I didn’t reply. After a moment, she moved her hand.
“This is me, by the way.”
I looked to the side and realized we were standing outside a café on one of the main roads. I’d been so engrossed in talking to her that I hadn’t paid attention to the world around us.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said. “But thank you.”
“Hey—anytime.”
And then she walked inside, leaving me alone on the sidewalk, my arm still tingling from the contact. Her words stayed with me too, and I knew she was right. Yes, I could pack my things into the car and be gone from here. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do. But not what I needed to do.
And I realized there was another question that needed to be asked about the doll. Not just why and who, but how? I didn’t know what had happened to the other three dolls, but I couldn’t remember getting rid of mine. I supposed it should have been in the box along with everything else from back then. But it hadn’t been. And if the doll that had been delivered to me was my own, then how had someone else gotten hold of it?
There was only one answer I could think of.
They had to have been in the house at some point.
TWENTY-FIVE
It was midmorning when the autopsy results for Billy Roberts finally came through, and Amanda already felt dead on her feet. Hotels did not agree with her. Or was it the other way around? The thought momentarily baffled her. Then she shook her head, took a sip of cheap coffee, and tried to concentrate on the screen in front of her.
It wasn’t easy. One of the many things she had learned from this case was that dreams occurred in the shallowest part of sleep. Last night, the uncomfortable mattress had done its best to keep her there and had helped to supply a wealth of them.
The nightmare, of course.
Given some of the horrors Amanda had witnessed in her career, she might have expected any bad dreams to be grim and visceral, but the most common one she had was superficially benign. Everything around her was pitch-black, and there was a feeling of vast space on every side, as though the whole world had been swept empty and clean. There was no sound. There was no real sensation at all, in fact, beyond the tight knot of awareness in her mind that somewhere out there in the darkness a child was lost. That he was going to die if she didn’t find him. And that she was not going to do so in time.
She always woke from the dream in a state of profound distress, with an ache in her chest. It was not a pain so much as an absence: a feeling of hopelessness and despair. This morning, that feeling had been compounded by panic. The bedroom around her was almost as dark as the world in the nightmare, and what little she could see in the gloom was unfamiliar and threatening.
She had sat up quickly.
Where was she? For a few seconds, she hadn’t been able to think. In that time, she had felt like a child again herself, the despair heightened by the dim knowledge that her father was dead, and if she cried out nobody would come.
At least she knew where she was right now. The Gritten Police Department cafeteria. It was a classic of its kind: a small room with beige chairs and old folding tables with the Formica chipped at the edges. The catering arrangements amounted to a vending machine in one corner. She took another sip of the shit coffee she’d gotten from it and thought, Focus, woman. Then she opened the autopsy report on her laptop.
There were photos attached, but she avoided them for the moment. It turned out there was more than enough devil in the details themselves, and she scanned them as dispassionately as she could. Time of death was estimated to be late morning yesterday. That information made her shiver. She had been sure the killer was still in the house when she arrived, and the forensics report all but confirmed it. When she had knocked, there had been a monster on the other side of that door, staring back out at her.
Christ, if she’d tried the handle right then …
She did her best to shake the thought away and read on. The cause of death appeared to be a savage knife wound to Roberts’s throat, but as she’d observed at the scene itself, there were numerous other injuries listed in the report: cuts to his face and arms; extensive bruising to the head and body; bones that had been methodically broken. Billy Roberts had been badly tortured prior to his actual death, and marks around his wrists suggested he’d been handcuffed for much of his ordeal.
Amanda steeled herself and opened one of the photos.
It showed a close-up of what was left of his face. She leaned back slightly, recoiling from the image. Over the course of her research she had seen photographs of Billy Roberts as a teenager, and the one that had stuck with her was from the press coverage: the surly face staring back at the camera, somewhere in that nebulous state between boy and man. The discrepancy between the teenage photograph and the sight before her now was stark in every possible way.
Who did this to you, Billy? she thought.
But, as always, another question pressed at her. Right now it seemed more important than ever.
And why?
* * *
Detective Graham Dwyer was fairly sure he had the answer to both questions.
“Walt Barnaby, Jimmy Till, and Stephen Hyde,” he said. “They’re fucking scumbags.”
Amanda followed him down one of the Gritten department’s ancient corridors, caught between the need to keep up and the desire not to. Dwyer was a large man. The back of his barely tucked-in shirt was stained with sweat, and his thin gray hair was damp with it; she could smell him even from a distance, and it was obvious he didn’t care in the slightest. It was equally clear that he was tolerating her presence here rather than welcoming it—that whatever strings Lyons had pulled higher up in Gritten had become a little more tangled on the way down.
Which was understandable, she supposed; she would probably have been the same if their situations had been reversed. But then she considered that. Maybe it wasn’t true anymore. She remembered the investigation into the little boy’s disappearance, and how she had initially resented another officer being drafted in to assist her, whereas now all she did was miss him.
“That’s three people,” she said.
Dwyer didn’t break stride. “Well counted.”
“I only saw one set of footprints at the scene,” she said.
“One set of bloody footprints.”
“Indicating one bloody killer.”
“Who will be one of the three men I mentioned.”
Dwyer led her into his office. It was tidier than she’d been expecting, the shelves lined with carefully labeled box files, the desk clear aside from his computer and some neatly stacked brown folders. The window behind the desk—mercifully—was open.
Dwyer sat down heavily in his chair and sighed.
“You have to understand, you don’t know these people. Barnaby, Till, and Hyde. Like I said—complete scumbags. If you don’t believe me, the files are right there.” He gestured at the pile of folders without making any effort to pass them to her. “Be my guest.”
“Thank you.”
She flicked through them, thinking that Dwyer’s definition of fucking scumbag differed slightly from hers. Maybe she was mellowing as she aged, but she found herself feeling slightly sorry for the three men. They were all in their forties, but looked much older in the mug shots that had been taken. Sallow skin. Bedraggled hair. Wild eyes. She recognized the type, of course, and could read between the lines of the various arrests and charges. These were the type of men who had drifted to the edge of society, or fallen through its cracks. You found them everywhere: drinking in the daytime in cheap, rough pubs; sitting with cans in the park; passing out in each other’s houses and flats, the days and nights blurring into one. A volatile network of friends where the threat of violence was always humming away below the surface. All it took was one wrong word or perceived slight. One falling-out.