The morning arrived as a stream of sunlight through the open curtains.
Jack squinted as he opened his eyes. He had slept downstairs, curled up under a blanket on the sofa so that he would hear the noise of anyone trying to break in. There was someone in front of him. Dark hair, dimples, a smile, holding a cup of coffee towards him.
He sat up and rubbed his face back to life. He took the coffee. ‘Thank you.’
‘You make a poor guard dog,’ Laura said. ‘I came in last night and you didn’t budge.’
Jack grunted. It still felt too early. He checked his watch. Nine o’clock.
‘How’s Bobby,’ he said, the coffee bringing him to life.
‘I’ve just been to Martha’s so that I could take him to school, and he’s fine, but we need to be careful. We don’t want him to be scared when he’s here.’
Jack nodded.
‘And I brought you a paper,’ she said, and handed him the Blackley Telegraph.
He looked at the headline, large and bold, next to a photograph of Jane Roberts. Cop Flops Secrets.
He threw it onto the coffee table. ‘Things have changed now,’ he said.
‘I know, but thank you for the photograph,’ Laura said. ‘He might have revealed too much of himself now, because we can focus on the emails. We can chase the IP addresses, see where he accessed the email account, and the photograph has been sent to the technical people. Digital photographs have hidden attributes. Time and date. Make and model of camera. If he registered the camera, it might even have his name.’
Jack smiled. At least some good might come out of the messages.
‘I’m going in now,’ Laura said, and she bent down to kiss him.
Her lips felt soft on his, and for a moment he wished that she didn’t have to go, so that they could do what they used to do before she went back onto the murder team: just relax, spend lazy days together when she was between shifts, with Bobby at school. It wasn’t like that anymore.
Then he remembered the photograph of Jane Roberts, and the ones he had seen pinned up in the Incident Room, and Laura’s near miss with the van.
‘Go catch the bastard,’ he said, and he watched as Laura left the house.
Once the sound of her car had faded into the distance, he picked up the copy of the newspaper and looked at the front page again. As he read the story, he saw Dolby had stuck to his part of the deal – that it would go in unaltered. Harry English will have made some alterations with the version in the London Star, and it will be tucked away inside somewhere, but anything might help.
Jack’s knees creaked as he got to his feet and he hobbled over to his laptop. He jabbed at the power button, frustrated, not in the mood to look through the online newspapers, but he wanted to know how far the article had spread onto the internet.
It seemed like a long wait, but eventually the whirring of the computer stopped and he skimmed through the usual sites. There was nothing new so far.
He clicked on the email software, and he saw that there was a new message. He took a deep breath as he leaned forward to read.
You’ve done some good work, Jack Garrett, but you know now that you’ve got it wrong. So wrong. And remember: I know your name. You don’t know mine. Knowledge is power. Remember Emma.
Jack slumped onto a chair and glanced towards the window. There were green hills and nothing else. And he knew that at night there was nothing but unrelenting darkness, easy shelter for anyone who wanted to approach.
Rupert Barker looked along the hallway when he heard his newspapers flop onto the mat.
He had taken The Times ever since university. It had changed over the years, with more celebrity and sports news, and the large sheets had shrunk to tabloid size, but he still enjoyed reading it with his morning coffee. Since his retirement though, he had added one of the red tops, just for fun, a bit of light relief. He would skim the headlines and smile, and then he would relax in his chair with The Times, and watch the morning slide away.
Retirement was hard. Thirty years as a child psychologist, speaking to the frightened and vulnerable all over Lancashire. But then it eventually caught up with him, the relentless plough through childhood problems, and so he gave it up, to spend his days reading or dozing in front of his fire.
He went into the kitchen and flicked on the coffee machine, almost tripping over his cat, a scruffy black-and-white thing with a gnarled right ear. The water started to gurgle through the ground beans and he took a deep breath and smiled. The smell of fresh coffee always signalled a good morning. The problem and the pleasure of retirement was this: so much time to fill, but so much enjoyment in trying to fill it.
He groaned as he picked up the papers from the mat and then shuffled back to his living room, a jumble of books and old memories, so dusty that it made the noses of visitors twitch. But it was his sanctuary, where he knew he would see out his life, reading and remembering in a high-backed chair in front of the fire. It had been a few weeks since he’d had to light it, the summer just starting now, but he still pointed his chair towards it. He glanced over to the garden, and saw that the cherry blossom from his neighbour’s tree was tumbling across the lawn and the flowerbeds were starting to explode with colour. The only sounds were the chirp of garden birds eating from a nut feeder hanging from one of his trees and the creak of the weather vane on the church tower behind his house.
He reached down for his glasses and lifted them onto his nose, and then started to flick through the red top.
He chuckled at the first few stories, footballers’ tales, massage parlours and mistresses, the press getting all vexed at overpaid young men enjoying themselves too much. He was flicking quickly, the pages making him smile, just as he’d hoped. Then he saw a headline, Cop Flops Secrets.
He started to read it, a story of an anonymous police officer sending emails to the press about a murder on the other side of the county. He shook his head. Someone was going to lose their job, and for what? Some work-place grievance?
Then he stopped. He felt a jolt in his chest, winded, and his fingers gripped the side of the newspaper. His mind flashed back through the years, like a video on fast rewind.
He put the paper down on his lap and looked out of the window again.
The story had taken him back to just one boy, the one who had always troubled him. The abuse-driven anger he had always understood, but it had seemed to be more than that in his case. It was his coldness that stuck with him, the matter-of-fact way he talked about what he had done. A direct stare, a tilt of the head.
He looked at the story again, and the memories from twenty years earlier became louder. The coffee machine bleeped that it had finished, but Rupert ignored it. He was thinking of something else now. Or rather, someone else. A quiet and withdrawn child, his hands on his lap, a flick of light hair, no emotions on his face.
Jane Roberts was found strangled, with her mouth and other orifices filled with dirt and leaves.
He glanced out of the window once more, but he thought the garden looked untidy this time, the cherry blossom cluttering his lawn and weeds emerging in the gaps between the flowers.