Paul thrust open his living-room window. A rush of night air hit his bruised face, widened his drowsy eyes. He slapped his cheeks to revive himself. His daughter and his wife were somewhere out there in this long, strange night. Paul had to expand his tunnel vision now, try to see the things his guilty conscience might have obscured.
Looking down at the newspaper cutting in his hand, he scoured the faded type yet again.
A poisoning, back in the nineties. The reporter had made a big deal of the controversial case: a young woman accused of murdering an older man.
He threw it down on the coffee table and flipped through the photos that had also been scattered in the hall. One showed a teenage girl with bobbed dark hair and a confident smile. The same girl was in another picture, standing between an overweight woman and a bearded man.
And then there was the birth certificate. The paper was thin as he lifted it, trembling slightly in the breeze from the window. This document was the most baffling, most troubling.
Because the date of birth was the same as Steph’s. And yet the name wasn’t.
Had somebody left these items, deliberately, to be found? Were they a clue, a warning?
Their family liaison officer stuck his head around the living-room door. Paul saw his eyes flicker again over his cuts and bruises. Since he’d called George and asked him to come straight over, Paul had managed to dodge all questions about his injuries. He knew he’d have to answer them sooner or later, but right now there were more urgent things.
“I’ve asked the team to look for any information about Kate Thomas or Rebecca Fielding,” George said. “They’re looking into the case described in the article too. And we’ve put out a search for Steph. The helicopter’s looking for her and Freya now.”
Paul stared toward the window, at the starless sky bearing down on the suburban rooftops. Was that the helicopter’s beam he could see, sweeping over the neighborhood, illuminating its nocturnal secrets?
Where are you, Steph?
Who are you, Steph?
He couldn’t help hearing Nathalie’s voice, asking that same question of him, like a reversed echo through time. Couldn’t stop seeing mirrors across present and past: Steph and Nathalie, Freya and Billie . . .
Steph and Kate?
Striding along the corridor into their bedroom, Paul stared at his wife’s clothes in the still-open wardrobe, touching familiar sleeves and collars. His marriage was in these textures: years of feeling this silk shirt brush against his skin as he kissed her, or hooking his fingers into the belt loops of these trousers to draw her close, or vaguely registering the softness of a sweater as he sat next to her on the sofa, Freya on his other side.
It wasn’t possible he’d been oblivious to something so big all these years. Yet fragments of memory were waking: questions that had stirred before, but had always been put back to sleep.
Paul had been obsessed with the life he’d had before meeting Steph and having Freya. The things he’d been forced to hide from them. Had that blinded him to the fact that Steph was evasive about her own past? Had he failed to see that he wasn’t the only one capable of wearing different masks?
If he’d learned anything these last few horrific days, it was that the stories he’d told himself about his life—or others had told him—couldn’t be relied on. They weren’t rigid but fluid, different perspectives flowing alongside one another. He hardly recognized himself anymore. Felt he’d changed as much in the last week as he had during three years undercover. But Steph was supposed to be the constant. His anchor.
“Paul?” George reappeared. “The team’s found some information.”
Paul whipped around. “Yes?”
George passed him his iPad and Paul scanned the email on the screen. Epilepsy medication . . . trial . . . disappearance from the record . . . His vision was fuzzy, like when he was tired and should be wearing his reading glasses, that film across his eyeballs.
But something was winking at him through the mist, like a single point of light.
George’s phone rang. He gestured apologetically and moved into the kitchen with it. As Paul continued to stare around his bedroom, the home phone also trilled. He broke from his trance and dashed into the kitchen to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Is that Paul?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
“Emma Brighton.”
Their downstairs neighbor? She spoke softly, struggling to make herself heard over a background din that sounded, from Paul’s recent experience, very much like a hospital.
“You’re home,” she said, seeming relieved. “Steph was afraid you were gone too.”
“She’s gone.”
“I think I know where she is.”
Paul clenched the receiver. “Seriously?”
“And I . . . I think you need to get to her before the police do.”
His heartbeat ramped up. He listened for a moment to check George was still occupied in another room, then pressed the phone close to his lips. “Where is she?”
Emma recited an address. Paul grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote it down. He’d never heard of the place, knew nobody who lived in that area. “Why would Steph be there?”
“I don’t know. She gave me the address yesterday. Asked me to nudge the police toward it in their search for Freya—”
“Freya?” He couldn’t stop the soar of his voice, and feared he’d alerted George, but he could hear that he was still deep in his own conversation. “Is she connected to this place too?”
“I’m not sure how. Steph didn’t seem to want anyone to know about it. But then Freya’s coat was found and things changed and I . . .”
Emma’s words were fragmenting, but it wasn’t the line: It was the thundering that had started in Paul’s skull.
“Freya’s coat was found?” he interrupted her.
There was a moment of silence. “You didn’t know?”
Paul gripped the back of a kitchen chair. “When? Where?”
“Yesterday. In the countryside, somewhere near Slough, I think. It was . . . buried.”
Paul’s breath left him. Why hadn’t anybody told him this? Presumably George and the other officers had assumed he knew. Paul began pacing with the phone, short distances back and forth. “Buried?” he echoed, and suddenly his cheeks were wet, his gut was hollow.
“I’m sorry,” Emma said. “It—it had blood on it. But that doesn’t mean . . . There was no . . .” He could almost feel her scrabbling for the right things to say. “God, I’m just so sorry.”
She sounded like she was crying too. Paul closed his eyes. Why did his neighbor seem so invested in his daughter’s fate all of a sudden? Everything was confused. He could hear George wrapping up his call. There was barely any time, but all he could think about now was a grave with his daughter’s jacket in it.
The only concrete thing was the address on the paper. It was a new focal point. A shred of hope. Paul shook his head forcefully, dislodging the despair that was trying to overpower it. He hung up on Emma and tiptoed out of the flat.
Outside the house, just as he was debating how best to reach the address without his car, he ran into his parents.
“Paul!” His mum threw her arms around his neck, her feet almost leaving the ground with the force of her hug and their difference in height. “Where have you been? Are you hurt? What’s happened?”
He disentangled himself. Her questions accelerated and he had to cut her off. “Mum, Dad, I’m sorry but I have to go.”
“Don’t disappear again, Paul,” his mum said, with fervor, almost anger. “Stay here with us. We need each other, and Freya needs us all.”
“I’m sorry. Can I take your car? I’ll explain later. Just please stall George for now. Make something up . . .”
“Paul!” His mum looked anguished, but she relinquished her car keys into his shaking hands.