Page 117 of The Twenty (Major Crimes)

He can’t take any more. The thought of what this woman was doing—it’s horrific. He walks quickly out of the house.

Rom is waiting for him outside the cordon. He stands on the other side of the blue and white tape.

“Anything?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Nothing obvious. And you don’t want to go in there. She’s … it’s … fucked up,” he manages.

She looks toward the house. Her face is pale with worry. Jamie knows exactly what she’s thinking.

Adam is still missing.

“I’ll go back in,” he says. “Keep looking.”

“I’m coming with you.”

He hesitates, going to stop her, then lets it go. So many protocols have been broken already, what’s one more? And two heads are better than one.

“Suit up,” he says.

He can’t bear to go back in the house, so he makes a turn around the side and through the wooden back gate. Romilly follows him, hesitantly, Jamie’s flashlight illuminating their way. The garden is neglected, and he walks across the tiny lawn to the shed at the end. No more than a small wooden box, with a window on one side. He tries the door, it’s padlocked, so he puts his gloved hands against the glass and peers through, shining the beam of the flashlight inside. He can’t see much. A set of metal shelving, boxes and tools jumbled across. A black wetsuit, hanging at the back. A surfboard. What looks like a lifejacket next to loops of dark green rope. He looks at it for a second, then turns to Romilly. She’s doing the same, squinting through the window.

“How do we make sense of all of this, Rom?” he asks. He can feel himself shaking. Panic threatens. There’s too much evidence, not enough time.

He feels suffocated in the crime scene suit, his breath hot. He pulls the mask off, gasping for air, then slumps on the grass in the darkness, putting his head between his knees.

He feels Romilly sit down next to him, then place a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“Do you remember when I met you? For the first time?” she says quietly. He shakes his head, then pulls his hood down, raking his hands through his hair in exasperation. “At that barbecue, the one for my birthday. I must have been … what? Thirty-one, thirty-two? Adam and I had been married for a few years, and he was talking about this new DC that had just joined Major Crimes.” She laughs softly. “If you’d been a woman, I would have been seriously worried, Jamie. The way he talked about you. Like he’d just met his soul mate.”

Jamie stays quiet, unsure why she’s telling him this. It only adds to his failure, that Adam had such high hopes in him, and he was letting him down.

“He invited you, along with half his team from the nick, and you weren’t at all what I expected.”

He looks up now, into Romilly’s eyes. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. That you’d be like him—the confidence, the charm—but you couldn’t have been more different.”

“This isn’t helping, Rom—”

“No, no. That’s not what I mean. You were exactly what Adam needed. He was a loose cannon in those days, and you kept him in check, made sure he focused.” She places a gentle hand on his arm and smiles. “Adam is a great cop because of you.”

“That’s bullshit—”

“No, it’s not. You’re just as smart, just as hard-working. But you’re calmer, more controlled. And you can do this. You can find him.”

Jamie sighs. His mind still feels fractured, broken by the loss of his wife. “That was the first time I met Pippa, that day.”

“It was?”

“Yeah, at that barbecue. On that awful beach. Don’t you remember? Those bloody seagulls trying to steal all the bread rolls, the wind throwing the sand into …” He pauses. A thought catches. He glances back to the shed and the lifejacket hanging inside. He remembers the evidence from the first crime scene: the traces of salt on the blanket. The nylon cording. “The victims were being held near the sea,” he says slowly.

Romilly gapes at him. “But where?”

“Think about it logically. She would need a large shed or a storage unit. And Maggie got here fast. It needs to be reasonably close. But remote. Somewhere where she wouldn’t be disturbed.”

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and dials Lee, back at the nick.

“Tim,” he says the moment he answers. “I need you to run an ANPR check. Look for the VW Transporter heading to the coast.” Next to him, Romilly has pulled the maps up on her phone. He looks over her shoulder and reads off the names of the roads. “A27 toward Swanwick. A326 toward Calshot. M27 toward Hamble.”

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