Dwyer was staring at her.
“We have all three in custody,” he said. “We have numerous witnesses who say they were drinking with Billy Roberts in the house on the day before his murder.”
Amanda remembered the raised voices she’d heard in the brief phone call she’d made to Roberts.
“And what else?”
“They all say they left at some point.” Dwyer spread his hands. “Except none of them can corroborate that. And their stories all conflict.”
“Maybe they were drunk.”
Dwyer laughed. “Oh, they were certainly that.”
“Okay,” she said. “Was anything taken from the house?”
“Who can tell? And before you ask, we’re waiting on forensics. My guess is we’re going to find tons of that.”
“Well, you already said they were all in the house.”
Dwyer ignored her.
“We’re searching what passes for their properties. We’re also talking to them—or trying to. Two of them are still plastered. But trust me. I know from experience that one of them will turn out to be the bloody killer.”
Amanda put the files back down on the desk, torn between the instinct she had to disagree with Dwyer and the knowledge that he was probably right. There was no reason to believe Billy Roberts’s murder was in any way connected to what had happened in Featherbank, and more often than not the most obvious solution turned out to be the correct one. Dwyer was placing his bet in exactly the same way she would probably have if she’d been in his shoes. Not everything had to have a deeper meaning; sometimes a cigar was just a cigar.
And yet.
The ferocity of what had been done to Roberts had stayed with her. Yes, the level of violence fit with a perpetrator whose mind had been ravaged by years of drink and drugs and God only knew what else. But it still felt like there had been more control to what had happened in his house than that, and that there was something here they were missing.
“You look worried,” Dwyer said.
“I am.”
“About what?”
“I’m worried this has something to do with why I’m here.”
Dwyer rolled his eyes.
“Detective Beck,” he said, “I know why you’re here. And let me tell you, places like this one have long memories. Nobody has forgotten what happened. But the thing is, nobody likes to think about it either. It’s done. It’s the past. Life moves on.”
“Someone left blood on Paul Adams’s door.”
“Apparently so. I said people don’t like to think about it. But maybe they don’t mind other people thinking about it.”
She leaned on the desk. “Charlie Crabtree was never found.”
There was silence in the room for a moment. Dwyer’s gaze settled on her, and there was stone in it, as though she’d transgressed, crossed a boundary.
She didn’t care.
“If you’re wrong,” she said quietly, “the killer is still out there. And what I’m worried about is what he might do next.”
She was about to say more when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She stood back from the desk, and took it out to find a message from Theo:
CALL ME ASAP.
Dwyer raised an eyebrow sarcastically.
“What have you got there?” he said. “A confession?”
She looked back at him.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
* * *
She went out into the corridor to phone Theo back, leaning against the wall as she waited for him to answer the call. When he did, she could hear the low thrum of activity in the hard drives he spent his working life surrounded by. Or at least imagined she could.
“It’s Amanda here,” she said. “What have we got?”
“We’ve not had an actual reply from CC666,” he said. “But there was a hit on the link I sent. I could bore you with all the information it’s given me about the user’s computer, but I won’t for now. The important thing is that the IP address turned out to be easy to pin down. I’ve got it to within a couple of streets. A place called Brenfield. It’s about a hundred miles from Gritten.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Last night. Sorry, I missed it until now.”
“That’s okay.”
Whoever was behind the CC666 account, it obviously wasn’t Billy Roberts. The place name nagged at her though. Brenfield. She’d seen it in the files somewhere. But she was so tired it was difficult to trawl through the sheer amount of information she’d absorbed over the past few days.
The sound on the line altered slightly, and she pictured Theo moving about in his dark room, shifting between screens.
“You recognize the place name, right?” he said.
“I’ve had a busy couple of days.”
“Fair enough.”
So he told her. And Amanda remembered. And even as she listened, she was already heading off quickly down the corridor.
TWENTY-SIX
Sitting on the edge of the bed in my hotel room, I picked up my cell phone and made a call. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to ask, or what I was going to do with whatever I learned afterward, but I knew I had to do something.
It took a few seconds for her to answer.
“Sally Longfellow speaking.”
“Hi, Sally,” I said. “It’s Paul Adams here.”
“Paul, hello. I’m at home right now. How is Daphne today?”
“I haven’t gone in to see her yet.”
“I know it’s hard. Well, I imagine she’s sleeping.” She lowered her voice slightly. “As sad as it is, that’s really the best you can hope for at this stage, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t in the mood and decided to cut to the chase.
“I suppose so,” I said. “What I actually wanted to do was ask a little more about the circumstances of my mother’s accident.”
“Of course. What would you like to know?”
“She fell, right?”
“Yes.”
I waited, staring out of the window at the street below, but it seemed that Sally was unwilling to add more without being prompted. If it was possible to hear defensiveness in silence, then the call seemed full of it. Maybe she thought I was planning to blame her for what had happened—for being negligent in some way.
“Was she going up- or downstairs when she fell?”
“I really don’t know. Does that matter?”
“I’m not sure.” I shook my head. The question had come from nowhere, and yet it suddenly felt important, for some reason. “Did she say anything afterward about what happened?”
“No. She was quite badly hurt. And you know what your mother is like, Mr. Adams. I’m not sure she understood anything had happened at all.”
“How long was she lying there?”
“Again, I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I got there as quickly as possible.”
I paused. I’d assumed it had been a scheduled visit.
“Hang on. So … you knew she’d fallen?”
“Not that she’d fallen, but Daphne had an alert. We call them a bat signal—meant in a nice way, of course. It’s basically a pager that patients carry with them that sends a signal through to our phones. I got an alert from Daphne, so I tried to call the house. When there was no answer, I drove straight over.”