BooksBarbecue
Back What You Did
Chapters (44)
  1. TITLE PAGE
  2. COPYRIGHT PAGE
  3. CONTENTS
  4. PROLOGUE
  5. Chapter One
  6. Chapter Two
  7. Chapter Three
  8. Chapter Four
  9. Chapter Five
  10. Chapter Six
  11. Chapter Seven
  12. Chapter Eight
  13. Chapter Nine
  14. Chapter Ten
  15. Chapter Eleven
  16. Chapter Twelve
  17. Chapter Thirteen
  18. Chapter Fourteen
  19. Chapter Fifteen
  20. Chapter Sixteen
  21. Chapter Seventeen
  22. Chapter Eighteen
  23. Chapter Nineteen
  24. Chapter Twenty
  25. Chapter Twenty-One
  26. Chapter Twenty-Two
  27. Chapter Twenty-Three
  28. Chapter Twenty-Four
  29. Chapter Twenty-Five
  30. Chapter Twenty-Six
  31. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  32. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  33. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  34. Chapter Thirty
  35. Chapter Thirty-One
  36. Chapter Thirty-Two
  37. Chapter Thirty-Three
  38. Chapter Thirty-Four
  39. Chapter Thirty-Five
  40. Chapter Thirty-Six
  41. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  42. Epilogue
  43. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  44. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

‘Of course it’s yours.’ I sat across from him in the other leather seat, determined to be brisk and clear and not give in to the small pulse of panic at the base of my spine.

‘I mean it. Got no lead in my pipe. It works but there’s nothing. Tanks are dry.’

I winced. ‘You mean you used a sperm donor.’

He drank some whisky and made a face. ‘Some German fella. Imagine we’ll have a tall blonde baby who’s very good at cycling. At least we’ll get sun loungers on holiday.’

‘Cal . . . lots of people do it this way. It doesn’t mean you’re not . . . that it’s not . . . anyway, Jodi needs you. She’s in pain, and she’s scared, and you need to go to her now.’

He raised his head. His eyes were bloodshot, piggy, as if he’d been smoking weed for hours or hadn’t slept in weeks or both. ‘She doesn’t need me. No one needs me.’

‘That’s not . . .’

He sighed. Regretful, or maybe irritated with my slowness. ‘Al. Ali. You know by now, don’t you? You know and that’s why you’ve come?’

It was almost a pleading. ‘What do I know?’

Another sigh. His voice was small, like a child’s. ‘What I did. I kept waiting for them to come for me, but they never did.’

My heart was pumping very hard in my chest, like someone was pounding me with their fist. ‘Cal . . .’

And I thought back to that moment in the kitchen, Karen stumbling in with blood on her thigh and my sense that this was it, the last moment before everything changed. I had that same feeling now, looking over the polished parquet floor at Callum, my friend of twenty-five years. I thought about the jumper I’d found in Benji’s toy-box, scarlet red, now dirty with burrs and leaves, unearthed from the rubbish pile. They’d say Mike took it off that night, afraid of DNA or blood, then he hid it somewhere he knew it would be burned. But Mike had not been sober enough to think of something like that. I’d seen him myself. So someone else must have done it. The jumper had been left on the decking, carelessly dropped. It was the jumper both Bill and Karen had mentioned seeing in the dark of the garden. But Mike was in bare arms when I confronted him right after, on the swing seat. Someone else could have put the jumper on.

Someone else could have done this to Karen.

Callum