‘Because I’m gay and he’s not okay with that,’ I said. Silence in response. I looked over. Dodge had his eyes locked on my face, quickly snapped his gaze forward to the road. ‘That’s not the only reason,’ I went on. ‘It’s just the most recent one.’
‘I’m sorry … You saidyou’regay? Orhe’sgay?’
‘I’mgay.’
Dodge started to blow out a disbelieving laugh, but swallowed it halfway through. What came out was a kind of breathy croak. ‘I would not have picked that!’
‘Good.’ I nodded. Dodge was blinking hard. He rubbed his face with both hands like he was trying to wake himself up.
‘That’s what it was, the whole time,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’ve been so fucking … guarded and angry about.’
‘I suppose.’
‘From the way you’ve been carrying on, I was sure you’d killed someone.’
‘I did,’ I said. And he probably thought I meant someone on the job. Or Stephen Branch, the night before. But what I meant was the thousands upon thousands of killings I had to perform whenever I let someone find out who I really was. I’d murdered the man Georgia thought of as her husband. The one Bridie thought was her dad. As we drove, Dodge and I were getting further and further away from the Detective Inspector Russell Powder he’d thought he had a handle on mere moments before, leaving him expiring by the roadside like a hit bird. Now he had to come to terms with this new guy he had sitting beside him and decide whether he accepted him or not.
‘Okay, well, fair enough.’ Dodge shook the whole episode off, literally shifting in his seat and throwing back his shoulders. ‘We can work with that.’
EVAN
My lips peeled apart as though they’d been glued. I rasped the words. ‘Chris didn’t … He didn’t …’
‘Of course he didn’t,’ Dad rolled his eyes. ‘He didn’t know anything about it.’
I gripped the arm of the couch I was sitting in.
‘The kid nearly dropped dead from terror when I killed a couple ofchickensin front of him.’ Dad shook his head. ‘I bet you have to get him six weeks of therapy just to have a nugget in that house.’
‘What did you do, Dad?’
‘Well, first off I got Steve Venables over to show him that car I told you about,’ he said. ‘So I’d have an alibi. Venables lives up the road here. By mid-afternoon every day he’s staggeringly drunk, so I called him, told him to come round. He won’t remember what time he came or how long he stayed for, so he’ll go along with what I tell him about the timing. Then I asked Chris down to the pub for a birthday drink,’ Arthur said. ‘We stood out the front, near the river. He went in both times. He had a fake ID in case they carded him. You know he had that? He showed me. Pretty convincing.’
My throat was burning. The coffee was gone, through my stomach and back out again, into the toilet. I could feel it at the back of my nose, stinging. ‘When did you …’
‘After he left,’ Dad said. ‘I hung around out there and watched her go up. Made sure I had the room right. You can see the lights from the front. The skylights. I was hoping to get it done some timeclose to Chris having been there, because I didn’t know where he was going afterwards. I didn’t want him popping up somewhere else and giving himself an alibi. There was one guest up there. A guy. He left, and Chloe went up, and then Chris left, and I just watched and waited for the right time.’
He puffed on his cigarette. Trails of smoke eased from his nostrils.
‘That’s half of it,’ he said. ‘The waiting.’
‘Half of what?’
Dad shrugged. I felt more ill than I ever had in my life. Because I knew. I could see it on his face. The waiting was half the pleasure.
‘What did you tell her at the door?’
‘Oh, I just played the confused old man.’ Dad stubbed his cigarette out on the arm of the couch, brushed the embers away. There was a great hole where he’d been doing that for years, blackened foam. ‘Deary, I’m looking for my room. Is this number three or number four? Oh, fiddlesticks, I’ve dropped my card.’
‘That’s what you did with Linda and Marian.’ I shivered. ‘You gave them a story at the door.’
‘That was part of it, too,’ he said. ‘Whether I could get them to let me in or not. Linda recognised me from the week before. I said there’d been an accident down the road a bit, and I needed to call my station. I remember running up to the house so I’d look breathless when I got there. She got me water. Marian … Oh, I don’t remember. It was years ago. I told her something. Probably the same thing. There was a problem and I needed to use the phone.’
I held my face. Shook my head, made myself dizzy. ‘I can’t clean this up. You’re asking me to … to … I mean, you murdered them, Dad. If what you’re saying is true, you …’
He was silent. I was suddenly so afraid to look at him. I stared at my hands.
‘You were so sure,’ I said.
