Callum gives a sudden shout of delight and breaks free of Eileen’s hand.
“Mr. Stay Puft!”
He runs over to the flowerbed under the oak tree, where the hamster is chewing something he’s found, oblivious to everything.
Above him, on a low branch of the old oak, Steve sits and surveys the whole scene with wide amber eyes.
Daisy slips free of Mrs. Evans’s grip and rushes toward her mother in the ambulance.
There’s a scramble of movement to my left, and when I turn back, Maxine and Charlie are sprawling in the gravel as Swann rolls away from their grasp, rising to his feet again, staggering forward, shifting into a run, angling toward the narrow gap between the ambulance and the hedge. He’s surprisingly fast, each step kicking up sprays of gravel, darting past my outstretched hand, and sidestepping Leah in a headlong sprint toward the street.
At the last second, PC James—all six feet three and sixteen stone of him—pivots into the gap and drops his shoulder.
Swann cannons into the young officer and bounces back onto the gravel like a rag doll flung against a brick wall.
James is on him in a second, a knee in his back pinning the smaller man to the ground.
“Sir?” He takes the handcuffs from his belt, unsnapping them with a practiced flick. “You’re under arrest. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
He closes the cuffs around Swann’s wrists and hauls him to his feet.
73
SIX MONTHS LATER
The house will survive. Swann actually set three fires that day, one on each floor, but fortunately they didn’t take hold properly before the fire brigade arrived. The repair work’s only just finished but the damage wasn’t structural. It wasn’t permanent.
The police investigation is moving slowly because of the sheer number of cases the new task force has had to reopen. Swann stonewalled all questioning at first, until the forensic results came back on the items I had found in the dresser in the hidden room.
Since then, he seems to have changed his tune.
According to what I’ve heard from DC Rubin, he’s now insisting he was coerced by Peter Flack, that he was in awe of him, swept up in his slipstream during their three-year killing spree around the turn of the millennium. Flack used him, for the very reason that he was a small and unassuming man, the kind of person who could put potential victims at their ease because he was clearly no threat. I’m not sure that will help Swann much when his trial starts. Each of the items from that room—with the exception of the old flip phone—contained viable traces of both his DNA and the victims’. The cashpoint receipt in the wallet didn’t belong to a victim, but it gave investigators a precise date, time, and place that put the account holder within aquarter-mile of another victim’s bedsit, on the evening he went missing. The account holder’s name was Jeremy Swann.
All of it had been insurance—so Peter Flack could keep his acolyte in line.
Until Swann turned on him, and Flack himself became a victim.
I hope the families might finally find answers; be able to find some kind of peace after all these years. Swann has already led detectives to human remains in a shallow grave in Sherwood Forest. Those remains have been identified—using DNA from Charlie Parish—as those of Adrian, his father.
The trial is not scheduled to start until next spring.
From the work the police have done so far, the case will revolve around the deaths of six people. Six men and women who never knew each other in life, who had disappeared or died in unexplained circumstances over a short span of years. Whose families had come to believe they might never have any answers—until now. The media coverage has been steady over the past six months, as each new name has been added to the grim tally of those who fell victim to a pair of ruthless serial killers more than twenty years ago.
Edward Stiles, twenty-five.
Adrian Parish, forty.
Carys Neill, thirty-two.
Dean Fullerton, thirty-nine.
Sian Stott, eighteen.
Pamela Roy, sixty-one.
I’ve kept in touch with Maxine and Charlie and we’ve met for lunch a few times. To me, the two of them seem changed in ways that are both subtle and profound; a liberation from the past,perhaps. Finally able to lay old ghosts to rest. Webber, too, seems to have found some redemption at last.
The hidden room was fully dismantled in the end, all of it carted away by the police for further examination. Every other inch of the property scoured and searched by boiler-suited forensics teams, floorboards pulled up here and there, the attic thoroughly searched, the cellar examined in minute detail, sections of the garden dug up, and ground-penetrating radar used to find various items they won’t even tell me about.
