Page 2

Two

I stood outside on the passenger deck of the ferry.

The sea ahead was gray, the water ridged like mud, the ferry was churning white froth steadily out to the sides, as though plowing a field. The wind was as cold as ice, but I leaned on the railing and forced myself to endure it. The enormous hum of the engines vibrated in the air, a sound and a feeling all at once.

You are detached , I thought.

You are calm.

Ever since the phone call yesterday, while I made the necessary arrangements, I’d been trying to keep my thoughts and emotions under control. But it was harder now. The half-hour ferry trip back to the island offered far too much empty time in which to think.

The coastline appeared at the horizon, and I leaned back from the railing, as though by doing so I could stop it approaching. The stretch of land was as thin as hair at first, but quickly grew larger, the island like a monster crawling through an ever-widening crack.

The main village was postcard-perfect in the afternoon sun. But most ports look pretty from the sea, and as the ferry juddered inexorably toward the terminal, my gaze found the peeling paint on the walls of the shopfronts. The closed stores and boarded-up windows. The day drinkers gathered together by the war memorial in the square. If the island looked nice from a distance, it was only because that was the best place to see it from.

There was always a sense of dread when I came back here. Any good memories of this place were tainted by bad ones, and at this point on the journey it always felt like I was returning not just to a place but also a time.

And today, that feeling was much worse than usual.

I have some bad news about your father.

As we arrived, I headed inside into the cheap lounge and queued up for the rickety metal stairs. The stone ground beneath the body of the ferry was stained with oil and strewn with coils of dirty rope. The air stank of petrol, but that smell faded as I stepped out into the cold afternoon air and followed the other passengers through the maze of railings. Gulls wheeled overhead and the water lapped insistently against the mossy wooden posts lining the dock.

A short walk through the cobbled streets to the police station.

I stopped outside, momentarily reluctant to open the door. That would be when all this became real. Instead, I took a few seconds to stare at the building. The sandstone walls; the peaked roof; the old blue lantern by the door. It was all exactly as I remembered. Easy to imagine that, if I were to turn and look at the low wall across the road behind me, I might see a shade of my younger self sitting there, kicking his heels after school and waiting for his father to leave work.

I pushed the heavy door open.

The layout of the foyer had barely changed. There was a seating area to the right, basic, a little grubby, and—because crime on the island was scarce—as empty right now as I remembered it usually being. Some of the informational flyers on the wall looked so old that they might have been relics from back then.

I rang the buzzer at the desk.

A man emerged from the back half a minute later. He was about my age, which meant we had probably grown up here at roughly the same time. But I didn’t recognize his face or the name on his badge .

“Daniel Garvie,” I told him. “I have an appointment to see Liam Fleming.”

Which was a name I had recognized.

Fleming was a couple of years older than me, and the two of us had had plenty of encounters, in and out of the playground, when we were younger. It hadn’t surprised me when I’d learned he’d gone into the police. Some men—and my father had been one—were drawn to the job because they wanted to do good and make a difference, but the power of the job inevitably attracted its share of bullies too. People could change, of course. But my father had worked with Fleming, and I knew well enough that he hadn’t.

The desk sergeant buzzed me through and then walked me to Fleming’s office. It was a small, cluttered room, with filing cabinets lining the walls and piles of paperwork scattered everywhere. Fleming stood up as I entered. He was much as I recalled him from our teenage altercations: tall and broad, albeit with a bit of a paunch now. He had the kind of build that suggested a visit to the gym every so often, but probably not regularly. His hair was shaved all the way down to the skull. I wondered if it was meant to give him an image of authority or it was simply because it was beginning to desert him.

“Daniel.”

He held out a hand and I took it. Even though his tone of voice was professional and formal, I braced for an overly tight grip—a show of strength—but it didn’t quite come.

“Liam,” I said.

“I’m sorry you’re back here in these circumstances.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am too.”

He gestured. “Please sit down.”

My work had ingrained in me the habit of analyzing people, and so I considered his tone of voice and choice of language. Please sit down. It had been slightly more of an order than a suggestion, and a part of me bristled. But the playground was a long way behind us. I took the seat across the desk from him.

“Not as grand as you’re used to, I’m sure,” Fleming said .

“I’m sorry?”

“The office.” He waved at the mess around us. “I imagine yours must be pretty impressive.”

I pictured the psychiatric ward, with its heavy doors, and the single plexiglass window in my office that faced down one of the three corridors. My office was smaller than this, and not much tidier. It smelled of cleaning product. When I arrived in from the fresh air each morning, it always felt like passing through an air lock between the outside world and the very different worlds of the men confined in the rooms around me.

“I work in a prison,” I said.

“Really?” He looked surprised. “I thought you were a profiler , or whatever they call it these days. Catching killers with your mind, all that stuff? I imagined there’d be couches. Books everywhere.”

“Not really,” I said. “Most of my job involves looking after my patients. By the time I meet them, they’ve already been caught.”

“Patients?” He gave me a pointed look. “These are killers, right?”

“Some of them.”

“Rapists. Guys who’ve hurt kids.”

“Some of them.”

He whistled to himself.

“It must be hard talking to people who’ve done things like that. Especially after what happened to you all those years ago.”

I held his gaze.

“Not really. And right now, I want to talk about what’s happening here.”

He stiffened a little at that. Then he seemed to shrug to himself, as though he’d attempted to be friendly and just been rebuffed, but it didn’t matter to him much either way.

“The coastguard is still searching,” he said. “The boats are probably out there as we speak. But it’s been two days now. I don’t want to be brutal, but you probably remember what the tide is like around the island.”

“You don’t need to worry about being brutal,” I said.

“I just want to be sensitive. ”

“I understand,” I said. “You don’t need to do that either. What I want is for you to talk me through the timeline.”

More of an order than a suggestion.

Fleming stared at me for a second.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Sure. We found his car at the Reach.”

The island rose steeply to the northeast, like a shoe turned at an angle. At the heel, it was over a hundred meters down to the sharp rocks and angry sea below, and one section of the cliff there jutted out farther than the rest. That was what gave the Reach its name, even if you would never see it called that in tourist pamphlets.

When we were kids, we used to dare each other to get as close to the edge as possible and, as Fleming spoke, I remembered standing out there.

Shivering.

Scared.

The height making me dizzy.

“It was Craig Aspinall who saw your father,” Fleming told me. “You remember Craig?”

“Vaguely.”

Aspinall was the same age as my father. I knew that he walked the trails a lot, an unofficial caretaker for the island’s beauty spots. Picking up litter. Fixing signs and fences.

“Craig was out there a couple of days ago,” Fleming said. “He recognized your father’s car parked, and then came across him standing out there, close to the edge.”

The two of them had exchanged pleasantries, Fleming told me. The conversation had been casual and Aspinall had had no reason to suspect anything might be wrong. But my father’s car had still been there when Aspinall returned the next day. He had checked the door and found the vehicle unlocked. There was a folded piece of paper in the glove compartment, on which my father had written three words, along with my name and contact details.

Fleming passed me a piece of paper across the desk .

“Is this your father’s handwriting?”

I read the words there— Notify my son —and then handed the paper back.

“Yes.”

Fleming looked off to one side for a second. I knew what was coming.

“Do you have any idea why your father might—?”

“Kill himself?” I said. “No.”

“Any health problems? Money worries?”

“Not that he ever mentioned to me.”

Fleming waited. I matched his silence. The truth was that I wouldn’t have been inclined to answer his questions even if I had been able to. I knew my father had felt isolated and aimless after retiring from the police last year, because it had been his life—as little as he might have felt that amounted to, stuck out here on the island. But that information seemed too personal to share with Fleming; my father would not have wanted me to. And in reality, it was no explanation at all. My father had seemed happy enough. Life had dealt him far harder blows than retirement in the past, and he had always rolled with them before.

“Well,” Fleming said finally. “Like I told you, the coastguard is still searching. As I said, you know what the sea is like round here. His body could wash up on the rocks in the next few days. But it’s also possible he’ll never be found at all.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

“Where will you be staying? In case we have news.”

I thought about it.

“My father’s house,” I said.

Fleming insisted on walking me back to reception.

“So anyway,” he said. “How’s life working out for you? Married? Kids?”

I pictured my sparse one-bedroom flat. I had been alone there for a year, give or take, ever since Laura left. My last relationship had followed a predictable pattern. I never seemed to have much trouble meeting women, but offering them enough reasons to stay was a different matter .

“No,” I said. “You?”

“No kids—not yet anyway. Partnered up, though. You remember Sarah from your year?”

I made sure not to miss a step.

The mention of her name was like a bruise I’d forgotten about: not pressed on for years now, and any real pain long dulled, but still surprisingly tender to the touch. After Sarah and I left for separate universities, we’d drifted apart, the way that people do, and I hadn’t thought about her in a while. The last I remembered hearing, she’d been working on the mainland, having escaped from the island the way I knew she’d always dreamed of. But obviously something must have fallen through and she’d found herself back here.

It occurred to me that my father must have known that, and yet for some reason, he’d never mentioned it.

“I remember,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah, it’s a good life. Nice job. Respect. Steady as she goes.”

We reached the door to the reception.

“Seriously, though,” Fleming said. “How do you do it?”

I waited.

“Those people you have locked up,” he said. “Your patients , if you want to call them that. They’ve done the worst things a person can do.”

“Yes.”

“How can you bring yourself to talk to them like they’re human beings?”

I thought about that.

It was a question that people asked me a lot, and I had sympathy with it. Richard Barber, for example, was a man who would never be released from prison, and I was sure many people thought he deserved to spend the rest of his days suffering for the damage he’d done. And it was difficult to argue with that. There were times when the details of my patients’ crimes made me want to cry. Days when it felt like they crept home with me at night, and I could imagine them standing at the end of my bed in the darkness, whistling to themselves .

But however horrific their crimes might be, they were only human beings. It was important to remember that.

I pushed open the door.

“Because there’s no such thing as monsters,” I said.