by Andrew Lowe
A skinny detective pivoted his chair at the sound of Sawyer’s voice. He took off his wire-frame glasses and cleaned the lenses with the hem of his shirt. ‘Are you authorised to be here?’
Sawyer unlocked his office door. ‘I am, DC Moran.’ He nodded towards Keating’s empty office. ‘Dad said it was okay.’
Inside, he made a show of fussing with his desk drawers, and took the micro listening device out of his pocket. He checked it was live and held it steady in the groove of his palm.
As he left his office, Moran was outside, waiting. ‘So, if I call DCI Keating, he’ll confirm that you’ve been authorised to be present on police premises, despite being suspended?’
Sawyer locked his office and turned to face Moran. ‘At the moment, I’m not sure DCI Keating would have a lot of time for a suspended officer retrieving a personal item from his office.’
He moved off, towards the window at the back of the room. Moran overtook him and turned the case whiteboard to face the wall. As he struggled to balance the legs of the board, Sawyer fixed the listening device to the magnetic frame underneath Moran’s desk.
‘Don’t worry, Moran. I’m not here to snoop.’ He leaned around the corner: another pretence. ‘Just seeing if Bloom was in.’ Sawyer turned and retraced his steps to the lift; Moran escorted him all the way, and stood nearby as he waited for the car to arrive.
Sawyer stared at the lift doors. ‘This could be a career-limiting moment, Moran. I might get off this accusation.’
Moran smiled. ‘And you’re going to have me directing traffic, right? Just doing my job. Upholding the law. Sticking to the rules. Someone has to.’
‘If you haven’t already, I would get a rural observation point on me, if I were you. Not easy in this weather. Not much tree cover. You’re the man for the job, though. There’s a lot of sneaking around, lurking in the shadows. It plays to your strengths.’
‘Seems to me that’s been your main skill since you got back here, Sawyer.’ He scoffed. ‘Sorry. Sir.’
Sawyer turned. ‘Questions. Good stuff for the CPS, this, so maybe make some notes. If I’d planned to kill the man who was convicted of murdering my mother, why would I go to such little effort to conceal the fact that I’d been spending time with him? And what gives Keating the idea that I believe he did it? I’ve told him the opposite.’
Moran shrugged. ‘Hiding in plain sight. Classic tactic.’
‘There’s a clear paper trail of the investigation work I’ve been doing with Klein. Witnesses, who can testify that we were following a specific line of enquiry that would lead us to the person who murdered my mother.’
Moran inched forward. ‘Gypos, yeah. A bunch of Irish freeloaders whose lifestyle is outside the law. They always play well in court.’
The lift doors opened. Sawyer wedged his foot inside. ‘Moran. You’re a decent detective. Park your animosity for a second. You must see there would be no sense in me doing this. Somebody didn’t like me getting close to the truth, and so they hit on a good method to get me out of the picture and off the scent. They weren’t prepared to kill a police officer. But an ex-con…’
Moran dropped his voice; more of a hiss than a whisper. ‘You came back here for some good old-fashioned revenge, Sawyer. You’ve muddied the water with this phantom investigation rubbish. You told anyone who’d listen that you didn’t think Klein was guilty. And you did what you had to do.’
Sawyer crossed town to The Source coffee shop. He ordered a cheese toastie and gazed out at the early evening procession of cars, rumbling through the slush down Terrace Road.
It was 4:30pm. He nursed the food and grazed on a few phone games. The briefing would be on the next hour.
At 5pm, he slotted in his noise-cancelling headphones and navigated to the phone app that controlled the device. He activated the listening option and adjusted the volume.
His heart jolted; the sound was pure and unmuddied, as if he had been sitting at the desk next to Moran. Scraping chairs, murmuring.
‘Any evidence of sexual assault?’ DC Myers.
He’d missed the start. They must have convened as soon as Keating had returned.
‘Nothing obvious.’ The plummy voice of Sally O’Callaghan, the MIT unit’s principal SOCO. ‘She seems well fed and otherwise pretty healthy. No obvious injuries. We won’t know for sure about sexual assault until we can… Drummond won’t be able to make a full examination until the body has defrosted. It’ll take a few days. Until then, no cause or time of death, no DNA, no toxicology.’
‘Can’t he do it any faster?’ DC Walker.
‘He could. But then the outside of the body would decompose, while the inner organs stayed frozen. We might lose evidence.’
‘So, she was just left out in the cold?’ Myers. ‘Her captor got bored with her, but couldn’t face killing her?’
‘Well…’ Sally again. ‘My best guess is that she froze to death. But it’s impossible to paint a clearer picture until the body has been fully thawed. There was a little light bruising around one ankle, but no other external anomalies.’
‘And it’s definitely Holly?’ Keating.
‘A hundred per cent.’ Sally sighed.
‘No tracks? Trace evidence?’
‘Weather has killed all that.’
Sawyer took out his burner phone and texted Walker.
Maybe she escaped? Not dumped?
‘Why would her body be left out there?’ Myers.
‘We can safely assume the body wasn’t left close to where she was being held.’ Moran. ‘That eliminates some location.’
‘The bruising around the ankle.’ Walker. ‘Could it be from some kind of restraint? And she broke free of it?’
‘No telling when, though.’ Keating. ‘We need to wait for Drummond. See if there’s DNA.’
Walker cut in. ‘We should do house to house, in a catchment area around the deposition scene.’
A snort from Moran. ‘He wouldn’t just leave her on his doorstep.’
Walker continued. ‘Maybe he didn’t leave her. Assuming we’re dealing with a he. Maybe Holly escaped.’
A moment’s silence, broken by Keating. ‘Drummond has got to be our next step. We have the body, but we can’t move until we know more about how she died.’
31
‘Dad came to see you?’
Michael Sawyer flicked his eyes up to his brother, and aimed them back down at the screen of his handheld console. Michael’s en suite room at the Rosemary House care centre had the look of a well-worn Travelodge: single bed with pastel sheets; boxy, wall-mounted TV; cheap kettle with a single cup. In contrast to his brother, Michael was burly, with greying buzz-cut hair and an uneven beard. His eyes were a similar shade of green, but without the sparkle of Sawyer’s. He wore a violet winter hoodie, and chewed on one of the white drawstrings as he played his game.
Sawyer sat in the high-backed chair, facing Michael on the bed. ‘Is the therapist decent? Any help?’
Michael ignored him, kept his focus on the game.
Sawyer pulled the chair closer. ‘I know this is hard. But I need to know if you saw what I saw. I need to know that my brain isn’t just making this shit up. Telling me stories.’ He leaned forward. ‘I’ve got a name. William Caldwell. Anything? Did you hear Mum use that name? Do you recognise it?’
Michael gave a short shake of his head.
Sawyer reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out the tactical pen, and the piece of paper with the sketch he’d made on the day before his arrest. He opened the paper out and laid it on the bed next to Michael, alongside the pen. ‘Mike. I saw this man in a dream. Please could you pause your game and take a look?’
Michael sighed. The chirping from the handheld fell silent and he hauled his vast head to the side and looked down at Sawyer’s sketch: heavy eyebrows; deep set eyes with dark irises; black moustache with lighter pencil strokes representing the dabs of grey hair.
Sawyer shifted closer. ‘Do you recognise him?
Is there anything you can add to this?’ Michael picked up the sketch and studied it. ‘Mike. Was this man there on the day? Was this the face under the balaclava when Mum pulled it away?’
Michael lowered the paper and looked across to the closed door, sifting through his splintered memories.
Sawyer reached out to him and rested a hand on his knee. ‘He also had a big watch. Maybe designer.’
Michael’s shoulders rose and fell with his breathing. The motion became deeper, quicker. He batted Sawyer’s hand away and locked eye contact. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. ‘Couldn’t see.’ His voice was soft and low, close to a whisper.
‘Couldn’t see what, Mike?’
Michael squinted, his eyelids flickering. ‘The sun. On the watch.’
‘Reflecting off the man’s watch?’
Michael nodded. ‘It hurt my eyes.’ He looked back to the handheld screen and restarted his game.
Sawyer tried for more. ‘Do you remember the face? The moustache?’
But Michael angled his body away, towards the wall. Lost again.
32
Sawyer drove back to Edale in a daze. Too many moving parts: the Klein investigation; Caldwell’s disappearance; Dale and Eva. Worst of all: his impotence in the face of the missing children enquiries and murders. The listening device was useful, but how long could he afford to leave it at the station?
At the cottage, he fed Bruce and poured himself a large glass of Coke. He paced at the sofa and took out the burner phone. Call Walker? Shepherd? The meeting with his brother had sapped his will; he needed time to recharge. He tossed the phone onto the sofa and opened the side door to let Bruce slip outside.
His nose twitched. That smell again. Tobacco. Scorched, exotic. Was it fresher than before? He stepped outside, walked round to the front porch, and looked along the lane towards Hayfield village. It was a cold but calm evening: midnight blue beneath a gauzy moon.
He slipped back inside, switched on the PlayStation and opened his favourite 2D shoot ’em up: Bullet Symphony. A relentless onslaught of enemy spaceships, swarming geometries of glowing missiles. Almost, but not quite, impossible to navigate. Blast the enemies, weave through the channels, dart into the pixel-wide gaps. To onlookers, the game was unfathomable, demented. For Sawyer, it was soothing: a mind-clearance technique; a safe space where he could power down and let his primal instinct run the show.
Tonight, though, he was off form. Overreaches, obvious mistakes. He could usually see the paths and patterns, but his timing was behind, his moves clumsy.
Between levels, he pulled back his head, stretching his neck muscles. It was only early evening, but his eyelids prickled and felt leaden. His remaining lives dropped from five to three with no memory of the moments where he had lost them. He had managed to get through the previous winter without catching a cold; was this payback time?
Tea.
He paused the game and rose to his feet. The room lurched, and he gripped the sofa, nudging his leg into the coffee table. The half-full glass of Coke wobbled and he reached down to steady it. But again, his timing was out, and the glass tilted and spilled its contents onto the floor.
A wash of black. Unconsciousness tugging at him. He shook his head, gulped back a deep breath and aimed for the kitchen.
He was suddenly holding an overflowing kettle underneath the tap, with no memory of the journey to the sink.
Then, more water. Splashing from the tap to his hands to his face. He was in the bathroom now, again with no memory of getting there.
He stared at himself in the mirror, holding his eyes wide between thumbs and index fingers. His head throbbed, and his stomach tingled with nausea.
Not tea. Bed.
But then he was in the sitting room again, stumbling towards the side door.
A knocking sound. He switched direction and hobbled towards the front door.
Then, he was on the sofa, lying back, his limbs spent and hollow.
A man with a stubby blond ponytail and black bomber jacket moved around the room. Latex gloves, shoe protectors. He turned off the PlayStation, shifted a few items around, righted the glass. He took the bottle of Coke out of the fridge and slipped it into a mud grey briefcase, humming as he worked. He replaced the Coke with a fresh bottle.
Sawyer was up, with the man pushing his feet into his shoes, and his arms into his jacket. He lashed out, but flailed at air. The man watched his efforts, waiting.
Another wash of black, stronger this time.
And he was gone.
33
Sawyer jerked awake as his head clunked forward into the Mini’s steering wheel, sounding the horn. He was travelling fast, no lights, down an incline.
He pushed himself back into the driver’s seat, clawing back to consciousness. Outside, the world scrolled by.
His stomach lurched at a second of freefall, as the car shunted forward, lost contact with the ground, and reconnected to a steeper incline, pitching him into the wheel again. He dug his thumbs into his eyes, trying to shock himself alert.
The engine whined as the car rolled forward at a terrible angle: so acute that the front wheels would surely catch at any moment, flipping the vehicle into a forward somersault.
He stomped on the brake pedal; the wheels skidded uselessly over the rough ground. He felt for the handbrake in the darkness, and summoned the will to lift it. The wheels skidded again as they locked, and the car spun.
Sawyer was now pushed back in his seat, facing up the incline, rolling backwards.
He grabbed the wheel, but the steering was locked. The car drifted and spun, aiming forward again. The wheels shunted, more fiercely this time, pitching him into another moment of freefall. His legs and body strained against the fastened seatbelt as he dropped.
He flopped forward as the car lurched into a heavy landing, killing the momentum. He held his head up to the window and squinted, cupping his hands around his eyes. He was floating: in a vast lake or reservoir that filled the lower half of a steep-walled basin. Langsett? Ladybower? Too dark to tell.
The engine whined again, and cut out, smothered by the water.
Sawyer sat there for a moment, in stupefied silence. Fragments of memory: the blond man; the videogame; his eyes in the mirror, stark and bloodshot. The sudden peace and silence soothed him, and as the adrenaline spike eased off, he had to fight to stay awake. The exhaustion was profound, deep in his bones. It squeezed at his brain, shutting him down.
Icy water seeped into his shoes, shocking him awake. The footwell was flooding. In the time it took for him to reach down and unclip his seat belt, the car had tilted forward and taken on more water, gushing in through the doors and the gaps in the bodywork. He was sinking.
Sawyer had read somewhere that you should always leave the doors closed in this situation, to keep the car afloat longer. Try to escape through the windows.
He pressed the window switch, but there was no connection, no movement. He felt around the door. No manual rollers.
The water seeped up, covering his knees. The cold ripped through him, and he sucked in a juddering breath. Despite the shock, his head lolled again, desperate for sleep.
The front of the car was almost full: a fibrous soup of murky water. Sawyer scrambled between the seats, into the back end, which was tipped higher and only half submerged. His breaths became laboured; the water was thinning out the oxygen.
He gripped the back and front headrests, clamped his feet together, and kicked at the driver’s side window. But the impact was feeble, dampened by the water’s density.
And then. It came again. The tingling sensation: prickling at the base of his neck, spreading over his shoulders and down into his core. His breathing grew rapid, staccato. He shivered: all-over tremors, unstoppable. His hands trembled. It wasn’t just from the cold; there was something deeper. The same panic he had felt in the cave network during the Crawley case. Dread. Desolation. Something close to how he imagined the sensation of fear.
The front of the car was fully submerged now. In the back seat, only the top half of his body remained above water.
He cried out, fought against the tremors, forced himself to slow his breathing. And still it tugged at him: whatever was in his system, whatever had laid him out. The adrenaline was keeping him in the fight for now, but his strength was waning, and he would soon be lost in the eternal night, claimed by the deep.
He kicked at the window, sloshing his legs through the water. But the impact was too broad to resist the pressure on the glass from outside the car. Lit by only the faintest shimmer of moonlight, he had no way of telling if the car was sinking horizontally or vertically.
Sawyer felt in the inside pocket of his jacket. His wallet was still there, along with the notepad and tactical pen. He dug out the pen and gripped it in his fist, with the titanium tip pointing out. He held his elbow above the water for purchase and stabbed the tip into the edge of the glass, using quick, powerful jabs.
A crack appeared, and he worked at the centre, speeding up the jabs. Fragments of glass spat back at him as water seeped through the crack. He pulled back his elbow and jammed it into the weakened pane.
The window collapsed, caving inward under the weight of the flooding water. Sawyer snatched his head away, drew in a deep breath and held it. He grabbed the edges of the frame and heaved himself through the gap, into the water.
He turned and watched, as the car sank away, out of sight.
He was deeper than he’d imagined, and it was difficult to tell up from down. He swam away from the direction of the car’s descent, thrashing his way through the freezing water, tracking a cluster of rising air bubbles. He had a minute, maybe two, before the exhaustion would shut off his muscles. And after that, a new threat: hypothermia. He had to get out of the water, find shelter, reheat himself.
Sawyer surged up and surfaced. He opened his mouth and held his head back, gorging on the air. He trod water and looked around. The lake was at the base of a steep valley, surrounded by a narrow lip of shoreline.
