For twenty minutes she revelled in the quiet, the drive into West Hollywood filled with nothing more than the low throb of the engine and the repetitive sounds of the freeway. She thought about the day ahead, about the men she worked with, about the things in her life that she could control, and then a picture of her son filled her head, an image of Ethan asleep in his bed, and everything settled. He was her ballast.

Her son was everything.

And, in that moment, Joline Kader found some peace.

She would never find it again.

7

We talked about what I’d found out at Black Gale over dinner in Healy’s hotel room, although dinner was something of a misnomer: we were five miles from the nearest town of any size and wedged between the motorway and the main building of a service station, so we’d had to make do with Burger King.

‘What did you find in the file?’ I asked him.

‘It’s a pretty thin case,’ Healy replied through a mouthful of burger, ‘but not because of sloppy police work. They worked all the angles you’d expect them to, they tried to tie available evidence to the biggest questions, but the lack of an obvious crime means some of it feels desperate. I mean, it’s not hard to see why they dropped the idea of it being a pissed-up game of hide-and-seek.’ He reached over and picked up a thick sheaf of papers; on top was a gallery of low-res shots extracted from Chris Gibbs’s phone. Healy waved it in his hand. ‘They were pretty well oiled even before they ate, judging by these pictures. Maybe not hardly-able-to-stand bad, but we’re clearly in warm-glow-and-stupid-grin territory. The empty bottles in the recycling bins seem to back that up too. And when you’re half-stewed, some spontaneous Halloween game is the sort of nutty shite some people might find fun. But I don’t know …’

‘Not this group?’

‘No.’

‘I agree. I think we can dismiss the idea of a game.’

I looked at the printouts that Healy had in his hands, in particular the photo that Chris Gibbs had taken on his mobile phone using the timer: nine faces, partly obscured behind party wear, but all of them recognizable. I tried to force myself to see something in the shot, some minor giveaway, something to help me make sense of what happened afterwards, but there was nothing. And that was something else that had begun to occur to me as I drove back from Black Gale: everyone had gone. The four couples liked each other, that much seemed to be indisputable, but was it really normal for nine individuals – including a kid of nineteen – to operate with such a hive-mind mentality? Wasn’t it more realistic to suppose that one or two of them might have decided they didn’t want to leave the village that night?