‘Did you find her?’ said Erin. ‘Please tell me that you found her.’

She was good, Harry gave her that. It was just what she should have said, just what the chief would have expected to hear.

Morland didn’t reply. He was leaving them to stew for a while, waiting to see what they might reveal to him. They’d have to step carefully now. What would the girl have said when she was caught? What would she have told them?

Nothing, Harry figured. She’d have kept quiet. That was why he and Erin had simply left the doors mostly unsecured, and gone about their business. If the girl were caught, they’d have deniability.

Morland leaned against the kitchen table and folded his arms.

‘How did it happen?’ he asked.

‘It was my fault,’ said Erin. ‘I left the door unlocked. I didn’t mean to. Sometimes, if I knew she was asleep, I’d just shoot the bolt and let the shackle hang loose on the mechanism. I was tired, though, and I think I may have forgotten to put the padlock on, and the bolt wasn’t properly in place. She must have worked the bolt free from the inside. I found a piece of cloth on the floor that she could have used. Maybe she tore it from her nightgown.’

‘How did she know that you hadn’t locked the door?’ asked Souleby.

Damn you, thought Harry. I always felt you were too smart for anyone’s good. Souleby, the miserable bastard, reminded Harry of an old stork, all beak and limbs.

‘I don’t know,’ said Erin. ‘My guess is that she never gave up trying to escape. She probably tried the door every time I left the room, and this time she just got lucky.’

‘Got lucky, huh?’ said Morland.

He permitted himself a little smile.

‘Show me the door,’ he said. ‘Explain it all to me again.’

They went down to the basement, and Erin showed him the cell, and the bolt, and the padlock. Just as she had told him, there was a piece of white material on the floor, stained with grease from the bolt. The chief examined it, and toyed with the bolt and padlock for a while.

‘Get inside,’ he said to Erin.

‘What?’

‘Go on. Get inside that cell.’ He handed her the strip of cloth. ‘And take this with you.’

She did as she was told. The chief closed the door on her and slid the bolt, but did not secure it with the padlock.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘open it.’

The saliva dried up in Harry’s mouth. He would have prayed, but he had long since stopped believing in God. The continued existence of Prosperous was one of the strongest arguments he could come up with against the possibility of a benevolent deity watching over humankind.

After a couple of attempts, Erin managed to get the cloth through the gap between the door and the frame, and over the bolt. There was, though, no way that she could pull the other end back in. Harry closed his eyes. This was it.

A thin shaft of broken wood poked through the gap, caught

the strip of cloth, and pulled it back through to the other side of the cell door. Slowly, Erin began to twist it back and forth. The bolt moved: not by much, but it moved. With some perseverance, it would only be a matter of time before Erin managed to unlock the door from the inside, just as she claimed the girl had done.

Morland stared at Harry. Despite what he had witnessed, Harry knew that the chief still didn’t quite believe what he had been told. If he was expecting Harry to crack, though, he was going to be disappointed, not unless he resorted to torture, and even Morland was probably above that.

‘Let her out,’ he told Souleby, and Souleby pulled the bolt.

Erin stepped out of the cell, flushed but triumphant.

‘Where did you get the wood?’ said the chief.

‘It was on the floor by the girl’s bed,’ she said. ‘I saw it when I was trying to figure out how she did it.’

She handed him the fragment of pine. The chief tested it with his finger, then went to the bed and found the spot from which it had been taken.

‘Looks new,’ he said.

‘She hasn’t been gone but an hour,’ said Erin.

‘Uh-huh.’ Chief Morland took the stick in both hands and snapped it. It was the first outward demonstration that he had given of the rage he was feeling.

‘You still haven’t told us if you found her,’ said Harry.

‘Oh, we found her all right,’ said the chief.

‘Where is she?’

‘In the trunk of my car.’

‘Is she—?’

‘Is she what?’

‘Is she … dead?’

The chief didn’t answer immediately. He closed his eyes and wiped his face with his right hand. His shoulders sank. That was when Harry knew that they were okay, for now.

‘Yes, she’s dead,’ said Morland finally. ‘Just not the right kind of dead. You got a shovel?’

‘Sure,’ said Harry. ‘In my toolshed.’

‘Good,’ said the chief. ‘Because you’re going to help me bury her.’

6

I had a ticket for the 8:55 PM fight with US Airways out of Philadelphia, if I chose to use it, but I realized that I would either kill myself trying to make it, or end up with a ticket for speeding. Neither possibility particularly appealed to me, so I changed my fight to 9:30 AM the following morning and checked into a motel off Bartram Avenue. I had dinner in a bar that was one step up from eating food off the street, but I didn’t care. Once the adrenaline had stopped flowing after the events in Newark, I had experienced a comedown that left me shaking and nauseous. It didn’t matter what I ate: it would have tasted foul anyway, but I thought I needed something in my stomach. In the end, I left most of the food on the plate, and what I ate didn’t stay in my system for long once I was back in my room.

In truth, such reactions were becoming increasingly common as the years went on. I suppose I had always been frightened as I faced situations like that night’s – anyone who has found himself looking down the barrel of a gun, or confronting the possibility of injury or death, and claims to have done so without fear is either a liar or insane – but the more often you do it and survive, the more aware you become that the odds are inevitably swinging against you. If cats could count, they’d start getting nervous around the time they put paid to their fifth life.

I also wanted to watch Sam, my daughter, grow up. She was long past those early years when children, though cute, don’t do a whole lot except babble and fall over, much like a certain type of really old person. I found her endlessly fascinating, and regretted the fact that I was no longer with Rachel, her mother, although I didn’t think Rachel was about to move back in just so I could spend more time with Sam. Then again, I didn’t want Rachel to move back in, so the feeling was mutual. Still, with Rachel and Sam in Vermont, and me in Portland, arranging to spend time with my daughter took some planning. I supposed that I could always move to Vermont, but then I’d have to start voting Socialist, and finding excuses to secede from the Union. Anyway, I liked Portland, and being close to the sea. Staring out over Vermont’s Lake Bomoseen wasn’t quite the same thing.

I checked my cell phone messages as I lay on the bed. There was only one, from a man in Portland named Jude. He was one of a handful of the local street folk who’d proved helpful to me in the past, either by providing information or the occasional discreet surveillance service, as people tended not to notice the homeless, or pretended not to. Naturally there was no callback number for Jude. Instead, he had suggested leaving a message with the folk at the Portland Help Center or on the bulletin board at the Amistad Community on State Street to let him know when I might be available to meet.

I hadn’t seen Jude around in a while, but then I hadn’t really been looking for him. Like most of Portland’s homeless, he did his best to stay off the streets in winter. To do otherwise was to risk being found frozen in a doorway.