Never Coming Back (12 page)

Farnmoor was a huge, seventeenth-century manor house buried in a crinkle of coastline two miles south of Dartmouth. The single-lane approach was beautiful. Framed by high trees, it gradually opened out on to a patchwork of rolling hills and sweeping sea views. The house itself remained hidden virtually the entire way down until, about a quarter of a mile short of the front gates, it emerged from a curve in the earth, its manicured front lawn flowing into a bank of craggy coastal rock and finally dropping away to the sea.

Beyond the gates, two hundred yards along an arrow-straight driveway, eleven cars were parked in a line, as well as a van with
DART GARDEN SERVICES
on the side. I pulled the car up outside the gates, buzzed down my window and pushed the intercom. A short, sharp squeal, then silence. As I waited for an answer, I listened to the sea crashing on to the shore somewhere below.

Bzzt.
“Yes?”

I turned back to the intercom. “Hi. My name's David Raker. I'm doing some work on the Ling family disappearance. I was hoping I could speak to someone about it.”

I left it at that. Carter Graham wasn't home—I'd already called his London office and talked the receptionist into revealing he was out of the country—but, judging by the number of cars parked out front, someone other than the gardener had to have been working here on at least a semi-regular basis. Graham might have been rich, but no one had eleven cars unless they were collecting them; and if he was a collector, he wasn't going to be buying beige Vauxhall Vectras.

A pause. “What did you say your name was?”

“David Raker.”

“Okay. Hold on a second, please.”

The intercom went dead again. About ten seconds later, the same woman came back on: “I'll buzz you in and meet you out front.”

I thanked her and waited for the gates to open. They fanned out slowly, wheezing on their hinges, and I took off up the drive, gravel spitting out from beneath the tires. Halfway along, the front door opened, a huge slab of oak with a small half-oval pane of glass cut into it, and a woman in her early forties emerged from the house, pausing at the top of
a set of sandstone steps. She watched me all the way up the drive and into a space next to the Vectra, and didn't break her gaze as I got out of the car and grabbed my notebook from the back. I headed over to meet her.

“Mr. Raker?”

“Morning.”

She smiled. “Katie Francis. I'm Mr. Graham's PA here at Farnmoor.”

Slim and attractive, her hair scraped back into a ponytail and dressed in a green skirt-suit, she looked every inch the harassed assistant: cordless telephone in one hand, a desk diary in the other. Through the door behind her I could see people moving around: a female in a cleaning tabard, and a chef carrying empty silver platters.

I stopped short of her on the front steps. She nodded. “You'll have to bear with us, I'm afraid—we're throwing a charity gala dinner here tomorrow, so it's a little manic.”

She nodded again and I realized it was a habit of hers, like the bridge between one conversation and the next. I followed her into the house. It was beautiful: original oak paneling everywhere, without the musty stench of a stately home. Every room had been furnished with a modern twist: light, airy colors, all creams and browns and reds, contemporary art, twenty-first-century furniture. I only caught brief glimpses of each, but I was immediately impressed by Graham's tastes. From one room came the whine of a vacuum cleaner; from another the conversation of workmen. One corridor branched off and headed toward a kitchen. Another headed in the opposite direction to a locked door. Ahead of us was a wide corkscrew staircase that gracefully wound up to the first floor, carpeted in cream and lined with photographs of Graham at various social functions. “This way,” Francis said, and as we headed up I glanced at a few of the pictures. Him with a former prime minister. Him at another charity gala, surrounded by four members of the England football team. Him shaking hands with a renowned media mogul.

At the top of the stairs the landing unfurled, leading down to further rooms. Francis took me in through the first door. In front of two huge bay windows was a desk, perched alone with a Mac on top, a small steel bin at its feet, and a leather office chair so comically huge it looked like it belonged to a Bond villain. Apart from a smaller, less impressive chair for visitors to sit on, the rest of the room was empty: literally no other furniture, just plain magnolia walls and a carpet in the same color.

“Please, take a seat.” I sat and retrieved my notebook while she
walked around the desk and sank into the chair. “So, you're some kind of . . . detective?”

I smiled. “Some kind of one.”

“You're
not
a detective?”

“I'm a missing persons investigator. I find people.” I got out a business card and slid it across the desk to her. “At the moment I'm doing some work for the Ling family.”

She nodded again.

“Does that name ring any bells with you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You remember the family?”

“Well, I never knew them personally, but I obviously knew about their disappearance. The police came up here after they went missing because one of our staff claimed to have seen them near the house. I managed to put the investigating team in touch with Mr. Graham—he was in New York at the time—and I think everyone came to the conclusion that it was a case of mistaken identity. Why, has something changed?”

“No. Nothing's changed.”

She seemed confused. “Okay.”

I held up a hand. “There's no mystery, I promise. This is kind of a favor to the family. I just need to check all this sort of stuff off the list to make sure I'm up to speed on what the police did after the Lings vanished. Then I can do the opposite.” I smiled again, and this time she responded, smiling herself and gesturing for me to continue. “So, maybe you can start by just giving me a brief overview of the setup here?”

“The setup?”

“You run the house for Mr. Graham while he's away?”

“The house, the grounds, his interests in the local community. He still has great affection for the area, as you can probably imagine, and likes to get involved in local issues when he returns to Farnmoor. He has PAs in each of his offices who deal directly with regional issues; I deal with the
really
regional issues.” She smiled. “I enjoy it.”

“How many people are employed at the house on a full-time basis?”

“Full time? Just me. I'm here five days a week, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Those are my official hours anyway. Sometimes Mr. Graham needs me in earlier, or needs me to stay later; it'll depend on what his diary is looking like, and what his plans are when he's back in
the country. I do late nights and weekends on an ad hoc basis too, if we've got something like this charity gala going on.”

“So, some days you're here on your own?”

“No. Never on my own. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we have a cleaning team in. Tuesdays and Thursdays it's the gardeners. Other people come and go too.” She realized I wanted to know who. “Oh, you know: delivery men, that sort of thing.”

“So, what can you tell me about Mr. Graham's gardener, Ray Muire?”

“Ray.” A softer expression filled her face, as if Ray was someone she liked a lot. “Ray was an old family friend of Mr. Graham. They went to school together. When Mr. Graham started Empyrean in 1967—right here in Dartmouth—Ray made the furniture for his office. Mr. Graham reckons Ray was one of the cleverest guys he'd ever met, in any line of work—you should see the furniture he made. There's a set of bookshelves downstairs that Mr. Graham commissioned for his sixtieth birthday. They're exquisite. Anyway, Ray was never the type to slow down, so even after he'd officially retired he used to come back and mow Mr. Graham's lawns once a week. That's why the police referred to him as a ‘gardener,' I think. But he was never a gardener. Not really.”

“So is he around today?”

“No.” A flicker of sadness told me what was coming next. “Ray died in February. He was only sixty-seven. The same age as Mr. Graham.”

“How did he die?”

“He'd been out for a drink in Totnes, and on his way home . . . well, he lost his footing and fell into the river. He was washed away. Police found him the next day.”

“He was drunk?”

She seemed a little embarrassed to admit it, as if she were betraying Ray Muire's memory. “Yes,” she said finally. “Police said he was three times over the legal limit.”

“Was he a big drinker normally?”

Another pause. “Yes. I suppose he was.”

“How did Mr. Graham take Ray's death?”

“Not well, as you can probably imagine. He paid for the funeral, made sure Ray's wife didn't have to contribute, and then took two days off to fly back from Tokyo to attend. If you know Mr. Graham, you'll know that's pretty unusual.” She shifted forward in her seat and dropped her voice to a whisper. “But he made it back for Ray Muire.”

“Ray was partially sighted, right?”

“Right. That was another reason police reckoned he'd strayed too close to the water's edge—and, to be honest, one of the reasons why he had to scale back some of his responsibilities here. We couldn't in all good conscience have him rewiring plugs or fixing our plumbing when he was losing his eyesight. But mowing the lawn was fine—he just pushed it across the grass and then left one of the younger men to do all the edging.”

She smiled again.

This was all getting a bit cozy and contemplative so I backed out and pushed on. “How did you first find out about what Ray supposedly saw here—did he tell you he thought he saw Paul and Carrie Ling himself, or did he go directly to the police?”

“The first we heard about it was when the police turned up here.”

“I wonder why Ray didn't speak to you himself?”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He seems to have been well liked here, felt at home here, was good friends with Mr. Graham—I'm just wondering why he didn't go to you directly.”

“Mr. Graham was out of the country at the time.”

“But you were here, right?”

She paused, looking like I'd accused her of something terrible, but the question seemed like a pretty obvious place to go: Graham wasn't around, she was the only full-time member of staff here, and presumably everyone at Farnmoor knew that. She was, for all intents and purposes, the only point of contact while the boss was out.

“I don't know,” she said.

“You don't know why he went to the police first?”

“No.”

“He hadn't fallen out with Mr. Graham?”

She frowned. “No. Absolutely not.”

I retraced my steps back through the conversation, to when I'd first mentioned Muire to her. I could tell immediately that she'd liked him, so I had to assume the feeling was mutual. “Do you think he might have been embarrassed about saying something to you? As if, by doing so, he was accusing you—and, indirectly, Mr. Graham—of being involved in something you shouldn't have?”

She seemed to give it some thought, her eyes off in a space across my
shoulder, nails of her right hand drumming out a rhythm on the desk. Finally, her lips flattened and she started shaking her head. “I don't know. Maybe. I think the only person who would be able to answer that is Ray. I'm guessing the police still have his statement to hand?”

“Yeah, I'm guessing they will.”

The printouts from the case file were in the process of being sent to me, so without looking at Muire's witness statement myself, I could only really go on Task's impressions. Rambling and incoherent was how he'd described Muire's interview, at least toward the end, and—based on how Katie Francis had painted him, as a lovable, infirm drunk—it wasn't hard to see why.

“Where was it Ray Muire claimed to have seen Paul and Carrie Ling?”

She got up from her desk, went to the window and gestured for me to join her. Through the glass there were a series of fields, one after the other, like a patchwork quilt; each was fenced and gradually dropped down toward a sheer cliff face. “The tenth field along is where Mr. Graham's land stops,” she said. “See the barn?” She was referring to a big, empty corrugated steel outbuilding in the third field. “Ray said he saw them—with someone else, if I remember correctly—just in front of that.”

“That's, what, a quarter of a mile away?”

“Probably a touch more.” She pointed to something else: a narrow path running along the bottom of the fields, parallel to the cliff edge. “That's the public right of way,” she said. Wire mesh fencing protected walkers from going over the side. “It goes way beyond the Farnmoor boundaries, but anyone can pick up the path just outside the main gates and follow it down. They can't get
inside
here without coming through the gates first, but anyone can come around the boundary and follow the path.”

I nodded. “What would be the chances of speaking to Mr. Graham directly?”

Given his relatively low profile, I wasn't expecting the response to be positive. Instead, she nodded. “I can certainly see what I can do.”

“I'm happy to chat with him over video conference.”

“Ah, well, that's just the thing,” she said, leaning toward the computer and clicking on something. “He's back in the country tomorrow for this charity gala. If I ask him nicely, he might be prepared to set aside some time before the guests arrive.”

“That would be great.”

“The only thing is, as you can imagine, Mr. Graham is in demand—so if I give you a call late tomorrow afternoon telling you he's got a gap in his diary, you're going to have to drop everything and drive like a maniac to get here.”

I smiled. “I'm pretty certain I can do both of those things.”