Page 70

6
Lucy is first to react. Perhaps because she has more to lose. When she leaps up, she loses her grip on her glass. The sound of it shattering on the hardwood floor barely registers.
Nick’s on his feet an instant later. He springs to theliving-room door and throws it open. Lucy follows, heart thumping in her ears. It takes her a moment to work out what she’s seeing. Because there seems to be atreelodged inside the entrance hall. Around it lie shards of glass, fragments of black pottery and soil.
‘Are youkiddingme?’ Nick roars.
But Lucy recognizes what’s happened.
The tree is an ornamental boxwood. Earlier, she saw two of them flanking the front entrance. Someone just hurled this one through Nick Povey’s glass door. When she lifts her eyes from the wreckage, she sees Daniel poised on the threshold.
A sound of dismay rolls from Lucy’s throat. Nick follows the direction of her gaze. Cold wind twines into the house. Rain speckles the hallway floor.
Daniel says nothing. He simply stares. At Lucy’s bare feet. At her towel-damp hair. At her unbuttoned rugby shirt bearing his best friend’s name.
It doesn’t just look bad. It looks catastrophic.
When she drops her head, she notices blood pulsing from her right foot.Lotsof blood.
Lucy frowns, confused. Glancing behind her, she sees a line of scarlet footprints. They retreat to Nick’s couch through slivers of daggered glass.
TWENTY-THREE
1
While Abraham waits for the assigned solicitor, he speaks to the CPS South West office in Exeter. A meeting is arranged for later that day. Daniel Locke’s confession has changed everything, but there’s still work to be done. The prosecutor’s office fears an ambush at the court hearing. In the meantime, Locke can be held without charge for twenty-four hours – although no magistrate will raise a frown at an extension request.
Sitting at his desk, Abraham reviews what he’s learned about Daniel Locke. Forty-two years old, born in Skentel, a marine engineer turned entrepreneur and joint owner of Locke-Povey Marine. With the exception of driving offences, of which there are several, the man has no adult convictions. Going further back, it’s a different story.
Aged fourteen, he served six months in custody for a vicious attack on two boys at his hostel, carried out while they slept. Locke went about them with a cricket bat before returning to his own bed. The next morning, he refused totell the arresting officers anything, only admitting guilt pre-trial in exchange for a lighter sentence. The violence, he claimed, was payback for slights both victims denied.
It isn’t the only entry on Locke’s record. A year earlier, he was the subject of a youth rehabilitation order, along with his friend, Nick Povey. Together, over a six-week period, they’d stolen alcohol from a string of Plymouth off-licences.
Abraham wonders if Lucy Locke knows all the details of Daniel Locke’s past. He can’t stop thinking about what her husband said in the hospital, about his wife deserving everything she gets. Nor his reaction when she arrived.
According to Lucy, they’ve been together nine years, married after two.
Only the worst kind of monster could live a decade with his partner before killing both her children. Yet in his thirty-year career, Abraham’s witnessed plenty of comparable atrocities. God granted humanity free will, and humanity now lives with the consequences.
Or perhaps God had no hand in it at all.
Pain, without warning, radiates across his back. It’s bad. The worst yet – as if razored wings beneath his skin are attempting to spread. He spins the cap on his pill bottle, swallows an OxyContin. For five minutes he concentrates on nothing but his breathing, his pain and his crumbling faith.
Did Daniel Locke intend to kill himself along with his kids? Was that the reason for his rage, back at the hospital? If so, why put on an immersion suit? It seems blind luck saved his life. Abraham wonders if he’ll consider himself fortunate.
He looks at his computer screen. The faces of Billie andFin stare back at him. Their scrutiny is terrible; their innocence cleaves his heart. He’ll never have kids of his own, but if he did, he’d want two just like these.
‘Lord God,’ he whispers. ‘Defend them from all dangers of soul and body; and grant that both they and I, drawing nearer to Thee, may be bound together by Thy love in the communion of Thy Holy Spirit, and in the fellowship of Thy saints.’
On the desk, his phone starts ringing.
2
Same room. Same recording equipment. Different interviewee.
Opposite him sits Beth McKaylin. Years of manual work and summer sun have left their mark on McKaylin, but they’ve also tempered her. Beneath the flannel work shirt, her body is hard with muscle. She’s recently stopped dying her hair, Abraham notices. Three inches of grey have sprouted from her auburn mass.
‘You don’t live in Skentel.’