According to the newspapers, which he’d followed obsessively since his incarceration, Carlin was last seen leaving the Northern Sea Hotel on the night Lynch was in an interrogation room confessing to Oliver’s manslaughter. Motorway surveillance cameras picked up Carlin’s car several times but lost track somewhere near the north-east coastline around midnight, the same time its GPS fleet-tracker ceased broadcasting. His car was later found torched under a pier, minus a body. His wife talked of his depression and massive debt problems he’d hidden from her, leading police to suspect suicide by drowning. Lynch had suspected they 197were right. But why torch the car? The answer came three days later when Carlin’s tortured body was discovered in a lakeside mansion, along with the bodies of his apparent abductors and torturers, the wife and son of the murdered Cyrus Green. The son, Henry, the monster with the handprint tattoo from the videos. Cyrus Green’s wife was also the sister of the pharmaceutics CEO who’d been found murdered along with his wife at their opulent home. Explicit photos of the pregnant pink-haired woman from the moors found scattered on the CEO’s desk. Their son, Millar Sweet, identified as one of the bodies found on that trembling farmstead east of Eden that Lynch had visited with Carlin in a past life. The identity of the castrated giant buried inverted remained unknown. How the McCabes had become involved in this havoc Lynch never fully understood, and since he’d recovered from his attack, Liam McCabe had said nothing. Lynch didn’t blame him. He’d lost his wife and uncle and suffered life-changing injuries and now had to raise his daughter alone. Some things are best left buried.

Echoic shouting and slamming doors in that mausoleum of live burials. The cell a dead womb, the prison a dead mother, he the limbo-dwelling stillborn. He gazed into the scuffed floor for what may have been seconds or hours. The clock was frozen in there. He looked up at the window overlooking the yard where snow fell down the night and down his beaten eyes.

The door hatch opened and eyes looked in and the hatch closed and the door opened. A prison officer stepped inside carrying a paper bag. He looked both ways before closing and relocking the door.

‘How’s it going, lad?’ the officer said.

‘Not bad, mate. What are you doing here? Thought we weren’t playing till Wednesday.’198

The officer sat down at the small metal desk. On the desk sat a fan, a phone and charger, a pack of cards, a Bible, a PlayStation and a TV draped with coloured Christmas lights.

‘Just thought I’d come say hello,’ the officer said.