Chapter 73
SIX MONTHS LATER
The house will survive. Swann actually set three fires that day, one on each floor, but fortunately they didn’t take hold properly before the fire brigade arrived. The repair work’s only just finished but the damage wasn’t structural. It wasn’t permanent.
The police investigation is moving slowly because of the sheer number of cases the new task force has had to reopen. Swann stonewalled all questioning at first, until the forensic results came back on the items I had found in the dresser in the hidden room.
Since then, he seems to have changed his tune.
According to what I’ve heard from DC Rubin, he’s now insisting he was coerced by Peter Flack, that he was in awe of him, swept up in his slipstream during their three-year killing spree around the turn of the millennium.
Flack used him, for the very reason that he was a small and unassuming man, the kind of person who could put potential victims at their ease because he was clearly no threat.
I’m not sure that will help Swann much when his trial starts.
Each of the items from that room—with the exception of the old flip phone—contained viable traces of both his DNA and the victims’.
The cashpoint receipt in the wallet didn’t belong to a victim, but it gave investigators a precise date, time, and place that put the account holder within a quarter-mile of another victim’s bedsit, on the evening he went missing.
The account holder’s name was Jeremy Swann.
All of it had been insurance—so Peter Flack could keep his acolyte in line.
Until Swann turned on him, and Flack himself became a victim.
I hope the families might finally find answers; be able to find some kind of peace after all these years. Swann has already led detectives to human remains in a shallow grave in Sherwood Forest. Those remains have been identified—using DNA from Charlie Parish—as those of Adrian, his father.
The trial is not scheduled to start until next spring.
From the work the police have done so far, the case will revolve around the deaths of six people.
Six men and women who never knew each other in life, who had disappeared or died in unexplained circumstances over a short span of years.
Whose families had come to believe they might never have any answers—until now.
The media coverage has been steady over the past six months, as each new name has been added to the grim tally of those who fell victim to a pair of ruthless serial killers more than twenty years ago.
Edward Stiles, twenty-five.
Adrian Parish, forty.
Carys Neill, thirty-two.
Dean Fullerton, thirty-nine.
Sian Stott, eighteen.
Pamela Roy, sixty-one.
I’ve kept in touch with Maxine and Charlie and we’ve met for lunch a few times. To me, the two of them seem changed in ways that are both subtle and profound; a liberation from the past, perhaps. Finally able to lay old ghosts to rest. Webber, too, seems to have found some redemption at last.
The hidden room was fully dismantled in the end, all of it carted away by the police for further examination.
Every other inch of the property scoured and searched by boiler-suited forensics teams, floorboards pulled up here and there, the attic thoroughly searched, the cellar examined in minute detail, sections of the garden dug up, and ground-penetrating radar used to find various items they won’t even tell me about.
Now, it’s pretty much back to normal. Back to how it was—except one top floor bedroom that’s slightly bigger than before. Like I said: 91 Regency Place was built to last; it was built solid and strong, with good bones and deep foundations. Built to be somebody’s forever home. Somebody’s dream home.
I hope the new owners will be very happy there.
As for us, those eleven days were enough: we never spent another night under that roof again.
Dom put us up at his house for a couple of days while we recovered and found somewhere to rent. It was strange—Jess and I never discussed it but we both came to the same decision: that we would sell the house and figure out everything else afterward.
It’s only bricks and mortar, after all. A house is only a home because of the people in it.
That’s why I find myself driving out here after work every so often, to see how things are going.
To chat to the builders, the site manager, the surveyor, to see our new house take shape as it rises from the ground.
We decided to move out of the city—not too far, just enough to breathe a little easier—to a place on the edge of a lovely village.
A small development of half a dozen purpose-built new houses, with views out across the open fields.
They’ve given me a full set of floorplans and architectural drawings so I will know every room, every corner, every inch of the property by the time we move in.
It may not be a Victorian villa, but it will have everything we need.
It will be a clean slate, a blank page on which to write a new story. A place without secrets.
A place where we can start again.