“I’ve something else for you.”

There was a sack on the dining room table—a rough hessian thing that had been printed with the single word: DARTS. It was moving slightly. Without needing to be told, Michael went to the sack and opened it, revealing four tiny kittens, all still with their eyes shut, and all a piebald mixture of black and white. He reached in and picked one up, feeling the hectic warmth of its body against his skin. So alive, and so powerless.

“Michael, lad, have you ever heard of the barghest?”

He curled the kitten against his chest.

“The what?”

“It’s a great demon dog, a wolf really, that haunts lonely roads and stiles. An old legend of the north.”

“Like … a fairy story?”

The man smiled, exposing his long, yellow teeth.

“Not really, lad. The barghest is an omen, but it’s also thought of as a spirit of the land, a symbol of death and rebirth. Where it walks, it makes no sound and leaves no mark, but if it bites you, the wound will never heal.”

“All right,’ said Michael, uncertain of what he was supposed to say.

“The wolf has an important role, lad. You know that? He gives life to the land, because the land is always hungry.” The man went to the sack, where the other kittens were clinging together, mewling at each other. He covered them over with a piece of hessian. “There are people who don’t recognize the power of that. Your dear old mother, for one. Women, lad. They have a different role to play.”

Michael winced.

“But you already solved that problem, didn’t you?” He turned to the boy, and his face changed again; an onlooker would have taken him for a kindly uncle, pleased to be treating his nephew. “The kittens are yours to play with.”

Michael nodded.

CHAPTER

15

FEELING A LITTLE shaken and more than a little tired, Heather opened the door to her mother’s house, half expecting more trapped birds. Michael Reave’s reaction had frightened her, but more than that, she felt haunted by dead women—by Sharon Barlow and Elizabeth Bunyon, by all the women butchered decades ago, and most of all, by her mum. Reave, with his scarred hands and green eyes, was connected to all these deaths, and if she could just figure out how … Perhaps she could end it. And that might just ease some of her relentless guilt.

Instead of birds, she was greeted by the gentle sound of the radio and the faint smell of the coffee she had brewed that morning. The normality of the situation reassured her, and she made herself a pile of scrambled eggs on toast and wolfed it down in front of her laptop, eating for once at the kitchen table.

Reading the names of his victims, seeing the photos of them while they were still alive, none of it had really conveyed the monstrousness of what he had done. She and Nikki had skirted around the edges of it with their own serial killer research, but there had been an unspoken agreement between them not to unearth anything they couldn’t handle. Well, today she felt she had caught a glimpse of the beast Michael Reave really was, and perhaps it was time to face that.