‘You’re sure it’s a man?’

‘I would be surprised if it wasn’t.’

‘You need to let us deal with it. When you find out who it was then you have to tell me.’

‘I don’t think I can. They are dangerous people, they don’t deserve prison, they would probably thrive in there.’

‘That’s not really up to you.’

‘I understand my return has put you in an impossible situation and I am truly sorry. I didn’t want this. It came to me.’

‘There is no way for me to protect you, or myself for that matter. If you get caught, then we are both in a lot of trouble.’

‘They won’t catch me, Detective. If they do, there is no way to connect me to the previous murders and I won’t tell if you don’t.’

‘What if I hand you in?’

‘You’re not going to do that. These people are ruining lives, they have killed people. I just need to get the last of the professors and then it’s over. The world will be a better place without them in it. They almost destroyed you, too. Think of all the innocent people they have hurt, including this girl. You know as well as I do that she didn’t commit suicide.’

Adrian couldn’t fault his logic, but if he stopped believing in due process and people’s rights then what was he? He had to do things by the book, no matter how much it pained him. There was a little part of him that wanted the people who made Caitlin Watts make those false allegations pay for what they did. As he walked through the corridors at work he could still hear whispers. He had a reputation with women, granted it had been a while since he had done anything like that, but shit sticks, and right now there was a definite stink around him, thanks to the group of people Parker was trying to eradicate. Maybe death would be too easy for them, but perhaps Parker was right, maybe they needed to just not exist any more.

‘You need to let us take care of this,’ Adrian said unconvincingly.

‘I don’t have any faith in your justice system, I only trust my own.’

The phone went dead. He was gone.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Adrian continued to look through the files, but his mind kept going back to Caitlin. He had tried not to think about her for a while now, since before she made the allegations against him. He had been attracted to her on some level; maybe if she was older and they were in another life, he wouldn’t have hesitated to take the opportunity she had offered to him quite plainly.

When he was younger Adrian was quite a vulnerable teen himself, which was how he ended up being a father at sixteen. His parents were both preoccupied with their own problems; his mother virtually a ghost and his father an addict. He was left to fend for himself with no real guidance and a compulsion to seek refuge in the arms of his girlfriend, now the mother of his child, Andrea. She was the closest thing to love that Adrian had ever known. Although looking back now, he realised it wasn’t love, just lust and, more than that, a desire to belong to someone, to be wanted by at least one person in the world. Caitlin had her grandfather; he was her home and her family. He could understand how she would do anything to keep hold of that and to keep him safe, and so Adrian couldn’t be angry with her for what she had done. She really was a victim in this, too. He had been lucky enough when he was a teenager not to fall in with the wrong people. His father’s experience had made him hate anything to do with drugs, and so he never touched them and stayed away from the dealers that used to hover by the back gates of his secondary school.