Whatever happened now, it was nothing to do with me. All I'd done was throw one stupid punch, which was several less than he deserved. A lot less than he'd done to Tori.
I kept repeating that. From performing, I knew you could convince people of anything if you tried hard enough.
Back at the car park, I checked out my hand. The first two knuckles were burning badly, and when I touched the skin below them I winced at the purity of the pain. It felt like I'd rested a white-hot coin on the back of my hand.
Leaving everything else aside, if there's one thing you don't want to do as a magician, it's break your fucking hand. I flexed my fingers and my hand blazed. What had I done? I couldn't palm a coin right now, never mind trick-shuffle a deck.
I wanted a cigarette but didn't know if I'd even be able to hold one.
Then I heard it.
Just a single noise, coming from within the woods. I turned my head slowly in that direction. In the distance, above the trees, birds had scattered into the air.
And then it came again: a dull, flat crack.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I found I was breathing very slowly.
A lot of ideas flashed through my mind right then, each of them upping the fear inside me. But on the surface, all I was doing was staring at the implacable face of the woods.
Everything was quiet again.
It couldn't be what I was imagining. Even Choc wouldn't . . .
Get out of here.
A little way in, I heard the undergrowth crackling. Someone was coming back.
For a moment I was frozen in place - then, when I started to move, it felt like nothing on earth could have stopped me. Round the side of the car, fumbling for my keys, opening the door. Throwing myself in. The engine rolling, then churning into life.
Oh fuck.
The gravel crunched and spat up behind as I swung the car round too quickly, my broken hand trembling as I attempted to hold the wheel, checking my mirror as the woods rotated behind me. Nothing. Not yet.
I sped off down the dirt track anyway, car rolling with the terrain, and pulled out onto the street beyond without even checking it was clear.
They can't have fucking killed him.
Then I accelerated.
Heading anywhere, so long as it was away.
One inch of vodka and one inch of water knocked back in one. Not a particularly pleasant or sociable way to behave, I grant you, but it's enormously practical.
After driving around aimlessly for a while, trying not to panic, I went home, parked up, and walked into my quiet house. The entrance was street level, between two shops, with stairs leading up to the first level of my two-storey flat. Emma had posted her key back through the letterbox, and I found it lying on the carpet as I went inside. When I went upstairs, she'd left the front room light on, but all the boxes of her clothes and books were gone. That was that.
I turned the light off and went through to the kitchen.
There was a bottle of vodka in the fridge, and an ashtray on the side. My fingers shook too much to hold the cigarette with my right hand, so I smoked south-paw, and set about getting drunk as quickly and comprehensively as I could.
The fifth glass I sat with for a time, with the strange sensation of watching my hand trembling even though the alcohol had dulled the pain almost entirely. The first two knuckles looked black, and the bruise was already spreading down the back of my hand towards my wrist. I tried moving my thumb to my fingertips and was rewarded by the burning return of that white hot coin, cutting its way through the vodka.
I downed the drink and poured another.
Nothing had happened, I told myself. Those noises hadn't been gunshots. I'd thrown a punch, but that was all. Eddie had got himself beaten up - no more than was coming to him - and that was all.
I downed the drink and poured another.
Like I'd told Tori the first night I'd met her, magic is mostly about misdirection. You have to make someone suspend their disbelief and accept something they know deep down isn't true. Now, more than anything, I wanted to perform a similar trick on myself. I needed to convince myself that nothing had happened.
So I continued drinking, and I kept repeating the lie to myself, over and over, until the words sank into my subconscious like a blueprint. Nothing happened. You went to The Wheatfield. You need to practise a physical routine about three thousand times before your body will perform it instinctively, and I wanted a mental equivalent of that. My mind needed to know nothing had happened without me having to think about it.
Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, by which time I could hardly walk, I clambered carefully upstairs and collapsed into bed; at some vague point afterwards, in a trough between peaks of nausea and panic, I fell asleep.
I dreamed about my brother, Owen. He was standing in different woods, and there was gunshot that I'd never heard but had been real, and then there was the memory of a policeman, kneeling down beside me in my bedroom and talking to me gently, telling me that my brother was dead.
Chapter Six
Friday 19th August
The day two years before when Sam Currie had gone to his son's house in the Grindlea Estate had been a warm August day, much like this one. The slate-coloured sky had been free of clouds, the hazy sun like a coin dissolving behind blurred glass. Currie had been irritated as he drove into the estate. He was annoyed with Neil, and with his wife, Linda.
The last time he'd seen his son had been a fortnight earlier, when Neil had called by their house. It had been as strained and awkward a visit as always. Currie had barely been able to suppress his disgust at his son's appearance. Neil's addiction hung around him: an unwashed, animal smell. His body was weak and pale, like a thin string of gristle. Sometimes, Currie would look at the photographs of those childhood birthday parties - that happy, smiling kid - and try to imagine what had gone wrong. There would be days when he felt sad and guilty that his son had ended up living this dirty hand-to-mouth existence, and other times when he was simply angry. Neil slipped back and forth between victim and villain; Currie's opinion of himself shifted accordingly.
During that last visit they'd had nothing to say to each other. Currie looked into his son's eyes and recognised the distracted calculations of the addict. Nothing approximating love. But at least there had been some good news: Neil was off the streets at the moment, even if a flat in the Grindleas was less than ideal. He said he was off heroin too, but the lie stank on him, and when he left that day they found that money and jewellery had gone missing. Linda cried. Currie's heart, damaged repeatedly over the years, had set as scar tissue, but his wife's had always seemed to mend perfectly, ready and waiting to be broken again.
That night they had a difficult conversation about what to do, and the decision they reached was to cut Neil off. He was their son, and they loved him, but Currie convinced Linda it was the right thing to do. After only a week of non-contact, however, she'd started to worry. She went behind Currie's back and phoned Neil; there was no answer, and she asked her husband to go round and make sure he was all right. At first, he resisted - their son hadn't returned the calls, he told her, because she was of no use to him right now - and for a whole week he remained stalwart, stopping the subject dead when his wife brought it up. By the end, she was practically begging him to check on Neil. Finally, Currie relented.
He drove into the Grindleas that day seething at this waste of his time, parked halfway up the hill, then walked along the paths between council flats, searching out his son's address. But somewhere between the car and Neil's door, he developed a slight tickle at the back of his skull. Perhaps his imagination added that afterwards, but still, he remembered it clearly. Nothing had changed, and there was no way he could have known anything was wrong, but he felt it. When he arrived, he saw the outside of the house resting in shade, and his stomach fell away. The smell in the garden could have come from the bins, but he knew straight away that it didn't.
There was no answer when he knocked; Currie had to kick the door open. As it splintered inwards, a thousand flies buzzed into life as one - filling the front room with static - and a wave of warm air rolled out, sticking to his skin like grease, coating the hairs on his arms as they stood on end. Neil had been dead for nearly a week. Currie found his son's body slumped on the sofa, an electric fire glowing soft-red to one side.
In the days that followed, the clean-up crew would be forced to remove the settee, the carpet and ten of the floorboards. Men with masks and thick gloves would come and pick dozens of needles out from piles of rubbish. They would scrape faeces from the hallway. But to begin with, there was only Sam Currie. The implications of what had happened to his son were put to one side in the first instance, as his professional instincts took hold and began issuing orders. He walked calmly back out into the indifferent garden and closed the front door behind him. Somewhere inside himself, he understood that his marriage was over, his life crippled, but all he did for the moment was phone his partner, then lean against the outside wall.
He thought about nothing. Nothing at all.
A week was a long time for a man to lie undiscovered. When he allowed himself to drink, which was less often now than it had been, Currie thought a great deal about that week. In his mind, Neil was alive during that time: dead, obviously, but still somehow capable of being saved, waiting for a man who stubbornly refused to arrive. A man who had priorities, just as he always had. Every second of that refusal added to the sorrow Currie felt as he stared at whatever wall happened to be in front of him at the time.
He pictured his son as he'd been in the old photographs - a little boy - lost, alone and crying. Death did that. With precious few exceptions, it froze people as victims for ever. Question marks at the end of blank sentences they left you to fill in for yourself.
Now, two years later, Currie scanned the houses to the left as they drove into the estate. Neil's old flat was out of sight, but he still felt it there, or at least imagined he could.
Swann was driving. 'You okay?'
'Sure,' Currie said.
'Checking for an ambush?'
Currie smiled grimly.
There were poorer areas, but the Grindleas were notorious by name: a dirty little pocket of poverty and crime nestling between two affluent suburbs. Only one proper road in. Some police said that, if they wanted to, the residents could man a barricade at the bottom of the hill and keep them out for a good few days. There were probably fifty or sixty men living in this postcode who'd happily join it, many of them with guns. Charlie Drake made his home in here, as did most of his crew.
And a man named Frank Carroll.
'I'm just tired,' Currie said.
Swann raised his eyebrows. Oh yes.
The time since the discovery of Alison Wilcox's body had been full of both work and frustration. The forensics had given them little to go on, and the majority of Alison's friends and relatives had been able to tell them nothing.
Instead, a familiar picture was emerging. Alison had been a bright, attractive student - popular too, although recently she'd slipped from several radars in the way that people did. As far as anyone had known, she was okay, and so, without consciously thinking about it, they'd put her on 'standby' in their heads: all fine; check again at some point soon, whenever I remember. A few of her closer friends had texted or emailed over the past week. They'd all received replies, worded in exactly the same way. But the last time anyone had seen her in the flesh or spoken to her on the phone had been over a fortnight before her death.
The texts and emails offered a horrific insight into what had transpired in that time. They meant Alison's killer had gained access to her mobile phone - her accounts and passwords - and that while she lay slowly dying, he'd been pretending to be her: keeping in touch where necessary; allaying any concerns.
It was an awful thought for the people who'd received those messages to contemplate, but it was made even worse by what happened afterwards. Alison's death hadn't signalled the end of the contact. Six of her friends had received a message from her mobile phone on the morning the body was found. Each said simply: You let her die.
Of course, they'd all been traced. As with the previous murders, the killer had sent his emails from the victim's house, and his texts from anonymous, crowded streets, carefully avoiding any CCTV. He knew exactly what he was doing. For the third time, Currie suspected he was going to get away with it.
Swann approached the roundabout at the top of the hill. In front, there was a post office, an off-licence and a squat, vicious-looking pub called the Cockerel. Beyond the roundabout, the Plug: three tower blocks, with towels draped out of windows, and clothes strung on lines across the pockmark alcoves. Graffiti curled up from the base of the buildings like overgrown weeds. Swann took the car round, drove a little further, and then pulled in on the left.
When they got out, Currie could hear music drifting down from one of the open windows in the tower block behind them.
'So,' he said. 'Frank Carroll. Remind me again why we're here?'
'Because we're good cops who follow up every lead.'
'Oh yeah. That's it.'
Swann closed the car door.
'And desperate,' he said.
According to the Sex Offenders Register, Frank Carroll now lived in the house they were standing outside: a flat-roofed, single-storey council flat, with a mucky, overgrown garden. Someone had daubed the words 'sick fuck kids bewear' in large white letters on the front door. Beneath it, earlier slogans appeared to have been rubbed off.
'Do you think it's the right place?' Currie said.
Swann shot him a wry smile as they opened the gate.
On the surface, this lead wasn't promising. Carroll's name had come in from an anonymous phone call the evening after Alison had been found, but the scant detail provided had kept the information away from their desk until yesterday. Having skimmed the basics of Carroll's file, Currie had been interested, but quietly unconvinced. They were good cops, though. And they were desperate.