Beverley’s eyes swivel from Margot to Sharon, back and forth. She’s waiting for the answer but dreading it at the same time.
“Hank sorta knew him.” Sharon’s shaking hand goes to the back of her neck, pulls at the dark roots there. “Said he’d brought his cars in on and off for the past year. Hank had been working on those cop vehicles. I can’t remember his name.” She moves her fingers to her mouth, starts biting her nails, then withdraws them. “Gray hair…well, not gray, more like silver. Blue eyes. A Paul Newman type.”
Beverley feels as if the ground below her is slowly fissuring, as if the chair she is on is beginning to sink, foot by foot. Then she remembers the receipts in Roger’s pockets, the movie stubs.
“Was it perhaps Detective Greaves?” Elsie asks, avoiding Beverley’s panicked glare. “Detective Roger Greaves?”
“That’s it.” Sharon’s eyes snap up. “Good-lookin’ guy.”
“He took the camera?”
“Two weeks ago. Said he needed to run some tests on it, that he’d return it. Then he took our prints. It took days for me to get that damn ink off my fingers.” She half laughs and trails off, looks between the women.
“When was the McKenzie murder?” Margot asks the room.
“Eight days ago,” says Elsie.
They both look at Beverley.
“Why? What is it?” asks Sharon.
“Oh, Sharon”—Elsie’s hand flicks to her forehead—“we’re so incredibly sorry.”
There’s a wailing now in Beverley’s head.
“What’s going on?” Sharon asks, confused.
“Please.” Elsie seems lost for words. “This is all just a big mistake. You’ll have to forgive us. I can’t believe we…”
Sharon frowns as Elsie pushes her seat back, followed by Margot, who gathers their mugs and takes them hurriedly to the sink. Sharon’s head swivels from left to right.
Beverley cannot bring herself to move. Her mind is wheeling,clawing back through time, finding those sensations again: the way her body crumpled in half, entirely winded; the way she knew—knew—when she saw the first flash of red light arcing across her kitchen window that her life was about to change forever. Now she feels a sensation of being uprooted, the way the guts know before the mind makes the connection. There’s something inside her, inside all women, that knows the truth before she is able to speak it. Denial—it’s a physical force. There is a lot that can be dismissed before things start to harden into a shell of indisputable truth. She tries to stand but finds that she can’t. If she gets up from this chair, that will mean that it is true. It will mean that she has missed it, that it has happened all over again.
Forty-Four
“Do you thinkhe’s got Enid in there somewhere?” Margot sneers as they eyeball Roger’s house. She has her baseball bat in her hands, the one she usually keeps in the footwell of her car.
Before them, the windows of the Greaveses’ house loom like empty eye sockets. The branches of the imposing oak tree twitch in the breeze.
The day has grown morose, hot but sludgy with storm clouds. Duke strains on the leash at Margot’s side. Beverley reminded her that she’s never seen the dog bare its teeth at so much as a squirrel.
“But he looks the part, right?” Margot replied, shoving the Great Dane into the back of Elsie’s Buick and taking a cramped seat beside him.
“What if she’s dead?” Elsie asks grimly. “What if there are other women in there? Other bodies?”
Roger said for months—did he not?—that all he needed was a meaty case to get his teeth into. Beverley knew he was frustrated at being passed over for promotion, that he felt he deserved a fast trackafter everything he’d done for the service, after he and Cornwell caught Henry. Sheneverthought it would come to this, that he—frustrated at not having a worthy case to solve—would create one himself, taking lives, attempting to frame a boy who had only just snatched his first steps into adulthood.
When he got the cars fixed at Hank’s garage, was that the first time he met the Farrers? The first time he identified Peter’s vulnerability, his fascinations, and realized he would be easy to frame?
Beverley knows now that she missed signs about Enid—the way Roger spoke so offhandedly about his wife, the way he dismissed her; the way Beverley never saw her, hasn’t seen any evidence of her at all over the past few weeks. She pushed it away, into the recesses of her mind, shoved aside her impartiality, her unswerving focus on finding the one right answer. She has done Enid a disservice, so many times, but now she is going to find her, and they will make sure Roger pays for his crimes.
“We have to stay positive,” Beverley replies, “for Enid’s sake. She could be alive.” She blinks away flashes of crime scenes—Enid buried somewhere, soil settling into the folds of her eyelids; her skin mottling at the bottom of a lake; her bones tossed around a forest.
But she might be here. They have to try to find her.
They pound on the door, not caring whether Roger’s there and answers. There are three of them. It’s daylight. They have a dog the size of a Shetland pony. Roger cannot overpower all of them, and at this point Beverley has come too far to let him. They could have called the police, asked for backup, but for the past six weeks the police have ignored them, disregarded their concerns and their instincts, pushed them aside. Would the policereallybelieve them now if they told them that one of their own was responsible? The women know they have to prove it first. Still, Elsie put in a call to a friend at theSignal, told her what they were doing, so there is someone who knows they’rehere. Beverley clings to the security of it. Someone will come if things end badly for them in this house.
She puts her ear to the door. There’s music coming from inside—a haunting country lilt, a man’s voice crooning in a minor key.
