Darkness always seems deeper when you’re scared, the wind bites harder when you’re alone, and shadows take on nightmarish shapes when you are at your most vulnerable. Harri experienced all these accentuations when she returned home. The long dusk had turned to night and the wind had picked up and swept a broil of clouds over Staffordshire. She parked around the corner from her building and hurried along the otherwise deserted street with her front door key protruding between her index and middle fingers like a talon. The sounds of the city seemed so distant, and she felt as though she were in an isolated pocket of the world where anything might happen.
Hanley had once been an engine of the industrial world but was now a patchwork of retail parks, offices, and apartment blocks that were separated by veiny terraces of Victorian houses. They had managed to cling to the world, remnants of a prosperous time now long gone. With the demise of industry, the town had become a place in search of identity, robbed of the qualities that had once made it special. It had floundered and transformed into another sprawl of chain stores, fast-food restaurants, and branded pubs. It was the sort of place where a woman’s body could be found in an industrial bin and no one would be able to recall quite where she’d been discovered, but they’d all remember she’d been wearing a pair of Marks & Spencer boots with the heels cut off. Harri knew because she’d once attended a crime scene exactly like that. She realized she was in M&S boots, and for a dark moment she pictured Ben Elmys standing over her body, engaged in the bizarre ritual of cutting off her heels. She smiled at the absurdity of the image she’d conjured. He might be behaving strangely, but he wasn’t dangerous.
She thought she heard a noise and glanced round, but the street behind her was empty. She hurried along the pavement and gripped the key even tighter.
You’re being paranoid, she told herself as she unlocked her front door. Am I?
She tried not to think about the factoids she’d been privy to as a police officer: that most murder victims know their killer, that women were more likely to be slain by someone they were romantically involved with than a stranger, that countless incidents of stalking or acts of violence trace their roots to online relationships.
She pushed the door closed behind her and checked that it was locked, and her anxiety faded as she crossed the lobby to the mailboxes. She opened hers to find a sad collection of junk mail and leaflets. She didn’t bother taking them.
As she turned away, she became aware of something in the stairwell next to the lift. The door was ajar and there was a figure seated on the steps. He stood and pushed open the door, and Harri tensed and took a lungful of air, ready to scream. The man stepped from shadow to light, and she recognized Sabih Khan.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. One of your neighbors let me in.”
“Sab, you…” Harri trailed off and took a couple of deep breaths to settle her heart.
“What’s got you so jumpy?”
“This case,” she said, walking to the lift.
“So it’s a case now?” Sabih pressed the call button.
“Yes. The deaths of David and Elizabeth Asha.”
“I knew you were up to something,” Sabih replied. “I’m guessing your former beau, Benjamin Elmys, is the suspect.”
“It’s too early to say whether he’s a suspect, or even if there’s been a crime. I could be chasing nothing,” Harri replied. “But it feels like there’s something there.”
She didn’t even experience the slightest glimmer of betrayal when she took the most recent poem from her pocket and handed it to Sabih. Her old partner started reading as the lift opened. He followed her absently into the car, and the doors slid shut behind him.
“ ‘I long to return to that so real place / Where you took your hand in mine,’ ” he said, leaning against the doors. “How is that even possible? ‘You took your hand in mine.’ ”
Harri flushed, suddenly feeling exposed by having shared something that had clearly been intended to be private. She understood what it meant.
“I think it’s about not having a choice,” she replied, “but having a choice at the same time.”
“Okay. Whatever,” Sabih scoffed. “ ‘Your fingers traced along my arm / Drawing maps of worlds to come.’ ”
Sabih looked from Harri to the note and back again, like a West End tourist who’d been handed a flyer for a religious cult, and for a moment his mouth opened and closed wordlessly. Harri hated him in that instant. Ben Elmys might be strange, but she’d felt a depth to his words that drained away when Sabih spoke them. They sounded meaningless and tacky. She regretted giving him the poem because he was robbing her of something special and diminishing the man she loved—used to love, she corrected herself, but she wasn’t sure that was true. She wasn’t over Ben. He had seemed possessed of a soul unlike anyone else she’d ever met. He might not be perfect, but she had thought he was perfect for her. Now, in this tiny elevator, Sabih made him sound like a moody teenage poet who’d listened to too much Bon Iver.
The clunk and rumble of the elevator mechanism announced they had arrived, and the doors opened.
“I think I should arrest him for crimes against poetry,” Sabih said as they stepped out.
Harri was about to protest, but caught herself. You’re developing some sort of weird Stockholm syndrome, she told herself. He rejected you. You owe him nothing. Any love you might have felt for him has to be in the past, or you’ll never move on.
“I think it’s good,” she replied, taking the poem. She couldn’t help it. She felt she needed to defend Ben.
Sabih followed her along the corridor to her apartment.
“He’s been dreaming about you,” Sabih said.
She’d surmised as much, but having someone else articulate it made the prospect sound unsavory.
“His old boss said he was away with the fairies,” Harri said as she unlocked her front door. “But I don’t think he is. I think there’s something else going on.”
“Guilt?” Sabih asked.
“I don’t think so,” Harri replied, wondering whether her feelings for Ben were clouding her judgment.
They stepped inside her little flat and she switched on the lights. She ignored his raised eyebrows when he registered that the place was still a mess.
“Whatever the cause, I’m not surprised his brain’s on the fritz. He was in a car crash when he was twenty. Three of his friends were killed.”
Harri realized why Sabih was here. He had the background she’d asked for, but her former colleague’s diligence took second place to an immediate sense of pity for Ben. No one could experience something like that and remain unchanged.
“Benjamin Elmys was the only survivor,” Sabih continued. “In a coma for three months. Went off to study in Australia. Came back to the UK a little over ten years ago. Maybe the accident tripped a fuse.”
Sabih grinned and tapped his temple, but his smile fell when he realized Harri wasn’t in the mood for cheap cracks. He reached into his pocket and produced a USB drive, which he placed on the kitchen counter, between a dirty plate and a grimy glass.
“It’s all here, along with everything I could find on Elizabeth and David Asha. Elizabeth died of cancer. David died a few weeks later. Fell from—or jumped off—the cliffs outside Barmouth, near a village called Arthog. I spoke to one of the uniforms involved in the investigation. PC Simon Lake. Good lad. A witness, Margery Allen, was walking her dog, saw Asha pacing around the cliff edge. The body was carried out to sea—never recovered.”
“He just left his kid?” Harri asked in disbelief. What could make a father so desperate he’d be willing to inflict such trauma on a child?
Sabih shrugged. “Well, we don’t know that he did, deliberately. The witness didn’t see him go over the edge, no firm evidence of suicide, so it’s death by misadventure, remember? Either way, the boy ended up in the custody of your weirdo.”
Harri winced at the word. “Don’t call him that.”
“Sorry, I thought you two were over.”
“We are, but still… Don’t call him that.”
“Well, whatever he is, he holds everything in trust for the boy.”
“And if anything happens to Elliot?” Harri asked.
Sabih shrugged. “Why are you so interested in these people?”
Harri grabbed the copy of Happiness: A New Way of Life from the sofa and opened it to the page with Beth Asha’s message. She handed it to Sabih.
“ ‘He’s trying to kill me’?”
“I bought this in Nantwich. It’s an old library book,” Harri explained. “The last person to borrow it was Beth Asha.”
Sabih whistled and shook his head. “Have you lost your mind? This is why you’re digging into these poor people’s lives? You bought an old book and now you think you’re solving a murder? Come on, Kealty. This isn’t normal. You can’t build a case off a few scribbles!”
Smoldering embers of resentment caught on the wind of Harri’s anger. His words hurt all the more because they were colored by truth. The message in the book was a tenuous reason to pursue an investigation. Would she have taken it quite this far if Ben Elmys hadn’t answered the door? Would she be treating it like a case if the man who’d spurned her hadn’t been involved? Was she looking for answers? Some reason to explain why he’d rejected her? Or did she want revenge?
“Normal? What’s normal? I’ve lost everything, Sab. My career, my so-called friends on the force, my life. What am I supposed to do? What exactly is normal for someone like me?”
Sabih closed the book and tossed it onto the sofa. He took her shoulders and squeezed gently.
“I’m sorry, Harri. It’s all my fault, but this isn’t what you need,” he said. “You can’t go poking into people’s lives. You’re not police. Not anymore.”
His words couldn’t have caused greater hurt, and Harri trembled as she fought back tears of shame. Had she been suppressing her feelings? Was that what the Elmys investigation was? A chance to play pretend? To stall the reality that the job that had defined her for so many years was no longer hers? She still harbored the hope she could get it back. If only she could find the man who’d filmed her that night.
Was she clutching at straws? The poster girl for lost causes? Was that why she was investigating Elizabeth Asha’s death? Did she secretly hope she and Ben might have a future together? Or were her true motives darker? It was a rare twist of fate that put a man who’d spurned her in such a position. Did she just want to see if she could make him suffer for the pain he’d caused her?
“I’m sorry,” Sabih said. “That was harsh.”
“I’m lost, Sab,” she replied, finally breaking down. “I’m really lost.”
As her tears fell, Sabih pulled her close, and she cried into his shoulder.
“I’ll help you. Whatever you need. I owe you that, at least. It’s going to be okay,” he said, but she really didn’t believe him.