NIGHT SHIFTS AND MOVES OVER London, deepening the shadows and creeping down rain-drizzled streets.
Laughton goes home to a closed bedroom door and no response to her tentative knock. She leans in, listens, and can feel her daughter’s anger radiating through the black door like a fire is raging on the other side of it.
She heads to bed, hoping her early start and trip to the gym will have bought her some sleep, which it does—for a while.
She wakes at three from a dream not of knives in school bags, or her daughter’s fury, but of Kate Miller, lying on her back. She lies awake staring up at her ceiling in the dark, her own arms outstretched like Kate Miller’s had been, wondering where the anger that violently ended Kate Miller’s life had come from. Such anger. And she realizes in the quiet dark that it’s an anger she understands and wonders if whoever killed Kate Miller was grieving too, like she still grieves.
A few miles south, Tannahill sleeps fully clothed on his sofa bed, the screen of his open laptop flicking on and off intermittently like a faulty neon sign as updates to the Miller case file continue to come in. He dreams he’s at the press conference, standing at the lectern while journalists ask questions he can’t hear but suspects are all about the woman who was killed in her own home. He has no answers to these unheard questions, but the questions keep coming anyway, just as the automated updates continue to flash up on his screen, all through the night and on into morning.
West of them both, on the far outskirts of London, a woman emerges from a glass-and-steel building and hurries through drizzle to a waiting Uber, dragging a large suitcase behind her. She sinks into the back seat of the car and feels her travel fatigue settle on her like a dirty duvet. Apart from a few snatched hours on the plane, Shonagh O’Brien has now been awake for almost twenty-nine hours. The driver stows her case in the back, then drives off, heading into Central London. She watches Heathrow slide away outside. A plane takes off, its lights twinkling against the predawn sky. She wonders where it’s going and has a sudden urge to be on it.
Funny.
Since discovering Mike was missing, her entire focus has been getting back to London, but now she’s here all she wants to do is run away again. Some of this stems from her brief but terrifying glance at the huge amount of news coverage now swirling around Kate Miller’s murder and the continued search for Mike.
Manhunt—that’s what most of the papers are calling it, like he’s an escaped lunatic or a monster on the loose.
She checks her phone for messages. She has called him whenever she could at every step of her journey, telling him she was coming and how long it would take her to get back to London. She has still heard nothing back.
On the flight back—in the cramped, stand-by, economy seat that was all she could get—she had played out a million scenarios in her head about what this silence might mean and what she should do when she got back to England. Her instinct was to go to the flat and see if he’d been there, or was maybe there still, hiding out, frightened and confused. But then the image of the bloody room on that video clip would flash back into her head and she would think maybe she should call the police instead, tell them what she knew and where she thought Mike might be. Not to turn him in, of course, but because if he hadn’t killed Kate—and he can’t have done, he just can’t—then he needed to stop hiding. He needed to turn himself in and start helping the police find who really did do it, and the sooner he did that the better.
But there was also something else she kept turning over in her mind.
As the “other woman”—horrible term—she had naturally entertained thoughts about Mike possibly leaving his wife for her one day. And though, in these quiet fantasies, she had never imagined anything as horrible as this, there was still some detached, pragmatic part of her brain that kept whispering the inescapable truth that Kate was now out of the picture. And wouldn’t Mike cling to the woman who stood by him and helped him through all this? Wouldn’t he owe an unpayable debt to whoever came to help him, and still believed in him when the whole world seemed to be against him? Would not that man end up loving that woman far more than, say, one who called the police on him, no matter how well intentioned she might have been? Right now Mike needed her more than he ever had before and possibly ever would again, and the thought made her feel powerful.
She eventually decided—somewhere over the Middle East, when London was still several hours away—that she would go to the flat first. She would go to the flat, see if he was there, then decide what to do next. But now that the consequences of her decision are only twenty minutes in front of her, her stand-by-your-man resolve is starting to waver.
She looks up at the sky, the lights from London bouncing off low clouds and the faintest hint of the new day behind them. It will be brighter still by the time she gets to the flat, and this comforts her a little. Entering somewhere at dawn is a lot better than doing it at night. Everything is easier in daylight.
So she sinks into her seat and decides to stick with her original plan. She will go to the flat, see if Mike’s there, and if he isn’t, then she can call the police—maybe.