‘The notes went quiet after I told him to stop pushing for more. Nearly two weeks.’
‘Right after.’
She stares at the table. ‘That could be a coincidence.’
‘It could be.’
‘He’s not from around our way. He’s from Liverpool.’
‘People lie about where they’re from. And people abusing kids will likely travel outside their own area for access.’
‘People do.’ She picks at the handle of her mug. ‘We’d need some kind of proof, because I really don’t get that vibe from him. He’s nice.’
‘I’m not moving on him. I’m saying we observe him.’
I lift a strand of her hair from her shoulder and twist it around my finger.
‘I also think we should tell your roommate.’
She shakes her head.
‘Kat—’
‘No.’
‘Someone’s put a knife in her door. She deserves to know there’s someone?—’
‘If I tell Ellie I have to explaineverything. Why I’m dating a masked man. Why I know you, what happened that summer.’ She looks at the knife. ‘I don’t want her to know about that side of me. She might leave me.’
‘Or, she might surprise you.’ She doesn’t know that I know Ellie, and know just how supportive she can be. Maybe not about my recent blood-tainted activities, but the past? She’ll understand.
‘Plus, I don’t think he’s after Ellie. Just me. And you. She’s not been pestered at all. And she’s so happy at the moment. It’s almost half term and the long weekend and she always goes home then.’
‘There’s a hotel we could get you in, just for a few weeks until I find him…’
‘No.’ The finality leaves little room to argue.
‘You’d be safe.’
‘I’d only be safe if I didn’t go to university, and I have no intention of failing my final year.’ She looks deadly fierce, and pride wells in me. Still that same girl beneath it all. ‘I don’t want to hide from him. I want tofindhim. I want to know who he is and what he actually saw and why he spent fourteen years letting it fester before he decided to make it our problem.’
There she is.
‘We need something to help us find him.’
‘Then we find something concrete.’ She reaches across and turns the knife so the handle faces me, a strange gesture. ‘This looks unique, maybe it’ll help.’
I pull out my phone and take a few pictures, finding a maker’s mark on the handle.
‘I’ll see what I can track down, but for now, keep it here. Just in case.’
THIRTY
KAT
The week’sgone by slowly, a feeling of anxiety gnawing at my heels everywhere I go. Whether I’m lying in Liam’s arms, studying in the library or cooking with Ellie, the thought of the knife in my door hangs over me.
Liam’s been trying to track down more names, but the boys from then are so incredibly hard to locate. Some likely ended up in the system, like Liam, or a multitude of worse possibilities. He’d managed to find two strong possibilities, one of which committed suicide in his teens, the other who’s serving a long sentence for stabbing a shopkeeper. I can’t help but wonder if, like Pete, he was someone who deserved it. I hope so.
