by Steve Mosby
I shook my head.
'I'm surprised you kept them,' Garland said.
'I didn't at first.'
I remembered running off in a blind panic, taking turnings at random. The knife was in my coat pocket; they were both covered in blood anyway, so it didn't matter. Marie. I couldn't get her out of my head. I've let you down so badly. At some point, I found myself near some waste ground, and I stuffed the coat and knife into an old tyre, and so I only had a T-shirt on when I ended up at Sarah's house.
I went back for them the next day. They were upstairs in my house when Detective Kearney called round to make his enquiries. I think that had been another attempt at absolving myself from blame, the same as writing the confession to Sarah. All he'd needed to do was ask to look round. I'd have said yes, and it would all have been over. But he never did, and so it wasn't my fault.
Garland had brought a briefcase with him. He laid it on the ground now, opened it, and took out a large see-through zipper-bag. He handed it to me.
'Put them in there. Carefully.'
I did as I was told, then passed it back to him.
He took the letter out of his jacket - the confession - and placed that in the bag with the knife. I wasn't sure how much legal weight the two items carried, but I suspected it would be enough. That was my soul then. As he placed it in the briefcase, I thought: that's what it looks like.
He snapped it shut.
'And this research material?'
The laptop and Sarah's folders: they were still in my bag, on the bottom shelf. I slid it out and handed it to him.
'Thank you, Mr Connor. We're nearly done.'
'Good.'
'This is what will happen next. After I leave, you will wait here for one minute. Then you will go outside, where you'll find your friend waiting for you.'
'I understand.'
'Before that, I want to remind you of the situation. You have two options. The first is that you can go to the police and tell them what you know. They won't believe you. Even if they did, I can promise you they will never, ever find us.' He gestured at the briefcase. 'And in addition, they will receive the evidence in my possession.'
'I understand.'
It wasn't just proof against myself I'd given him. The letter implicated Sarah too, confirming that she'd lied for me. Although, if it came to that, the police were going to have far more difficult questions for her to answer.
'The second option,' Garland said, 'is for you to run.'
He reached inside his jacket again. When he brought it back out, he was holding a passport. He handed it to me.
I took it and checked the back page. Sarah's photo. She had bright red hair in it, just as I remembered. I had no idea whether passports were cancelled automatically, or if people really paid attention when you showed them, but perhaps we could get away with it. Maybe not at an airport, but possibly a ferry. A hundred thousand pounds and our feet on foreign soil. It was a slim chance, but it was something. It was enough to run.
'What happens next is your responsibility,' he said.
'Yes.'
'She's… damaged. So you have to make her understand what's necessary. That might be hard, but she's your responsibility too. Do you understand that?'
'Yes.'
Garland looked at me for a second longer, then picked up the briefcase and the bag and walked past me without another word.
I checked my watch.
One minute.
While I waited, I looked around the garage. There were haphazard boxes of belongings here. Most of them were Marie's. Clothes, books, jewellery. It had been easy to discard my own things, but I'd agonised over the shared possessions, and the items that had been solely hers. Looking around now, I was surprised to find I could remember the contents very clearly.
But that was part of the problem, wasn't it? They were packaged up and stored away out of sight, but whether it's boxes of belongings, or a video clip, or even simply a memory, just because you don't look at something, it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Marie.
I checked my watch again. It was time to leave.
As I headed back out, I took one last glance behind me, and then turned off the lights and locked the door.
Sarah was outside, waiting for me. Just a small girl dressed in black, sitting at one of the benches, huddled up, as though protecting herself against a cold that wasn't to be found in the air. I sat down opposite her, and she looked up at me.
Damaged, I remembered.
She seemed to be half asleep, peering at me through the haze of a dream, but after a moment she smiled. Only slightly, but it was there.
'Alex?' she said.
'Yes.' I tried to smile back. 'It's me.'
And then I reached out and carefully placed my hand over hers.
* * *
Chapter Forty-Eight
Todd Dennis walked down the corridor of the hospital, running his big fingers through his hair, attempting to stem the frustration inside him.
She was probably going to be all right.
That was the main thing. They had found her.
But it wasn't the whole truth. He had been able to see Rebecca Wingate through the meshed window of the prep room. She was nothing more than a thin shape moulded from a bed sheet, with a plastic mask obscuring most of her face, and a fan of lank hair on the small pillow. The doctor beside him explained that her condition was serious, and she was in no position to be spoken to for the time being. They would be operating shortly. She was certain to lose her right arm.
So it wouldn't be true to say they'd found her in time.
You didn't find her at all.
He wanted to slam his hand into the wall.
Todd had moved quickly after Paul's phone call, but not fast enough. And now that it was all over, he kept questioning himself. Could he have got there sooner? Might it have played out differently? He remembered how desperate Kearney had sounded, and he wasn't sure there was anything he could have done. Because Paul would always have got there first. And he would never have waited.
But he still had no idea what had made Paul so certain about Hammond, or what had happened in the time leading up to both of their deaths. Which meant there must be something he had missed. Something he would never know that he could have done.
He couldn't think about that now. Not yet.
Todd stopped at a drinks machine and bought himself a coffee. When it emerged, he stared at it in disgust. The cup was tiny, and made of beige plastic so thin that it burnt the tips of his fingers. He blew on it gently as he walked.
A minute later, he stopped outside a small consultation room just down from the main reception.
Simon, he reminded himself; that was the man's name.
While Kearney had spent the last week talking to him each morning, Todd had always been careful to avoid him. He didn't fancy it much now either but, with Paul gone, it felt like that particular baton had been passed.
'Simon.' Todd closed the door behind him, and did his best to smile. 'How are you doing?'
Simon Wingate was perched on the single bed at the side of the narrow room, the black of his suit contrasting against the pale green bedclothes and the white paper sheet rolled out along the bed. He was clutching the edge, his knuckles hard and white, and staring at the small trolley across from him. When he looked up now, Todd didn't think he'd ever seen a man look so exhausted and eaten away. Not even Kearney. But there was also a kind of light inside him. A sense of validation, perhaps. He looked like he'd been outside in the freezing cold for a very long time, waiting patiently for a warmth that nobody else had believed would ever come.
'How is she?' Wingate said.
'You've not seen her yet?'
'Through the window. And they told me…'
He trailed off. Todd nodded as sympathetically as he could manage. That was something Paul had never understood when he sat down with people like Simon Wingate. There was nothing you could really say. Even in the rare moments l
ike this, all you could offer was the meagre comfort that, as bad as things might seem, they had beaten the odds and come out incredibly lucky.
'But she's alive, Simon,' he said. 'Don't lose sight of that.'
'I know.'
'You must have feared the worst.'
Wingate frowned. Then shook his head.
'No,' he said. 'He promised me you'd find her.'
It took Todd a second to realise that Wingate was talking about Paul. He said nothing.
'Where is he?' Wingate asked. 'Detective Kearney, I mean?'
Todd felt himself grow blank. Not now, he reminded himself.
'You haven't heard what happened?'
'No. I'd like to thank him.'
His first instinct was to dodge the question. For one thing, it was too early to be sure exactly what had taken place in Arthur Hammond's basement; for another, the conversation would be out of place. What stopped him was the knowledge that Kearney, if he'd still been alive, would be sitting down beside this man now. And, rightly or wrongly, he'd be telling him the truth.
Todd leaned against the opposite wall.
'I'm not sure what to say.'
In the end, he told Simon Wingate what they knew, and a little of what they suspected. About Thomas Wells and Roger Timms, and their motivations for abducting the girls, and about Arthur Hammond, who had been involved with the pair on some level. Rebecca had been found at his house. In addition, they had found the remains of what appeared to be another victim. He didn't say that the body had been gathered up and crammed in a sports bag, like a handful of litter.
Detective Paul Kearney had learned of Hammond's involvement and confronted him at the property. In the course of what followed, it appeared that Hammond had shot Kearney and then turned the gun on himself.
As he explained that, Todd found himself wondering about
Paul's final moments in Hammond's underground gallery. The last six months had seen Kearney desperately searching for something. The events unfolding from that compulsion had ultimately led Paul to Arthur Hammond's house; they had saved Rebecca's life. Todd hoped that, before he died, Paul had at least had the opportunity to know what he'd done. That he'd kept his promise.
He didn't tell Simon Wingate any of that, though, just as he didn't explain that Kearney had no longer been a police officer. If Paul hadn't quite redeemed himself by his actions - if there was even such a thing as that - then he'd at least earned the right for this man to remember him well.
So he just told him what was important. Rebecca Wingate was alive. And that was because Paul Kearney had looked for and found her.
* * *
Chapter Forty-Nine
Every so often, my thoughts return to that early memory I have of my brother, the one in which James is red-faced and shouting, losing control of himself and throwing the cushion at our mother.
And I remember this:
I am three or four years old, and I'm crying as hard as, at that point, I imagine I ever will. After James storms out of the room and slams his door, my mother puts her arm around me and holds me tight for a moment. Then she gives me one extra squeeze and goes upstairs to my brother's bedroom. She talks to him, so softly I can't make out the words, but I can hear that he's crying, and perhaps she is too.
She doesn't leave me alone for long, but it's long enough to notice that I am alone, and that I shouldn't be. The emptiness downstairs feels heavy.
There is something missing.
After a time, I sit down on the living room floor and then pick up some toys and start clacking them together. One of them is a red Lego car, and I remember, for a second, being outside in the driveway. A familiar man was in the car in the driveway, and I was standing on the doorstep. James was by the car beside the man, and he was sobbing, holding onto the door by its open window. My mother was trying to pull James back, but it wasn't working.
I clack the toys together curiously.
The man took James's fingers calmly off the door and then the window came up. And I remember the car reversing. There was a screech, I think, but I'm not sure where that came from: whether it was from the car, or from something else.
Something makes me put the toys away again: back in the wooden box as I've been taught. And then I go and clamber up onto the settee and curl up. A few minutes pass before I notice the emptiness for a second time. There is something missing, but I'm not quite sure what it is. I do know that I'm terribly upset with James for losing his temper and throwing the cushion, so perhaps that's what it is.
I decide I don't want to play with the red car again, although
I don't frame it to myself in exactly those terms. In the end, don't think it ever gets thrown away, but it sinks to the bottom of the wooden box through lack of use. And there are always enough things on top for me not to see.
When I met Sarah outside the storage unit, she was dazed and forgetful, and not quite sure what had taken place, as though she had just woken from a long dream, and was unable to remember where or when she fell asleep. She spoke very little. As we left that afternoon, she simply followed me, determined to keep close by my side. In terms of our travel plans, she asked me where we were going, but not why.
It was a full two days later, when we were in Venice, before she first mentioned James.
We had been walking for most of the afternoon, nowhere in particular, just losing ourselves amongst the crowds, and found ourselves pausing on a flat stone bridge. The canal snaked off in front of us. The water down there looked dark and meaty, pressed between the buildings on either side. A small boat was moored there, bobbing slowly on its leash and nosing the water. Further up, the canal expanded out into something sunlit and blinding, although it wasn't immediately clear how you might reach it. We just leaned on the stone side of the bridge and listened to the lap of the water.
And then Sarah said, 'I miss him.'
I turned sideways to look at her. She was staring at the water in the distance, a few strands of jet-black hair wavering in front of her. Her expression was tight and pained, like someone wincing against a strong, icy wind.
'I know,' I said.
'What happened, Alex?'
'You don't remember?'
She shook her head, but I wasn't sure whether she was saying yes or no. I thought about it.
I understood a lot of what had happened, but not everything. And I wanted to. I wanted to know what Sarah and James's plan had been. It was clear a kind of madness had overtaken them and that, sealed in the house together, their mutual need and support had built up layer upon layer of foundations for what they did. But I wasn't sure how they'd ever expected it to be resolved: what they thought would happen afterwards.
I did wonder if, somewhere back at the house, there was another letter, one that they'd written together and hidden somewhere - at the bottom of a box, for example - which I hadn't looked hard enough to find. One that perhaps explained it all and, just in case anything happened to Sarah, laid bare her own responsibilities for the events of the past few weeks. And I wondered if at some point in the future she would feel compelled to return, either to destroy it for ever or to confront the truth of what was written there: to face the evidence of the terrible ripples that death had cast.
For the moment, though, I thought she needed something else.
I turned back, and flicked a small stone off the side of the bridge.
'You were investigating an organisation,' I said.
'Yes. I remember that.'
'And you got too close to them.' I thought about it, then said, 'They abducted you, and they killed James. They held you captive for a few days, the whole time trying to work out how much you knew about them.'
She didn't say anything.
'And in the end,' I said, 'it was OK. I came to find you, and they decided to let us both go.'
I looked back at her.
'But it means we can never go home.'
She nodded, and then began to cry softly at that. After a moment, I put my
arm around her. It wasn't quite right, and I knew it wouldn't always be enough, but what I'd just said was something. It was the bare bones of a story I could keep telling her, fleshing it out as we went, until it was written indelibly over the real narrative and the parts that were missing no longer showed through.
And every word of it was the truth. The best place to hide something black is always in the darkness.
In the week following our arrival, I kept checking the international papers for coverage of what had happened. Sarah's disappearance continued to make the news, but the space accorded to it gradually decreased. James's death was reported, and Mike and Julie's was, although the press did not connect the two stories. But with no real developments to go on in either case, the media began to lose interest.
The focus remained on Rebecca Wingate.
I learned that she had been found in Arthur Hammond's mansion, following his suicide. She remained in a critical but stable condition, and was expected to recover. One paper carried a few brief comments from her husband, who paid tribute to the efforts of Detective Paul Kearney in finding his wife, and expressed sadness at his death.
I read all the coverage carefully, attempting to keep myself calm. It was believed that Kearney had been shot by Hammond, only seconds before the businessman took his own life, and the papers were calling Kearney a hero: a policeman murdered during the course of active duty.
There was only one report that differed from that stance, implying that he'd been suspended and was under investigation over unspecified allegations at the time of his death. But no explanation was given, and that side of the story was dropped the following day. It fitted with what I remembered, from meeting him that day in the cafe, but even if it was true I thought the overall tone of the coverage was right. Whatever he was under investigation for, when someone dies they deserve to be remembered for the best thing they did, not the worst.
The police also uncovered a number of other incriminating items from Hammond's house, including several illegal videos, and they confirmed that his fingerprint matched that of one recovered from the victims of Thomas Wells and Roger Timms.
