Page 61 of No Safe Place

Saturday | Early hours

Field

She desperately needed sleep, but Field couldn’t bring herself to actually close her eyes.

With every minute that crept by, she felt more tightly wound, convinced the phone would ring at any second – there would be a third attack, all because she hadn’t figured this out fast enough.

Her bedroom was cool, a fan whirring on the bedside table.

The minute hand on the clock ticked over.

One a.m.

David Moore had been dead twenty-four hours. Sam for forty-eight.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ she muttered, sitting up and flicking the lamp on. Her handbag was packed next to the bed, and she dragged it over. It was almost as bad as Young’s, and she pulled things out, hunting for the slim purple paperback.

If she wasn’t going to sleep, she might as do something useful. For all she knew, Mulligan’s novel might contain something relevant to the case.

It wasn’t in there. She flopped back onto the pillows, suddenly treated to a vision of it, smack bang in the middle of her desk.

Field pushed herself to sitting, swung her legs over the edge of the bed and got to her feet. Toby’s room was the other side of the thin corridor. A few years ago, she’d painted it a motherly shade of beige and bought neutral bedding, in case she ever had guests.

The door creaked as it opened, and she groped for the light switch.

Tobes was a big reader – always had a book stuffed into a pocket or under his arm. He still had a Billy bookcase full of paperbacks in one corner of the room. Michael Morpurgo and The Worst Witch were crammed in next to the YA zombie series he got into in his early teens.

She was about to give up, when the purple spine winked at her from the bottom shelf.

The book had Post-it notes sticking out of the top, and when she opened it to a random page, she found annotations in Toby’s cramped writing, and whole passages underlined, with exclamation marks in the margins.

It would be better, she thought, to wait for tomorrow. Read the clean copy.

She turned her head to read one note, repeated twice.

It’s not just me

It’s not just me

A lump rose to her throat.

She didn’t bother going back to her room, or turning off the big light to put the lamp on instead.

Field lay down on the spare bed, bent the cover back on Toby’s copy of Darlings, Obsessed and started to read.