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IT WAS ABOUT FORTY-FIVE MINUTES later that I shut down the laptop with a sigh, knowing that I had done the easy tasks, and that now only the impossible ones were left. I had emailed the clients we had in the diary, not giving much information apart from explaining that I’d had a serious family bereavement and that Crossways would be closed for at least a fortnight and would not be able to fulfill their job. I gave them the choice of waiting to be rescheduled or contacting one of the other security companies that I rated, and then I changed the out-of-office response to say something along the same lines. I didn’t say that Gabe was dead—I couldn’t bring myself to type the words—but I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t need to. It would probably be in the papers very soon.
Now I had to contact Gabe’s parents, John and Verity, and his best friend, Cole. The only question was what order to do it in.
I decided to call John and Verity first—if only because I thought the police would probably track them down fastest. Their home phone number was stored in my contacts as “Gabe’s parents,” whereas Cole was down simply as “Cole Garrick,” with nothing to spell out his relationship to Gabe.
But when I rang, the call went to answerphone. “You’ve reached the Medways,” Verity’s pleasant voice came over the recording. “Sorry we can’t come to the phone. We’re either out or on the other line. Please leave a message and we’ll return your call as soon as possible.”
There was a beep and I sucked in my breath, wondering what to say. Fuck. Fuck. Why hadn’t I thought of this? They were probably out walking the dog. Or maybe Detective Sergeant Malik had already rung them, and they were speeding down the motorway from Oxfordshire to London.
“Hi,” I said at last, realizing that I had to say something. There was a crack in my voice. I tried to harden it, knowing that I couldn’t break down, not like this. “John, Verity, it’s Jack. Something… something has happened. It’s, well, it’s serious. Could you call me? I’m not on my usual number so you’ll need to call me on…” Shit, what was the number of this phone? I grabbed for the paper folder that Hel had left on the side and read off the number. “Okay,” I ended, lamely, but unsure what else I could say. “Oh, and it’s pretty urgent.” Then I remembered the appointment with the police. I couldn’t very well take their call during a police interview. “I won’t be around between eleven and… I don’t know. Maybe one? So if you don’t get this message until after eleven, then, yeah.” Oh God, I was screwing this up. “Call me,” I said again. And then, “Bye.”
The answerphone beeped halfway through the bye, putting me out of my misery, and I hung up. My throat felt choked, but I had a sense of reprieve, in a way. I wasn’t sure how I would have coped with John and Verity’s grief and shock while my own was still so raw.
I gave it ten minutes in case they had just been in the garden or upstairs, but no one called back, and now it was almost ten o’clock. I had only half an hour to contact Cole. If the police hadn’t already done so. But when I brought up his number on the phone, I couldn’t quite bring myself to dial it. Because Cole would pick up. He was welded to his phone, twenty-four/seven. And I had no illusions what I was about to do to him.
Unlike me, Gabe was an only child. But he and Cole were closer than plenty of siblings I’d known, and had been in each other’s lives almost as long. They’d met at primary school, and had formed a kind of chalk-and-cheese friendship that had apparently baffled the teachers. Gabe had always had a touch of anarchism about him—Verity had said once that even at age five, he’d been the kind of child for whom a button marked do not press was an irresistible temptation—not out of any malice, but just because he couldn’t not find out what it did. He’d scraped through his exams, too busy exploring the chaotic online world he’d just discovered to study hard, and then at age seventeen, he’d pressed one button too many and found himself on the wrong side of the law—a mistake it had taken him a good decade to recover from.
Cole, on the other hand, had been the perfect student—grade As in all his exams, a first from Cambridge, an internship at Apple, and then headhunted by Cerberus, an up-and-coming IT firm in the UK that had risen, in the last few years, to become an establishment player in the tech industry. On the face of it, they had nothing in common, and no one on the street would have pegged them for friends—Cole in his crisp white T-shirts and pristine Adidas, Gabe in his ripped jeans and Doc Martens.
But in spite of their differences, Cole and Gabe’s friendship had endured, bonded at first by their shared fascination with computer games, tech, and coding, and then later by something much deeper—a genuine, bone-deep love for each other that you had to be blind to miss. I had never seen two men hug goodbye like Cole and Gabe did—holding each other so hard it was like they didn’t want to let go. Cole had told me once that Gabe’s time in prison had been one of the loneliest periods of his life.
And now I had to tell him that Gabe was gone—for good.
When I dialed Cole’s number he didn’t pick up straightaway, it just rang and rang, and after the first few rings I began to get the same creeping sense of release that I had with John and Verity. It was stupid, because of course I wasn’t off the hook; I would still have to have this conversation, but it felt like putting off homework—a kind of relief, even if it was a false one.
But just as I was about to hang up, there was a click and Cole’s breathless voice came on the line.
“Hello? Who’s this?”
“Cole? It—it’s Jack.”
“Jack?” His voice went faint, and in my mind’s eye I could see him pulling the phone away from his ear to look at the display, making sure he hadn’t imagined it. When he came back on, his voice was puzzled. “Are you all right? This isn’t your number, is it?”
“No.” I swallowed. “No, I’m—I’m not really all right. Cole, something’s happened.”
Oh God, this was hard. This was so hard. Harder than I had even imagined.
“What’s happened?” His voice, puzzled, kindly, with an accent painfully similar to Gabe’s, made my stomach curl with grief. I wanted to put the phone down and howl.
“Cole—” My voice cracked, a huge painful lump of unshed tears seeming to lodge in my throat. “Cole, it’s Gabe—he—he’s—”
I drew a long, shuddering breath, trying to force the word out.
“Jack?” Cole sounded a mix of confused and alarmed. “Gabe’s what? What’s happened?”
“Oh God, Cole, he’s dead.” The last word came out not as the factual piece of information I had been trying for, but as a long, almost incoherent moan of pain.
“What? What the— Jack, did you just say Gabe is dead? Wh— How? What happened? How?”
I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me, and put my hand over my eyes, closing them as if that could shut out the memories that had begun to crowd in, unwanted. They weren’t like ordinary memories, little pictures recalled at will. They were more like PTSD flashbacks, unbearably real. For a moment I could almost smell the blood. The thought made me gag.
“I came home from work.” My voice was shaking, but I tried to keep it steady enough to get the words out. “And he—his throat had been—” I didn’t want to say it, but the images in front of my mind’s eye were too vivid to push away and the words came in spite of myself. “His throat had been cut.”
“Wait, are you saying he was murdered?”
“Yes. But I just—I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
