Long Time Lost (11 page)

Lloyd pulled her car over in a residential cul-de-sac in Manchester. The weather was warm for late April, the evening sun shimmering through the splayed branches of a nearby oak. At the end of the street, a haze of midges swarmed above the lawn of a 1930s semi with tile-hung walls. A child’s bike had been abandoned in the driveway, its back wheel spinning lazily.

Lloyd contemplated the suburban scene for several long moments, then turned her head and looked towards a square of weed-strewn land that was hemmed in tight behind temporary metal fencing. It was all that remained of the family home of Nick Adams and his wife and daughter.

Lloyd slumped with the same weight of emotions she always experienced when she came here: saddened because of the lives that had been lost; frustrated because the barren plot seemed so much a symbol of how badly the investigation into the murders of Sarah and Melanie had withered and died; ashamed because she’d failed to prove that Nick Adams was to blame.

The fire that had been set following the shootings of Sarah and Melanie had taken hold rapidly. It had raged through the property, collapsing the roof, tearing down walls. By the time the fire brigade had gained control of the inferno, the structure was so unstable that the house had to be levelled, but not before Sarah’s remains were recovered from the charred kitchen, where fire investigators believed the blaze had been started, and Melanie’s body had been carried out under a blanket from the hallway outside her first-floor bedroom.

The clearance work had taken place without the owner’s consent. Nick Adams had vanished on the night of the fire, his car abandoned outside the front of the house with the keys in the ignition. Based on a neighbour’s sighting of a blurred figure darting away from behind the property, Lloyd had always believed that he’d fled the scene by bolting through the tangled area of woodland that backed on to the rear garden.

The woodland was creeping closer now. Lloyd knew the neighbours were unhappy with the situation, but without owner consent, the land couldn’t be built on or sold to a developer, and until a few days ago, nobody had seen the current owner for nearly four years.

All anyone knew was that six months after the council had stepped in to tear down the blackened husk of Nick Adams’s home, a single lump-sum payment had been made against his mortgage. The amount had been sufficient to clear all debts. Some of Lloyd’s colleagues had attempted to trace the source of the money but had drawn a blank at a shell company based out of the Caymans. No insurance claim was ever lodged.

Popping her door, Lloyd stepped out on to the street, leaving her folder of notes behind in the car, then circled around the ruptured concrete plinth and tramped into the woods beyond.

The trees were straggly and sparse, the vegetation dry as tinder. After no more than thirty metres, the land fell away into a shallow compression that might once have been a stream but was now little more than a bramble-choked trough. Then the bank rose up again, the trees began to clear and Lloyd pushed aside branches and briars until she found herself on a neat lawn that led towards the rear of another 1930s semi.

A half-glazed door swung open and a slim, dark-haired woman leaned her hip against the frame. Fiona Grainger was early forties, barefooted, dressed in leggings and a denim smock that was flecked with dried paint, as were her hands and cheeks. Lloyd had been invited into her studio once. It was a white, light-filled space in a converted room in the attic, filled with easels and canvases and the reek of oils and turps.

Fiona waited until Lloyd had stepped on to her patio before saying, ‘I was wondering when you’d come. I saw the television.’

‘Has he contacted you?’

‘No. But I wouldn’t tell you if he had.’

‘I’d like to come inside.’

Fiona looked away from her towards the trees, as though she was searching for something among them that would tell her how best to respond.

‘Would it make any difference if I told you to go away?’

‘Not a lot.’

‘If you’re planning on carrying out some kind of search, you’re wasting your time. He’s not here.’

‘I just want to talk. That’s all.’

‘Right. Because look at all the good it did me last time.’

But Fiona backed away and gestured for Lloyd to come past her into a kitchen that looked just the way Lloyd remembered it. The units were solid but uninspiring, finished with dark veneer fronts that contrasted with beige countertops. There was a lot of earthenware crockery, all of it crooked and warped, given to Fiona as cast-offs by an artist friend.

Lloyd drifted towards the window above the sink and found herself wondering, as she often had in the past, how similar it all was to the kitchen where Sarah had been killed. Instinct told her it would have been close to a mirror image, though she knew she was swayed by how alike Sarah and Fiona looked, which wasn’t the least surprising, given that Fiona was Sarah’s twin sister and sole surviving relative.

The twins hadn’t been identical – at least not in strictly biological terms – but they’d always been close. Which was the reason why, Fiona had told Lloyd the first time they’d met, she’d moved to a house that backed on to Sarah’s place following a messy divorce.

In the years before Sarah’s murder, the sisters had often walked through the woods to call on one another at all times of the day. Now that Sarah was gone, Lloyd found it hard to decide if Fiona had stayed because she had no place better to go, or because she sometimes looked out of this window and imagined Sarah walking towards her through the trees again; the ghost of a memory she couldn’t bear to leave behind.

‘You won’t find Nick, you know. Not if he doesn’t want you to.’

Lloyd turned to see that Fiona was leaning her forearms across the breakfast bar, picking at the paint on her fingernails. She hadn’t offered Lloyd a drink or closed the door to the garden. It was clear she wanted her to leave as soon as possible and Lloyd tried not to show how much she was stung by it. In the days following the fire, it had felt as if the two of them had become close. It was Fiona who first confided in Lloyd about the arguments Sarah had been having with Nick.

But as the months and years had passed, Fiona’s judgement of Nick had mellowed. She’d told Lloyd more than once that she regretted speaking about him in the way she had.

All of which was suspicious, of course. And then the fact that the two sisters looked so alike . . . Well, Lloyd had sometimes wondered if perhaps there had been an affair. Maybe
that
was the reason Nick had come running through the woods after the fire. And maybe, once it was clear that her sister and niece were dead, it was guilt and regret that had made Fiona criticise Nick so savagely.

Lloyd said, ‘You do understand why I’m here.’

‘Not in the slightest. Do you?’

‘If Nick contacts you, you must call me. We need to talk with him. We can help him.’

‘Right. Because helping Nick is your number-one priority. Anyone who’s seen the news appeals can tell that.’

Lloyd could remember when she was welcomed here. She could remember when Fiona had clung to her and wept.

‘What are you working on these days? Do you have a show coming up?’

‘Don’t play nice with me.’

‘Where’s that?’ Lloyd had spotted a picture that was stuck to the fridge-freezer with a magnetised frame. It was a mountain scene. There were snowy peaks in the far distance and a meadow of spring flowers in the foreground. ‘Are you planning a trip?’

‘Only in my head. It was a freebie with a travel magazine. Every morning when I come down for breakfast I stare at it for a few minutes. It calms me.’

Lloyd stepped closer. She could understand why someone would want to transport themselves to that flower-filled meadow with its view of raking mountaintops and dazzling glaciers and azure skies. She could understand the need to escape there, if only for a minute or two each day.

‘He won’t hurt her, you know. If that’s what you’re worried about.’

Fiona had moved to the far side of the kitchen. She had one hand on the open door, a signal that she expected Lloyd to leave soon.

‘Hurt who?’

‘The redhead. Nick is protecting her.’

‘That’s one interpretation.’

‘But not the one you favour?’

‘I honestly don’t have a preference either way.’

And that was when Fiona’s face twisted and Lloyd knew that she’d lost her trust for good.

‘I miss my sister every day. I miss my niece very badly.’

‘I know you do. I was here for you. I tried to help. Don’t forget that.’

‘I betrayed them once before. I let my grief get the better of me. But the truth is I know Nick loved them. Deep down I
always
knew that. And I know he’s out there now doing the best he can for them. I know that’s what he’s dedicated his life towards.’

‘You know it how?’

‘Because I know that’s the kind of man my sister would have wanted to spend the rest of her life with. And now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d really like you to leave.’

At just before 1 a.m., a full hour before he was scheduled to meet Kate, Miller walked towards the revolving doors at the front of his hotel. He was wearing black cargo pants, a lightweight black fleece and his small black rucksack, and feeling awkward about it, because the outfit reminded him of the dead assassin on the Isle of Man.

The doors were locked due to security concerns. But there was a night porter on duty and he flicked a switch below the reception counter so that Miller could exit, whereupon Miller offered him a quick salute and a glum smile and said, ‘Can’t sleep.’

Which was a lie, and almost certainly one the porter could see clean through, though possibly not for the reasons he had in mind. The porter probably assumed Miller was yet another middle-aged tourist heading off in search of the dubious comfort available to lonely men in the Reeperbahn, and if so, his suspicions would only have been confirmed had he been able to listen in as Miller ducked inside a taxi parked out front and asked to be taken to the fringes of St Pauli.

The driver was a middle-aged Turk with a receding hairline and way too much aftershave. He showed a lot of teeth in response to Miller’s request, then cranked the engine, punched the meter and swooped out on to the sodium-lit street, all the while grinning back over his shoulder.

‘You want girl? What kind do you like? I know great place.’

Miller told him he wasn’t interested in anything like that.

‘What about live sex show? I know best in the city. Best girls, easy. I take you there. We drink lots of beer, yes?’

Miller guessed the driver was on some kind of commission, and when he declined again, the guy frowned and his mood darkened, as if Miller was trying to bilk him out of his fee based on some misplaced sense of propriety.

So he tried a third time, at which point Miller switched to German and told him to shut the hell up and just drive him to where he’d asked to go, and the guy took clear offence, which he communicated via the manner of his driving, which featured a lot of abrupt acceleration and snappy gear changes and heavy braking.

All of which was fine by Miller, because he was perfectly willing to get to his destination as fast as possible and more than content to be left to his own thoughts.

His thoughts were of Clive. Hanson had emailed through a summary of Clive’s hospital notes not long after Miller and Kate had fetched their luggage from the train station. Like the orderly had said, he’d been discovered hanging upside down. There was bruising to his stomach and kidneys, broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and abrasions to his shins and ankles, one of which had been dislocated, but most of the violence had been concentrated on Clive’s head. He’d been beaten over and over. It was thought that a chair leg had been used as an improvised bat.

He was still alive, according to the update Hanson had texted through within the last hour, but his prognosis was dire. His doctors had inserted a shunt to relieve pressure from his skull, but if he emerged from his coma, it was likely he’d show signs of brain damage.

There’d been related news in a call Hanson had placed once Miller was alone in his hotel room.

‘Patrick Leigh,’ Hanson had said. ‘I hacked into his autopsy report.’

‘And?’

‘He was killed by multiple injuries consistent with a fall from a very tall building. Blunt force trauma to the head and chest. Severe fractures to just about every bone in his body.’

‘Sounds painful.’

‘But get this: there were extensive abrasions on his shins and ankles. The pathologist spends a couple of paragraphs on them. She concludes that metal wire or chains were wrapped around his lower legs and he was hung upside down for a long time before he was dropped, possibly from a construction crane on the building site where he was found.’

‘Hung upside down like Clive, you mean.’

‘I thought you should know right away.’

‘So Lane is behind both attacks.’

‘Looks that way. And whoever he has working for him has a thing for stringing people up by their ankles.’

Miller hadn’t told Kate about the connection and he felt bad about that. He also felt bad about tricking her tonight, and he hated to think of how she’d react when she realised she’d been stood up. He was sure she’d be mad. She’d suspect that he’d deceived her. Eventually, though, he hoped she’d remember to return to her room, where Becca was prepped to phone her promptly at 2.30 a.m. and tell her that something had come up. She’d explain that she couldn’t provide details over an open line but that Miller would be in touch later in the morning.

Which was all good in theory, until Miller’s driver slammed on his brakes at the cross street where he’d asked to be dropped and Miller stepped out on to the pavement only to see another taxi swoop into the kerb directly behind him.

Kate jumped out.

‘Funny,’ she told him, ‘I could swear you told me we were meeting at
two
o’clock.’

Miller opened his mouth to reply but Kate rushed towards him and jabbed a finger into his chest before he could summon an excuse.

‘Don’t lie to me again. And don’t underestimate me. I’m coming with you, no arguments. So deal with it. OK?’

The taxis were idling at the kerb, both drivers bending low and peering out, paying more attention to their spat than Miller would have liked. He considered opening the door on the second cab and forcing Kate back inside. But she knew where he was going. She knew what he had planned. He couldn’t guarantee she wouldn’t interfere.

And at least she’d gone to some effort with her appearance. She had on dark blue jeans, a black turtleneck sweater and the baseball cap she’d worn earlier in the day.

Miller stared at her, weighing up the alternatives. But in reality, she’d already made the decision for him. Again.

Grabbing a fistful of euros from his pocket, he paid both drivers, then turned and walked on, feeding his arms through the shoulder straps of his rucksack, texting Becca not to stay up to make the call.

‘That was not smart,’ he said, when Kate caught up to him.

They were a block behind Schanzenstrasse, the night pulsing with the blur of dance music from a late-night bar. A huddle of people stood smoking beneath the coloured bulbs strung up around a makeshift terrace.

‘Neither was sneaking out of your hotel to come here without me.’

‘The police will have the place under surveillance. Any slip-ups and we could easily get caught.’

‘Then let’s not slip up.’

Miller looked across at her. ‘If you’re coming with me, you’ll do everything I say and nothing I don’t. Those are the rules. Understand?’

‘More rules. You’re a real stickler for them, aren’t you?’

He had been, Miller thought ruefully. So what had changed? What was it about Kate that was making him act this way? She was stubborn, no question, but he’d had stubborn clients before.

But of course, he already knew the answer to that question, even if it wasn’t one he was prepared to confront. It was tied up with the insinuations Becca had made; a creeping truth lodged deep inside him.

He liked Kate. A lot. And the thought of it scared him on a far deeper level than the risks they were about to take.