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  There was one thing, though, for which she knew she wasn’t drunk enough—hadn’t been last night, certainly wasn’t this morning, and probably never would be.

  There wasn’t enough vodka in the world that would make the thousand pounds in cash on her coffee table okay.

  Chapter 18

  In my dream, which had featured, among other things, a new species of spider named Trump and a car made entirely from human bone, Erica Shaw was ranting accusations at me while dismembering herself limb by limb when Jenny Riley woke me with the phone and said, “We’ve got a break. We’ve had a call from a member of the public who thinks his dog has found an elbow.”

  The jumble of thoughts that flooded my brain was conflicting to say the least. On the one hand, if Erica had been chopped into pieces, then she most likely wasn’t our killer, in which case I felt somewhat vindicated. On the other, if Erica was the innocent victim I’d believed her to be, then I’d failed to protect her and everything was fucked. And now I wasn’t really listening to anything Jenny was saying, because I was furious with her for describing Erica’s defiled corpse as a “break,” and because how the hell do you find a severed elbow, anyway?

  I was crying by the time she hung up, my head filled with photos of Erica in her sixth-form uniform and a rolling replay of my encounters with her at That Man’s house: her in a dressing gown, looking for somewhere to plug in her hair dryer, startled as I walked right into her; my hand tight around her throat, hers tight around mine, as we rolled together on wet gravel, wrestling for a gun.

  Hindsight, I reminded myself, helped no one; had I known then what I knew now, then of course I’d have been able to save her. But I didn’t. And as simple as that was, the reality of it just made me cry harder, and harder still until I began to choke and cough and retch in the shower.

  * * *

  It was a half-hour drive at that time of the morning, but I made it to Two Mile Bottom in twenty minutes with my heart in my mouth and my white fingers clawed painfully into the steering wheel. Jenny had sent me the location in Google Maps, and I found the forest access road without any trouble. The constable on guard duty swung aside the single-bar gate to allow me onto a rutted gravel track, along which I navigated the Alfa at a speed unsafe for wildlife and wheel rims alike.

  A quarter of a mile in, the rows of tall, still pines seemed more dense, the shadowy places between them tighter, darker. And then they weren’t.

  On the left of the road was a clearing, an intersection with a narrow tract of grassland that backed onto a railway line. Adjacent to this junction, a ring of trees marked the edge of a dell, maybe a hundred meters across; how deep, I couldn’t see.

  A pair of patrol cars marked the spot, and the CSI van, and a Focus from the car pool, but there was only one person in sight: Kevin, standing beside his car with a large plastic bag in his hand, staring blankly at his phone as I drew up and launched myself from the car, struggling for breath.

  “Where is she? Where’s Erica?”

  Kevin looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Well, that’s the million-dollar fucking question, isn’t it?”

  My brain froze, and my mouth with it, wide open, the hot, thick air stinging the raw patch at the back of my throat. I looked from Kevin’s narrowed eyes to the bag and back, mind wheeling between confusion and hesitant relief and fear and back to confusion. “You mean...”

  It dawned on him then what I was asking. “Oh,” he said, waving the bag at me. “You thought... Yeah, this isn’t hers.”

  It wasn’t an elbow, not as such. It was an arm, severed just below the shoulder and just above the wrist and folded at the elbow to fit inside the bag. The torn skin and ragged flesh were blackened, the bone protruding. I felt bile rising in my ragged throat. “Thank fuck,” I panted. “Whose is it?”

  I half expected him to play on my obvious distress, to torment me with a bit of showmanship, drag out the dramatic tension before the big reveal. He didn’t, though. He just turned the arm around to reveal the lower section of a tattoo—some kind of Celtic band, edged in gold. “Well, that’s what I was just looking at,” he said, wiggling the phone in his other hand. “I think it’s Samantha Halloran’s.”

  My stomach flipped. I was dangerously close to throwing up, and Kevin knew it when my cupped hand flew to my mouth in an effort to hold it in.

  “You alright?” he said, although it was quite obvious that I wasn’t.

  I nodded. “Show me.”

  He hesitated just for a second, eyes narrowed, judging me. Finally, he nodded back and said, “Got some wellies?”

  * * *

  The crime scene was on the opposite side of the train tracks, which meant finding out how deep that hole went. Quite deep, as it turned out, though the slope of the ground, a well-beaten path and a helpfully raised perimeter tape made a relatively easy walk of it.

  “It’s a flint pit,” Kevin informed me, though I hadn’t asked him. He led me to the mouth of a tunnel under the tracks, where water trickled through between a small pond in the base of the crater and whatever was on the other side. “They used to haul it away by boat. This goes to the river.” He pointed to the far end of the tunnel, where all I could see was mud and overgrown weeds. I turned around, surveying the steep, tree-lined walls and the impenetrable tangle of brambles and fallen branches within.

  “Creepy,” I muttered, both to myself and as a lazy acknowledgment of Kevin’s history lesson. “We’re going through there?” I scanned the arch above us: crumbling brick pinned through with giant russet-colored bolts, presumably to stave off collapse. It looked as though it had been unattended for decades, though the facing wall was adorned with newish signs appealing for reports of damage.

  Kevin nodded and beckoned me to follow him, which I did, splashing through the shallow stream and emerging into what I can only describe as a swamp. “Up here,” he said, clambering up a steep bank, up to his ankles in wet mud.

  “I’m not sure I can,” I said, but he didn’t stop and help, the bastard.

  My leg was throbbing by the time I’d clambered over three fallen trees and sunk twice almost to the tops of my boots in the marsh. The white forensic tent, however, was erected on a flat, level, relatively firm patch of ground, which at least allowed Kevin to dress me with some degree of dignity, albeit in front of an amused uniform and Leila Solomons, the duty crime scene tech, who just looked vaguely baffled.

  “Sorted?” he said as I flexed myself inside the paper suit and smeared Vicks under my nose and slipped the mask over my face, pointedly ignoring my audience.

  “Net noo it,” I said, and slipped inside.

  There were two bags in the tent—large, green, heavy-gauge rubble sacks with tied handles. One had been neatly slit along its side, spilling a mat of hair and a slippery, curled-up hand into the weeds. The smell, even through the mask and the Vaporub, was almost overpowering. I only took a quick look before I tapped Leila on the arm and said, “Alright, if you’re finished recording, open them up,” or some muffled version of it, and then I turned around and got the hell out of there.

  * * *

  It was no better after two cigarettes and a cup of rancid tea from Kevin’s Thermos, but I doubled up on Vicks and breathed through my mouth and thought hard about the smell of my mum’s linen, fresh from the washing line.

  Leila had opened the bags and artfully arranged their contents on a plastic groundsheet. The parts made one complete body, give or take, but laid out in order, its condition was striking.

  She was relatively intact—desiccated flesh still covered her limbs and most of what remained of her torso, though her skin had split and slipped along the paths of least resistance. Her scalp lay beside her skull on the sheet, but she still had a semblance of a face. Her legs had stripped clean to the bone, though, and she didn’t appear to have any feet. Comparing the whole to the mugshots and family-supplied photo
s on Kevin’s phone left me in little doubt that we’d found Sam Halloran.

  I called Leila over and asked her what the story was with the legs.

  “First impression,” she said, seeming much better able to enunciate clearly from inside a mask than I am, “she spent some time in the open before she was wrapped up. The condition’s fairly consistent across the rest of the body, which ties with the first bag only being split open this morning. Otherwise, it’s thick plastic, tough, airtight. There was nothing alive in there with her.”

  Kevin looked like he was going to throw up in his mask. I sympathized, and so I clapped him on the back and beckoned him back outside.

  “Okay, two things,” I said, flipping off my mask again and taking a breath of clean air. “Firstly, who the hell walks their dog in a swamp?”

  Kevin shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

  I nodded. “And why don’t you know?”

  He looked baffled by this question, so I gave him a clue.

  “Kevin, where’s the witness?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I don’t know. Anonymous call.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Male.”

  “How did you get hold of the...elbow?”

  “He told us where the dog dropped it. Uniform got here first and recovered it from the nettles.”

  I pointed to his phone and said, “Bring up the map,” and he did so, zooming in on the pulsing blue dot that more or less marked our location. I took the phone from his hand and spun it around, zoomed out a little. Turned around and watched the landscape rotate with me, the roads and the railway and the nearby river forming a shape that I instantly recognized. And there, maybe half a mile away as the crow flies, was a spot I’d pinpointed on my own map at least once or twice.

  Heart pounding, right leg aching sickeningly to the bone, I waded back through the stream to the flint pit, and levered myself between trees as I scrambled up the steeper southern face, and, with Kevin in hot pursuit shouting, “Ali, what’s going on, what have you found?” I strode out to the top of the railway embankment.

  “Look,” I said, and let him follow my outstretched hand across the tracks, and the wide, murky river, and the dense belt of trees, to an open field in the middle of the forest. From up here, it was just possible to make out the mouth of a driveway, and the outline of a cluster of buildings shrouded in heat haze: a barn, and a four-car garage, and a two-bedroom stone cottage constructed sometime around the turn of the last century.

  My body turned cold, as though That Man had reached up from his house in the woods and opened up the top of my head and filled me to the brim with ice water. I turned slowly around on the spot, peering out into the cool, dark spaces between the trees across the trail, suddenly hyperaware of the silence, the gloom, and the eyes of every creature in the forest upon me, breath held fast, muscles twitching, poised to run. Watching. Watching me.

  “He’s here,” I said. “Somewhere. He’s close.”

  Kevin followed my stare along the track. I was determined that I’d see him; that he’d slip out onto the trail and glance back at me with a nod and a wink before melting into the haze.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “That Man.” I looked up at the limp treetops and sniffed the air. It smelled of heat and death and Vaporub. The sky was a deeper blue than I thought I’d ever seen, like an impossible memory of a summer from so many years ago, of Mum and Dad and Reena and me, in a hot, stuffy car in the south of France, looking for our campsite, Mum wrestling an upside-down map with all the windows down while the two of us kids drank Fanta the temperature of tea and tried not to be sick.

  “Reed?” Kevin said.

  I nodded. “Whatever you want to call him. He’s here. Watching.”

  Kevin spun around, just as I’d done, presumably torn between ridiculing me and pointlessly demanding that the entire forest be locked down immediately.

  “You won’t see him,” I said, peeling the paper suit down over my arms and shivering as the sweat on my neck met the air. “But come on, you think it’s a coincidence? That some mystery dog walker happens to stumble across Samantha’s body, right now, today, in the middle of everything that’s happened? What do you think the odds are? A hundred to one? A thousand? A million? No way did this just happen,” I said. “Trust me. That Man is back.”

  Episode 4

  Chapter 19

  The morning briefing was chaos, the incident room buzzing with confusion and enthusiasm and a strange kind of voyeuristic excitement that I’d never seen there before and which unsettled me slightly.

  Jenny was a juddering mess of caffeine and bed hair as she stood at the front of the room, looking like she was ready to sweep everything from the incident boards and start over. I wouldn’t have blamed her; if she hadn’t been out of her depth before, she was in well over her nose now.

  “Right,” she shouted, a little louder than was necessary to gather our collective attention. She seemed to make herself jump, and had to take a deep breath to collect herself. I felt for her. “Sorry. Right, we’ve got a bit to get through. Um...” She had a handful of printouts, but she didn’t seem to know what to do with them. She flipped through them once, then waved them above the desk beside her as though willing her hand to open and let them go, and then she closed her fist on them so tightly that they crumpled all to hell. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of coffee. Okay, first things first. At 5:37 this morning, we received a call from a member of the public, advising us that his dog had found something he described as a human elbow on an area of marshland beside the Little Ouse River, off the A134 between Thetford and Mundford. This—” she straightened the bundle of papers and held them aloft to display a photo of Samantha’s bagged limb “—is the offending article. It’s part of an arm, approximately midbicep to midforearm, with elements of a tattoo clearly visible.” She flipped the photo to the back of the stack, and held up the next. “Two cars responded from Thetford, and found two partially buried refuse sacks, one of which had been torn open, ostensibly by the dog.” She flipped to the next photo, a close-up of the opened bag. “In and around the bag, they saw what they deduced, given the presence of the arm, to be a quantity of dismembered human remains, which, on closer inspection, we believe to be those of Samantha Halloran.” She stepped aside then, and pointed to Samantha’s mugshot on the board behind her. “I know you all know this, but to recap, Sam was last seen on...” She scanned the board for the date, but it wasn’t there and she couldn’t remember it. I glanced at Kevin, who looked like he was trying to divide big numbers in his head. “Last seen in February,” she continued, her voice wavering, “in King Street, where she was working as a prostitute. Sam was also known to Kerry Farrow, whose DNA was subsequently found in a cage on the property of the individual known to us as Thomas Reed.” Flip to a printed Ordnance Survey map of a section of the forest, with the railway bridge and That Man’s house circled in red Sharpie. “Given the proximity of that location to today’s crime scene, I’m going to hazard a wildly pie-in-the-sky guess that it’s not a coincidence, and that Sam isn’t the only missing woman who was buried in this marsh. Therefore, I’ve asked for a radar survey and excavation of that location, which has been authorized. Kevin, I want you to get in touch with Dr. Galloway at the university and get wheels rolling on that as soon as we’re done here.”

  Kevin was still staring at the mugshot, and took a second or two to register his own name. He did so now, and acknowledged her with a nod. I scribbled a note of Jenny’s instruction, in case he hadn’t been listening and asked me what she’d said, and then raised my hand.

  “Have we traced the dog walker who supposedly found the remains?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s going to be a prepaid, unregistered mobile, isn’t it?”

  “What makes you say that?”

&
nbsp; “Well, having been to the scene,” I said pointedly, “it’s a bit of a trek to get to it, not an obvious place to walk a dog at all. I’d imagine that’s why they were buried there in the first place. The forest is full of walking trails, and that’s well away from any of them, so what was this so-called dog walker up to that he needs to be anonymous?”

  Jenny shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, with more than a hint of nervous impatience, “but it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “It does if Reed alerted us to the body himself to point another finger at Erica and tie up our resources for a few more days while he tracks her down,” I pointed out.

  She flinched at that; it clearly hadn’t crossed her mind, because she said, “Point the finger how?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s cottoned on to you blaming everything he’s done on her and he’s running with it? Like, ‘Hey, look, I know where the bodies are buried’? Bearing in mind how much of her DNA we found in Mark Boon’s flat, where I don’t believe for a second she ever set foot, what’s the betting we’ll find a load on Samantha? If we do, he’s playing right into your narrative by giving us the bodies, and by killing Richard Cockburn.” I didn’t know if any of that made sense; it did in my head, but I was speaking faster than I could think.

  Apparently Jenny didn’t think so, or maybe she just didn’t appreciate me pointing fingers at her, because she gave me a hard stare before she looked over at Dan Hooper and said, “Fine. Dan, when you’re done with Samantha’s parents, see if you can get a fix on the phone. Where was it sold and when, and where did the call come from?”

  “Guv.” Handsome bastard.

  “Moving on.” She took a deep breath, and I put my elbows on my knees and my burning cheeks in my hands and gently stroked my eyebrows with the tips of my little fingers. “We’ve finally had Malcolm Lowry’s postmortem results back from Wales,” she said. “Dr. Kubica has reviewed them this morning in the light of yesterday’s incident and determined with a ‘high degree of probability’” (she made quote marks with her fingers, and I cringed on her behalf) “that both Mal and Richard Cockburn were attacked with the same style of weapon, if not the same weapon.”