7

 

Stuck in his office, disoriented, Eric stared at the door without really seeing it. Miriam’s words had hurt him in a way he wouldn’t think possible. It was even worse than eleven months ago, when in a hospital bed, awakening from a surgery where he’d risked his life, he’d been accused of having lied to her for over twenty years. At that time, he hadn’t felt like blaming her. He knew her well. He knew that finding out he might be her father would upset her; for this reason and for fear that such a revelation would negatively affect their relationship, he’d avoided sharing his doubts with her. And therefore, he’d complied with her wish to stay away from him for the following months. She was an impulsive, emotional, proud woman. But now, after hoping for more than a day that their problems were about to be smoothed over, he’d been caught unprepared. And she’d taken advantage of it to be pitiless, as if she really wished to hurt him.

He should’ve been furious, and he was in a way, because he’d taken care of her since she’d been ten, because he’d always been there for her, and now Miriam seemed having forgotten about it or was not considering it so important, but only a duty.

And after all, she was right. The sense of duty caused by that doubt had driven him to take his role as godfather seriously and to try to be a father to her. But only at the beginning. It’d taken no time for him to love her beyond any blood tie, even beyond the fact she was the daughter of a woman he’d loved more than himself. Despite the physical resemblance that had grown more evident every day, and the one related to some aspects of her character, Miriam was a different person, a better person. There had never been any wickedness in her excesses, nor dishonesty in her actions. For this reason, Eric felt he deserved her disapproval, although he didn’t quite comprehend it.

Yes, for over twenty years he’d been blaming himself for the death of Madeleine and Jean-Michel, but he’d paid enough for that guilt, allowing his regret to tarnish his life. That was enough now. He was no longer willing to accept being accused of having killed them.

But the rest was a different story. The thought that Miriam might’ve been an unhappy child before her parents’ death had never crossed his mind. In spite of his cowardice, he’d really been convinced he should make her life easier by stepping aside to avoid altering the harmony of her family. He could still remember her the day of her baptism. She’d been sleeping through the whole ceremony, in her mother’s arms. She was so small and helpless. She deserved a normal family.

What if that had really been his mistake?

He should’ve come between them to find out the truth. If it had come out that he was her father, he would’ve had his say in Miriam’s life since the beginning, and might’ve helped make it better. Otherwise, her mother might’ve loved her.

But at that time, he couldn’t have imagined the consequences of his silence. And now it was too late.

No. He refused to believe that. Perhaps now Miriam was upset by the circumstances, but over time she would forgive him. The fact that she’d let it out and had confessed to him the reason for her resentment, as much as it’d hurt him to be accused like that, was a positive thing. It had to be.

Oh God, how he wished that someone would tell him he was right.

He regretted he’d sent Adele home. All he needed now was her reassurances. She would’ve known the right thing to say to make him feel better. Actually, her presence alone would’ve sufficed.

In moments like this, he realised how Adele had become an essential component of his life. It wasn’t only she who needed him. And the more he realised the importance of their relationship, the more he had to deal with the fact that it was destined to evolve. It was already evolving, whether he wanted it or not. It was no longer the strange relationship between a man who was over fifty years old and a thirty-year-old woman, between a boss and his young subordinate, between a mentor and his pupil, between a policeman and a murderer. Now they were two people who’d started to walk a stretch of life together, who’d made a tacit commitment. Where would that take them? What did Adele expect from him? And what did he want from her?

He sighed and was surprised to find himself smiling at that thought, while realising he still was in his office, even if he had no idea how long he’d been there. He could barely remember walking along the corridor between the meeting room and that room, closing the door, sitting down. It was like he’d been watching from a remote place someone else carrying out those automatic gestures.

He touched the mouse, and the computer screen lit up, allowing him to read the time. It’d only been half an hour since Miriam had left.

He was worried about her, but also about what she would find out. Her theory about Megan was plausible. But he feared she was trying to cut him out of that phase of the investigation.

He would not allow her to. He would not just wait in the lab. Even though she’d enforced her authority as a detective from a Murder Investigation Team to keep him away from her and had used their disagreements as a weapon to prevent him from following her, Eric couldn’t really stop taking an interest in the evolution of the case. Even if it was late, even if he was tired. He had to be kept in the loop about the events of that day.

His gaze fell on his mobile phone, which was on his desk in front of him, in the same place where he’d left it on his return from Belvedere Road, where Tammy Ellis had been hit by a tourist bus. After turning on the screen, he touched the contacts icon. He scrolled the list to Miriam’s name. He almost touched it, but then stopped his finger.

He shook his head. She wouldn’t answer. He scrolled back to Mills.

The sound of footsteps beyond the door distracted him. Through the opaque panel, he could see a human shape walking in front of his office.

Who else was there?

Almost relieved by the appearance of a distraction, which had prevented him from making a call he didn’t feel entirely convinced he wanted to, he managed to tear himself away from his chair and reached the door. As he opened it and looked out, he surprised Stern, who was walking down the corridor.

The young forensic investigator flinched and turned. ‘Boss!’ He looked guilty.

Lately Eric had rarely caught him with that expression, but it wasn’t the first time he noticed it today. ‘What are you still doing here? I thought you’d already left.’

Stern stiffened, and the folder he was carrying crackled as he tightened his grip on it. ‘Er, well …’

‘You left the screen and the notebook on in the meeting room.’ After already catching him in evident distress, Eric couldn’t help but succumb to the temptation to scold him. He’d been missing that little pleasure.

‘Oh!’ Stern widened his eyes, but instead of becoming even more distressed, he seemed to regain control. ‘Silly me! I’m sorry, boss. It’s been a chaotic day.’ And then he smiled.

Unintentionally, Eric had given him the time to compose himself and perhaps figure out a good pretext for his presence at that late hour. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He waved his hand. ‘In the end, it came in handy. But you didn’t answer my question.’

‘Well, I was out to take care of … something personal of my own.’ Stern’s eyes darted to the folder in his hand, but then returned to him. ‘Only something you said during the meeting kept playing on my mind, and now it’s occurred to me why.’ A new excitement shook off any trace of embarrassment from his face. ‘Come.’ He beckoned Eric to follow him, and without waiting for his boss’s reaction, he resumed walking.

Pleasantly irked by Stern’s authoritarian attitude, Eric followed him to the IT laboratory.

Once having stepped in, Eric found him in front of his computer, which was on. So it hadn’t been switched off either, and that supported the theory that the young forensic investigator hadn’t left at all, or at any rate had already intended to return to the department that evening.

Eric couldn’t help but notice once again the white folder that had been put on the far corner of the desk, on the side opposite to the one where there was another chair, as if Stern wanted to be sure he didn’t come too close to it.

‘Earlier you said Tammy Ellis mentioned “a dream”, right?’

Stern’s voice drew Eric’s attention to the screen, where there was a window with the interface of an application. It looked like a social network, although he couldn’t recognise its logo. But at a closer look, he realised it was something slightly different. ‘What is that, some kind of forum?’

‘Yes! We’re in an app on her tablet.’ Stern’s hand released the mouse for a moment to point at the device, which was still connected to the computer via a USB cable. ‘It’s a Pro-Ana and Pro-Mia community.’

‘Huh?’ Now Eric noticed that the logo was nothing but the two letters A and M intertwined.

‘Ana stands for anorexia and Mia for—’

‘Bulimia,’ he completed. Now he understood. ‘Oh God.’

Stern sighed. ‘It’s a virtual place where people discuss how to eat as few calories as possible or how to consume them, how to make yourself vomit, the best laxatives on the market, and the like.’

Eric was hit by a feeling of nausea while reading the statistics displayed on the screen: over three hundred users currently online, almost two thousand active topics.

The screen changed and was replaced by the page of a user called TammyE. The avatar was a photograph of one of those ghostly-looking models.

‘This is her account,’ Stern explained, moving the pointer on the window. ‘Before I logged in today, she hadn’t for about ten months. But here …’ He clicked on “Friends”, making the screen change again. ‘Here are all her contacts. As you can see, they aren’t many.’

The nicknames list included a few dozen users. Eric’s eyes were immediately attracted to SkinnyNora. He reached out to point at it. ‘Nora Sharp?’

Stern nodded. ‘This app doesn’t have a very safe encryption system. I could extract all the email addresses and passwords quite easily. From this SkinnyNora’s profile, I could find out she’d created it by using Facebook authentication. And yes, it’s connected to Nora Sharp’s Facebook account.’

‘So, in addition to being neighbours and visiting the same psychologist, they used the same app.’

It was an additional connection between the two of them, but it wasn’t easy at all to establish what order they’d been created in. Perhaps it didn’t really matter; anyway, it was another direction in which the investigation could be addressed. So far, they’d thought about something that linked the victims in real life, a real place, not a virtual place.

‘Maybe Emma Taylor is on this list, too,’ Eric suggested. He could barely stay still behind his younger colleague.

‘There’s no Emma or similar name, not on this list.’

Eric stepped aside and reached out for the backrest of the other chair. He moved it closer to Stern and sat down. ‘In which one, then?’

‘Perhaps in this user’s.’ The pointer stopped, and Stern turned to look at him. ‘You said that Tammy Ellis before dying, when you asked her the name of the killer, said, “It’s a dream.”’

‘A dream,’ Eric repeated, while his gaze lingered on the nickname showed by the pointer: aDream. ‘It was the answer to my question.’

Stern clicked on aDream and opened its profile, whose avatar was the stylised image of a doctor. Unlike in Tammy’s, there wasn’t more personal information, but it included over one hundred friends and the number of replies to topics exceeded one thousand. ‘I bet that, if I check among these users, I’ll find one whose account is connected to Emma Taylor’s on Facebook.’

‘It’s the killer …’ Eric drew his chair closer, making the castors roll. ‘It must be them.’ He turned his eyes to Stern, who was staring at him like waiting for his orders. ‘You said the app’s encryption system doesn’t hold water. Can you trace the IP address?’

Stern nodded, stirring all his body. ‘aDream isn’t connected right now.’ He turned his full attention to the computer again. In a second, he opened a window with an unintelligible code and offered Eric a knowing smile. ‘But I bet the server saved at least the IP address from the last login.’

 

 

The lights from the lamp posts ran beside her; the brake lights from the car ahead turned on, together with the left signal, but Miriam observed the night already fallen on London vacantly, her mind still recalling the terrible words she’d spoken with the specific intent of wounding Eric in the hope that hurting him would soothe her pain.

It hadn’t worked.

She’d been so out of her mind when she reached Mills in the car park that she’d let him drive. And now her partner cast hesitant glances at her from time to time. He’d tried to ask her whether she was fine, but she’d just replied by waving her hand to prevent him from continuing that conversation.

She wasn’t fine at all. She felt like she’d just reached the bottom of the depths where she’d been sucked since June of last year, when she’d discovered that she and Eric shared the same rare blood type, and that there was a real chance he was her father. Discomfort and anger had grown inside her until they’d exploded, pouring out on the only person she could still blame for the troubled childhood she’d lived. But she’d taken it out on the only person who’d been there for her during the rest of her life.

She’d justified her attitude by telling herself he’d done that only to atone for the death of her parents and not because he really cared about her. She’d wanted to interpret Eric’s mild insistence on getting close to her again in the last months as disinterest.

How could she even have thought that?

Now she hated herself for the suffering she’d seen in his eyes as she, unable to exert the slightest control over herself, had rubbed it in him, in a vain attempt to ease her own pain.

The ringer of her mobile phone woke her from that trance-like state, allowing her to recognise the typical buildings in the neighbourhood where Megan lived, and thanks to them to remember the reason why she was there, which was more urgent than her personal problems. She took her phone from her pocket while the car pulled over and came to a halt.

The screen was occupied by the call notification, including a photograph of the caller: Eric.

‘Not now,’ she whispered, and tapped the red icon.

She got out of the car and started walking on the concrete. The milky and impalpable mist thickening the air was revealed by the opaque cones generated by the street lights. Miriam shivered as she felt it make way through her clothes and skin, and her bones, as she heard another familiar ringtone behind her, followed by Mills’s voice saying his name.

‘Miriam!’

Reluctantly, she turned.

Mills was walking towards her on the street, around the car parked in front of theirs. ‘He wants to talk to you. He says it’s important. It’s about the case.’ There was no need for him to specify who he was referring to.

She saw him stopping in front of her, handing her his phone, right under one of those spotlights aiming at that desolate tarmac stage.

Miriam stepped off the pavement and accepted the device. ‘What’s the matter now?’ she exclaimed into the microphone rudely. Her pride had prevented her from doing otherwise.

‘Please, listen to me.’ Eric’s controlled voice exuded a seriousness that silenced any possible complaint from her. ‘Through Tammy’s tablet, we’ve just found the connection between the victims. They joined a community followed by people with eating disorders, and together with them, there’s a user whose nickname is aDream.’

Miriam’s breath stopped in her throat for a moment. ‘A dream, like Tammy said …’

‘Yes, but that’s not all. Stern traced the IP address of this user. It’s been inactive for about three months, but the last access goes straight to a private medical practice in South Kensington.’

That detail resurfaced a notion to her mind that she felt was connected to the place she was in, while her eyes focused on the vehicle parked by the kerb, right beside her. It was a silver saloon car. But the bonnet was dented, as if something had ended up on it. The left headlight was cracked.

‘The owners of the practice include William Reynolds.’

Miriam stepped onto the pavement again and walked back so that she could see the left side of the saloon car. There was a long scrape on it, and the wing mirror was partly detached and hanging ‘Will …’

‘Don’t do anything. Wait till I get there with the backup.’

Miriam’s hand holding her phone lowered while Eric’s voice became distant. She turned to the opposite side. She looked at Mills, and then ahead along the street she made out the façade of the house belonging to Megan Rogers and her partner, William Reynolds.

She remembered what his face looked like yesterday evening. He’d seemed stressed to her. A few hours earlier, he’d told her he’d been at the hospital for an emergency, and then he’d switched off his phone. He’d been unreachable the whole time Nora Sharp was going to the Savoy, where she would inject a lethal dose of morphine. Where had he been on Sunday morning? And today in the afternoon?

The few times she’d heard from Megan in the last months, her friend had always told her Will was buried in work. He stayed at the hospital longer than needed. As a joke, she’d even said she suspected he was having an affair.

Miriam turned to the car again. Meanwhile, Mills had come over and was looking closely at the vehicle. When he raised his head, their gazes met.

It was Will’s car. She herself had got in it once. How did it get that damage? Where was it that morning while Phillips was being hit in Woodford?

‘Mon Dieu,’ she murmured, placing her free hand on her mouth.

Megan had lived with him for years. Will was the person who’d fixed that bad scar on her belly caused by the infected wound from the surgery by the Plastic Surgeon and worsened by the one she’d undergone to stop the bleeding due to her efforts to break free. Will was considered a luminary in reconstructive surgery. He didn’t do surgeries whose purpose was purely aesthetic, but he was a plastic surgeon all the same. He didn’t work in the university hospital where Robert Graham had been engaged in specialised practice, but he often took part in especially complicated surgeries in hospitals other than his. They might be acquainted.

He was the accomplice. Or perhaps even the instigator?

For all that time Megan had been living with, and had trusted, the accomplice of the man who’d kidnapped and would’ve killed her? A serial killer?

And what was happening in that house right now?

No, Miriam couldn’t wait for backup.

She went over to Mills and put his phone in his hand. ‘I can’t wait.’

‘What?’

She ignored his question and walked back to the police car. She opened the driver’s door and unlocked the boot.

‘What are you up to?’ Mills was following her like a shadow. ‘Speak to me, Miriam.’

She reached the back of the car. ‘Megan is in danger now.’ She took off her jacket and put it on the edge of the boot, then grabbed a bulletproof vest and threw it to her partner, who caught it. ‘If you intend to come with me, I suggest that you put it on.’

‘No, no, that’s not a good idea. Let’s wait for the backup.’ He was trying to use an authoritarian tone with her, but was wasting his breath.

Miriam had just donned her bulletproof vest and was putting her jacket on over it. There was still a chance to pretend she didn’t know anything and had come there only to pay Megan a visit. The timing was a bit unusual, but it was the only chance to avoid the situation being aggravated. Had the backup come with sirens blaring, Will would’ve understood and might freak out.

She recalled in her mind his face from less than twenty-four hours ago. He wasn’t a stressed surgeon. He was a serial murderer on the edge of a breaking point.

She drew her gun and, while heading for the house, buttoned out the magazine to check it was full, then rammed it back. She put her gun back in its holster. Her arm, now stretched along her body, would take less than a second to rise and allow her hand to grab her weapon and aim it.

She stopped before the steps leading to the front door. The windows overlooking the street were lit up.

An increasingly closer sound of feet hitting the concrete preceded the arrival of Mills beside her.

Looking at him, she recognised the focused expression on his face. ‘I’ll go first. You follow close,’ she said, noticing he’d donned a bulletproof vest too. She had to prevent someone else from seeing that detail right away. ‘If Megan opens the door, I’m going to take her out so that we can wait for the backup. I have no intention of playing the heroine.’

‘And if he opens it, I’ll intervene and we’ll arrest him, without giving him time to react.’ Mills nodded. ‘All clear.’

Miriam resumed looking ahead and took a deep breath, then she started to walk up the stairs. As she reached the top of it, she raised a hand with the intention of ringing the doorbell when her attention was attracted by the thin strip of light separating the shutter from the jamb.

She placed her hand on the door and pushed it gently, moving it further away from the frame. She opened her mouth with the intention of calling Megan, but she held back.

She pulled out her gun.

Behind her, a light rustling caused by the same gesture preceded Mills’s footsteps. She didn’t hear any other sounds that usually complemented his walking. He must have removed any keys and other noisy objects from his pockets, as always when they prepared for an arrest, but she could still recognise his gait, his characteristic way of dragging the soles of his shoes on the floor.

Miriam gave a decisive push to the door, then put her left hand back on her weapon, which she now aimed in front of her.

The door panel opened slowly and stopped before reaching the wall in the vestibule, but close enough to make the presence of a person behind it impossible.

All the lights were on.

As she stepped over the threshold, Miriam looked up towards the top of the flight of stairs. The light was on upstairs, too. From there she could catch sight of the closest door; it was open. That was the room that Megan used to take refuge in to study. The next one, if she remembered correctly, was a bathroom, while on the left you could reach the bedroom. Instead the ground floor included a living room, with a window overlooking the street, a loo, and the kitchen.

Miriam moved to the left, gestured Mills to go upstairs and showed him three fingers, indicating how many rooms he would find there.

He nodded and started walking up the stairs, this time placing his feet down without dragging them, silent like a cat.

Imitating his cautious gait, Miriam advanced towards the double door of the living room, skirting the wall. Every fibre of her being was on alert. Immersed in the action, she had full control of each movement of her body. From her position, the right panel, which was completely open, allowed her to see an increasingly bigger portion of the room with every step she took. The chandelier was on, but the standard lamp must be too, because the closest chair cast two shadows.

She leaned forward beyond the jamb; the right side of the living room was empty, except for the furniture. She lunged forward, putting her back against the other jamb and aiming her gun in front of her. The sudden change in perspective revealed that the other door was completely open and there wasn’t a soul in the rest of the room.

She whirled around and resumed looking at the corridor. No noise came from upstairs, a sign that Mills hadn’t encountered anyone yet.

She let out a silent sigh. She took a step forward. Half of the space under the stairs had been turned into a cupboard, big enough to accommodate at least a person, for example a hostage. She grabbed the knob and opened it.

The light over her head hit a vacuum cleaner, two brooms, a bucket, and a wide selection of plastic bottles and cans, whose labels suggested they were regular cleaning products. She closed the shutter and turned her gaze ahead.

Her next target was the loo. She remembered it was long and narrow, because it ran beside the kitchen. Its left wall was shared with another room of a similar size, used as a laundry and only accessible from the back garden. The door, now open, was located on one of the long sides, whereas the furthest short one had a window overlooking the back of the building.

In there, a cold fluorescent lamp lit up the fine ceramic of the tiles.

That house wasn’t very large, but even to an untrained eye it was evident the place was enhanced by expensive furniture and finishes. Reynolds made a lot of money. Miriam had always been convinced that this particular talent of his must have helped to attract a young woman like Megan. As much as she considered her a friend, she wasn’t blind to her habit of evaluating people based on their social or economic status.

Had she not saved Megan’s life three years ago, her friend would’ve probably never favoured her with the slightest consideration.

While a corner of her mind pondered over this, her body lunged into the loo, her weapon ready to fire. Nobody was in there.

She returned to the corridor, and checked again the entrance and the stairs. Nothing.

Then again towards the kitchen, whose door was closed.

She went over, took her left hand off the butt of her gun, and reached out for the handle. She was about to pull it down, but then she realised the door was ajar.

She halted to observe it. The hinges were on the left. The jamb on the same side was distant from the corridor wall, which then continued separating the loo from the kitchen, enough not to allow it to fully open. This left enough room for a person to hide if she entered, and surprise her from behind.

‘Okay,’ she whispered to herself.

With a rapid gesture, she pushed the door open with a hip so that it touched the wall, and burst into the kitchen pointing her gun.

Nobody.

She placed her right foot forward and turned on it, pushing the panel closed with the other.

Nobody behind the door either. There was nobody on the ground floor.

She relaxed her arms’ muscles and tried hard to control her breathing to recover her cool.

The sound of a gunshot reached her through the walls and made her wince.

‘Mills …’

Miriam opened the door again and dashed forward, but her momentum stopped as she noticed a lifted panel on the floor under the stairs. The mat that must have covered it earlier was now moved aside against the understairs storage cupboard. From that opening, she could see the top of a narrow flight of steps going down towards the darkness in a basement that she didn’t know existed.

Was it possible that, as she hesitated in front of the kitchen door and then checked the inside of the room, Will had sneaked out of there and gone upstairs?

‘My God, Mills.’

She resumed running towards the entrance to climb the stairs.

A shadow was caught by the corner of her eye, and her head turned to the living room. Not fast enough.

Will pounced on her, grabbing both her wrists.

The back of Miriam’s head violently hit the edge of a stair, causing a dull thud. Her grip on the gun loosened.

She had to react, now.

She pressed on her feet to counterbalance his push, but Will was taller and stronger than her, and the blow to her head was slowing down her reflexes. Her brain was throbbing in her skull. A warm liquid was running down her hair.

Will stared at her with demonic eyes. He gritted his teeth and slammed the back of her hand against the marble covering another stair.

A rush of electricity ran through her wrist and her arm, paralysing it for a moment. And her gun fell to the floor.

A shout burst out of his mouth as she pulled her and then pushed her face against the opposite wall.

Miriam’s forehead hit a corner of the shelf fixed beside the living room door. And her vision was flooded by a blinding light. Then it went out.

 

 

A notification popped up from the system tray, accompanied by a sound, thus drawing Martin Stern’s gaze to it. Since Detective Shaw had left, the young forensic investigator had fallen victim to the cyclic routine of compulsively checking emails and social networks. At that time, he was supposed to be home for quite a while for some good binge watching, but his evening filled with TV shows, one of the few his girlfriend Danielle allowed him, had definitely fallen through. He couldn’t move from there, for he hadn’t understood whether his boss still needed him, given the way the latter had left the IT lab. And moreover, he’d not yet concluded the thing that was the original reason for him being so late.

He moved the pointer on the notification, breaking the embryo of enthusiasm that had formed in his thoughts. Perhaps he’d found a way to kill time, at least for five minutes.

That application had bombed him with notifications all day long, with matches that had then proved disappointing. Anyway, Martin had let it dig through the public accounts from the main social networks, searching for any photographs taken at Madame Tussauds on Sunday morning. He was running it remotely from a private server of his, but had arranged so that it sent notifications through the copy installed also on the computer he used at work and on his mobile phone. As the hours passed, the frequency of the alerts had reduced until they stopped altogether. But from time to time, something came up, like now.

He clicked. A window overlapped the others and was filled by a fairly dark photograph. It was the umpteenth selfie taken at the waxworks museum. The phone’s flash sufficiently illuminated the two faces in foreground, but the figure in the background seemed to be in the dark, making it unrecognisable, especially since its head had been half cut from the frame. The funny faces of the two girls in the shot, maybe taken by mistake, must have been the reason why the account owner had decided to share it. If Martin went to check the original post on Instagram, he’d probably find it studded with amused comments and complaints from those girls about that joke.

And at any other time he would’ve, but not now, because there was something more interesting in that picture.

First of all, the visible portion of the waxwork gave a glimpse of a long evening gown, like one of those you would expect to find in the so-called party room at Madame Tussauds.

He straightened up in his chair as enthusiasm escaped his control. Of all the pictures found by the application so far, only five had actually been shot in that room.

Moreover on the right side, near the edge, a third person had been captured without them noticing. Unfortunately the face was blurry, but they seemed alone and kept their sweatshirt hood over their head.

How odd. Could they be cold?

He recalled the diagram of the room on the screen, including the position of the waxworks and their photographs. He immediately recognised the gown. It was Helen Mirren’s. According to the layout, a camera was installed on the nearby wall.

He brought up the picture and compared it with the diagram. The mysterious individual had their back to the camera. Did they have their hood up to avoid being caught on film?

He selected the area and zoomed in. The resolution was so poor he found himself looking at a face still deformed by the movement during the shot, just bigger.

He emitted a moan. Another dead end.

He was about to close the viewer when a detail caught his eye. A white wavy line stuck out between the hood and the neck. Another one, fragmented because partially hidden by a fold of the fabric, ran along a similar path by the opposite shoulder. As he moved down into the picture, the two lines joined.

The earbud cables of a mobile phone?

Martin started chewing on the edge of his left forefinger nail while moving the mouse with his right hand to explore the image.

The ghost was wearing a too big drab grey sweatshirt. Due to the low lighting, it was impossible to get an idea of their build. Moreover, the shot angle made it difficult to find a reference that allowed inferring their height. But perhaps the few available details might be enough.

He clicked on the archive icon, and from there he dived into the case’s folder. With a series of rapid manoeuvres, he reached the subfolder where he’d saved the footage from the video surveillance relating to the moment when Emma Taylor had stopped in front of Julia Roberts’s waxwork and walked back to sit down on the chair. He’d already cut a smaller video coming from each camera and including those few seconds. He arranged the video clips on the screen so that he could watch all of them with a single glance, then started them simultaneously.

While Taylor kept walking past Roberts, stopping, and then going to take her seat, Martin examined the rest of every single image.

First, he lingered on the footage taken from behind Mirren. As he’d supposed, there was no trace of the unknown person. In spite of the wide-angle lens, they were so close to the wall that they didn’t get into the shot.

Then he quickly checked the others. Nothing.

They were in a rare spot not covered by the video surveillance. They couldn’t be there by chance.

‘I bet it’s you.’

But now Martin knew what to look for.

He extended the loop by twenty seconds in both directions. Emma Taylor entered the room, passed by most of the figures without even casting a glance at them, walked past Roberts, stopped and went over to take a seat, then sat there, offering smiles. Before the end of that short video, she’d already drawn the attention of two young boys.

Martin checked all the videos again, but still no trace of the suspect.

‘How long have you been waiting for her?’

He moved to the footage where Mirren’s waxwork was visible. The angle didn’t allow seeing the wall under the other camera, but captured the portion of the room beside it in the direction from which the flow of people was coming. Then he played it at normal speed, but backwards. The visitors started walking backwards as they filled the frame.

All at once a group, including three men and a woman, appeared on the right side of the image and, backing off, moved to the left until they disappeared. But at the end of their walk, the four had become five.

Martin paused the image and clicked on normal playback.

Five people entered the frame. Five heads. Halfway across it, one of them left the group and disappeared beyond the upper edge of the image. It was covered by a grey sweatshirt hood.

Bloody hell!

They were smart. They must have found a path that allowed them to jump from a blind spot in the surveillance to another, mingling with the groups of visitors and thereby concealing their face.

He restored the original image coming from the search application, and leant closer to the screen. ‘Who are you?’

That chaos of pixels wouldn’t certainly answer him.

Frustrated, he pushed himself away from the desk with his palms. He sat back in his chair while half turning to the right towards the window. It was dark outside, although he could make out the London Eye’s light through the branches. He let his arms hang along the chair’s sides and tilted his head backwards, emitting a disconsolate sigh.

A face bowed down on him from behind. Martin screamed in fright and sprang to his feet.

Adele’s laugh filled the room. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t help myself!’

‘Are you crazy?’ Martin turned to her, his heart trying to escape from his chest.

Now Adele stared at him with a grin. She had to be in a good mood to play a joke like this. Usually, she wasn’t such a kidder.

To avoid falling to the ground unconscious, Martin dragged the chair towards him and sat down again, making sure not to turn his back on her. He huffed. ‘That’s the thanks I get for all the favours I do you.’ He tried hard to look angry, but that smile made it so difficult.

‘Do you know where Eric is?’ She was pointing with her left thumb over her shoulder towards the door. ‘Light’s on in his office, but he’s not there.’

There she was, straight to the chase. His poor attempt at scolding her had been completely ignored.

‘He was here with me until about twenty minutes ago. We found some trace on Tammy’s tablet that took us to an IP address, and from there to a private medical practice.’

‘What trace?’ Adele took a step forward, turned to the screen, which was still filled by the ghost, then to him again. ‘Whose medical practice?’

‘Of a group of doctors, but our boss was only interested in a William Reynolds, then ran away without a word.’ Martin mimicked the action with a hand gesture. ‘I’ve only heard him discussing with Miriam over the phone … until he was too far for me to hear—’

He was still speaking when Adele goggled. ‘Reynolds?!’

Apparently everybody knew who the hell the bloke was except him.

‘And anyway, speaking of favours again, I’ve been sitting here waiting for you,’ Martin replied, resentfully, raising his voice. ‘It’s ten o’clock.’

He was fed up with everybody using him as they pleased, and then most of the time, when push came to shove, they didn’t keep him in the loop about the developments.

Martin went over to the desk, reaching out for the folder, and took a sealed envelope out of it. This time Adele had asked him a really big favour and had even refused to tell him the origin of the haematic trace on that swab, so that he could have an inkling of the trouble he would’ve got himself into if someone had caught him running a DNA test and then delete the analysis from the biological lab records. Although he’d run it only once, without the necessary repetitions of an official context, he’d been busy with it from early afternoon, considering the idle time and the like. And since then, his coming and going had drawn more than one curious glance.

Why did he always end up doing everything she asked him?

He had to learn to say no, but especially to keep repeating it and not to surrender to her insistence.

A twinkle of surprise appeared Adele’s face. ‘Have you already found a match?’

‘Thanks God I didn’t need to go and compare the genetic profile on the NDNAD! In which case, I wouldn’t have had any chance to cover my tracks.’ He waved the envelope like it was a weapon he wanted to threaten her with. ‘I would never try to get my hands on the logs of the national database. I’m not that crazy.’ He was making an effort to show off the harsher tone he was capable of.

Adele wrenched the envelope from his grasp, slipped a finger under the closure flap, and started tearing it. ‘So, have you already found a match in the profiles of the people involved in the cases?’ Her movement was abrupt, and therefore imprecise.

Watching the way she was struggling with the paper, Martin couldn’t hold back a mocking smile. ‘Yes, with one of the victims.’

The envelope had ended up on the floor, but Adele’s hands hesitated before opening the lab report, while her disappointed gaze turned to him for a moment. ‘Justine Steele.’ It wasn’t a question. Then she stretched out the sheet and checked it.

‘No,’ Martin replied.

 

 

The dial tone repeated until the answerphone picked up the call the minute that the police car driven by PC Patel turned into the street where William Reynolds’s house was located. On the passenger seat, Eric tapped the red icon and put the device in his jacket pocket.

After leaving Scotland Yard, he’d tried to get in touch with Miriam. He hadn’t liked the way their previous call had ended. Usually, she didn’t like to take risks at work, but Eric knew how she felt responsible for Megan and how she was angry with him. She would hardly have been inclined to follow his advice about waiting for backup.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have told her he would come, too. In the past he would’ve considered it an attempt at reassuring her, but given the situation, it could’ve driven her to act impulsively.

The fact that even Mills didn’t answer his calls corroborated Eric’s worry. The sergeant would’ve followed her anywhere, even if he didn’t approve of her decision.

His hope that he might be wrong was shattered when the car he was in drove by another police car parked along the pavement. Eric looked through its window. The street lighting returned him to the sight of an empty compartment.

He turned his gaze forward, towards the building. Reynolds’s front door was about twenty metres ahead. ‘Pull up,’ he said to Patel, and checked the wing mirror on his side. The headlights of the police car carrying the armed backup reflected in it.

They’d crossed the city with the lights and sirens on to get there as quickly as possible, but a few junctions further back, he’d commanded them to turn them off, so as not to announce their arrival.

Cora Patel stopped the vehicle on the zebra crossing, and Eric got out a moment later. Without waiting for the others, he went over to the front of the house. It was quiet. No lights through the windows.

The hurried shuffling of the officers reached him from behind.

‘Maybe they went to check the back,’ Patel suggested. ‘Maybe there’s a garden or a yard.’

‘You saw how houses are here,’ Eric shook his head. ‘If there’s some room on the back, it’s closed by a wall of another house overlooking the parallel street.’ He gestured at the door. ‘This is the only way in.’

They walked up the stairs. He had no other choice. Once in front of the door, he placed his right hand on it and tried to push. It was closed. He stepped back and drew his gun.

One of the two backup officers stepped beside him on the right. Like him, the policeman was wearing a bulletproof vest and aiming his weapon ahead, his arms bent.

Trying hard not to think about what might have happened to Miriam, Eric nodded his head.

The officer rang the doorbell, then banged on the door a few times. Finally, his left hand returned to his gun.

No reaction from the house. No light came from the windows on the left of the front door.

Eric took a deep breath. It was like Gravesend, except it wasn’t a drill, and almost three years had passed since the last time he’d carried out a break-in.

‘Looks like there’s no one at home.’ The officer lowered his weapon.

‘They are here. We must get in.’ Eric looked back. Patel and the other officer were waiting for his orders.

He resumed observing the door, then the window. There were no window bars, but it wasn’t easy to get there. He put his gun back in its holster and leant forward from the railings running along the stairs to the raised floor he was standing in. There was a small gate at the pavement level that gave access to a metal ladder, which in turn led down to a basement door. The little light from the lamp post that managed to reach down there showed crumpled plastic bags in a corner, dead leaves piled up, and everything covered by a layer of slush ending up in a puddle of water.

His eyes went up to the window again. It was less than a metre away from him, and the windowsill was wide enough. He sighed. Then he climbed the railings, leaning against the wall.

There was a noise behind him. ‘Wait. I’ve got you,’ the officer said. Two firm hands grabbed his right leg.

Eric leant forward, reaching out his hands on the edge of the window recess. He glanced down.

Usually in the scenarios in Gravesend, in such a situation, there was something soft where you would fall if you lost your balance. It had never happened to him, he knew he could make it, but this time there was a variation: everything was made slippery by the mist. Although it wasn’t raining, a mist had fallen on the city, condensing on cold surfaces.

He turned to the officer holding his leg. The latter nodded at him. That foot wouldn’t slip. He raised the other from the railings and placed it on the windowsill.

He felt the grip on his right leg loosening a bit, and then tightening again.

Since his gun was on the wrong side for his needs, Eric took his left hand off the window’s edge and pulled out his electric torch from a pocket. He reached out and hit the centre of the right windowpane, which shattered. Large pieces of glass fell inside, in the dark.

‘I’m good.’

The officer let go of him, and Eric placed his other foot on the windowsill too, squatting at the same time. Holding his torch by the strap, he reached his left hand through the frame, now almost completely devoid of any glass. He did the same with his leg, then stayed still, crouched down, listening.

Absolute silence was the house’s answer to his intrusion.

He jumped in and grabbed his torch again. He turned it on. The light beam hit a settee, a table, a few chairs.

His hunting instinct was telling him to go on alone, but his reason prevailed.

He turned around, unlocked the tall window and opened both wings.

Someone had mimicked his Spiderman-like move and was looking through the window. He helped the officer in. Only when the latter landed beside him, did Eric realise it was Patel. She adjusted her cap and drew her gun, offering a resolute glance at him. Then she pulled out her electric torch and started walking, pointing it forward together with her weapon.

Eric followed her across the room. Behind him, he heard the other two men jump in.

The light went on, and for a moment he was blinded by it.

A few steps away from him, Patel stood beside the wall where a plate with two switches was installed. Touching it with her electric torch, which had now assumed the function of an additional weapon, she flicked the other switch on, and the corridor beyond the door lit up.

Eric slipped his wrist through his torch strap and quickly reached the woman. He pointed to her. ‘With me,’ he whispered. He turned to the other two officers, then gestured to them to go to the left.

He dashed through the door to the right, followed by Patel. He heard the other two sneaking behind him to look at the rest of the ground floor. Instead, ahead of him was the front door, and facing the latter a flight of stairs leading to the first floor. He followed them up with his gaze until he was looking straight in front of him.

A red stain stood out on the white edge of one of the steps. It was at eye level.

On instinct, Eric looked down. The floor was clean, but the light brown colour of the parquet flooring was interrupted by a dark object left near the wall on his right: a gun. It was identical to his own.

‘It looks like one of our service weapons,’ he heard Patel say.

Miriam.

Eric’s breath became laborious.

‘All clear here.’ It was one of the backup officers who had spoken.

‘Clear,’ the other repeated.

Beside the gun was a book. Looking up from the floor to find out whence it’d fallen, Eric noticed the shelf. The closest corner was bloodstained.

‘Miriam!’ This time he’d said it aloud.

A loud moan, accompanied by some blows, made him turn his gaze to the ceiling. Those noises were coming right from above his head.

Putting aside all caution, Eric rushed forward and climbed the long flight. Once on the top of it, he ignored the door in front of him and turned to the corridor running parallel to the stairs, delimited by a railing.

The blows and the moans repeated. They were coming from the closed door down the corridor.

He rushed along it letting the other officers, who’d followed him upstairs, check the other rooms.

He kicked the door open, revealing the presence of a man. The latter goggled as his eyes met Eric’s. He was sitting on the floor. A piece of packing tape covered his mouth. More tape was wrapped around his ankles and wrists, with the latter literally stuck to a radiator pipe.

‘Mills,’ Eric murmured, slightly relieved to see him alive and in good health. In another circumstance, he would’ve found the current situation of the sergeant amusing, but now he was worried about more than that. He went over to the officer and, after hunkering in front of him, tore the tape from his mouth with a single sharp movement.

‘Ouch … detective.’

‘Where’s Miriam?’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘My God, Mills!’ Patel entered in haste and knelt down. She immediately started freeing his wrists. ‘What happened to you?’

‘When we arrived, the door was open, and the lights were on.’ Mills was talking to Eric. ‘She wanted to go in anyway. You know what she’s like.’

‘What the fuck happened?!’

‘I really don’t know.’ Mills shook his head again. His wrists were free now, and Patel had turned her efforts on his ankles. He put a hand on the back of his head and grimaced. ‘I checked the other rooms, and there was no one, same here. She was checking downstairs. As I walked in here, I saw the window was open.’ He pointed to it. ‘I perfectly remembered I had seen all of them closed from outside. I thought someone was trying to escape, perhaps by jumping on the roof.’ He helped his colleague remove the last piece of tape. ‘I had just realised it was impossible when someone hit me from behind.’ The corners of his mouths turned down. ‘We shouldn’t have come in. I should’ve dragged her away by force. I’m terribly sorry.’

‘The rest of the house is empty, detective.’

Eric stood up and turned to the origin of the voice. The backup officer who’d helped him climb up stood by the room door, his weapon pointing to the floor. On his right was an open built-in wardrobe.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Mills said. He was standing now. ‘I didn’t think to check in there.’

‘Is this yours?’ Patel crouched down to pick up a gun partly hidden by the curtain on the other side of the window.

Mills put his right hand on his holster. ‘I’m afraid it is.’ Then he raised it to his temple. ‘Come to think of it, I didn’t pass out at the first blow. I moved my finger from the bridge to the trigger and tried to turn around, or I guess I thought to, but I was hit again.’ He turned his eyes to the double bed occupying most of the room.

There was a lamp on one of the two bedside tables, while on the other, which was closer to them, was only a lampshade. The rest of it was on the floor, on the fitted carpet. Its shaft and base were steel. A blunt object, perfect to knock someone out.

Eric could barely keep calm. Miriam wasn’t in there, but Reynolds, although having assaulted Mills, hadn’t killed him, nor had he taken any of their weapons. He’d just tied up the sergeant.

Had he kidnapped Miriam? That blood downstairs had to be hers.

Adele had been right. They were dealing with someone who lacked the courage to kill with his own hands.

But what had happened to Megan?

He heard a sudden commotion coming from outside the room.

‘Someone is opening the front door,’ the third officer shouted from afar.

All rushed to the corridor and down the stairs.

‘Armed police! Don’t move!’

Eric stopped halfway down the stairs.

The front door was open, the key still in the keyhole. ‘What are you doing? What’s happening?’ William Reynolds had been grabbed by one of the backup officers and slammed against the wall. The other was handcuffing him.

Then the former searched him, pausing on one of his jacket pockets, and pulled out a car key and a second set of keys. The man was turned around. His shirt was partly hanging out of his trousers, and there was a red stain and some streaks of the same colour on it.

Eric clenched his jaw and rushed down. He hit the suspect’s chest with his left palm and pushed him against the wall again. He pointed his gun at the man’s face. ‘Where’s Miriam? Where did you take her?’

He could feel Reynolds shivering. His face was pale. Sweaty. ‘Miriam? What about Miriam?’ He moved his head, as if to look for something around him. ‘Megan!’ he called out loud.

‘Answer me!’ Eric yelled at him and pushed the barrel on his brow. ‘What did you do to her?’ He felt someone passing behind him. Then Mills appeared on the right side of his field of vision and stopped near the wall beside the prisoner.

‘N … nothing. I’m coming back home right now … I … don’t know what’s happening …’ Reynolds turned his eyes to Mills, moved them to Eric again, then halfway between the two of them, but down.

Eric followed his gaze to the floor, down the corridor, where the raised edge of a mat revealed a discrepancy in the flooring. ‘What are you looking at?’

Mills was the first one to go there. ‘It looks like a door. To a basement?’ He squatted and pulled a ring handle, thus opening a trapdoor. ‘There’s a staircase.’

‘What’s down there?’ Eric pushed Reynolds again and let his hand slip on the suspect’s neck, but all he got was that the man stood still. He could feel him swallowing.

Eric let him go and grabbed his electric torch. As he switched it on, the light beam hit the surgeon’s face.

‘Ah!’ the latter shouted, turning his head to the other side.

Eric’s thrust towards Mills was stopped by that overreaction. He grabbed Reynolds’s chin, forcing the suspect to turn to him.

His eyes were odd. His pupils were more dilated than the light in the corridor should allow.

‘Scopolamine …’

Reynolds was the umpteenth puppet in someone else’s show.

The real truth reached Eric in a moment and horrified him. The letter M didn’t stand for Megan, but Miriam. Miriam was the next victim.

 

 

Her fingers lost their hold on the glass, and it crashed to the floor, breaking into a thousand pieces. Shards were projected in all directions, and the orange juice flooded the floor.

‘Miriam!’ her mother yelled at her, pushing her away from the disaster. ‘Look what you’ve done!’

But while backing off, her shoe slipped on the wet surface, and Miriam fell on her buttocks. The pain ran through her body, bursting into tears she couldn’t control.

‘You’re so clumsy. Get out of my sight, now!’ Through her weeping, she could barely see her mother’s forefinger pointing towards the door.

Miriam felt someone gently taking her from behind and found herself standing again. As she turned, her father was there.

Bent forward to reach the height of her eyes, he stroked her face. ‘Are you hurt?’

She shook her head. It wasn’t the physical pain that made her cry, rather the distinct feeling she’d failed. Again. She was a total failure.

‘Go change your jeans.’ Jean-Michel smiled at her. ‘There’s orange juice all over you.’ Then he directed her towards the corridor.

‘Why are you tormenting your daughter like this?’ she heard her father say after a few moments. She stopped by her bedroom door, torn between curiosity and dread about how that conversation would continue. ‘You’re a slut.’ This time, he’d used a lower tone.

‘You said it right: my daughter.’

Did he know? Had her mother told him in the end? Or had he always known?

Now that possessive assumed a more important meaning than a ten-year-old girl had been able to grasp.

Madeleine’s voice echoed in her head again until she realised her eyes were open. She was lying on something soft, and wasn’t a little girl anymore.

Miriam stirred. A moan escaped her mouth as a stab of pain exploded in her head.

Her field of vision widened to the bed she was in, covered by a green bedspread. Beyond the edge was a yellow wall, and a window fastened by wooden shutters. A lighter board was placed crosswise, which seemed nailed to them. On both sides, two sheets of a curtain of the same colour as the coverlet were held by as many ribbons.

She heard a cry, but this time it hadn’t been she who emitted it. Her gaze identified its origin in another person who was there with her, sitting on the floor, her back against the wall, her head between her knees, and her hands on it. They were held together by a rope.

Miriam stirred again, causing a squeaking, and the other person raised her head, showing an upset face streaked with tears.

‘Megan …’ Miriam made to sit up, but as she tried to prop herself up on a hand, the other one followed. She looked down. Her wrists were tied too.

All at once, she remembered being assaulted by Reynolds.

She sprang up in a sitting position, and immediately a stab hit her stomach, while the room started whirling around. She turned to the opposite side of the bed to give in to her impulse to vomit.

The violent contraction expelled no more than gastric juice from her stomach, causing her a hint of relief, accompanied by a more intense clarity of mind.

She touched her brow with both hands restrained by the rope, feeling something slimy and rough. As she moved them away, she found out her fingers were smeared with blood. As she shook her head, a sudden pressure on its back replicated in her senses the impact against the edge of a stair.

‘Miriam, are you all right?’

She turned to Megan. ‘Where are we? How did I get here?’

She looked down at her chest. Clotted blood droplets dotted the lower part of her bulletproof vest and the open jacket she was wearing on it. She reached out for her holster, but it was empty.

Yes, she’d been holding her gun when she was assaulted, and it fell. He must have it.

‘Will brought you here.’ Megan’s murmuring was followed by another rush of tears.

Miriam resumed exploring the room with her gaze, in spite of the constant headache and the dizziness hitting her in waves that made it difficult for her to focus on any thought. Although it was quite stark, the place had a pleasant and clean appearance. The wallpaper, which now she noticed was decorated with a floral pattern lighter than its background, was intact. There was no other furniture than the bed, but a large, lighter rectangle on the wall opposite to the window suggested a wardrobe had been there for a long time. Near the corner was an open door, from which a sink was visible. Instead the other one, located in front of her, was closed, certainly locked.

She wasn’t in Reynolds’s house anymore. For a moment she’d thought she’d been locked in the basement, but the size and position of the barred window suggested she was above ground level.

‘Where are we?’ she repeated, resuming looking at her fellow prisoner. The latter had her tousled hair partly pulled back in a ponytail, and her sweater and trousers were marked by long dark streaks, as if she’d been kept for a certain time in a much dirtier place than that room.

Megan shook her head. Her resigned eyes stared at an undefined point on the parquet flooring. ‘I don’t know. When he took me out of the boot of his car, I just saw trees out there, and this house.’ She finally raised her gaze; she had a glazed look in her eyes. ‘It’s a big house. He dragged me in here, on the first floor.’

‘When?’ Another pang of nausea reached Miriam after she’d spoken that single word. She turned to observe where she’d been lying. The pillow was bloodied. It had to come from her head.

‘Many hours ago … in the morning. I don’t know how long I’ve been here.’ Megan pressed her face against her hands. ‘My God, I can’t believe it. Will, all these years …’ Her voice faded and turned into a subdued cry.

‘Megan!’ Miriam called to her. She had to shake her. ‘You have to help me.’ She raised her hands, and her jacket sleeves came down. She bent her neck to check her watch. It was twenty-six minutes past ten. She’d been assaulted about three quarters of an hour ago. She couldn’t be too far from Reynolds’s house; she was still in Greater London, or at least somewhere close to it. ‘Maybe you can untie my hands, then I’ll do yours.’ She stretched out her arms forward. Stricken by a sense of dizziness, she lost balance. She found herself lying on her side again.

‘It’s no use.’ Megan’s eyes peeped out from over her hands. ‘The door is locked. It’s a sturdy one. I’ve been trying to break it down all day.’

‘The two of us can …’ Miriam felt her throat tighten while her nausea returned. Her eyelids had become so heavy.

No! She had to stay awake. She might have a concussion. She had to try her best not to pass out.

While inhaling and exhaling deeply, her thoughts went back to what had happened in that house. She’d made a mistake. She’d seen the trapdoor open and hadn’t considered the obvious: that son of a bitch was nearby waiting for her.

What a fool she’d been!

It’d been only a few seconds since she’d walked down the corridor. She’d checked the loo, then entered the kitchen and closed the door to make sure nobody was behind it. Despite the parquet flooring, it was impossible that someone had walked behind her without being heard. It must have happened in the short span of time when she’d been in the kitchen. Reynolds must have sneaked into the living room.

But … the gunshot?

Mills! What had become of him?

She could’ve sworn she’d heard the sound of a gunshot coming from upstairs. That was why she’d gone straight to the stairs, without checking whether someone else was still on the ground floor.

As she tried to raise her head, the dizziness got the better of her, and she found herself staring at her blood-stained fingers in front of her face.

She was so confused. Maybe she was remembering it wrong?

‘We can’t do anything. You’re sick.’

Miriam winced as she heard Megan’s whiny voice close to her.

Now the other woman was resting her chest on the bed. She should be kneeling. Her tied hands were stretched out, but not enough to reach Miriam. ‘Does someone know you came to my place?’

‘Eric,’ Miriam said, more to herself than to Megan, whilst the pain in her godfather’s, her father’s face materialised in her mind.

She thought she could hear his voice as they’d spoken on Mills’s phone. He’d told her not to do anything. Backup would come; he would come. She hadn’t listened to him. Finding out that the front door was open, she’d decided to put herself and Mills in danger because she’d been worried about Megan.

She turned her gaze to her friend.

How did Megan know she’d gone to her house?

 

 

‘Megan Rogers,’ Graham said, after dragging his chair to the short side of the table and sitting down. Having finally let those two words out of his mouth was a great liberation for him.

He collapsed on the tabletop to avoid DCI Bennet’s gaze.

The latter wasn’t allowed to question him because the prisoner’s lawyer wasn’t there, so he’d just talked to him. He’d told him about the details of the new murders, the fact they’d started as an attempt at emulation, but then they’d changed. The police knew that the new killer was another person. Someone had been playing with Graham. He had no hope of taking advantage of those killings at his appeal trial. Actually, he was conniving at those crimes by refusing to tell the name of his accomplice in 2014. He would get a worse sentence than that at first instance. He would lose the few privileges that had made his life at Belmarsh more bearable as compared to that of the terrorists locked up in there.

At each word said by Bennet, Graham’s thoughts had become more confused. They’d started to revolve around themselves, in tighter and tighter spirals. He’d sensed the truth pushing from the depths of his mind, and eventually he’d allowed it to take control of his voice.

‘I loved Justine, but Megan was obsessed by her.’ He rubbed his hands on his face, looked up, and met the surprised expression of the detective. ‘She was buzzing around her like a bee round a honey pot. Justine would take advantage of her.’ He let out a mocking huff. ‘Justine used everyone. When you were alone with her, she made you feel like the most important person in the world until you gave her what she needed, but then she enjoyed humiliating you in public. She pretended she didn’t know Megan. And with me …’ He paused to breathe. ‘She fancied herself a great actress. She was part of a cultural circle that used to stage comedies from the Victorian period. They were awful. They were pathetic.’ Calmness was slowly invading him. ‘I didn’t say anything about that, to not piss her off.’ He shrugged. ‘Then one day she decided I wasn’t good enough for her. She told me in a café, in front of everyone, loudly. That was the first time I longed to kill her.’

‘And you started stalking her,’ Bennet suggested. The detective seemed to be in a hurry, but now Graham had nothing left to lose. He would take as much time as he needed.

He shook his head. ‘No, I could’ve found a thousand like her. She wasn’t as beautiful as she thought she was, there was considerable room for improvement.’ He sneered. ‘She was the one showing up at my place. She would do anything to seduce me, and as soon as I fell for it, she humiliated me in public.’ He slammed his hand on the table. ‘How long can a man endure something like this, detective?’

‘You tell me.’

‘At one point, I decided to take revenge on her. I would follow her and wait for the right moment to pester her when she was with her friends, those cool kids from a good family she used to hang out with, to whom she’d never introduced me. Oh, how it pissed her off. She also tried to report me to the police, but I was very careful. I never did anything illegal. After all, it was just a game.’ As he rubbed his fingers together, Graham remembered the velvety feel offered by Justine’s skin, her hair brushing his face when she bent over him, the warmth of her body. ‘A few days later, I always ended up finding her on my doorstep. And my bed was just a few steps from there.’ He laughed, more at Bennet’s grim frown than at his poor joke.

‘And what about Megan? When did she join the game?’

‘Oh, she was already part of it, in the shadow. If there was someone stalking Justine, it was Megan Rogers, but she didn’t mind. Actually, she liked having a fan who couldn’t get too close to her. Like she really was a famous actress!’ He laughed louder, sitting back in his chair. ‘Justine considered her harmless.’ He cleared his throat in an attempt to regain composure. ‘Megan approached me when she noticed I’d ended up in the losers’ team. Uh, yes, I shagged her every now and then. She was so fixated on Justine, she imitated her way of speaking, even her laugh. I learned more about my ex from her than from Justine herself. She liked the idea she could benefit from something that had belonged to Justine, like I was a kind of used garment.’

‘So the two of you kidnapped her together?’ Bennet pressed him, distracting him from the anything but unpleasant memories of that period.

‘Yes, but it hadn’t been planned.’ He paused. ‘Well, not by me, at least. I’ve always suspected that Megan had orchestrated our encounter near my place, that she’d managed to draw Justine there somehow. Perhaps she’d sent her a message from my mobile phone without me noticing, and then she’d deleted it. Ah, women are crazy.’ He winked at Bennet, but the detective didn’t react to his attempt at eliciting some hint of approval. Unsatisfied, he sighed. ‘The fact is, that evening Megan was glued to me near my place. It was unusual, because she carefully avoided that in public places. She used to say our affair had to be kept secret. What affair, anyway? She was just a slut I shagged to take the edge off. Anyway, I’d found her in front of me while getting off my car. She’d thrown herself at me, and we were kissing when I heard a camera shutter click.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Justine was there taking pictures of us with her phone, and laughing. She said something like, are you hanging out with the low-life now? She wanted me to believe she didn’t give a fuck, but I could see she was annoyed. For a moment I thought it was the perfect revenge, and I was grateful to Megan for offering me that opportunity, but right after that she reacted. She hurled abuse at Justine, calling her a bitch. Megan wanted her phone, wanted the photos to be deleted. And Justine defended herself, hit Megan in the face with her phone.’ He smiled, thinking back at the show made by the two women fighting and scratching each other for him, in a way. ‘Megan had a cut on her cheek, her face was all bloody. At once, she punched Justine. Whoa!’ He stretched out his hands. He could feel the excitement of that moment again. ‘Justine fell and hit her head on the kerb.’ The rush of pleasure had dissolved. ‘She’d passed out. And Megan told me, let’s take her to my house. Only that wasn’t her house, but I didn’t know that at the time.’

He told Bennet about the basement set up like one of those clinics in horror films. He had no idea where all that stuff came from. He tried to explain to the detective why Megan’s machinations hadn’t frightened him. She’d created all that for him. She’d listened to him all the times he’d lingered on fantasising about the way he could transform any woman he met, to enhance her, to make her closer to his idea of beauty.

But the detective didn’t seem to understand. He didn’t seem to comprehend Graham’s frustration, forced to submit to the will of his teachers, who underestimated him, didn’t allow him to spend enough hours in the operating theatre, prevented him from showing them how good he was. They insisted in saying there was a limit a cosmetic surgeon should never cross, despite their patients’ requests. Were they jealous of him? Oh, yes. Because he was young, he had a bright career ahead of him. He would make tons of money, offering an ephemeral youth to rich cougars and preventing young models from bending to the passing of time.

Instead Megan had understood, had been listening to him, and had decided to help him.

‘I thought she was doing that for me.’ He shook his head while laughing at his own stupidity. ‘Then I understood she just wanted me to practise so that I could improve her. She wanted to become like Justine!’

‘You and Megan kidnapped those women, you operated on them, then the two of you put them on display so that everybody could see how good you were.’ Any word spoken by Bennet was uttered with false indifference.

‘I didn’t kill anyone.’ Actually, Graham hadn’t lied about that. ‘I’m a doctor, after all. I took an oath. I couldn’t harm those women. I just wanted to help them.’

‘So Megan killed them?’

Graham nodded. He could feel tears in his eyes.

He’d let Megan inject an overdose of morphine into Justine’s IV circuit. He loved her, but let her die. He had no choice. Justine had thrown a mirror at him when he’d showed her how she’d become. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. She’d shouted he was a maniac; he would pay for what he’d done to her. Only death would shut her up.

Instead, the other two women had meant nothing to him.

‘Then it was Megan’s turn. Did you feel ready to operate on her?’

‘I already was since the beginning!’ Graham exclaimed. Even that policeman dared to doubt his abilities? ‘But she’d insisted I spent some time practising, because she wanted to see what I was able to do before she underwent those surgeries. I think she was a bit scared.’ He shrugged while wiping his cheeks. ‘I indulged her. Besides, she’d arranged everything, even chosen the women, all of them with the same build as hers, the same as Justine’s too.’

Bennet breathed in deeply as he folded his arms. Who was he kidding? Beneath that patina of ice he was assuming, Graham could glimpse a volcano about to explode. He wished the other man would jump at him, only to have an excuse for smashing the face of that copper, who thought reason was always on his side, who thought himself superior to him. ‘If you were ready, what went wrong?’ the detective asked instead.

Graham’s face stretched out in a smirk. ‘Nothing. It’s only that while I had her under the knife, with nobody looking at me, for a moment I thought of killing her. Justine was dead because she’d come between us.’ He sniffed. ‘I pressed that scalpel a bit too hard … but then I thought better of it. I wasn’t a murderer. I couldn’t have gone on without her. So, I did my best to fix it, but things took a turn for the worse. After the surgery, she developed an infection.’ He started talking faster; he wanted to get to the end as soon as possible. ‘The antibiotics we had weren’t working. I panicked. I tied her to the bed, and I left. I had always used gloves in the basement. It was the only place of what I thought was her house where I had stayed longer. Nobody knew we were acquainted. They would find her dead at home after who knows how many days or weeks. I was sure no one could ever trace it back to me.’

‘But you were wrong.’

Graham broke into a guffaw. ‘That little slut had set me up all right!’ Looking back, he could not help but admire her cunning, although she’d fucked him. ‘Her place, my arse! She’d rented it under my name since the beginning. She even tricked the chap from the estate agency. While listening to her testimony, I almost felt like laughing. I imagined Megan with her anything but graceful voice as she imitated a man’s voice over the phone.’ Pleased, he nodded. ‘She could be credible. Oh, yes. And then the throwaway phone in my locker. Another brilliant move. I’d found it in my car and recognised it as the one she used at home. I thought it’d fallen out of her pocket, but I was on my way to work, and once there I put it in my locker, then I forgot about it.’ He placed his hands on his mouth to emphasise his incredulity. ‘When the police questioned me, I was forced to say I’d found it at the hospital. I couldn’t really tell its real origin. Actually, it gave me the opportunity to corroborate Rice’s theory about me being framed by a colleague of mine. Anyway, I couldn’t say a word about Megan’s role. Not without incriminating myself.’ He leant forward, placing his forearms on the table. ‘But the real masterstroke was my DNA on Justine’s phone. Ah! She must have taken it when she assaulted her. I don’t know how the fuck she managed to get my blood instead. I can’t remember cutting myself in her presence, but for all I know, she could’ve taken some drops of it from my fingertip with a lancet while I was sleeping, one of those nights we used to get drunk together in my flat.’

‘In short, she did everything except the surgeries, set you up, and you’ve never said her name to avoid incriminating yourself.’ Bennet was out of breath. Perhaps he didn’t believe Graham? ‘You could’ve negotiated a plea bargain in exchange for more leniency.’

‘Oh, what the fuck, detective. I was fucked! Complicity in a triple murder. What more leniency? I had to play along. She’d framed me. She could’ve accused me, and nobody would’ve believed me if I’d said she was involved, too. There was no evidence. And then she started sending me those bloody letters. I knew her. I knew she was up to something. I was convinced she’d find a way to confirm Rice’s theory. When I heard that the Plastic Surgeon had reappeared, I thought I would get out of here, that she was finally helping me.’

Bennet stood up. ‘Instead, she’s still playing games with you. To punish you because you almost killed her.’

Another laugh escaped Graham’s mouth. ‘She just kept me at bay as long as she needed to set up someone else. I know her. After all, nothing of all that I told you can be proved. I could have made the whole thing up.’ I pointed behind himself. ‘The surveillance camera didn’t film my mouth, and the sound isn’t recorded in this room reserved for prisoners’ private meeting with their lawyers.’

The fury in Bennet’s eyes was now palpable. Oh, yes, why didn’t he assault him? What was he waiting for?

‘This confession extorted without my lawyer present isn’t worth shit.’

 

 

With his elbows on his thighs, William Reynolds sat on the settee in the living room and covered his face with both hands. He raised his head, slightly shaking it. His pale, sweaty skin was furrowed by livid circles under his eyes. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘What’s the last thing you remember?’ Eric was trying so hard not to stand up and shake him until any shred of his memory, erased by the progressive fading of scopolamine’s effects, was released by his mind.

The doctor sighed. ‘This morning, when I woke up. It was about eight. I did a double shift yesterday, so today I intended to stay home to get some rest. And for Megan.’ He gritted his teeth, curling his lips. ‘She said she was scared of what Miriam had told us yesterday. I can’t believe she did those things. Who the hell is she?’ He turned to Eric, as if the other man could offer him an answer.

The latter placed a hand on his shoulder. Eric knew well the feeling you got when finding out the person you loved had manipulated you and killed people. A sense of relief pervaded him as he compared Adele to Megan. ‘What else do you remember?’

But there was no time for solidarity between men loving a murderer. Reynolds would have enough time to despair and accept the situation later. Now they needed some answers.

The doctor contracted his face, like he was trying to grab an image from the depths of his brain. ‘I think I had breakfast, and then … nothing. Oh my God … I can only remember being in the car, and it was already dark. I was driving, but it was like I was dreaming. But little by little, I realised what I was seeing and hearing was real.’ He waved his hands, then placed them on the top of his head and started moving his torso back and forth. ‘I had no idea where I was. I was in my old Mercedes, the one I gave Megan.’ He stretched out an arm to point to the table, where the car key and remote control were. ‘The GPS antenna hasn’t worked since last year. I couldn’t use the navigator, and I didn’t even know where my phone was.’ He ran the fingers of the other hand through his hair as he moved his gaze to Eric again. ‘I had to follow the signposts until I found myself in an area I recognised. I came back home; I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Detective.’ Mills had popped his head around the door.

Eric had asked the officers to search Reynolds’s house and car for any significant clue to deduce where the doctor and Rogers had taken Miriam. They hadn’t found anything in the vehicle, except traces of blood in the boot.

Meanwhile, he’d wanted to talk to that man alone. He didn’t doubt Reynolds was sincere, but he was visibly upset. Eric had explained to him what was happening, or at least he’d tried to suggest a reconstruction of the events.

All evidence leading to the doctor could actually be traced back to his partner. Reynolds had confirmed that Megan often visited his medical practice when she came back from Cambridge earlier than usual, and as she waited for him, she used to connect to the Wi-Fi of the health centre with her tablet. Moreover, he couldn’t tell her whereabouts on Sunday morning, when Emma Taylor had visited Madame Tussauds. Concerning yesterday evening, he only knew that she’d been out with some girlfriends, but had no idea who they were, and now he was telling Eric he had no memory about the day that was coming to an end.

‘We checked the basement.’ The sergeant offered only a shake of refusal. ‘Not much. Judging from the layer of dust deposited all over the place, it hasn’t been used in years, except for the footsteps on the top of the stairs.’ He gestured at Reynolds’s shoes. ‘I think he was hiding there. He must have caught Miriam off guard.’ He swallowed noticeably; his regret traced hard lines on his face. ‘She knows how to defend herself. She was armed, but her adversary had to be stronger than her.’

Eric nodded at him. He shared the same feeling of helplessness about Miriam, but he had to keep his emotions at bay and reason. The answer he was looking for must be there somewhere, connected to the man Megan had decided to frame as the perpetrator of her crimes.

‘My God,’ Reynolds whined. ‘I can’t remember. I swear I didn’t want to hurt anybody.’

It was difficult to believe that man was capable of killing any living soul. He looked like the average reassuring doctor, one of those irradiating professionalism mixed with experience gained over the years, with a careful eye on the progress of medicine that was typical of someone who was still young. It was also true that evil would hide behind the most unsuspecting people, but recently Eric had got to know it closely, thus honing his instinct.

Reynolds was surely involved. Emma Taylor had been subjected to cosmetic surgery techniques that couldn’t be improvised by a former student. Even the scars of the incisions on Nora Sharp were the work of a professional. Yet that man hadn’t acted of his own free will. The persisting mydriasis suggested he was still partially under the influence of a foreign substance. The amnesia he claimed pointed to scopolamine, already used by the killer with the victims.

‘William, you must help me to find them.’ Eric had pronounced those words slowly, but in a tone of command. ‘Where were you when you came to your senses?’

‘I told you, I don’t know exactly!’ Reynolds exclaimed, but then waved his hands. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that everything is so … absurd.’

‘Focus.’

The doctor inhaled deeply. ‘At first, I couldn’t recognise the area. I started to orient myself only when I realised I was driving along Lee Valley Park. Then I understood I was on the North Circular Road.’

It was in the opposite direction of his medical practice. For a moment, Eric had hoped that there might be a connection with that place. It would’ve been a starting point. Instead, they had nothing. On second thoughts, it was too far. Considering the time spent since Mills and Miriam had entered the house, which was followed by the assault on both of them, and the geographic detail provided by the doctor, he could narrow down the range, but there were still many populous areas of London inside it. The place he was looking for might be anywhere.

‘I bet you had more of these amnesias. Perhaps you can remember where you were right after one of these episodes.’

Megan couldn’t have established with certainty when Reynolds would come down off the drug. She’d tied Mills up upstairs. She must have known that someone would come looking for the two officers. It would make no sense to let the doctor drive back home right into the hands of the police. Had he still been under the influence of scopolamine, he would’ve talked. Instead, if the effect had faded away earlier, even if the police hadn’t already arrived, he would’ve realised there was an officer stuck to one of his radiators with packing tape. He would’ve freed him, and the alarm would’ve been raised anyway.

Eric’s eyes grew moist.

That woman had a plan for Miriam. And she needed time to carry it out.

‘Oh my God, yes.’ Reynolds turned his focus from the space in front of him on Eric’s face. ‘Fuck …’ He rubbed a hand on his cheek, pulling down the skin. ‘It’s been a few months since I started having blackouts. I can’t remember what I did hours earlier. I was starting to think I had the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s.’ His face regained colour, whilst his chest swelled. Signs of a hint of relief in the prostration shown until now. ‘Megan told me not to worry, it was just stress. That … bitch!’ And from relief, he was turning to anger. He tightened his lips, as if he wanted to restrain himself. ‘But no, I was at home. Sometimes I was in bed. She told me I’d gone to take a nap. That’s what she said, a bloody nap.’ His voice tone was getting louder and louder. ‘Only I didn’t remember going to bed, and I didn’t feel rested like I had slept. I was always exhausted.’ He snapped to his feet, and Mills, who was still standing by the room door, took a step forward in his direction.

Eric gestured to the sergeant there was no need for him to intervene. Reynolds wasn’t dangerous. He himself badly wanted to pick on that man. The only thought of Miriam’s blood on the other side of the wall awoke the worst instincts in him, but letting them out would be of no help to find her.

‘You said Megan used that car, whose GPS is down, so we can’t retrieve the recording of her last destinations from the navigation device’s memory,’ Mills said, moving closer to Eric and drawing his attention. ‘She must have used it in these months to drive to the place where she kept the victims. And the dent on the front and left side suggests it might be the same vehicle that hit Burton Phillips this morning.’

‘It happened in Woodford.’ Eric stood up too. He’d understood where the sergeant was going with that. ‘Leaving from here, unless you take a longer route, you must drive near Lee Valley Park to get to Woodford.’

He wasn’t used to driving over there, but from the place they were, during low traffic hours you might be in Woodford and back in less than half an hour.

A buzz, accompanied by a slight vibration through the bulletproof vest he was wearing, disrupted the flow of his thoughts. He pulled out his mobile phone from his pocket.

Marvin Bennet’s name filled the top of the screen.

 

 

‘Although he can’t use it as evidence, shouldn’t we tell him?’ Stern was opening the umpteenth windows on his computer screen. ‘He’s going to her house. It’d be better he knows the suspect is Rogers, not Reynolds. Actually, he must be already there.’

‘No, no, no,’ Adele said, drowning out his colleague’s voice.

In the last half an hour, she’d heard what he and Eric had found out during her absence, and then she’d told Stern where the swab he’d analysed came from. They both had decided that, since that evidence was unusable in court, they wouldn’t move from there until they found a way to come to the same conclusion towards which it pointed them.

So now Stern was reviewing all reports and notes related to those last three whirling days of investigation, while Adele was searching the file from the 2014 case thoroughly. Their hope was to find some detail, regarded as not relevant but which became useful in the light of that piece of information: the blood on Justine Steele’s mobile phone belonged to Megan Rogers.

It was true that both of them had been in Graham’s lair where the device had been found, but at different times. Steele had been already dead for days when Rogers, as she said, had been kidnapped. But it was still possible that the biological trace had ended up there because the killer had taken possession of the mobile phone, and maybe he had it with him when he assaulted Megan.

Eric’s decision to tamper with that piece of evidence hadn’t been a completely bad idea, because it wouldn’t have been enough to point the finger at Megan. She’d been found in critical condition in the basement of that house. Detecting her DNA on an object found in the same place wouldn’t have proved anything. It might’ve been the result of an unintentional contamination.

But it was different now. New evidence pointed at Reynolds, her partner, who she didn’t even know back then. Putting the two elements together changed the scenario.

Perhaps at some point Graham had decided to get rid of his accomplice, and Megan had become a victim, only she hadn’t then accused him, because if she had he would’ve involved her. It was much easier to say she didn’t remember she’d ever seen her kidnapper’s face.

It was hard to interpret the kind of relationship that existed between two people who kidnapped some women to torture and kill them. Adele understood well the desire to hurt, to see life leave someone’s body. The sense of power you felt was exhilarating. As she remembered Damien Johnson’s death occurring at her hand less than a year ago, she felt unwillingly warmed by a sense of excitement, for which she felt shame right after.

But the onset in her of that urge and the fulfilment she took after having indulged in it were the direct consequence of the hate she’d felt for the victim. And hate had to come for a reason, even an irrational one.

What pleasure could you feel in annihilating someone if you didn’t feel anything for them?

That was why she’d been persuaded by the validity of the theory, according to which there had to be a reason for the death of the victims from three years ago, which should be searched for in their life and in their relationship with their murderer. As for Justine Steele, it was obvious. She’d had an affair with Graham, and had dumped him. Perhaps the other two women had aroused his anger, or Megan’s, or both.

But what if it wasn’t so?

And most of all, such a theory collapsed before Emma Taylor, Nora Sharp, and Tammy Ellis. Everything suggested that the elusive aDream was the typical predatory serial killer, an animal looking for prey to satiate his hunger for violence, someone who didn’t see the single victim as a person, but rather a means to reach their purpose. None of that had to do with hate, or other feelings on which human beings’ relationships were based.

There was nothing human in Megan Rogers’s actions.

‘I don’t understand why you’re behaving like that.’ Stern turned to Adele just as he was shaken by a shiver.

She’d been staring at the screen again. ‘You know how fussy he’s become,’ she tried to complain, but with little conviction.

‘Ah, I don’t buy it. I don’t believe you’re worried about being given a scolding by your boyfriend. Especially in these circumstances.’

Adele shifted her gaze to him. Again, that mix of pride and affection had emerged from the stormy sea of her anxieties, conferring on her an unexpected comfort. ‘That’s not the point. You can’t understand.’

Stern rolled his eyes.

No, he certainly couldn’t understand. He didn’t know the pact of trust she and Eric had stipulated, nor had he the slightest idea about the events that originated it. It’d started as a promise not to kill anybody without first talking to him, which meant she wouldn’t be allowed to do that anymore. Eric would never give her his assent. But then, while she allowed him to join her in the dark wandering of her soul, it’d been extended to any unlawful action. None of them should ever push themselves beyond that limit without the approval of the other.

On the last day, she’d infringed that pact twice. She still couldn’t say whether she’d made a mistake or not. Her opinions, once firm, had become vanes twisting in the wind.

‘Okay, let’s put our heads together.’ Stern waved both hands in front of her. He’d turned his chair ninety degrees and wasn’t looking at the computer screen anymore. ‘Megan was Graham’s accomplice. For some reason, he thought of turning her into one of his dolls. She decides not to say a word about it and lets him know through Aunt Tilda. They are at an impasse: if one talks, the other drags them down. So Megan decides to help him get out of prison, but then she loses it and ends up killing a journalist who must have got too close to her.’

‘Right, Phillips,’ Adele exclaimed. ‘She might’ve seen him at Golden Days House with Tilda Gough and heard her tell him something, because that woman in some closed drawer of her brain must have some important information. And then she took the first chance she got to take him out of the game without dirtying her hands.’

Her colleague shook his head, a disconsolate expression on his face. ‘We have no evidence Megan Rogers was there. She’s never been on the staff, not even as a volunteer.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘I’d already cross-referenced the databases of the nursing home and St George’s, and nothing turned up. She was a former student at the university. Anyway, just in case, I ran a search by name earlier, and there’s no record of her in the nursing house. Moreover, I checked today’s visitors list, and no person with that name appears there.’

‘Do you have a visitors’ list?’ Adele didn’t know anything about it. ‘Where’s this coming from?’

‘Hall gave it to me this afternoon, although she doubted it might be useful because Leroux had already checked the people who visited Tilda Gough over the last few years, and nothing relevant came up from it. I repeated the check, always just in case … well, in the short time I had.’ He darted a sideways glance at her. ‘Apart from today’s visit of Phillips, there are some very irregular ones from a Jordan Gough, who is referred to as her son in her personal record. I verified the name. He’s resident in northern England, near Newcastle. He hasn’t been at the nursing house in several weeks. And then there’s someone else who came to see her years ago. Anyway, no Megan Rogers.’ He raised a corner of his mouth. ‘I would’ve noticed her.’

‘You didn’t know where to look for her.’ With a hand, Adele dragged herself together with her chair closer to her colleague, and with the other she forced him to turn to the screen again. ‘Enter her name in the search field and extend your search to the whole visitors’ database.’ She felt like a new crack had just opened. There had to be a connection between Megan and that place, and if she didn’t find it on that list, it would never come up. The urgency to get rid of that doubt overcame even the fear that it was unfounded.

At first Stern pouted, then the muscles in his face relaxed. ‘Good idea …’ he seemed to concede.

‘Come on!’

The clicking on the keyboard became the only audible sound in the room and probably in the whole section of the Forensic Services hosted in the Curtis Green Building. They were the only ones left.

Once “Enter” was pressed, the screen became white, then it refreshed and started filling with results, dozens of results, all matching with the name Megan Rogers.

‘Good gracious!’

‘Here she is. The first one was five years ago. The last one at the beginning of April.’ Adele shook his arm. ‘Check whom she was visiting.’

Without replying, Stern clicked on one of the results. ‘A Stephanie Richmond.’ He pulled a face. He went back and clicked on the next one. ‘Her again. Maybe a relative?’

‘How do we learn more about her?’

Stern offered her a smug grin. ‘We also have the guests’ database starting from January 2014. There was a remote possibility that the person we were looking for was a guest who is still in good health, one of those who goes in and out whenever they want.’ He moved the pointer on the woman’s name, which became underlined, and pushed the left button of his mouse. ‘I’ve linked all three databases, so you can navigate from one to another if you need to.’ A record with a photograph, a few biographical data, and some further information opened. ‘She died on the ninth of April. That’s why Rogers stopped going there.’

‘Show me Tilda Gough’s record, too.’ The crack in Adele’s mind had completely opened as her eyes lingered on a particular detail among those of Ms Richmond.

Her colleague carried out her order with a strafe of clicks until another window opened.

Adele felt her mouth stretching into a smile. ‘As I thought.’ She reached out and pointed her left forefinger towards the screen. ‘Room B72. Check Stephanie Richmond’s again.’ But she already knew what he would find.

‘B71 … oh!’

‘Here is the proof we’ve been looking for. Megan and Aunt Tilda certainly know each other.’

‘We need to call the boss.’

A trill with a background of laser gunshots exploded in front of them, making them jump onto the chair. It was Stern’s mobile phone ringtone.

He picked it up from the sheet with the DNA analysis results at the far end of the desk. ‘What the heck. Is he spying on us?’ He dragged the green icon and then tapped the hands-free one. ‘Hey, boss, we were just about to call you.’

Adele wrenched it from his grasp. ‘Eric, Reynolds is not the killer. Megan Rogers is. We’ve just found proof she’s known Tilda Gough for at least five years.’ She shooed Stern’s hand away as he tried to get the phone back. ‘She was a regular visitor at Golden Days House all this time until a month ago. Perhaps she didn’t think they kept the names of those who visited a deceased guest.’

‘Adele? What are you doing there? I thought you were home,’ Eric’s perplexed voice replied from the speaker.

‘I came back.’ She hesitated. She thought she’d heard an accusatory tone. But no, it was all in her mind. ‘Martin called me to tell me the news.’ She put a finger on her mouth in response to the other forensic investigator’s glare. ‘So I came back. Did you hear what I said?’

‘I already know it’s Megan.’

Disappointment caught her unprepared. Even Stern seemed to deflate in front of her.

‘I’m here with Reynolds, and Graham told Bennet about it,’ Eric continued. ‘But it’s even better if you found a confirmation because the bastard has no intention of making a confession.’

The praise implied in those words brought her mood back up.

‘Stern, you have to find out any possible link, even indirect, between Megan Rogers and Woodford.’

‘Woodford?’ Adele echoed. ‘Isn’t that the place where Phillips was hit?’ If her memory served her, it was in the borough of Redbridge, in the north-east of Greater London. It wasn’t too far from Upminster, further east, where Golden Days House was located.

‘Oh dear.’

Adele turned her gaze to the screen that seemed to hypnotise Stern. Tilda Gough’s personal file was still displayed on it. The pointer moved to highlight the home address of the elderly woman. ‘Woodford.’ She couldn’t believe it. ‘Aunt Tilda’s house is in Woodford!’

‘It was right in front of me. How could I not see it?’ Stern murmured in an apparently dazed state.

‘Wait.’ Adele placed her colleague’s phone on the desktop and reached for her jacket, which she’d left on the back of her chair, to get her own phone from a pocket. ‘I’m sending you the address.’ To save time she tapped the SMS icon, which was in plain sight on the main screen, and then her fingers started flying on the virtual keyboard. Then a last touch to send. ‘It’s coming.’

A beep came from the speaker on Stern’s phone. ‘Thank you. I gotta go now.’

‘Eric,’ she hastened to say, her throat closing off. The storm of her emotions had grown and threatened to overwhelm her. ‘Be careful.’

A sigh. ‘Don’t worry.’ A caring tone in his voice had replaced his previous hurry. ‘I’ll call you later.’

The silence fell in the room as “Call ended” appeared on the screen, but at every moment that passed it filled with a muffled hum, louder and louder, which only Adele could hear.

Later. When? How could she wait?

She stood up, retrieved her phone and her jacket. ‘I’m going there.’

‘What?’ Stern turned to her, but at that very moment Adele moved and walked behind him, forcing him to spin around with his chair. ‘To Woodford? But it’ll take about forty minutes. When you get there, it will be all over.’

‘I’m going,’ she repeated, walking through the door. Her tread bounced off the corridor’s walls, dampening a bit of the hum in her head.

‘Adele, wait!’ A second noise of hurried footsteps was added. ‘I’m coming with you.’

 

 

Miriam’s head was pulsing in time with her heart. She felt as if she was floating on the surface of water, and from time to time she was engulfed by a wave, losing contact with reality. Every time she opened her eyes again, she found Megan in the same position. She was motionless, as if she too were in an altered state, or dead. Only her occasional blinking betrayed her, and her staring pupils.

How long had it been?

Miriam had wondered that a moment before re-emerging from the surface of her consciousness. Something had changed now. Megan was standing by the barred window, facing the wall. A piece of rope stuck out of her jeans pocket. She ruffled her hair with a hand. She’d stopped pretending she was a prisoner.

The awareness of her own mistake had made its way into Miriam’s mind little by little. She’d tried to resist it. She couldn’t believe that affectionate girl for whom she’d felt responsible since the moment she’d rescued her from certain death might be the architect behind all those crimes. Yet it made sense, even in her confused thoughts.

She should have known better after seeing the dents on the old Mercedes. She knew Megan used it, but it was easier to accept blaming Will. Miriam barely knew him; he was a man, a real plastic surgeon, he might as well be a ruthless serial killer. She’d met murderers with a more reassuring appearance than his.

But Megan? How was that possible? Inconceivable.

Except she’d been unreachable when Nora Sharp had gone to the Savoy. She’d even told Will she would’ve gone to the West End that evening. She’d been so bold as to tell the truth. Nobody had thought to verify her story about a night out with her girlfriends. After all, she was a victim.

Earlier in Megan’s house, the gunshot heard by Miriam had really come from upstairs, but she was assaulted a few seconds later on the ground floor. And Will’s eyes seemed to her those of a demon, but only because his pupils were dilated as Emma’s, Nora’s, and Tammy’s had been.

Instead, even now that Megan had turned to look at her, from that distance Miriam could see her ice-blue irises shine under the warm light from the chandelier.

Megan gave her a dejected smile. Her now free hands were holding a mobile phone.

The phone!

Rolling over a bit, Miriam managed to rub her right elbow against her jacket pocket to make sure her phone was still there. She always kept the GPS on. Eric could track her.

‘Are you looking for this?’ Megan showed her the device in her hand. She had it. ‘I’m afraid it’s broken.’

She threw it towards the bed, and it fell a few inches away from Miriam’s face. Its screen was crossed by a crack, and it was off.

A movement out of the corner of her eye warned her about Megan advancing towards her. On instinct, she moved back as her friend sat down on the edge of the bed, making it sway.

‘Why are you doing all this?’ A sharp pain in Miriam’s head followed her struggle to ask that brief question.

Megan’s face turned serious again as she reached out to stroke her friend’s hair while leaning on the pillow with her other elbow.

Waiting for an answer, Miriam tried hard not to react. She wasn’t even certain to what extent she could. It was so difficult to fight the tempting sleepiness shrouding her, and that affectionate gesture did nothing but make it even more enticing.

‘Because you’ve been a terrible friend,’ Megan said. Her amused tone was that of someone reporting the obvious. ‘You used to come over to see me at the hospital, and I really thought you cared for me.’ A hard vein coloured her voice. ‘But instead, it was only pity, wasn’t it?’

Miriam shook her head, and the room whirled around for a few seconds. ‘That’s not true. I do care for you.’

A sudden laugh erupted from Megan and then stopped as quickly as it had started. ‘No. You just wanted to feel gratified because you’d helped a poor victim.’ She paused, and her hand stopped too at the back of Miriam’s head, near the wound, but without touching it. ‘You liked to feel sorry for me until you found something better to pass the time: Jonathan and your son.’

She dropped her hand with force, and it was like a blade pierced Miriam at the very same point where she’d hit the stair. The pain gave her the strength to draw back from her, rise on her knees and, with her hands joined by the rope, strike a blow to the other woman’s face.

But Megan backed off, and Miriam lost balance then fell on the stained bedspread again.

‘You’re no better than Justine.’

Barely managing to make her out behind the tears, Miriam moved away from her, taking refuge at the bottom of the bed. She was alone with a madwoman, who could kill her at any time. Nobody knew where they were, not even her, yet she wouldn’t give up. Hunched over, she checked the door. It was closed, but perhaps not locked. Megan had no reason to lock herself in there for real with her prey.

A way out wasn’t enough. Miriam needed a weapon. She desperately looked around her. Between them was the mobile phone, but it wasn’t much of a tool to fight back.

If only she didn’t feel so sick.

‘She pretended she didn’t know me, and when I asked her why, she laughed at me. She treated me like I was a retard.’ Megan kept talking, as if Miriam’s behaviour didn’t worry her, or as if she wasn’t even looking. ‘I just wanted to be perfect, like her … Bobby!’ she shouted all at once.

Miriam flinched.

Megan’s face was contracted in a grimace. She looked as if she was on the verge of crying. ‘He’d said he would make me perfect, but he almost killed me.’

Bobby. Exactly what Robert Graham was called in Tilda Gough’s letters. They had to be the work of Megan, too.

Why hadn’t she listened to Eric? Why had she rushed to Megan’s home like that?

The fact was that somehow the latter was right. She’d felt pity for her, at the beginning, and then she’d felt guilty for having disappeared, sometimes even for months. She hadn’t been a good friend, and she’d seen her rushing to the aid of Megan as a way to make up, to be forgiven.

‘But then I realised my mistake. I thought the others were the answer, while instead it depended on me.’ Megan stretched forward, propping up on her elbows. She was rubbing her right hand on her left one. There were evident scratches on the knuckles of the former, as if she’d been fighting against an animal.

Russell’s sign.

‘My problem was that I was fat. I should’ve controlled my body, but …’ A tear poured from her left eye. ‘I was weak. Running, spitting out my soul at the gym wasn’t enough. No! I had to do more to reach perfection. Food was the enemy. I couldn’t stop myself from eating. I binged any time I could. I sucked!’ She exhaled a sigh while a relieved smile took shape on her face. ‘So I found another solution.’

‘Why did you kill those girls? Just to help Bobby?’ Miriam had to make her talk, had to buy time, gather strength.

Megan laughed. ‘Emma and Nora had already reached perfection.’ She nodded vigorously. ‘The future only held decay, ageing for them. I spared them all that.’

What was left of the shy girl in a hospital bed Miriam had immediately liked? Had she ever really existed? Had she always been crazy or had something in her past made her this way?

‘Tammy, instead, wanted to betray us. She kept talking about that psychologist. She’d become fatter. She was lost.’ Megan’s face darkened. ‘She didn’t deserve to die happy. She had to suffer.’ The edges of her mouth rose again. ‘It really turned out better than I planned.’

‘Nora is still alive.’ Miriam shouldn’t have contradicted her, but couldn’t help herself.

Megan’s lips tightened. ‘It’s something I’ll have to fix after I take care of you.’ She tilted her head backwards and closed her eyes.

Now was the time.

Miriam rose from her curled up position and, clenching her fists joined by the rope, hit the other woman under the jaw. The latter emitted a moan and rolled to a side. So she jumped on Megan’s chest with both knees, and before her adversary reacted, she placed her forearm on her neck. She started pushing.

Megan was thrashing, her mouth and eyes wide open. Her hands pushed against Miriam’s shoulders.

All at once, Miriam felt being grabbed by her legs’ hold. Although Megan was lighter, she knew how to defend herself, how to take advantage of her agility. A hand covered Miriam’s face; rubbing on her nose, it would reach her eyes. She moved her head to shake it out of her, but this way she was seized by a sudden dizziness.

Unwillingly, she released her grip, and a fist hit her. The room capsized, and Miriam found herself staring at the chandelier. Any ounce of strength had been consumed in her desperate attempt to attack.

‘Bitch.’

Raising her gaze as much as she could, she saw Megan standing beside the bed.

‘You’ll suffer, too.’ Her captor backed off until exiting Miriam’s field of view. ‘Instead, I’ll be once more the victim who is saved, while everything else is destroyed, including you.’ Megan paused. ‘Oh! I didn’t know she was here,’ she added in a theatrical, whiny tone. ‘Yes, Will hit me, and then I found myself in the basement. It was hot, it was choking with smoke.’

An airflow caressed the skin on Miriam’s face, then she heard the sharp thud of a door.

No!

Some residual energy, emerging from who knew where, pushed her to turn to one side and sit up. The door was still closed, but Megan wasn’t in the room anymore.

She dragged herself out of the bed, fell with her knees on the floor. She forced herself to rise again, gritting her teeth, and reached the door. The handle lowered under her hands, but the panel didn’t move.

‘Merde.’

She could hear an odd splashing on the other side of that barrier, then a pungent smell reached her nostrils and made her throat tingle. Petrol.

‘Non, non …’ She started banging on the panel. ‘Megan!’

There was no point in calling her. She grabbed the handle again, lowered it, and pulled it towards herself. But there was no point in doing that, too. Everything was pointless.

The window.

She lunged at it. She didn’t even know how she could stand. It was like she was aboard a rowing boat in a force nine gale. The board blocking the shutters was nailed, but didn’t completely adhere to them.

She stuck her fingers in the gap. As a cry escaped her mouth, she pulled.

She failed to move it, not even by an inch.

A new dizziness, a more powerful one, overwhelmed her, and the floor came towards her.

 

 

The match reached a wet spot, and the flame expanded in all directions, following its trail along the corridor.

Megan observed it, fascinated. The floors of that house were covered by high quality parquet that seemed to have a kind of fire-retardant coating. Indeed, the flame moved along the petrol trail, but it failed to harm its surface, which just blackened. Until it reached the curtains, and then it immediately blazed upwards, attacking the wallpaper.

Soon the fire, like a hungry animal, would envelop everything, would spread into the other rooms and devour any flammable obstacle in its path, like the synthetic carpet in the room where Miriam was locked, the bed, the curtains, her clothes.

Megan should’ve poured some petrol on her and turned her on like a torch, but it wasn’t what she wished. The thought of causing the death of others excited her, yet she was disgusted by the violence of the act itself. She’d rather be a witness to it, albeit with her mind’s eye. The idea of power over the life of others and of its annihilation was all she needed to feed the control on her own. Knowing that a simple gesture like generating a spark had, as a result, although indirect, to erase a person fed the pleasure running along every fibre of her body.

Nothing else could satisfy her so much.

Megan signed. She couldn’t stay there. That place was turning into a furnace. Reluctantly, she took the flight of stairs down to the ground floor.

The house was huge, magnificent, and forsaken. The owner’s son had neglected it. In one of the woman’s rare moments of apparent lucidity, she’d heard Tilda talking with her great-aunt and saying that Jordan hated the place, and the old lady couldn’t explain it. Megan remembered her watery eyes. She was convinced she was still at home and that they were two neighbours come to visit, at least thirty years ago. Who knew if her son’s aversion to his childhood home depended on something that happened in there a long time ago, or was it just the reflection of his melancholy at losing his father, and now finding himself with a mother who hardly recognised him?

Actually, Megan had never cared about it. She’d just seen an opportunity in it. Tilda always kept a ridiculous handbag beside her as she, all dolled up, waited in vain for her husband to return from the patisserie and take her out to dance. Usually, she said she’d come back home earlier to dress up, or that she hadn’t gone to work in the morning because she was unwell. She kept nervously checking the hands of the broken watch she wore on her wrist. Until one day, when the old lady had been staring at a game show, Megan had searched inside that worn-out accessory and found what she needed: a set of keys and an old driving licence with an address in Woodford.

Tilda had always described her house like it was in the middle of a forest. That had to be a dated memory, too. Anyway it was pretty secluded, because it was located at the edge of a small suburban neighbourhood surrounded by the trees. Nobody would drive in front of it, unless the place was their destination, and the large grassy space before the building prevented possible busybodies from peeking in the windows unseen.

It was perfect, especially since nobody had bothered to disconnect it from the electricity network, although it was disused. Someone still paid the bills, probably Tilda herself through the bank account where she received her pension. It’d become the place where everything would start all over again.

The idea of questioning Bobby’s guilt had inspired Megan’s first steps, but then she’d gone beyond that. Had he played his cards right, maybe he would’ve been released from prison.

He and Will knew each other; her partner had confided in her. While still specialising, Bobby had attended some surgeries performed by him as an external specialist called in by the chief of plastic surgery, who had also been a teacher to him.

He could’ve been the real Plastic Surgeon who’d framed Bobby. Why not?

The final touch had been taking advantage of scopolamine’s effect of nullifying a person’s will, if administered in adequate dosage, to use Will for her purposes: carry out the surgeries on Emma and Nora, and help her kidnap Tammy. And then Miriam.

Now the circle would close. The fire would take away any details that could’ve compromised her and would provide her with the opportunity to emphasise that she was a victim haunted by a psychopath, who had even succeeded in seducing her and getting into her life, engaging in a perverse game with her. This time she would recognise him as the culprit, and the evidence would crush him.

She’d already won once. She would win again. There was much more at stake, but that would grant her an even higher satisfaction. There was a chance of failure, yet she didn’t fear it. The final reward was worth the risk.

Smiling, she set more fires on the ground floor, made sure both the front and the back door were locked, and put the keys in a drawer in the kitchen before lighting another fire in that room. Finally she headed for the basement door. She turned the key to locking position and walked in, letting the panel close behind her.

Now she too was a prisoner for many hours and couldn’t possibly know she wasn’t the only person locked in the house.

The bright light from the lamp lit up the worktop that had been used twice as a rudimentary operating table. But that was months ago, and the dust reigned over everything. A metal piece of furniture beside it held the surgical tools and the last pair of latex gloves used by Will with his fingerprints.

She walked past it and headed for the adjacent room. It was a proper cellar where dozens of fine wine bottles were stored, sorted in a rack along the right wall.

Further ahead a set of plywood boxes had been arranged on top of each other to form a few steps. Originally they’d contained more bottles, now jumbled almost in the middle of the small room. It’d taken her an hour to take them out one by one, so that she could move and arrange the boxes. As she came closer to the bottles she kicked one, which broke, flooding the concrete floor with red nectar.

She pulled out of a rear pocket of her jeans the piece of rope she’d held around her wrists for a long time, rubbing them against it to cause abrasions, so much that the fibres were stained with blood.

She dropped it and started climbing the makeshift stairs.

A far crackle was spreading in the air, together with an increasingly intense, irritating smell of burning. The light from the bulb hanging from the ceiling, screwed to a simple holder, flickered.

It was time to get out.

Once there she would check the status of the fire, and then run away screaming and crying, looking for help towards the nearest building. By the arrival of the fire brigade, it would be too late for Miriam. Perhaps her old friend was already suffocating and would die before the flames reached her.

Despite everything, that was what she hoped. The thought of Miriam being burnt alive disturbed her.

The top box crackled as she put her second foot on it.

Fat! She needed to lose more weight.

She reached out her hands to the little window on the top of the wall. It was quite narrow, but she was slender enough to sneak through it. She’d tried that already. But she couldn’t if the frame was on, which limited its opening.

She removed the screws that kept it in position. They were loosened. She’d partly unscrewed them, using one of the scalpels as a screwdriver. Now the tool was on the windowsill.

She rubbed the rough edges of the screws on her fingertips, causing more scratches and getting more blood on them. She removed the window frame and threw it towards the bottles. The impact caused a sound of broken glasses and a faint sizzle. She must have hit some champagne.

An extra dramatic touch.

Her head and shoulders went through easily, then with a sudden jump, she shifted her body weight out. More grazes were added to her arms as she pulled herself up and emerged out of the basement. On all fours, she advanced on the mud until she reached the grass.

Before her, the glow of the flames reflected on the trees on the edge of the woods. The fire’s roar penetrated her ears, pressing against her eardrums. Soot made her eyes watery.

She touched her hair, transferring some dirt onto it. She stopped smiling at her triumph and slowed down her breath, her eyes half closed. Then she opened them while letting her face muscles relax, then contract again, turning it into a mask of terror.

She started running. She skirted the side of the house until she reached the front, overlooking the open space and the other buildings in the neighbourhood.

As she turned the corner, a new light source was intermittently mixed with the one generated by the fire, altering it to purple. The flashing lights from the car parked on the grass were on. Another one was coming along.

Had someone already called for help? So soon?

Megan slowed down as she caught sight of two silhouettes moving quickly towards the front door. One stopped and raised an arm to point. The second stopped walking too, and shouted something.

There was nothing else Megan could do.

‘Help!’ she cried out, emptying the little air her lungs managed to contain in her running effort.

That was when she recognised the face of the man who was now heading in her direction.

 

 

While driving through the little secluded neighbourhood on board of the police car, Eric had noticed an unusual glow reflecting on the blanket of low clouds looming over Woodford, and even before seeing the cause, had sniffed a strong burning smell spreading from the aeration circuit of the vehicle.

‘There seems to be a fire nearby,’ Mills commented a moment before turning left. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

Tilda Gough’s house now stood out in front of the forest’s darkness. High flames stirred from a window on the first floor. The panes of those on the ground floor seemed still intact, but let the gloomy dance of light be seen from outside.

An ice-cold terror expanded in Eric’s chest at the sight. ‘Miriam …’ escaped the laborious moving of his lips.

The car entered the untarmacked road, then turned right. Even before it stopped, he’d unfastened his seat belt and was pulling the door handle.

He rushed out towards the building.

‘Detective,’ Mills called him. ‘There’s someone down there.’

Eric stopped and turned. The sergeant was pointing at the right side of the house. He followed the direction of the officer’s arm and noticed a dark figure emerging from the glow of the fire. ‘Miriam!’ He started running towards it.

‘Help!’ It was a woman’s voice, but not his daughter’s.

As the distance between them decreased, her facial features, confused by the soot deposited on them and by the smoke and ash floating in front of him, became clearer.

Anyway, he didn’t need to see her to figure out who she was.

Eric forced himself not to react to that knowledge as he reached her. Meanwhile, that same face had become a canvas where the most genuine of suffering had been painted, tinged with consolation in recognising a friendly face. Only the eyes bore an echo of her panic.

‘Where’s Miriam?’ he said, disguising his torment as he stopped in front of Megan.

She gaped in a too much dramatic way. ‘Miriam? Is she here too?’

Before such a plaintive tone and ostentation of ignorant innocence, Eric’s last mental brake gave way. He grabbed her by the filthy sweatshirt and brought her closer to him. With his other hand, he pulled out his gun, released the safety catch, and aimed at her brow. ‘If anything happens to Miriam, I swear I’ll put a bullet in this sick brain.’

In a moment, the surprise in Megan’s gaze gave way to horror.

‘Where is she?’ he shouted.

‘Up … upstairs …’ But her stammering still betrayed her reticence. Eric pressed the barrel against her skull, and Megan’s tongue seemed to loosen as if by magic. ‘The second room on the right after the stairs.’

Eric threw her to the ground sideways, and looked at the house.

‘No, no, what are you doing? I’m a victim,’ Megan’s indignant script was recited while Mills turned her to a prone position and closed the handcuffs, one by one, around her wrists.

‘Get her out of my sight.’ Eric holstered his gun and hastened to take off his jacket and open his bulletproof vest.

‘I’ve already called the fire brigade.’ Mills had handed over Megan to Patel, who had come from the second police car. The third one, with two more officers, had just pulled up in the grassy area.

Eric got rid of his vest, too. ‘I have to find her.’ His legs were already taking him towards the house.

The front door was closed. Megan hadn’t got out from there.

Fuelled only by a lucid desperation, he removed from his pocket the set of keys that had been found in Reynolds’s possession. The logo on the longest key matched with the one on the lock plate. He put it in the door and grabbed the knob.

It was as if his palm was clamped by a scorching vice.

‘Ah!’

He drew it back, but with the other hand turned the key until the door was unlocked. He kicked it open.

A heat flash hit him, causing him to bend double while the flames leaked from the top of the jamb, hungry for oxygen.

Eric forced himself to look ahead as he took a step across the threshold. Fire flooded the whole ceiling in the room and extended down by the curtains and what was hanging from a coat stand. The floor was free, but the heavy air made his breathing laboured.

‘Miriam!’

He rushed forward past the entrance room and ventured into what looked like a huge living room. Every single piece of furniture was a small blaze, separated from one another. Megan must have lit them on purpose to help the fire spread.

His gaze wandered through the room as he tried to orient himself. He spotted a door across it, beyond which he seemed to catch sight of some stairs.

Acutely aware of the ocean of flames a little over a metre above his head, Eric ran to reach the staircase. As he put a foot on the first step, he looked up at the top of the flight. The fire poured upwards on the floor upstairs to his left.

Hugging the wall to his right, he climbed all the steps two at a time. His eyes were staring at the hungry demon rising from a carpet on the first floor to his left; it was set on the walkway bordered by a railing that ran along the stairwell.

A symmetrical one was on his right. Once at the end of the stairs, Eric followed it, avoiding touching the metal handrail. The flames were consuming the wallpaper, exposing the masonry wall. From it, ashy splinters with glowing edges peeled off and fluctuated towards the parquet flooring. Its surface was run by a blackened trail, evidence of the recent presence of a fire that had gone out. Megan must have used some fuel, but not enough to conquer the refractoriness of the fire-retardant substance that covered the boards.

Moving his arms to shoo away the burning ashes falling on his shirt and hair, threatening to ignite them, Eric walked along that trail. He kept low so that he could move under the smoke.

He reached the first door. It was open. Megan had said that Miriam was in the second room, but he couldn’t really trust her word.

He looked inside. The spectre of an empty room was outlined by the flames covering everything.

He rushed to the next one. The door was closed. The handle was inviting, but the bubbles on the varnish covering the panel informed him of the danger it posed. Right underneath, a key was in the lock.

‘Miriam! Are you in there?’

Eric pulled out an edge of his shirt from the trousers and placed it on the key head. Even through the fabric, the heat was barely tolerable. He half turned it, then again, until he reached the end. He moved the fabric on the handle and pushed down.

As the door opened, he perceived the air suction, accompanied by tongues of fire on the ceiling advancing through the opening into the room. They partly broke its darkness, although the black smoke occupying the upper half of the room dimmed it. But bending forward and taking advantage of the gleaming behind him, Eric could see. Everything looked intact in there.

‘Miriam,’ he called in a lower voice.

Panting, he searched the place by moving his eyes clockwise. An open door, an empty wall, a bed, a barred window. And then down.

Miriam.

She was lying on the floor, right under the window. Her hair covered her face.

He rushed to hunker beside her. He turned her supine. She didn’t react. Her wrists were tied.

‘I’m taking you out of here,’ he whispered to her as he slipped an arm around her shoulders and the other under her knees.

He lifted her bodily, avoiding straightening up fully, and went along his previous steps out of the room. But he was forced to move more slowly to avoid running the risk of her hitting her head against some edge or her hair ending up too close to the flames.

Holding her tight, he walked along the railing to get to the stairs. In the few seconds he’d spent to enter and exit the room, the fire had spread further. The smoke accumulating against the blazing ceiling almost pushed on him.

The right sheet of the curtain before the top of the staircase broke away from the rod, going down to the floor and taking along the flames engulfing it.

Eric coughed as, in a sort of apnoea, he stepped on the flaming cloth and then started to descend the stairs.

He had to move sideways, sidling along the wall. He could feel a burning pain in his left shoulder. Some ash, ejected by the falling curtain, must have reached him, allowing a little fire to catch on his shirt’s cotton.

He mentally thanked his good luck that he’d decided not to wear something synthetic today.

Eventually, his foot landed on the bottom of the flight. The air down there was more breathable than upstairs, but that was the only upside he could see in the situation. As soon as he walked past the living room door, he found out that the fires from each single piece of furniture had mostly merged, leaving just a narrow passageway to him.

He lifted Miriam’s shoulders so that her head leant on his chest, then squeezing every last ounce of energy that the shortage of oxygen allowed his muscles, he ran across the room, with flames brushing on his hips and head.

‘This way!’

Halfway through his run, he caught sight of Mills’s image standing out at the end of the fire corridor. A white cloud was generated by the sergeant. He was tinkering with a fire extinguisher to clear a path by the front door.

As Eric reached the other man, the latter backed off, aiming a jet at one side and then at the other, until they passed the threshold and started running side by side on the dirt path, with Mills patting him on the shoulder to kill the last flame.

Once they reached a certain safe distance from the house, Eric laid Miriam down on the damp grass. He brushed her hair off her face again.

Kneeling, he bent over her to pat her face, but he couldn’t get any reaction from her. He couldn’t see whether she was breathing because she was still wearing a bulletproof vest and a thin jacket on it.

Without wasting any more time, he untied the piece of rope binding her wrists and started removing her jacket, assisted by Mills, who was on the ground on the other side of the woman, then tore open the Velcro of the bulletproof vest, and took it off from her head. Finally he moved closer to her, his head cocked to one side, so that his line of sight was at her chest height.

It didn’t expand or contract.

He observed her mouth. Despite the soot, he could make out a slight lividity in her lips.

He immediately tilted her head backwards, putting his palm on her brow and pushing her chin upwards. Then he placed his hands on her chest and started cardiac massage.

While counting, Eric’s mind, still blurred by the exhalations, recalled from his memory the remaining steps of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The first and last time he’d done that was ten years ago, on a cyclist who’d been involved in a car accident he’d witnessed. And in that case, he’d succeeded in resuscitating the injured man, although the latter had died at the hospital some hours later.

He must do it once again. He had to. He couldn’t lose her.

After thirty compressions, he opened Miriam’s lips to make sure her airway was free, then he closed her nose and blew slowly into her mouth. Her chest rose.

He repeated that, then resumed the cardiac massage.

‘Come on, Miriam, fight!’ One on the other, fingers interlocked, Eric’s joined hands pushed with a constant rhythm. ‘I’m not letting you go.’ Through a veil of tears, he could see his daughter’s body stir because of his push. He shook his head, and a tear fell off his chin then landed on her neck.

At that moment, Miriam’s face had a spasm, and a cough escaped her mouth while her eyes cracked open, revealing a glimpse of white, shining as it reflected the light from the closest street lamp.

Eric withdrew his hands, and he too resumed breathing deeply. ‘Miriam, can you hear me? I’m here.’ He caressed her cheek.

Miriam’s chest was going up and down quickly, then the pace became slower. Her eyelids went up, revealing her irises. Her eyes turned around until they stopped on Eric.

He smiled at her. ‘I’m here,’ he repeated. ‘It’s all right.’ He picked up her jacket and, once rolled into a kind of pillow, he placed it under her head.

Miriam was alert. Her face relaxed, her lips moved, but no sound came out.

‘Don’t strain yourself. An ambulance is coming.’

‘I could hear you calling me.’

Eric felt a touch on his knee as Miriam’s right arm rose. He took her hand in his. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mills stand up. As he glanced at the sergeant, he received a nod.

Miriam squeezed his fingers, getting his attention back. ‘I couldn’t answer, but … I knew you would find me.’ A faint smile brightened her face.

He bent to kiss her hand and nodded, shedding more tears.

‘Forgive me. I said things …’ Miriam’s voice trailed off, and she shook her head. ‘I love you.’

A sigh escaped Eric’s mouth as he smiled at her. Then he lowered to kiss her on her brow. ‘There’s nothing to forgive.’

His girl was safe. That little devil who’d shown up in his life twenty-two years ago, giving him a purpose in his darkest hour, didn’t hate him. In the last eleven months, he’d really feared that was possible. The mere thought of it had thrown him into despair, but it was nothing compared to the abyss of pain into which he would’ve fallen if she’d died.

He stayed by her, sitting on the grass, while moisture made its way through the fabric of his trousers, and holding her hand until he heard sirens blaring in distance.

A fire engine ventured onto the dirt track. The local residents, some wearing dressing gowns, were congregating by the three police cars. All of them held smartphones and were filming the fire brigade. A few of them were certainly streaming live on some social network.

None of this mattered to Eric, whose mind wandered as his sight made sure Miriam was awake. There was a nasty wound on her brow, covered in clotted blood, but he knew she must have suffered a blow to the back of her head, too.

That last day had been full of emotions that had shaken him to his core. He’d taken so many things for granted. Like the fact he had all the time in the world to wait for Miriam to forgive him. The fragility of her life and that of the people he loved had never been so clear to him as it was right now. He couldn’t afford the luxury of waiting when he desired something, because he wasn’t able to determine how long he’d been allowed to. Too often in the past, all he’d done was to survive, guilt-ridden, letting such negative feelings steal his happiness, nullifying all the good he’d done to deserve it.

The time had come for him to stop waiting.

A shadow was cast on Miriam’s chest, followed by the appearance of a gloved hand belonging to a paramedic in Eric’s field of vision.

The newcomer placed an oxygen mask on her mouth. ‘We’ll take it from here, no worries.’

Eric nodded and carefully laid Miriam’s hand on her belly. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ He stood up to allow room for the other paramedic carrying a stretcher. He turned to the latter. ‘She hit her head twice more than an hour ago. She might have a concussion.’

‘Okay. Don’t worry.’

He moved to Miriam’s feet, where he was intercepted by another emergency operator, a woman. ‘I’m fine.’ He shook a hand in denial. ‘Take care of her.’

‘My colleagues already are.’ She smiled. ‘Let me at least check you out, just in case.’ She stretched out an arm to show him the open ambulance. ‘Then have someone see to those burns at the hospital.’ With the other hand, she was pointing at his sore shoulder.

‘Okay,’ he conceded. While looking at her round, friendly face, his attention was drawn by two people coming forward after entering the police perimeter. First he recognised Stern’s skinny physique, then his gaze focused on the figure preceding the young forensic investigator, and his heart gave a jolt. ‘Give me a moment.’ He gestured at the woman. ‘Then I promise I’ll be right over.’

He could barely take two steps before Adele flung herself into his arms. ‘Oh my God, Eric, are you okay?’ She pulled away from his shoulders and started stroking his hair. As she stared at him, her lips quivered.

Eric smiled at her. ‘Better than it seems.’

He saw her sigh and relax her face, then her eyes turned beyond him. They widened. Her fingers contracted. ‘Miriam?’

Now Eric was holding back a laugh. She’d come straight to him, although the one in danger since the beginning had been Miriam, and she’d remembered that only now. But after all, it was an improvement. In other times, she would completely forget to ask. She wouldn’t even notice the other woman.

‘She’s in good hands.’ He slipped his onto Adele’s back, making her look at him again.

He was so happy she’d come. It was like she’d listened to his thoughts and was giving him a chance to turn them into actions now, without waiting any longer.

Adele opened her mouth; her face darkened. ‘Eric.’ She swallowed. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

This time, Eric laughed. ‘No, no. I know you and Stern were up to something.’ She shook his head in denial. ‘But it doesn’t matter now.’ He gave her a quick kiss, and when he pulled away, he met her doubtful look. ‘You’ll tell me tomorrow.’ He hesitated. ‘There’s something else I need to know.’

A flicker of concern came across Adele’s face.

Eric was almost tempted to ask what was swirling about in her head, but didn’t want to stop what he’d started. He had to go all the way. Anything else could wait. ‘Will you marry me?’

Adele’s body flinched, and an inarticulate sound filled with surprise escaped her mouth.

On any other occasion, Eric would’ve been amused by that reaction, but now he was nervous. Until he’d asked her that question, he’d been sure he knew the answer. Now the doubts assailed him.

Since their story had begun, they’d never talked about that, not even in the last year during which they’d been happy, and Eric had had the impression that their relationship was finally going towards building something. But after discovering the real Adele, he’d put aside the idea of marrying her that, because of the enthusiasm of falling in love, had imposed with force in his mind since the beginning, although she’d made it clear to him she didn’t want to rush.

What did she want now?

Of course she considered him the centre of her world, but what existed between them was anything but conventional. Perhaps in her way of focusing on the present, on what they’d reached at last, she hadn’t contemplated that outcome. The two of them were inextricably tied by the unspeakable secret they kept. What use was marrying him?

Adele’s temporary paralysis was broken by the appearance of a tear, which started rolling down her cheek. The corners of her mouth rose. Another sound, almost a gasp, broke free from her as she pulled away a hand to place it on her lips. ‘Eric …’ Her fingers slipped down, stopping mid-air and revealing a big smile. ‘Of course I’ll marry you.’

The shiver that ran through Eric’s body as he heard those words was immediately tamed by Adele’s passionate kiss, which took him away from the burning on his shoulder, from the unpleasant oily sensation of the soot covering him from head to toe, and from the equally uncomfortable one of his moist trousers on his skin, and from all the commotion surrounding them.

When it stopped, it felt like a trauma, but the temporary sense of loss was filled with the expression of pure joy shining on her face. He couldn’t remember he’d ever seen one that looked so genuine.

‘I am.’ Adele laughed. ‘I mean, I think I am.’

‘You are what?’ Her hilarity was infecting Eric.

She moved her face closer to his. ‘Happy.’