Let the Dead Speak: A gripping new thriller. Jane Casey

      ‘Well, it’s not naptime.’

      His answer was a snore. I hit the brakes a bit harder than I needed to at the next junction and he startled awake, his hands flying up.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Why are you sleeping?’

      ‘Because I’m knackered.’ He did look tired, I thought, with shadows under his eyes that weren’t usually there. ‘Thomas hasn’t been sleeping well.’

      ‘He has to get used to the new house.’

      ‘It’s not that. He’s been having nightmares. Night terrors, actually.’

      ‘What’s the difference?’

      ‘It’s like sleepwalking except he’s in bed. Screaming.’ He shivered. ‘It’s fucking creepy. He can be sitting there with his eyes open, shouting at the top of his voice about monsters and people chasing him, and there’s nothing you can do to comfort him. He doesn’t even know you’re there.’

      ‘What does Melissa think?’

      ‘She wants to take him to see a sleep specialist.’ He sighed. ‘I think she’s overreacting but I can’t say that, can I? He’s not my kid. Google says it’s normal at Thomas’s age.’

      I pulled up outside Lowe’s house, on the road. The high beech hedge screened the front of the house completely from anyone walking past. ‘What did you say he screams about? Monsters?’

      ‘Monsters, baddies, someone watching him, you name it. I put the light on to show him there’s no one there but he’s not conscious really, so he doesn’t register it. You have to wait for him to calm down by himself and go back to sleep and it takes hours.’ He yawned so widely I heard his jaw crack. ‘It’s happening two or three times a night. And in the morning he doesn’t remember any of it.’

      ‘Maybe moving house will sort it out.’

      ‘Maybe. The flat was too small for the three of us. That didn’t help. But Melissa thinks it might make it worse. He’s had a lot of disruption in the past year.’

      ‘Yeah, but with a happy ending. He got away from his dad, didn’t he?’ Mark Pell had beaten and intimidated his wife until she took Thomas and ran away to London, to what should have been a safe place. It wasn’t her fault that it had turned out to be the opposite.

      Derwent nodded soberly. ‘That could be part of the trouble, though. He must miss his dad. Melissa never let him see any of the violence. He didn’t know about her injuries. As far as he’s concerned, his mummy and daddy loved each other very much and then Mummy took him away. Daddy disappeared out of his life from one day to the next.’

      ‘But you’re there.’

      ‘It’s not the same.’

      ‘Isn’t it? He adores you, you know that.’

      Derwent put a hand up to his eyes, rubbing at them with his forefinger and thumb. ‘Fuck’s sake. I’m not crying. My eyes are watering because I’m tired.’

      ‘Yeah, of course. I think we drove past someone chopping onions, actually. That’s probably it.’

      ‘Don’t take the piss,’ he mumbled.

      ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

      ‘I want to look after him. That’s all. And I don’t know how to make it better for him.’

      ‘It’s a phase.’

      Derwent squinted at me. ‘What do you know about it?’

      ‘That’s what my brother says about every annoying thing his kids do. Everything’s a phase. In a month’s time he’ll be sleeping beautifully and you’ll have something else to worry about.’

      He thought about it. ‘Thanks, mate.’

      ‘Any time.’ I got out of the car and looked up and down Constantine Avenue. The houses were detached, set back from the road and there were no pedestrians. It was quiet, and private. ‘This is going to be rubbish for witnesses.’

      ‘Come on.’ Derwent led the way through the gate and paused to scan the gravel in front of the house. ‘What do you think? Tyre marks?’

      ‘None to speak of.’ I crouched down, trying to see. ‘Nope. There isn’t enough gravel for that.’

      ‘Typical.’ He looked up at the house. It was a 1930s house with ugly aluminium-framed windows that had probably been put in four decades after the house was built. It had a general air of being unoccupied. The curtains were drawn in every window and weeds had sprouted through cracks in the steps. Some rubbish had blown in from the street and tangled in the undergrowth. ‘You’d know it was empty, wouldn’t you?’

      ‘Empty or that it belonged to someone elderly.’ I followed him through the front door, working my hands into my gloves as a precaution but also because I really didn’t want to touch anything. I stepped over the slithery pile of post and junk mail on the doormat, wrinkling my nose. ‘It stinks in here.’

      ‘Not as much as the nursing home did.’ Derwent looked back at me. ‘When I get old, I’m going to Switzerland to end it all. No way do I want to drag out my days staring at the walls surrounded by a load of drooling vegetables.’

      ‘It can’t have been that bad.’

      ‘Whatever you’re imagining, it was worse.’ He strode into the kitchen, snapping with energy now that we were working again, the hunter’s instinct overriding fatigue. I tried and failed to visualise him as an old man. Impossible to think of him being calm, sitting quietly, staring at the walls. He’d burn the place down first.