‘Killing her must have been hard.’ Adrian was trying to buy time. Buy time for what, he didn’t know, but he knew that when Finn finally stopped talking there was only one thing left for him to do. He could hear the faintest movement next to him. Parker, who Finn seemed to have forgotten about, was working his way out of his restraints. Adrian wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

‘I had no choice. I didn’t want to do it. She was angry with me for Russ, for Norris … she called me, said she wanted out. I thought she was going to tell.’ His eyes glazed over a little. The tears started to come. Time was running out for them; Adrian had pushed him too far.

‘How did you get into it? How did they get you?’ Adrian needed to find a way to calm him down.

‘My dad is in prison, they told me they could make things difficult for him.’ Finn dragged his sleeve across his nose.

‘That never came up when we processed you, that your dad was in prison.’

‘Mother’s name – Blackwell. She left him off the birth certificate because he’s such a liability. He’s been in and out of prison since before I was born. He knew though, the guy in charge, he knew exactly who he was and he told me he could get someone to fuck him up.’

‘How would they do that?’ Adrian asked.

‘He said he knew someone on the inside and that they could hurt my dad.’

‘I can make sure that doesn’t happen. I can keep your father safe,’ Adrian said.

‘Why would you bother for someone like me?’ Finn said.

He was spiralling into that place people go when they think they have run out of options. Given that Finn was holding a large steel knife, Adrian needed to pull him back, fast.

‘I don’t know what that means, Finn. Someone like you?’

‘I worked damn hard to get on that course. No one in my family ever got into university before. I wish I hadn’t now. I didn’t think it would be like this.’

‘It shouldn’t have been like this. What they made you do is wrong.’

‘I just couldn’t stand up to them. You know? I didn’t want anyone to know about my dad and I didn’t want him to get hurt.’

‘What else did they make you do? What was your first mission for them?’

‘The first one was silly, but they offered me a grand do to it, that was when it was fun. I just had to duct tape that kid Owen to the wall in the library, high up.’

‘Owen Sager? You knew him?’

‘Yeah. It was too bad when he hung himself,’ Finn said.

Adrian wasn’t sure if he heard sarcasm in his voice. There was no reason to lie about killing Sager after having confessed to killing Norris and Caitlin, but Finn Blackwell had already established himself as a liar. Maybe it was Adrian projecting when he was trying to give kids like Finn and Caitlin the benefit of the doubt. He saw them as victims, but at what point does someone become responsible for their own actions? Maybe Finn liked killing people, maybe that’s why he was chosen. It was possible that that’s what the professors saw in him, what they saw in all of them. Adrian always remembered his own teen years when faced with kids like this on the wrong side of the law. He remembered choosing not to let his life and his past affect him. Adrian was lucky that he’d found a mentor that helped him to make the right decisions when his parents let him down. These kids had been found by a different kind of teacher.