This was always a possibility, the cold and rational part of Zigic said. The moment Dani returned to Walton she was in danger of an escalation of the abuses he’d already committed against her.
But the better part of him knew they had hastened this violence. Pursuing Walton so openly rather than working the case quietly. If they’d done things right – if Adams hadn’t let his ego run rampant – the first Walton would have known of it was when they came to arrest him.
Instead they’d goaded him, backed him into a corner, started to unpick his family around him. Did it deliberately because they thought an unbalanced Walton would be easier to deal with in the interview room. They’d wanted to break him and never properly considered how dangerous he would become with nothing to lose.
‘Found the boy,’ Adams said quietly, standing in the hallway, staring at the floor.
‘Dead?’
‘Smothered, by the look of it.’
‘We should get out of here before we make any more of a mess,’ Zigic said, walking numbly towards him and shepherding him down the stairs and out of the front door.
Adams fumbled a cigarette out of the packet, fingers trembling. ‘This isn’t on us. Whatever we did. Walton made that choice.’
He was right. Technically.
But Zigic felt the guilt tight around his chest, the pressure of it building behind his eyes. They’d failed to protect Dani and her son and Mrs Walton. Like their predecessors had failed to protect every one of his victims after Tessa Darby, by screwing up her murder investigation and letting an innocent man confess his way into a twelve-year jail term, leaving Walton free.
And if he’d checked his messages an hour or two earlier, they might have got here before all of this happened and the family would still be alive.
His heart ached with the knowledge and he knew it would never fully go away, the guilt would be there for ever, a gnawing black thing in his chest; every time he was with his own family he would think of what happened here and how he could have prevented it.
Adams walked over to the driveway, the garage door up, the strip light on.
‘Fuck.’
Zigic forced himself to move, look inside.
No Walton hanging from the rafters, no car in there either.
‘Where the hell is he?’
Adams dropped his cigarette in a shower of sparks. ‘Mel.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
She thought she’d dream about him, but she didn’t. Slept for ten blissful hours, knocked out by the painkillers the doctor in A&E gave her after he reset her nose, a quick, practised flick of his hand that hurt more than the initial break. He had the grace to apologise for it though.
The pills were wearing off now and she found the packet on the side table but nothing to take them with. Carefully she got up, swung her legs out of bed and stood. There was a dull ache along her jaw where Walton had punched her and when she probed with her tongue, she found two teeth at the bottom were loose. The only thing that could make this worse was a trip to the dentist and she prayed it wouldn’t come to that. The teeth were at the back, she figured she could live without them.
She trudged into the kitchen, found Billy unpacking two bags of food from M&S.
‘Go back to bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring your breakfast in.’
‘I’m good.’ She filled a glass with water and swallowed a pill. Her throat was raw and dry and she heard the residual burn in her voice, the after-effects of the CS gas she’d inhaled. ‘I thought you’d gone to work.’
‘They can do without me for the day.’ He eyed her warily. ‘You’re not planning on going in, are you?’
‘I just want to get this over with.’
‘Riggott won’t be expecting you today.’
‘What else am I going to do?’ she asked. ‘I can’t go anywhere nice looking like this.’
‘You look fine.’
‘For someone who took a battering.’
‘Can you eat?’ he asked, taking a bag of pastries out.
‘I’m not really hungry.’
‘I’ll make you a smoothie. You shouldn’t be taking those pills on an empty stomach.’
He was putting a brave face on, working at this carefree display as if he hadn’t walked into a massacre last night. She wondered at his ability to compartmentalise.
Zigic was taking it hard. She’d seen that last night when they found her in A & E. Zigic looking about ready to collapse, face slack, eyes dark, and as Billy explained what they’d found at the Walton house in an oddly neutral voice, she could see Zigic turning further in on himself.
If he’d been in charge of the cold case, it wouldn’t have happened, she thought. He would have been more delicate, more circumspect. Ziggy never would have started pitting people against one another to see what happened.
She felt the guilt spread heavily across her own shoulders. Dani and her son, Walton’s mother, all dead because he knew he was heading back to prison and couldn’t stand the idea that their lives would continue without him.
And then he’d come for her.
She wished he’d made her the first stop on his spree. Or that Dani had just listened to her when she told her not to come back to Peterborough.
She watched Billy pouring fruit into the blender, concentrating on it like it was a far more complex task than
