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I frown. ‘It wasn’t in her house?’

She shakes her head. ‘We looked, didn’t we, Jeff? We searched everywhere. I just don’t understand where it went.’

I hesitate for a moment, making a mental note, then take a breath. Steeling myself. ‘Can I ask . . .? There was an incident at the hospital. The night before Emily’s accident.’

Alexandra nods. ‘Yes. She said something, didn’t go into details. Just said they’d had a couple of problems with a visitor, that she’d had to call the police.’ She looks away, thinks for a minute. ‘It’s odd, though.’

‘What is?’

‘Well, it really upset her. Said she couldn’t sleep at all that night. I thought that was strange because Emily . . . she’s, well, unflappable. Very calm. I was surprised that it bothered her the way it did.’ She isn’t looking at me now, is looking over my shoulder at the picture of her daughter. ‘I gave her some of my sleeping tablets. Told her to try those – you know, just so she could get a good night in, before she went back to work.’

I nod, trying not to let my face give me away. Because now all I can think is: was that it? Was that what killed her? Did she take more pills than she should have? Did she have a bad reaction? Find herself confused, disoriented, and begin walking, ending up on the M4? Could it really just have been a coincidence? The gunman, her death. And then the piece that I just can’t make fit: if the gunman had been there for Emily, why did he go back? What was the point of returning on that second night, when Emily was already dead?

‘I think that’s the worst thing, though,’ said Mrs Wilson. ‘These things people are saying about her – about her being drunk. Her patients are hearing that, her friends, people at our church. They’re hearing all these things about her. All she is, all the wonderful things she’s done, it will all be washed away, and all people will remember is this. That she died because she was drunk.’ She grips my hands again, nails digging into the flesh on my palms. ‘This wasn’t her. It wasn’t her. She wouldn’t have done that. Something else happened that day.’

ADEN SWUNG THE
Armed Response Vehicle to the left, pulling into the hospital car park, and joined the queue of cars waiting at the barrier. It was rarely used, this barrier, normally unmanned, cars simply coming and going. But it was all change now. A security guard, young with rippling muscles under a too-snug shirt, waiting with a flat face, a steady stare, like he could dissuade a gunman by his expression alone.

‘Here we go again,’ murmured Rhys.

‘Yup.’ Aden eased the car forward, suppressing a sigh as the silver Picasso in front stalled, the driver fumbling to restart. ‘Starting to feel like I live here.’

It was early, the sun still low across the bay, but it was warm. They had predicted storms on the news, had said that the sky would split apart, bringing with it torrential rain and sheet lightning. It had felt like a reprieve – the thought of rain, a break from the heat. But it hadn’t come, there had been no reprieve, but instead a constant, relentless march of heat. Aden drummed his fingers against the outside of the car door, feeling the pads of his fingertips burn. He and Rhys had worked the night shift. A quiet night, lots of time to sit around, to think. He rubbed his hands across his eyes, feeling them prickle and burn. Another couple of hours, then they would be done. Aden tried not to think about his bed waiting for him. The Picasso driver had managed to start its engine, was creeping forward towards the security booth and its grim-faced guard. Aden glanced up at the hospital itself, his eyes finding the second floor, counting the windows. One, two, three, his gaze snagging there.

‘Still no sign,’ said Rhys.

‘Huh?’

‘The bloke. The gunman.’

‘Yeah, well, you heard about yesterday, yeah?’

‘Yesterday?’

‘Some woman reported seeing him in the hospital car park. Said that he chased her. The team onsite did a search for him, but nothing.’ Aden shrugged. ‘Think they thought she was imagining it. You know how it is: people hear the stories, get all excited about them, and suddenly everyone they see has a gun. Whoever he is, he vanishes like Lord Lucan.’ The Picasso was waved forward, moving into the car park with an awkward, jolting motion, and Aden slid the ARV up to the barrier, looking up at the security guard. ‘All right, mate?’

The man was younger than he looked from a distance, couldn’t have been older than nineteen, twenty at most, his head shaved close, the creeping darkness of a tattoo snaking its way from beneath the arm of his short-sleeved shirt. He leaned in, a sudden smile breaking across his face, eyeing the marked car, their uniforms hungrily. ‘All right, boys. ‘’ow’s it goin’? God, there’s bloody tons of you lot about the place. More coppers than doctors now.’

Aden smiled. ‘It’s the canteen, mate. We can’t get enough of it.’

‘Well, look now, lads. I don’t want you to worry, okay? The bosses, now, they’ve had a good look at security. Between you and me, the old ones, like that Ernie, they’re on their uppers, they won’t be long for the job. I mean, they just can’t be, can they? Too old and slow. The bosses ’ave made a bunch of us fitter ones up to full-time, so we can catch this bastard.’ The security guard pushed himself up, folding his arms across his chest, and Aden suddenly thought how young he looked, how hopelessly clueless. ‘We’ll get him now, for sure.’ He gave a firm nod, the muscles in his arms flexing.

‘That’s great.’ Aden nodded, deliberately not looking at Rhys. ‘Good news. Well, we’d better get going.’

‘Oh yeah, boys, on your way.’ The barrier swung up and the security guard leaned back in, a sudden overpowering smell of Lynx filling the car. ‘And don’t forget, right – give me a call if you need anything.’

‘Will do, mate. Thanks.’ Aden pulled the car forward with a wave. He could feel Rhys grinning.

‘Wannabe firearms officer, by any chance?’

Aden glanced in the mirror, could see the security guard standing, legs akimbo, watching them drive away, oblivious to the line of cars behind him. ‘I’d say so.’

Rhys shook his head, voice quiet. ‘Should try doing the damn job. Might figure out then it’s not all guns and women and fast cars.’

Aden glanced at Rhys, his gaze far-off. Thought of the night of the shooting, after it was over and they were safe, back in the debriefing room, sitting around on hard plastic chairs, sipping water-weak coffee, the air thick with suspended belief. You talked about this. You trained for this. They told you what would happen when it happened.
If
it happened. Then, just like that, you were sitting there, on those ridiculous chairs, and it had happened, and now everything was different. Aden would remember the smell afterwards, cigarette smoke drifting in as the door opened, closed, trapping it inside. Would remember Tony, his voice clambering back into the room along with his cigarette smoke, reliving the shooting, Welsh and loud; seemed like he couldn’t stop talking about it, his words repeating themselves, over and over. Rhys sitting beside him, his head in his hands, looking so much younger all of a sudden, as if he has shot backwards in time, now a schoolboy playing dress-up in an overlarge police uniform. Aden would remember his own fingers shaking so that the coffee slopped against the rim of the cup, pulled by an invisible tide.

He should have said something. He had thought that a lot, afterwards. He should have patted Rhys on the arm, should have said something. Aden was his teacher. Had been partnered with Rhys because he was young and new, and Aden really should have said something, should have done the job he’d been given to do. But, on that night, his mouth – like his trigger finger – simply wouldn’t move. He had failed. Had known that, before the muzzle-flash had died away, before the ringing in his ears from the cacophony of sound had finally stopped. He had failed and was now no longer entitled to say anything.

Funny how so much can change, in the space of an hour, a minute. How your whole world can be upended by one simple inaction, so that afterwards it seems like there has been a death and that it is you, or who you thought you were, who has died.

‘You doing okay?’ Aden tried to keep the words light, as if they weren’t really asking what they were asking. Didn’t look at Rhys, just concentrated on steering the car, slipping it into the area that had become the hospital’s unofficial police parking site. So he sensed rather than saw the shrug.

‘This doesn’t help,’ said Rhys, quietly. ‘Being here. I mean, it’s with me a lot anyway, but with this . . .’ He shook his head. ‘It’s all I can damned well think about.’

‘Yeah,’ Aden murmured. ‘Me too.’ A stealthy silence crept over the car, words sucked away by the torpid air. Aden’s gaze tugging upwards to the second floor, third window across, to Dylan Lowe’s room. ‘You ever wonder why?’

‘Why . . .?’

‘Why he did it. The kid, I mean.’ Easier somehow to refer to him that way. ‘The kid’ – like he wasn’t a real person, like it wouldn’t sting so much then. ‘I mean, it doesn’t seem to fit in with the kind of person he was. I looked up his police record, after it happened. Clean as a whistle, nothing. The newspapers, they make him sound like he was some kind of choir boy.’

Aden had slept late, the morning following the shooting. Or rather had lain awake, had finally slipped into some kind of uneasy rest somewhere around dawn. When he awoke, the paper – a national that he had long since stopped subscribing to – had been waiting for him on the mat. The dead boy’s face staring up at him. Aden had stopped, there in the front porch, with his bare feet and his head spinning like he had been on a two-day bender. Had stared at it. Seemed like it must be some kind of sick joke. But there was no one there, and it was certainly not funny. Aden had sunk to the floor, sitting in his underpants in the cold, tiled hallway. Had pulled the paper towards him.

That was how he had learned that the boy wasn’t dead. Was in some kind of coma. The details were foggy on that point. But he was in Mount Pleasant Hospital. In intensive care. Aden had sat for a long time, staring at Dylan Lowe – long, lean, the gawky angles of puberty, bone pushing against skin that hadn’t yielded yet. Dark eyes, hair shaved down to the scalp around the sides, the top spiked. His face round, soft curves, still that of a child.

The face of an angel, the papers had said. The tragedy of a child.

Aden had scanned the story, knowing that he shouldn’t, that this would not help. Dylan was a good boy, said friends and teachers, had no history of violence, nothing that you could point to and say ‘There, right there, that’s where the trouble began.’ The boy’s parents were pictured in front of their council house, standing arm-in-arm, faces set into a made-for-papers grief. The mother thin, hair pulled back flat against her head. Father, his eyes blistering with anger.
We’ve lost our child. The police have destroyed our family.

Rhys looked at him then, his gaze steadier than Aden would have expected. ‘To be honest, I never read the newspapers. Or watched the news. I just . . . couldn’t.’

Aden nodded, watching as a young couple trooped slowly past the ARV, the woman’s belly swollen and ripe, her steps unsteady. ‘That’s probably sensible. I kept the paper, the one from the shooting. Just couldn’t seem to get rid of it. I don’t know, sometimes I think I’m almost obsessed with the whole thing.’

Rhys frowned. ‘I’m guessing you haven’t told Imogen that? Or the sarge?’

Aden let out a laugh that felt forced. ‘Nah. I mean, it’s not like I’m stalking the kid or anything.’

‘You sure you’re not the gunman then?’ Rhys’s voice had taken on a faux-serious edge, his eyes sparkling.

Aden grinned. ‘Not this time.’ The couple were crossing the road now, heading to the maternity unit, the woman’s steps getting slower and slower, the man’s face creasing up in worry. ‘It just . . . it makes you think, doesn’t it?’

‘What does?’

‘The gun. The one Dylan used.’

‘What about it?’

They had been waiting for the debrief, Tony standing, looking out of the window as he bounced on the balls of his feet, like he just couldn’t bear to sit down. ‘Thing is, these Browning HPs, Second World War guns,’ Tony had said, ‘they’re all over the place. You know how it is. Granddad brings it back from the war, shoves it in a box in the attic. No one ever knows it’s there, until some little fucker uses it to shoot someone. That’s what will have happened.’ Tony had nodded, confident. ‘You mark my words.’

‘Steve Lowe, the kid’s father – he said Dylan had no way of getting hold of a Browning, that there wasn’t one in the family.’

‘Yeah, but it could have come from one of the other kids, the ones we never caught.’

‘I guess. But I just wonder . . . the Lowes are a farming family. Got a decent spread up in Rhydypandy. I’ve dealt with them a few times over the years and they’re a solid lot.’

Rhys snorted. ‘Steve Lowe’s fallen a long way from the family tree then.’

Aden nodded. ‘You’re not wrong. They’ve got another son. Decent bloke, helps his father on the farm. But Steve . . .’

Aden had been called to the Lowe family farm once, years ago when he was still in uniform, the mother crying as Steve bellowed into the face of his smaller, thinner father. He was just, he was so angry. He just erupted. You never saw it coming. Had arrested Steve for breach of the peace, listened as he threw himself against the cell door, spitting a venomous tirade. Steve was a mechanic now, or something like that. Had settled in a council house in Harddymaes with his narrow-faced, downtrodden wife.

‘The thing is,’ Aden said, ‘the kid would have had access to shotguns. The Lowe family has a licence. If he wanted a gun, why not take one of those?’

Rhys shrugged. ‘Maybe Grandma and Gramps are a bit more careful than whichever family let their kid play with the family’s Second World War weaponry. Who knows.’ He pushed himself upright, hand on the car door. ‘Shall we?’

Aden, still seeing the boy lying in the puddled rain, the iron-grey gun fallen beside him, nodded. ‘Yeah, let’s get on with it.’