Approaching slowly, I moved on to the porch and stopped in the doorway, leaning in so that I could see most of the living room. None of the furniture had been moved. To anyone else, it probably looked like nothing had changed at all.

Except it had.

My laptop was gone: I’d left it charging, but all that remained now was the cable, plugged into the wall and snaking across the floorboards. My phone was missing. My notebook was still on the table, open to a page halfway in, but I knew straight away that it wasn’t untouched: inside, along the gutter of the book, pages had been torn out, and when I picked it up and started going through it, I could see that the only pages that remained were the ones on which I’d made notes in shorthand, or in a form that only I understood.

I looked across the room.

It got worse.

Everything on the wall had been torn down. Photographs, cuttings, paperwork, theories – it was all either scattered on the floor, ripped into pieces that I could never put back together, or gone entirely.

‘Stop looking into Black Gale.’

I turned, almost dropping the notebook, startled by the voice, the pages of the investigation like confetti under my feet.

A man was standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

He was holding a shotgun.

Monster

1985

Los Angeles | Thursday 1 August

They met in a coffee shop on Broadway. Downtown was busy, the sun baking the city’s streets again, Jo watching from one of the booths at the back as a fight broke out on the sidewalk opposite, two bums pushing each other as their shopping carts blocked a lane of traffic.

Larry O’Hara turned up shortly after.

Jo had already gone ahead and got herself a coffee and was picking at some eggs. She’d missed breakfast with Ira to get here for 10 a.m. O’Hara slid in at the booth without even saying a hello.

‘Morning, Jo,’ she said to him.

He rolled his eyes.

‘I’ll skip the pleasantries if that’s all right.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she responded, and watched as he started going through a bag he’d brought with him. O’Hara was in his late thirties but looked like he’d done a ton more miles, the bags under his eyes like permanent scars, his hair already gone in its entirety. He slid on a pair of reading glasses and brought out a personal stereo.

‘What you got for me, Larry?’

‘First,’ he said, ‘let’s establish some ground rules.’

‘We already did that on the phone two hours ago.’

He shook his head, as if the conversation she’d had with him this morning hadn’t ever taken place, and then laid a hand over the tape slot.

‘If, and when, you get this guy,’ O’Hara said, ‘you give me what I want.’