Chapter Two

He looked at the screen. A number, not a name, but a number his hands recognised before his mind fully caught up to it, the particular sequence of digits that had once, three years ago, been saved in his phone under a name he had eventually deleted along with the number itself, on the theory — mistaken, it turned out, because a number without a name still rang exactly the same — that removing the name would somehow make the ringing easier to ignore. He had never quite managed the reverse trick — deleting the number itself from whatever part of his memory still filed such things — and he was aware, in the half-second before he answered, of a small unwelcome clarity: he could have recited those ten digits to a stranger on the street without having to think about it, three years on, the way you never quite lose the shape of a phone number that once meant someone would pick up specifically for you.

He let it ring twice before he answered, which was a habit and not a strategy, though Melissa Steed would probably have assumed the latter. She had always assumed the worst of his small hesitations, in the last year of whatever they had been to each other, right up until the point where assuming the worst had become simply accurate.

‘Callum Spencer.’

‘It’s Melissa.’

‘I know.’ He turned his chair away from the newsroom, a small, reflexive privacy that fooled no one, least of all Grant, who had excellent hearing and no shame whatsoever about using it. ‘What’s happened.’

‘Why do you assume something’s happened.’

‘Because you don’t call to catch up. Neither of us does.’ It came out flatter than he’d meant it, three years of not-quite-avoiding each other compressed into four words, and he heard her not respond to it, which was its own kind of answer, the specific silence of a woman choosing not to spend her limited patience on a fight that wasn’t the one she’d called to have. ‘Melissa.’

‘I need to tell you something and I need you to hear the whole thing before you react to any part of it. Can you do that for me.’

‘I can try.’

‘That’s not the same as yes.’

‘It’s the honest version of yes,’ he said, and heard, faintly, something that might have been the ghost of a laugh on her end of the line, gone before it had fully arrived, the sound of a woman remembering, briefly and against her better judgement, that she had once found this particular habit of his — the refusal to promise more than he could actually deliver — more endearing than exasperating.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’

‘I’m sitting down.’

‘Sit down properly, Callum, not journalist-sitting-down, where you’re already halfway to standing up again because some part of you thinks bad news is easier to take on your feet.’

He sat down properly. He was aware, doing it, of a small absurd comfort in the fact that she still knew that about him — that three years of silence had not erased the specific, granular knowledge two people accumulate about each other’s bodies in a relationship, even a relationship neither of them had ever quite agreed to call by that name, even one that had ended the way theirs had, quietly, over the course of about six weeks, with no single argument either of them could point to afterward as the argument that had actually finished it.

‘Go on,’ he said.

She told him about a man found in a car on a forest track twelve miles north of town, dead of what looked, on first examination, exactly like what it had been made to look like. She told him about a note, handwritten, addressed to no one in particular, expressing the kind of general distress such notes usually expressed, and then two further sentences at the bottom, written in smaller writing, as though added afterward, or as a second decision made once the first decision was already complete — the careful hand of someone who understood he was writing the only version of the truth he was ever going to get to give, and wanted, in the last document of his life, to make sure it survived being written in a hurry.

She told him a name. Stuart Rennie.

‘I don’t know that name,’ Callum said.

‘You will by this evening. Every outlet with a Scotland desk is going to know it by this evening, once the Fiscal’s office confirms what I’m about to tell you, so I wanted you to hear it from me first, properly, rather than off a wire alert while you’re standing in a queue somewhere.’ A pause, the specific weighted pause of a woman choosing her next sentence with more care than she usually needed to choose anything. ‘Stuart Rennie was fourteen years old in October 1987, Callum. He was the eldest of the five boys on the shore path that night. The only one whose face was never circled in Diane Morse’s photograph, because he was the one who survived. He ran, in the dark, and got away, and built an entire second life somewhere in this country under a name that wasn’t his own, and came back to Kinloch eleven years ago and lived three doors down from a house on Wallace Crescent under the name Raymond Costello, and nobody — not the inquiry, not me, not you, not any of the eleven thousand words you spent three years assembling — ever knew he was here.’

Callum sat very still with the phone against his ear. Somewhere behind him he heard Priya finish her call and start typing, the small ordinary sounds of a newsroom continuing to be a newsroom while something enormous rearranged itself quietly at his own desk.

‘And now he’s dead.’

‘Now he’s dead. By his own hand, so far as the physical evidence tells it — I want to be honest with you about that much before I tell you the rest, because I don’t want you building a version of this in your head that isn’t supported by what we actually have. But he left a note, Callum, and the note names two things. It names himself, finally, after thirty-seven years of not being able to. And in the second sentence, it names someone else.’

‘Who.’

She read it to him. He would remember, afterward, the exact cadence of her voice reading it, careful and level and professionally flat in the way she read things she had decided, in advance, needed to be read without any inflection that might colour how the listener received them.His name is Emlyn Spencer and everything he did to us I saw and I know where he still keeps the record of it and the record will still be there when someone who knows how to look goes to find it.

Callum did not say anything for long enough that she asked if he was still there.

‘I’m here,’ he said. His voice sounded normal to him, which surprised him, given that something in his chest had gone very cold and very still, the way water goes still just before it turns to ice, that specific held quality that precedes a change of state rather than describing one already finished.’Say it again. The second sentence.’

She read it again, patiently, without being asked twice, and he sat with it a second time and understood that repetition was not going to make it mean anything different.

‘That’s not possible,’ Callum said, and heard himself say it, and understood even as the words left his mouth that he did not mean not possible. He meant something closer to not survivable — the difference between a fact you could argue with, could interrogate, could send back for revision, and a fact that simply arrived and sat down inside you and refused to leave, regardless of what you thought about it or how many times you asked it politely to be something else.

His father was a fisherman. His father owned one boat, theMarion Rose, thirty-one feet of scarred fibreglass that had been in the family since before Callum was born, and one cottage with a blue door that needed painting, and had, so far as Callum’s entire understanding of the man extended across thirty-nine years of knowing him, never in sixty-three years done anything that would attract the attention of a dying man’s last testimony. His father checked creels. His father read tide tables the way other men read scripture. His father was — Callum reached for the word, sitting at his desk with the phone warm against his ear, and found, with a small internal shock, that the word he reached for was nothing. His father, to Callum, for the better part of two decades, had been essentially nothing: a fixed point on the map he had stopped visiting, a man he sent a card to at Christmas because his mother would have been quietly, unbearably disappointed if he hadn’t, a man he had not sat down to a proper meal with since he was nineteen years old and had told him, across this exact kind of silence, that he was done trying.

‘I need you to go and see him,’ Melissa said. ‘Not because I’m asking as a police officer — I’m not, this isn’t mine, this was never going to be mine. I’m handing the note to the wider inquiry team within the hour and after that it belongs to them, not to me, and I shouldn’t even be the one telling you this much, if I’m honest. I’m asking because you’re his son and because someone should tell him what’s coming before it arrives on his doorstep in a form he isn’t braced for. And because—’ She stopped.

‘Because you think I need to hear whatever he says as much as he needs to say it.’

‘Yes.’

He looked across the newsroom. Grant had gone back to his screen, or was pretending to, with the particular studied pretence of a man who had heard perhaps a third of the conversation and understood, correctly, that he would eventually be told the rest of it whether Callum wanted to tell him or not. Callum lowered his voice anyway, out of habit rather than any real belief it would help.

‘I haven’t spoken to him properly in three years, Melissa.’

‘I know.’

‘The last time I saw him — it was after Mum’s sixtieth, at that dreadful hotel out past the golf course, and he’d had two whiskies too many and started saying things about my job, about how I’d made a career out of exposing everyone else’s family for money while I hadn’t managed a single honest conversation with my own — and I told him I was done. Properly done. I meant it at the time in a way I don’t think I’d ever meant anything before.’

‘I know that too.’ A pause, and when she spoke again there was something in it he recognised from three years ago and had spent three years telling himself, not always successfully, that he didn’t miss. ‘I’m not asking you to forgive him, Callum. I’m not even asking you to like him. I’m asking you to find out what a dying man’s note about four murdered children has to do with your father before someone else finds out first and decides what to do about it without you anywhere near the room.’

That landed the way she’d clearly intended it to. He sat with the phone against his ear and looked at the front page of the paper still open on his second monitor — his own words, KINLOCH FOUR NAMED AT LAST, the story that had taken three years and had cost him a relationship he had never properly grieved losing and very nearly his job on two separate occasions, the story he had believed, honestly and completely, standing in Grant’s office the night it went to print, was the end of something — and understood, with a slow, sickening clarity, that Melissa Steed was telling him, as gently as the facts currently allowed her to be, that it was not the end of anything at all. That it was the middle of a much older story that had been running underneath his own the entire time, close enough to touch, close enough that he had built an entire career walking directly beside it without once looking down.

‘I’ll go today,’ he said.

‘Good.’ Another pause, longer this time. ‘Callum. Whatever this turns out to be — be careful with him. He’s an old man and he’s about to find out that the thing he’s apparently been carrying alone for thirty-seven years isn’t his to carry alone anymore, and I don’t know how a person takes that news well, whatever they did to deserve having to hear it.’

‘You almost sound like you feel sorry for him.’

‘I don’t know him,’ Melissa said. ‘I feel sorry for anyone who’s spent thirty-seven years carrying something they never told a living soul. I’d have thought you might too, given the last three years, though I appreciate that’s not remotely the same thing and I probably shouldn’t have said it.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’

‘Go and see your father, Callum.’

She hung up before he could decide whether that last remark had been a kindness or an accusation, or whether — and this was the possibility that sat with him longest, in the minutes after the call ended — it had simply been the truth, offered without much ceremony, by a woman who had never in the time he’d known her wasted words when one would do the work of ten.