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six men. His last victim had been Tom Andrutti, his own long-term boyfriend. Bonsignore still seemed like a fictional character – white, wannabe alpha male and the subject of an international manhunt that culminated in his confession to the Vacation Killer murders aftermurdering Andrutti. The trial and the media hype surrounding it had unfolded from a place that Leo had felt entirely dislocated from.
    The three of them watched the same report book-ending the rest of the day’s news stories before Joe switched off the TV with the remote. The crackling screen seemed to pick up the static in the room and even Maggie’s neurosis couldn’t fill the silence.
    ‘That’s it then,’ Joe said definitively, although he seemed to be waiting for a consensus.
    Leo suddenly felt his wrist straining with the weight of the full coffee mug in his hand and he couldn’t remember when it had been placed there.
    ‘Thanks for coming to see Maggie.’ Joe left after he said it and Leo knew he wasn’t just thanking him for driving to their house that morning. He was thanking him for all his visits now that no more would be required.
    Leo looked at Maggie but she didn’t make eye contact. ‘Is this enough for you?’
    ‘Of course not,’ she croaked eventually and then lubricated her throat with her glass. ‘It’s always been out of our hands, though. You know that don’t you.’ She still didn’t meet his gaze but fixed her eyes on the patch of wall beneath the TV.
    ‘There’s so much we never found out.’
    ‘And what more would we have learnt if he’d lived another twenty years? Or wanted to learn?’ She clickedher wedding ring nervously against the side of the glass.
    Of course, things were different for Maggie and Joe. There were more absolutes for them. It was obviously how Joe saw it but Maggie had been closer to Laura.
    Maggie didn’t take his arm as she normally did when he left but led the way to the garage, striding as if she were trying to beat her own emotions.
    ‘I had another sitting last Friday. She’s in a comfortable place now,’ she said as she hugged his shirt collar again.
    ‘Maggie.’ Joe’s muffled remonstration came from the other side of the door. He must have followed them back into the kitchen.
    Maggie touched Leo’s cheek, found his eyes and shuttered out her green tears. She nodded and returned to her husband.

C HAPTER 8
    ‘Events have made her embrace things that normally she wouldn’t have got mixed up in.’
    It was what Joe had once said about Maggie’s involvement with a local spiritualist. There was always a deluded message of reassurance for Leo when he left but, driving back, he realised how much he was going to miss them.
    He knew that contact with the Allan-Carlins would be short-lived after Bonsignore had been convicted. He couldn’t blame them for wanting to move on and had noticed that the photographs of Louis about their home had slowly dwindled. Now there was only a single frame of photos in the hallway showing him growing up from a baby to the age of twenty-five. He wasn’t being forgotten but his school portraits and university achievementshad obviously become too much of a painful reminder to have hanging on display every day.
    Did Leo really have an implicit connection to Bonsignore and the Allan-Carlin’s grief? Bonsignore’s confession to Laura’s disappearance suggested so. But now Joe had decided to sever his visits he’d shut down Leo’s last palpable connection to the Vacation Killer. He suddenly felt twice removed from ever finding out where Laura had been taken and why the police had never been sent her parcel.
     
    The rain had eased and, after looking both ways, Leo pulled the car out of the junction that would take him along the usually quiet stretch that led back to the A3.
    The bike impacted before he’d pulled into the left lane, clipping his rear wing and spinning its rider around the axis of its front wheel.
    The front of the Saab was spun back