Colleen kept her campervan on the very edge of the gathering, but he already knew what he was going to find before he got there. He skidded to a halt, the taste of something foul in the back of his throat. The screaming red landscape shivered and beckoned, making the fields and the woods look insubstantial and dream-like.

The campervan was gone, along with the little tent just outside it where she liked to sleep sometimes. In its place there was a patch of yellowed dead grass and a light scattering of damp cigarette butts.

Colleen was gone.

CHAPTER

40

THAT NIGHT, HEATHER did not go to bed. When they went off to their separate rooms, she waited half an hour or so for Nikki to go to sleep, and then she crept back down the hall to the living room, where she sat with her phone in her lap and her legs tucked up under her for the rest of the night. She listened, and she looked at Ben Parker’s number on the small electronic screen. There was no signal, but she could use the phone at the cottage to call him. As easy as that. Despite the late hour, she was almost sure he would answer.

But instead she stayed awake, one small lamp on next to her and a knife from the kitchen lying in easy grabbing distance on the sofa. She listened and watched, her body thrumming with tension like electricity through a wire. Someone here knew who she was. Someone here was playing with her. Why? What did they want?

Was the new Red Wolf watching her?

By the time Nikki got up the next morning, Heather had brewed a pot of coffee and put the knife away. In the daylight, the crisp green landscape around them seemed less threatening, and all the horrors of the previous night—whose daughter am I exactly—seemed ludicrous.

“You’re up early.” Nikki yawned hugely, taking the cup of coffee in both hands. “Raring to go?”

Heather smiled, although it felt sickly and false on her face.

“Not exactly. My head is killing me.”

Nikki sat on one of the kitchen stools, her mouth turning down at the corners. “A migraine?”

Heather nodded and sipped from her own cup, ignoring the slippery feeling of guilt in her chest.

“Bloody hell. Do you want to go to a doctor or something?”

“No, but I think I’m just going to lay low for the day. Maybe you could move your date with Harry forward a bit? Spend the day with him.”

“But …”

“Don’t worry about me, honestly. It’s hardly fair to drag you all the way up here then doom you to a day of tedium because I’ve got a migraine, is it? Just test the water, see what he says.”

“If you’re sure.”

When Nikki had vanished from sight in the car, Heather went and got dressed, and stood for a moment with the Polaroid in her hands. Someone was fucking with her. Someone who had followed her from London, someone who knew more about her mother’s history than she did. Despite everything, she found it hard to believe that the person responsible for the photograph was the new Red Wolf—he had been far too busy dismembering women in Lancashire to be the person leaving notes at her mother’s house in outer London—but she was aware that as rational as this assumption was, it was still a dangerous one. Her most concrete link to this person, whoever they were, was the photo that had been left on her pillow. Time to see what she could find out about it.