‘What can’t you tell me?’ he repeated.
George held out one hand, as though to keep Joesbury at arm’s length. ‘Guv, it’s too soon to know anything. We should get back. We can check her room again. We’ve got people searching her car. Come on, you know her as well as anyone. You’ll be in the best position to spot anything.’
Joesbury didn’t move. The two officers exchanged a look. The other detective dropped his eyes to the mud.
George sighed. ‘It’s pretty clear someone left in a hurry,’ he said. ‘They didn’t have time to clear up. There was a lot of serial-killer paraphernalia, apparently. Not difficult to see where they were going with that. And the team that went in found a pretty good mock-up of her room at St John’s. It’s possible something happened in there but it’s too soon …’
‘What did they find?’
‘A lot of blood, Mark. And body parts. Organs.’
She’d looked directly at him, with those hazel-blue eyes that could turn so cold, as if daring him to challenge her. She’d looked at him the way he’d only ever seen the guilty look.
‘And a knife, I’m afraid,’ continued George. ‘With her name on it.’
The dog was standing at the door of Evi’s kitchen, whining to go out.
‘I’ll take her,’ said Harry.
‘Stay near the back door,’ the constable who’d been waiting with him said. ‘We’ll need to search the garden before we’re done.’
Harry opened the door and kept his hand on the dog’s collar as it stepped outside, sniffed the rear step and climbed the small stone wall edging Evi’s patio. Harry went too. Light from the house reached about a quarter of the way across the lawn. Beyond it was the soft twilight that snow brings to the darkest of nights.
The garden was large, longer than it was wide, and flanked on either side by high stone walls. It sloped downwards to a much lower wall, with a central gate. Beyond the lower wall was a line of pollarded willow trees.
The dog began to whine at the exact moment that Harry spotted the footprints in the snow. He took his hand off her collar.
The footprints led across the lawn, around the cedar tree, to the gate. Small prints, made by small feet. Uneven footsteps, the one on the right much deeper and firmer than the one on the left, made by someone who walked with a pronounced limp. A few inches to the side of the left print were small indentations, left behind by a light, aluminium walking stick.
The dog made it to the gate a second before Harry did. She stood on her hind legs, barked once and then fell back on to all fours. As Harry pulled the gate open, she leapt the wall in a single bound.
Beyond the wall was a short stretch of snow-covered ground that sloped to the riverbank. A wooden pier leaned out across the water. On the bank beside it was a canoe that looked silver against the snow. Sitting close by the canoe, one arm wrapped around her knees, the other cradling the dog, was Evi. She looked round and her face was spectral pale.
‘Hello, Harry,’ she said.
They were approaching Cambridge again. Joesbury had a sense of tall old buildings rising up around them. He’d taken Lacey out for a meal that first night, practically forced her into going with him. She’d sat opposite him in a restaurant on the Wandsworth Road, in an orange jumpsuit, her face shiny-pink from the shower, and he’d thought, how can this be happening? How can I be falling for a killer?
‘Nothing in the St Clement’s address either,’ said George, who was at the wheel and seemed to have some idea where they were going. ‘Just a whole lot of computer gear. The hard drives appear to have been wiped but it looks as though most of the surveillance was done from there. The industrial unit was for the more advanced filming and the editing.’
‘They’re gone, aren’t they?’
Joesbury couldn’t summon the energy to turn his head. He couldn’t feel any pain, he realized. He felt dizzy and nauseous, and as though every second the real world was slipping further away from him, but no pain. Whatever they’d given him at the hospital was strong stuff. Perhaps they’d let him take it for the rest of his life.
‘Looks that way,’ agreed George. ‘But they can’t have gone far and if they’re in their own vehicles there’s a good chance traffic will pick ’em up.’
She’d been with him at one of the worst crime scenes he’d ever come across and hadn’t flinched. She’d calmly and quietly followed him round the corpse, done everything he’d asked her to, and then, even though she’d seen exactly what the killer did to women, she’d agreed instantly when he’d asked her to make herself bait. She’d walked off into the darkness without looking back and he’d told himself that he was never going to put her in danger again.
George increased the volume on the police radio. They were almost back at the college.
One of the porters appeared beyond the gates ready to open them. Joesbury didn’t wait. He jumped out of the car and sped across the short stretch of grass to the main student entrance. He raced past the porter on duty and was in First Court. The tower was immediately ahead of him.
‘Alice called you, didn’t she?’ said Evi. ‘I’m sorry I scared you.’
Harry slipped his jacket off and wrapped it round her. He’d forgotten how her hair gleamed in the dark, how it reminded him of polished walnut. He hadn’t forgotten how soft it was.
She reached up, maybe to pull the jacket more securely on to her shoulders, maybe to touch him. Her hand against his felt like the snow, damp and cold.
‘We need to get you inside,’ he said. As he sat down beside her, his foot caught the edge of the canoe. It slid a little further down the bank. Harry stretched forward to catch the rope.
‘Leave it,’ Evi told him.
There was a hammer on the ground in front of them, a fragment of pale-blue wood clinging to its claw foot.
Evi leaned a little closer to him, the side of her head resting lightly against his shoulder. ‘I knew you couldn’t be dead,’ she said. ‘I worked it out, once the pain went away. If you’d died, Alice would have phoned me, not just sent a newspaper cutting. There would have been some mention of it on your Facebook page. I realized they were just messing with my head again.’
The canoe slid a little further towards the water. Evi put her hand on Harry’s arm, to stop him getting up. ‘Let it go,’ she said.
‘Who?’ he asked her. ‘Who’s been messing with your head?’
‘I’m not entirely sure. But I know one of them’s a senior police officer. He’s going to make trouble for me, if he’s still around.’
‘He’s got to get past me first, pet.’
The tiny lines on the side of Evi’s face appeared slowly, almost reluctantly, as though she hadn’t smiled in a while and her muscles couldn’t quite remember how it was done. ‘I’d forgotten you used to call me that,’ she said. ‘I think it all started with a very damaged young man, who found some relief from his pain by tormenting and terrifying others. And then somewhere along the line more people got involved and the whole dark business began to feed on itself until it was almost unstoppable.’
The canoe had reached the water. The river, sensing a prize within its grasp, began to tug at it. Harry blew out through pursed lips and put his arm round Evi. On the other side of her, the dog licked his hand. He had no idea what she’d just been talking about but it hardly mattered. They had plenty of time. ‘What was the hammer for?’ he asked her.
‘To break a hole in the bottom of the canoe,’ said Evi. ‘And the canoe was for me to float away in, like the Lady of Shalott. The heavy dose of liquid morphine I gave myself just before I came out was to stop me struggling to the bank when it went down. If I sound a bit spacey, that’s why.’
‘Evi—’
