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Adam glares; he’s refusing to play his game.
“Thirteen years. Thirteen years of saving lives, Bishop. Do you know how many people that equates to? Because I don’t. It must be hundreds. Maybe even thousands of people I helped.”
“So what?”
“So—that must work in my favor, surely?”
“It’s not a fucking get-out-of-jail-free card,” Adam explodes. This man’s logic, it’s insane. “You don’t get a free pass because you diagnosed someone’s cancer! You kill and rape and torture even one woman and that’s it, game over.”
“Maybe so.” Elijah nonchalantly tilts his head to one side, considering. “But I think I should get some credit. I could have killed far more.” He meets Adam’s disbelieving stare. “Oh, calm down. You can sleep easy at night.”
He lifts his hand, his fingers in a fist. Then slowly he raises them, one by one.
“Ethel Henshaw,” he says, the first finger pointing skyward. “Vera Fox, and Fred Powell.” He stops. “Three. As I said.” He shrugs. “I soon learned it wasn’t my thing. Have you ever killed anyone, DCI Bishop?”
“No.”
“Ever wanted to?” He laughs. “Don’t answer that. I’m sure you have. But you’re too weak a man to go through with it. It takes someone made of sterner stuff, to take a life.”
“Who was the first, Elijah?”
“Joanna. Romilly’s mother.”
Adam takes a sharp breath in.
“Not like that,” Cole carries on quickly. “All legal. All above board. She died from her cancer. It doesn’t count. But I was there. I helped her, as her husband, her doctor. I made sure she didn’t suffer. And until that point, until Joanna died, I made sure I held it together, suppressed any urges. For her. I didn’t want to destroy our family, like my father had.”
“You raped Sandra Poole.”
Elijah shrugs. “Oh, that. That’s nothing. I could have done far worse. That feeling, when you’re there, on the edge, as they take their last breath. It’s … almost divine, Adam. Like you’re close to God in that brief moment. So I thought I’d give it another try.” He frowns. “But it’s not the same. These old things, wasting away. Don’t know why Harold bothered. Where’s the fun?”
Adam waits. What this man is saying, his flippancy, it’s disgusting. But he can tell Elijah wants to talk, and as much as it turns his stomach, this is their best chance of knowing the extent of Cole’s crimes.
Elijah turns his eyes onto Adam. Black and dark. “Those girls. Now that’s what I discovered I enjoyed. But not the act of keeping them—or killing them. It was the omnipotence. It was intoxicating.” His eyes gloss over, lost in the memories. “The edge of survival. The total control over those girls. What they would do for me …”
Adam cuts him off. “So why did you leave the keys?”
“For Romilly to find?” He laughs. “Same reason. I wanted to see how much I could push her. Like father, like daughter. Turns out the apple didn’t fall so far from the tree. She kept quiet, little Romilly. I was proud of her. For keeping my secret for so long.”
“Romilly is nothing like you,” Adam hisses through clenched teeth. “She is good, and strong. She knows what you did was wrong and has spent her entire life trying to atone for it.”
“But don’t you wonder, Adam? How much like me she already is?” Cole leans forward across the desk, closer. “Nature or nurture? Doesn’t it prey on your mind when you talk about having children? Because I see that wedding band is back on your finger. You can’t possibly have got married again so quickly, so it must be more symbolic. And good for you both. But when something happens—if your child ever has an accident, falls, bangs its head—wouldn’t you wonder? Because I did. About myself. Did you read any of the books, Adam, when you first met Romilly? About me and my past?”
“A few.”
“A few!” Cole laughs. “I bet you did! Take in all that information about your father-in-law, about the woman you’d married. But most of them were rubbish. Made-up crap to fill in the gaps.”
“Are you saying your childhood was perfect?” Adam bites back.
“Of course not. My father was an abusive drunk. My mother, a killer. And I didn’t blame her, not for one second.” Cole’s voice gets almost wistful now. His eyes drift away from Adam, looking into middle distance. “But what he did. To her. To me.”
He pauses, the clank of chains as he pulls the sleeve up on his jumper. He reveals his forearm, the skin puckered, a mess of tiny round scars. “Payday, the twentieth of the month. Always. And he’d get drunk. He’d take that money and he’d go to the pub with his mates. Drinking until the early hours. I’d hear him come home, the shouting outside. The front door banging as he kicked it closed. And that’s when the fun started, DCI Bishop. Right then.”
Adam doesn’t dare move, listening to Cole talk.
“Because—the lack of money, my mother taking odd jobs, whatever she could, to keep food on the table. Mending my school clothes over and over again. That was all fine. It was payday we dreaded. He’d go for her first. His slow, heavy footsteps on the stairs, the noise as he opened their bedroom door. He’d pull her out of bed—she was never asleep, waiting for him—and I’d run to my door, open it a gap, and watch him drag her down the stairs by her hair. Sometimes he’d throw her down, give her a kick for good measure. But she always tried to keep quiet. For me. To protect me. Because the more noise she made, the more he’d punish her. ‘Don’t wake the neighbors,’ he’d say.”
Elijah pauses. He takes a long swallow from his coffee mug.
