clouds are mainly dispersed. I open up the curtains and dump my sopping clothes into the washing machine. It seems that getting messed up at night is becoming a habit. Then I make coffee, wondering at what point in the human evolution coffee became such an important ingredient, and I figure if nothing else in this world, no matter what happens in the future, coffee will sure as hell be around a lot longer than religion. I carry the photographs I’ve pulled back out from under the carpet into my office. I go through them all again, but recognise only Bruce among the various boys and girls. Then I turn them over. They all have names and dates on the back. Just first names. The dates go back twenty four years. I start flicking through them, the names rushing out at me from the past month, the names connecting the dots.
I put the photos down. I stand up and start to walk around my office, my breath quickening. Excitement is starting to build, the kind of excitement I haven’t felt in a long time, not since working homicides in my previous life, not since the thrill of feeling things coming together and knowing you’re heading for the finishing line.
There are five girls in these pictures. Four of them share names with the dead girls who’ve been found. I have no idea where the fifth girl is, but I have a first name. Deborah. There are three boys too: Bruce, Simon and Jeremy. I have no idea where Simon and Jeremy are either.
I go back to Rachel’s photo and turn it over. I remember
the other photos I’ve seen of her on the wall of her parents’
house. Then suddenly I’m back in Father Julian’s office. Bruce was like a son to me, he’s telling me. Like a son. Were all these people like sons and daughters to Father Julian? I think they were. I remember looking at the pictures of the missing girls a month ago and thinking how similar they were, how their killer had a type. I was right and wrong. His type wasn’t based on characteristics the girls shared, or body type or age. It was based on who these people were. He targeted them specifically because they were all related.
chapter forty-five
The house looks a little tidier than the last time I was here. I figure their lives are no longer on hold. The news they’d been dreading has arrived, and though they’re struggling with it, they’re starting to move forward.
“I don’t know whether to thank you or hate you,’ Patricia Tyler says, and she really seems to be trying hard to make up her mind.
‘Can I come in? Please, it’s important.’
“I don’t know. The truth is I hardly know what to think any more.’
I pull out the photograph from Father Julian’s collection. The rest are in the envelope, tucked inside my jacket pocket. I hand it over. I know immediately that she recognises it. Her knuckles turn white as she holds it ever tighter.
‘Where did you get this?’ she asks, though I’m pretty sure she already knows.
‘Please, can I come inside?’
She takes a step back for me to move in, and leads me down the hallway.
‘Michael isn’t here,’ she says, then pauses. ‘Thankfully’
The photographs on the wall are all the same as the last time I was here, but I see them a little differently now. Michael Tyler, who is holding her hand when she is maybe five years old, doesn’t appear in any earlier photographs.
We sit down in the lounge. Patricia Tyler offers me a drink and I tell her I’d like some water. She gets up and returns a minute later, carrying two glasses. She sets them down carefully on a pair of coasters and I ask the question I came here to ask.
‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘It all seems like a lifetime ago. Longer, when I think about it really hard. Rachel was four when I met Michael and six when we got married. It was like starting a new life. I could only hope that Michael would one day look at Rachel as if she was his own.’ She takes a sip of water. ‘He did see her that way too. He loved her, and the past years — well, they’re killing him as much as they’re killing me.’
And Father Julian, he was Rachel’s biological father,’ I say, and it isn’t a question.
‘It’s been over twenty years, and you’re the first person to ever ask me about him.’ She looks back down at the photograph.
“I remember this moment,’ she says. ‘It was the day Rachel turned two. I was leaving work early. My mother would look after Rachel while I was at work. She made a cake and we had a party, but Rachel didn’t understand the occasion.’
I remember a similar party for my own daughter. I remember getting carried away and buying too many gifts. Emily was excited tearing them open, but her concentration would drift from her new toy to the wrapping paper the toy had come in, and she would run around the room as if she was on a sugar high while friends and family watched and laughed and played with her.
She would have five more birthdays. Rachel Tyler had seventeen more.
‘This moment,’ she says, and she twists the photo towards me for the briefest of seconds. Rachel is sitting in the corner of a room with her head resting on her knees, her arms wrapped around her legs, and her eyes either half open or half closed, ‘was at the end of the day. I was getting ready to take her back home and she didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay with my mother, because she thought that it meant there would be more presents tomorrow’