arms.
Please protect Mia. I think Gilbourne is her father. I’m sorry – E
She is the one good thing in all of this, and she will be safe now.
Not hunted anymore. Not hidden away. Free.
I let my head fall back to the stage, looking up at the blinding brilliance of hundreds of lights arranged in rows above me. I take a breath, wincing against a fresh wave of pain. The coppery taste of blood in my mouth.
The lights above me are dimming now. Receding.
Fading into darkness.
THREE MONTHS LATER
69
The day is dry and bright and icy-cold, trees bare under a cloudless December sky, the high street busy with shoppers making the most of the good weather in the last few days before Christmas. Mia sits in her pushchair, chewing enthusiastically on a bright yellow teething ring with bunny ears. She’s dressed in a white padded romper suit, with a blanket across her lap and a knitted bobble hat pulled down over her ears, wrapped up and cosy, her cheeks ruby red.
I smile as I see her, making my way over to a table by the window of the café.
‘She’s getting big,’ I say to Dominic.
‘Sitting upright,’ he says. ‘She’ll be crawling soon.’
Mia is in her pushchair, with Dominic at her side. On her other side is Barbara, her great aunt, who’s been helping to take care of Mia while Angela follows the long road of rehabilitation from her injuries. A sprightly sixty-something with an uncanny resemblance to her older sister, Barbara holds out her hand and I shake it.
‘Nice to meet you at last, Ms Devlin.’
Dominic pushes a cup towards me as I sit down. ‘It’s good to see you again, Ellen. How are you feeling?’
‘Much better, thank you.’ I unzip my jacket, the warmth of the café a welcome contrast to the crisp winter cold outside. ‘Feel like I’m pretty much back to normal. The physio has been good and the doctors seem to think I’m doing OK.’
It’s true, but luck was on my side too: Gilbourne’s bullet missed an artery by half an inch – clipping my lung instead. A fraction higher and I would have bled out long before help could arrive. Instead, the wound had left blood leaking into my lung as I lost consciousness, DS Holt arriving minutes later with other officers and paramedics. Gilbourne was already dead, the shotgun lethal at point-blank range as I knew it would be.
A storm of publicity about the rogue policeman-turned-killer has still not abated, the official inquiry only recently announced. Leon Markovitz finally got the big scoop he’d been chasing, the huge story to prove the doubters wrong, a worldwide exclusive that I agreed to help him with.
I give Mia a wave. ‘So nice to see this little one again.’
She continues to chew on her teething ring, giving me a gummy smile.
I take a sip of my drink, the hot chocolate warming me, and Dominic tells me more about Mia and all the things she’s been learning to do in these past few months. He’s not a blood relative but he’s keen to spend as much time as he can with her, to be part of her life. He’s made peace with Angela and started to put his life back together again, the cloud of suspicion that had hung over him for a year finally lifted – his supposed criminal record, I know now, was just another part of Gilbourne’s tapestry of lies. Dominic, Angela and Barbara will all be together for Mia’s first Christmas and I can tell it means a great deal to him as he starts to rebuild and look to the future.
Barbara goes to the counter to ask about heating Mia’s bottle of formula milk. I lean forward, lowering my voice a little.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Dominic, when we first met? Tell me what was really going on?’
‘Because I knew that sooner or later you were going to end up talking to the police, and I wanted them to have as little information as possible.’
‘So you kept me in the dark.’
‘I did what I had to do, to keep her safe. Both her parents are gone now, only her grandma left. And me.’
‘She has her mother. She has Zoe.’
‘You know what I mean. She needs someone who can look out for her as she grows up. I can do that.’
I nod slowly, catching his eye for a moment before looking away. I’ve been wondering whether to tell him, whether it would feel right, but now