“I know it,” Ryan interrupted him. It was the same brand favoured by Keir Edwards to restrain his victims.
“Well, it’s looking like Colin used the same brand to hold his mother’s bandages in place. There’s a stock of it in the house and the bin is full of discarded medical waste, including bandages and tape. We’ll check the samples to make sure none of the DNA matches our victims, but my working theory would be they all belong to Geraldine Hart.”
“OK, he had access to a supply of medical tape of the same kind found on Claire Burns, but that must be balanced against the fact that anybody could buy the same kind of tape from a local pharmacy. Is that it?”
“In one.”
“OK,” Ryan watched a grey squirrel run up the bark of the large tree and he was reminded of another leafy tree, miles away from here.
“We’ve confiscated any potential weaponry we could find, which comes down to a few kitchen knives and a pair of scissors, and we’ll test those in depth, but if you were hoping we’d find a bloodied surgical knife, I’m sorry to tell you that we’ve come up nil.”
“Understood. There must be quite a lot left to go over, so let me know if anything else crops up.”
Behind locked doors, Colin sat huddled in the corner of the room, in a borrowed shirt that was a size too large for him and the same trousers he had worn the day before.
Clutched to his chest was a carrier bag containing Claire Burns’ uniform.
“I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t have killed her.”
His teeth still chattered and his wan blue eyes were haunted as they stared fixedly at the wall ahead.
“I – maybe I did kill her. I don’t know.” He started to cry, big, blubbering tears which rocked his body.
Against the bare wall, his mind conjured up wild dreams, crazed imaginings where Claire still lived; where his mother was thirty years younger, still the vibrant, younger woman she had been before she had allowed life to get on top of her.
“Mother will be worrying about me,” he whispered, but he could not dispel the sight of her lying on the bedclothes, her eyes unblinking and beginning to film with white.
His mind retreated, to a place where reality could not touch him. In that safe cocoon, he was no longer Colin; he felt immortal.
He looked down at the postcard he held in his hand and knew where he belonged.
CHAPTER 18
Anna looked up from her computer screen when a knock sounded at the front door. Wednesday was her day off from teaching, a time when she preferred to work from her home office undertaking research for her next paper.
She skipped down the narrow flight of stairs in her cottage and opened the door to a friend, not minding the fact that her hair was piled into a messy knot, or that she had a half-gnawed red biro tucked into it.
“Mark!”
Doctor Mark Bowers, her former history mentor and the man she considered a surrogate father stood on the doorstep with an enigmatic smile. He was tall, in his early-fifties and possessed of a year-round tan, which came from working outdoors wherever possible.
“Got some time for a weary traveller?”
Anna grinned.
“Come in, come in!” She ushered him inside, happy to receive a visitor. Usually, she relished the opportunity to enjoy a few quiet hours to herself, never needing to fill the silence with background noise, but after her experience the day before, the empty house had suddenly seemed too empty. Now, she turned off the radio, happy to have real company instead.
She made tea for them both and they settled in the living room.
“How have you been?”
Mark considered the question as he sipped his tea. Trust a northerner to drink hot fluid even on a warm day. The sun beamed gentle rays through the bay window behind him, casting his face in shadow, for which he was grateful. There had been too many sleepless nights of late.
“It’s been a busy time, with lots of change,” he replied.
Since the events of last Christmas, he had had his work cut out for him as manager of the National Heritage Visitor Centre on Holy Island. There had been an influx of tourists, some of whom visited the island not for its historic credentials, but in ghoulish curiosity to see where a cult circle had operated.
“How is everyone coping?” Anna referred to the families of the victims and those who had survived. It shamed her, but for her own sanity she had avoided going back to the island. Everyone needed time to heal and she, very much like DC Lowerson, had no desire to rush back and remember things she would rather forget.
“It’s a tight-knit community,” Mark said. “People come together when the chips are down.”
There was a pause.
“We’ve missed you, Anna,” he admonished. “I thought you might have stopped by to see us.”