He turned his head to look at the far wall, just as though there was a window there he could look out of.

“I think I’m done,” he said quietly. “I think I want to go back to my cell now. No more talking for me.” Heather blinked, surprised by his sudden change of attitude. As DI Parker touched her shoulder, inviting her to leave, Michael Reave met her eyes one last time. “Did you understand the story, Heather? Do you see what the sister should have done?”

Heather didn’t answer.

“She should have drunk the water, too,” he said.

DI Parker offered her a lift back since he was going that way anyway, and she took it gladly, pleased to be avoiding buses as the skies turned dark with rain. The interior of his car was untidier than she’d expected of a police officer—hollow McDonalds cups, empty Tupperware, a few screwed up chocolate bar wrappers—and she spotted a faint pink flush cross his cheeks as she chased a plastic bottle top off her seat. It was sort of adorable.

“Sorry about the mess,” he said, grimacing faintly as they pulled out onto the rain-slicked roads.

“Don’t worry, you should see my place.” Heather paused, both amused and horrified by the way the sentence seemed to hang in the air between them. Inviting him back to my place already. Bloody hell. “Do you have a siren hidden in here somewhere? Zipping home like I’m in The Bill would mean this day wasn’t a total write off.”

DI Parker grunted. “Those things are literally for emergencies, Miss Evans. And listen, don’t take it so badly. You did well in there today.”

“I did?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “It’s a start. It’s certainly the most I’ve ever heard him say to someone. He’s interested in talking to you, and we have to hope that will open up some new threads. Maybe he’ll let something slip. I’d like to put you back in there, if that’s all right with you.”

Heather glanced out the window. Raindrops had turned the outside world into something uncertain, smeared with red and yellow lights. Despite her description of the session as a write off, she had to admit that it had been fascinating; both Reave and his unsettling confidence, and the morsels of information he had dropped about her mother.

“It’s quite the thing, speaking to … someone like that. If you saw him in a pub you wouldn’t look twice, yet I can feel he’s holding stuff back. Stuff about my mum.” She looked at Parker briefly, feeling vaguely embarrassed. “Hark at me, been in one interview and I think I’m Miss Marple, right?”

DI Parker gave her a brief lopsided smile.

“Anyway. He’s scary, Inspector Parker, but the fact that he’s been talking to my mother all these years, that there’s this whole side to her I knew nothing about, and then she commits suicide out of nowhere …” She shook her head slightly. “And this new killer. Did you already check out Fiddler’s Mill? I mean, back in the day.”