Porter was awake before his alarm sounded, lying back as he watched the curtains brighten.
His sleep had been fitful, a memory jolting him in his sleep. For a few minutes he tried to reclaim it, wanting to know if it was something important that had always been buried in his subconscious, an answer in plain sight but ignored by him.
Nothing came, but it cost him his sleep.
It was how he’d been throughout his career and it had got worse once he’d retired. There weren’t many murders in Brampton, but he’d rarely felt a success whenever he locked someone up. For every win, there came a lost life, so he was just piggybacking misery.
The ones where there’d been no resolution haunted him the most. The late-night reveller found in a pool of his own blood on the seafront one morning. The woman found stripped and strangled in a park. The pensioner found beaten on his living room floor, whatever valuables he had left plundered. He walked past the homes of their loved ones sometimes, consumed by memories of their distress as he sat, helpless, unable to find answers, offering merely unfulfilled promises that he would catch whoever did it.
That was all he ever sought to do: provide answers. Give them a villain, a figure to hate. There was the cliché about needing closure, but it was true. They needed to know, because they needed to target their anger and sorrow somewhere.
His mind went to her. Jayne Brett, she said she was called. First Mark Roberts. Now her. What would she uncover? He needed to know more. He could call in favours, find out more about her.
Linda stirred, lifting her head, one eye open, bleary-eyed, her dark hair across her face. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Thinking, that’s all.’
She flopped her head back onto the pillow. ‘It’s too early. What do you have to think about?’
He didn’t respond. It was his own fault, because he’d never shared his job when he came home. The blood and the sadness stayed locked away in the police station. Or so he made out.
He threw back the covers and made his way to the landing, stopping to collect some clothes, blinking as he turned on the light. ‘I’ll take Freddie out.’
He closed the door and headed downstairs, the house coming alive to the sound of claws on a wooden hallway, excited pants at an earlier walk than normal.
Once outside, he yawned and stretched. He needed the solitude of an early morning. The air was crisp and the sky blue.
Freddie ran ahead as he made his way to the clifftop, his usual walk, and his mind drifted back more than twenty years, to the day when he’d brought in Rodney.