Chloe had barely slept, and what little rest she had managed to cling on to had been permeated with dreams that had left her shaken. Her brother’s voice on the recording and the memory of his visit to her shared flat not long after Emily had died all played back to her, the words distorted, incriminating. Why was she now starting to doubt him? She hated herself for even contemplating the notion that Luke might not have been telling the truth. She had come this far. She wouldn’t stop believing in him now.
It was twenty past seven. It was early to be calling Alex, although she knew the DI was always up early. She wanted to catch her before she got to the station, or wherever it was that the investigation into the deaths of Lola Evans and Sarah Taylor would take her that morning. She wished she could be of greater help. She felt useless there, confined to the flat and unable to go to the job that she realised had for so long now been the very thing that had been keeping her afloat. Without it, what was she?
‘Alex?’
‘Everything all right?’
No, Chloe thought, but of course they both already knew that. Nothing was all right. It was starting to feel as though nothing would ever be all right again.
‘Any updates on the case?’
Alex exhaled loudly down the phone. Chloe realised what a difficult position she was putting her colleague in, and she had already asked too much of her. Relaying details of a current case to an officer on suspension would be yet another round of ammunition the superintendent could use against Alex, were Harry to decide that her involvement in Chloe’s closed case investigations was sufficient to take action against them both. Alex had already made herself vulnerable for the sake of helping her.
‘Chloe, you know I can’t give you any information.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I just feel so bloody useless sitting here, not doing anything.’
There was a pause.
‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’ Chloe pressed, reading the unspoken suggestion in Alex’s silence.
‘You’re not useless, OK. We have a suspect, and that’s all I can say, but something you wrote in your email… we wouldn’t have got there without you. You’re not useless.’
The DI was trying to offer her reassurance, but Chloe couldn’t bring herself to accept it. She should be there with her now, she thought, helping her catch the bastard responsible for the deaths of two innocent young women. She had allowed herself to become distracted. She had failed those girls. Words had their place, but it was actions that solved crimes and ensured convictions.
‘Who is he?’ Chloe asked, knowing she was pushing her luck.
‘I’m going to put the phone down if you ask me anything else. How are you?’
‘Like I said, useless.’ Chloe played distractedly with a loose thread of cotton at the seam of her duvet cover. ‘Look, I know we can’t do anything more about Luke now. I realise I might not be coming back. I just want you to know something.’
There was silence again as Alex waited for Chloe to resume her speech. Chloe had wanted to tell Alex of her suspicions about her father so many times before, but there had never seemed to be a right time. Whenever she had thought to tell her, she had visualised Alex’s likely response. She knew how erratic her suspicions already appeared, what trouble they had already led her into. Accusing her father was likely to help her lose what little credibility she’d had left.
There was never going to be a right time. Somehow, the urgency to tell her now seemed pressing. If someone else knew what she thought had happened at least she would no longer be alone with her suspicions. Even if they chose not to listen, she had told someone.
‘I think my father killed Luke.’
Chloe could hear the scepticism in Alex’s silence. To anyone else, her words were those of someone barely clinging on to common sense. First Patrick Sibley then all those other names she had reeled off that morning in Alex’s office, crowding the room with events and accusations that seemed to hold little coherence even to her. Now her father.
‘Do you have any evidence?’
There was a tiredness to Alex’s question – a ‘here we go again’ sigh mingled between the words that Alex couldn’t have hidden even had she attempted to.
Chloe looked at the screen of her laptop. She knew what she wanted to say. She wanted to tell Alex, louder this time, what a controlling bully her father had been throughout her and her brother’s childhoods. She wanted to tell her again – had she not heard it the first time? – that she had watched her father beat Luke for little more than what he had referred to as insolence.
Luke had been accused of murder. What had her father been capable of under those circumstances?
She looked again at the screen in front of her. She couldn’t tell Alex – not without admitting to having copied the files. Not without forcing Alex to an even greater scepticism of her integrity. ‘No.’
‘You need to stop this now. For your own sake, please.’
She thinks I’m losing the plot, Chloe thought. ‘I wish I was there to catch him with you.’
Was she talking about Lola and Sarah’s killer, or was she talking about the man she believed responsible for her brother’s death? Was it now more important to find that man than it was to find the one responsible for the death of Emily? The boundaries between everything seemed blurred. Chloe wasn’t sure of anything any more.
Except maybe one thing.
She looked at her opened laptop and at the CCTV footage that was paused on the screen. A main road, not far from Marcross where her brother had been found. Her father’s car stopped at a set of traffic lights. A driver who wore a hooded jacket – a jacket that was one of Luke’s.
A driver she was certain was not her brother.
Chapter Sixty
He stood on her front doorstep still looking so much like the younger man Chloe remembered with such fondness. Time had altered him, tracing the finest of lines at the corners of his eyes, but that smile – that front tooth that crossed ever so slightly over the other – was still instantly recognisable as his. It brought a comforting sensation that she felt enclosed by, as though nostalgia had wrapped itself around her like an old blanket, cosy in its familiarity.