‘Hello, Gordon.’
He turns, holding the petrol can at arm’s length. His other hand reaches behind his back and produces a pistol from beneath his sweatshirt. It must have been tucked into his belt, nestled against his spine.
‘I assume you’re not alone,’ he says.
‘No.’
‘So you brought the police.’
‘You did that all by yourself.’
I can see him calculating the odds, pondering an escape route. There is a movement in the scrubby hedge behind him. Safari Roy is hunkered down, talking on his radio, summoning back-up.
‘You’re different from the others,’ says Ellis.
‘What others?’
‘The police. They want to know how, but you want to know why. You’re desperate to know. You want to know if I was abused as a child; if I was buggered by some uncle or the Parish priest. Did I lose my mother? Did I wet the bed? Did she make me sleep in soiled sheets? You think there has to be cause and effect - and that’s your weakness. There’s nothing to understand. I’m a hunter. It’s how we all started. It’s how we all survived. It’s how we evolved.’
‘Some of us have evolved a bit further than others.’ I want to keep moving to stop my legs from locking up. ‘Tell me something, Gordon. Were you grooming Charlie?’
He gives me a crocodile smile. ‘What did you do to that poor girl? She’s a timid little kitten.’
‘She’s had a rough few years.’
He nods. ‘I can tell. I thought somebody had got to her first.’
That same smile again. He’s goading me.
Almost in the same breath, I hear Cray’s voice over a megaphone, demanding that he put the gun down and raise his hands above his head. Ellis swings around and hurls the petrol container in my direction, where it bounces end over end.
He turns and puts a key into the lock. Behind him I can see Safari Roy emerge from cover, running hard, his gun drawn. Cray is yelling, ‘Move! Move!’
The van door swings open and the air seems to wobble like God is shaking the camera. I see a puff of dirty smoke, grey like the sea, and then feel the pressure wave created by the bomb. Gordon Ellis is blown backwards, like the scene is playing in reverse, speeded up.
The caravan disintegrates from within - windows shooting outwards, the roof lifting off, walls splintering into a jigsaw of flying debris - a sink, a toilet, cupboard doors, plastic, stainless steel, reels, spindles - blasting across the park, tumbling to earth.
A hail of metal fragments, nails or ball bearings that must have been packed around the explosives, are sent hurtling outwards, punching holes through fibreglass and flesh.
Knocked from her feet, Ronnie Cray picks herself up. Running. Her hair wet with blood. A nail embedded in her shoulder. She yells into her radio, deafened by the blast and unable to moderate her voice. She wants paramedics.
Ellis had a darkroom. The explosion has ignited the chemicals on the inside and the petrol on the outside creating an orange ball that boils up and evaporates in a wave of smoke and debris. Scraps of photographs, torn paper, twisted negatives and scorched contact sheets are carried by the breeze, clinging to branches and shrubs, skipping across the grass.
Two caravans are burning - one on its side and the other pocked like a Swiss cheese. Roy is lying between them. Monk gets to him first. He signals to me. The front of Roy’s shirt is soaked in blood. I rip it off and see half a dozen puncture wounds. Two of the nails are still embedded in his chest.
Someone hands me a first-aid kit. I pull out bandages and dressing, instructing Monk what to do. Roy is conscious and cracking jokes to Ronnie Cray.
‘Hey, boss, I’m taking a few weeks off. I’m going to buy ten boxes of condoms and work my way through them.’
‘You’d be better off buying ten lottery tickets,’ she replies.
‘You think I’m that lucky?’
‘I think you’re that unlucky.’
Crouching next to me, she pulls the nail from her shoulder and squeezes a bandage beneath her bra strap.
‘He should be OK,’ I say, looking around for more wounded. The nearest caravan has had its side ripped away. Gordon Ellis is lying in the wreckage. One arm is reaching out for something while the other is only a spike of bone jammed into a wall.
The skin on his face has been peeled away and one eye is a bloody hole. I look at his chest, which has been crushed by the blast. He’s dying. He can go in seconds or a few hours, but he’s going.
I tell him to hold on, the paramedics are coming, a helicopter . . .
His one good eye is staring at me and words bubble in his throat. ‘You have a fatal curiosity.’
‘I’m not the one who’s dying.’
His tongue appears, licking at the blood on his lips. Can he taste death?
‘Who did this?’
He sucks in a ragged breath and coughs.
‘I wasn’t useful any more.’
He’s talking about Novak Brennan.
‘Why were you helping him?’
‘Novak collects people.’
‘He blackmails them?’
‘He’s a hard man to refuse.’
Ellis grimaces. His teeth are like pieces of broken ceramic sticking from his gums.
‘What about Ray Hegarty?’
‘The girl must have killed him.’
‘No. There was someone else in the house that night waiting for Sienna. You wanted to silence her.’
‘Why would I bother? I owned her.’
I can hear sirens in the distance, getting closer. His blood is running between my fingers, over my hands. Ebbing away.
Something brushes my shoulder - a scorched photograph, blown by the breeze from the roof of the caravan. A black-and-white image of a naked girl, snap-frozen, my daughter’s best friend, with her arms bound to her ankles and her body, arched backwards. Exposed. Obscene. Unconscious.
I look at Ellis.
I look at my hands.
I walk away.
Rotors flash in the sunshine, beating the air, pushing it aside. Faces appear at the windows of the air ambulance. A door slides open and paramedics sprint across the swirling sand, their hair flattened by the downdraught.
Ronnie Cray is yelling orders and barking into her mobile. Scotland Yard is sending a team from Counter Terrorism Command and the Bomb Squad, while Louis Preston has also been summoned.
The blades of the chopper are spinning more slowly. Safari Roy and Gordon Ellis are strapped to litters and I watch them being carried to the helicopter. There’s room for one more. Cray looks nervously at the rumbling chopper. ‘You go with them. I hate those things.’
‘What about your shoulder?’
‘I’m fine. I’m needed here.’
The last of the litters is lifted into the chopper.
‘Why booby-trap the van?’ she asks.
‘Ellis had become a liability. He was attracting too much unwanted attention.’
‘So Brennan ordered this?’
‘He’s tying up loose ends.’
‘Did Ellis say anything about Ray Hegarty?’
‘He says he didn’t kill him.’
Cray doesn’t look at me, but I know what she’s thinking.
‘What about the trial? Are you going to stop it?’
‘That’s not your concern.’
‘Ruiz says it could cost you your career.’
‘It might not come to that.’
She pauses and gazes past me along the beach to where a wooden lighthouse on stilts seems to be trapped between the waves and the shore. The daylight is behind her.
‘Do you have a lot of friends, Professor?’
‘Not too many. How about you?’
‘Same. Why do you think that is?’
‘I know too much about people.’
‘And you don’t like what you see?’