Adam’s investigations into the disappearance of Joby Clifton had pointed the finger of suspicion at the boy’s father, Cooper, who had recently been placed under surveillance. In a bid to maintain his cover, and because Royal Mail did not deliver on Sundays, the postman had been absent on the morning that Adam disappeared. A fuckup with rotas, a lack of personnel, meant no one had filled that gap.

She knelt beside the old man. His face was gray, patches of sweat in semicircles beneath his armpits. His right hand was curled into a protective fist.

One word on her lips. “Why?”

Cooper shrugged, his eyes sliding away. But there was something in his expression. Resignation, yes. But more than that. Acceptance.

She gripped his shoulder. “Tell me.”

“Greater love has no man than this: to lay down one’s life—” He was mumbling now, the words spilling from him. He closed his eyes and smiled, as if staring into the face of God himself.

“What do you mean?” She was shaking him now, and he was unresisting, his head flopping back and forth. “Tell me.” A scream was rising in her, a fury so bright and blinding that she did not know if it would ever dim. In her heart, she knew what he had done. Guilty. Plain as day. Written in the slump of his shoulders and the coy smile and the infuriating refusal to explain himself.

Mac pulled her off and she struggled against him, resisting. “Let me go,” she said, tugging at his arms. “Get off.”

“Stop it, then,” he said. “Don’t give Sampson the satisfaction.”

She threw him off and stalked toward the tree, circled around and back again. Crouched next to Cooper Clifton with fire in her eyes and her heart.

“If you won’t tell me why, then tell me how?”

The old man raised his eyes to meet hers. A watery blue sea surrounded by yellowing sclera. His pupils were dilated in the murk of the copse. Tiny red capillaries. Witness to so many horrors.

The woods seemed to still. Time did not march on, but paused, to see what would happen next. The other officers burst into the clearing. DCI Roger Sampson. A couple of uniforms. Five seconds from justice. That was all. The time it took for Cooper Clifton to execute the plan he had so carefully conceived.

In a graceful movement, he lifted his restrained hands to his mouth and funneled in the contents of his tingling palm.

Four.

Five.

Six of them.

One missed his mouth, and it rolled down the front of his polo shirt and came to rest in his lap.

A small, dark seed. Innocuous. Like the brown button eye of a bird. Or the pupil of a porcelain doll.

Cooper’s face twisted at the bitterness, but he forced himself to swallow them, fighting an instinct to spit them out.