“Yes. Yes, of course. I’ll head up there now.” His voice lowered and his eyes skittered over to Anna, who remained seated at Ryan’s desk a few feet away. “Are you sure it’s alright?”
Another pause.
“Right-oh. I’m on my way.” He replaced the receiver and looked at it for a couple of seconds while he pursed his lips.
Anna glanced over at Faulkner with a question in her eyes. He began shrugging into his jacket, noting that dusk was falling outside the smudged windows and would soon bring with it a cold evening breeze.
“They’ve found him,” he explained. “Colin, that is. They’ve found his body, up at Sycamore Gap.”
Anna put a hand to her mouth, in reflex.
“His body? You mean he’s dead?”
It was funny, she thought, how human compassion worked. The man might have killed several women, but she could still find it in her heart to mourn the loss of another life.
“Yes,” Tom rooted around for his glasses, then realised they were already tucked into the pocket of his trousers. He always kept a field kit in the boot of his car, containing all the materials and tools he would need for an initial walk-through of a crime scene.
“How? I mean, was he killed?”
“Don’t know yet,” Faulkner replied. “Ryan just said to get up there and make a start on the forensics. Might be that Colin killed himself.”
Faulkner hesitated, despite his orders from his commanding SIO. He fiddled with his car keys uncertainly.
“Are you – ah – are you going to be OK here, on your own?”
Anna looked around the empty space and felt a small wave of unease, but nodded cheerfully, batting him away with her hand.
“Of course! Your suspect is dead and I’m in a building filled with police officers. Couldn’t be safer, could I?”
“It’s not that … I, um.”
He trailed off, feeling stumped.
“Tom, give me some credit,” Anna smiled. “It’s obvious that Ryan left you here to watch over me. Now, there’s no need for you to bother.”
Faulkner nodded, feeling much better about it. She was right, after all. Surrounded by police, she couldn’t be safer.
But, as he left her in the quiet space, he wondered why the conversation with Ryan replayed in his mind; why he checked, then double-checked the instructions he had been given. He peered into the passing offices along the corridors of CID as he headed for the exit and was encouraged by the sounds of activity: phones ringing, men and women swearing at each other in jest and earnest, the tap-tap sound of fingertips hitting keyboards.
With a final glance over his shoulder, he headed out into the twilight and prepared to journey out into the hills.
Colin stood west of Sycamore Gap, beside the ruined mini-fortress labelled, ‘Milecastle 39’. His thin shirt buffeted in the breeze, his hair repeatedly dashed against his face. Lost and lonely, he surveyed the world around him but with eyes only half tuned into the present. Beside him, he saw Claire as she had been in life. He could hear her voice on the air and he could feel her soft hand taking his. The brush of the wind was a caress and the broken stones a towering castle, rising nobly at his back and filled with people.
Not alone, after all.
“See, Mother,” he murmured. “Everything’s alright.”
The present jarred for a moment when the tiny figures of real men and women intruded. They stole over the brow of a hill to the west, like black ants.
Colin tried to focus on them but the ground shifted and moved. Voices of the women he had known droned on, an endless cycle of repeated rejection until another voice he recognised spoke loudly enough to drown them out.
“Colin?”
He turned, seeking its source.
“Yes?”
“Colin, do you remember me?”
He squinted as the sun fell further into the horizon, up into the face of the tall man who stood a careful distance away from him.
“Of course, I remember you. You’re DCI Ryan, aged thirty-five, six-feet three inches, dark hair, grey eyes. Mother and father living, sister deceased. Joined the Metropolitan Police aged twenty-three, moved to the North-East in 2008.” He reeled off the facts robotically, in a funny, detached voice.
Ryan saw that the man’s hands were almost white and, in them, the fingers clawed at a bundle of shiny, pale pink fabric of the same type worn by waitresses at The Diner.
“That’s right, Colin. I’m DCI Ryan, but you can call me ‘Ryan’, if you prefer.”
“Thank you,” the other replied politely.
“Pretty up here, isn’t it?” Ryan remarked, taking stock of their immediate terrain. A few more steps and Colin would be over the side of a steep hill.