said to them, scooping up some papers and dumping them in the top tray. He pulled a couple of chairs out from the wall. “Let me go and get you something to drink.”

While the women settled in, he went through to the kitchen and poured them both some lemonade, and when he got back, Annabel was standing, using the back of the chair as an anchor and slowly rolling her hips. He'd given her some exercises to do in order to build up her core strength, but she'd recovered even faster than he'd hoped.

“How's it feeling?” Schiltz asked.

Annabel smiled. “It feels really good.”

He sat down at his desk, and both he and Carrie watched Annabel finish up her routine. When she was done, Carrie turned to him. “I can't even begin to thank you.”

“Honestly, it's not me you have to thank.”

She nodded. “I know. But . . .”

“It was my pleasure, Carrie.”

Annabel sat down. “Thank you, Dr. Schiltz.”

“If you call me Dr. Schiltz again, I'll have to put you back on the operating table and unfix you,” Schiltz joked, searching his in-tray for a checklist he'd printed out that morning. “I hope you'll both keep me up to date with how it's going once you get back.”

“We definitely will,” Carrie said.

“When do you go?”

“Thursday.”

“Two more days to get a killer suntan, then.”

The women laughed.

“Sorry about this,” Schiltz said, pulling the in-tray toward him. “I printed out some things I need to go through before I can give you the final sign-off, and now it's gone missing.” He moved from tier to tier, unable to find it. “Old age never comes gracefully.”

“Can we help?” Carrie asked.

“No, it's fine. I obviously went and left it somewhere this morning.” He got up. “You two make yourselves at home. If I don't return in five minutes, send a search party.”

He headed out into the living room, looking for the paperwork, checking drawers and cabinets, before moving to the kitchen. There was nothing in either room. He circled the decking area, even though he knew he hadn't been out to the pool that morning, then came back inside and headed upstairs. He didn't remember taking the checklist up to his room, but inside a couple of seconds he found it there, perched on his bedside cabinet.

“Old age really doesn't come gracefully,” he said quietly.

Scooping up the form, he returned to the study.

As he entered, Annabel was in a standing position again, hands gripping the back of the chair, gently lifting her legs, one after the other, like a ballet dancer. Carrie had moved too: she was behind her daughter, standing at a cabinet in the corner, where eight photographs—all in frames, each frame different—were lined up on top. She had her back to Schiltz and was leaning toward one of the photos, phone in her hand at her side.

“I think I'm getting the hang of this,” Annabel said.

He smiled. “You'll be a ballerina before you know it.”

Carrie turned, surprise in her face, as if she hadn't realized Schiltz was back. But there was something else too. Something he couldn't put his finger on. Was it guilt? His eyes drifted to the photos. There was nothing worth seeing: just pictures of
friends and family, taken over the course of Schiltz's sixty-six years. He dropped the form on to the desk and moved across to where she was standing. She slipped her phone into her pocket and smiled warmly at him, and he started to wonder if he had read too much into her look.

He took in the nearest photo: the eightieth anniversary of the golf club, him at the front with the runners-up trophy he'd won that day. He liked that photo. He looked good in it: slim and lean, not too gray, tailored suit jacket and a blue open-neck shirt.

“Are you jealous of my runners-up trophy?” he joked.

Carrie looked embarrassed now. “Sorry. I was being nosy.”

“It's fine. Be as nosy as you like.”

She nodded, her eyes returning to the photos. He watched her for a moment and saw her attention fall on a picture right at the back. “When was this taken?” she asked.

He reached for the photograph she was referring to and brought it toward them. The picture must have been over forty years old. Schiltz couldn't remember the last time he'd looked at it.

“Goodness,” he said. “I'd forgotten this was even here.”

“I like your fashion.”

He smiled. “Pretty dashing, eh? I guess this must be the early 1970s.”

“You were all friends?”

Schiltz looked at the three men in the picture, their arms linked around each other's shoulders. Schiltz was one of them, standing to the left. The picture had faded over time, become a little discolored and frayed at the edges, but the frame—and the photo's position away from the window—had helped to disguise the damage. “Yes,” he said, finally. “Best friends.”

“Are you still friends?”

“Definitely. They're like brothers to me.” He studied the photograph for a long time, Carrie watching him, Annabel continuing her leg exercises. “I bought a scanner a few months back, so I could get all my old pictures on to computer before they started to get beyond repair. I've got so many, though, I've .
 . . well, kind of been putting it off.”

“That's a good idea.”

“To put it off?”

She smiled. “No, to scan them in.”

He shrugged. “I don't want to lose these memories.”

“Well, maybe you can start with this one.”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes moving between him and his friends. Finally, he returned her smile and placed the photograph back on top of the cabinet. “Maybe I can.”