perched on me, and then pressed his small body against mine.
“I don’t think that at all. That wasn’t what I meant.”
Except, it had been. Kind of, anyway. One of my biggest fears since Rebecca’s death was that I couldn’t connect with him. That we were strangers to each other. And a part of me did feel he might be better off without me and my fumbling attempts at fatherhood—that when he walked into school without a backward glance, it was how he felt all of the time.
It made me wonder if he thought the same about me. Maybe my going out this evening had made him feel I didn’t want to be with him. That I’d booked him into the 567 Club because I wanted to be rid of him. While I did need my own time and space, nothing could have been further from the truth.
How sad that was, I thought. Both of us feeling the same. Both of us trying to meet in the middle but somehow always missing each other.
“And I want to be with you too,” I said. “I won’t be out for long, I promise.”
He tightened his grip on me slightly.
“Do you have to go?”
I took a deep breath.
The answer, I supposed, was no, I didn’t have to, and I was reluctant to leave if it was going to upset him badly.
“I don’t have to,” I said. “But it will be fine, I promise. You’ll go to bed soon, fall asleep, and when you wake up I’ll be home again.”
He was silent, thinking over what I’d just told him. But the whole time, his anxiety seemed to be creeping into me as well. Apprehension. Dread, almost—the sudden fear that something bad was going to happen. It was silly, and there was no reason to think that. Even so, I could stay home, and I was about to tell him just that, but he nodded before I had the chance.
“Okay.”
“Right,” I said. “Good. I love you, Jake.”
“I love you too, Daddy.”
He disentangled himself from me, and I stood up. My father had been waiting by the door the whole time and I walked over to him.
“Jake okay?”
“Yes. He’ll be fine. But any problems at all, you’ve got my cell number.”
“I have it. But everything will be fine. Just strange for him, I guess.” He raised his voice a little. “But we’ll get along grand, Jake. You’re going to be good for me, right?”
Jake, who was drawing again now, nodded in reply.
I watched him for a moment, crouched down and concentrating on his picture, and I felt an indescribable burst of love for him. But it was one that hardened into determination. We were going to get back on track, the two of us. Everything was going to be okay. I wanted to be with him, and he wanted to be with me, and somehow, between us, we would figure out a way to make that work.
“A couple of hours,” I told my father again. “That’s all it will be.”
Forty-eight
“We’re nearly there,” DS Dyson said.
“I know,” Amanda told him.
She’d made Dyson drive, if only to keep him off his phone for an hour. They were fifty miles away from Featherbank now, heading along one edge of a large university campus. A corner took them into what was obviously the student heartland of the city, the houses all redbrick and cramped together on thin streets. Each was at least three or four stories high: buildings where five or six people could live together in groups, or landlords could rent single rooms out, creating collections of random strangers who remained strangers. A square mile of disparate people. A place it was cheap and easy to disappear into.
And this was where David Parker, previously known as Francis Carter, had chosen to make his home.
The ID was a solid one—right age, and a close visual match for the build of Victor Tyler’s prison visitor. They’d found him an hour before Pete had been due to leave, which had worried her at first, as she had been concerned he might overturn whatever arrangement he’d made earlier and insist on being involved. And she could tell that he had wanted to. But instead, he had watched quietly as Amanda made arrangements with the local force to visit the address, and when it had been time for him to leave, he had done so without complaint—just wished her luck and asked her to keep him informed on any developments. With the decision already made,