Now, he realised, it was in this room. A black folder, directly below the television, leaning against the cabinet and just tall enough to encroach on the screen slightly. Richard was supposed to see it, he was supposed to read it too, just like he had been the day before. He dropped to his knees next to it, already terrified of the contents, the biscuits discarded. The television screen was now directly in front of him and still showed his image. As he watched the screen, the angle changed again to a wider shot. Now he could see Danny Evans in the middle of a cleared space. The white ropes flared on the camera and even from a distance he could see the fear on the man’s face. His eyes bulged and his body twitched where he fought the restraints and, unable to tear himself away, Richard was still watching at the moment the screen flashed.

The moment he had taken Danny Evans’s life.

Richard closed his eyes and held them shut, like this was all a nightmare and if he waited long enough he might open them to a new reality – to everything back to the way it was before he had pulled that trigger. It had felt so right at the time but the footage – seeing what he had done from outside his own mind – it was so different from how he remembered it. That man had been helpless, tied down, no chance to even speak for himself. Richard felt his head shaking. He wouldn’t have listened anyway. He was well beyond that. Angela always said he was a hothead. She said it like it was a criticism but Richard had never seen it like that. Sometimes you needed to react, you needed to let anger or fear guide you, that was how you survived. But this time she had been right.

The first page of the folder had just two lines, both in block capitals to shout out at him from the page.

DANNY EVANS DIED BECAUSE OF YOU.

GLENN MORRIS DIED BECAUSE OF YOU.

Richard’s hand had a visible shake as he struggled to grip the blue-tinged paper. The next page made him exhale in a panicked whine, the folder slipping to bounce off his thighs and he pushed away from it, falling backwards onto his buttocks, crushing the biscuit packet to find an uncomfortable seat. He scrabbled for the folder, flicking back to the second page, to read again the single sentence it contained:

THOMAS MADDOX WILL DIE BECAUSE OF YOU.

Chapter 37