Hollis forced a chuckle. ‘No nonsense, eh? Fair enough. Obviously, photos of faces won’t be much use, so what I had Jay here do, I had him check our files for full-length shots of men who broadly fit your descriptions. That is to say, for a white male aged between forty and sixty, about six foot two or three, and strikingly thin. And also for a second white male, this one aged between twenty-five and forty, around five foot ten and very bulky. If any of these men ring a bell, we have footage of some of them too. But there’s little point looking at that if it’s obviously not them. Make sense?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Then let’s start with the first guy, because we’ve only got three plausible candidates.’ Patterson took this as his cue to bring up the first picture on his laptop, a fair-haired man in black leathers standing outside a pub, chatting to a red-headed woman, also in leathers, but with her back to the camera. The man was certainly tall and thin, but he himself was all wrong: too young, loose-limbed, gangling and good-humoured in a way her intruder simply hadn’t been. Anna shook her head. ‘I mean I only saw him for a few seconds,’ she said. ‘And I was terrified.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Hollis assured her. ‘We all realise this is a long shot.’ He gestured at Patterson for a new photo. Meaner this time. Darker of complexion and of countenance, staring belligerently at the camera, clearly aware he was being filmed. Another biker, to judge from the black helmet with red flashes in his left hand, and from the motorbike behind. Too young again, though. Too broad. She shook her head once more. The third was even easier to dismiss, thanks to his beer belly.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Hollis. ‘Let’s try your second guy.’

  Patterson opened a different folder on his laptop, pulled up a new photo. It showed the upper body of a shaven-headed man in a black T-shirt, his arms muscled and tattooed, standing on the pavement outside a bookies. Big, yes, but not even close to big enough. He showed her the next, then eight more. Medium height and stocky seemed to be the build of choice among Lincolnshire’s bikers. But none had the sheer immensity of the man from her bedroom.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said finally. ‘I’ve wasted your time.’

  ‘Ruling people out is almost as valuable as ruling them in.’

  ‘Sure it is,’ she said.

  Patterson gave a snort of laughter, perhaps enjoying the way she’d put Hollis down. ‘Just to be clear, love,’ he said, ‘are you saying it’s definitely not any of these men? Or only that you can’t be sure?’

  ‘I was petrified, like I say. That could have made them look bigger, I guess. But I’m pretty sure.’ She turned back to Hollis. ‘Do any of them have accents?’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Accents?’

  ‘The big guy sounded foreign. The tall guy sounded posh.’

  ‘You never told me that,’ said Hollis to Patterson.

  ‘I didn’t know it,’ retorted Patterson. ‘Elias never said.’

  ‘They only spoke a couple of words each,’ said Anna, feeling an obscure urge to defend Elias. ‘And I might have been imagining it anyway. They might even have been putting it on.’

  ‘You don’t think…’ murmured Patterson.

  ‘No,’ said Hollis. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we at least ask? I mean I’ve got those new photos.’

  Hollis gave him a glare. The two men might be colleagues, but Anna got the strongest sense that they didn’t much like or trust one another. ‘Wait here,’ Hollis told her. He picked up the laptop and left, beckoning for Patterson to follow. The door had a small glass viewing window. She could see Patterson’s mulish expression through it, while, out of sight, Hollis scolded him in a voice so low that she only caught the odd word.

  A minute passed. Hollis poked his head back in. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said, with his bright false smile. ‘You couldn’t give us five, could you?’ He didn’t wait for her to reply but closed the door instead. Anna paced around the room again. She was genuinely cold by now. She kept breaking into shivers. The two men finally came back in. Patterson went to stand in the corner with his arms folded, his eyes on Hollis rather than on her. For his part, Hollis sat back down beside her with what he doubtless intended as a reassuring smile. Yet the more he smiled, the less comfortable she felt. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s possible that you’ll recognise one of the two men I’m about to show you. It would cause us no end of grief if he learned he was under surveillance, so I need your word it goes no further.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Anna.

  Hollis opened the laptop back up. ‘It won’t be him, mind,’ he said, with another glance at Patterson. ‘He’s too careful for that. But we might as well make sure.’ He tapped a key. A new photograph appeared, of two men in suits outside an office building, about to get into a gold Mercedes S-Class. The first – short, balding, fat and frightened – clearly wasn’t the one she was supposed to be looking at. That was the man behind: Slavic of features, with a face carved from granite, dressed in a bright white silk shirt and a sharply-tailored black suit, yet clearly a bruiser of some kind, not just from his immensity and multitude of scars, but from the way his eyes were fixed on the other man’s back, as if expecting him to make a break for it, as if wanting him to, just for the sport of catching him and making him pay. But what really got to her was the way he carried himself, his torso so bulky that it pushed his arms out from his body in a way that was so instantly familiar that she flinched and drew in a breath.

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered Hollis. ‘It’s him? You’re sure?’

  Anna nodded uncertainly. ‘I mean I never saw his face. But otherwise…’

  ‘Okay,’ said Hollis. ‘Fair enough. How about this one?’ He tapped a key and a new picture appeared, of the same gold Mercedes S-Class, only parked inside a huge open building of some kind, perhaps an aircraft hangar, with the two men from the first photograph standing with their backs to the camera while they talked to a tall, thin man in a gorgeous charcoal grey suit with a cream silk handkerchief neatly folded in his breast pocket, standing in front of a silver Rolls Royce.

  Anna was about to ask for a closer look when Hollis anticipated her, zooming in on his face and shoulders. A peculiar-looking man, not handsome so much as aristocratic. Or, to be more precise, a casting department’s idea of how an English aristocrat from between the wars should look. Thin to the point of gauntness, with pronounced cheekbones, a Roman nose and weirdly full lips curled into a permanent sneer. His hair was of such a glistening blackness that it had to be dyed, and he had a peculiar posture too, his chin upraised in order that he might look down his nose at the others, and his chest puffed out like some populist politician taking the podium at a rally. And suddenly she was back in her bedroom, facing a man who meant her ill. ‘It’s him,’ she said flatly.

  ‘How sure are you?’ asked Hollis. ‘We can’t afford mistakes. Not on this.’

  Anna hesitated. How certain could she be when she’d only seen two or three pieces from the full jigsaw of his face? ‘I mean I wouldn’t like to swear to it in court,’ she said. ‘But I’m more confident than I ever expected to be. Far, far more. Who is he? Who are they both?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I told you. This is an ongoing investigation. A highly sensitive one. If word gets out…’ He glanced up at Patterson once more, still standing there with his arms folded, gazing at Hollis with an expression she found hard to decipher. ‘Honestly, we can’t afford even a whisper. Not right now. And it’s for your own safety as much as anything, believe me.’

  ‘My safety? Are you trying to spook me?’

  ‘Yes, frankly. I’m trying to make sure you don’t say a word. Not to anyone. Not even to Elias.’

  ‘But he’s leading the case,’ protested Anna.

  ‘Not any more, he isn’t,’ said Hollis. ‘He got taken off it this afternoon. I’m surprised you haven’t heard.’ And there was the faintest flicker in his eye, which might just have been satisfaction or even relief, but which might also have been merely the poor lighting, or even her imagination hard at work.

  FORTY-FIVE

  A kink in Elias’s character compelled him, when feeling low, to push himself lower still. He thus ignored Wharton’s order to return directly to Nettleham HQ and left the A17 at Heckington instead, cutting cross country to a florist he knew in Walcott before continuing on through Dunston to St Mary’s Church.

  Elias had become a father much younger than he’d intended. Neither he nor Julie had planned it, they’d just been careless. He’d been silently furious with her, all the same, as though only she had been to blame. He’d felt trapped for those next few months, increasingly filled with dread. Then Marcus had arrived in the early hours of a winter morning, and it had decked him faster and for longer than any uppercut had ever done. It had felt as though a new colour had been added to the world, or more accurately a new dimension – as if he’d seen the world only in 2D until that moment, but now could see its depth.

  It had been for Marcus’s sake that he’d set aside his fading dreams of boxing glory to concentrate on his career in the police instead. It had been for him and the twins, when they’d arrived some eighteen months later, that he and Julie had bought a near-derelict cottage a few miles up the road from here, even though he’d known what brutal hard work restoration would be, on top of his regular job. He’d wanted it brutal. He’d wanted to build empires with his bare hands.

  It was dark by the time Elias arrived, but the old church was spotlit from beneath, making it plenty bright enough to see by. He turned off his phone out of respect for the dead, then knelt by his son’s graveside to lay his flowers against his headstone. He could feel the wetness of the grass through his trousers. It pleased him that he’d have to wash them later. All penance welcome here. Some weeds had been tugged up by their roots and set in a small heap to one side, and there were fresh lilies in a weathered crystal vase whose sides were splashed with watery mud. Julie had clearly been by, though she hated it here in the rain, for it gave her nightmares to think of his coffin filling with water, of Marcus battering his little fists against the wood as he drowned all over again.

  Nearly four years had now passed, yet Elias hadn’t healed. It wasn’t just grief. A bone had lodged in his throat, forever choking him. After it had happened, he and Julie had gone to counselling. She’d taken his hands in hers and looked into his eyes to tell him that she forgave him. A lie, of course. Bitterness had been her way of keeping Marcus alive. Elias, too, had said what had been expected of him: That sometimes terrible things happened despite our best efforts; that consequences could be out of proportion to failings; that if this had happened to a friend, he’d have felt desperately sorry for them, but he wouldn’t have blamed them. All of which was abstractly true, but none of which helped the slightest bit. He’d let his beloved son die. Everything else was bollocks.

  Eighteen months he’d worked on the cottage. But finally it had been ready. The garden had still been a mess, of course, but that could wait. There was only the sitting room to finish off, where they’d been storing their new furniture beneath dust sheets. He’d been putting up the last of the masking tape when Julie had arrived, wanting him to look after Marcus while she took the twins shopping. No worries. He was a joy to look after. Give him a book or some toys to play with, he could entertain himself for hours. He even enjoyed helping decorate, though five minutes of that usually took fifty to put right.

  Decorating mostly bored Elias, but he did enjoy a roller. That smell of paint, the satisfying sticky noise, the speed of transformation. He finished the first coat and stood back. It looked amazing. He’d had reservations about Julie’s choice of lilac, but he should never have doubted her. He turned to Marcus to share the moment. All parents must know that humpback sensation when their kid isn’t where they should be. That plunge of heart, that swell of terror. Usually it’s over in a blink, the little rascal popping up from behind the sofa, delighted at the trauma they’ve caused. Not this time.

  The door was closed but the sash window was raised a little for ventilation, and Elias had left his paint pots beneath it, almost like a set of steps. And there was a lilac smudge on the sill that he knew he hadn’t left himself. It made him feel quite ill. He lifted the window all the way and yelled for his son. Nothing. He climbed out, feeling so dizzy he feared he might fall over. The cottage was at the end of a private track that led to a lane with so little traffic that people drove recklessly fast along it. Elias ran to it now. Thank Christ, no sign of Marcus. Wherever he was, he surely couldn’t have done himself any—

  That was when Elias remembered the old swimming pool.

  He sprinted back up to the cottage and across the overgrown lawn. There were metal stakes around the pool, and bundles of wire mesh with which to fence it off before Julie and the children moved in; but his eagerness to get the house finished had taken precedence. He told himself that Marcus must be somewhere else. Fate couldn’t be that cruel. He slowed as it came into view, approaching it from the deep end. He felt hollow inside. He pledged his soul for a reprieve.

  The walls were grey cement, cracked and bulging. The bottom was covered by leaves and dirty brown water. Elias was almost at its edge before he saw the leg of Marcus’s blue dungarees and then a sleeve of his red jersey. He must have fallen from almost exactly where Elias was now. He was lying on his front, his face in the water. The floor was so slick with vegetation that Elias’s feet slid from under him when he jumped down. He cracked his head sickeningly hard against the side, but managed to hold onto consciousness by an effort of pure will.

  He picked Marcus up in both arms and staggered up the pool’s sloped floor to the shallow end, where he laid him on his back. His skin was pale and blue. A gash in his forehead was leaking blood, and more was coming out of his ear too, along with a fine white froth from his nostrils. Yet he looked so at peace that it was impossible to believe anything serious was taking place.

  Elias had learned emergency first aid in the police. He checked for breathing and a pulse, couldn’t find either. He put his arms around Marcus’s waist, as he’d been taught, then made a fist of his right hand and pressed his thumb below his ribcage and gave it an upward thrust, sending water gushing from his mouth and nostrils, leaving his face covered by slick trails of pinkish foam and mucous. He laid him on his back again, pinched his nostrils, breathed into his mouth, gave him chest compressions. He still couldn’t find a pulse, but he was so panicked he couldn’t have found his own. He needed help. Professional help. A doctor, a paramedic, an ambulance.

  He picked Marcus up again and raced to the house where he gave him another round of CPR. It was the most gruelling thing he’d ever done, pressing that hard on his beloved son’s chest as his skin somehow turned both white and blue. His eyelids were closed. Elias lifted one with his thumb. His eye was upturned, pale and watery. The telephone hadn’t been connected yet, his mobile had no signal. The nearest hospital was in Lincoln, a good ten minutes away, but what choice did he have? He gave Marcus another round of CPR on his back seat then sped off, tooting traffic out of his way, overtaking on blind corners.

  The hospital entrance was on the other side of the road. A silver Bentley was approaching sedately down the other lane. Elias flashed his lights in warning but the arsehole only accelerated. He cut across him anyway, his car jumping as its rear was clipped, blaring his horn non-stop for attention as he raced up the approach, nurses and visitors jumping out of his way as he screeched to a stop outside the front doors.

  He must have looked a sight in his wildness and distress, his clothes sodden and covered with blood and paint. But they knew what they were doing. They put Marcus on a trolley while one doctor asked precise questions and another searched for vital signs and shouted orders. Assured, brisk, calm. They’d done this a hundred times, it gave him confidence and hope. His legs gave way beneath him. A nurse helped him to a chair. He tried to explain how Marcus must have been alive when he’d found him because he’d still been bleeding. Her expression told him that that wasn’t much of a straw to clutch at. The shock kicked in. He began to shiver. He took out his phone to call Julie without the first idea what to say. A door opened behind him and the nurse looked up and he read the news on her face, and he really didn’t remember much else after that.

  In the graveyard, Elias heard the squeaking of the gate, then excited laughter. A boy and a girl appeared, arms around each others’ waists. They stopped when they saw him kneeling by that tiny headstone. They winced in sympathy. He pushed himself back to his feet then dried his eyes and gave them the most encouraging smile that he could find as he turned and headed past them for the gate.

  Because life rolled on. It was what it did.

  FORTY-SIX

  It was blustery, cold and dark by the time Anna left Nettleham Police HQ. She hugged her jacket tight around herself as she set off for the pound, following the directions the desk officer had given her. It began, almost inevitably, to drizzle, scattering diamonds in the car headlights and making the flagstones glisten. She upped her pace as the rain fell ever harder, turning into such a violent squall that she ran the final stretch, splashing past a school outside which the last few parents were waiting in their cars for their children.

  The pound’s main gate was only a little further on, but she arrived to find it padlocked and its Hours of Opening sign telling her it had closed fifteen minutes ago. She stood there seething at Patterson and Hollis for having wasted so much of her time, and at the desk officer for not bothering to warn her. But there was nothing for it now.

  She took shelter beneath a bus stop a little way down the road. She didn’t want to throw herself on Oliver’s mercy, not without at least trying for a taxi. But it was the afternoon rush, and the first two companies she called were booked solid. She was about to try a third when a black SUV with tinted windows parked a little way up the hill from her began to roll slowly out of its spot on the slope, yet without turning on its engine or its lights.