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That was it. A wall of rage hit me like a truck, propelling me out of my seat and across the table in a desperate lunge for the gun. Erica’s right hand got there first, her left sweeping up a crumb-covered plate and bringing it down hard enough across my knuckles to break it clean in two. I yelped as it tore open the skin; lost my balance and collapsed onto the table as I snatched away my fingers. Without hesitation, she slammed her fist down onto the toppled plastic Lyles bottle, unleashing a jet of syrup directly into my eyes. And then, as I slithered about helplessly on the polished oak, she threw her hand across my mouth and ground my head into the butter.

“Shhh,” she hissed. “Car.” She let go of my face and peered out through the window as the sound of crackling gravel drew near.

“I can’t see,” I protested.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” She took hold of my bleeding hand and hauled me off the table, letting me fall in a groaning heap on the floor. “Sorry,” she whispered.

I staggered to my feet and thumped straight into the wall. “No. I mean I actually can’t see, you mental b—”

“Look, I’m trying to give—” Her fingers found my wrist and she pressed a damp cloth into my hand. “There.”

“You fucking
belong
in a cage,” I said as I wiped the maple syrup from my eyes.

And then my day got even worse. Outside on the driveway was a dirty blue Ford. It had a rubber whip antenna, and its hubcaps were held on with cable ties.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

“Tell me you didn’t call the police.”

“I didn’t call the police.”

“Where did you hide the shotgun?”

“In the loft. What’s going on? What do they want?”

“I don’t know. For Christ’s sake get rid of that thing.”

“Oh, God.” Erica whirled around, scanning the kitchen for somewhere to stash the revolver as I headed for the door. “Where?”

“Anywhere, just lose it.” I stalled in the hall, furiously scrubbing my eyes with the cloth. “Hurry up!”

“Okay, it’s gone.”

“Oh, and I’ve framed you for murder, so you’d better bloody hide.”

“You—”

I opened the front door as John Fairey was raising his fist, leaving him weakly punching the air. “Good morning, Detective Inspector.” I smiled. “What an unexpected pleasure.”

“It’s all mine,” he replied, taking a step back to look me up and down. “Are you, um...?” He furrowed his brow, took in the trickling blood, the crack in my head, the syrup sliding down my face. “What in God’s name happened to you?”

“Walked into a door.”

He regarded me with undisguised contempt for a moment, before shrugging his shoulders and chuckling to himself. “Okay,” he said, clearly savoring the moment. I let him have it.

“Thanks for your concern. Is there anything else I can help you with, or did you just come by to see how I am?”

“Actually,” he said, smiling, “I came by to have a little chat with you. I hope this is a good time.”

It quite obviously was not but, while his smile was innocuous enough, his tone suggested that I didn’t have a choice. “It’s a bank holiday,” I reminded him. “Shouldn’t you be at home pulling the legs off spiders or something?”

He laughed. “Well, that was what I said, right before I drew the short straw.” He relaxed then, took to an easy lean against the porch post. “To be honest, I’m actually avoiding work by being here. I didn’t come to give you a hard time, it’s just a chat. Tie up some loose ends, give you my card, thank you for the tea, that kind of thing.” He shuffled himself comfortable, crossed his big clown feet. “Milk and two sugars,” he said, jacking a thumb over his shoulder to where a beard in a shabby gray suit leaned awkwardly against the car. “And the same for the constable.”

“Cocky shit,” I observed. “Go work on your tan for a minute. I need to clean my face.”

To their credit, Fairey and his shadowy friend stayed put while I tried and failed to work out where Erica had concealed herself. Indeed, neither appeared to have moved at all by the time I returned with a clean shirt and their two teas.

Fairey clearly had little time for his colleague; he neither addressed the man as he passed him his tea, nor extended the courtesy of an introduction.

“Let’s walk,” he said simply, leading me away from the car and off toward the garden, throwing back as an afterthought a curt, “Wait with the car, Keith.” The constable’s hateful scowl connected only with the back of Fairey’s head.

“Where’s your mistress today?” I asked. “Is she pacing around a park somewhere with your lead in her hand? Asking passing joggers if they’ve seen you?”

Fairey, God bless him, graciously laughed. “Detective Sergeant Green,” he replied, “has been having ideas above her station. She’s been whisked off on some joint fucking taskforce or other. I think they’re training her to be a sniffer dog or something.”

“Good for her.” I smiled. “It doesn’t sound like you’re bitter at all, either.”

“I’ll tell you what pisses me off,” he said with a backward nod. “They sent
that
nonce to follow me around. He hasn’t been out of uniform five fucking minutes. He just sits there in the car, staring out the window like he’s on the Sunshine Bus.
And
they reckon he’s a bit...you know.”

“I don’t—”

“Anyway, I’m not surprised she got the job. I’m white and male. She’s half-Paki and a woman. They’ve got a quota to fill, right? Whatever, I don’t want to talk about the uppity bitch. I didn’t want the job, anyway. My hours are shitty enough as it is. You know what? I’ve worked every bank holiday for the last four years. It’s the wife’s birthday, and look where I am. All I get is ‘Oh, you’re never at home, and you’ve never got time for the baby, and you haven’t even changed his bum yet, and he’s gonna grow up not knowing who his dad is’ and all that shit. Like he fucking cares. I’ll be divorced by Christmas. Comes a point, you have to wonder whether it’s all worth it.”

“Well,” I said, smirking, “if you ever need a shoulder to cry on...”

“Yeah, I’ll bear it in mind.” He sipped his tea, spilling more on his tie than he got in his mouth. “Bollocks,” he mumbled. “She’ll moan about that, as well.”

The farther we wandered from the house, the more uneasy I felt. Fairey’s efforts to ingratiate himself carried the distinct aroma of cheese—the kind one might apply to the sharp end of a mousetrap. I glanced back at Constable Keith; he was exactly where Fairey had left him, playing with his mobile, tea sitting ignored on the roof of the car. “So, come on,” I said, “stop talking mindless, offensive shit and tell me why you’re really here.”

He finally lost the battle with his fixed false smile, and squinted up into the sun to disguise its rapid disintegration. “Ali Green’s not stupid,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I spluttered weakly.

“What I mean is, Mark Boon’s lab results came back.”

Whatever it was I was convinced I’d forgotten, it was about to bite me in the balls. My tender head churned over a thousand get-out clauses, but the only one to leap from my mouth was “Who?”

“Don’t give me that crap. You know who I’m talking about, so let’s not dance around it. There’s no point in us insulting each other’s intelligence.” I wasn’t convinced that I
could
insult his intelligence, but I let it pass. “She’s ready to announce that they found Erica Shaw’s DNA all over his flat. Sarah Abbott’s, too. And Erica’s fingerprints on the knife that cut him, which they seemingly can’t quite establish didn’t happen after he was dead, whatever that implies.”

We’d strayed onto the rough ground out beyond the lawn and, given my agreement that dancing was an inappropriate diversion, I casually steered us toward the barn. Should the conversation take any more ominous a turn, a moment of shared privacy might prove invaluable. “What’s this got to do with me?” I asked, in a pleasingly steady voice.

He flicked the last inch of tea from his mug; clearly a boy raised on strainers and leaves. “She’s going to announce it tomorrow,” he said, “but first she’s coming out here to ask you what size boots you wear.”

“I’ll be happy to see her,” I assured him, certain that bootprints were the least of my worries. “As we’ve discussed before, insinuations are one thing, but evidence is quite another.”

“You’re right.” He nodded. “And she’s got none.”

“I know.” I hoped. “And she doesn’t know you’re here, either, does she?”

“Of course she bloody doesn’t.”

“So why are you?”

Fairey took to a gentle, hand-in-pocket stroll, leading me out past the barn toward the edge of the woods. “Green’s a thorn in my side as much as she is yours,” he said. “She’s had the knives out since the minute she set eyes on me, and she’ll happily drag me through the mud if it means getting promoted over my head, the spiteful little cow. I don’t know anyone who’d shed a tear if she fell off the edge of the Earth. Certainly not me. But hey, if your story holds up, then Boon’s in the frame for everything she’s suspected you of since the moment she met you. He’s a convicted rapist and lady-batterer, so in everyone’s mind he fits the profile. There’s evidence that Erica’s been in his flat at least once since she went missing, which more or less torpedoes any theory about you having abducted her, and if that’s the case, then since she and Sarah disappeared together, you can’t very well have taken her, either, can you? And I still can’t prove you buried Kerry Fallow in a quarry, so I guess you could conceivably get away with that one, too.”

“Farrow,” I muttered.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “You were right, of course. It wasn’t her body we found.”

“I didn’t speculate on that.” Nice try.

“No, fair play to you. You’ve done a pretty good job of covering your tracks.” He smiled. “There’s actually hardly any evidence at all that you could be the most prolific predator of women these three counties have ever seen.”

Something in my throat began to twitch. I fought the urge to bury my mug in Fairey’s skull as he stooped to collect something from the unkempt grass. “I’m almost disappointed,” I said, my voice strained and wavering. “My life could have been so interesting.”

He straightened up to examine his find—what looked like a small animal bone. “Oh, it will be.” He nodded. He shot me a wry smile, one that reached his eyes this time. He considered me at length, rolling the bone idly between his fingers. “Listen...” He bent to fumble on the ground, came up with a second, larger bone. He hung his mug from his little finger, all the better to turn the two pieces over and around in his hands in a childlike effort to connect them. “I want to apologize for what happened between us the last time I was here. You know how to push my buttons, don’t you, but that’s no excuse for what I did, so...you know, thanks for not taking it any further.”

“
That’s
what I’ve been forgetting to do.” I sighed.

“No, I appreciate it.” He held up the two bones, which he’d finally managed to arrange into something resembling a joint. “What do you think this was?”

“Rabbit,” I said, declining close inspection. “We get a lot of weasels here.”

He nodded thoughtfully for a moment, admiring his reconstructive handiwork. “More likely stoats,” he muttered. Finally, he issued a heavy sigh and cast the remnants back into the grass. “I’d like to bury the hatchet,” he said, a familiar darkness about his face. “What I mean is, I’d like to keep our relationship light and breezy, because God knows we’re going to be spending a lot more time together from now on.”

Fist tightening around mug. “Let me guess. Caravan holiday?”

“Shut up and listen,” he said. “Listen carefully. I know you know where Erica is, and I know you broke Boon’s neck, and frankly he was a vile piece of shit, and I don’t give any more fucks about him dead than I did alive, and he’s Ali Green’s problem anyway, and she can go suck a duck. But what I
do
care about is Kerry Farrow, because Kerry Farrow is still very much
my
problem, and it’s a problem I’m going to solve if it’s the last fucking thing I do. And I
know
you fucking did it, you son of a bitch, and God knows how many more, and I can’t even begin to tell you how infinitesimally small the slip-up’s going to be that’s going to put you away for the rest of your fucking natural life, but believe me, when you make it, I’m going to be right here, just like this, as close as I am to you right now, because from here on in I’m going to be on you like the honey on your fucking face. I’m going to be the last thing you see when you close your eyes at night, and the first thing you see when you open them in the morning, and I’m going to ride your arse like a hen-night stripper until you’re either in Belmarsh or you’re dead from old age and misery. You get me?”

I told him I thought I’d caught the gist.

“I know you don’t think very much of me,” he said, perceptively, “but that’s fine. I want you to underestimate me. You think you’re going to get away with it forever, but trust me, any day now, you’re going to run smack-bang out of luck.”

“Thanks for popping by,” I said.

He stared at me as though anticipating a punchline. Not getting one, he snorted through his nose and said, “I’m not fucking around here. You’re on borrowed time.”

“Likewise.”

He nodded. Turned his smile to the ground. Took a deep breath and hummed the aggression out of his voice. “Good luck tomorrow,” he said, slipping the mug from his finger and offering me his hand. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

I took the handshake, tolerated his effort to break my fingers. “I’m glad you’re leaving,” I replied. “I thought I was going to have to bury you alive.”

He laughed, an almost covenly cackle. “Maybe I’ll stick around, then,” he said. “I’d love to see you try that.”

“We’ll save it for another time.” I smiled. “Ride our luck a few days longer.”

“Well, you know, I don’t need luck, because the law’s on my side.”

“Maybe so,” I conceded. “But the law’s not here, is it? It’s just you and me and the rabbits, and they don’t like you, either, so if I’m the monster you say I am, then you’ll need all the luck you can get just to make it back to your car. Won’t you?”

I only hoped my face looked as unconcerned as his. “Nah.” He shrugged. “Not your style. I’m wearing trousers.”

Ouch. “I’m glad we had this talk,” I concluded. “You’re barking up completely the wrong tree, but I do admire your tenacity, so I wish you all the very best.”

For one of us, however, the luck was to run out far sooner than expected, for as we turned to head back to the house, the source of my nagging discomfort became abundantly and unfortunately clear.

I’d forgotten to bury Samantha.