Chapter 3

Victor Walsh was arrested quickly.

He was a minicab driver. When they brought him in he had the dead-eyed defiance of someone who'd already decided nothing mattered. He confessed easily, almost enthusiastically.

He said that on the night in question, he'd been docked money by his employer and screamed at by his wife. He was driving through the area, stewing. He'd seen a woman — Nina — stepping out of a taxi on the pavement, smiling and talking on the phone. Happy.

"Why should she get to be happy?" he said. "I was living like a dog."

He said he'd felt a sudden surge of hatred. A desire to destroy something.

"One second of anger — I hit the accelerator. I hit her. She went down. She was still moving. So I reversed and went over her again."

"And again."

"When she stopped moving, I felt better. Why do you all get to be fine when I'm not?"

The dashcam footage confirmed it. No direct image of Nina, but the sounds were clear: the impact, a brief cry, and then the deliberate, nauseating back-and-forth of a car over a human body. Walsh's heavy breathing. His low, scattered swearing.

Tyre impressions, fibres from Nina's clothing, biological material from the wheels — it all matched.

When I saw Walsh at the police station, something tugged at the edge of my memory. I couldn't place it.

The case was being wrapped up. The evidence chain was complete, seamless, perfectly constructed.

Too perfectly.

A random violent incident by a driver with a road rage history. Two months of intensive searching with zero results, and then — the moment the police gave up — a "child" with a laughable series of inconsistencies hands over the key evidence?

And those lilies.

Nina, who would go out of her way to avoid lily pollen, who'd been hospitalised as a teenager because of it — she had somehow requested that lilies fill her wedding venue?

None of this was right.

I couldn't sleep. Night after night I lay awake going through it.

I got a copy of the dashcam footage from Detective Pierce and watched it over and over, frame by frame, scrubbing through the darkness and the noise.

I was on my third consecutive hour when I stopped.

In the corner of one frame — a detail I'd been passing over because it was barely visible, barely relevant — I could see what Nina was holding.

A large cup of bubble tea.

Almost empty.

The cold moved through me from somewhere deep and specific.

Nina's habit with bubble tea was as fixed as any ritual. She drank it slowly, always. She'd find a bench or a windowsill and take her time — savouring it, she said, because drinking it quickly was a waste. A large cup took her forty, forty-five minutes minimum.

I sat up and did the arithmetic.

Nina had texted me at eight fifteen that evening to ask if I wanted bubble tea. She said she was bored because Sebastian had gone out. She was texting from home.

A taxi driver confirmed he'd dropped her at the junction at eight thirty-five.

The accident happened at eight thirty-eight.

From text to accident: twenty-three minutes.

In twenty-three minutes, she had to have decided to go for bubble tea, gone to buy it, bought the large size, and drunk all but the dregs of it.

A large cup of bubble tea, in twenty-three minutes, on foot, alone.

I knew her. That was impossible.

Unless the cup wasn't bought during those twenty-three minutes.

Unless someone had been with her before she texted me.

Someone who bought her that tea. Who sat with her while she slowly drank most of it. Who, when the time came, let her out of a car at that junction — at the precise moment, on the precise stretch of road, in the precise window of darkness before it rained.

Then sent that text from her phone. To tell me she'd gone out alone, late, on her own — to establish that nobody had been with her.

Someone who knew her routines well enough to choreograph this.

Someone who had spent six years learning every detail of how she moved through the world.

I understood all of it now.

The blood pounded in my head. I could feel my pulse in my teeth.

The anonymous tip. The child's note full of inconsistencies. Walsh, who confessed to a crime that was supposed to look spontaneous but had been prepared with surgical precision. The cameras that happened to be broken. The rain that happened to fall at exactly the right moment. The evidence that happened to arrive exactly when the investigation was suspended.

And the lilies.

Please use lilies at our wedding. Fill the whole room with them.

Nina, who loved me for twenty-something years, who I could read like my own handwriting — she had said that to Sebastian knowing perfectly well what it would do to her. Knowing she was about to be killed. Saying something so wrong, so unmistakably wrong, that only one person in the world would notice.

Leaving me a key.

I looked at the clock. The light outside had changed — it was already mid-morning.

Walsh's trial was today.

I grabbed my phone and jacket and ran.