Fall From Grace (32 page)

Then I heard something.

I got up from the PC and wandered into the living room.

It had sounded like a series of clicks.

Now, though, there was nothing: the house was utterly silent. I retraced my steps through both floors again, listening out for the same sound, but all that came back was the patter of rain on the roof. After a moment more, I began looping up the extension cable.

As I closed up the house and returned to the car, I paused for a moment midway across the lawn and looked back at the woodshed.

An odd feeling ghosted through me.

I’d just spent an hour searching the place, opening every door, checking every loose floorboard, making sure nothing remained hidden.

And yet something unsettling clung on.

A sense that I’d missed something.

I watched clouds pass in the windows of the house. Listened to the soft moan its wooden bones made as the wind pressed against them. My eyes traced the spaces beyond the building, across the rolling moorland, falling on three paths that had been carved – through seas of heather and bracken – by walkers over the years. They moved parallel to one another, like claw marks, until they finally faded from view.

Maybe it’s nothing
.

Maybe you just want something to be here
.

I headed back to the car.

45

My parents’ old place was west of Dartmouth, off the coastal road that eventually wound its way to Kingsbridge. It was part of a small settlement built on a curved bay, although – of all the houses in the village – theirs was the most physically removed from it, perched in the hills above: the kitchen looked out over a line of fishermen’s cottages butting up against a sea wall, and to the beach beyond, boats moored on its shingle. At night, when the wind passed through, sometimes you could lie in bed and hear their masts chiming. Other nights, the sound of laughter from the Seven Stars, a shabby, salt-blanched pub that sat among the cottages. But, mostly, all you could hear was the sea, relentless, metronomic, the gentle chatter of pebbles in summer and the boom of breaking waves in the winter.

I let myself in, turned on the electrics and the water, then sat at the table in the kitchen, listening to the kettle boiling. There was no mist here but the skies were equally oppressive, and as I nursed a mug of coffee, rain began peppering the glass, and it was like moments in time had become tethered. Thirteen months earlier, I’d been in the same position, with the same drink, looking out at the same weather.

Another time. Another life.

Connected to each other by the missing.

I woke to the sound of my phone. For a moment I was disorientated, unsure of where I was. But then slowly, as I crawled from the depths, everything shifted into focus.

I glanced at my watch.

Ten past five.

I’d been asleep for six hours.

I brought the mobile towards me and looked at the display. Annabel. Taking it through to the kitchen, I sat down at the table.

‘Hey, sweetheart.’

‘Hey. Are you okay?’

‘Catching up on some sleep.’

‘You burning the candle at both ends again?’

‘Not in a fun way.’ It was dark outside now, the village reduced to dots of light. ‘Actually, I’m back in the motherland.’

‘Oh, cool. Are you coming to see us?’

‘Definitely. I just need to take care of a couple of things first.’

‘You still trying to find that guy?’

‘Still trying.’ In the background of the call, I could hear Olivia laughing at something. ‘How’s Liv?’

‘She’s good. Glued to the TV.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m fine.’

But, as she paused for a moment, I sensed she wanted to give voice to something. ‘You sure?’

‘It’s Emily,’ she said. ‘She keeps trying to call me.’

Emily: the woman who’d kept Annabel’s real parents a secret from her, from me, from anyone. She’d had her reasons, good reasons some of them, but it didn’t make it any less painful for Annabel. It pained me too – some days a great deal – because I’d spent twenty-four years not knowing my daughter. But I was older, a little more sculpted by life. Maybe, in a strange way, I was even expectant of lies now, because of the nature of my work. Annabel would come around – but in her own time, and on her own terms.

‘Things will get easier between you,’ I said.

‘I don’t want to speak to her.’

‘I understand that. But if you think, even for a moment, that you can make it work, I’d pick up the phone to her. Emily’s just like the rest of us.’ I looked out across the table, at the pictures I’d laid out, of Franks, of Ellie, of Craw. ‘We all just want to be surrounded by the people we love.’

46

Although Franks’s iPad – and the photographs on it – had been destroyed, in a moment of what was either fortune or foresight, I’d removed the SD card from his SLR camera when Craw had first handed me Franks’s boxes at her house. I’d left the camera with her, but taken the SD card with me, ostensibly as back-up in case I ran into any problems with the pictures on the iPad. I hadn’t been expecting the kind of problems Reynolds had brought me, but when he turned over the house, he missed the SD card, as I’d left it in the car.

After I was finished with Annabel, I went out to the BMW and retrieved the old laptop I’d brought from home, returned to the house, and slotted the SD card into it. A minute later, the pictures were copying across to the desktop.

As I sat there waiting, I still couldn’t shake the feeling I’d missed something.

Maybe something Murray had said.

Maybe something at the Frankses’ house.

Using the trackpad, I double-clicked on a picture of their home, taken by either Leonard or Ellie in the months after they’d moved in. Next to the laptop, in two rows on the table, were colour printouts of the photos that Craw had given me, which I’d asked her to resend after Reynolds had taken the original printouts from my house. Craw’s were different shots, taken over two and a half years later, but of the same house from the same angles.

The house is empty
.

You didn’t miss anything
.

My eyes drifted back to the photograph on the laptop, of the home when Leonard and Ellie had first moved in. I’d looked at it countless times. When I compared it with the ones Craw had taken in the months after Franks went missing, they appeared identical. Same A-frame roof. Same veranda. Same woodshed. The same sense of complete isolation.

I moved through the photographs on the PC desktop, then through the hard copies on the table. Outside, through the rain, the beach was barely visible now. Inside, my work was lit by a single table lamp and accompanied by the gentle hum of the central heating.

After ten minutes, I got up and filled the kettle again.

Clear your head
.

I walked to the kitchen door and opened it up, letting the bitter air ghost past me. The rain made a soft sound on the gravel of the drive, like a gathering of voices. As I listened, I thought of another picture, also taken on Dartmoor: the one Franks had two copies of – the shot of the valley with the remains of the tinner’s hut in it, and the church spire in the distance. This one was a real church spire built on top of a real church, not the kind I’d seen on the hospital at Keel Point. But I was yet to narrow down the location, and still hadn’t been able to figure out why Franks had two versions of the same shot: one taken on film years ago, and one taken in the time after he retired to Devon.

As the kettle came to the boil, my thoughts shifted again, back to Bethlehem, and to my plan to get across there in the morning, at low tide. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find, but I knew there was
something
there, my mind returning over and over to the room with the IV stand. Why was Reynolds so interested in it? Why that room, of all the hundreds of rooms there must have been in the building? What did it represent?

If I was going to do it, I had to be at the beach for 5 a.m. I’d bought a wetsuit on the way down from Dartmoor, and had packed that, a change of clothes and a torch into a waterproof backpack and left it in the boot of the car. Deep down, I knew a boat would be more practical, safer too, but it would also be harder to hide once I got across – and that just gave me one more thing to worry about.

I closed the door and poured myself a coffee, returning to the pictures.

I moved from the front-on shot of the house taken two and a half years back, around the time the Frankses had first moved in, to the one Craw had taken on a grey autumn day only a few months ago. The only change was in the colour of the structure itself, a subtle, imperceptible difference, the wood lightening by a couple of shades as sunlight bleached it over time.

What aren’t I seeing?

I went through the other pictures. The back of the house, the porch, the rooms, the unfinished kitchen, returning to that shot of the front, feeling that if there was something, it was here. I’d stood in the same position, in the rain, facing the house, earlier, and I’d got exactly the same sense that something was up.

A murmur of conviction.

A certainty.

So what the hell is it?

The old pipes creaked and shifted behind the walls of the cottage as the central heating fired up again.

The house is empty
.

You didn’t miss anything
.

‘The house is empty,’ I repeated quietly.

And then, in an instant, I saw it.

I’ve been looking at the wrong part of the picture
.

As I’d stood there earlier on, I’d seen three paths beyond the back garden, carving their way through carpets of heather and bracken – almost parallel to one another – as the moor rolled on past the boundaries of the house. They were trails imprinted on the moor by walkers, by years of passers-by rounding the property as they skirted the tor. Except in the picture the Frankses had taken when they’d first moved in, there weren’t three trails.

There were only two.

In Craw’s photograph – two and a half years later – the third trail was less defined than the other two, still covered in a flat layer of bracken, but it was there nevertheless, bearing slightly right as the other two remained straight. I let rationality kick in, trying to convince myself of the reasons why: maybe walkers had begun to carve out a new path for themselves in the years in between, keeping to the gentlest contours of the slope as it dipped and then rose. An easier path. A tamer, less demanding route across land that could be craggy and hard.

Or maybe it wasn’t walkers who had made it.

Maybe it was Franks, after he moved in.

And maybe it led somewhere.

47

The weather got worse the moment I hit the moors. By the time I reached the house it was 10 p.m. and rain was coming down so hard it was like nails were falling from the sky.

I pulled as close to the house as I could get, headlights flooding the veranda, and kept the engine running. Everywhere else, the moors were utterly, perfectly black: there was no definition to anything, no sense of where its lines moved and fell. Outside of the headlights, it was a vast, endless void. As I got out, wind whipped in, pressing hard, rocking the car on its springs.

From the boot, I grabbed the extension lead I’d used earlier, connected it to the car and began unravelling it, moving across the front lawn – just a fenced-in continuation of rolling moorland – and up on to the veranda. I unlocked the house, grabbed a tatty lamp that had been left behind by Ellie, and plugged it in. Light spilled out across the living room and ran through to the kitchen. With no electrics to call on, it was as good as it was going to get. More importantly, it would help anchor the house in the darkness while I headed out into the night, following the third trail. After I was done, I returned to the veranda, immediately under attack from the wind and rain again.

Continuing around the woodshed, I swung my flashlight across the spaces beyond the back garden and found the three trails. In the months since Franks had vanished, the third trail had started to become less defined, fresh roots growing out of the trampled bracken, callow heather closing in from both sides. The other two – established over decades – remained flattened yellow pathways, clearly demarcated across the grass.

Rain came again and again, pounding my face and jacket. I stood at the start of the third trail and shone the flashlight along it. Behind me, the picket fence that the Frankses had used to segregate their land creaked and popped in the wind. To my left, somewhere in the darkness, and a third of a mile above me, was the tor. To my right, I could see the very faintest of lights – a square of window – from one of the houses in Postbridge.

Otherwise, except for the lamp in the house, there was only darkness.

Tilting the flashlight down, I started along the trail.

It was uneven and difficult to judge. When I almost turned my ankle in an animal burrow, I slowed down even further, and started to feel the toe of my boot hitting gashes in the earth, hidden beneath blankets of bracken. There were sudden, unexpected slants in the topography too, knocking me off balance and forcing me away from the path. When I got back on to it, I tried to concentrate on where I was stepping, but it became more and more difficult: not only was the path becoming less defined, the rain was getting harder, pelting against my face in pellets as hard as gravel. Finally I had to stop – adrift in a sea of total, impervious darkness – pull up the hood of my coat and zip it to my chin.

Now all I could hear was rain.

As it drummed against my hood, I pushed on. Ahead of me, mud trails – slick with rainwater – winked in the glare of the flashlight, and the path disappeared for a moment, overrun by bracken. I stopped again, raised the torch, tried to angle it beyond the growth – and then I picked up the trail on the other side, zigzagging slightly and bearing right.

I glanced over my shoulder, back towards the house.

It was why I’d used the lamp: to act as a beacon. Even so, it was like being out at sea in the middle of the night, the shore reduced to a pinprick of light. Except I’d gone further than I thought: I’d dropped about three hundred and fifty feet, the house above my eyeline, and I was a quarter of a mile away already. The light from the living room and the kitchen seemed to drift in and out as rain ran into my eyes.