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Around him, blood dries. Black and sticky, like tar. At first it poured from his arms, his racing heart rate intensifying the bleeding, but now it’s slow. A drip drip, to the floor. Steady. Constant.
How much longer does he have? Time is meaningless; hidden in the black. He’d watched the light fade behind the boards, disappearing into night.
Nobody knows where he is.
Nobody will find him.
He doesn’t have long left. He can sense it. By the quick, frantic beat of his heart. The confusion. The sweat cooling on his skin.
Drip. Drip.
So very, very cold.
He is tired. He closes his eyes again.
Darkness consumes him.
CHAPTER
69
ADAM IS STILL missing.
The thought rotates around Jamie’s head, a mantra that won’t abate. He is utterly numb.
Maggie has been taken away. Jamie knows she is being interrogated by detectives downstairs, but she is refusing to say a word. There is no news from the hospital about Marsh.
He stands in the incident room, in front of the detectives who wait, silent and tense. Then he tells them the news in short, sharp sentences.
He wants to send them all home. To their families, their loved ones. For comfort and support. But Adam is still missing.
Adam is still missing.
“Where are we with the house?” he asks DC Lee.
“SOCOs are still there,” he replies. “Nothing to note yet.”
And Jamie knows he has to go. To see where she lived. To get into her mind. And then, perhaps, he’ll find Adam.
* * *
The house is a mess of chaos and disorder. Now he’s here, Jamie doubts what help it’ll be. But still. He has to try.
He puts a crime scene suit on and steps over the threshold. The smell hits him like a sucker punch to the face. A mixture of something rotting, death, sweat, and human waste. He’s glad of the mask, the gloves on his hands. He holds his arms close to his chest as he walks through.
Belongings scatter the floor and every surface. A SOCO has pushed the door open to the front room: again, this one is a mess, but he can’t see anything significant. Just evidence of a troubled woman, falling apart.
He picks up a black boot, lying on its side in the hallway, and turns it over in his hand. Stones, broken glass, mud, sand, stuck in the heavy tread. And there’s something tacky down the side. He takes his hand away and looks at the transfer on his gloved fingers—dark red, viscous. He closes his eyes for a moment, swallowing down a swell of horror. Don’t think about it, not now, he tells himself as he hands it to a SOCO to bag.
Not now. He has a job to do.
He backs away into the kitchen. This—this is different. It’s where the smell is coming from. The room is filthy. Thick, layered dirt coats the floor and the surfaces. Even the ceiling is spattered.
And it looks like the fridge is rotting. Black blood oozes around the door, leaking out of the machine and onto the lino around it, as if it had once been a living thing and was decomposing in front of them. Jamie takes a tentative step toward it, opens the door, then retches behind his mask. Bladders of blood rest on the shelves, souvenirs taken, he assumes, from the victims. Some leak, rivers of indescribable, thick gunk running from the shelves to the floor. And there it congeals, a marble of black and scarlet and brown.
He gags again, barely able to suppress the vomit this time, and shuts the door quickly.
Cutlery and plates lie on the side, coated in mold and dried food. Pieces of paper sit in rough piles on the dining table, scrappy handwriting in ballpoint pen on all. Jamie leans down to look at one, but there’s nothing that makes sense. Jumbles of words, delusions and ramblings. The tableau of a broken mind.
