“Mr. Watson, we need you to accompany us to the police station.”

Chris’s voice was thick but his words came out oddly formal: “In what capacity?”

“We need to re-interview you, on the record, about Freya Harlow’s disappearance.”

Chris couldn’t move. His T-shirt sucked against his back. Then he heard a door swing open behind. He’d given Vicky and her sisters enough time to wonder what was happening, and now they were spilling into the hall, and he couldn’t bring himself to turn and see their expressions.

“What’s going on?” This was Di, of course, taking charge.

“Chris?” Jane sounded giddy.

Vicky said nothing.

Chris stepped toward the police officers. He wanted to say something to his family, something reassuring but appropriate: Just doing my bit for the investigation. But he didn’t trust himself not to misjudge it.

He prepared to walk up the steps onto the unforgiving stage of the street. Maybe it would have turned into an amphitheater, with high stands full of neighbors baying for his blood. He glanced back at Vicky and her sisters and realized what an idiot he’d been not to make that reassuring comment. His silence had hushed them all, too, even Jane. They were watching as if something momentous was happening, and Vicky was holding on to the edge of the hall table looking utterly lost.

41.

EMMA

Emma sat in her chilly car, engine off, watching the curtained upper window of a small maisonette. She’d been there for half an hour and seen no movement. The house radiated a shut-down air, exacerbated by the fact that the lower floor was boarded up. In fact, the whole street seemed lifeless, the bricks and pavement an unbroken gray.

The maisonette’s address lay on the passenger seat beside her. She couldn’t stop glancing at Steph’s handwriting, remembering her eyes as she’d pressed the note into Emma’s palm. Remembering, as well, Steph’s howl the next morning, when she’d been told, as Emma had later understood, that Freya’s bloodied jacket had been found buried in a ditch thirty miles north.