‘I saw him,’ said Holly. ‘On the TV. The private detective, the one who hunted down all those bad people.’
Owen wanted to ask Holly when last she’d eaten, and if she was managing to sleep at all, because his daughter had begun visibly to waste away since the discovery of the body, and her eyes stared out from reddish-blue hollows. Instead, he said: ‘We’re not bad people.’
‘It won’t make any difference to him.’
‘He can’t know any more than the police do.’
‘Maybe not yet, but he’s not like the police. He’s different. Jesus, the stuff on the Internet: if even half of what they say about him is true …’
Owen was of the opinion that virtually nothing on the Internet was true, and most of what was true wasn’t worth reading. But he also acknowledged that he might just be part of a dying generation, and eventually he, and those like him, would cede their places to men and women who thrived on conspiracy theories, the echo of their own voices, and the opinions of dogmatists and fools.
Owen had Holly’s laptop open on the table before him. He was clicking through the searches in her history, taking in a headline here, a report there. He knew Parker’s name, and something of Parker’s reputation, from his own research, but Holly had discovered much more. Even allowing for falsehoods and exaggeration, this was a man to be reckoned with.
‘But who could have hired him?’ said Owen. ‘If he’s a private investigator, someone must have paid him to sniff around.’
Holly looked at him. She was still frightened, but the tincture of her fear altered.
‘What if it’s the people Karis was running from?’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because I’ve been reading the same material as you,’ said Owen, ‘and I don’t think Parker would accept their money. All those cases – murderers brought to justice, missing women found, children saved from Christ knows what kind of end – they share some sense of morality, of right and wrong.’
‘They say he’s killed people.’
‘They do,’ Owen admitted. ‘But if anyone believes the world is poorer for their absence, they’re keeping quiet about it.’
Holly knocked back a mouthful of bourbon large enough to empty her glass. Owen hoped that at least it might help her sleep. It wouldn’t be good sleep, but in her current state, any rest at all would be a bonus.
‘He’ll come here,’ said Holly. ‘He’ll find his way to my door.’
‘You can’t know that.’
She was no longer looking at him. She was staring over his shoulder at the window, her gaze penetrating the glass and taking her into the darkness beyond, moving through forest and glade until it alighted at last on a man approaching from the south, his advance inexorable, his intent to deprive her of Daniel.
‘You’re wrong,’ she said.
Owen closed the laptop. He’d seen all he needed to see.
‘Then we have a choice,’ he said.
‘Tell me.’
‘We wait for Parker to arrive, and the police with him.’
‘Or?’
‘Some of these stories mention two lawyers here in Maine, one in Portland and the other in Falmouth. Parker’s done work for both of them. The woman in Falmouth I don’t know, and it doesn’t look like she’s engaged with Parker lately, but I’ve heard of the second, Castin. I can talk to him – just over the phone, no names. I’ll be careful.’
Holly put the glass down. She started to cry.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s all the law.’
‘We need help. We have to tell someone what happened. We should have done it as soon as they found the body.’
‘They won’t believe us.’
‘We’ll make them believe us. It’s the truth.’
‘I can’t lose him, Daddy. I can’t. I’ll die!’
Owen reached across the table to clasp her hands. He closed his eyes. He could feel again the spade in his hands, and the ache in his arms and back as he dug the hole; the form of the woman in her makeshift shroud, and the weight of her in his arms as he laid her in the ground. They had made her a promise, he and Holly, but it was one they should never have kept. Owen saw another path appear, one in which the police were called in the aftermath of the birth, and the child was temporarily taken from them while a process was initiated that ended with Daniel as his daughter’s boy, but without the secrets and without the fear.
A fairy tale.
Because there was another possibility: the woman identified; Daniel in care; and finally, the appearance of the father, come to claim his son at last.
‘Don’t let them have my baby.’
A dying woman’s words, her hand in Owen’s, still slick with her blood; Holly beside them, holding the child, this wailing boy; and something in the way Karis Lamb says those words makes Owen want to tell his daughter to smother the newborn’s cries, to silence him with whispers and caresses, with the warmth of her flesh and the scent of her skin, lest the hunters might hear.
Because unspoken yet still acknowledged between his daughter and him is the certainty that Parker and the police are not the only ones to be feared.
‘Don’t let them have my baby.’
Them.
He knew it would only be a matter of time before Karis Lamb was identified.
And then they would descend.
53
Despite Giller’s efforts to bring Quayle up to speed on Parker, the lawyer was still surprised by his own response to the detective’s arrival at their table.
From across the bar, Parker had resembled just another customer: average height, hair graying, his body perhaps refusing as yet to acquiesce entirely to the softness of middle age, or not without a fight. But Parker was different when viewed up close. It wasn’t as though any single facet of his character appeared more remarkable in proximity, although Quayle was prepared to make an exception for the eyes, which suggested a degree of insight both unusual and hard earned. Looking into them was like staring at the play of light on the surface of the sea, the greenish-blue of them communicating compassion, sadness, and a potential for violence that, once unleashed, would not easily be subdued. But Quayle thought also that there was about Parker a certain otherworldliness, a sense of one with an acute awareness of the ineffable. Quayle had encountered other such individuals in the past, but they were often ascetics, occasionally fanatics. Parker, from what Quayle knew, was neither. He was simply very, very dangerous.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Parker. ‘I hope you’re enjoying yourselves tonight.’
Quayle noticed that he kept his body slightly angled, so he could monitor both them and the crowd at the bar – in particular, Mors. Somehow he had picked up on her presence, even as she kept herself at one remove.
‘Very much,’ said Quayle. ‘Although it’s a little noisy for my liking.’
‘Not from around here, are you?’
‘Just visiting.’
‘English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Business?’
‘Mostly.’
‘And what kind of business would that be?’
‘Are you the welcoming committee?’
‘The regular guy is off, and I’m still working on my people skills.’
Parker waited for Quayle to answer his earlier question. The three men understood what was unfolding. Neither Quayle nor Giller made any effort to protest at Parker’s intrusion on their conversation, or to pretend that this was anything other than what it was: an adversarial confrontation brought down upon them by some moment of carelessness on their part, or the detective’s responsiveness to threat and predation.
‘I’m involved with the legal profession,’ said Quayle, at last.
‘A lawyer?’
‘Yes.’
‘You could have just said that.’
‘I don’t practice very much anymore.’
‘Yet here you are, on “business.”’
‘Indeed, here I am.’
A printed sheet lay by Quayle’s right hand: the cryptic crossword puzzle from that day’s edition of The Times of London. Completing it was one of Quayle’s pleasures, and he had been forced to subscribe temporarily to the newspaper using a proxy account in order to enjoy it while away from home. Quayle’s fountain pen lay alongside it, and the index finger of his right hand bore a telltale smudge of ink.
‘Puzzle fan?’ said Parker.