“So, thissupposedinvestigator,” Jess says, sitting cross-legged on the sofa. “He could be anyone. Did he show you his warrant card?”
“He said he was a civilian investigator now, working with some regional cold case unit.” I describe the webpage Webber had shown me on his phone, the old news story with his picture.
She shrugs. “Easiest thing in the world to fake. What about a car—what was he driving?”
“He just turned up. Said he got a taxi.”
“Or maybe he didn’t want to bring it because it’s a gray Volvo. Please tell me you didn’t hand over the rest of the stuff, the last of the things you found?”
“Gave him the glasses. Kept the other two things.”
“I don’t like the sound of this guy,” she says. “Something about him doesn’t ring true. And that whole thing with him waving a big knife around—that’s just messed up.”
“He was quite strange. But maybe the job does that to you, working on the murder squad for years.”
“What if itishim though? What if Webber is the sidekick, the one who’s been hiding in plain sight all these years?”
“Then why didn’t he stab me up in that room today, when he had the chance?”
“Maybe it’s all about recognition for him now; maybe he’s craving the ‘credit’ that he never received at the time. The pointis, how do you know he isn’t just burrowing his way into our lives, to find out what you know as part of some sick plan to go down in a blaze of glory?”
“He wants to solve this case, Jess. He wants the same thing as us.”
She gives me a look as if I’m being hopelessly naive. “I don’t think you should trust him. I don’t think you should trust anyone.”
Exhaustion from the last few nights of broken sleep overtakes me and I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep in the late afternoon. When I wake up and head downstairs, there’s a car in the drive I’ve never seen before. A battered white Toyota pickup with a dirty green tarpaulin stretched over the cargo bed at the back. I look around the front garden. No one seems to be here—no one issupposedto be here, as far as I know. Jess was picking the kids up from school and working from home this afternoon, but she’d not mentioned anything to me about a visitor.
The dashboard of the pickup is littered with fast-food wrappers and other rubbish, the seats tattered and stained. I shift the tarpaulin off the cargo bed to find a set of aluminum ladders, a chainsaw, various spades crusted with soil, and a thick stack of heavy-duty refuse sacks. Lying next to them, a sledgehammer and two black-handled axes.
A figure emerges through the gate from the back garden and I feel a sudden jolt of alarm before I realize it’s Tobias, in jeans and a gray sweatshirt. Three bulging garden waste bags in each of his hands. He nods a greeting to me as he heads over to the green bin at the side of the house.
Jess’s words are still fresh in my mind.I don’t think you should trust anyone.
What was the other thing she had said?He doesn’t really like being shut in; he prefers to be outside.Maybe that was because he’d spent so much of his life under lock and key, behind prison walls? Was that why the killings had stopped, all those years ago? I summon the memory of Saturday night, trying to picture the intruder in my house during the power cut. Was he the one who had broken in, the one who had been at the top of the cellar stairs? This stranger who had access to my garden, my house?
“Hi,” I say. “Tobias, isn’t it?”
He dumps the first bag into the green bin and I notice a dirty bandage around the palm of his left hand.
“That’s me.”
“What happened to your hand? Car accident?”
He doesn’t look at the bandage. “Barbed wire.”
“Right.” I turn and head for the house, reaching for my keys. “Wait there a minute, will you?”
His voice, behind me now, takes on a harder tone. “Is there a problem?”
I ignore him. In the house, the tiled floor of the hallway and the kitchen are wet, as if they’ve just been mopped. I call out but there’s no answer, eventually finding Helena upstairs in the spare bedroom wiping glass cleaner off one of the big leaded windows.
The last stranger I’d confronted up here was Shaun, who had knocked on my door with some story about his grandfather’s old watch, and I’d had to march him out of the house after finding him rooting around in the master bedroom. She has thesame yellow Marigolds and pink housecoat as the last time she was here, same outfit, hair clipped up in the same way, but all I can think of is the conversation with Webber from earlier.
One is the distraction, the lure, the shiny decoy; the other one makes the kill.
Helena was in her mid- to late forties, so around the turn of the millennium she would have been in her early to mid-twenties. She was an attractive woman now, with fine, delicate features, and I’m sure she had been as a younger woman too. And at least two suspected victims of the A52 Killer—Edward Stiles and Dean Fullerton—had been single men who might have been easily taken in by a woman like that.
The distraction, the lure, the shiny decoy.
