‘No,’ she said, and thought of the notebook she’d dug out at home, of the two names written in the middle. Gabriel Wilzon. Donald Klein. They weren’t the only unsolved murders in her career as a cop, they weren’t the only case of hers that had hit the skids, but they were the first, and they’d always stuck the hardest, and she’d always known that there would only ever be one way to shift the weight of them.

It was the same way you shifted the weight from any case.

You found the killer.

‘Mom?’

She tuned back in.

‘Do you think we should get going?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘Of course.’ She laid out some bills on the tray and then flashed her son a big smile, telling him everything was fine. ‘Let’s get my little boy to college.’

Jo didn’t get back home until after 9 p.m.

At the screen door, she froze, her key in the lock, as if there were something bad waiting for her on the other side, and then she opened up and moved through to the hallway. The silence of the house crashed past her. She went further in, to the door of Ethan’s room: back when she’d been at the LASD, standing here had been the thing she’d done – the goodbye she’d given – as her baby had slept. Now the crib was long gone, and so was the LASD; so was Ira, so was Ethan. She took in the emptiness of the space, hated how unnaturally clean it was, from the perfectly stacked bookshelves to the flawless bed linen. And then her eyes were drawn to the other side of the room, to his desk, where – in a frame – there was a picture of him and Ira. It was taken on Ethan’s fifth birthday.

It didn’t matter how much you loved a person.

Eventually, you had to let them go.

Jo burst into tears.

Part Seven

THE DIPLOMAT

51

Robert Zaid lived at the end of a winding cul-de-sac, the entire road cut off from the outside world by a pair of five-foot-high security gates. At 7 p.m. I pulled up in front of it and pushed the buzzer on an intercom. From this side of the gates, the cul-de-sac looked quiet, and the road I’d come in on had little in the way of through traffic, but I could still hear vehicle noise from Highgate High Street, the wail of sirens, the low drone of planes in the sky. London was never silent. It made me think of how different it was from Black Gale.

‘Yes?’

The intercom crackled into life.

‘Mr Zaid? It’s David Raker.’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

With a clunk, the gates began to open.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’m down at the end.’