by Nick Hollin
Katie wraps her arms even more tightly round the papers held to her chest. ‘And maybe that’s why he’s given us this link to the Steven Fish murder. He thinks it will be the trigger for you.’
Nathan takes a step back, recognising the sense in her words and the danger in what she’s holding.
‘But what was Christian’s trigger? The doctor wasn’t killed when I wanted to kill him, more than twenty years ago. The autopsy will likely prove it happened in the past year. So why did Christian wait so long after my dad died?’
‘Maybe something else happened in his life to send him insane. He could have lost that wife he told you about. He could have lost the child.’ Katie takes the papers from her chest and slips them into a discarded supermarket bag, tying the top as if to hold in a stench. ‘Or maybe there’s been nobody. Nobody to keep him in line.’
‘I should have been there for him,’ says Nathan with a grimace, remembering what his brother had said on the phone: I thought maybe you could find yourself a nice policewoman, someone who understands that crazy world of yours.
‘So how long do you need?’ says Katie, nodding back at the little room.
‘A couple of hours. I’ll also need something to drink – something strong – to get past myself. Because this will be different to the other times. I’m not imagining a stranger.’ He nods towards an almost full bottle of wine next to the television. ‘That’ll do,’ he says. ‘All of it. In something unbreakable.’
‘How will I know when it’s over?’
‘Come back in two hours. Go to the station, or something.’
‘Not the best idea. I’m meant to be with you at all times, remember? But I think I might know somewhere I can pay a visit.’
Katie heads towards the kitchen, pulling open a cupboard and locating a red plastic mixing bowl which she holds up for approval.
‘Two hours.’
She reaches out and grabs his hand, and he feels a jolt. He pulls away but continues to look her in the eye and, despite the tightening he can feel in every inch of his body, he somehow forces a faint smile.
* * *
Nathan stands in the tiny room with his head pressed against the door. Fifty minutes have passed since he heard Katie turn the key in the lock and then the sound of the front door closing. Since then, he’s been working his way through the evidence from the Brooks case, reading every report and every forensic note, stopping every now and again to make sure she hasn’t returned. If he’s going to commit to this he needs to know she’s not nearby.
When he’s finally happy he’s on his own and that he’s read all he can about the killing of Sally Brooks, he reaches down and picks up the mixing bowl, watching the contents swish around – red bowl, red wine, red visions already starting to appear. It takes several gulps to finish it all and no little effort to keep it down. He’s never been a drinker – always so afraid of letting go.
The room starts to swim as he finally turns towards the images and forces himself to look, pressing his nose right up against the bloody scenes until it feels like there’s no air left in the room and he is forced to sit down on the spinning chair in the centre. Gripping the arm with one hand, he lets his eyes follow a path around the walls, taking in a series of photographs pinned to the wall of the victims Katie has failed to find justice for in the year he’s been away, and noticing the blank space where the papers about the torture and murder of Steven Fish have been removed. Round and round he goes, running laps around the room with his eyes and tiring out his brain just like he did in Scotland. Suddenly he stops, lining himself up with an enlargement of the chocolate copy of his birthmark on Sally Brooks. He hadn’t considered his birthmark had looked like a skull until he was in his teens. Before then it had always been an animal’s head, a monkey or pig, but as his thoughts grew darker the skull seemed the perfect fit. He’d once wanted to take a knife to it, desperate to break free from the curse, but as he’d sat on the side of the bath with a shaking hand he worried it would achieve the very opposite: that the blood would represent the beginning, and not the end.
He closes his eyes, knowing he’s seen more than enough. Now he has to let go. He leans forward and stares down at the floor, a tiny drop of sweat landing between his shoes. He tucks an imaginary strand of hair behind his ear, picturing his brother’s hair as it had been; tidier and shorter than his own, parted on one side. His head lowers further, his chin almost touching his chest, and he can feel himself slipping, starting with the tiniest twitch at the tip of his fingers, then spreading like a poison down his arms and into his chest, ice cold and unrelenting.
He was only eight or nine years old when he first discovered he could think so convincingly as someone else, putting himself in the place of a sportsman, or adventurer, or musician, or sometimes just a son impressing his father. The longer he did it the better he got, to the point where his imagined train of thought felt so perfectly real he could almost be living it. All he needed were details and room in his head to truly believe. It had made him a formidable actor, until he started losing control.
Today will be his greatest challenge yet, since the person’s mind he is attempting to occupy is a killer he knows almost as well as he knows himself. Here he can see out through eyes that are the same, down the bridge of a nose the same, past a fringe the same. Part of him wants to stop, but the other part of him has already taken its first step…
He’s standing, tucked into the hedge with a rose bush behind him and thorns digging into his legs. He should feel pain, but he doesn’t feel anything but excitement and anticipation. He stares at a tiny window in the distance. There’s a woman there – beautiful, black hair, pale skin – washing plates in yellow gloves. He looks down at his own hands, a long knife with a serrated edge in one, a tiny tremor in the other. He looks up at the window; the woman is still there. The faintest whisper in his heart is wishing she’d disappear, that she’d see him and he’d run, but he knows he won’t be going anywhere. She’s smiling. He can’t believe he didn’t notice before, because it’s so broad, so beautiful and so strangely familiar. He starts to walk forward, tingling with desire, telling himself to stop.
He crouches down by the side of the window, still unseen. He can hear music, an old song from the fifties or sixties, but it’s one he knows well. He looks down at his feet, a pair of unremarkable black shoes, unpolished, size 10…
Things are suddenly cloudier than they were before. Part of him is relieved, part of him enormously frustrated. He stares harder and finally the image sharpens. He can see his trousers are blue jeans, dirty on the knees. His sweater is black and frayed at the sleeves. The whole outfit strikes him as cheap – the sort of thing he wouldn’t mind getting dirty; the sort of thing he’d be happy to throw away. He’s caught a tiny strand of the sweater on the rose bush. He stares at it, but doesn’t remove it, knowing he needs it, needs it for this… He can see his feet in the soil below, can see the depth of the mark he’s left, and the longer he looks the more rounded his stomach seems. He follows the line of it with his free hand and it disappears. Although now it’s the hands that don’t look right: dirty and lined, rough on the knuckles. He twists them and bunches them and they slowly return to what he’d seen before. He tries to look for a reflection in the window ahead of him, but there’s nothing there: he’s invisible, even to himself.
He moves confidently round the side of the house, past a well-tended lawn and carefully weeded flowerbeds. Flattening flowers as he goes, sometimes bending to slash at them with his knife. Open flower heads litter the floor. And there are more footprints. Still too deep.
On the patio behind the back door is a brightly coloured bike, a hula hoop and a tiny plastic hedgehog. The door is partly open, just an inch or two; he reaches out, pulling to make the gap large enough to squeeze through. The music has stopped. There are no birds, no wind, no cars in the distance, no sound of singing, no sound of his heart.
He’s in the house; more toys spread out on the living room floor.
There’s a soft, floppy doll ahead of him, and he stops to pick it up, tucking it into his pocket. As he moves forward his boot makes contact with a Lego brick, sending it spinning away. Again, there’s no sound. Although when he looks up towards the kitchen it’s clear that there should be. The woman at the end of the hallway is staring straight at him; her mouth is stretched wide in a scream, the rest of her body completely frozen.
He’s moving quickly now, although not as fast as Nathan wants, not as fast as Nathan would himself. The knife leads the way. As he continues down the hall he allows himself time to consider the photos on the wall, images of two small girls smiling out at the camera. The woman in the kitchen has turned for the door; she’s slipping and stumbling and crashes into the cupboards. He rushes forward as if trying to catch her, but his movement is clumsy and surprisingly slow, and his own feet slip twice on the mud still caked to the soles. The woman turns to look at him, her eyes wide, her open mouth now twisting hideously as the blade enters her neck. An arc of blood sprays across the floor, onto his shoes and his trousers and onto a painting pinned by a magnet to the fridge door. He stares at the child’s brightly coloured work of art, seeing his addition, before turning back to the woman. Her mouth is full of blood and her body is motionless, twisted unnaturally down on the tiles, although the mouth is still moving, still trying to shape sounds. But it’s in her eyes he sees the truth, the reflection that hadn’t been there before, badly blurred but unmistakable. The man there is nothing like him, or his brother.
Nathan rises at such speed he almost topples backwards off the chair, tearing down a few of the photos as he tries to steady himself. He drops into a crouch, elbows pressed against the wall behind, his eyes darting left and right, his breath short, sharp and wild like an animal’s. He wishes he could have stayed there for ever in the blood, but there’s something important he needs to do. He reaches for the door handle, only to find it locked and that he is trapped in a devastating space between reality and fantasy. He rests his head against the door as an unspeakable feeling of loss and helplessness washes over him. Outside, he knows someone’s life is in terrible danger.
Twenty-Three
Katie stands staring up at a window, one of many in a large building ahead of where she’s parked. She knows the exact one to look at because she’s been here before, sitting in this very spot, looking up and wondering if she has the courage to go in.
She has another question troubling her today. Did she do the right thing in leaving Nathan alone in her flat? Might it change him, as he had always feared? Might it lead him to hurt others? Or make him even more likely to hurt himself? She might have removed details of the murder that she thought would be the most damaging, but was that just a selfish act to ease her conscience if he can’t cope? She fights the panic, remembering the way he’d looked at her when he’d said goodbye. She knows what it sounds like when that goodbye is for ever: she’d heard it in her dad’s voice once before.
She pops open the door of the car, feeling the cool of the late evening air. At the main door to the building she’s met with a smile as broad as you would hope for with all the money she’s paying, although it slips when the woman behind the desk hears what she wants.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, turning towards the clock on the wall behind her, ‘but the visiting hours are—’
‘I know what they are.’ Katie cuts her off. She reaches into her pocket with a sigh and brings out her warrant card.
‘Really?’ says the woman, her concern growing. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Just a case I’m working on,’ says Katie. ‘It’s become… personal. And I wanted to check…’ She points upwards.
‘I can assure you that the security here is of the highest level,’ says the woman, gesturing towards a camera in the corner of the room, then down the corridor ahead at a shut door with a keypad entry system.
‘Nevertheless,’ says Katie, moving towards that door as she slips her warrant card away.
* * *
Having convinced the woman to go back to her desk after letting her through, Katie has climbed two flights of stairs and is standing in the doorway of a room she hasn’t visited in several weeks. Nevertheless, it all still seems horribly familiar; even the figure in the armchair close to the window is exactly as she remembered him.
‘Hello, Dad,’ she says, placing a hand on the back of the chair as she moves alongside. His head is slumped against the high back and his mouth is partly open, as are his eyes, which, rather than looking at the beautiful sunset out of the window, seem to be focused on nothing. She wonders if he’s ever noticed this view. Even when she’d first moved him into this care home he was deteriorating so rapidly that she was certain she was spending all the money on nothing. Nothing other than her guilt.
‘I should have said these things to you before, a long time ago,’ she starts, her hand slipping from the back of the chair to his shoulder. There’s no response. ‘But I couldn’t…’ She creates a fist and twists her face, as if struggling even now to say what should be the simplest thing for a daughter to say to a dad who has given her everything. ‘I love you. I’ve always loved you. And it doesn’t matter what you’ve done.’ She leans in closer and lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘If you killed him, I know there was a reason.’
She’s distracted by a sound behind and spins round to find a man standing in the doorway. Instantly she can feel her cheeks flush. She’d almost forgotten how unattractive he is. He’s overweight, his hair is thinning and his features somehow look like they don’t fit the overall shape of his face. Yet when he smiles she finds herself smiling back, feeling a warmth spread through her that she’s only ever felt with Nathan.
‘Is everything okay?’
On his chest is a badge bearing the name ‘Martin Coates’, and below that the word ‘carer’. She remembers staring at that tag and, in particular, that word on the floor of the hotel she’d taken him to, her eyes struggling to focus from all the drink, her regret overwhelming.
‘I just wanted to see him.’
‘I thought that would be it. Barbara at the door,’ Martin gestures down, ‘told me it was police business. But I knew it would be something far more important.’
‘Listen, I need to speak to you,’ she says.
‘And me to you.’ Martin’s voice has always been very quiet, his words slow and measured. ‘I want to apologise, Katie, I’m appalled at what I did.’
She very nearly laughs at the suggestion that he had been the one to blame. ‘Why?’
‘Because of the job I do; because it’s clear I abused my connection with…’ Martin looks across at Katie’s dad, who is oblivious, she’s certain, to the conversation they’re having. ‘Otherwise you would never have…’ He turns his attention back to her, his rounded face starting to redden as he removes thick glasses and rubs his eyes. ‘Not with someone like me.’
‘That’s not true. It’s not your job. It’s who you are. It’s who you’ve proven you are with all the help you’ve given Dad.’
He smiles and puts his glasses back on. ‘I’m glad you think that.’
‘I haven’t been here for him myself,’ she says, the words catching in her throat.
‘We’ve spoken about this before,’ says Martin, taking a step forward and lightly resting a hand on the top of her arm. ‘There is no blame here. It’s a natural reaction, an understandable fear.’
‘Maybe,’ Katie says, squeezing the bridge of her nose as if that might stop the tears. Her phone starts to ring and she pulls it out quickly, wondering if it’s Nathan, before reminding herself that he had been left a prisoner in her home.
She raises an apologetic hand to Martin and then turns away, answering the call. ‘Hi, Mike. What’s up?’
‘Sorry to disturb you, boss, I just wanted to check you were doing okay.’
She wipes the tears from her cheeks. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘And what about Nathan?’
‘He’s okay,’ she say
s, taking another step away from Martin, before looking back over her shoulder and finding that he’s gone. ‘Again, thanks for asking. You’re the only one that has.’
‘You know about my brother,’ he says, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘You know what I’ve been through with him.’
Katie remembers the day from just a few months ago, when she’d been taken out to a run-down estate to visit a drug addict that looked so much like the sergeant that no explanation had been needed. It was proof of his trust that he was willing to show her. It was also, she can see now, a warning about the effect all the drinking and the sleeping around might have on her own life.
‘You remember what Nathan used to be like.’ She pauses as the images come into focus. ‘When he was doing his thing, it was like he travelled somewhere else, but you could see he was finding it harder and harder to come back. It’s the same with…’ She reaches out and places a hand on her dad’s shoulder. He hasn’t moved in the chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, having drawn in a deep breath.
‘Don’t be,’ says DS Peters. ‘Your dad was a good man.’
‘And you’re too good a detective, Mike,’ she says, acknowledging his understanding. She finds herself straightening, muscles firming, barriers rising. ‘Now, what more do we know? Anything on the phone number for Christian?’
‘Nothing yet.’
‘What about CCTV of the house?’
‘Again, nothing. A couple of the neighbours have cameras, but we haven’t had a chance to run through it all.’
‘And the family doctor that Nathan spoke of? Any joy with him?’
‘Some. We know he was living in Spain until a little over four years ago. Then he was marked coming back through Heathrow. Nothing after that.’
‘Nobody reported him missing?’