The lights went out in the house windows and he emerged and locked the front door. He got in the driver seat and sat looking back at the house while absently putting on his seat belt. She helped him buckle up and then she locked the doors and he started the engine. She looked down at the baby awake beside her, tired eyes lost in the middle distance.

‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ he said.

She held his hand on the gearstick. ‘It’s for her, Liam, not for us. It’s all for her. Remember that. It’s all for her.’

The baby opened her eyes and saw them there and her face crumpled and she looked as if she were about to cry, but sleep swallowed her consciousness and she slipped back under.

Liam switched on the headlights and pulled away into predawn darkness. While he drove, Orla reached down into the passenger door compartment and carefully rearranged something in there and then sat back and looked out the window into the onrushing dawn.

64

Almost noon. The blinds in the police station were open but the city skyline was blocked by the courtyard walls that held the carriers and the vans and the cruisers below. The urban roar beyond resonated through the glass. Car alarms, blowing horns, roadwork, the airport flight path. After thirty-five years 21Carlin was used to it. He wouldn’t miss it when he was gone but he was used to it.

He sat alone in the office, drinking vending-machine chicken soup from a plastic cup, bifocals hanging on the end of his nose. He was studying a series of monochrome photos developed from the film canisters found with the Nikon camera in the shooting box. Photos of moorland and reservoirs, outcrops and gritstone walls, limpid brooks, moorbirds. Photos of an abbey in ruins. Photos of the shooting box’s exterior. Photos of the vandalized and abandoned vehicles and their plates. None of the dead in the living room or the concrete chamber. Why?

He thought about this, picturing the suited man on the chesterfield aiming the gun at the doorway, the bullet holes, the positioning of the camera and canisters on the hallway floor. He guessed a dying man lying there firing a gun would probably prevent him from taking photos too. He picked up a pile of monochrome photos developed from another of the canisters.

Candid images of a woman, mid-thirties, sitting on a swing. Then a man laughing while driving a van. Another of her sitting with the man and a newborn on a blanket in tall grass, the photo taken at arm’s length by the woman, the two of them smiling over the sleeping child, the low sun flaring behind almost darkening the woman from the image. To Carlin’s eye something was wrong with their smiles.