How many others are there?”

How many?

She knew. They were in her head. You didn’t forget. She was very, very careful. The thing was, now, that it was the end and yet it wasn’t finished, the thread hung loose. The girl. It wasn’t finished.

She smelled the green-sea smell of the cold cave.

They were lucky. No one would understand that but her. The cave was beautiful. She’d hidden there. She wouldn’t mind ending there. What could be nicer? Quieter? Peaceful. They had each other. They were safe for ever there.

She felt very, very tired. She could hardly stop herself from putting her head down on the table in front of her.

“What about Kyra?” Blondie.

She sat up, angry, banged her hand down.

“What, Ed?”

“Kyra’s … leave Kyra alone.”

“Kyra’s what?”

Shut up, shut up, shut up, stupid. Only they wouldn’t understand in a million years about Kyra and how they were going on holiday, her and Kyra, in a caravan, and how Kyra was different. Would always be different. How she loved Kyra.

“Take her back.”

He sounded disgusted. He looked into her eyes. Yes. Disgusted. He’d no time for her. She hated him for that.

“Get up.”

She thought afterwards, in her room, that she should have spat in his face. She should have done that.

The DCI beckoned Nathan away from the CID corridor. They went down the concrete stairs and out into the yard at the front of the police HQ.

“Let’s walk,” Serrailler said. Not that he knew anywhere decent to walk to. Just the straight main road, dusty now and smelling of tar from the heat of the day.

“I thought Ooop North was supposed to be great,” Nathan said, taking two steps to Serrailler’s one stride, to keep up. “Dales and that.”

“That’s the other bit. Like the cliffs. The beaches.”

“This is rubbish. This is worse than Bevham.”

“Funny. It changes everything. No one in Lafferton can ever look at the Hill in the same way again … won’t, for generations. I can’t think of the coast … that stretch of cliff. The sea. It’s some of the best coastline in the country … and it’s blighted. It’s stained. Nothing will shift it.”

“Do you reckon it’s your cave where she took them?”

Simon shrugged.

“Forensics will go in.”

“Forensics. It’s all we’ve got, Nathan. The house. The car. And the cave. If they don’t find anything, we’re empty-handed.”

“They’ve got to.” Nathan smacked his balled fist into the other palm.

“She won’t talk.”

“Like an iron door, ent she? Gives nothing. Not a flicker. Only …”

“What?”

“Only she did it. She did them all.”

“Oh yes.”

“How long will she go down for as it is, do you reckon? Ten? More?”

“Ten minimum.”

“If we can get forensics …”

“Yup. Then it’s fine.”

“If we don’t …”

“I can’t stand it. Loose ends. We know. She knows we know. But there’ll be nothing She could have buried them in the sand. Thrown them into the sea.”

“Can a shrink get her to open up?”

“Doubt it. They don’t win them all either. Only pretend to.”

“I get a smell off of her, you know, guv? That smell.”

“Guilt.”

“Badness. It smells.”

They reached a junction. The road went on for miles, shining and sticky in the sun.

“Come on.”

“We having another go?”

Simon was silent. Were they? They could leave it until the next day. Or press on, hope to grind her down, wear her out. It wouldn’t work of course. She wasn’t the sort to wear out. Ever. Yet he couldn’t leave it, go back to Lafferton. Loose ends.

“I’ll go in there without you this time. Take one of their team to sit in.”

“Guv.”

“No reflection on you, Nathan.”

“No, it’s fine. I don’t fancy looking at her any more today. I’m going to ring Em.”

“How is she?”

“Bloomin’, thanks. Suits her. All, like, rosy with it, you know?”

Simon laughed. He remembered his sister, pregnant with her last. “Rosy.”

It occurred to him that he would never know what it was like to have a wife, “rosy” with his own children. He knew it instinctively in the same way that he knew Ed Sleightholme was guilty. You didn’t ignore feelings like that, even if you were powerless over them.

“Be glad to get away from here, be glad to get home.”

A patrol car swerved, screaming, out of the station forecourt. Another.

“Where’s the difference?” Simon said.

Twenty-one

They were to see Ed Sleightholme at ten. At half past nine, Serrailler sat in Jim Chapman’s room with a plastic cup of sludge-grey coffee and DC Marion Coopey Simon had asked for her. He wanted her take on Ed.

“You won’t crack her,” she said now. “She just stared me out and it’s what she’ll go on doing with you. How’s your forensics team doing?”

“They’ve done the caves—the beaches, the cliff paths—nothing. They’re in the house now. They’ve got the car and another lot are pulling that apart. We might be lucky. But I want her confession. I need her to talk.”

“She’s got to you!”

“Well, of course she’s got to me. Hasn’t she got to you?”

The DC shrugged. She was wearing a cream T-shirt and short linen skirt. She looked cool. “Not really. I try not to let them.”

“If I didn’t get like this from time to time I wouldn’t think the job was worth doing.”

“Shows you care?”

He swigged his coffee and ignored her. “Do you think she’s a psychopath?” he asked after a moment.

“Probably. On the other hand, she wants gratification. But that’s the usual. It’s like an itch … in the end, you have to scratch it. The urge is too great, and the satisfaction is great … for a bit. Until you start to itch again.”

“Why children? What makes a woman want to abduct children?”

“Why stress ‘woman’? What makes anyone want to abduct children?”

“It’s a male crime, overwhelmingly. You know that.”

“I still don’t see why the motives need to be different.”

He thought about it. “Maybe … maybe they’re not. But either the desire to abduct children and probably kill them is rare in women, or women suppress it more readily … something censors it very strongly.”

“So the censor is absent in this case?”

“Has to be. She has not only done it, she’s done it again and again. Boys and girls. No conscience, no brakes … seize the moment. Gratify. Why?”

“It’s sexual. Surely it always is.”

“In men.”

“Why not in women?” She was aggressive with him. She had him on the spot and knew it. “Look, if you believe women have a tender side in relation to children, because they mother them, whereas men, who father them, don’t—that’s crap. And why shouldn’t women’s sexual feelings be as strong as men’s?”

“No reason, if you’re talking about normal sexual feelings, but these are not normal, are they?”

“Why does that signify?”

“There’s a reason, somewhere … Why does she want to do this? Why does anyone need to commit this particular crime?”

“I know what the usual explanation is.”

“Emotional deprivation in childhood … abuse … possibly in care … lack of close and trusting relationships when growing up …”

“Blah de blah, de blah.”

“You don’t buy it?”

“Dunno. It’s trotted out as an explanation for most crimes. Makes me look for more.”

“I want Ed Sleightholme to tell us more.”

“She’s not going to. You might as well get back down south.”

“Come on. Back in there.” He held the door open for her. DC Coopey went through with a contemptuous look.

Ed Sleightholme gave him no sort of look at all.

“Did you talk to the children?” Serailler asked. She was staring at the table and did not glance up but he thought he noticed a reaction, some sort of start or hesitation, some twitch in her body. She had registered. She had had to stop herself from responding to him.

“Or did you gag them? Knock them out? Or were they killed pretty soon after you got them into the car?”

Silence. Marion Coopey leaned back in her chair, one leg up over the other.

Simon plugged on. “Are your parents alive, Edwina?”

“Ed.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you so bothered about it? I rather like the name Edwina.”

“Well, I hate it.”

“Why?”

No answer.

“Did your mother call you Ed?”

“No.”

“Edwina?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m interested. Was it your father then? Who called you Ed?”

Silence.

“You love your parents, don’t you?”

“What gave you that idea?”

“So you don’t?”

“Don’t know them. Never known them.”

“What, neither of them?”

She looked up straight at him. “Fuck off.”

“Not yet. Were you adopted? In care?”

“None of your business.”

“Tell me about Kyra.”

That was it. He’d got it. Nothing else worked. She held back, or blocked him out, she was silent, or defiant. But with Kyra, he had got there. Twice now. Her eyes flashed and brightened, her skin took on the faintest flush. She leaned towards him.

“You shut up about Kyra, you hear me?”

“You’re her friend, aren’t you? She goes round to your house and spends time with you.”

She looked at him. He thought she was going to say something but, at the last minute, she did not.

“What did you do?”

“Made biscuits. Made toffee. Cut things out and stuck them in the scrapbooks. Coloured in. Did soap-and-water bubbles.”

“Fun.”

“Yeah. We had fun. She likes doing fun things.”

“Were they the sort of things you did when you were a kid?”

A flicker. What? A shadow across her face. Gone.

“When I was that age, we made peppermints on wet Saturday afternoons. With my mother. That was fun.”

She stared at him.

“What did you talk about?”

“Stuff. What we were doing. Anything. You know.”

“I don’t know. Tell me.”

“No.”

“Kyra will.”

She blazed at him. “Don’t you talk to Kyra. Leave her alone. Leave her right out of all of this, OK? I don’t want Kyra knowing …”

“Knowing what? About the other children?”

“Where I am. What …”

“What you’ve done … about Amy and David and Scott … and … how many others were there? Kyra may have to know.”

“If …”

Serrailler could almost see the tension in her, like an electric charge coming at him across the table. He felt excited. He was getting somewhere. Getting there.

“We have to talk to Kyra. She’ll be asked about you … what you did together … how often she was with you … what you talked about … whether you ever did anything to her … tried to get her away.”

“We were going away. I was going to take Kyra on holiday. To a caravan.”

“Her mother didn’t mention that. Did she know?”

“It was OK, she’d be fine.”

“Was the caravan in Scarborough, near the beach and the cliffs?”

“No.”

“I thought you’d have liked it there. With Kyra … she’d have loved it, along the sands, playing in the caves.”

There was a steel cable and it was stretching and stretching, thinning, growing tighter … He felt the pull on it. The room was hot and humid and the silence was extraordinary, an electric, quivering silence. It went on, as the cable tightened and stretched. He could feel Marion Coopey beside him, tense herself, hardly breathing. There was a faint smell of sweat.

Ed Sleightholme’s hands were too still. She did not fidget with her fingers, did not move one hand on top of the other, did not scratch, did not pick her nails. Her hands were as still as wax hands, in front of her on the table. If hands could speak, perhaps they would tell most of all. They were ordinary hands, not large.

“Where were you going to take Kyra, Ed? You must have had a plan.”

“I said. Holiday. A caravan.”

“Is that what you told the others?”

“What?”

“Come on, we’re going on a holiday, we’re going to a caravan. Did you tell them their friends would be waiting there for them? Did you say, ‘It’s fine, Mummy and Daddy are going to come on later?’”

She looked straight at him. Her eyes were steady. They hid nothing. Ordinary eyes. She was so ordinary.

It was what Serrailler had noticed every time he had been close to a murderer, unless they were high on drugs, or out of their minds. The ordinariness. You wouldn’t notice them in a crowd. Ed. Boyish. Not plain, not pretty. Not unpleasant. Not remarkable. Not memorable. Ordinary.

“How do you see yourself, Ed?”

She blinked. Then shook her head.

“Do you understand what I mean?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean how you look, I mean what you are … how do you see yourself? As someone who would melt into the background? People wouldn’t really be aware of you at all … If we said, ‘What did she look like?’ they’d scarcely be able to remember. Insignificant, really. Is that how you see yourself?”

“No.”

“Then how?”

“I’m … Ed, that’s what people see. Ed. Me. They know me. ME. Kyra … ask her … she thinks a lot of me, she’s always wanting to come round. People think … they just think Ed.”