She paused. From somewhere down the hall she could hear a phone ringing and ringing, no one answering. Reave had gone very still. One hand rested against the edge of the table, and one thick, callused thumb pressed against it, turning the flesh white. His eyes, which would still not meet hers, looked haunted.

“When I saw you the other day, we talked about this being a chance to tell your story. Was there someone helping you, Michael? Someone who helped you grab the women, and get them in the van?”

“My story.” He smiled tightly. “I told you lass, no one cares about my story.”

“I do.” She managed to say it this time, and with enough feeling behind the words that he looked up, his eyebrows raised. “If it’s my mum’s story, too, then I want to know about it. You think no one cares, but they would, Michael, if your story helps to stop someone from hurting more women. I care, if it means I can understand a bit more about my mum’s pain, and what made her do that to herself.”

She stopped, and for a long moment there was silence in the room. Heather reached for her bag, and after a slight hesitation, she pulled her mother’s suicide note from inside her note book. She smoothed it down with her fingers, trying to ignore the crushing feeling of guilt—What are you doing? Why would you show this, this painfully private thing, to a killer like Reave? And then she passed it over to him. Reave took it carefully, as though he was handling a baby bird.

“This is the note she left behind. It’s … I wondered if you could make anything of it.”

She watched his face carefully as he read it, hoping for something obvious—shock, anger, sadness, even amusement. Instead he looked at it steadily, his big hands making the note look like a tiny scrap of paper. He swallowed once, and then he passed it back to her, nodding slightly as though she had done him a big favor by letting him read it.

“Well?” Heather paused and bit her lip, trying to remove the desperate tone from her voice. “Does it mean anything to you?”

When Reave spoke again, his voice was softer than it had been.

“Your mother. She was different to the rest of them. Kinder, more innocent. She was a doe in those woods.”

“My mum was? Different to who?”

He snorted. “The rest of the commune. They were there because their friends were doing it, or they wanted to take drugs and get drunk, but your mother, lass. She was different to everyone, to all other women. She knew how important the woods were, she knew …”

When he didn’t continue, Heather leaned forward again. “What did she know?”

He’s going to say she knew about the murders, she thought wildly. That my mother stood by and waited for him to come back every night with blood on his hands. The idea was horrifyingly appealing. If her mother had been a terrible person all along, she’d be free of her guilt.