Eventually, Mills said, ‘He was a killer before he ever killed, and he stayed that way after. You could see it if you looked for it. So, you know, the other students on that Politics course, I’m sure they did whisper behind his back when Beatrix Steards went missing, maybe even passed a comment in front of him, but they didn’t stand up to him. No one bullied or pushed Adrian Vale around like he said. Most of them were probably as shit-scared as Donald Klein was that night at the motel.’

He let out a grinding breath.

‘You need a doctor, Isaac.’

‘Yeah? And what am I going to tell them?’

He looked down at the knife again, the blade, the grip.

‘Just write down what I’m saying,’ he said sharply.

He raised the gun off his lap, reminding me it was there.

‘I always knew what kind of a person he was,’ he said, his voice trapped inside the trees, its bleakness and remorse somehow at home here, ‘so it wasn’t naivety. The very first time Jacob Pierce brought me on board, the first time I took money from Vale, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. But the money was so good. I thought, “I’ll just do this for a while, and then get out.”’ He shook his head.

‘How much does Jacob Pierce know?’

‘Enough to take his share and keep quiet.’

I thought of Seiger and Sten, of the boxes full of cash.

‘You know what’s funny?’ Mills said, smiling, his eyes returning to me. ‘There isn’t a Seiger and Sten. There’s no Mr Seiger and Mr Sten, and there never was. That’s just the name that Jacob gave his practice because he said it would make it feel like it had been going for years. It’s why he’s got that place in the Shambles, so it looks all olde worlde and established.’ He looked down at the gun, at the hands holding it, pale and bloodied. ‘It’s a measure of who he is, I suppose, a measure of who Vale was as well: they even lie about the simple things.’

‘And you?’ I asked.

He looked across at me.

‘You haven’t lied about the simple things?’

I expected a reaction of some kind, a flash of anger, but instead he just rolled his shoulders in acceptance, an admission of guilt.

‘I lied,’ he said quietly. ‘But mostly I just tried to forget.’

I watched him, pen poised above the page.

‘I tried to forget what Vale told me about those two kids in LA, I tried to forget what he told me about Beatrix Steards – and, for two and a half years, I’ve been trying to forget what we did to the people from Black Gale …’

65

At the mention of Black Gale, the forest seemed to still.