Page 124 of The Twenty (Major Crimes)

Death.

Then, a voice.

“Please.” Whispered softly, through the dark. Romilly blinked. There was a figure there, a body. No, two. Entwined together on the mattress.

“She’s sick. She needs to get out of here.”

A woman looked at her, then slowly pulled herself to her feet. White shining eyes in a blackened face. Clothes, no more than rags. Skinny limbs, lank greasy hair. She took a step toward Romilly, and with that, the fear tore through her.

The woman looked inhuman; her face was little more than a skull with skin, jutting cheekbones, teeth missing. Dried blood, dirt, who knows what, coating her body. Metal circled her wrists, limiting her movement as she held her hands out, pleading, toward Romilly.

She leaped backward, through the door. She pushed her full weight into it, closing it and pulling the locks shut again.

“Please!” the woman begged through the wood. “Please!” Then a thud. Two more. Banging, screaming, frantic cries, pleading for Romilly to open the door, to call the police, to get help.

But Romilly did nothing. She turned and closed the outer door, locking it tight. She ran back down the garden, placing the keys where she found them on the table. And when her father came home, he picked them up.

“Did you go in?” he asked.

“No,” she replied.

* * *

“What made you call the police?” the detective asks.

“I saw her in my dreams,” Romilly replies. “Begging. Covered in blood. I woke up crying. The same way I have every day since.”

The detective nods solemnly.

“But I was confused. When you interviewed me. I knew I’d fucked up.” Romilly talks faster now, her brain desperate to expel the information after all this time. “I said that I saw the keys when I came home from school, and I knew you’d realize I waited before calling the police. So I lied. Over and over again. I said I had no idea what he was doing.”

“But you did.”

“Yes. All of it. And I did nothing.”

The room is still. The fire is starting to burn out, needing another log, but nobody moves.

“Those women are dead because of me.”

“No.”

She looks up. Adam’s spoken: firm and loud.

“No, Romilly,” he repeats. “You were eleven. A child. You were scared, confused. Those women are dead because your father killed them—”

“But if I’d called the police sooner?”

“Maybe,” Adam replies. “But you were in a terrible situation. Your mother was dead, you had nobody else. You loved your father.”

Romilly starts to cry again. “I did,” she says through her tears. “But maybe—”

“DCI Bishop is right,” Detective Shepherd says. “We knew you were lying to us. And we wanted you to tell the truth. But not so we could arrest you, or anything like that. We wanted to get you help. We didn’t want you to spend the rest of your life with this hanging over you. Because this sort of thing …” He pauses. Shakes his head. “It can screw you up. It’s a miracle you’ve turned out the way you have, frankly.”

“I’ve had a lot of therapy,” Romilly says, laughing through her tears.

But the detective’s face is serious. “You would have needed it.” He leans forward, taking her hands in his. “Thank you for coming here today, Romilly,” he says. “Thank you for telling me.”

“I still think about her,” Romilly says. “That woman I saw. It was Grace, wasn’t it? Grace Summers?”

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