‘It wouldn’t have taken a genius to make the connection between you and us,’ Duggan said. ‘We drank together.’

‘It was thirty years ago,’ Tony said. ‘He didn’t care about you, or me. He just wanted to keep his kid alive. If you’d listened to me–’

‘Listened to you?’ he said. ‘A fucking coward and a tout?’

‘Better that than kill a kid,’ Tony snapped, confident now in the rightness of his choice. ‘That youngster had already lost her mother. She was struggling and her father was the only thing she had. She’d done nothing wrong. She didn’t deserve it. She had a hard enough time as it was, just surviving. So I’m not sorry I spoke to him. I’m sorry that Martin took my place. I’m sorry that I wasn’t honest thirty years ago, and sorry I didn’t spare his family their grief, too. If I’m a coward, it’s not because I wouldn’t kill a child, it’s because I didn’t admit what I did back then. But I wouldn’t change what I did with the cop or Alice. I was right to do it. So fuck you, Hughie. You want to shoot me, go ahead. I’m ready.’

Tony realized how quiet it had become. Even the birds above them seemed to have been silenced by his words, as if waiting to see how Duggan might respond. Tony looked to Karen, who sat on the bough of a fallen tree over to his right, her head in her hands. He wanted to apologize to her, for not telling her earlier, not telling her back then, but he didn’t know what to say. For a moment, he worried that she was upset with him. He’d expected her to understand and was perturbed that she seemed not to, now.

He only realized the truth when Duggan spoke.

‘You fucking bitch!’ he shouted, raising the gun at her.

‘Wait!’ Tony shouted, rushing at him. ‘It was me! Me!’

‘You never named Martin,’ Duggan snapped, looking at him, the gun still trained on Karen. ‘That’s not on you.’

She looked at Tony, tears already bright in her eyes.

‘It was her said she seen him,’ Duggan said. ‘It’s her fault!’

‘You?’ Tony asked.

Karen nodded, the tears slipping freely down her face now as Tony realized that, in confessing, he had not damned himself, but damned her; she who had lied thirty years earlier, to save him.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Forty-Nine

‘No one’s going to save you,’ Duggan said.

They’d reached the forest and stood in silence as Duggan opened the trunk of the car, in which Kelly lay, gagged and bound. His body was livid with bruises, visible because his T-shirt had become pulled up in his thrashing around the boot, as he attempted in vain to get free. ‘Shout all you want,’ Duggan said. ‘No one’s coming.’