‘There’s someone else involved in this?’
Travis nodded. ‘Someone with much more to lose.’ He paused, a flutter in his face, like a shadow shifting. ‘Foley’s crime had the potential to expose this person, to compromise them – perhaps professionally – and so did the night you spent with Foley. We know why Foley killing Louise would be a problem for this person – a murder is a problem for anyone with something to lose – we just have to figure out why you were such a danger as well. We have to figure out if any other women Foley slept with were targeted in the same way as you. I mean, Foley wasn’t married, he had no girlfriend that we know about, so it shouldn’t have mattered who he shared a bed with. But it did. It mattered so much that Lima tried to kill you. So there’s really three questions here. Why does it matter who Daniel Foley slept with? What makes those women dangerous to the person Hain works for? And who is the person he works for?’
Again, there was something in Travis’s face, a kind of residual pain laced to the end of that last question, and this time it was so much like looking at her father, at the expression of grief he’d held in the weeks after Mike died, that Rebekah could read Travis like a book. She leaned across the table slightly, closer to him, and said, ‘Frank, do you know who this person is?’
He looked up at her and a smile twitched at the corner of his lips. ‘Cops I used to work with, they called me the “Sphinx” in interviews because I was so good at not showing emotion. Not any more, I guess.’
‘So you do know who this person is?’
‘I have a suspicion.’
‘Who?’
His face creased into a grimace. ‘Would you mind if I didn’t talk about that for now? I know it’s a deeply unsatisfying answer, but I need to make sure that I’m right before I start throwing accusations around.’ He glanced through the door, into the living room, watching the girls. ‘If I’m right about this, though … well, it’ll break my heart.’
Rebekah tried to work out who Travis might be talking about. Someone he knew? Someone he’d worked with?
Could it be a cop?
Eventually, he pulled his notebook towards him and, turning a couple of pages, slowly began to gather pace again. ‘On Foley’s Facebook page, someone on Bowners’ team found a photograph of him, with some pals, at a restaurant. There’s a guy in the background. They think it might be Hain.’
Travis reached into the breast pocket of his shirt.
It was a printout of a photo. Foley was in the foreground, along with five men and three women. There were even more faces behind them, including one obscured slightly by the darkness of the restaurant.
He’d been circled in red pen.
‘It’s not clear if he’s there with the group,’ Travis said, tapping a finger to the face of the man, ‘or whether he just happened to be in the shot, but he doesn’t seem to be keen on having his photograph taken either way. That would be exactly the type of behaviour you’d expect from a man who uses an alias, even when he thinks he’s alone. Bowners has her team calling all of the people in the picture here to see if any of them can ID Hain.’
‘That definitely looks like him,’ Rebekah said quietly, remembering the man on the island, his face, the feel of his hands on her throat.
‘I think so too,’ said Travis.
The only difference was that both times she’d seen him in the flesh Hain had had a shaved head and no facial hair. In the picture with Foley, he had the beginnings of a beard and a thick mop of hair.
‘I strongly suspect that Foley and Hain knew each other,’ Travis said, ‘otherwise this picture is the most outrageous coincidence in the history of policing. And if we’re to assume that Hain is the type of guy you bring in to clear up a mess, it’s likely he helped Foley make things go away after Louise was murdered. As for you and Johnny, I think it’s a pretty safe bet now to suggest that you were the primary objective. They decided to target Johnny simply because you and he were together on the island that day, and maybe also because he’d been around Louise on the night she was killed, had spoken to her, texted her. He was a link to her. To put it crudely, it was a kind of two-for-one. If Johnny was going to be somewhere remote like Crow Island, and especially if you two were going to be there together, it was too good a chance to turn down. If you hadn’t gone together …’ He stopped.
Things might have turned out differently.
‘You’re saying I got Johnny killed.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘If I hadn’t gone with him –’
‘No,’ Travis said, more forcefully than Rebekah was expecting. ‘None of this is your fault. How could you possibly have known?’ He eyed her, making sure she wasn’t going to break on him, then, very slowly, picked up where he’d left off. ‘Hain is the type of guy who’ll like to plan. He wants things running like clockwork. What happened with Louise was the opposite. And when things get disordered like that, you start to feel the pressure. That’s why he rushed into the Crow Island plan to kill you. It’s why he made that anonymous call to me about Johnny. It’s why I believe he sent that email from Gareth’s account to Stelzik. With no pressure, you can see what desperate ideas those are. With pressure, even smart thinkers like Hain screw up. Whatever his reasons for not being there personally the day Lima tried to kill you, whatever his reasons for not doing it himself, as soon as Lima messed up, Hain was in panic mode.’ His eyes went to the Facebook photo. ‘Sadly, Lima had no known associates with the name “Hain”. Maybe we’ll have more luck with these people.’
From the next room, Kyra began singing ‘I’m The Map’ from Dora, then tried to get a reluctant Roxie to dance with her. Rebekah watched Travis as he gazed at the girls. There was a distance to his expression that Rebekah had never seen before, as if he was recalling something from his past, something that had shaken loose on hearing Kyra. In that moment, Rebekah realized she’d never asked Travis if he had kids of his own, but it seemed impossible that he didn’t. The more she looked at him, the more she recognized the expression flowering on his face: he was caught in a memory, a flicker from history, where his own kids were this age.
‘Are you all right, Frank?’
He snapped out of the moment. ‘I’m good, kiddo.’ He seemed to understand what had sparked the question. ‘It’s just nice listening to them in there, that’s all. Anyway, maybe I should be asking you that question.’
Rebekah shrugged. ‘Johnny might still be here if I’d let him go to that island alone.’
‘You can’t think like that, Rebekah.’
‘I know he’s not alive,’ she said quietly, and forced a smile, sad, painful. ‘I do know that. I accepted it months ago …’
She blinked, didn’t want to break down again.
‘We’ll find Johnny,’ Travis said, pushing his coffee cup aside, reaching across the table so that his hands were almost touching hers. ‘One way or another, I promise we’ll bring your brother home.’