Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
ROMAN
Roman has already counted the police cars outside.
Blue lights slice across the houses. They’re outside the Coach House and the Stables. And Oliver has already been taken away in the back of one of the police cars. Arrested.
Roman stares out of the window, thinking. Murder changes everything.
The street reacts around the two houses. Curtains twitch. A front door opens and is left ajar. People find reasons to be out in their front gardens.
Roman doesn’t move. He tracks it all while working his way through a packet of crisps, the open laptop balanced on his desk. He knows this isn’t just about Oliver in the simple sense—the fake identity, the dead man walking. This feels wider. Messier.
That’s when the next piece drops into place.
Roman sits back, fingers hovering over the keys, and stares at the details on the screen.
The crash article he was sent is a few years old.
One person dead and one survivor.
Roman flicks back to his notes, trying to find a connection. He opens another tab—the probate record he’d saved earlier.
Oliver Sutton. Deceased. 2021.
He checks the date on the crash article again: 2021.
Not close. Not approximate. The exact same year.
His jaw tightens.
That’s not coincidence. That’s details falling into place for a reason.
The dead man got a full line: Andrew Guthrie, 31. But the woman—the passenger—was just referred to as ‘a heavily pregnant female passenger’ who is ‘currently in hospital’.
He stares at the article again. The bit that hooks him in isn’t the story, it’s the comments underneath. And not just the conspiracy theorists or the ‘thoughts and prayers’ brigade. There’s this one line, towards the end:
There’s more to this story, cars don’t just roll over cliffs by themselves . .
Roman knows a dog-whistle when he sees one. There is a lot more to this . . . otherwise, why would GRN_DoR be so interested?
He opens a new tab and starts with the same method as always: three traces, one truth.
Within ten minutes, he has her. Electoral roll: Jane Guthrie. The age bracket fits, but back then her name was tied to an address in Leeds.
When things stop adding up and start clashing with the facts, that’s when Roman starts getting really interested.
He pulls up the Companies House record he screenshotted a few days ago.
People don’t reinvent themselves for fun.
They do it because something happened.
And if something happened in 2021—something involving a car going over a cliff—Roman feels pulled in that direction.
He goes looking for anything medical. More walls, more log-ins, more systems that at least pretend to be secure. But this is what he’s good at: finding the weak edge, the sloppy outer layer, the bit that somebody forgot to lock properly.
He takes a back route through a careless third-party portal that gives him a way in.
Patient: Guthrie, Jane.
Presenting issues: residual weakness, reduced mobility following RTC (road traffic collision) 2021. Uses wheelchair indoors believes someone is to blame for the accident. Partner is deceased, patient’s life ‘ruined’.
When questioned, patient is confused. ‘He walked away. He gets to be happy.’
He whistles under his breath. Sounds like someone intended to kill them . . . knock them off the road on purpose.
A woman who survived. A man and baby who didn’t. And a line about the murderer who just walked away.
Roman leans back slowly and thinks it through.
This was not an accident. Jane Guthrie is certain of that.
Most intriguing, GRN_DoR wants information that could somehow tie this mess to Orchard Lane.
A man with a new name moves to a new street in a new town . . . in the exact year the incident happened.
If Oliver was that second driver—if he walked away from a cliff-top accident where someone died, while a pregnant woman lay still alive . . . then what exactly is he capable of?
Suddenly, Vanessa Lambert’s death doesn’t look quite so random now.
Roman’s heart is pounding. He pushes the crisps aside and cracks his knuckles.
He needs to calm down. He needs something more concrete before he gets too excited.
He leans closer to the screen, the familiar blue glow making him feel warm inside. His mum is downstairs, watching some reality show, the sound rumbling up through the floor.
But outside, Orchard Lane is in chaos. They all think they’re so in control, but not one of them has a clue what Roman has humming through his circuits.
It’s hard to keep his mind on the task at hand with everything that’s going on out there, but he turns his attention back to the accident.
Most people are ridiculously unimaginative. They use the same handle for everything—socials, log-ins, shopping accounts. It’s about looking for clues. He digs through an old benefits contact form and spots Jane’s email address in the correspondence section: J.Guthrie1989@
Got you.
The first couple of attempts bounce. Password resets have got tighter recently—thanks a lot, tech bros—but there’s nearly always a weak seam if you keep picking. Security questions, for example.
Name of first pet? Favourite teacher? First school? The same stuff people stick on Facebook.
It takes him another twenty minutes. The inbox cracks open, a neat column of unread newsletters and bills and the odd message from debt collectors for late payment.
‘Hello, Jane,’ he says softly.
Now he searches by keyword.
Cliff. Accident. Crash. Driver. Complaint. Police. Solicitor.
Results stack up. Letters from a law firm about compensation. A complaint to the force who handled the investigation:
Another email to someone with ‘Bereavement Liaison’ in their signature title. His eyes skim faster.
And then he sees it.
Subject line: His new address.
It’s a draft, not sent. His pulse jumps as he clicks it open.
I’ve found him. Orchard Lane, West Bridgford. Cream door, big bay window. He thinks he can hide there. He thinks I won’t do anything. He’s wrong.
That’s all. No greeting, no sign-off. Just those lines burning on the screen.
Then, he realizes: she’s probably written it to herself, like a journal note and left it in her draft email box for when she wants to reread it
Roman sits back, the hairs on his arms standing up. Has Jane Guthrie commissioned GRN_DoR to finish the job? And has he in turn given the job to Roman and Sanj to complete?
Orchard Lane. His street. His view out of this very window.
Oliver is already in custody. For murder.
Roman drums his fingers against the desk.
When the police dig into Oliver’s finances they will probably find out about the name change. They’ll clock the probate record. But will they look beyond that? Will they connect whoever Oliver was in 2021 to a cliff-road death in Yorkshire?
Is he ahead of them?
The thought makes his pulse spike.
He wonders if Jane Guthrie has already walked up and down the lane on Google Street View.
It makes his bedroom feel smaller somehow, like the house is shrinking in on him.
He’s not been able to find a photograph of her online. What might she look like? Probably ordinary, not a threat to anyone. And yet if she came here, she might just be the most dangerous person on the lane.
She wants revenge for what happened all those years ago, and who can blame her?
But what about Emily?
If Oliver is the second driver—if he killed someone and rebuilt himself—then is Emily unknowingly married to a murderer?
And if she knows and she turned the other cheek, what does that make her?
Or was she somehow more complicit in what happened back then?
Jane Guthrie must be a very determined woman with a very big axe to grind, thinking about the person who killed her partner and unborn child living a neat life, a sunny existence where nothing ever goes wrong.
In Roman’s mind, Jane Guthrie is no longer just a patient or a name on a physio report or a form. She is a real person who has been very badly wronged and who now wants to bring the person who ruined her life to account.
A person Roman knows all about. Could help snare.
Does that mean he’d be partly responsible for whatever came of the information he’s trawling? How far is Jane Guthrie prepared to go?
Roman is pretty sure it should creep him out more than it does. But mostly, he feels excited.
Because here’s the thing. Up till now, it’s just been him watching Oliver and a few of the other residents on the street. Him and Sanj, and maybe GRN_DoR lurking in the background. But this?
This is someone with skin in the game. Someone who is looking for blood.
She lost everything when that car went over the cliff. Maybe Jane Guthrie and Roman want exactly the same thing. To take Oliver down.
Vanessa Lambert is dead.
Five years ago, a woman lost her husband and her unborn baby.
And the same man sits at the centre of both stories.
Either Oliver Sharpe is the unluckiest man alive.
Or he’s very, very good at surviving the wreckage.
He toggles to the crash article, to the probate record, back to her draft email. It’s like one of those optical illusions where the picture changes depending on how you look at it.
Oliver Sharpe, the puppeteer. He fancies himself as a clever man who borrows dead identities, scoops money from neighbours and smiles fake innocent smiles that fool everyone. But he’s not the only person who can pull strings around here.
His phone buzzes and a message from Sanj flashes up.
You online? Contact just pinged. Says job is incoming, Orchard Lane related . . .
Roman stares at it, his heart pounding. Then he looks back at Jane’s words one more time.
He thinks he can hide there. He’s wrong.
He starts a new folder, drags her emails into it, adds the physio notes, the legal docs. He labels it: guthrie—cliff
Everything neat and ready for when he needs it.
On the street, the lights flick on one by one as people draw their curtains and settle in for the night, safe in their little boxes. They have no idea what is building around one man on their perfect lane.