فصل 57

57

ERIN

I was in the back office with Sean when the call came in. A pale young woman with a stricken expression stuck her head around the door. “There’s another one, sir. Someone spotted her from up on the ridge. Someone in the water, a young woman.” From the look on Sean’s face, I thought he was going to heave.

“There can’t be,” I said. “There’s uniforms all over the place. How can there be another one?”

• • •

BY THE TIME we got there, there was a crowd on the bridge, uniforms doing their best to keep them up there. Sean ran and I followed, we hammered along under the trees. I wanted to slow down, I wanted to stop. The last thing on earth I wanted to see was them pulling that girl out of the water.

It wasn’t her, though, it was Jules. She was already on the bank when we got there. There was a weird sound in the air, like a magpie scolding. It took me a while to realize that it was coming from her, from Jules. The chattering of her teeth. Her entire body shook, her sodden clothes clung to her pitifully thin frame, which folded in on itself like a collapsing deck chair. I called her name and she stared up at me, her bloodshot eyes looking straight through me, as though she couldn’t focus, as though she didn’t register who I was. Sean took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders.

She muttered, trance-like. She wouldn’t say a word to us; she hardly seemed to notice we were there. She just sat, trembling, glowering at the black water, her lips working the way they did when she saw her sister on the slab, soundless but purposeful, as though she were having an argument with some unseen adversary.

The relief, such as it was, lasted barely a few minutes before the next crisis hit. The uniforms who’d gone to welcome Mark Henderson home from his holiday had found his house empty. And not just empty, bloody: there were signs of a struggle in the kitchen, blood smeared all over the floor and the door handles, and Henderson’s car was nowhere to be found.

“Oh Christ,” Sean said. “Lena.”

“No,” I cried, trying to convince myself as well as Sean. I was thinking about the conversation I’d had with Henderson, the morning before he left for his holiday. There was something about him, something weak. Something wounded. There is nothing more dangerous than a man like that. “No. There were uniforms at the house, they were waiting for him, he couldn’t have—”

But Sean was shaking his head. “No, they weren’t. They weren’t there. There was a bad smash on the A68 last night and it was all hands on deck. A decision was taken to redeploy resources. There was no one at Henderson’s house, not until this morning.”

“Fuck. Fuck.”

“Quite. He’ll have come back and seen the windows all smashed up and jumped to the right conclusion. That Lena Abbott told us something.”

“And then what—he went to her house and took her and brought her back to his place?”

“How the hell should I know?” Sean snapped. “This is our fault. We should have been watching the house, we should have been watching her . . . It’s our fault she’s gone.”