Jo’s adrenalin spiked. Shit. I might actually have found him. She grabbed the printout from her in-tray with the list of all the employees Paolo Caraca had hired since 1982, and pushed the woman again: ‘Who did you see driving around, ma’am?’

Nothing.

‘Ma’am? What was the name of –’

‘Adrian.’

Jo checked the list: there was an Adrian on it.

‘Adrian Vale, that’s who you need to look into,’ the woman said, more quietly this time, as if his full name had spooked her. ‘He’s a total fucking monster.’

35

Isaac Mills emerged from the shadows.

He held the shotgun across his front, the barrel tilted towards the floor, his fingers fixed to the fore-end. Around his neck hung the night-vision goggles. He watched me for a second before he edged forward, still shadowed by the angle of the stairs.

‘Close the door,’ he ordered.

He used the barrel of the gun to gesture towards it and, once I’d shut the door, he pulled out a chair for me and backed away, the two of us standing either side of the table.

‘Sit down,’ he said sharply, the shotgun turning in my direction as he used it to point to the chair. I sat, watching him closely, and as he came further into the light I saw mud and manure caked around his boots and then something else on the hem of his sleeves. It was dotted across both of his hands too.

Blood.

He stopped at the other side of the table, leaning against the wall, adjacent to the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, and then his eyes shifted to the space on which I’d mounted the casework, and he said, ‘It’s a real shame about your wall, there.’ He said it flatly, without any expression or emphasis at all, and when he returned his gaze to me, it was equally neutral. I thought of the man who’d come to Black Gale the day before, evasive and opaque, asking questions he already knew the answers to and lying about his reason for being there; and then I pictured the other Isaac Mills, the one who’d been so warm with the woman and her two kids, who’d stopped an armed robbery and had stood there for photographs afterwards, smiling and benign, before going on to collect a bravery award. I couldn’t get a read on him then, I couldn’t get a read on him now either – and if I didn’t know who he was, I couldn’t anticipate him. He was unknown and unpredictable.

And both of those things scared me.

For the first time, he dropped his hand away from the fore-end of the shotgun and went to the pocket of his coat. Initially, inside his closed fist, it was hard to make out what he’d removed. But then I saw a headphone jack at one end.