Never Coming Back (5 page)

The next morning, Healy was gone before I got up, so I put some coffee on and sat at the kitchen window, looking out at the beach. Even this early, as the sun clawed its way up behind a wall of cloud, uniforms stood along the sea wall, black marks against the gray of the concrete. Rain started to fall as a bunch of techs in white forensic suits emerged from the village hall, ducked under the cordon and headed down to the cove. I tried to spot Healy among it all but couldn't see him, and then felt bad for assuming the worst.

After I'd showered and had some breakfast, I went back to repairing an old chair that my dad had bought a few years before his death. He'd been an amateur collector of antiques, though not a very successful one, but it had kept his mind occupied in the weeks and months after Mum had gone. The chair was worth nothing, but I was slowly working my way around the house trying to give everything, even the junk, an upgrade.

A couple of hours later, just after eleven, I was washing my hands in the kitchen sink—trying to remove grease from my skin—when I heard a car pull into the driveway. I assumed it was Healy, but when I didn't hear him approach I dried my hands and went to the back door. It was a Suzuki Vitara, parked with its rear toward me.

The rain was heavy now, drawing the light from the day, and as I stepped further on to the porch, the security lamp sparked into life and I saw movement in the car.

“Can I help you?” I said above the rain.

More movement, and then the driver's door opened and a woman got out, shoes crunching on the gravel, her back to me. Then she turned—and I realized who it was.

Emily Kane.

“David?”

The moment she spoke, memories came alive. It wasn't just her voice, it was the way she carried herself, the slight reticence in her. Suddenly it was so familiar, as if no time at all had passed since we'd last met. In reality, it had been twenty-four years.

“Emily.”

A full smile bloomed. “Yes!” She seemed delighted I'd recognized
her, but apart from the wear and tear of time—the lines, the creases—she looked remarkably similar: five-three, slim, dark hair scraped back into a ponytail, a face full of tiny, delicate angles. She'd always been slight—build, height, the way she spoke, the way she stood—and, as I gradually recalled each little part of her, more memories came flooding back: sitting on the sea wall watching the boats rock on the waves, the late-night walks to the coves, and then everything that came after when you were teenagers and in love for the first time.

I walked over to her and immediately dwarfed her, and we stood there facing each other in a moment of awkwardness. Did we kiss? Shake hands? How did you greet a girlfriend you hadn't seen for almost a quarter of a century? In the end I leaned in and politely kissed her on the cheek and, to prevent any more discomfort, immediately asked her inside. She thanked me and followed me through the rain to the front door. I turned back to her and smiled. “Let me apologize up front for the mess you're about to witness.”

“I'm sure it's fine,” she said.

“I'm normally pretty good at washing dishes.”

She laughed, maybe politely—I didn't know her well enough to tell the difference anymore—but, if it was put on, that was okay. She was trying to figure out how similar I was to the boy she remembered.

Inside, I put the kettle on and offered her a seat at the table overlooking the beach. Under granite skies, the lights from the crime scene were on, casting a long, bleached glow across the shingle, turning it pale and oddly beautiful. Emily sat there, bag perched in her lap, a half-smile on her face. But for the first time there was something else: a hint of sadness. It was a look I'd come to recognize easily and often in the families of people who went missing, and I knew instantly she wasn't here to catch up on old times.

“Wow,” she said. “David Raker.”

“It's great to see you, Emily.”

“And you.”

“Did your aunt tell you we bumped into each other last night?”

She colored a little. “Yes. She mentioned that. That's why I thought I'd pop by.” But we both understood this wasn't a social call, and as she realized I'd figured her out, her fingers started drumming nervously on her bag. I glanced at her hands. No wedding ring. No indent to suggest one had been there recently. “I hope you don't mind me . . .”

“Not at all. You're living up in Totnes?”

“Yes. I don't come here much. Just pass through sometimes. Mum and Dad are both gone now, and the only time I'm down this way is when I see Vera in Kingsbridge.”

I told her I was sorry to hear about her parents, and she talked for a while about her house in Totnes, a town about thirty minutes inland. She had an apartment, five minutes' walk from the quay. “I have a studio at home,” she said. “I work as a graphic designer.”

“I remember you used to love to draw.”

“Yes.” She smiled. “Times are really tough—but I get by okay.”

“That's great to hear. And what's Carrie up to these days?”

Carrie was her sister. She was eight years older than Emily, yet—growing up—the two of them had been uncannily similar, despite the big age difference. But as I waited for her reply, I felt the change coming, and remembered what Healy had said in the pub the night before:
I heard a couple of the locals talking about this village being cursed
 . . .
Some woman and her family who used to live here
.

“Carrie?” she said. “Oh, she's, uh . . . that's why . . .” She trailed off.

In my line of work everyone was hiding something, but the road to the truth often played out the same way on their faces: a tremor of emotion followed by a composed blank. It was their need to offload, their need to get to the bottom of what had happened to the person they loved, followed by the fear that the truth might end up being worse than not knowing. It was a confession and a denial all at the same time, and it seemed obvious that, whatever she was about to tell me, it was going to be about her sister.

“What happened to Carrie?” I said.

She didn't react to the question, accepting that she'd already given herself away. Her fingers played with the strap on her bag and, slowly, her eyes shimmered. When she looked up, she seemed even paler, even smaller, even more beaten down.

“She and her family,” she said quietly. “They all disappeared.”

“I went to see Vera this morning and she mentioned seeing you last night,” Emily began, both of us sitting at the table with coffees. “She said you were just like she remembered.”

She paused, looking at me. I wasn't the person they remembered—certainly not now, and not even before I'd been attacked—but I smiled, putting her at ease, and let her continue.

“This sounds like I'm stalking you, but after I left her place this morning I thought I'd google you, see if I could find you on Facebook or Twitter. I thought I could maybe drop you an e-mail, see how you were. But instead I found all these news stories about you, about what you'd done. The families you'd helped. The men you'd tried . . .” She glanced at my stomach. “I read about what that guy did to you. How your heart . . .”

Stopped.

I nodded but didn't say anything, watching her in the half-light of the kitchen. She stared back. Composed. Still. Then, gradually, there was a movement in her lips.

She dabbed a finger to her eye. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be.”

She smiled, and then brought her coffee toward her. “I'm sure you moved down here to start again. To get away from people like me. I just . . .” Steam passed her face as she looked down into her mug. “I just don't know where else to go. She's my sister.”

“You said the whole family disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“January 7.”

“So, that's Carrie and who else?”

“Carrie, her husband Paul, Belle and Liv—their two girls.”

Five months after dying, I should have ended the conversation there. Deep down, I knew I wasn't ready for this; not physically, maybe not mentally either.

But I didn't.

I let her carry on.

“They live an hour from here, just west of Buckfastleigh,” she continued, tone flat and barely audible, as if the story had been told countless times. I
didn't read anything into it. They all became like this sooner or later, wading across old ground, looking for the same answers in the same places. “I'd driven up there from Totnes, because Carrie and I were supposed to be going out in Torquay with some friends. But when I got to the house, no one answered. Their cars were still on the drive, the lights were on in the house, so I rang the doorbell, five, six, seven times.” A pause. “Nothing.”

She stopped altogether then and seemed to waver, her upper body swaying like a boat listing on ocean swells. “The front door was unlocked, so I let myself in and went along the hallway. They always had a nice house. I know this sounds weird, but it always
smelled
nice. Flowers and coffee and candles. But it didn't smell nice when I went inside that night. I walked through to the kitchen and the dinner was still cooking.”

“It had just been left like that?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “I remember it vividly. The potatoes were still cooking even though there was no water left in the pan. The pork steaks were burned to a crisp. Vegetables were half prepared, just left there on the chopping board. It was like the four of them had downed tools and walked out of the house. There was nothing out of place.” She turned her coffee mug, lost in thought for a moment. “In fact, the opposite, really. Everything was
in
place. Even the table was set: cutlery laid out, drinks prepared.”

“Did it look like they'd left in a hurry?”

She shook her head, but in her eyes I saw a flicker of hesitation: as if she'd remembered something but wasn't sure whether it was even worth bringing up.

“Emily?”

“The milk,” she said.

“Milk?”

“The fridge had been left ajar. This big four-pinter was lying on the floor, and all the milk had poured out of it, across the linoleum. But that was it. That was the only thing. Even the dog was still wandering around the house.”

“Did you check upstairs?”

“I checked the whole house.”

“Anything stolen?”

“No.”

“Money, bank cards, wallets, phones, TVs, DVDs, computers—you know the kind of thing. None of that had been taken?”

“No.”

“Would you know if it had?”

“The TV was on in the living room, Paul's computer was on in his study, Liv's toys were scattered all over the floor of her room. But not like the place had been turned over. Not like that at all. It was like Liv—like all of them—had
just
been there.”

“Moments before?”

“Right. It was like a museum.”

She meant it was a snapshot of time; nothing but the milk out of place. The food was still cooking, the lights were still on, the TV, the computer, the cars, the dog.

“You presumably tried calling them?”

“Yes.”

“No answer?”

“Their phones were still in the house.”

I reached across the table and grabbed a piece of paper with a shopping list on it. It was everything I needed to repair the fence panels out back. For now, it would have to do as a makeshift pad. I'd left the real one back in London, I suppose as some sort of symbolic gesture. Except here I was, four months after leaving the city, doing everything I shouldn't have. Part of me knew this was already a mistake: my feelings about taking on work from people I knew had hardened and crystallized over the past two years, mainly because I'd done it once—for a woman Derryn had worked with—and, in trying to find her son, I'd been left with scars on my body that would never heal, and memories that would never fade. And yet, as Emily recounted the disappearance of her sister and her family, I felt a buzz of electricity in my stomach. For the first time in months, I felt normal.

“What's Carrie's surname now?”

“Ling.”

I started making some notes. “Her husband's Paul?”

“Yes.”

“And the full names of the girls?”

“Annabel and Olivia.”

“Did you file a missing persons report?”

She nodded. “I called them right away. They told me to come to Totnes station. The PC there asked me a few questions, filled in some
paperwork, then said a team would be by the next day to take DNA samples and look around the house.”

“They didn't find anything?”

“No,” she said, eyes on me, hands flat to the table either side of her mug. “They took lots of things away for analysis, but it all got returned eventually.”

“Do you remember exactly what they took?”

“Paul's computer, their phones.”

“Whose phones?”

“Carrie's, Paul's and Belle's.”

“Annabel had her own phone?”

“She's almost twenty-five.”

I put down the pen. “So, how old is Liv then?”

“Eight.” But she didn't need me to fill in the blanks. “Both Paul and Carrie wanted kids pretty much from the moment they got married, so they started trying straight away, but both of the girls were . . .” She shrugged. “Both of them were a struggle. Belle less so, I guess, but Olivia definitely. Both times they ended up having to get . . . you know . . .”

“Help?”

She nodded. “Yeah, help.”

“IVF?”

“Right.”

“So the age gap between Annabel and Olivia is seventeen years?”

“Yes.”

I wrote that down. “Annabel was still living at home?”

No reply. I looked up from my notes and Emily was staring across my shoulder, set adrift in thought.

“Emily?”

She flinched. “Sorry.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine. What was it you asked?”

“Was Annabel still living at home?”

“Yes. She'd been at university up in Bristol for four years; she'd done an MA in English Literature. But she couldn't get a job anywhere. You know what it's like at the moment.”

I nodded. “So she moved back home?”

“Yes. She got some part-time work in Newton Abbot, teaching
drama to students, but she was applying for jobs all over the country. She had plenty of interviews, but never seemed to quite make the cut. So she kept going with the teaching gig right up until . . .”

“They all disappeared.”

“Right.”

I'd filled one side of the paper, and as I turned it over I saw something change in her face. An expectation. A glimmer of hope.

“Were Paul and Carrie having any problems?”

She frowned. “Problems?”

“Were they fighting?”

“No. No way.”

“They didn't fight?”

“They fought, but never seriously. Carrie and I were always close—you probably remember that—and she never talked about arguments. Paul was very even-tempered.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a doctor.”

“Did he work here in the village?”

“No. In Torquay. He was a pediatrician.”

“And Carrie?”

“She was a stay-at-home mum.”

“But they were doing okay?”

“Nice house, nice cars, nice holidays—I'd say so.”

“Carrie never complained of financial worries?”

“No.”

“What about Paul?”

“I didn't really have that kind of relationship with him.”

“You got on all right with him, though?”

She glanced at me, and I could read her thoughts like they were written across her face:
Was that a loaded question?
“You mean, did he leave because of me? No.”

“Don't be offended,” I said to her. “I'm trying to close off dead ends. You're the person who knew them. You're basically the best hope of finding out where they went. I'm sure this isn't anything that you haven't heard already from the police.”

She shrugged. “I haven't spoken to the police for months.”

“When was the last time?”

“July, August—whenever they returned Paul's wallet.”

“That was the last thing they gave back to you?”

“Yes.”

“Why did they hold on to it for so long?”

She paused, uncertain. Maybe she'd never thought of it like that. The police would have held on to a lot of the Lings' property and gradually fed it back over time as it became obvious it wasn't going to lead anywhere. She probably stopped noticing.

“I don't know,” she said eventually.

“Okay. But, clearly, Paul left his wallet behind too?”

“On the kitchen table,” she said, and started to drift away again. Her eyes dulled as the memories rolled back to her. I waited it out, finishing my notes. Then, after a while, she said quietly, “Who leaves like that without their wallet?”

Two hundred and fifty thousand people went missing every year in the UK, so lots of people left for lots of different reasons. But the truth was, most missing persons cases were pretty mundane: teenage runaways, depressed middle-aged men, people in their twenties and thirties drowning under the weight of mortgages or unemployment, terrified of not being able to feed their kids. Often, the missing left without anything. They got up and walked away: wallets weren't taken, bank cards weren't touched, e-mails weren't sent. It wasn't the wallet that interested me, it was the way the house had been left.

All the signs of being a family home.

But none of the family.