JOHN REES DOES NOT DIE that night.
The crash team manages to restart his heart on the third attempt, then they wheel him away at speed to the ICU, leaving Laughton staring at the space where his bed had been in a room that feels suddenly empty and uncomfortably quiet, like she’s in the eye of a hurricane that is still turning all around her.
Laughton glances at the ancient laptop lying open on the floor next to the box file, its screen casting a dull, malevolent glow across the box and the clean floor. She checks the time on her phone. It’s late, or early depending on how you look at it.
If you want to call me to talk about anything, then call, Tannahill had said. Doesn’t matter what time it is. Just call.
She calls him and he answers on the first ring.
“Hey,” he says.
“My father had another heart attack,” she says.
“Jesus. Is he OK?”
“I don’t know. They took him away.”
“You want me to come over?”
“I opened the box,” she says. Tannahill says nothing. “I found the laptop. I was talking to him about it all when he . . . when his heart . . . I think maybe . . .”
“I’m coming over,” Tannahill says. “Don’t talk to anyone else about any of this until I’m there, OK?”
“You knew,” she says, a statement, not a question. “You said I could call you anytime because you knew I’d open the box. You knew I’d open it and figure out the same things you did.”
A long pause stretches out, filled only by the soft hiss of air piping in through the ceiling vents.
“So what do you want to do?” Tannahill says, his voice low and neutral.
His question takes Laughton by surprise because the answer is obvious, they should put the laptop into evidence and she should write up a statement detailing how her father confessed to the murders of Mike Murphy and Kathryn Warren, that’s what they should do. But as the silence lengthens and she doesn’t say any of this, other answers start to form.
It is Tannahill who finally breaks the silence. “At the moment,” he says, his voice still low, “all the evidence, the official evidence, unequivocally points to Adam Evans being the killer. His fingerprints are at every murder scene and we know Adam Evans is a killer because he murdered Brian Slade and clearly intended to kill you and Gracie, so he’s going away for life anyway. Now, maybe if he hadn’t killed Slade his defense team might have questioned how one single fingerprint conveniently showed up at both Mark Murphy’s and Kathryn Warren’s murder scenes. Maybe they also would have suggested that someone with enough forensic know-how could have collected Adam Evans’s prints from a discarded Coke can or something, then planted them at the scene—an ex-cop maybe, or even a serving one. But that’s a very serious accusation, and they’d need way more than just conjecture before they made it. They’d need solid evidence that someone else was involved, something concrete, something that unequivocally ties the murder victims to a new suspect.”
Laughton’s eyes drop down to the laptop lying open on the floor.
“As it stands,” Tannahill continues, his voice so low it’s now almost a whisper, “you and I are the only two people who know about the laptop, apart from your father. And your father is . . . well, your father is dying.”
Laughton waits for him to say something else, but he lets the silence finish his thought and she realizes what he’s doing. He’s outlining the story already written but allowing her to decide how it ends.
“Why kill Mark Murphy?” she asks, holding up the one loose thread still untied in her mind. “I can understand his hatred for Kathryn Warren, but killing him makes no sense.”
“That man in the photograph,” Tannahill murmurs, “the one in the commander’s uniform. He was an old friend of your father’s, career copper, no family, helped your dad a lot after your mother died and you . . . well, when you were no longer around. Anyway, he retired a few years back, then developed an aggressive form of Alzheimer’s, went downhill very quickly. He died in one of Mark Murphy’s care homes.”
Laughton nods and closes her eyes. Normally when the last piece of a puzzle drops into place on a case she’s been obsessing about, she feels a rare and momentary sense of peace. But there is no peace here. She has spent most of her life hoping for an opportunity to ruin her father, and now here it is. All she has to do is her job, put the evidence she has on record and let justice do its thing.
Justice.
Would that be justice?
She recalls the pain of the last conversation with her father, the confession of a dying man telling her what he’d done and why he’d done it. She looks down at the folder containing the evidence of her father’s undiminished love for her, a ghost parent looking out for her the only way he could because it was the only way she would let him. She had always believed she’d done everything on her own, prided herself on it even. Now she realizes he had been there all the time, watching over her, looking after her the best he could, like she tried to do for Gracie. He even killed for her, like any parent would do given the right or wrong circumstances, like she would have done for Gracie, like she would have killed Adam Evans if someone hadn’t dragged her off him.
“So what do you want to do?” Tannahill asks.
Laughton stares at the empty space where her father had so recently been. “I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t know.”