Reckoning Point, стр. 76

I’m coming, Ellie, he wants to shout it, but keeps the thought in his mind, and it does what he had hoped, and spurs him on towards her.

The doctor knows these tunnels like the back of his hand. He knows them as well as he knows the backstreets and the main roads and the canal towpaths and hiking trails. He knows everything in this town, has looked after it, kept it clean for so many years.

Too many years, he thinks, ruefully, because twenty years ago, ten years ago even, he would never have made a mistake like the one he has made with the simple kid Roland. No, back then, in his heyday, if he meant to kill someone he would have done the job properly.

The doctor smacks a hand to his forehead, berates himself.

You’re getting too old for this, he thinks, and he feels a wave of sadness because he knows it is true, he’s not just having an off day, he really is getting too old.

And now the other one, the foreigner, is on the run. As is too the pretty, lovely Elian, who turned out to be not so pretty and lovely, but is actually, just like all the other girls.

It is another indicator, another red flag that tells him he needs to slow down. Because he never would have been taken in by a girl like Elian. He has seen very many young girls who are beautiful and vivacious and who – on the outside – look clean and wholesome, yet Elian, this one, this young, beautiful, seemingly untouched thing, is the only one who has duped him in such a way.

He feels the fire now, thinking how primly she sat in his office and talked guardedly about her head injury and subsequent worries. Only then, once he had totally and utterly become spellbound by her, had she turned around and in an almost offhand manner requested the tests that he ‘gives the other girls’.

It makes him shake his fist ahead of him, aimed at her who is at some point down this long tunnel. And it makes him doubly furious that even then, even after she had requested the tests, still he had coveted her, thought of her as different somehow. Only after reading and photocopying the notebook that he had taken from her bag, seeing all the names of the women she socialised with, that Brigitta for one, and a man’s name, scrawled childishly, and the other men, the ones who had violated her. That had almost made him waver in his feelings of distaste for her. For a brief while he considered her a maiden who had been held against her will, (just thinking that had stirred other, unfamiliar feelings in him), but she hadn’t learned from that, had she? No, instead she was cavorting all over town at all hours of the day and night, on her own, wearing those tiny, tiny shorts, that showed those creamy milk chocolate legs that seemed to go on for–

The doctor makes fists from his hands and crashes them into his own face.

Stop it, he instructs himself, stop daydreaming like a love struck teenager, find the people who have eluded you, and deal with them, the way you used to. Properly and without messing up.

Because it had been a long time since he had failed at a task. And he had escaped that debacle with such a narrow margin. And he slowed his pace a little, thought back to that time, remembered how he had pushed through with his life and his career and his reputation untouched.

“Do you remember that?” he asks himself, and the echo that comes back to him makes him smile.

Yes. Yes, he remembers.