“Are there any other suspects?” a reporter shouted.
“No.”
“Fuck you,” yelled Tabitha, stepping forward into the glare of light and liberty. “You fucked up and now you’re trying to smear me to cover it up.”
Cameras flashed and snapped and mics were thrust forward and she heard people calling her name.
“Murderer,” a voice shrieked, and turning her head, Tabitha saw the furious face of a woman who had been in the public gallery day after day.
“Piss off,” said Tabitha.
“The police have just said they have no further lines of inquiry.” A voice from her left; a woman holding out a mic. “What do you say to that?”
Tabitha thought of Brockbank’s words—being found not guilty is not the same as being found innocent.
“They failed,” she said. “They failed in there and they’re failing out here.”
“How does it feel?” someone shouted.
“Say something to them,” said Michaela hoarsely. “I’ll get us a taxi.”
But Tabitha, standing on the steps in the unreality of her freedom, had no words left.
“Please, all of you go away,” she said.
“What will you do now?”
“I think I’ll go for a swim.”
But she wouldn’t have a swim yet. There was something else she needed to do first. Everything else could wait.
Part FourOutside
Seventy-Five
Tabitha was sitting on a train. She stared out of the window, and through her own faint reflection—a small, pale face and a mop of wild hair; witch, she thought—she watched the sea in the distance, glittering and foaming. Fields and small woods and folded hills rolled by. The green of summer was tired now; the leaves on the trees were limp in the heat.
She got out at Truro, where she bought a small mug of bitter coffee and then waited half an hour for a bus. When it arrived, it was empty. It trundled her along Cornish lanes, through sudden towns and past lonely churches, and finally deposited her on a dusty road.
It took her over an hour to walk the last stretch. She didn’t mind. For half a year she had been dreaming of walking through deserted landscapes, feeling the ache in her calves and the wind in her face. There was no wind today. The air stood hot and still. Seagulls pecked at a carcass on the road. She knew she should be thinking about what she was going to do, but she didn’t, just let half-formed thoughts drift through her mind.
The caravan park was on the edge of a town. There was a grocery store at one end and what perhaps in rainy seasons passed for a stream, but was now a dried-up ditch, at the other. One of the caravans had a small garden at its entrance, with bright flowers and a miniature picket fence. One had recently been burned out and was just a charred remnant. There was a van with broken windows, through which Tabitha could see multiple crushed cardboard boxes. One of the caravans had closed curtains and a motorbike parked at its door. Another had a mountain of a man sitting on the small steps who raised his beer can toward her as she passed.
Tabitha was looking for a camper van and she saw it at the far end of the plot, facing the perimeter ditch and the fields beyond and in the distance the glitter of the sea. She walked over to it and it was as if she were in a dream, suddenly slow and without volition.
She knocked at the back door and stood back, and the door swung open.
He looked down at her and he didn’t seem surprised or upset or angry or even scared, but almost relieved, like he had been expecting her all along.
“How did you know?” he said at last.
“Hello, Sam.”
They sat together on two rickety foldout chairs that he pulled from under the van. He looked more like a fox than ever, thought Tabitha: mangy and neglected. But he had strong arms along which his tattoos rippled, a mermaid’s tail and a full-blown rose, and she remembered he had been in the army. He was scrawny but strong. Much stronger than she was. She twisted her head round, but the big man had gone from the steps and there was no one around.
“How did you find me?”
“It wasn’t that hard. You didn’t leave a forwarding address with the coach company, but I talked to Joe Simons.” McBride’s eyes flickered but he didn’t answer. “I talked to this woman in the office at the coach station and I looked at the schedule. Joe was the one who was driving the bus that day. You were just a passenger. You got off at Okeham and you didn’t get back on.”
“How did you know?” he said.
He took a tin from his pocket and rolled himself a thin cigarette; his fingers were yellow and his teeth stained.
“I kept seeing it,” said Tabitha, “but I didn’t see it. It was in plain sight and nobody noticed. It was the bus.”
“What do you mean?”
“On the CCTV. When it arrived in the morning, there was a cracked window. I watched it over and over again.”
She could see it now: a boy was staring out of it and his face was crisscrossed by the spider’s web of glass.
“But in the afternoon, when the bus returned, the window wasn’t cracked anymore.”
A different boy was staring into the camera through a clear pane of glass.
McBride wasn’t looking at Tabitha, but at the baked earth.
“You told me you drove that bus all day. You said it twice. As soon as I realized about the window I looked at the CCTV properly and, sure enough, it was a different bus. You didn’t mention that.”
Sam started making another cigarette. She watched his long fingers
