“Ocean View Avenue. Is that inhabited?”
“No, sir. Just walls.”
So no one could say we were putting the inhabitants in danger, by letting this thing go free through the night to find its own way to us. Even if Ocean View Avenue had been teeming with rosy families and unlocked doors, I wouldn’t have worried. This wasn’t a spree killer, blazing away at anything that came on his screen. No one mattered to this guy, no one existed, except the Spains.
Richie had moved over to his holdall, crouching low so he wouldn’t be silhouetted against the window-holes, and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He spread it on the floor in front of us, in a pale rectangle of moonlight: a map of the estate.
“Good,” I said. “Get onto Detective . . .” I clicked my fingers at Richie and pointed down at the Spains’ kitchen; he mouthed Oates. “Detective Oates. Let her know it looks like action stations. Tell her to make sure the doors are locked, the windows are locked and her gun is loaded. Then she needs to start moving stuff—papers, books, DVDs, I don’t care—from the front of the house to the kitchen, as visibly as possible. You two, fall back to the point where you first spotted this guy. If he chickens out and tries to head back past you, pick him up. Don’t ring me again unless it’s urgent. Otherwise, we’ll let you know if anything happens.”
I pocketed my phone. Richie brought a finger down on the map: Ocean View Avenue, up in the northwest corner of the estate. “Here,” he said, very quietly, just a murmur under the powerful murmur of the sea. “If he’s heading for us, and he’s sticking to the empty streets and going over walls for shortcuts, it’ll take him ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”
“Sounds about right. I don’t see him coming straight here: he’s got to be worried that we’ve found this place. He’ll have a nose around first, decide whether he’s going to risk coming up here: look for cops, for unfamiliar cars, see if there’s any activity . . . Let’s say twenty-five minutes, all told.”
Richie glanced up at me. “If he decides it’s too risky, does a legger, then it’s the floaters who get to pick him up. Not us.”
“Fine with me. Unless he comes up here, he’s just some guy out for a night walk in the middle of nowhere. We can find out who he is and have a nice chat with him, but unless he’s stupid enough to wear the bloody trainers or come out with a full confession, we won’t be able to hold him. And I’m happy to let someone else be the guy who picks him up and has to throw him back a few hours later. We don’t want him feeling like he’s got one up on you and me.” What we would do if he ran didn’t matter: I knew he was coming to us, knew as surely as if I could smell him, a sharp hot musk steaming off the rooftops and rubble, curling closer. Since the moment I had seen that lair, I had known he would come back to it. Sooner or later, an animal on the run runs for home.
Richie’s mind had been moving in the same direction. He said, “He’ll come. He’s already closer than he ever got last night; he’s dying to find out what’s the story. Once he sees Janine . . .”
I said, “That’s why we’ve got her moving stuff to the kitchen. I’m betting the first thing he’ll do is check out the front of the Spains’ house, from the building sites across the road. The idea is that he’ll spot her from there, he’ll want to know what she’s doing with all the stuff, but in order to find out, he’ll have to come back here. The houses are too close together for him to squeeze in between, so he can’t come over the wall and in by the back. He’ll have to come down Ocean View Walk.”
The top of the road was dark, shadowed by houses; the bottom stretch curved into moonlight. I said, “I’ll take the top of the road and the goggles. You take the bottom. Any movement, any at all, you let me know. If he does come up here, we’ll do our best to keep things quiet—it’d be nice not to alert the residents that something’s going on—but he may not give us the choice. The one thing we don’t forget for a second is that this guy is dangerous. Going on past form, there’s no reason to think he’s armed, but we’re going to act like he is. Armed or not, this is a rabid animal and we’re in his den. Remember exactly what he did down there, and take it for granted that, given the chance, he’d do the same to you and me.”
Richie nodded. He passed me the thermal-vision goggles and started tossing his things back into his holdall, fast and efficiently. I folded the map, stuffed Richie’s food wrappers into a plastic bag and tucked it away. A few seconds later the room was bare floorboards and breeze block again, like we had never been there. I slung our holdalls into a dark corner, out of the way.
Richie set himself up by the window-hole facing the bottom of the road, squatting in a slant of shadow by the sill, and pried a corner of plastic sheeting loose so he could see out. I checked the Spains’ house: our Fiona came into the kitchen carrying an armful of clothes, put them on the table and left again. Upstairs I could see, faint through Jack’s window, the glow of a light in Pat and Jenny’s bedroom. I pressed myself against the wall by the window overlooking the top of the road, and lifted the goggles.
They turned the sea invisible, a bottomless black. At the top of the street, the flat gray crisscross of scaffolding stretched away into the distance; an owl floated across the road, drifting on the air currents like a sheet of burning paper. The stillness went on and on.
I thought my eyelids were frozen wide open, but I must have blinked. There was no sound. One moment the top of the street was empty; the next he was standing there, blazing white and fierce as an angel between the shadowy ruins on either side. His face was almost too bright to look at. He stood still, listening, like a gladiator at the entrance to the ring: head up, arms held free from his sides, hands half closed, ready.
I didn’t breathe. I kept one eye on him and lifted a hand to catch Richie’s attention. When his head turned towards me, I pointed out the window and beckoned.
Richie crouched low and slid across the floor to the other side of my window like he was weightless. As he pressed his back against the wall, I saw his hand go to the butt of his gun.
Our man came down the road slowly, placing his feet carefully, his head turning to every tiny sound. There was nothing in his hands, no night-vision gear on his face; just him. In the gardens, the small glowing animals uncurled and bounded away from his approach. Radiant against that web of metal and concrete, he looked like the last man left on earth.
When he was one house away I put the goggles down, and that tall shining figure flicked to a huddle of black, trouble sliding down the night to land on your doorstep. I signaled to Richie and backed away from the window-hole, into the shadows. Richie eased himself into the far corner opposite me; for a moment I heard his fast breathing, till he caught it and stilled it. The first weight of our man’s hand on the metal bar sent a shiver vibrating all through the scaffolding, circling the house like a dark shimmer.
It grew as he climbed, a low thrumming like the pulse of a drum, and then it faded to silence. His head and shoulders appeared in the window, darker against dark. I saw his face turn to the corners, but the room was wide and the shadows hid us.
He swung in through the window with an ease that said he had done it a thousand times. The second his feet hit the floor and his body turned towards his lookout window, I came out of my corner and slammed into him from behind. He let out a hoarse shot of breath and staggered forward across the floor; I got an elbow around his neck, twisted his arm high behind his back with the other hand and slammed him up against a wall. The air went out of him in one sharp grunt. When his eyes opened, he was looking at Richie’s gun.
I said, “Police. Don’t move.”
Every muscle in his body was rigid; he felt like he was made of steel rods. I said, and my voice sounded cool and clipped and like someone else’s, “I’m going to handcuff you for everyone’s safety. Do you have anything on you that we should know about?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. I eased my hands off him, watching; he didn’t move, didn’t even flinch when I wrenched his wrists behind him and snapped the cuffs tight. Richie patted him down, fast and hard, tossing what he found into a small pile on the floor: a torch, a packet of tissues, a roll of mints. Wherever he had hidden his car, he had left his ID and his money and his keys with it. He had been traveling light, making sure there was nothing to give him away with even a clink.
I said, “I’m going to take the handcuffs off, so that you can climb down the scaffolding. I don’t expect you to try anything stupid; if you do, it won’t do anything except put me and my partner in a very bad mood. We’re going back to headquarters for a chat. Your belongings will be returned to you there. Any problems with any of that?”
He was somewhere else, or fighting hard to be. His eyes, narrowed against the moonlight, were fixed somewhere on the sky outside the window, over the Spains’ rooftop. “Great,” I said, when it was obvious I wasn’t going to get an answer. “I’m going to take that to mean there’s no problem. If anything changes, you can go right ahead and let me know. Now let’s go.”
Richie climbed down first, awkwardly, with one of the holdalls slung over each shoulder. I waited, holding the handcuff chain between our man’s wrists, till Richie gave me the thumbs-up from the ground; then I clicked the cuffs open and said, “Go. No sudden moves.”
When I took his shoulder and pointed him in the right direction, he woke up and stumbled across the bare floor. In the window-hole he stood still for a moment; I saw the thought go through his mind, but before I could say anything he must have realized that from that height he would be lucky to break anything more than his ankles. He swung himself out of the window and started climbing, docile as a dog.
This guy I used to know gave me the nickname back in training college, when I scored a scorcher of a goal in some football match. I let it stick because I thought it would give me something to live up to. In the second when I was alone, in that terrible room filled with moonlight and sea-roar and months of waiting and watching, a tiny part at the back of my mind thought: Forty-eight hours, four solves. Now there’s a scorcher. I understand how many people would call that sick, and I understand why, but that doesn’t change the fact: you need me.