His phone was out and to his ear the second he let go of me, and I heard him say his brother’s name as I left, running down our steps, running down the street, weaving through pedestrians like I was a crazy person. I was crazy. There was no way one person running randomly through the acres and acres of Regent’s Park would find two other people if they didn’t want to be found. And it wasn’t as though he would kill her out in the open where anyone running up could see.
Had I the time to indulge it, that thought alone might have tripped me up, halted my breathing. Had I the time to indulge it, I might have fallen to pieces on the bridge, or when I ran into the trees near the college and there was no one there save me and the birds. I went to the most recent crime scene, and there was no one. The tape had been removed and the grass mowed. I went to the place Mr. Patel had died, by the zoo, to the fountain planter, to every place I knew he’d killed before, and when I couldn’t run any more and my lungs screamed for air, I collapsed against the bandstand. Of course my addled mind had taken me there last.
The park was shadowed, stepping into the sheer cloak of dusk, that time of the evening when everything seems so clear, but the details are cloudy. I almost gave in, then, to the screaming frustration inside me, to the panic, to the knowledge that he could have killed her fourteen times over already. Instead, I stood and forced my rubbery legs to take me to the shore. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find there—some sign that his sword really was still in the depths of the lake. My own footprints to prove that I’d actually thrown it in, that the morning hadn’t been a dream.
Instead, I found a shoe. A uniform shoe. A girl’s uniform shoe with a ragged scuff down the outer side and mud all around the toe. I stared at it for what felt like an unreasonable amount of time but was possibly only a second. And in that second I ran the probabilities. Population of London sec-ondary schools was roughly 625,000 students, 141,000 in private schools requiring uniforms, statistically 51 percent female, leaving only a one in 71,910 chance that the shoe belonged to Sadie Mae Jackson.
But it did. Of course it did. As did the foot inside and the stocking-covered leg that protruded at an unnatural angle.
The next seconds were silence. A buzzing silence that stripped out the typical chorus of birds and insects that followed us all through the park, stripped out the sound of the rain, even the sound of my own breathing. I only knew I took breaths by watching the rise and fall of my chest. I finally forced myself to look up at Sadie, who didn’t move at all.
She was my friend, and I’d lured her right into the arms of a killer—a monster who’d left her slumped against a willow tree by the lake, hidden in the branches just feet from where I’d disposed of his weapon of choice. I thought I was hobbling him, removing one piece of his ritual. I thought he had a list and that only those on it were in danger. I’d thought so many wrong things. Turns out he hadn’t needed a sword to kill Sadie Mae, only his hand wrapped round her neck. His fingers left pink-striped impressions there. He hadn’t even bothered to close her eyes. And I found I couldn’t get close enough to reach them.
Someone tried to break through the silence, even taking my hand in his and pulling me into his arms, so that I couldn’t see her anymore, forcing me to hear the pounding beat of his own heart. I wrenched myself free of him, but he’d broken the spell and every sound in the entire city came rushing back, including the wasplike buzz of his voice that seemed to come at me from everywhere.
“Stop, Mori. Stop and think. We call this in now.”
I held my hand up in front of Lock’s face but didn’t touch him.
“Mori.” He tried to hold me again, but I stumbled away before he could. “We can’t just leave her here.”
I stared at Sadie Mae again, but she still wouldn’t move. “Stay with her?”
“And you?” Lock’s look was blank again, but his voice betrayed that expression. He was afraid.
I shook my head. I knew I should stay. Do something to cover for that man. Take away the fingerprints that were probably waiting to be discovered on her skin. Run home to practice lies with the boys until they were ready to swear Sadie Mae had only dropped off the pie, that she hadn’t even come inside the house. Covering meant we wouldn’t be on the news. We wouldn’t be separated. We would be free from the consequences of having a killer for a dad.
Only he would be free as well. And he would still be breathing. I couldn’t have that.
I didn’t know when exactly I’d decided that my father had to die. But it had been well before that evening in the park. Perhaps I knew it from that first night when Mallory and Day left us in the house with the monster who’d once been my father. Perhaps just two nights before, when I met his eyes across the shadowed hallway. I was taller than him, standing up on the stairs, looking down. And I already knew. It was just this truth that had spun through my unwitting consciousness for hours or days or weeks, until I accepted it fully as the only way.