I reach for my own drink again, remembering too late that the coffee is almost cold as it slides unpleasantly down my throat. What I’ve just heard is starting to make a horrible kind of sense.
“But… if this killer is dead, why are we even having this conversation? Why bother with the watch after all these years, why take the time, why come to my house? Just to give Edward Stiles’s family some sort of closure?”
He shakes his head slowly. “No. His parents are both dead. No children. Not much other family to speak of.”
“Then what? Professional pride? I mean, I get it. I understand that you want to solve this case, prove your theory was correct all along. But if your killer has been dead for twenty years, surely the chance of actually proving his guilt is infinitesimally small?”
More to the point, I think to myself,who has been coming after me and my family for the last ten days? Who followed Leah home from school? Who broke into my house? Who was Jess following last night?
Even though I think I already know the answer.
He sits back in his chair, the wood creaking under his weight, and crosses his arms over his big chest. He looks at his almost-finished pint, then glances toward the entrance to the pub before seeming to think better of it. Finally, his small, sharp eyes settle on me again, as if coming to a decision.
“I was a police officer my whole career,” he says quietly. “Always took pride in trying to do the job right, to the best of my ability, no matter how much it went against the received wisdom. I still do. Even if most of my colleagues thought I was crackers by the time I handed in my warrant card. What I’m about to tell youhas never been disclosed to any civilian outside the force. It was never widely shared internally either and I shouldn’t be sharing it with you, really. But here we are.”
I nod, waiting for him to continue. He takes a puff on his vape, streams of pale gray smoke issuing from his nostrils.
“Like I said, we got a lot wrong with those cases. We never really got close. And there was one thing in particular that we didn’t grasp at the time—it’s only in the years since that I figured out what it was. But fundamentally we made too many assumptions without even realizing it.”
“Assumptions about the killer?”
“Yes and no. I believe we made a fundamental mistake at an early stage that skewed everything that came afterward. You see, we had no name, no physical description, no convincing forensics to hang an ID on. So, I gave him a nickname, a shorthand to use when I was talking about the case, trying to convince people.”
“Kind of like theYorkshire Ripper?”
He frowns. “That sort of thing, yes. I started calling the suspect theA52 Killerbecause the first two victims that I linked were on either end of that particular road, one in Derbyshire and one on the coast, and there was hardly anything else to connect them. But it sort of stuck from then on.”
I had been on the A52 a thousand times myself. It was a main road, one of the region’s arteries running east to west from Stoke-on-Trent to the Lincolnshire coast at Mablethorpe.
“That’s a long stretch of road,” I say. “A lot of towns along the way where your dead guy could have come from.”
“A hundred miles or more,” he says. “But I’ve long had a suspicion there was a more basic problem with the nickname. Asuspicion that’s been proved correct, from what you’ve told me. From everything that’s happened since you discovered that room at the top of your house, in fact.”
I look at him, a cold loosening of terror low down in my stomach.
A confirmation of all my worst fears over the last week, gathered in one place.
Bonnie and Clyde.
My voice, when I reply, is so quiet that I can hardly hear it.
“There were two of them, weren’t there?”
He looks surprised, almost impressed. Gives me a slow nod of approval.
“Yes. I believe it was a pair, working together.” He takes another deep drag on his vape. “The A52 Killer was actually two people, not just one individual. Two of them, hunting as a team. And one of them is still out there.”
PART IV
You learn to recognize them, the ones who are like you. Recognize the 1 percent that sets you both apart from everyone else. Because we’re 99 percent normal. We’re not broken; if anything we’re more efficient, more effective, more alive to the world than regular people.
You learn to recognize targets too—the ones who were always destined to end up as victims, one way or another. The plain, the unremarkable, living life on the periphery. The ones who aren’t photogenic, or rich, or anything other than just slightly below average. The runaway. The secretive single man, living alone. The ex-junkie fresh out of jail.
But just because you recognize each other, doesn’t mean you always agree. Especially if one of you starts taking unnecessary risks, stupid risks. Taking pictures. Acting like they want their moment in the sun. Acting like they want to get caught.
60
An ice-cold wash of fear rolls over me and my first thought is for the kids. For Jess.
