It’s not from my wife.
Heart rising up into my throat, I click on the message.
It’s five seconds of looping video: Jess’s unconscious face, her eyes closed, black tape over her mouth, a line of blood snaking down from her temple. Below it, a brutal succession of texts drop in one after the other.
You made me do this.
Bring everything that belongs to me. No police.
She has maybe fifteen minutes of life left.
Or you will never see her again.
I type a rapid reply with one shaking hand, steering with the other.
Will bring it all to you. Where?
Further instructions to follow.
GPS says you’re heading in the right direction.
But if you’re late, she dies.
Fifteen minutes was barely any time at all, but I had to get to her.
I push down harder on the accelerator, flashing through a gap between a truck and a bus pulling away from the curb. On the other side of the carriageway, traffic is gridlocked and at a total standstill. In my head, I can’t stop seeing that five seconds of looping video of Jess, unconscious and helpless, at the mercy of a psychopath. The ultimate confirmation that my family would never be safe until Peter Flack’s partner in crime was off the streets for good.
I dial Webber’s number again.
“My kids are in danger,” I shout over him. “You need to send police to Regency Place; they’ve gone to my neighbor’s house but they’re in terrible danger.”
He doesn’t seem to have heard me. “Listen, Adam, that name you gave me, Peter Flack? I put it into the system, but he was never on our radar, no criminal record at all, he was absolutely clean as a whistle.”
“JUST SEND THEM!” I repeat the address and hang up, weaving around the cars in front and accelerating through a traffic light as it goes red to a chorus of honking horns behind me.
Thirteen minutes. It was going to be incredibly tight.
Another call to Dom’s phone goes straight to voicemail.
I’m overtaking into oncoming traffic when the FaceTime app on my phone shows a new video call. I stab the green icon to accept, almost crashing as I swerve lanes and dive back into a gap. The screen opens up on an image of a dark ceiling, moving as the camera pans down onto my wife’s motionless body.
“Jess?” I shout it, the word catching in my throat. “Where are you? Are you OK?”
But she can’t hear me. She can’t speak. The black tape that had been covering her mouth is gone but her face is pallid, her lips starting to turn blue as if she’s slipping away. A trickle of blood crusting at her chin. The call cuts off abruptly and a message drops in a moment later.
You better hurry, she doesn’t have long left. You know where.
I blink, suddenly realizing that Idoknow where. I recognized the room, the desk, the wooden paneling on the wall. I recognized all of it.
Because the call was coming from inside my house.
PART V
Betrayal. It’s a sharp-edged word. An ugly word. And so you find a way to guard against it. A guarantee of mutual loyalty so you both keep the secret, or you both go down together. A blood pact, written in the blood of others. And it meant those hidden souvenirs served a double purpose.
Not just to remember each victim, but an insurance policy too.
It was foolproof, a tried-and-tested system of mutually assured destruction. There was just one flaw, one tiny problem that never occurred to me back then, when I decided he had to die.
