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And why is she so interested? She sips at her wine, already feeling woozy as the alcohol goes to her head. But it’s nice, this fug. Helping her forget the violence and the death in the time-honored manner.
Libby swings back onto her bar stool, crossing one elegant leg over the other. She flashes a mischievous grin.
“So,” she asks Cara, “shots?” And then, without waiting for an answer, beckons the barman over.
* * *
An hour later, Cara finds herself rolling out of the taxi at her front door. None of the lights are on. She knows her husband will be in bed, needing to be up early in the morning for the breakfast service.
She opens the front door, putting her keys on the hook as quietly as she can in her alcoholic haze. She takes her coat off, her shoes, and puts them away. She’d have liked someone to talk to about other things than murder and dead girls and dismembered body parts, but settles for making herself a bowl of cornflakes and eating them in front of an old episode of Friends.
She leaves the bowl in the sink and turns the light off again, going upstairs. She pauses outside the door to her daughter’s room, then pushes down the handle, opening it quietly.
Inside, the stars on the ceiling highlight her face in a hazy glow. Tilly’s sleeping, her hands tightly clasped around a small white owl, now grubby and worn from years of love. Cara rearranges the duvet back over her, then crouches by the side of her bed.
It’s a parent’s worst nightmare to hear the news that too many families had received that week. Your child is dead, and not only that, but their last hours would have been scary and painful. They would have most likely begged for mercy, prayed for their mothers, and their last thoughts would have been for the ones they loved. Cara looks at the sleeping face of her daughter and feels the anger eating away in her stomach. Losing a child from illness or an accident is tragic, but this senseless taking of a life, of so many lives, was unconscionable. It was inhuman. For the first time that week, she feels tears rolling down her face, then swallows them away, wiping them dry with her sleeve.
Cara leans forward and kisses her daughter on the cheek, and she stirs. She opens her eyes and looks at her.
“Go back to sleep, pickle,” she whispers.
“Did you catch the monsters?” she asks. “Daddy said you weren’t home because you were catching the monsters.”
“Always, my love.”
“What do they look like?” Tilly’s eyes shine in the darkness. “Daddy says they look like you and me.”
Cara silently curses her husband. “Yes, but I’m trained, so I can always tell the difference.”
“Is Josh a monster?”
Cara smiles, tucking the duvet around her. “No, as much as you think so, your brother isn’t a monster.”
“Is Daddy? Is Noah? Is Uncle Nate?”
“No. We don’t have any monsters here, Tils. I got rid of those long ago. Now go back to sleep.”
She nods, satisfied with her answer, and closes her eyes, rolling over in bed, taking her owl with her.
Cara gets up and goes into her own room, cleaning her teeth in the en suite in the dark. She doesn’t want to look at herself. To see the effects of the day on her face. She takes her clothes off and climbs into bed, pushing up against the back of her husband. He mumbles something incomprehensible.
“Roo?” she whispers. “Are you awake?”
She knows he’s not, feeling guilty for wanting to wake him up. But he stays resolutely in slumber, and she envies her husband’s ability to sleep.
Cara rolls away from him, and lies on her back looking at the ceiling. She waits for the tiredness to overtake her, for a blissful oblivion she knows will never come.
CHAPTER
24
IT’S EARLY MORNING, still dark, when the pain wakes him. Griffin shifts in the bed, testing out the extent of the problem, then slowly sits up. It’s nothing he’s not used to by now, and he stands tentatively, making his way toward the kitchen.
The apartment has cooled, and he feels the chill on his skin. He gropes his way toward his bag, pulling out the box of pills, swallowing two down quickly.
He’s not a good guy—Griffin’s always known that. He took no offense at Jess’s earlier words; it’s just how he is. Even when he was new to the police force, he wasn’t one of the shiny fresh recruits, turning up eagerly, their shirts ironed, their boots clean. He’d be out the back, cigarette in hand, when he should have been reporting for duty.
But he was the one they called when a douchebag didn’t want to go into his cell. The person they sent single-crewed to a dangerous area. He got into fights, broken bones and black eyes littering his record. He got the job done, and if that meant a few more pounds spent by the NHS, so be it.
