"Listen, Yvonne Stanton. Get her client list. It's a blue book with little flowers on it. Check it for a name that only comes up once. Got that?"

"I'm not your fucking gopher."

Coleridge took a deep breath before he spoke again. "I know. But I'm in Cromer, you're in Norwich. Just do it, would you?"

"For fuck's sake, Coleridge. We're working our asses off. What the fuck are you doing in Cromer?"

"Having fish and chips. Very nice it was, too. I'll wait. Call me back."

He hung up before he could take any more flack. He'd have to talk to the boss soon, but he didn't want to talk to him before he had something to go on.

He walked back to the car while he was waiting for the call. It came through just as he got to the parking lot.

After catching his breath he picked up.

"Coleridge?"

"Yeah," he panted. "What you got?"

"A few regulars. Some names that only appear once. Not many."

"Scratch the women. It's definitely a man."

"Three names. You want them?"

"Not yet. Check the others."

"Ahead of you. Smith didn't keep a book, or if he did we didn't find it. Same goes for George and Meakings. But the Westmoors kept records."

"Go on. Don't fucking draw it out."

Coleridge could sense Mooney smiling over the phone.

"Gregory Sawyer."

"Gregory Sawyer? Is it him?"

"What do you think?"

Coleridge thought he'd have to have some kind of dark, foreboding name. The kind of killer who'd do that to people, take someone's heart right out of their chest. Cutting their heads off. What the fuck would someone called Gregory want with a bunch of body parts? No. His first instinct was that Gregory didn't cut it.

But what's in a name? Nilson? His first name was Dennis, for Christ's sake. West, fucking Fred. Shipman, what was that? Harold. A Harold, a Fred, and a Dennis.

Maybe people with simple first names were more, not less, likely to be serial killers.

Coleridge caught his mind wandering. Wished he'd got to eat his second piece of fish. It was just a fucking name, and more, it was a lead. Slim chance, but better than yesterday.

"How far away did the Westmoors live from Stanton?"

"Hold on."

Mooney went to check some online route finder. Quicker and more accurate than a map.

Coleridge would've checked the map and guessed.

"Forty-three miles. On the back roads, north of the county? Could take over an hour."

"Long way to drive," said Coleridge. "You get an address on Sawyer?"

"Harvey's working on it."

Fucking Harvey. He had a score to settle with him.

"Alright. Work it. Tell him to get his finger out of his ass, would you? Call me back, anything changes."

"You want to be there?"

"No. I need to get to Beth's house."

Coleridge could almost hear the old bastard's wrinkled face rustling into a smile.

"Shut up," said Coleridge.

"Didn't say a thing. You want to talk to the boss?"

Coleridge shook his head. "No. You talk to him. Call me back you get anywhere."

"Will do."

Mooney hung up. Coleridge opened the door to his car and squeezed himself in.

He'd just got somewhere, and he should have felt good about it. But he didn't. Because it didn't work. Gregory Sawyer? Maybe. But it didn't feel right. It didn't feel like all of it.

Beth was the key. She knew something. He hadn't wanted to push her before, not after what she'd seen. He'd felt guilty, too, so he'd taken it easy on her. Gone soft. But he could feel time ticking down.

He couldn't afford to baby her anymore. He was sure she was holding something back, and whatever it was, he needed to know. What he didn't know might kill her.

Coleridge started to think about how to get it out of her. Working it over in his head, he started the car, drove with that kind of absent concentration people have when their mind was on other things.

To finish the case, he had to have what Beth knew, whatever it took. Even if he had to be a bastard to get it.

He wasn't the kind to leave things undone. If you start a thing, you should damn well finish it.

Chapter Thirty-Three.

The ride back to Beth's house was slow and quiet. The policemen asked if she found anything. They asked if she was all right. She told them no. Short, simple, but in a hard voice that left the "leave me the alone" off the end.

They drove the rest of the way, silence in the car apart from the occasional burble from the radio.

When they got back, she didn't ask them in or offer them a cup of tea to warm up. They didn't seem disappointed.

"Night, then, ma'am," said the older one, the one with the ghost dog. Dean, she remembered. She didn't care though.

"Night," she said.

"We're right out front if you..." he said, but she was already closing the door.

She showered in her cold bathroom. Her house was tiled throughout and in the winter it was freezing. She didn't mind. Sometimes in the morning she splashed cold water on her face first thing, just to get her blood flowing 'round her pounding head. Walking barefoot around the house in winter had the same effect.

November, now, and winter was coming on. It wasn't quite here, but soon. Another couple of weeks, maybe even before the start of December, she'd be freezing. She didn't have central heating, just a wood stove and her oven. She didn't have gas, but she did have an electric heater stored in the shed for the coldest months.

When she finished her shower, Beth headed into the kitchen and took out a pint of milk. She sniffed it, figured it was a little past the sell-by date, but it didn't reek or anything. She filled a mug and put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes.

When it was done, she spooned in hot chocolate and instant coffee and three sugars. She checked the clock. Waited for a minute, the drink cooling. The minute hand hit twelve and that was it. The day was done. Now it was just a long slow slide until bedtime.

She poured in the whiskey and sat at the table with the mug in both her hands, trying to warm herself through. She was colder than she had any right to be. Some part of her reasoned that it was just shock, but it didn't feel like shock. It felt like a death, a small death, maybe, but something quite definitely final.

She tried to figure it out while she had her dinner and her medicine all rolled into one.

She'd experienced death today.

That had to change you. Knowing what it felt like to be decapitated. She didn't remember how it felt, physically, but emotionally, she felt it right down into her soul. The shock, the jarring impact sensed as her head hit the floor. Warm blood, but no pain. Sadness. The blade had been so sharp there hadn't been any accompanying sensation. Just a kind of confusion, looking up at her headless body from the floor. The sense of her body slumping, the life leaving it, while her vision clouded, then ended as the blood washed over her unblinking eyes.

A head in a box seemed almost inconsequential after that.

No. That wasn't right. It had been shocking and terrifying. But it wasn't the head, or seeing death through Mary Westmoor's eyes.

It was Mary, alone.

No. That wasn't quite right, either.

She took a gulp of her drink, not really tasting it. Thinking hard while she cradled the cup in her shaking hands.

What was it? There had been something there. Something she'd noticed at the time, but that hadn't quite registered.

Mary. Alone. Waiting.

Waiting for what?

For her, of course.

"Oh." She sat back, leaning against the back of the chair. Realized what it meant.

Mary had known she would come. Spirits had known she would go looking.

Spirits knew things that the living could never know. Spirits, even those that didn't move over to the other side, those that waited, angry or sad or just plain lonely, those spirits still touched the other side. There was knowledge there. Secrets.

That was what she'd been told, but that was a matter of faith.

She'd lost her faith a long time ago. Maybe it was on the day her son died. Maybe it was when she started drinking. Not the tipple at Christmas, and the one over the eight at a friend's wedding. The real business of drinking, which when you got right down to it wasn't about being drunk but working toward something bigger. Working toward solace, peace, or whatever came at the end of it.

Death?

She shrugged with no one to see her.

Is that what she wanted?

She'd tried it out tonight. She didn't want that. She wasn't a coward, but this was bigger than her. Spirits were involved somehow. Not the personal spirits she saw on a daily basis. The big one. The one she didn't believe in anymore.

But maybe the big one believed in her.

Was there reason to hope?

Someone at some seminar once had told her that time was different for spirits. Was it in Thetford? With Mary and Stan? Might have been. It didn't matter.

What was spirit? A form of consciousness that lived in the past, present, and future, all at the same time? What a body left behind when it died? Memory, thought, personality, love...did all these remain?

Sure they did, she thought. She'd seen enough to believe that. It wasn't a matter of faith. She'd observed it. Maybe not good enough for a scientist. Maybe not good enough for a Christian, but good enough for her.

But could the dead see the shape of things to come? If they did, she'd never known them to intervene. They gave comfort where they could. They confirmed things, sometimes, but life was about learning. They didn't teach. That wasn't their job.

But Mary had waited for her. She took an active hand in showing Beth the way. She pushed, damn it.

What did that even mean? Had the dead stepped down, stepped in? Was this killer so unnatural that the spirit world felt it had to take a hand?

She'd never known spirits to be so active outside of stories she'd read before her life became a kind of story.

She finished her drink, stood, then sat down again with a thump. She remembered Miles taking her hand when she found the head.

He'd put her hand on the head. He'd led her where she didn't want to go.

"Fuck," she said, more afraid than ever, because the things she thought she understood didn't make sense any more.

She wasn't just stuck in the middle of a nightmare. She was being led through it by the dead.

A tap came from the window and she jumped. It was full dark, so she couldn't see what it was for a second. Then she picked out the shape from the darkness.

A raven, beak tapping on the glass, hard and insistent then harder and so loud she put her hands over her ears and shouted for it to go away.

But it didn't. The glass cracked. It shattered across the floor, flashing like diamonds in the light. The raven cawed, an awful sound, and flew into her kitchen.

It was his, she knew, and it had come for her.