I’d just said his mother was dead so brazenly. He uncurled and slowly sat up straight, finally looking at me, his face expressionless. When he spoke, it was with a raspy, unearthly voice that sounded far too old for his years.
“I want to scare you,” he said.
Twenty-three
When the alarm went off, Pete lay very still for a moment, letting it ring on the bedside table. Something was wrong and he needed to prepare himself. Then there was a burst of panic as he remembered the events of yesterday evening. The sight of Neil Spencer’s body on the waste ground. The almost frantic race to get home afterward. And the reassuring weight of the bottle in his hand.
The clicks as he’d broken the seal.
And then …
Finally, he opened his eyes. The early morning sun was already strong, streaming through the thin blue curtains and falling in a wedge over the covers bunched up over his knees. Sometime in the night, sweating with heat, he must have thrown them off his upper body, and the tangle of material felt ridiculously heavy now, wrapped tightly around his knees.
He turned his head and looked at the bedside table.
The bottle was there. The seal was broken.
But the contents remained, full to the top.
He remembered how long he’d deliberated last night, battling the urge again and again as it came back at him from different angles, both he and the voice refusing to relent or retreat. He’d even brought the bottle and a tumbler up here to bed with him. Still fighting, even then.
And in the end, he had won.
Relief rushed through him. He glanced at the tumbler now. Before going to sleep, he had put the photograph of Sally on top of it. Even after everything that had happened—the horrors of the evening—that photograph and those memories had still been enough to keep him clean.
He tried not to think about the day ahead of him or the evenings to come.
Enough for now.
* * *
He showered and ate breakfast. Even without drinking, he felt so worn down that he contemplated not going to the gym. A briefing had been scheduled for first thing, and he needed to be prepared for it, to be filled in on the case. But he already felt soaked to the skin in it. As dispassionate as he’d tried to be when viewing Neil Spencer’s body, it was like pointing a camera without looking through the viewfinder; your mind took the photograph regardless. If anything, if he was going to be competent and professional in a couple of hours, he needed to empty some of that horror out.
He drove to the department and went to the gym.
Afterward, feeling calmer, he went upstairs. For a moment, he stared at the blissful piles of safe, innocuous paperwork in his office, then found the old, malignant bundle of notes he was going to need and headed to the operations room one floor above.
His calm faded slightly as he opened the door. It was still ten minutes before the briefing was due to begin, but the room was already heaving with officers. Nobody was talking; every face he could see looked somber. Most of these men and women would have worked this case from the beginning, and whatever the odds, each of them would have clung on to hope. By now they all knew what had been found last night. Before today, a child had been missing. Now a child was dead.
He leaned against a wall at the back of the room, aware as he did that gazes were falling on him. It was understandable. While his initial involvement in the case had come to nothing, all of them must know that his presence here now was not a coincidence. He spotted DCI Lyons sitting near the front, looking back at him. Pete met his eyes for a moment, trying to read the expression on the man’s face. Like last night at the waste ground, it was blank, which only left Pete free to imagine. Was the man feeling an odd sense of triumph? It seemed unfair to contemplate such an idea, but it was certainly possible. Despite the disparity in their career trajectories since, Pete knew that Lyons had always resented him on some level for being the one to catch Frank Carter. This recent development meant the case never really had been closed. And here was Lyons, presiding over what might turn out to be the endgame, with Pete reduced now to the status