little sister. It made me sick just thinking about it but I knew I had to listen to it — had to know the ghastly details of how she died. Surely the reality couldn’t be worse than my nightmares, I told myself, knowing that was bullshit.
As I watched Wolf lumber up the slope in search of a pine cone to chase, I remembered a film I’d seen about a guy killed and eaten by bears he’d been filming. His camera had been running at the time of the attack but the lens was pointed in the otherdirection so no images were caught on film. But the microphone had picked up every last yell and scream as he tried to fight off the attack, and then every last bone crunch, lip smack and slobber as the bear consumed him. The tape recording had ended up in the possession of the dead guy’s girlfriend but she’d never been able to bring herself to listen to it. In the film I saw, the director listens to the tape and then tells the girlfriend she must never, ever play the tape. It’s just too horrible. And in the film, the girlfriend agrees to lock the recording away, unheard.
I ran my thumb along the edge of the disc. I guess that girlfriend and I are just different.
CHAPTER 3
H eaps of people go missing. Some do it deliberately and don’t want to be found. Others go missing for the prime purpose of being found: they want the reunion. They want to hear that all is forgotten or forgiven. My job is to locate the missing people and find out to which of those two groups they belong. The deal is that once I’ve located them I get to decide if I hand over the details of their whereabouts to the client paying me, or not. Either way I keep the deposit and my integrity. I take on jobs for individuals, for PI firms, for lawyers looking for witnesses to crimes, insurance companies, television companies, all sorts really.
Until my showdown with McFay the police service had been a good source of work. I guess being married to a cop for five years inevitably meant I’d end up doing work for them. The police jobs were not usually about finding a missing person, but about finding the people who should be missing them. When bodies or sometimes bits of bodies turned up on beaches or were unearthed in pine forests, I got the enviable task of trying to find out who the corpse might once have been.
Mostly they were suicides and it was a matter of going back, sometimes as far as fifty-odd years, through police archives, to try to match the remains. Often there was nothing more than the record of a phone call to police to say someone had gone missing. Sometimes not even that. They’re the saddest ones. Those poor buggers unnoticed in life and unmissed in death.
The police work, which until recently was my staple, means I’ve ended up with office folders packed with photos of corpses in various states of decomposition. Yeah, I know, nice work if you can get it. But decaying bodies have never really bothered me. Well, not dead ones anyway. Still, I’ve learnt from experience that it’s best for me to view work material during daylight hours. I’ve also learnt not to leave photos of corpses lying around on the kitchen table where Girl Guides can see them and go complaining to their parents who then pay me ‘a serious visit’. After that particular sobering little event I made two vows: one, to keep all the ugly work stuff in my office, and two: never to open the door to Girl Guides.
I decided to approach Snow’s confession as if it was just part of my job. Ugly work stuff. I didn’t want him invading the rest of my home, and anyway I reckoned he was in good company with the rotting corpses. So, early morning, still in my pyjamas and dressing gown and clutching my small percolator of coffee — okay, Sean’s percolator of coffee — I checked my emails and then, as if it was a routine job, I opened the plastic CD case, dropped the disc Gemma had given me into my laptop and clicked on play.
I squashed in beside Wolf, who was curled like a