Never Coming Back (15 page)

Forty-five minutes later, I reached Miln Cross. The sea was rough, especially this close to the cliffs, and rowing my way between the two broken pieces of the bridge in a six-foot dinghy with a couple of forty-inch oars was hard. I'd bought an electric pump from the general store, just to quicken the process, but it took me almost half an hour to get back to the place I'd been earlier, inflate the dinghy and get it ready. I still managed a wry smile as I got to the other side, though, able to appreciate how I must have looked: a 42-year-old man setting sail in a kid's dinghy.

Beneath the bridge on the Miln Cross side was a natural platform, smoothed and carved out from the rock by the sea. I rowed close to it, reached out and dragged myself in, clambering out of the boat and on to the rocks. In the car I'd had a length of tow rope, which I'd brought across. Once I was out of the boat, I pulled the dinghy up, on to the platform, and looped the rope through the rowlocks, securing the raft and both oars to a gnarled arm of rock six feet from the water's edge. Then I climbed the rest of the way up to street level, and stood and looked down the main street.

On the left-hand side there were six stone houses, all in a line, tracing the gentle curve of the road at their front. Behind them, though, the rock fell away sharply, ragged and brittle, their foundations exposed, like the bones of a body, iron pillars breaking out of the earth and reaching up to the floors of the buildings. As I moved forward, the street uneven and fragmented beneath my feet, I could see the chapel on the same side, and then another house right at the end, set back from the others, next to where the harbor was. On the right, under the looming edifice of the cliff, was the rest of Miln Cross: seven houses, consigned to oblivion, a tiny inn, its white walls blanched by four decades of sea salt, and what once had been a shop. There was hardly anything left. The cliffs weren't gray, they were black, blanketed in a wall of hardened mud. This was the epicenter of the landslide: it had moved right through the middle of the village, right to left, and into the sea, taking the shop with it. The only memory of the shop now was three half-broken external walls, and a floor of mud and concrete.

As I got to the first of the houses, the whine of the wind seemed to fade away into a gentle whisper, a strange, disconcerting sound like
voices—deep within the roots of the buildings—talking to one another. There was a sudden stillness to the village, its street protected from the breeze coming in off the water, even from the sound of the sea itself: there was no roar from the waves anymore, just a soft slosh as they grabbed and shoved at the plateau the village rose out from. When I paused for a moment at the open window of the first building, it hit home: Miln Cross was a graveyard, its hushed silence the same as every place I'd ever been to where people had been taken before they were ready. In those places there was always a residue, a feeling that echoed through it.

Inside the first house was the decaying reflection of a living room, the fireplace still visible at the back, the wall to its left gone completely. At one time there might have been a picture hanging on that wall. Now there was just a view of the sea. The wall that had once divided this room from the kitchen was a memory, reduced to nothing but a pile of bricks, the interior walls of the kitchen rotten through to the support beams, criss-crossing in sodden, blackened struts. There was no second floor and no roof.

I moved on, past other houses.

In some, just like the first, daylight poured through big holes in the roofs, through gaps in the outside walls, illuminating interiors in a weak kind of half-light. In others, where the roof and the walls were still, somehow, intact, there was nothing but darkness, windows like the eyes of a skull, doorways like widening jaws, black and hermetic.

I stopped at the inn and looked through its big front windows into a building with no roof and no walls on three sides. It was like something from a film set, a facade, and beyond its only vertical surface was a mass of ossified mud, clawing its way across the remains of the floorboards. On the other side of the street the chapel was the same: one side of its high vaulted roof had fallen into what remained of the building, its two stained-glass windows had blown out, and its door had been carried out to sea at some point long forgotten.

I checked the time. Four-forty.

There was about thirty minutes before it was completely dark.

I quickened my pace across the cobbles, heading past the chapel and the inn, and down the gentle curve of the street to the harbor. It was a harbor really only in name: a set of steps was carved out of the rock, leading down to a small, L-shaped concrete jetty, which, of all the structures in Miln Cross, had probably survived the best. Huge nails fixed the
jetty to the plateau itself, rust leaking out of them and running down the rocks to the water. On this side of the village the cliff face folded around on itself, creating a natural cove, which was probably why they'd built the harbor here. In years past there would have been space for three or four trawlers, maybe some smaller boats too; once they'd got this side of the village, the cove would have calmed the water for them and they'd have drifted in year after year, unhindered and impervious, until the night the storm came.

The furthest house down was right next to the jetty, angled so that it looked over it. Famously, Miln Cross had had a harbor mistress: this must have been her home. It wasn't lined up next to the others; instead it was set away, built on a separate plateau of rock about six feet below the level of the main street. Out front was a small square of lawn, reduced to a patch of sea-soaked mud, and, behind it, some kind of extension that seemed to be teetering on the very edges of the rocks. The main part of the house was like all the others in the village, the interior filled with rubble, dwindling light stabbing through the tears in the roof, the upstairs gone completely, the living room divided from the kitchen by a tiny sliver of a wall. However, at the back of the kitchen were three walls, all relatively intact, one with a doorway through to the extension.

I moved inside the house.

The smell of damp was overwhelming, an earthy stench eating its way through the house. There were countless punctures in the wall, whole slabs ripped clean away, and, from the roof, water fell in a constant
drip, drip, drip,
soaking its way through patches of what remained of the ceiling. At my feet was a layer of debris: plaster, brick, glass, sand, a twisted, gnarled fire grill fused to the floor in the center of the living room by mud as hard as concrete. When I passed through to the kitchen there were still the skeletons of a counter and a stove in place, doors ripped from it. Apart from that, it was empty. I could vaguely make out old, floral wallpaper, and through the only window—now just a square opening in the wall, dusted with glass—was a view of the jetty.

Halfway across the kitchen, I suddenly felt a gentle suck beneath the soles of my boots, and when I looked down saw that the layer of dust and debris had been replaced by half an inch of water. The floorboards were soft, like sponge, bending under my weight, and as I moved further across the room toward the door, I could feel the boards bending even more and see water running into the house from outside.

I stopped at the open doorway.

The extension might once have been some kind of storage room, but it was hard to gauge exactly how big. Thirty feet from where I was standing, it basically ceased to exist. Beyond that point, the floor and what was left of the walls and the ceiling had been ripped away completely, destroyed by the ferocity of the storm. I stepped into the room and felt it shift slightly, left to right to left again, and when I looked back, I saw that, gradually, over time, the extension had begun to lever away from the house, popping free of the bolts that had once bound it to the main building. The sea was about six feet further down, immediately beneath the point at which the extension ended. In the moments when it was still, it was far enough out of reach; when it got rougher, when the wind started to pick up, the waves sloshed up into the open mouth of the extension and ran all the way through it, into the kitchen. There was the smell of fish, of sea salt, and of dust and age, but mostly there was the smell of damp, picking at the house like a vulture.

Dum. Dum.

A noise from somewhere.

I stood there, right at the end of the extension, feeling it shift and move around me as the sea spilled in, but the sound didn't come again. To my right, out through a hole in the wall, I could see a small back garden, a similar sort of size to the front, awash in mud and rock and water, and beyond that the harbor area. Suddenly, I realized how little light there was left in the day, the sky stained gray, the sun dying somewhere out of sight.

Dum. Dum.

The same noise again. It sounded like it was coming from inside the main house. I moved through the extension, back into what had been the kitchen, and stood there in the advancing darkness, listening. A breeze picked up for a moment, passing through the cracks and fissures of the house, and it made an immense creak, like it was about to fall in on me. More water ran in, under skirting boards, through the holes in the wall, creating a pool of stagnant water, and a
DANGER—KEEP OUT!
sign, nailed loosely to one of the walls, flapped in the wind as it died away again. Yet even as it faded, something of it remained: a gentle whisper, almost like a chant, and off the back of it, more distant now, I could hear the same unnerving rhythm:
dum dum dum dum dum.

I moved out on to the main street.

In the twilight, definition was starting to wash out, the interiors of the buildings fading to black, their white walls becoming ashen and indistinct. I waited for the sound again. Ten seconds. Thirty. After a minute I started to move slowly along the road, back toward the place I'd left the dinghy, but then—as the wind picked up again, funneled through the broken chasms of the village—a strange, unsettling sensation passed through me.

I stopped.

I wasn't cold, but I could feel goosebumps forming, scattering down my arms and along the ridge of my spine. For no reason I felt compelled to turn around, as if part of me sensed I was being followed. But when I looked back down the street, toward where the harbor mistress's house was, there was nothing but stillness and silence. High up on my right, on what remained of the chapel's spire, I spotted a crow, sitting alone, the tattered remnants of the flag shuddering in the breeze. It looked at me, unmoved, frozen.

Then, finally, it took off, into the night sky.

By the time I got home, it was pitch black. The house was quiet and cold, and as I closed the kitchen door and put the kettle on, I thought of Healy. He would have been back in London by now, staying wherever it was he'd decided he was going to stay, for whatever reason he figured it was best to be back there. He hadn't said anything before he left and I hadn't expected him to, but I knew I was right: not being a cop anymore, not being treated like one, not having the power of the badge, or a single person at the Met he could call in a favor from, had all got to him. He would have felt it keenly over the past couple of days too, first when the body washed up on the beach and he had to watch from the outside looking in; and then when I'd told him he was doing things my way on the Ling case—or not at all. London wouldn't offer him any of those things back, but he would at least be closer to his boys, and from there he could think about starting to move his life on.

I headed upstairs, showered, and then prepared myself some dinner. I ate sitting in front of Paul Ling's computer, looking at the Google Maps shot of the red phone booth in Princetown. Five days after the last of the calls were made to Paul Ling by whoever had been using the payphone, the family was gone. That was too much of a coincidence, especially given the remoteness of the phone booth and what had followed: a disguised call from a mystery number, then Paul's aborted attempts to get in touch with a travel agent.

And that didn't even take into account the second anonymous call to police about Miln Cross made in the days after the family was gone. I'd forgotten to ask Ewan Tasker whether that call had been traced, but I'd find out as soon as the file arrived.

I tried to make the natural leaps in logic. The only reason you'd try to disguise the origin of
any
call was to protect your identity—and there was really only one rationale for doing that with the Lings: in the days before they vanished, someone had threatened them and knew the number might lead somewhere; and then, in the days after, they'd called the police in order to force investigators away from whatever they were protecting.

Grabbing my pad, I went to a fresh page and started to make some notes—and then my phone started buzzing on the sofa next to
me. Automatically, I reached down, picked it up and hit Answer, before I realized whose name was on the display: Liz.

It was too late to kill it.

“Liz,” I said softly.

Silence. I imagined she was shocked I'd even picked up.

“David.”

“How are you?”

“I didn't expect you to answer.”

There was so much in those six words: accusation, anger, grief, insinuation. “I'm sorry about . . .” I paused. “I'm sorry I haven't called. This isn't how I wanted it to be.”

“Healy said . . .” Her voice sounded uneven, as if she hadn't been ready for me to answer either, as if all the things she'd planned on saying to me—all the conversations that had played out in her head—were gone. “Healy made it sound like we'd never speak again.”

“Healy loves to be dramatic.”

“He was good to me.”

“I know. I know he was.”

A short silence, then she said, “So, how have you been?”

“Fine. I'm getting there slowly.”

“Physically?”

“Physically, I feel fine.” The first of the lies: I wasn't grounded by the injury, but I could feel it most days. A dull ache. A sharp pain. If I told her exactly how I was feeling, it returned us to the point at which we'd parted: my job, its risks, the people I tried to find, and how she failed to understand the reasons why. From her side there was no failure to understand anything. After all, what was there
to
understand about a job that ended up with me on an operating table? To her, to most people, it was insane: a job full of uncalculated risk. To me, it was everything that mattered.

“Are you coming back?” she asked finally.

“I don't know, Liz.”

Silence. “I miss you.”

“I know.”

“Do you miss me?”

“Yes,” I said, and I did. That wasn't a lie. “I miss what we had. I miss London and my home. I miss being close to you. I liked being able to come next door to chat with you. I liked having someone to share my life
with again.” I stopped, glancing at the photo on Paul Ling's desktop.
She needs to hear it. You owe her that much
. “But this is my job.”

She didn't respond.

“The job is always going to come between us.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you have to do it?” she said. There was less emotion in her voice now, and more resolve. “Why would you
want
to do a job that leads you to such dark places?”

“I have a responsibility.”

“To who?”

“To the people I'm finding.”

“A responsibility?”

“They don't have anyone else.”

More silence, and this time I imagined she was returning to the conversation we'd had almost a year before, in the aftermath of another case. We'd been sitting in a police interview room—solicitor and client—as I told her everything that had happened in the case and why I needed her to insulate me. And then she'd said something that had stuck with me ever since:
You're trying to plug holes in the world because you know what it's like to lose someone, and you think it's your job to stop anyone else suffering the same way.
I'd denied it in the weeks after, to myself and to her face, and the relationship had begun and blossomed, and Liz had probably forgotten all about it. But somewhere, right at the back of my mind, I knew I could never get away from what she'd said.

Because she was right.

And now I had to tell her.

“I can't see you again,” I said to her, and all I got back was the static on the line. “I care deeply for you, Liz, but this job has already come between us—and it always will.”

I waited for a response.

A couple of seconds later, she hung up.