AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The guard looks at her father, and Cole nods. And only then does he take the keys from his belt and move toward the door.
“Do what you think is right, Romilly,” her father shouts after her. “However crazy it might seem. Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.”
But she’s not listening anymore. She’s running. Out of that room, down the corridor, out of the prison. Away from the man that’s haunted her for her whole life.
CHAPTER
31
“WHAT DID HE say?” Adam asks the moment he answers the phone. He can hear her gasping, struggling to catch her breath. “Are you okay? Romilly?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. He … he …” He can hear her crying now, and he curses himself for letting her go alone. But Pippa, the investigation. He can’t let things slide, not even for a moment. He sits behind his desk, watching the detectives in the incident room: reviewing CCTV, analyzing reports, witness statements, the continued door-to-door on the streets.
“I’m so sorry.”
“No. I was right to see him. But he knows nothing. You were right, Adam. He used it to manipulate me.”
“So he didn’t say anything useful at all?” He can’t hide his disappointment, and she knows it.
“Not really, no.” She stops. “But he knew we’d gotten divorced. How would he know that?”
Adam feels a wave of anger; he battles to keep it out of his voice. “Prison guards know police,” he says at last. “He might have bribed someone to find out. Or public records, access to the internet somehow. We need to keep you away from this now. It’s not right how close he got.”
“It was my decision. I’m fine. He did say something interesting, though. He asked what the killer would be getting out of it. Why they’d kill all those people.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Their motivation behind carrying on what”—she pauses, and he hears her swallow—“what Elijah started. Why would anyone do such a thing?”
“Misplaced adoration. Something fucked up in their brain. Who knows?” Adam sighs. More conjecture. More theories. “But more importantly, how would they know? About the numbers? You remembered because you saw them. Are we looking for someone who was there, back then?”
“A journalist? A cop?”
“Or someone who spoke to Elijah in prison. A cellmate? Direct from the psycho’s mouth.”
“He didn’t deny it, Adam.”
“Of course, he didn’t,” Adam retorts. He’s annoyed. He doesn’t like Romilly being manipulated like this. She’s still susceptible to his charms, even after all this time. “This is just what he wants. This attention. Getting to see you.”
“But it wasn’t just that …”
Adam pauses at her hesitation. He feels a twinge of disquiet. “Romilly. Did your father say anything else?”
“He said … um …” She hesitates. “He was always coming out with these sayings when I was a kid—you know, well-known phrases. He loved them. And he said one today. Something odd about a clock. It didn’t feel right. Like he’d deliberately shoehorned it in.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“That even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.”
Adam frowns. Something niggles. He turns to his computer and pulls up the photographs from the crime scene yesterday morning, now uploaded to the system by the technicians. He scans the shots, looking closely at the bloody floor, the mass of spatter on the walls. The horrific panorama of psychopathic rage and impulse.
“Adam?” Romilly asks again down the phone. “Are you still there?”
But he ignores her. He flicks to the next shot, then the next. But— Something grabs at his subconscious. He goes back.
And there it is. The clock on the wall in the kitchen. Everything else had been so horrifying, so out of the range of normal human experience, he hadn’t given it any consideration at the time.
It was a boring analogue clock. Cheap. Ugly. But the hands. They’d been stopped. At precisely eleven minutes past eleven.
