chapter Seven: What's left behind
622 Words
What’s Left Behind
The wind picked up as they left the lock-up, slamming the steel door behind them with a metallic groan that echoed down the empty road.
Isla didn’t speak for a long time.
She just walked, head down, hands jammed in her coat pockets, the confession looping through her mind.
Bell hadn’t told them everything—she could feel it. There were pieces still missing. Why now? Why the sudden killings, after all these years?
Beside her, Rhys finally broke the silence.
“You believe him?”
Isla looked out over the marshes beyond the road. “I believe he’s scared.”
Rhys nodded slowly. “Scared men lie.”
“Sometimes scared men finally tell the truth.”
They drove back to the station in near silence. Back in the office, Malik was waiting.
“You’re going to want to see this,” he said, handing Isla a tablet.
Surveillance footage.
From the road just outside the lock-up.
Timestamp: thirty minutes after they’d left.
A dark SUV pulled up. Two men got out—faces hidden beneath hoods. One approached the door, examined the lock. The other held something under his jacket.
The footage cut out in static.
Malik’s expression was grim. “Whoever they are, they’re watching him. Maybe us too.”
Isla’s stomach dropped. “Is Bell still at the lock-up?”
“No. We had someone tail him. He went to the cemetery.”
“The cemetery?”
Malik nodded. “Joseph Merrin’s grave.”
---
They found Tomas Bell standing alone at the edge of the burial ground, wind tugging at his coat, lips moving with words lost to the sea breeze. He didn’t turn when Isla approached.
“I told you,” he said softly. “I tried to stop it.”
“Who are they, Tomas? The ones cleaning up?”
He was silent for a long time.
Then finally: “Not who. What we made. When we chose silence.”
He turned toward her then, eyes wet.
“Don’t let it end the way it started.”
Then he pressed something into her hand—a small metal key with initials etched faintly on the edge: JM.
“Your father left you more than just that letter.”
Back at her childhood home, Isla stood in the narrow attic, the key cool and heavy in her palm. The air smelled of dust and cedar, and the sea wind rattled the window panes like an old memory knocking.
She hadn’t been up here since the funeral.
Stacks of old boxes lined the wall—some marked with dates, others with her mother’s handwriting. But one stood apart, tucked behind a beam, wrapped in a canvas sailcloth and bound with rope.
On the side, faint and almost rubbed away: JM.
Her father’s initials.
She crouched, slid the key into the small brass lock on the front.
It turned with a satisfying click.
Inside: a wooden case, felt-lined and dry despite the years. Documents, carefully wrapped. A cassette recorder, the kind her father had always preferred over taking notes. And a single envelope marked in black ink:
FOR ISLA – ONLY IF YOU KEEP DIGGING
She opened the envelope.
Inside: a photograph, torn at the edges. The five men again—Joseph, Bell, Warren, and the unknown fourth with the scratched-out face.
But this version hadn’t been edited.
The fifth man was intact.
A thin smile, dark hair, sharp eyes. Not a local. Not someone from the town.
On the back, her father had scrawled four words:
“His name was Bastian.”
Isla’s heart stopped.
Not Sebastian Thorne, the man who’d died for speaking out.
Bastian Thorne—his brother.
Still alive.
And watching.
- Writer
