Fall From Grace (41 page)

‘Did you tell that to the guy who came to see you?’

A silence heavy with remorse. ‘Yes. He said he’d kill my
family
. I betrayed her, I betrayed Casey, but …’ He paused. ‘My family. I just … I couldn’t bear to …’

…
live without them
.

There was no sobbing from him this time, but I heard him sniff, cover the phone and – for a second time – tell his kids to give him some space.

Then he came back on the line.

‘I need to go, Mr Raker.’

‘Did you ever think about calling the police?’

‘About the man who came to see me? No way.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why do you think? I’m not putting my boys at risk.’

‘What about Casey? What about before then, when she said Leonard Franks had scared her? Did you think about calling the police back then, on her behalf?’

‘That was just the problem,’ he said, and I heard some of the uncertainty return to his voice; a tremor of fear misshaping his final couple of words. ‘I couldn’t call the police – because she said the police were all in on it.’

61

Craw got out as I approached, leaving her door open, the lights on, the heaters blowing. She stood there watching me, shadows at her face. I kept my expression neutral, but inside I was burning up.
I couldn’t call the police – because she said the police were all in on it
. I didn’t know whether that just meant Reynolds, or it meant him and Craw. Maybe Paige. Maybe Murray. Maybe even Franks. At this point, I didn’t know who I could trust.

‘Everything all right?’

I looked at her. ‘Yeah, all good.’

Her eyes lingered on me, as if she could sense that hadn’t been entirely the truth, but then she looked off into the parking lot. ‘I don’t see your car anywhere.’

‘No. I left it about half a mile away.’

‘Do you want me to drive you there?’

‘No, it’s fine. I’m already soaking wet.’ I attempted a smile and hoped it looked convincing, then removed the ring with the keys to the cottage on them. ‘Here.’

‘What are they?’

‘The keys to my parents’ old place.’

She glanced at them. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘I need to make a couple more calls.’

‘To who?’

Just take the damn keys
. ‘There’s a couple of leads I need to chase up. Once that’s done, I’ll meet you back at the house and we’ll get everything straightened out.’

‘ “Straightened out”?’

It was the wrong choice of words. She eyed me again, mistrust written in every muscle on her face. ‘I mean, I’ll tell you everything I’ve found out, and we’ll lay down a plan. One that doesn’t involve me taking a detour to A&E.’

She nodded.

‘Okay?’

She glanced at the keys, still being held out to her, then back to me. After a moment more, she reached over and took them. ‘Okay.’

I gave her directions to the cottage. If she, or anyone else, turned the place over, they’d find nothing. I’d cleared it out earlier in the year when I’d moved back to London. Everything I needed I had in the car twenty feet beyond where she was standing.

‘I’ll see you later, then.’

She nodded again, her eyes still lingering on me – and then we both set off, moving in opposite directions.

She got back into her car.

I headed anywhere that wasn’t with her.

62

A mile and a half out of Kingsbridge, I found a public phone box, overrun by grass and half hidden in the shadows. I pulled up alongside it, turned off the engine and got out.

Inside it smelled of piss and damp.

The road was lonely, lined on both sides by high hedges, but the rain had stopped and now there was a break in the clouds, like a hole punctured in a ceiling. As I fed some coins into the slot, I could see moonlight escaping through the gap, illuminating fields further down, and then hinting at what lay beyond.

The ragged outline of the coast.

And then, across the causeway, Bethlehem.

I dialled Ewan Tasker’s mobile and waited for it to connect. He picked up after a couple of rings, sounding suspicious. He didn’t recognize the number.

‘Task? It’s me.’

‘Raker?’

‘Yeah. How’s it going?’

‘Everyone’s fine. How’s things your end?’

‘Good.’

‘You want to speak to them?’

‘Please.’

I heard a muffled conversation, and then Annabel came on.

‘Hello?’

‘How you doing, sweetheart?’

‘Okay, I guess.’

‘I’m sorry about this.’

She didn’t say anything initially, but then: ‘Okay.’

‘What have you been doing?’

‘Getting Olivia to sleep.’

‘Is she all right?’

‘She’s fine. She thinks it’s a big adventure.’

But I didn’t need to dig too far to find out what Annabel thought about it. The wind whined gently as it passed through the spaces in the telephone box, the cracks in its glass, its rusted-out frame. In the background at her end I could hear laughter on a television, a snapshot of domestic normality. Except even that was a lie. I’d dragged the two of them out of their beds in the middle of the night and sent them into hiding.

This was their normality now.

I’d made certain of that.

‘Have you found the man you’re looking for yet?’ she asked.

‘No. Not yet.’

‘What happens when you do?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On whether he’s alive or not.’

She paused. ‘And us?’

‘You and Liv?’

‘Yes. When you find him, can we go home?’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘And this won’t happen again?’

There was a mix of sadness and frustration in her voice that would have got to me even if she hadn’t been my daughter.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It won’t happen again.’

Briefly, I could see my own reflection in the glass.

Another lie
.

‘So where are you at the moment?’ she asked.

My eyes moved to the coastline again, a grey smudge in the distance. The clouds had begun to knot together, gradually returning everything to darkness. ‘I’m a couple of miles from Keel Point.’

‘Keel Point? Oh. That’s where the hospital is.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, a little thrown. The fact that she knew about it surprised me, even though it shouldn’t have: she’d been brought up only a few miles down the coast.

‘You’re not going across, are you?’

She’d asked it as a joke.

‘I was thinking about it.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

A long pause. ‘You’re brave.’

‘Why do you say that?’

I waited her out, but I thought I might already know what she was failing to put into words: people weren’t the only vessels for memories. In my work, in the search for the missing, I’d been to places that had a resonance, a sense of what had taken place in them, even years after they’d been abandoned. It wasn’t ghosts, it was something real and more powerful; as if a place could become scarred by its history.

Eventually, she said, ‘If you’re really thinking about going, you should cross at Parl Rock.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Another half a mile further down the coast. The crossing takes a little longer, but because of the sandbanks the water level never gets quite as high.’

I paused, wondering how she’d come to know that.

She seemed to sense my thoughts. ‘I had some friends who went across, after it closed. They did it as a dare. I’ve got a brain between my ears, so I just watched from the beach.’ She cleared her throat, as if finding it hard to articulate the words. ‘On one side of the building, there are all these windows. Loads of them, all looking out to sea. I remember watching my friends head out there and thinking those windows … they looked like …’

‘What?’

‘It makes me sound crazy.’

‘It’s okay.’

A brief hesitation, then: ‘They looked like eyes. Some had already been vandalized, smashed and broken, but lots of them were still intact – and when the moon, or the lights from the beach, reflected off the glass … it was like people were moving around in there.’

I looked out into the darkness.

‘Just be careful,’ she said.

‘I’ll let you know if I’m being washed out to sea.’

She made a brief, amused sound. ‘Honestly, cross at Parl Rock. That’ll make it easier. All you need to do to get there is follow the signs for Brompton Lee.’

‘Okay, I wi –’ I stopped. ‘Wait, where?’

‘Brompton Lee. It’s the last village before Parl Rock. That was where my friends lived. The ones who went across.’

‘What’s in Brompton Lee?’

‘In
it? I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Houses? Shops?’

‘Yeah. Uh … a pub. A post office.’

I removed my pad and flicked through the notes I’d made. Pretty soon, I found what I was looking for: what Franks had written on the scrap of paper and the pub flyer. What I’d found printed on the plastic tag I’d dug out of the ground on Dartmoor.

BROLE108.

I told Annabel I’d check back in a couple of hours, then hung up, powering on my mobile. I went to the web browser and searched for ‘Brompton Lee post office’. After a couple of seconds, I found a picture of it in Google Images. It was a post office inside a general store. On the board above its entrance, in a thin serif, was
BROMPTON LEE GENERAL STORE AND POST OFFICE
. Next to that was its phone number.

BROLE 577233.

When I scrolled down, I found its opening hours. Because of what else it sold – milk, bread, newspapers – it opened at 6 a.m. It was a stroke of good luck, as I could take a look inside and still get down to Parl Rock for low tide the next morning.

But that wasn’t what caught my eye. Instead, what I zeroed in on was part of a list below the store’s opening times.

Its facilities and services.

Including one hundred and ten post-office boxes.

63

Brompton Lee was a mid-sized village south of Salcombe, set on the edge of the coast. It had maybe eighty homes, in a raft of different colours, two pubs, a butcher’s, an estate agency, a tea room and a pharmacy. The general store sat on its own, midway through, an extension on its side doubling up as the entrance. The A-road in and out meant the village had good access to Salcombe, Kingsbridge, the surrounding villages and everything east of the Avon, which was probably why this post office had survived the government cull.

In the windows was a mix of foodstuffs, ice-cream signs and postcards of the local area. A sign confirmed its opening time as 6 a.m. I drove past, finding a spot about two hundred yards away. When I switched off the engine and the lights, the night washed in, and – except for the metronomic crash of the sea on the beach, eighty feet below – all I could see were squares of light from the village, hanging there in the blackness.

I got out, the night cool, and walked further into the lay-by, where a hole had been cut out of a thick tangle of ivy. Through it, I could see the vague outline of boats, drifting slowly across the channel, miles out to sea. In front of them, it was difficult to see anything.

But I knew the hospital was there.

A ghost marooned in the water.

I’d set my alarm for five-forty-five. As it started to go off, I shrugged off the spare coat I’d been using as a blanket, and sat up on the back seat. It could easily have been midnight. The sun wasn’t going to be up until after eight, so there was absolutely no hint of light in the sky at all. It was as cold as a tomb too. The first thing I did was clamber into the front, start up the engine and put the heaters on full.

Ten minutes later, warm and awake, I locked the car and headed back into the village on foot, trying to keep my arrival as low-key as possible. The lights above the store were already illuminated, and forty feet from the entrance I could see a grey-haired woman in her sixties standing at the window, turning an Open/Closed sign around. I was at the door before she realized she had a customer, the darkness disguising my approach.

The store was small and cramped, shelves packed with produce. At the front, in wicker baskets, was fresh fruit. At the other end was a dark wood counter, a sweet display and the day’s newspapers on top, then a cove beyond that, perhaps ten feet across. Inside was the only thing in the store that looked like it belonged in the twenty-first century: post-office boxes, built floor to ceiling. The antiquation hadn’t quite been abandoned, though: the boxes were all housed behind a pair of old-fashioned saloon doors.

‘Morning,’ the woman said.

I smiled at her. ‘Morning. How are you?’

‘I’m good. You’re up early.’

It was clear she didn’t recognize me as a local, her eyes lingering on me a fraction longer than they should have done. She moved slowly, was slightly hunched, round and overweight, but she was switched on. There was a spark to her. At the back, through a glass sliding door behind the counter, I could see a man about the same age.
Her husband
. He was marking something off on a printed list. Next to him, on the wall, was a board full of hooks. From the hooks hung one hundred and ten keys, all secured behind a locked, reinforced-glass cabinet. They were spares for the PO boxes.

Each key had a red plastic tag on it.

‘I’m just passing through,’ I said.

‘Ah. I didn’t think I recognized you.’

‘I’ve been in a few times before.’

She frowned. ‘Oh, right.’

‘Your husband helped me with my PO box.’ I nodded to the cove at the back. ‘My wife and I have just moved to a place on the other side of East Prawle.’

‘Oh,
right
,’ she said again. It was obvious she didn’t recognize me, but she tried to pretend my story rang a bell.

‘Anyway, I’d better get on.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, gesturing towards the cove at the back. ‘Do you need anything else? I can gather some stuff together for you in the meantime.’

I needed to keep her occupied while I had a look around, but sending her on a milk and bread run wasn’t going to take longer than a minute. I felt around in the pockets of my jacket: the plastic tag, my notepad, my mobile phone.