‘Right. He’s just fucked in the head?’ Gary added.

‘After what happened to him, who wouldn’t be?’ Imogen acknowledged, still feeling as though she should defend Parker. After all, he had saved her life.

‘So where do I start?’ Gary asked.

‘We have two problems. We need to find Parker, but what concerns me more is the person who killed Hugh Norris. That wasn’t him, so we need to know who it was,’ Imogen said.

‘How do you know it wasn’t him?’ Gary said.

‘In his note he said three down and one to go. We know that those three were Coley, Mitchell and Lassiter. It makes no sense for him to lie about Norris, so it must be someone else,’ Imogen said.

‘I have a feeling that all has something to do with Owen Sager, that was the first death. I’ll find out if his parents have his phone or computer still. He wasn’t living in halls, he was still at home,’ Adrian said.

‘We’ll go back,’ Imogen replied. ‘Gary, you can dig into Hugh Norris more. We are missing something.’

‘What about the “one to go”?’ Gary asked.

‘We don’t know who that is. We need to find out the motive, what’s driving all of this. Without that I don’t see how we could figure out who the final person is. Maybe Owen Sager’s parents can shed some more light on the situation. Maybe they can tell us the connection between Owen and Norris.’

‘Thanks for telling me all this,’ Gary said.

Imogen detected a hint of annoyance in his voice.

‘We didn’t want you to get in trouble before. We made the decisions we did, and it wasn’t on anyone else to lie for us. It was never about keeping secrets from you, Gary. It was about keeping you safe.’ Imogen felt bad for not confiding in him, but confident that it was the right thing to do.

‘OK. I get it. I’ll see if I can find anything.’

‘The wife’s name is Abigail Lucas, and she was a student at both Bristol this year and Exeter a few years ago,’ Adrian added. They hadn’t known anything about her before, bar the fact that she worked in the museum. Her name hadn’t been on any of the staff registers at the museum so she must have been paid cash in hand. After the case had ended they hadn’t been inclined to find her, until now. ‘See if you can find anything about her on any of the dead professors’ computers. Or maybe the uni social media forums, they go back a few years.’

They stepped out of Gary’s lab and walked back to their desks.

‘We need to think of something to tell the DCI, she’s not stupid,’ Imogen said.

‘I don’t know how to tell her now. We’ve kept too much from her. There is no conclusive proof or material evidence pointing to Parker. So, at the moment, there’s nothing to tell.’

Chapter Twenty-Six

Imogen woke up with a tight knot in her stomach. She was thinking about Adrian; he had even started making cameo appearances in her dreams. Something had changed between them. They had had the conversation now, too. It just felt so weird, like it was wrong in some way, although she didn’t know why. In many ways, her friendship with Adrian was the healthiest relationship she had ever had. He was quite uncomplicated as a person; he didn’t lie, and she never felt as though she wasn’t getting the whole picture with him. The more she got to know Adrian, the more she liked him as a person. If anything, her original thoughts of him were unfair, not that she’d ever disliked him, but she hadn’t fully appreciated what a good guy he was. He hid it well by being a bit crap at people. He had appeared to be vain and a bit in love with himself when they first met, but as they spent time together she realised it was nothing like that. He messed around for the same reason she ran. A little time pretending you could be better, be someone else. She couldn’t judge him for that.