18
Outside, the rain was still heavy. It seemed to have set in for the night. After the accident Lou and Kate had been taken to Sentara Obici Hospital, a five-minute drive north of Suffolk and about twenty miles from the Campions’ place.
Jerry Derham was driving a navy pool car, an unassuming silver Ford, and a young uniformed naval officer, Lieutenant Niels Goldman, sat next to him. Lou and Kate were in the back. They couldn’t see much through the windows other than the black shapes of passing trees and occasional lights, the rain hammering out a tribal beat on the roof. Kate was dosed up with painkillers, but her anxiety more than counteracted them; she felt jumpy, anxious.
The traffic was light, the town of Suffolk almost deserted, and soon they were back on the highway heading out into the wooded windswept countryside, retracing the journey Kate and Lou had made a few hours earlier. They turned left off the highway onto the same country lane they had driven down, the street lights falling away behind them, the wheels of the Ford crunching over the uneven and rutted surface.
Lights were on at the Campions’ house, and for a few moments Kate held on to the image of her godfather burning the midnight oil in his study, poring over his books and papers.
The car had barely stopped when Kate reached for the door handle and started to push her way out.
‘Kate… please,’ Derham snapped.
She kept going.
The captain was out, heading her off. ‘Kate!’
‘I’m going in there.’ She went to push him back, ignoring the sharp pain in her side.
‘Not yet! We don’t know the situation. Just wait… please!’
He pulled out his pistol and turned towards the house. Lou eased out the other side of the car and Lieutenant Goldman came up on Derham’s right side, his weapon raised in both hands. The younger officer shifted the gate inwards and was first onto the path, Derham close behind.
The front door was ajar. Kate saw it in the half light and felt a stab of fear in the pit of her stomach. The two officers stood either side of the front door and beckoned to Lou and Kate to fall back into the shadows. Derham slithered into the hall.
It took all Kate’s willpower to stay still and quiet but it was not enough; she made for the path. Lou gripped her arm, hard. She whirled on him, furious, but he kept hold of her and met her gaze, jaw set.
Goldman emerged from the house, his gun lowered. Kate pulled free from Lou and ran.
The hall was empty, but through a gap between the frame and the door to the living room Kate caught a flicker of movement. She went to push on the door just as Derham was emerging.
‘Kate… I don’t think you should…’
She shoved at the man’s shoulder. He resisted but then saw the resolve in her eyes and reluctantly let her through.
The scene was instantly etched into her brain. A vision she would never forget, one that would haunt her at night and tear into her dreams. George and Joan Campion were slumped in a pair of chairs against the far wall of the living room. They had been gagged, their hands tied to the chair backs behind them. They had been tortured, disfigured, then dispatched with a bullet to the temple, execution style. Great fans of blood and brain tissue covered the rear wall. It had sprayed in an arc across the ceiling and the light fixture in the centre of a plaster rose.
Kate could not move. Then slowly she brought her right hand to her mouth as vomit swept between her fingers and down her front. She stepped towards the dead couple. Derham moved to hold her back but she knocked his hand away with surprising force and let out an almost inaudible cry as she knelt down between the two pathetic, mutilated figures. ‘What have they done?’ she whispered and ran a finger along her godfather’s knee. She pulled up, turned to the three men behind her, her face ashen. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why?’
Lou gazed at her, stricken, barely able to take it in. Kate went to him and fell into his arms, the tears exploding from her, her body heaving as he guided her back to the hall.
19
The place had been completely trashed. The door to George Campion’s study hung open. Kate could see the edge of the devastation before she reached the opening into the room. The shelves had been emptied, the chairs upturned, the upholstery shredded. The contents of her godfather’s desk were scattered around randomly.
Kneeling down behind the desk, she plucked the professor’s ancient cassette player from the wreckage, brushed away some crumbs of sandwich from the top and placed it back where it had sat earlier under a pile of papers. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Back in the hall, Jerry Derham had emerged from the living room. He was tucking away his cell phone. ‘This is now a crime scene for military investigators, and it won’t be made public just yet,’ he said. ‘The police have been notified. The FBI are on their way.’ He gave Kate a sympathetic look. ‘Shall we get you and Lou home?’
Kate wiped away a tear from her chin. ‘Need to get cleaned up,’ she said and turned towards a downstairs bathroom.
Closing the door, for a second she could almost believe she was shutting off reality, but the thought was as fleeting as melting ice. If only life were that simple. She stepped over to the washbasin and peered at her reflection in the mirror.
She could see her younger self there, the little girl who had stood on this very spot years before when she visited the Campions with her parents. Then she recalled the afternoon of her mother’s funeral. They had buried her in a church not far from here, and her father, Nicholas Wetherall, George Campion’s closest friend, had accepted the Campions’ kind offer to act as hosts for a small gathering after the service. She was ten, dressed in a dark-blue dress, pigtails tied with black silk ribbon. She had cried before this same mirror that day too. But then she could leave the room and feel the embrace of her father and the love of her godparents. Now, all of them were gone.
Derham led them back to the car. It had stopped raining, but it was cold with an insipid dampness in the air. Before they could pull away, a Chevrolet compact drew up in front of the navy pool car. Derham got out again and spoke to a couple of men in black suits. Kate and Lou sat in the back of the car immersed in silence, lost in their own thoughts.
‘It’s the Feds,’ Derham said, leaning in through the back window of the navy car, ‘… insist on talking to both of you.’
Lou went off to the house with one of the FBI agents, the other came around the car and opened the back door.
‘You mind if I talk to you here, Dr Wetherall?’ the agent asked. He looked at Goldman who was in the driver’s seat. He got the message immediately and stepped out. Kate watched him and Derham walk back to the house. The agent slipped into the car and sat down where Lou had been.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ the man said, extending a hand. ‘Special Agent Mike Colm.’
Kate took his hand limply and met his eye.
‘How were you related to the deceased?’ Colm asked, pulling a notebook and pen from his wet jacket.
‘I’m not. They are… were my godparents.’
‘Can you talk me through what you know of what happened here.’
Kate was silent for a moment, turned to her right to look at the house lit up from inside. ‘Lou and I visited this morning…’
‘What time?’
‘We got here about two o’clock.’
‘So not strictly this morning,’ Colm said, gazing down at the notebook.
Kate looked at him and the man lifted his head. ‘Go on.’
‘We drove over from our lab in Norfolk. I wanted to show my godfather a document we had been studying.’
‘A document?’
‘Yes.’