‘Oh my God,’ she gasps. ‘Are you, are you saying that… that Stewart, that he got Fiona pregnant too? Was it his baby?’
“It’s possible.’
‘Oh no, oh no.’ She starts to cry.
“I need to get hold of her.’
‘You … you don’t understand,’ she says. ‘You have no idea.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Her sobs start to grow louder. ‘You … oh my God,’ she says, and it’s all she can say over and over as the words intermix with tears and sobs. In the end she barely manages to compose herself enough to carry on. ‘You need to know something,’ she says. “I don’t even know how to say it, but … but you need to know.’
‘Tell me.’
And she does, and suddenly I understand everything.
It comes back to Henry Martins. I asked Patricia Tyler four weeks ago if she knew the name, and she didn’t. If only she had, if only she’d known the name of Fiona Chandler’s husband, the one who left her, then most of this could have been avoided. There was never any reason to suspect a link between the dead girl and the man who owned the coffin she was dumped into. Nothing links the others—it was just a matter of putting girls into the ground and using the coffins of those who had just died, making the digging easier. I’ve spent those four weeks making death and making misery, but now things are going to change. Henry Martins was Fiona Chandler’s first husband. He left her when Father Julian got her pregnant. He moved into a different world from her, he met another woman, he fell in love with a woman who wouldn’t cheat on him, and he had a family. Twenty something years later I stood by his grave and watched his coffin get pulled from the dirt.
‘Hey, hey, you can’t come in here!’
The answers have come crashing down on me and the white noise is back. There are images and words screaming from every corner of my mind, and this is the way it sometimes gets when an investigation is coming to a close, the way it gets when the adrenaline is rushing and the high that comes is only an arrest away. Only this time my hands are shaking and I feel like a fool, so the high may not arrive.
I’ve just broken a dozen road rules getting here. The rain is pouring down, hitting the roof with the sound of land mines. I push my way into the hallway. If Henry Martins hadn’t found out about his wife’s affair, if he hadn’t left her and had raised the boy as his own, then none of this would be happening. The girls, the priest, the Alderman family, even good old Henry himself— they’d probably all still be alive. For the briefest of moments I wonder if there would be other ripple effects if those people were still around, whether one of them could have crossed paths with my wife or with Quentin James two years ago and delayed one of them for the ten seconds it would have taken to prevent the accident.
‘Hey, you deaf? You can’t come in here.’
‘Where is he?’ I ask.
‘What?’
‘Maybe you’re the one who’s deaf. Where the fuck is he?’
“He’s gone, man.’
I push Studly against the wall. He’s added a couple of piercings to the collection since I last saw him. I feel like pushing him right through the wall and strangling the skinny little bastard, but the anger I feel isn’t towards him, it’s towards myself for having been so easily deceived. It’s towards David for being the one to have deceived me. A month ago his pain was so raw, so unbearable, so believable. How the hell did I fall for such an act? Even as a cop I would have missed it. As did the other cops who spoke to him.
‘Gone? Where?’
‘He moved out. A few days ago. And he owes me rent.’
I let Studly go. He pushes himself off the hallway wall and puffs his chest out, trying to look a lot tougher than he is, trying to look as though he let me start manhandling him.
‘Where’d he go?’
‘How the fuck would I know?’ he asks, sounding tougher now that I’ve let him go.
I shove him into the wall again, and make my way down to David’s bedroom. Last time I was here the place looked like a bomb had gone off. The furniture is still here, but everything else has gone.
‘He told me to keep it,’ Studly says, ‘but bro, that stuff ain’t worth shit.’
‘He ever bring other women here?’
‘No. He’s never been with anybody since — well, since Rachel went missing.’
‘She’s not missing any more.’
‘Yeah, he told me.’
I look around the bedroom but there’s nothing here to help.
I tip the bed up. I search through bedside drawers. I pull the corner of the carpet away on the chance this hidey-hole is more genetic than I first thought, but there’s nothing there.
‘Dude, you’re destroying the place.’
‘You sure he’s not seeing anybody else?’
Studly shrugs. ‘Man, I’m not his mother.’
‘Well, hopefully she’ll know more than you.’
‘I doubt it. He hasn’t spoken to her since Rachel went missing.