“They didn’t, Alan,” Logan said. “Nobody made her sick. Not on purpose. It was just… It was tragic, and it was unfair, and I can’t imagine how terrible it must’ve been. But it was nobody’s fault. And it certainly wasn’t Jameelah’s. Hurting her, killing her…” Logan shook his head. “What would she say, Alan? What would Lucy say if she knew what you were doing?”
The words came out of him like some sort of primal roar. “Don’t you say that! Don’t you say her name! You didn’t know her! You don’t know!”
“You’re right, I don’t know her. But you did. You do. So tell me, is this the legacy she’d want?” Logan pressed. He chanced another step forward. Alan’s eyes darted to the detective’s feet, but he said nothing. “Is this how Lucy would choose to be remembered, if she could? As the catalyst for an innocent girl’s death? I bet she never hurt a fly in her life, did she?”
Alan’s head shook. A tear cut through the grime on one cheek. “No. She was… she was kind. She was kind, and she was funny, and she was beautiful.” He sniffed like he could draw his grief back into him. His face darkened. “And she’s gone. He took her. My little girl, he took her away. So I’m going to take his away. I’m going to kill his daughter, like he killed mine.”
“But I don’t think you are, Alan,” Logan told him. Another step. Closer. “I think, if you were going to do that, you’d have done it by now. I think you know that you shouldn’t. That you can’t. That you won’t do it. You know Jameelah has done nothing to you, Alan. You know how disappointed Lucy would be in you if you destroyed her memory like this. That’s why you haven’t hurt her yet. And that’s why you won’t do it now.”
He chanced three steps in a row. Tyler hadn’t moved, and so was several paces back now. Alan Rigg was no longer looking Logan in the eye and was fixated on his feet, instead. He hadn’t objected to the detective coming closer, but then he was still safely out of reach. Still too far away.
There was no way Logan would reach Jameelah in time if Alan decided to give her a push. No way he could stop her smashing onto the rocks and tumbling into the foaming water below. One shove, and she was gone.
“Let me take her, Alan. We can talk. Man to man, father to father. This is not a complete disaster yet, Alan. There are a lot of happy endings still available to us here.”
Alan flinched, like he’d been struck. “It is. It’s too late. I already did it. I already killed him.”
Logan nodded, just once. “The man in the tent. Who was he?”
“He was me,” Alan said, his movements were becoming jerky, his voice a hiss barely audible above the wind and the waves. “And I’m him. Or was going to be. Because, you’d figure it out. Someone. Maybe not you. But someone would figure out what had happened. Why I’d done it. But, if I was dead, then I was dead, and you wouldn’t look for me. So I found someone in Glasgow that nobody would miss, and I swapped. Me for him. Him for me. He would be me, and I would be him. You see?”
“Not really,” Logan admitted. “You’re saying the man in the tent we found. The body. You brought someone up here, and you killed them so we’d think it was you?”
“And now I’m him. I’m nobody,” Alan concluded. “I can go sit on the street like him. People will pass me by and not even notice. Not even look. They won’t see me sitting there. They won’t know what I’ve done, or why I’ve done it.”
“Except, now we do know, Alan,” Logan pointed out. “We know everything, so you can’t disappear anymore. You can’t run away and pretend you didn’t do this. All you can do is try to fix what you still can. Do what’s right, Alan. For Lucy’s sake. Don’t be someone else, be you. Be her dad.”
For a moment—but just that, and no longer—it looked like he was buying it. It looked like he might let the girl go.
And then, as if a switch had been flicked, his expression changed. His grip tightened, and his eyes blazed with fury.
“You’re them, aren’t you? You’re like the rest of them. You’re fucking lizards, both of you!”
Jameelah cried out in fright as he shoved her right to the edge. Her foot slipped, and her hands, which were bound in front of her, grasped at Alan’s ragged clothing, searching for something to hold onto.
“Alan, don’t do this!” Logan barked. “Please. Let’s keep talking. Let’s—”
“Shut up! Stop talking! I don’t listen to lizards! I don’t let lizards tell me what to do!”
Tyler stepped forward before Logan could respond. “Wait, you’re right! You’re right!” he cried. Logan and Alan Rigg both turned to him, eyes narrowed. Tyler swallowed, and shuffled past the DCI, hands still raised in surrender. “We’re lizards. Under this.”
Alan’s mouth fell open, then snapped shut again, his jaw clenching until the veins on the side of his head looked like they might go pop.
“I knew it,” he whispered. “They said it was in my head, but I knew it.”
“I can prove it,” Tyler said. “I can show you.”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Logan whispered, but Tyler took another half-step onwards, leaving him behind.
“You can feel the scales. Under my skin,” he said, pulling up his shirt sleeve to reveal the underside of his bare forearm. “You can feel them for yourself. I’ll give you my phone. You can take pictures. You can finally prove it. You can finally prove you’ve been right all this time.”
Alan was focused on nothing else now but Tyler’s arm. His face twitched, like each individual muscle was alive and engaged in some sort of complicated dance that none of them had thought to rehearse.
“What does it… What’s it like?” he asked. “What does it feel like?”
“It’s… I can’t really explain. It feels normal to us,” Tyler said. He moved closer. Twelve feet now. Ten. “But you can feel it. See what you think. And we’ll tell you everything.”
Alan’s lips moved, repeating that last word in silence.
“Anything you want to know, we’ll tell you. About the Earth. About the government. About the Royal Family. Everything we’ve done, we’ll tell you.”
Nine feet.
Eight.
The intrigue and uncertainty that had started to fog over Alan’s gaze lifted in the blink of an eye. His head snapped up, meeting Tyler’s gaze. His lips drew back, becoming a snarl.
“You’re lying!” he hissed.
And with that, he pushed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Tyler sprang forwards, grabbing for the girl’s outstretched arms. His fingers brushed against her, nails scraping white lines up the dark skin of her forearm, and then he found purchase on the rope around her wrists just as she plunged over the edge towards the rocks below.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Tyler cried, her momentum pulling him, dragging him over. He held on, looking down at her, and at the thunderous waves swirling and crashing impatiently below.
The world lurched. His centre of balance shifted inexorably forward. There was nothing he could do but go down with her, take the fall, take the hits, try to be alive enough at the bottom to keep her head above water. To keep her from drowning in the—
A hand caught him by the back of the trousers, jerking him away from the edge and setting his recovery from his testicular cancer operation back by at least a fortnight.