She was shoving the photos back inside the box when her phone pinged back with a message from Nikki.

Sorry, was finishing up some marking. Scary stuff. Why wasn’t DI Parker there? How did your mum hide all this stuff? Do you think it’s true? Are you okay, Heather?

Was she ok? Putting the box back on the floor, Heather pulled the bed covers up over her legs, thinking. On the one hand, she certainly did know more about her mother—she never would have suspected that she was the wild child type, that she had run away from home at the age of fifteen, or even that she had a fascination with eerie fairy stories. Yet somehow all this new knowledge had only exposed more holes in what she had thought was real, leaving gaping absences that seemed to lead to something darker and more terrible—like the awful wounds in the bodies of the Red Wolf’s victims.

Whether or not the police would let her speak to Michael Reave again, she would need to fill in some of those holes.

CHAPTER

16

ABI PULLED HER hood up and gathered her arms around her, cursing the thin material of the sports top. If she’d been thinking clearly, she’d have grabbed her coat as well, but the perpetual itch of withdrawal didn’t leave much space for clear thinking, and she’d been anxious to get out of her brother’s house so she could give him and his date some space. He had said more than once that she didn’t have to go out, of course not, but she had seen it on his face clearly enough: few things would put a potential girlfriend off faster than your junkie sister sleeping on the sofa.

She wandered to the end of their road and stood for a moment, considering which way to go. Her lower back ached faintly. She was too old for sofa-surfing, but she’d lost her third job in a row and had little choice about that. It was too cold for wandering the streets, too, but she didn’t have enough money to do anything else. Abi chose to go right, and started walking again.

It was the run-down end of town, where most of the shop fronts were either boarded up or displayed posters for betting shops, and one or two of the street lamps were dead. There was a pub called the Joiners on the corner, and Abi looked longingly toward its dimpled windows, but the thought of standing in there just for the warmth was humiliating; the thought of hoping someone would buy her a drink, even more so. She hadn’t had the heart to tell David that she didn’t have the money to “amuse herself” for the evening and that his cozy date would be condemning her to a night of slightly cold boredom.

Abi walked on past the pub, pretending that she didn’t have an end destination in mind. She turned another corner, heading down an even seedier road, wondering already if anyone would be there. She could see the park at the end of the street, obscured by a chicken wire fence and an ugly steel gate. There were the swings and the rusting roundabout, the looming shadow of the slide, but she couldn’t make out any figures. Sometimes, she reminded herself, when it was cold, they would sit underneath the slide and pass out their goodies.