Never Coming Back (7 page)

After Emily had gone, I walked through to the living room and sat down in a chair by the window. Like most of the furniture in the cottage, it had belonged to my parents, its arms marked by years of wear, the material worn thin, the pattern bleached by age. Outside, I could see Start Point lighthouse further along the coast, like a bone-white finger breaking out of the earth. Mostly, though, on this side of the house, all I could see was the garden.

I booted up my laptop, pulled a stool toward me, then googled the Ling family's disappearance. Nationally, it hadn't got much coverage. One single-column story in the
Daily Mail
; a short in the
Guardian
and
The Times
. Both were light on details and included the same soundbite from Rocastle, probably issued through a catch-all press release. There was nothing juicy about the story a day in, just a very basic framework of events, which was probably why coverage died out pretty much as soon as it had begun. If the police had given the press the house—everything untouched, TV still on, toys on the floor, spilled bottle of milk—they'd have generated some buzz, but it was a catch-22: they didn't want to release too much information too soon, as with any case, and the surface detail didn't intrigue the media enough for them to start digging deeper.

Local press coverage lasted longer, but hard information was thin on the ground, which meant either the police had kept the details locked down or—more likely—the case had quickly fizzled out. Ten and a half months down the line, with no sign of the family and no further updates for Emily, certainly suggested as much. Even so, there were a couple of things that nagged at me. The first was Rocastle, and his involvement in the case. The second was Paul Ling's wallet, and the amount of time it had taken for it to be returned. It could have been nothing. Extra caution on the part of the police, or maybe an administrative error. But seven months seemed a long time to hold on to it.

I turned back to the laptop.

On-screen was a front-page story from one of the local newspapers, the family's photo on the right, their faces clear even if the colors were washed out. Emily had given me their basic personal details, but it was good to put names to faces. At the back of the group was Paul Ling. Fifty-three. Balding. Mustache. Five or six inches taller than his wife, who was to his right, his arm around her. Carrie looked just like Emily: slim, small, dark hair,
dark eyes, exactly the same smile. The only difference was that, at fifty, she was eight years older. To Paul Ling's left, also smiling, was Annabel.
Belle
. She was definitely more like her mother than her father; her frame a little bigger maybe, her hair a little lighter, but neither by much. Height-wise, she was midway between Carrie and Paul—probably five-eight—and had her hair up in a ponytail, revealing a beautiful face, full of gentle sweeps. In front of her—Annabel's hands on her shoulders—was Olivia, seventeen years younger than her sister at just eight, but much more like Paul.

“Your girlfriend gone?”

Healy stood in the doorway closest to me, which led out of the living room to the stairs. He'd showered and changed, but still smelled of booze. I didn't bother responding.

He came further in and collapsed on to the sofa opposite me.

“Is she why you won't speak to Liz?”

I looked at him. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

“She was an ex, though, right?”

I didn't reply.

“Emily, I mean.”

“I know who you meant, Healy.”

“So was she?”

“Was she what?”

“An ex?”

“Why do you care?”

His gaze lingered on me. “You need to tell Liz.”

I closed the laptop. Said nothing.

“You owe her,” he said.

“Owe her what?”

“An explanation.”

“Is that her talking—or you?”

“I don't know,” he said, leaning back. “I just know I chat with her, and whatever you think's happened between you, she needs to hear it.” He stopped. Looked at me. Slowly, something changed in his face; something softer, less severe. “It reminds me of . . .”

“Of what?”

“Of a place I've been before.”

He meant his marriage. He meant the terrible mistakes he'd made. And he meant the aftermath, when the case he was on was falling apart, when his wife and kids told him they hated him, and when the last conversation
he ever had with Leanne, his daughter, was a screaming match that ended with her storming out. Ten months later, he found her dead in a room full of so much suffering I sometimes wondered how he slept at night.

I nodded that I understood and then watched him for a moment, half formed in the dull light of the living room. This version of Healy—this quiet rendering of him—was the one I was always trying to get at because it was the part of him I liked. He didn't show it often but, when he did, it felt like a call for help; as if, subliminally, he wanted this part of himself to be pulled to the surface.

“I'll try and call her tomorrow,” I said.

He nodded. “I think she'd appreciate that.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“You know what I mean, Healy.”

He shrugged. “She's your girlfriend, not mine.”

And yet, even as he said it, even as he raised his defenses again and began to look more familiar, something of the other Healy remained. Somewhere in his face there was a bleakness, as if the thought of me sorting things out with Liz—or, more likely, me telling her it was definitely over—had shifted things into focus. The calls would stop. She wouldn't need Healy anymore. And whatever she'd brought to his life would be gone.

“I'm going out,” he said.

I watched him disappear into the kitchen, listened to him open and close the front door, and then opened the laptop again. The photograph of the Lings popped back into view. Close in on the four faces. Carrie. Paul. Annabel. Olivia. My eyes moved between them, one after the other, back and forth.

Father. Mother. Daughters.

Something seemed more obvious this time.

Paul was Asian. As I'd been walking her back to her car, Emily had mentioned that his parents were from Hong Kong and had moved here two years before he was born. Carrie was Caucasian. Olivia was a good mix of the two: Asian in and around the eyes, the cheeks, in the soft triangle of the chin; Caucasian in the center of her face and her bone structure. But Annabel wasn't like that at all. She looked exactly like her mum: one hundred percent Caucasian, with no hint of her father.

Nothing in the cheeks. Nothing in the eyes.

Nothing of Paul Ling at all.

Early the next day, I got up and found Healy was already awake, sitting next to the open window in a vest, smoking. Cold air escaped into the house, but the wind and rain were gone and, in the skies above the sea, narrow slivers of blue broke between clouds.

As soon as I entered the kitchen, he nodded in the direction of the kettle. “Water's just boiled,” he said. “We've run out of coffee. I'll go and get some later.”

After making myself a mug of tea, I sat down opposite him.

“Emily's family went missing.”

He looked at me, nodded, but didn't say anything.

“Her sister, brother-in-law, their two daughters.”

“Where did they go missing from?”

“From their home. She reckoned their place was like a time capsule: the TV was still on, he'd left his computer running, the younger girl's toys were all over the floor, food still in the oven, dog still wandering around the house. Like they'd just stepped out.”

He finished his cigarette and pulled the window shut.

“You working for her?”

“I said I'd do some asking around.”

A hint of a smile on his face, one whose meaning we both got:
You say that now but wait until this starts to go deeper. Before long, it'll be just like all the other cases. And you won't be able to let go
.

“Do you want to come along today?” I asked him.

“Where are you going?”

“Buckfastleigh. To see the house.”

He looked at me, left hand—wedding band still on—flat to the table; right hand clamped around a mug of tea. “Yeah, all right,” he said, finally. “Let me get changed.”

•   •   •

We took Healy's car so I could make a couple of calls on the way. The first was to Spike, an old contact from my days as a journalist. Originally from Russia, Spike had come here on a student visa, but when that ran out he'd stayed on illegally. That wasn't the only law he'd broken. Spike was like a skeleton key: as a hacker, he accessed names, addresses, e-mails and phone numbers for me, never leaving a footprint. I'd used his talent,
such as it was, more than ever since my change of career, especially in the early stages of a case when I was trying to build a picture of the missing, and the life they'd left behind.

“Pawn shop,” he said when he answered.

“Is that with an
a-w
or an
o-r
?”

A moment of confusion. “
David?
”

“How you doing, Spike?”

“
Man
, how are you?”

Spike's accent always made me smile. It was barely recognizable as Russian now, completely Americanized except for a soft European lilt.

“I'm good,” I said. “It's been a while.”

“I read about you online. You okay now?”

“I'm fine.”

“That's good, man, that's good.”

“Listen, I need your help on something.”

“Anything.”

We were a couple of miles from the Lings' house, negotiating our way through the western fringes of Buckfastleigh. I had the phone on speaker so Healy was looped in. Working with someone wasn't exactly a new experience for him, yet it had been a long time since anyone at the Met had trusted him enough to partner up. But if he was rusty, I was rustier. I'd spent my life, as a journalist and then an investigator, working alone. On the two occasions I'd tethered myself to someone, it had been Healy, and both times it had gone bad. I'd asked him to get involved here because, when he was good, he was seriously good; he offered a feel for a case you couldn't teach. But there was a flipside, an inherent risk: that, sooner or later, he'd lose control and everything would go south. If he was involved in something else, trying to dig deeper into the body on the beach, this was a good way to keep him close and to lessen any damage.

“Spike, I need a full background on someone. Two people, actually. A couple.” I gave him as much as Emily had passed across on Paul and Carrie. “Absolutely everything you can dig up, stick it in the file. Work, credit histories, repayments, bank accounts . . .”

“You got it.”

“I'll need their cell phone records, and their landline—the last six months of 2011 and January this year for both financials and phones. Actually, you can throw a third name into the mix as well. Annabel
Ling.” I thought for a moment about including Olivia. But she was eight. She didn't have a phone, a bank account, wouldn't own or pay into anything. It seemed pointless. “One other thing: when you source the phone records, if you can also get street addresses for the incoming and outgoing calls, that'd be great.”

“Consider it done.”

“Actually, I lied: that wasn't the last thing.”

“What else?”

“I need access to their e-mails too.” Unsurprisingly, Emily didn't have the login details for any of the Lings' e-mail accounts—Paul, Carrie and Annabel all had their own—but she
was
able to give me the addresses, which would be more than enough for Spike. I read them out to him. “Passwords for those accounts would be useful.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks, Spike.”

“By the way, I've shifted my bank account.”

Spike's bank account was a locker at the local sports center. He gave me the pin number for it and, when we were done, I'd leave the cash there for him to collect. For obvious reasons he wanted to stay out of the banks and off the taxman's radar.

“Fine,” I said. “I'm not in London at the moment, but give me the details and, once I'm back, I'll deposit whatever it is I owe you. You know I'll be good for it.”

“I do. It's great to have you back, David.”

“Thanks, Spike.”

I hung up just as Healy pulled off the A38 into a narrow lane with signposts for Harbourne Lake. Two minutes further on, we found a cluster of five houses, obscured by trees, all of them old fishermen's cottages but renovated beautifully in the same style: thatched roofs, gleaming whitewashed walls, colored doors and matching window shutters, immaculate gardens with driveways leading up to recently added extensions, all of it finished in a patchwork of sandy brick. The lake itself was about a mile long by about half a mile wide, unfurling beyond the houses, and the views were stunning, even as autumn slowly gave way to winter: reedbeds and marshes; red berries dotted like perfect drops of blood along the banks; gulls, terns and warblers drifting across the surface of the water, which, with no wind, was like glass.

The houses were roughly laid out in a triangle, the Lings' house
furthest back from the road, at the apex. Both cars—a blue BMW X3 and a black Golf GTI—were still on the drive, presumably where they'd been since the family went missing on January 7. Emily hadn't arrived yet, so Healy bumped on to the pavement and I made the second call.

This one was to another old contact.

Ewan Tasker was a semiretired former police officer who'd gone on to work for the National Criminal Intelligence Agency, its successor SOCA, and then as an adviser at SOCA's replacement, the National Crime Agency. Our relationship had originally been built on mutual understanding: he fed me stories on organized crime that he wanted out in the open, and I was always the one that got to break them first. But, over time, we began to become more friendly and, after I left journalism to nurse Derryn through her last year, it had solidified into friendship. These days I had no way to repay him for his help, other than money, which he would never accept. So my penance was a charity golf day once a year at his club. It was double the fun for him: he raised money and got to laugh at me.

“Raker!” he said, as he answered the phone.

“Task—how's things?”

“Good. I can still go to the toilet by myself, so obviously that's a massive bonus.” He laughed, but—even at sixty-three—he was in great condition. “How's the stomach?”

He'd come to visit me in the days after I'd been stabbed.

“It's getting there.”

“It takes time.”

“Yeah. I need some of whatever you're taking.”

He laughed again. “So, you back on the job?”

“Kind of.”

“Sounds mysterious.”

“Not really. I'm just helping out a friend, said I'd do a bit of hunting around for her. I was wondering whether you might be able to get hold of a couple of things for me.”

“As long as you don't forget your debts.”

“December 18, right?”

“Right. Injuries or not, you're playing.”

It was the date of the next charity golf day. I was paired with Tasker's wife, who—like him—played off a single-figure handicap. I was going to get annihilated.

“I'll be there,” I said to him.

“Good. So how can I help?”

I gave him some background on the disappearance of the Lings, and then cut to the chase: “First off, I'd like to take a look at the original missing persons report.”

“That's easy enough.”

“I was also hoping you could run their names, their home address and their car registrations through the PNC, the PND and HOLMES. To be honest, I'm pretty sure all you'll find is that original missing persons report, but it's an avenue I want to close off.”

All three were databases: PNC held convictions, cautions and arrests, individuals who were wanted or missing, vehicles registered in the UK, and stolen property; PND allowed regional police forces to access each other's data immediately, rather than having to wait for the information request to filter through weeks later; while HOLMES was the system forces used to cross-check major crimes. The family's prints—and any other prints found at the house—would also be in NAFIS, the national fingerprint database. But, as it synced up with PNC, if the police had lifted anything from the house that led to anyone or anything, we'd probably already know.

“Leave it with me,” he said.

“I appreciate it, old man.”

I killed the call just as Emily's Suzuki emerged from the lane. Healy looked out to where the vehicle was approaching, and then back to me. “I could have got you that.”

“Got me what?”

“That information.”

“The missing persons file?”

He nodded. “I've got guys right there.”

“You don't work for the police anymore, Healy.”

The mood changed instantly. “What?”

“I didn't mean it like that,” I said, trying to head him off. If I looked at him sometimes and caught a glimpse of another man, the one I liked, the one who had saved my life, I looked at him just as often and saw this version: angry and unwilling to cede any kind of control to anyone. “Number one rule is to insulate yourself. You know that. You don't need me to
tell
you that. Task can get us the information we need on the Lings—but the most important thing is he can get it without raising any flags.”

“Don't patronize me.”

I rolled my eyes. “I'm not patronizing you.”

“These are people I've known for
years
.”

“You know we'd still be taking a risk.”

“How?”

“Involving them is a
risk
, Healy.”

He turned to me. “How's it risk? Because this
Task
you speak to used to work for SOCA and my guys are just regular cops? That makes him
better
somehow? Give me a fucking break. My guys are there at the coalface, they've got the computers
right there
. They're not sitting in semiretirement with the cigars out and their feet up on the desk.”

“Task still advises three days a week at—”

“Whatever.”

“Look, Healy—”

“No,
you
look, you self-important little prick. I've been doing this for twenty-six years. I was a cop while you were still getting a hard-on for your English teacher.”

Silence settled between us.

As Emily got out of her car, Healy started to do the same. But then I grabbed his arm and pulled him back in. “Listen to me,” I said, ignoring the look on his face, and leaned in. “You'd better not screw this up for me.”

“Let go of my fucking arm.”

He tried to wrestle free of my grip but I held on. “Listen. You got fired from the police. Those people there you call friends, colleagues, whatever they were to you—they aren't going to go out to bat for you, because they don't want to end up like you. I know, one hundred percent, I can rely on Tasker. No mistakes. No trails. Can you say that about the men you know? Can you say it with absolute certainty?” I paused. He just looked at me. “I asked you along because I thought you could help. But if this is how it's going to be, if this is what I'm going to have to deal with, you can pack your bags and go home.”

We stayed like that for a moment.

And then I let go, got out of the car, and went and met Emily.