Cover

About the Author

Tim Weaver is the Sunday Times bestselling author of ten thrillers, including I Am Missing and You Were Gone. Weaver has been nominated for a National Book Award, selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club, and shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award. He is also the host and producer of the chart-topping Missing podcast, which features experts in the field discussing missing persons investigations from every angle.

A former journalist and magazine editor, he lives near Bath with his wife and daughter.

Praise for Tim Weaver

‘Terrific’ Sunday Times

‘Thrilling’ Richard and Judy Book Club

‘Packed with twists’ Daily Express

‘I couldn’t put it down’ Sun

‘Serpentine and satisfying’ Daily Mail

‘Impressive’ Guardian

‘Dark, complex and visceral’ Financial Times

‘So many twists and surprises’ The Times

‘Full of clever twists’ Dead Good Books

‘Little short of brilliant’ Crime Fiction Lover

‘It had me racing to the end’ Fiona Barton

‘Enthralling’ Liz Nugent

‘Kept me guessing until the final page’ Jane Corry

‘The rising star of British crime’ Tony Parsons

‘Tense and twisty, with an emotional punch’ Karen Perry

Dedication

For The Linscotts

Part One

THE VILLAGE

1

The sign said: Welcome to Black Gale.

It was weather-beaten, rinsed pale over the time that it had stood guard at the gated entrance to the village. Purple crocuses were dotted like jewels along the grass bank it was on, and beyond the sign was a mud track littered with stones, leading to three homes in a semicircle and a farm. The farm itself was modest, surrounded by a crumbling drystone wall dotted with moss and half covered by weeds, which also hemmed in the other homes. But on the other side of the wall, the farm’s fields unfurled across the moors like a huge patchwork quilt.

I’d met Ross Perry just outside Grassington, a market town twenty miles south of Black Gale, and had followed him up here. The further I drove, the higher I climbed, daffodils dotted along the banks of the narrow, one-lane roads. Even in March, though, winter hadn’t quite vanished. As I pulled my Audi in next to Ross’s Range Rover, I looked north, towards the heart of the moors, and could see hills still painted with ribbons of snow.

Ross waited for me next to his vehicle, dressed in a smart black suit and a bright red windbreaker. Stitched into the breast pocket of the windbreaker was CONNOR & PERRY PROPERTY | YORKSHIRE. I’d done a little reading up on Ross: he was young, twenty-six, but already the co-owner of an estate agency, and one of West Yorkshire’s most eligible bachelors according to a list in a local magazine. He was stocky, dark-haired and olive-skinned, the latter an endowment from his mother, Francesca, who had been born and raised in Florence.

The three houses were all roughly the same size and the same build too – a mix of stone and render, with slate roofs and double garages, and then a U-shaped garden that wrapped around the front and sides of each. They were separated from each other by wooden fences, wild flowers and vines weaving their way through the slats, so that each property maintained a degree of privacy. But the privacy was more of an illusion than anything: the buildings were beautifully constructed – big, four-bedroomed homes – but they were close enough to one another that it would have been almost impossible to live here if you didn’t get on with your neighbours.

The farmhouse fanned out behind one of the houses, a bungalow all on one level. It too was built from stone but it had a thatched roof and was a little less pristine, hay bales randomly, untidily scattered, tractor tyres piled up. There was an overturned animal trough close to the front door and two ruptured water butts. But nothing could quite impair the view: in whatever direction you looked, hills rolled into the distance and the dark spring sky seemed to go on for ever.

‘Which one was your mum and dad’s?’ I asked Ross.

‘That one,’ he said, gesturing to the house closest to us. I’d seen pictures of the house already in the research I’d done, in the police file I’d managed to get hold of as well, but as they all looked the same, I wanted to be sure. ‘They moved in three and a half years ago,’ he added.

‘They were obviously looking for somewhere quiet.’

Ross smiled, but it was sad and seemed hard to form.

‘They loved this part of the world,’ he said softly, his eyes scanning the hills. The nearest village was a mile to the east. In between it was just fields and stone walls. Other houses were dotted further out, like smudges against the morning and, way off into the distance – little more than a few strokes of a brush – was the ashen hint of a town. Chimneys. Roofs. Telegraph poles.

‘Before this,’ I said, ‘they lived near Manchester – is that right?’

‘About twenty miles away, in a village called Denshaw.’

‘They seemed happy there?’

‘They were in the same house for twenty-one years. The house I grew up in.’ He glanced at me. ‘They always seemed happy wherever they were.’

His mouth flattened – an attempt to appear stoic – and then his eyes instantly betrayed him as he looked at their home again. He started to blink a little faster, obviously not wanting to stand here, in front of me, in tears. I saved him any embarrassment by moving past him, closer to the house. At the side I could see a grey Mercedes, parked outside a garage, and then a glimpse of the back garden.

‘How come the car’s still here?’ I asked Ross.

He shrugged. ‘The police did take it away for a while and then – after they’d completed all the tests they needed to do – they gave it back. I know it sounds weird, but I didn’t know what to do with it once they returned it. I didn’t want to drive it, because it would only …’ He stopped. Bring back bad memories. ‘But I didn’t want to sell it on in case Mum and Dad just walked through the front door one day.’

None of that sounded odd. I’d heard something similar, on repeat, in every missing persons case I’d ever worked. The idea that loved ones might suddenly resurface, out of the blue, even after decades, was powerful and impossible to let go of.

I turned back to the house and saw a garden room with skylights and a grey slate roof at the rear, and then somewhere, out of sight, I heard a weathervane move, its gentle squawk like a bird that had injured itself.

‘What about the neighbours?’ I asked. ‘Everybody got on?’

‘Yeah,’ Ross replied, stepping in alongside me again, his composure restored, ‘they got on well. That’s why Mum and Dad loved it here so much. It wasn’t just the house, it was everything. The eight of them – the four couples – they were always getting together as a group. Dinner parties, nights out, pub lunches. I mean, literally the first year they moved in – when I was in Australia for Christmas – they all got together on Boxing Day.’

I looked to my right, down the remainder of the track, past the third house to where the farm was visible. Each of the properties had driveways and two out of the three had cars parked on them. The Perrys had the Mercedes; the people in the second house had a Porsche Cayenne. There was plenty of money up here, and plenty more at the farm: it might have been less pristine than the houses, but as well as a tractor, and all the farm equipment, there was a new Land Rover Defender parked outside.

‘I just don’t understand what happened to them,’ Ross said.

For a moment, as I looked at him, he was perfectly framed, his parents’ house behind him, the grass too long out front, weeds running rampant, the dark windows giving just a hint of the empty hallways within. He told me over the phone that he’d been trying to keep the house together, the lawn mowed, the rooms tidy, but it was hard when even the process of unlocking the front door hurt. His parents had been gone two and a half years, with no answers and no trace.

But they weren’t the only ones.

As I looked again at the other two houses, and then back in the direction of the farm, I saw windows that were just as dark as the Perrys’ and gardens just as overgrown. That was what made the scale of this case so intimidating.

It wasn’t just the Perrys that had disappeared.

It was the whole village.

2

Before I’d met Ross Perry, I’d met someone else.

I’d arrived late at the drab motorway hotel where he was staying. The drive up from London had been bad, the journey pockmarked by constant roadworks, and as I crossed the empty car park, rain hammering against the tarmac, I glimpsed him at one of the windows, partially formed behind a white gauze curtain. He looked like a ghost, a shape drifting in and out of existence, and in some ways that was what he’d become; but this ghost was what had first got me interested in Black Gale.

His obsession had now become mine.

The foyer was unremarkable, the woman behind the counter uninterested in who I was and why I might be there. She never looked up, didn’t even move, her face washed white by the glow from her monitor. Bland music was being piped out of a speaker close to me, but mostly all I could hear above the rain and traffic was the intermittent sound of her fingers across the keyboard.

He was sitting halfway down a corridor housing a row of vending machines, holding a plastic cup of coffee, steam spiralling out of it. He had his legs crossed and, either because of the angle he was at, or because of the light, he appeared smaller than the last time I’d seen him. I tried to remember when that was and realized, despite talking to him on the phone four times a week, every week, for three and a half years, I hadn’t actually seen him in the flesh for thirteen months. Before today, we hadn’t had much choice: he’d been living off the grid in a fisherman’s cottage in south Devon that had once belonged to my parents and now belonged to me, and he’d been doing it in secret, and under the alias Bryan Kennedy. His real name was carved into a headstone in a cemetery in north London, and buried under the earth beneath was a body that was supposed to be his. It was all a lie. He’d faked his own death, I’d helped him do it, and if anyone ever found out the truth, we were both going to prison. So, in the time since, he’d steered clear of the Internet and mobile phones – anything that put him on the map – all of his bills paid by me because he didn’t have a bank account, and we’d agreed never to meet up unless it was absolutely necessary.

I’d spent the three days before coming up from London – and the entire drive out to see Ross Perry – wondering if what we were doing here qualified as necessary.

In the end, I’d come anyway.

He got up and walked towards me. In the time since he’d moved to Devon, he’d been working on a fishing trawler, being paid cash in hand to go out into the English Channel casting for hake, cod and herring. It had made him slender, sinewy, a stark contrast to how he’d looked before he’d fooled the world into thinking he was dead. Back then, he’d been a cop; even further back, he’d been a good one. He’d worked murders at the Met for nearly two decades, overweight and restless, and had existed on bad food and adrenalin. For a while, towards the end, booze had crept in too. He was in his early fifties now, his red hair shaved off, his face covered by a thick beard, but it was hard to say if he looked older or younger: physically, he was in better condition, but his face was marked by more lines than ever, cut into him like nicks from a blade. It gave him the weary look of someone permanently scarred by their history.

‘Sounds like you had a relaxing trip up,’ he said as we shook hands. He’d called me twice on the hotel’s payphone to find out where I was; the second time I’d been sitting in a four-mile tailback. He picked up his machine coffee and rocked it towards me in a cheers motion: ‘Still, after all this time, at least we get to meet somewhere really glamorous.’

I smiled and then looked through the curtain to the empty car park. Rain continued to hammer against the ground – a fierce, relentless drumbeat.

‘Did you get a taxi here yesterday?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah, from the station at Knaresborough.’ He took a sip from his coffee, his eyes scanning the foyer over the rim of the cup, and then – very quietly, his voice deliberately dialled down – he said, ‘I checked in at three yesterday and then sat at the window in my room for the entire evening, watching. There were only two other people staying here last night, and they’ve both already left. No one’s checked in this afternoon. There are four cars around the back, all belonging to staff, including her.’ He gestured to the woman at the front desk. ‘She’s the most unresponsive person I’ve ever met. Literally doesn’t give a shit who comes and goes because she’s too busy playing solitaire on her computer. It’s dead here. I’ll be fine.’

I nodded, but checked the car park again anyway.

‘Have they closed all the supermarkets in London, Raker?’

I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you’re looking lean.’

‘I’ve been running a lot,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’

‘I’m doing the New York marathon in November.’

He broke out into a smile. ‘You serious?’

‘I’ve done London, I did Paris with Derryn in 2006. I did the Two Oceans when we were in Cape Town. I’m enjoying all the training. It’s keeping me focused.’

He nodded but didn’t say anything.

We both knew why.

In November 2009, my wife, Derryn, had died – aged only thirty-four – after a long battle with cancer, and then, three months ago, I’d landed a case over Christmas that had been related to her death. The case had taken everything from me – in fact, it had almost destroyed me – and I’d spent the months since trying to recover from it and return to some sort of equilibrium. So, while I’d always been a runner, mostly I’d do short distances and had only ever used it to supplement gym work – but now I was doing fifteen-mile runs as standard, from my home in Ealing, south into Kew, and then out across the northern fringes of Richmond Park. I liked the singular, solitary nature of running, the time it gave me alone, the way it cleared my head and calmed my thinking; and because I liked it, I’d kept doing more of it.

‘We’d better go through the case again,’ I said.

‘Everything’s in the room.’

We headed for the lift. As soon as the doors slid shut, I said to him, ‘Your new ID will be ready in a couple of days.’

He only nodded this time.

By now, it was just routine: another new name for another pretend life.

His room was right at the end of a corridor on the second floor. He removed a DO NOT DISTURB sign from the handle, took out a keycard and swiped it through the reader. We both instinctively checked the corridor, and then I followed him inside.

‘So are you going to start calling me by whatever name I get next?’ he asked, popping the card into the power socket. The lights in the bathroom and bedroom flickered into life. Before this, we’d tried to get into a routine of only calling him by the name we’d arranged last, Bryan Kennedy – but it had never felt natural.

‘No,’ I said. ‘To me, you’ll just be Colm Healy.’

Colm Healy.

His real name weighed heavy on the air. There were so many miles attached to it, such anger and tragedy and sadness, and yet – as a smile formed at the edges of his mouth – it was clear that this was what he’d always wanted; he wanted to go back, even if it was only when the two of us were alone, to return to the part of his life that had made the most sense, when he’d had the structure of a family and a career.

‘Thanks, Raker,’ he said quietly.

I looked at the walls.

He’d moved aside a desk, the TV, a corner table and chair. He’d taken down a painting. In its place, he’d filled the entire wall, every inch of it: tacked-up photocopies, pictures, printouts, a cascade of paper, of headlines and handwritten notes that meant nothing to anyone except us. This was no one else’s obsession but ours.

At the top, on hotel stationery, was a title for it all.

Black Gale.

When he’d first floated the idea of looking into what happened at the village, I’d said no. I’d said no a month later when he tried again, even though I knew he was going stir-crazy stuck in a hotel room in the north-east; he’d moved there from Devon as a safety measure when a journalist had started sniffing around my life. Eventually it dawned on me that giving Healy something to get his teeth into made sense, as it was then less likely that he would get careless, and at the time I’d taken ownership of all the information that was now pinned to the wall of this room. So as a peace offering, perhaps as an apology too, I’d couriered everything back to him in Newcastle in an effort to keep him focused, but also to send him a message: I still wasn’t ready to get involved. Missing people had always been my life, as essential to me as the blood in my veins, but my last case had almost killed me. I hadn’t felt ready for something on this scale, and the idea of working a case with Healy seemed a bad way of acclimatizing.

But that was just the problem: when something was in your blood you could never really get rid of it. I could deny it for a while – or try to – but the compulsion would always remain. So when we’d talked on the phone three nights ago and he’d mentioned Black Gale again, this time I let him tell me about it. I put the phone down afterwards and went looking myself. And then the next day I woke up and I realized something: this job had nearly destroyed me before, but it had saved me as well. It had brought me out of the darkness after my wife had died. It had given me focus, and maintained me, and taught me how to live. It was like breath.

It was how I felt normal.

‘We came here once with the kids,’ Healy said, the distance in his voice instantly bringing me back, its timbre laced with the anguish of events long past. He was looking at a picture of Black Gale. ‘I mean, not here, but the Yorkshire Dales. We stayed at some place near Malham Cove.’ Another smile, there and gone again. ‘Leanne was always easy; she’d just go along with whatever Gemma and I decided. But the boys …’ He made a noise through his teeth: amused, then more emotional. ‘All they did all week was whine. Every walk, every place we took them.’

I watched him for a moment, the dull light of the room reflected in his eyes. There was no animosity in his voice. Just sadness because of what came after, the things he’d lost.

The family.

‘I wish I could come with you,’ Healy said.

It was hard to remain silent, harder still to insist that he didn’t, but that the best place for him was right here, inside a room booked in a false name, where no one would remember him or ask questions about who he was. When a man wasn’t supposed to exist, you risked absolutely everything even by driving into the middle of nowhere.

Even so, it hurt me to deny him the chance; if it wasn’t for Healy, we wouldn’t have ever got this far. Before he was forced to relocate, in his evenings, at weekends, alone inside my parents’ old cottage, with no access to the Internet, he’d spent the money that he’d earned on the trawler paying for photocopies and books, and on bus tickets to the local library. There, he’d kept his sanity by reading newspapers, using their computers to get online, even sitting at ancient microfiche readers, in order to study old, unsolved cases. That was where he’d found this one. If the world hadn’t believed him dead, this would have been the sort of case he would have worked. Instead, he’d called me, telling me to look into it, knowing the whole time that – whatever contribution he made – he’d always exist in the shadows.

I’d brought a backpack with me from the car and, as I looked at the walls again, reminding myself of the timeline that Healy had constructed of what had happened out at Black Gale two and a half years ago, I handed him the bag.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, taking it from me.

‘A printout of the police investigation. One of my old sources at the Met mailed it over to me, but it just came through this morning so I haven’t had a chance to look at it properly.’

He unzipped the bag, pulling out a stack of paper.

‘I thought you could go over it while I’m out,’ I said.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!