by Andrew Lowe
He pushed up onto the bottom step and started to climb, not looking back.
71
FOUR WEEKS LATER
Maggie Spark spooned two lumps of white sugar into Sawyer’s mug. He lifted his eyes from their table in the centre of the Nut Tree.
Maggie paused. ‘What?’
‘You went for the white. Not the brown.’
She stirred the tea. ‘There’s no such thing as wholemeal sugar.’
He gave a weak smile, and dropped his eyes to the table again. ‘How’s Mia doing?’
Maggie sighed. ‘Fewer nightmares. Still jumpy in public places. She’s been writing to Joshua, the boy.’
Sawyer looked up. ‘Writing?’
‘Well, WhatsApping. Snapchatting. She wants to go and visit, but… I don’t know.’
‘I’ll come and see you once it’s settled, talk to her. I’m good with ex-abductees.’ He daubed a hunk of jam over his teacake. ‘My father left me the house in Midhope. It’s too far out for me, though. I’m selling it to a rental agency. He had a decent estate, too. Half to me, half to Michael, with a percentage ringfenced for his speech therapy.’
‘How was the funeral?’
‘Low key. Tried to get him in with my mum but couldn’t make it work with the church. He’s up at another place in Sheffield, near to his old family home.’ Sawyer used light caresses of his knife to spread the jam out to the edges of the teacake. ‘Michael came. Some of Dad’s family, a few colleagues, one or two arty types. It was like a weird dream. I wasn’t really aware of much.’
She nodded, watching him. ‘What about the dogs? Are you keeping them?’
‘Couldn’t do it. Not fair on Bruce. I took them to the Manchester Dog Trust centre. The handler sent me some pics last week. They went to a decent-looking family near Bury. Big house. I insisted they stay together.’
Maggie sat back. ‘How about you?’
He shrugged. ‘What about me?’
‘Your defences are up.’
‘Can you blame me?’ He crunched into the teacake.
‘Are you still seeing Alex?’
Sawyer nodded. ‘Haven’t been for a while. Appointment this afternoon.’
‘You should take a holiday, Jake. Get away. Winter sun.’
He laughed. ‘Canaries are nice this time of year.’
‘I’m serious. Recharge. Get a bit of distance.’
‘Maybe. I need to get back to work. Now I’m official again.’
She sipped at a herbal tea. ‘Will you be involved in the case against Caldwell?’
‘Don’t think so. Guilty plea. The CCRC overturned Klein’s conviction for my mother’s murder. Caldwell pled guilty, but they’re making it watertight in case he gets obstructive over my father’s actions.’
Maggie dunked the teabag, pondering. She leaned forward and kept her voice low. ‘Mia told me what happened, during the raid on the Briggs place.’ Sawyer raised his eyebrows. ‘She said that Joshua attacked the woman, the mother, and she had to fend him off, along with the other girl. And she said that someone in a mask came in, before the police, and handcuffed the mother.’
Sawyer shrugged. ‘Special ops?’
She nodded. ‘Mia’s very sharp. Observant. She said this man had green eyes.’
‘Lots of people have green eyes.’
‘And that he sounded a bit like you.’
He angled his head. ‘Lots of people sound like me.’
Maggie smiled. ‘I liked the piece in The Mirror. The ‘hero cop’ who hunted down his mother’s killer. Dean Logan must have been paid well for that. National exposure.’
He took a slurp of tea. ‘I thought I might as well tell the story myself.’
‘Have you sold the film rights?’
He laughed. ‘I think it’s more of a BBC thriller. Mini-series. Sunday evenings.’
‘You might find things more difficult, now you’re a celebrity.’
‘Hardly a “celebrity”.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll retreat to Lanzarote for a couple of weeks. If that doesn’t work, I can always fake my own death.’
She reached over, rested a hand on his. ‘I prefer you alive.’
72
Alex Goldman hobbled into the consulting room and flopped down in the mauve armchair, groaning and rubbing at her thigh. Sawyer tore his eyes away from the waterfall photograph. ‘You okay?’
She winced. ‘Just age. Time.’ She looked up and straightened out her beige roll-neck. ‘Or, to put it another way… Varicose veins. I’m not even seventy, Jake.’
‘Is that only a seventy-plus condition, then?’
She poured the tea. ‘Well, I thought it was somewhere around there, yes. I have to wear compression stockings for a few months.’ She looked up, smiled. ‘Anyway, I’ll get an early night, since it’s the shortest day.’
‘Winter solstice. It gives me a rare sense of optimism.’
‘Darkest before dawn, eh?’
‘I like the feeling that it can’t get any worse now. Can’t get any darker.’
Alex handed Sawyer a cup of tea, with two Bourbon biscuits wedged into the saucer. ‘Do you believe that?’
He scoffed. ‘I’m working on it. The Stoics would say that there’s no such thing as good or bad events. Dark or light. It’s all about how you choose to respond. That’s all you can control.’
‘Events. Plenty of those in the last few weeks for you. Is this a change of outlook? Moving forward with a sense of hope? Optimism?’
Sawyer snapped one of the biscuits in two. ‘I wouldn’t go that far. Hope isn’t necessarily a good thing. Optimism is unrealistic. I’m trying to scale everything down to the moment in hand, then build out from there. Have you seen the film La Haine?’ She shook her head. ‘French. Disaffected youth, police brutality in the Parisian suburbs. It opens with the lead character telling a story about a guy who falls off a skyscraper.’ Sawyer munched on the biscuit. ‘As he passes each floor, he keeps telling himself, “So far, so good”.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out the Memento Mori medallion. ‘My father gave me this.’ He handed it to her.
Alex turned the medallion round in her fingers, read the inscription. ‘You could leave life right now.’
‘My father couldn’t let go of the past, and live life in the present. In the end, his desire for revenge destroyed him.’
Alex handed back the medallion. ‘In the recording we made, reliving the day of your mother’s murder, you said that she told you to run, to not look back. Are you familiar with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice?’
He nodded. ‘Vaguely.’
Alex leaned forward. ‘Eurydice was Orpheus’s love, and when she died he was so stricken with grief, he travelled to the underworld to bring her back. He charmed the god of the underworld, Hades, who said he could reclaim Eurydice, but only if he didn’t look at her on the way back to the overworld.’
Sawyer smiled. ‘And Eurydice followed Orpheus out of the underworld, but she was behind him, and he couldn’t resist looking back to check she was there. And so she was sent back to the underworld.’
‘Yes. You see something similar in the Bible, where Lot’s wife was told not to look back as she escaped the destruction of the city of Sodom. But she did, and was turned into a pillar of salt.’
Sawyer dunked the other half of the biscuit. ‘I get it. Move forward. Don’t live in the past. You can’t go back, you can’t change things there.’
‘No, of course. But we have to push on with the reliving therapy. You lost two things on the day your mother was murdered. Your childhood innocence, and your mother herself, your protector. Try to see the therapy as going down into the underworld, to retrieve the pain of all that loss, and turn it into an adult memory. Something you can process and live with.’
‘There’s still unfinished business, from the past.’
‘I know. You need to revisit the brain scans, look into the possibility that your issues with fear are physiological, not psychological.’ She took a sip of tea. ‘And
you have to help your brother to get better. But, yes. Focus on moving forward, away from the pain that sits behind you. You can’t retrieve your mother from the afterlife, but the reliving will help you to reframe her memory, and see her as a huge influence that you carry around with you. You can use that influence to build your own growth.’
Sawyer looked back up at the waterfall, suspended in time. ‘Sounds like hard work.’
He left Alex’s, and drove back up to Buxton, to Enterprise Rentals. Howard shook his hand and led him through to a desk near the entrance to the parking garage. They signed off the Corsa’s return, and Sawyer completed the paperwork for a new orange-and-black Mini Convertible.
Howard handed over the keys and took a folder out of his top drawer. ‘What would you say if I tried you on the extended cover again?’
‘You mean as in, “I told you so”?’
‘Obviously, I don’t know what happened to the old vehicle. None of my business. But I don’t get the feeling it was planned.’
Sawyer smiled at his cheek. ‘I’ll be more careful this time.’
He parked up outside Tideswell Church, in the shadow of the fourteenth-century ‘cathedral of the Peak’. He took out the polaroid of his mother, smiling at the garden gate. For the first time in years, he felt a twinge of distance, as if the scene had lost some of its weight.
He held the photo up to the window. The image was fading, growing less distinct; the light that defined its outlines whiting out, draining away. It was not his mother; it was just her image. Just one moment in her brief, beautiful, complex time; a random capture of something unrepeatable, immutable. His mother was in bad shape in the present day, but she was eternally bright and alive, there by the gate on that morning. He slotted the photograph back into his wallet: a chunk of the past that had at last broken off and begun to drift away.
Sawyer trudged between the low stone pillars and stood at his mother’s gravesite. He set down a bunch of white lilies and stared at the gravestone: a custom commission he’d installed to replace the previous dour default. A rose-white oblong headstone, with plain black capital lettering and a quote from his favourite poet, Philip Larkin.
JESSICA MARY SAWYER
1954-1988
WHAT WILL SURVIVE OF US IS LOVE
73
‘I’m pressing the button. To tackle. It’s not doing what I tell it to do.’
Sawyer held up the PlayStation controller and demonstrated by tapping his thumb against the X-button.
Luka sat back on the sofa and smiled. ‘That’s the pressure control. It’s to contain the player with the ball. If you want to stop them going forward, you have to press the O-button.’
Sawyer shook his head. ‘I’m doing that, as well.’
‘Your timing is bad, then.’ Luka turned back to the screen. ‘Like real-life football. You have to judge the best time to try and take the ball.’
Eva poked her head around the sitting room door. ‘Luka. Upstairs now. Too late for this.’
On cue, the final whistle blew on their game of FIFA. Luka sprang to his feet and strode to the door.
Sawyer slumped. ‘I lost to the controls.’
Luka smiled. ‘Like you said, nothing good is easy. Keep practising.’ He slipped through the door and charged up the stairs.
‘I’ll be up in ten minutes,’ Eva called after him and joined Sawyer on the sofa. She was dressed for home: yellow-and-black hoodie, faded blue jeans, her long black hair loose. She set down a tumbler of Coke on the coffee table and draped her legs over Sawyer’s knees, sipping from a glass of red wine. ‘He’s better. Good report from the counsellor. Teachers are happier.’
Sawyer powered off the PlayStation and took a slug of Coke. ‘Dale?’
‘Hasn’t been around.’
‘Probably explains why Luka is brighter.’
‘I guess so. Spoke to him on the phone the other day. There’s an investigation into what went wrong with the raid on his club. The guy who was killed.’
‘Shaun.’
‘Yeah. He’s accusing the police. Says it was all botched and they shot him. There’s an inquiry or something.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘The operation will be reviewed internally. Chain of command. Orders given. Shots fired. It’ll take time. And a parallel investigation into what happened to Shaun.’
‘Will he be charged?’
‘I doubt it. They’ll look into ballistics. I’d guess that Shaun was killed with a sidearm similar to the ones issued to police.’
Eva frowned. ‘Really? You think that Dale had someone kill Shaun so he can accuse the police of doing it?’
He nodded. ‘A lot depends on how closely they can match the bullet to the actual murder weapon. They’ll need a suspect gun to fire and make a match. It can be as accurate as fingerprints. If they can connect it to Dale, he’ll be in a bad place.’
Eva gazed into the blank TV screen and sipped her wine. ‘And how about you, Jake? What kind of a place are you in?’
‘In what sense?’
‘After what happened with your dad.’
He sloshed the Coke around the glass. ‘Now all the admin has calmed down, it’s beginning to sink in. He did so much for me and my brother. I have to help Mike more, now we’re the only ones left.’
Eva leaned forward, rested a hand on his wrist. ‘It’s what your dad would want.’
He glanced at her. ‘I know. He told me that himself.’
She set down her drink and took out her phone. ‘Let me show you something. You’ll like this.’
‘Is it the meme of the guy getting run over by the ice-cream van?’
She looked up. ‘What?’
He shook his head. ‘You’ve taken off your wedding ring.’
Eva ignored him. She turned her phone horizontally. ‘Dale did an interview for a local Manchester current affairs show. He was billed as an ex-con who had “turned his life around”.’
She played a video. The footage showed Dale talking to an off-camera interviewer. He had scrubbed up: good suit; new, heavy-framed glasses.
‘…we have a chronic drugs problem in this country, and it’s too simplistic to tackle it by declaring a “war on drugs”. That hasn’t worked in the US, and it won’t work here. It just drives the problem underground and brings more drugs into the system. We need to see it as more than just a crime. It’s a social issue. The dealers, the kids, they’re not being groomed by gang bosses. They’ve already been groomed, by society, austerity measures, denied opportunities…’ The interviewer tried to comment, but Dale waved a hand and continued. ‘Jason, some of these kids can earn up to five hundred quid a week. It’s a social problem and we have to tackle the root causes at the highest level. It has to be overseen by someone who understands the system from both sides.’
Sawyer sat back, waved the phone away. ‘Jesus Christ. He’s going to run for Manchester mayor next year, isn’t he?’
‘He’s mentioned that before, yes.’
‘That can’t happen.’
Eva edged towards him on the sofa. He caught her perfume: rich, sensual.
‘I have someone on the inside who might be able to help stop him. He’s also got the problem of the enquiry.’
Eva ran her hand over Sawyer’s arm, up onto his shoulder. She leaned in and kissed him. ‘Let me get things settled with Luka. Then we are going to stop talking shop and start enjoying our evening.’
She got up and walked out. Sawyer listened to her footsteps fade as she climbed the stairs.
He took out his phone and browsed the BBC News app. The lead national story caught his eye.
NOTTINGHAM MURDER: WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN PARK
The body of a missing West Bridgford woman has been found in woodland at Wollaton Park in Nottingham. Laura Bertrand, 34, was reported missing after she did not turn up for work on Monday.
He closed the app, took another sip of Coke, and launched a basic mobile game where he moved a cannon left and right to shoot bouncing balls that divided
as they were destroyed. He settled himself, focusing on the game, blasting his virtual enemies, resisting the urge to re-open the news app.
In the street outside the house, a silver Ford Fiesta pulled up on the corner and idled for a few seconds. A large male figure, dressed in black, climbed out of the driver’s side and walked across the road, towards Eva’s house. He crouched at the back of Sawyer’s new orange-and-black Mini, and attached something to the inside of the rear wheel guard. He stood up, walked back to his car, and drove away.
BOOK FOUR IN THE DI JAKE SAWYER SERIES
Returning to duty after an enforced psychological break, DI Jake Sawyer is called in to investigate the murder of a young woman found near one of the Peak District’s key beauty spots.
Sawyer is intrigued by the unusual mix of extreme violence and decorative presentation, and when the death is connected to the earlier killings of three other local women, he joins a task force of regional detectives in a hunt for the man the media are calling The New Ripper.
As the UK sweats in a record-breaking heatwave, a fifth woman goes missing, and the killer contacts the police, personally challenging Sawyer to catch him before he claims her as his next victim.
https://books2read.com/prayforrain
Acknowledgments
I couldn’t have completed these books without the help of Detective Constable Ralph King, who consulted on UK police procedure and kept me honest with some of the more heightened elements of Sawyer’s predicament.
Thanks to the remarkable Bessel van der Kolk for his encyclopaedic book on trauma, The Body Keeps The Score; Bryony Sutherland for peerless editing and creative steerage; and Stuart Bache at Books Covered for beautiful design.
Special thanks to Julia, for listening to me go on about it all.
