Page 78 of The Trap by Catherine
But Jamie didn’t laugh.
“He saw you,” he said.
“What do you mean? Saw me where?”
Jamie couldn’t mean in town, because she hadn’t stepped foot beyond the boundaries of the property since the day she’d first stepped inside them.
At first it was because she was hiding, trying to disappear. Then it was because there was never any real need to, and the longer she stayed hidden, the better chance she had of staying disappeared. Now, lately, it was because she was terrified that, having been here for so long, she wouldn’t be able to cope with the world out there.
If Bastian actually did kick her out, she didn’t know what she’d do.
“On the news,” Jamie said, and for a beat she didn’t know what he was talking about now, didn’t connect those words with the question she’d asked him.
“Television and papers,” he added. “More than once.”
“But why...?” She laughed now, because the only logical explanation for this conversation was that this was all some kind of joke. “Why wouldIbe on the news?”
“Because people are looking for you.” Jamie cleared his throat, evidently uncomfortable with having to deliver whatever news was coming next. “And I think... I think Bastian’s told them where you are. He was so pissed off with you, after last night. And your complaining about the cottage, and the rules in general... He thinks you have a bad attitude and that it’s best that you go. But he doesn’t think you’ll leave quietly, or willingly, and he probably knows no one else will back him up, so he, ah... He called them. He called them and told them you were here.”
“Called who?”
Noise then, outside.
A car horn. The roar of engines. A distant shout.
“I’m so sorry,” Jamie said.
“What are you...? Who did he call?”
She got up and looked out of the open door, and got the answer to her question.
A vehicle was coming through the stone pillars, toward them, wheels crunching on the gravel. There was a woman at the wheel and another one beside her, in the passenger seat.
It was a Garda car, and there were two more behind it.
PHANTOM
And then there was that feeling again, that vertigo, like the entire world had tilted up sharply at one end, taking Lucy’s insides with it, but her outer body hadn’t moved at all. Her stomach swam and pushed bile up into her throat and she swayed a little; she had to put all her weight back against the glass to keep herself from falling over.
“I didn’t kill any of them,” he said. “Well, no. I tell a lie. I did kill one of them, but I didn’t plan to. The first one. But her name was never even in the papers. No one even missed her. And then there was the last one, the idiot, who ran off and into the middle of the road and got herself killed.”
Lucy tried to think of things that only the killer would know.
“Tana Meehan,” she said. “The woman who disappeared from Kildare town. The first one, according to the Gardaí. Did you kill her?”
“I told you, I didn’t kill—”
“Did youtake her, then? Is she one of them? One of...?” She had to swallow back a mouthful of acrid bile to get the rest out. “One of yours?”
Because she was still sure that was Roland Kearns.
More than ever, after tonight.
The man met her eye, shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know who she is, or why they’ve included her with the other disappearances. But that one wasn’t me.”
If there had been a wall between Lucy and believing this man, that revelation made a crack in it.
