Her heart pounding, Hannah slipped out of bed. She moved silently and swiftly out to the landing. It crossed her mind to put a light on, but she didn’t want to ruin things. If Tilly was here, she didn’t want to do anything that might frighten her away.
She went to Tilly’s door. It was partly open, and Hannah couldn’t remember if it had been that way when she’d gone to bed.
She opened it wider and stepped inside.
Tilly’s curtains had not been drawn, and the streetlamps were casting a weak grey light into the room. Enough to see what was here.
Enough to see Tilly.
She was sitting on her bed, perfectly still. She was in her school uniform again. Shiny shoes pressed tightly together, inches above the floor. Her expression was unreadable. Was she happy to be here, or sad? Or was she simply here to deliver a message of some kind?
‘Tilly?’ Hannah whispered.
Tilly didn’t move.
Hannah started to head towards the bed, but stopped in her tracks when she saw how Tilly tensed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Please don’t go.’
It doesn’t matter why she’s here, Hannah thought. I’m just happy that she is. Look how beautiful she is.
Tears sprang from Hannah’s eyes. She wanted desperately to hold her daughter and never let her go. This vision of her wasn’t enough.
‘What is it, Tilly?’ she asked. ‘Are you missing me? Because I miss you so much.’
The tears flowed more freely. Hannah wiped them away with the back of her hand to stop them blurring what little she could see of her daughter.
‘Talk to me, Tilly. Please, talk to me.’
And then Tilly moved.
She slid off the edge of the bed, but didn’t come towards her mother. Instead she walked across to the window and stood looking down at the large toy hamper.
‘What is it?’ Hannah asked.
Tilly continued to stare at the hamper. Hannah took a few tentative steps towards it, and Tilly didn’t move.
‘What is it?’ she asked again.
She knelt down in front of the hamper. Lifted its lid. The first thing she saw there was one of Tilly’s favourite teddy bears. She lifted it out and held it up in front of her.
‘This? You want Bramley?’
But Tilly didn’t even give it a glance. Hannah looked again. On the top, where she had left them, were all the Adam-9 toys and comics and games that Tilly had once loved so much.
She pulled out an Adam-9 action figure and a comic. ‘These?’
And this time, Tilly looked her directly in the eye, and she knew she was right. What she couldn’t understand at first was why.
But then it hit her.
She pictured Daniel, her rescuer, sitting in his chair in exactly the same pose that Tilly used to adopt. Transfixed by his favourite television programme the way Tilly used to be.
And she remembered her discussions with Ben.
‘You want me to let you go, don’t you? You’re not here because you want to be, but because I’m keeping you here. I’m stopping you leaving. That’s right, isn’t it?’ She looked into the hamper again and rummaged around. ‘All of these things – I keep them to remind me of you, but you’re telling me they would make somebody else so happy. You want me to—’
Tilly was gone.
Hannah jumped to her feet and scanned the room. But she knew she was alone again.
Tilly had delivered her message, and Hannah had received and understood it.
Time to move on.
43
Hannah had hoped that Friday morning would be different. After all she’d been through the previous night, she’d assumed that she was owed one to redress the balance, and that all the answers she needed for the Joey Cobb case would fall into her lap.
It wasn’t like that.
In fact, it felt as though she was nowhere nearer solving this case than she was at the beginning.
What made it worse was that this wasn’t true. She had mountains of evidence and witness statements. She knew approximately where and when Cobb was murdered, where his body parts were deposited, and even the make and model of the car that was probably used to transport his remains. She had Cobb’s possessions – notably the drugs and money. She had the fingerprints and DNA found on the bin liners and the drug packets, and she had transcripts of interviews with nearly everyone Cobb had spoken to in the hours leading up to his death. She knew his enemies, and she knew every detail of their alibis.
So why couldn’t she make that final step? Why wasn’t there enough in that huge mountain of material to establish the identity of the killer?
She couldn’t blame her team. They had worked tirelessly. Done everything asked of them.
