Emilia’s seatbelt clicks into place, her thoughts whirring, a spinning top turning ceaselessly. She glances over at Ciaran, his eyes wide as he stares out through the windscreen.
‘I just don’t understand,’ she mutters. ‘How weren’t they captured on CCTV or something in the hours leading up to the confession? We would have known that they were alive when the confession was posted!’
‘Isabella went out with her friends the day before,’ Ciaran says. ‘And that’s the last time she was captured on CCTV. After that she was with him, at his house. There was nothing.’
‘And Hayley and Luca?’
‘The same – the last they’d been seen by anyone was the day before when they went to lunch with friends. After that they weren’t captured anywhere. They just disappeared. So when the confession was posted it looked like what it said it was – a confession.’ Ciaran looks over at her. ‘Something else happened while you were speaking to Isabella,’ he says.
‘What is it?’ She glances down at her phone again. Still loading.
‘The coroner … from the angle of the shot he’s determined that Luca Franco did not commit suicide.’
‘What?’
‘He was shot by someone else. And not just that … He’s been dead for some time. He died around the same time as Hayley. They were most likely killed together.’
Emilia’s stomach lurches. She’s always thought that Luca being the main suspect was too simple, too convenient. But she had been hoping – at least then, they would have known something. Without Luca in their sights, they are running blind. ‘So it was never him?’
He nods. ‘But now that we know that the confessions pre-date the murders, we can try to protect whoever is next.’
Whoever is next … When will the next confession come?
Emilia unlocks her phone, quickly typing theconfessionroom.com into her search bar.
It loads slowly, the signal lagging.
A shrill ring pierces the silence. Ciaran’s phone.
And it’s as if she knows it then, before he even answers the call – Emilia knows what is coming.
‘Jones,’ he says abruptly.
‘We need you on alert,’ a voice says as the phone connects to the car’s loudspeaker. ‘The next confession has just been posted.’
‘Who are they, Rory?’
Emilia holds her breath, the world outside the car suddenly blurring, nothing else except the words that have just been uttered being of any consequence.
‘Freddie and Joseph Henley,’ Rory says. ‘Brothers.’
Emilia glances back down at her phone, her eyes swimming with tears. The page has loaded. And it is there, the words set out in black and white. The next set of fodder announced for the masses.
Two more names. Brothers ensnared by the Confession Room.
Two potential victims who, at this very moment, are probably still alive.