Their ‘relationship’ had been an on-and-off thing, way more off than on, for almost a decade. Never serious or exclusive, never more than a series of spur-of-the-moment encounters based entirely on physical attraction. She couldn’t deny the change that had occurred in the last eighteen months though, even if she wasn’t quite ready to discuss it properly with him or make that one big step he was pushing her towards.
She shook the thought away, put a pot of espresso on the hob and ate a few handfuls of granola from the jar while she waited for the coffee to come bubbling up, remembering that last night in the bar on the beach. The pair of them drunkenly stringing along an ageing Dutch couple who they were sure wanted to swap partners for the night. Her pretending fascination at the husband’s stories of spearfishing and skydiving, distracted by his grey chest hair and very blue eyes, while Billy flattered and flirted with the wife in a voice too low for her to hear. Another few drinks and they might have talked themselves into it. They were an attractive couple and now that she thought about it, the husband wasn’t much older than Billy anyway, had a good, hard body and a filthy look.
When the coffee was ready she took it into the living room, put on some music and opened her laptop, throwing back one shot while it booted up and pouring a second as she typed ‘Joshua Ainsworth’ into Google.
It wasn’t a common name but she scrolled through a few people who weren’t her dead man: a professional photographer and a long-deceased soldier, people who blinked in and out of their own online presence.
On Facebook she found an account Josh had started in his teens but not touched since he graduated from med school. It was tame stuff: lots of photographs of bikes and off-road rides, views from fell paths and moments where he stopped to capture the dappled sunshine hitting forest trails.
She kept scrolling, until she got back to his first post, a shot of the vaulted metal ceiling of a train station, taken from an elevated walkway.
‘Okay, let’s do this.’
The message of a man psyching himself up to suicide, she thought darkly. But the dates were right for it to be him heading off to university.
His friend list was just under three hundred people and she wondered at how easy it was not to notice his lack of activity for the last fifteen years. If anyone had reached out to him when he fell silent.
As she clicked onto the friend list, a moth settled at the centre of her screen, the backlight glowing through its delicately patterned wings. It had fallen dark outside without her noticing.
She got up and went to close the windows, wondering what was keeping Billy so long at the station. In the bedroom she paused to grab her mobile, found a message two hours old, saying he was delayed but was on his way. She texted him as she tugged on the bedroom window, stopped without knowing why she was doing it and looked up.
Across the street, half hidden in a recessed doorway, she saw a figure turned towards her. Couldn’t see his face but could feel him staring at her.
As she stepped back, he stepped forward into the light spilling from a window above him.
Lee Walton.
For a second she couldn’t move. Part of her wanted to turn the light off and make herself invisible to him, but part thought she should go down there and challenge him. Her pulse was beating in her neck, eyes wide and unblinking, as she waited to see what he would do.
What felt like an eternity passed and she was sure she could see the expression in his eyes, fierce and flat at the same time, that dead intensity she remembered from the interview room, the moment when she had been toe to toe with him and felt herself being flayed down to the bone.
A car came around the corner, breaking her gaze, and she registered the shape and sheen of Billy’s Audi turning into the space under the building.
Now Walton was moving away into the city centre, hands in pockets, taking his time. Heading for the isolated grey tunnel next to Barclays bank and whatever woman was unlucky enough to be walking home alone at half past nine on a quiet Tuesday night.
She flicked the light switch with shaking fingers.
Had Billy seen him?
He must have. He drove right past him. Four or five metres away.
And if he hadn’t and she told him about it, what was he going to do? Tear off after him and hand him a caution for loitering?
She heard the front door slam home hard and knew that the questions were moot, that he’d seen Walton.
The Billy she’d left at the station was not the one in front of her. His face was ashen under his tan, hair pulled about at strange angles, while a disconcerting wildness sent his eyes wandering around the flat. He threw his jacket down onto the sofa, the flutter of a newspaper underneath it.
‘You want a drink?’ he asked. ‘I need a drink.’
She followed him into the kitchen, pulling down the blinds as he poured a hefty slug of rum into a glass and sank it.
‘Sadie Ryan,’ he said. ‘You remember her?’
Ferreira nodded; the moon-faced, black-haired young woman Lee Walton had dragged off the path on Orton Mere and raped. Who Colleen Murray gently coaxed into bringing charges, only to see her refuse to cooperate mere days after making her official statement, scared off by a visit from Walton.
‘She took an overdose,’ he said.
‘Shit. Is she okay? What happened?’
‘Walton was back on his manor this morning. Someone saw him, sent her a photo. All kicks off on Facebook, people saying she was lying about being raped, that she must have been
