by Nick Hollin
Twenty-Four
Nathan lets the phone fall from his ear. He’s tried three more times to call Katie’s number, without success. Images of her body being twisted and stretched as his own birthmark is carefully copied on her thigh flash through his mind, but he can’t allow himself to believe that it has happened for real. He needs to get to her. And he needs help.
He’s connected to her office in less than a minute, his memory somehow dragging up the number, along with the name of the colleague she’d often talked about and clearly trusted. He won’t explain everything – it would complicate matters and slow things down, the same way it had with Katie. If he’d told her to get out instantly, if she’d trusted him instantly, the way she always used to, if he hadn’t had so much to drink, then perhaps he wouldn’t need to be making this call.
‘DS Peters?’
‘Speaking.’
‘Katie’s in danger,’ he says, glad that the terror rather than the alcohol is registering in his voice. ‘At Markham’s house. You need to get there!’ He hangs up, desperate to do the same himself, but is suddenly confronted by the practicalities; the house is far out to the west, the width of the city from where he is now. He doesn’t have money for a taxi, bus, or train, and there’s no cash he can see around the house. He thinks of her expression as she’d pulled the door closed on the little room, and realises a new frenzy building inside of him; a desperation not to take a life, but to save one.
He snatches a knife out of the block on the side in the kitchen and feeds it up the sleeve of his top so he can feel the coldness of the blade on his skin as he rushes out the door.
Out on the street he’s spinning round and round, searching for a solution. There are so many forms of transport in front of him, above him, below him, and yet nothing can get him there quickly enough. He could run, he could run for miles – his body has been craving it ever since he got back – but he knows it wouldn’t save her. He tries to slow his breathing, give himself room to think. The traffic is moving freely, some cars travelling at speed. When he sees a gap he steps out into it then turns to face a car racing towards him. He holds up a hand and hears the brakes scream. He closes his eyes and prepares himself for impact, wondering if he was being brave or reaching for a way out.
He only looks when he hears a door opening and the shouting start. The man is not as big as his voice, and the closer Nathan gets the more his words lose their strength.
‘Are you fucking mad?’
‘Yes,’ he hears himself say, and he means it as his fingers grab the man by the front of his hooded top and fling him towards the pavement. For a terrible moment, he wonders if he might stay to finish the job – take a random life while his desire is this high. But there’s still a part of him holding on, telling him there’s no time, telling him to think of Katie and only Katie.
He sinks into the driver’s seat and closes the door, and before he knows it the lights of the city are flashing by. It’s been a while, and the gear changes are far from smooth and the alcohol is still flooding his senses. A part of him hopes a police car might stop him so he doesn’t have to turn up alone, but all he sees are angry faces and the occasional scared-looking pedestrian.
* * *
As he pulls into the street where Markham lives he realises what a miracle it is he’d remembered the way. He’d barely even looked at the signs. It wasn’t a route he remembered driving, certainly not from Katie’s house, and yet again he’s been able to drag up bits of information he hadn’t known were there.
He bumps up the kerb and skids to a halt, flicking off the engine and leaving the keys in the ignition. He rushes for the gate, flinging it open and almost tripping and falling flat on his face. He doesn’t care who might be waiting for him on the other side; he just wants to be there, as he should have been, to try and help, or face the consequences.
The front door is open a couple of inches and the hallway is dark but there’s a light on in the kitchen at the end. Rushing forward, he slips on something and nearly falls, righting himself as he approaches. As his focus sharpens, he thinks he can make out a hand poking out from behind the door. The tightness in his chest is unbearable as he feels for the knife up his sleeve.
The first thing he sees is her face. Her eyes are closed, and he can see no expression, and her skin is horribly pale. Her body is laid out in the shape of a cross: legs together, arms stretched wide. There’s blood on her neck and on her temple, and far more above her head. A great pool of it, still spreading as the rest of her remains deathly still. Her fingers are flat, unbent, unbroken, and this, at least, brings a moment of relief.
He looks across and sees a small plastic shopping bag, not dissimilar to the one Katie had filled with the Steven Fish papers. Poking out of the top is something dark and hairy with eyes wide and a mouth stretched in agony. He takes a closer look. It’s far easier to look at this than to look at her. Up close he can see it’s the rigid remains of a black cat, fur sticky and matted with blood.
He turns back to Katie and reaches out to touch her face. There are things he wants to tell her, things that might have made a difference to them both. He draws a finger down her cheek, desperately trying not to look at the neck and see the very point where her life was ended. Even on the periphery of his already tear-stained vision he can tell that it isn’t as bad as his imagination would have him believe. He dares to look closer and sees that he was right; the line is too thin, no white of the windpipe, no tear of the skin at all. It’s also too dark, like congealed blood, like… He touches the line with the point of his finger and then slips it into his mouth. In his fantasies he’s gone this far, drunk the blood that he’s been so desperate to spill and found it wonderful, found it sweet – but this is too sweet. Chocolate. He lets out a triumphant cry, lowering himself towards her mouth, tilting his ear to listen, one arm lightly resting on her chest, the other holding the knife behind him. Then, as he searches for her breath, a blow to his ribs takes all his away.
A split second later something strikes him across the back of his neck, sending him tumbling off Katie and into the side of the cupboards. It had been a trap. He was the target all along. The thought fills him with a sudden strength and a murderous rage. He tries to get up, but he’s kicked again and this time there’s screaming, a man’s voice he half-recognises, repeating the very desires that are lighting a fire in his own mind: ‘I’m going to tear you apart, dig your eyes from your sockets, rip your head from your shoulders.’ He feels for the knife, but it’s no longer in his hand. Just as he’s thinking about punching his way out, his arm has been flipped over and squeezed against the floor, his other tucked underneath him and his face pressed against the tiles. In front of him, all he can see is something that looks bizarrely like the tip of a carrot.
He tries to roll, but there’s a boot pinning him down and that voice again, shouting words in a wall of rage that he can’t translate, or even separate. He realises he’s outmatched and it terrifies him.
Nathan feels his muscles slacken, certain that this is where it ends for him. He’d wanted it to be tomorrow, to disappear in his own, quiet way, but now he knows he’ll soon be carefully arranged on this very floor, turned into another cartoon for people to photograph and investigate.
He’s slipping away, drifting somewhere he hopes will be more bearable, when a woman’s voice cuts through everything.
‘Don’t kill him!’
It’s Katie. He wants to tell her to stop. He wants to tell her to run. But now she’s screaming. He hopes she’s somehow found his knife and will be able to defend herself. But he can’t hear her moving above the sound of his attacker panting and waiting to land another blow. Then, suddenly, he is released and Katie’s voice floats above him.
‘It might be Nathan,’ she says. ‘It might be Nathan.’
Twenty-Five
‘What an all-fucking-mighty mess,’ Superintendent Taylor barks as he climbs into the front passenger seat of the police car and tosses his hat on
the dashboard.
Katie is slumped against the door in the back. She doesn’t respond. She’s not sure she can. Her head is throbbing, but she’s not telling anyone that, either. She knows something terrible has happened, something that should have marked the end of her life, but she can’t come to terms with it yet. The problem is, if she’s going to use it to her advantage, she needs to find a way to talk. She pictures the moment she’d found Nathan standing on the doorstep of his house in Scotland; she pictures the moment she’d found her dad standing on the doorstep of their family home, both distant, silent, lost; both so removed from the person she knew was trapped inside.
Her still-throbbing head starts to tip forward, and she desperately wants to fall to the floor, to curl up and search for somewhere, anywhere, where she doesn’t have to do anything, to think of anything ever again. Then, just as she’s convinced it’s going to happen, she hears Nathan’s voice beside her, strong and alive.
‘Have you got Markham’s description out to the press?’
‘We’ve done what’s necessary,’ says the superintendent. ‘His and Christian Radley’s images are being circulated.’ He reaches for his hat, picking it off the dashboard, dusting it down.
‘Why the hell are you involving my brother in this?’ says Nathan, pushing himself between the two front seats. ‘We know it wasn’t him.’
‘Do we?’
‘I worked the evidence and played it through in my mind. The killer is older, less able, overweight—’
‘Like Markham, yes,’ the superintendent cuts him off. ‘I’ve never failed to be amazed by your imagination.’
‘That imagination has built your fucking career!’ screams Nathan.
‘And it’s going to end it,’ Superintendent Taylor says calmly, ‘if I don’t recognise the conflict of interests here.’
‘What about what Katie saw? The boots. His trousers.’
‘That doesn’t prove anything.’
Nathan hesitates. ‘Christian was always pristine.’
‘Detective Inspector Rhodes,’ says Superintendent Taylor, twisting the rear-view mirror to catch her eye in the fast-fading evening light, ‘has passed on what you were able to tell us about Christian.’ He twists the mirror back, lining it up with Nathan. ‘Your brother appears to have pulled the same trick as you: changing his name and vanishing from our systems twenty years ago.’
Nathan opens his mouth as if keen to dismiss this as impossible, then closes it again, brow furrowing. ‘You couldn’t find his wife or child, either?’
‘No trace at all, of him or his family.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ says Nathan, with the faintest smile. ‘I guess the three of us were always the same.’
‘Three?’ says the superintendent, twisting in his seat to look directly at Nathan for the first time. ‘Please don’t tell me you have another brother?’
‘My mum,’ says Nathan, all trace of the smile gone.
‘And she hid her identity from the authorities too?’
‘From the world.’
The superintendent now twists to try and see Katie, but she’s slipped back down in her seat.
‘I changed my identity to protect my brother,’ Nathan continues, ‘so that he didn’t follow me into this. I lied to him. I said I was using my acting skills to work undercover and as a result had taken on another life. I said the people I was up against would think nothing of taking out whole families if my cover was blown. I told him it was enough for us to stop seeing each other. He obviously decided to do more.’
‘Don’t tell me you believe this?’ says the superintendent, stretching further to try and see Katie, the strain registering on his face.
She rubs the back of her head, pretending not to have heard the question. She’s still not ready to reveal Nathan’s true motivation for ending contact with his brother, to reveal the darkness that – she reminds herself of the poor homeless man whose identity Nathan had taken – had maybe already led him to take a life. She fears she’s going to be asked again, to be forced to take sides as she was when she first started working with Nathan and so many of her colleagues expressed their doubts about his unusual methods. However, in keeping his secret, hadn’t she already chosen a side?
‘When has he ever let us down?’ she asks, pushing herself up, her leg pressing against Nathan’s.
‘How about the day he ran off without any explanation?’
‘Only because he pushed himself to the brink of madness for us,’ she snaps back, causing her head to throb.
‘The brink?’ the superintendent replies, raising one eyebrow.
Katie forms a fist and opens her mouth.
‘I’m going to forgive you your previous outburst,’ says the superintendent, getting in ahead of what would have been another. ‘Because of what you’ve just been through. But I’m sick to death of us having this conversation. What the hell happened to the model detective who followed the process and always had everything in line, who was just like her dad?’
‘You know nothing about my dad,’ she says, then wishes she hadn’t, remembering that she too might not know him as well as she’d once believed.
A knock at the window, and DS Peters leans in. She can just make out a mobile phone in his hand. ‘Sorry for interrupting, sir,’ he says. ‘But we’ve done an initial background check and Markham is who he says he is.’
‘Hallelujah!’ says the superintendent, slapping the dashboard. ‘Finally, somebody is telling the truth.’
‘The truth about who he is,’ says Nathan, still leaning between the two front seats. ‘But it’s what he’s done you should be worried about.’
Superintendent Taylor gives a dismissive grunt. ‘There are things he couldn’t have known.’
‘And things my brother couldn’t have known, either,’ says Nathan, lifting a hand to slap the left side of his chest.
Katie flushes as she makes the connection, her fingers twitching as she fights the urge to touch the location of the two moles.
‘I imagine that’s becoming increasingly common knowledge,’ says the superintendent, and Katie’s flush deepens.
The two men lock eyes, and Katie wonders if she’s going to need to intervene. She can see that DS Peters has already pulled back a little.
‘We need to find a way to work together,’ she says, resting her hand lightly on Nathan’s shoulder.
‘What I need,’ says the superintendent, ‘is people who can follow orders. I told you not to leave him alone.’
‘I left him locked in my flat.’
‘And yet, here he is. How is that, exactly?’ He looks at Nathan again.
Katie follows Nathan’s gaze over the superintendent’s shoulder to a row of cars, one of which is parked half up on the kerb.
‘How did Nathan’s brother get here?’ asks Katie, suddenly seeking to shift her boss’s attention. ‘If it was him. We should check for CCTV.’
‘We already are.’
‘And where has Markham gone?’ says Nathan. ‘If it wasn’t him. He must have put up a struggle. There must be evidence.’
Katie looks out the window at other members of the team moving in and out of the house, wearing the same white paper suits that she and Nathan have been given to replace clothes that have already gone off for analysis. Cringing, she wonders what they might find on Nathan’s borrowed clothes besides evidence of her shame.
‘Neither of you are part of this anymore,’ says Superintendent Taylor, popping open the door, the light flicking on above them again. Suddenly DC Alice Jones, the youngest member of Katie’s team, or what she’s slowly starting to accept is not her team, appears at the window.
‘We found some kind of journal on the bed upstairs,’ she says, lifting up a large bagged object to show the superintendent, before adding a belated, ‘sir.’
‘Wait there,’ he says, grabbing his hat and climbing out of the car.
He’s gone for several minutes, time in which the light in the car goes out and Katie and
Nathan say nothing, both focused on the window to see what’s going on outside. DC Jones, DS Peters and Superintendent Taylor are huddled together at the back of the forensics van, deep in conversation. When the superintendent returns he’s holding the same evidence bag and is wearing a glove on one hand. This time he climbs into the driver’s seat.
‘You’d better look at this,’ he says, pulling open the bag. It looks like it originally had a red cover, but is now covered in hundreds of doodles, all in black ink, all with jagged edges and with the nib digging deep into the card. Katie has pushed herself ahead of Nathan this time, squeezing between the front seats, and so it’s only when she turns to ask him if he has any idea what the book is, that she sees he’s fallen back and covered his face with his hands.
‘Mine,’ he says, his voice muffled by more than just his fingers. ‘It’s my book. I wrote it when I couldn’t cope, when it all got too much.’ He lowers his hands and stares at Katie. ‘Please don’t let anyone else read it.’
‘It’s evidence,’ she says, softly. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’
‘No,’ says Nathan, in weak acceptance, eyes closing as though trying to shut out the world. When they open a couple of seconds later, they’re stretched wide and he’s moving forward, finger jabbing. ‘Evidence! That’s exactly what it is! It’s evidence of how Markham knew all the things he couldn’t have known! I talk about the doctor in there, about how he failed us. I talk about Mum, about the drink, about the pills, about what she said in her note. I talk about Christian, about the difference, the birthmark. I talk about beans and sausage; I talk about swirls; I draw a load of fucking swirls!’ He traces one more in the air ahead of him, round and round towards the centre. ‘I talk about my fears, my desires, my fantasies…’ He’s not holding back now, everything is coming out, and Katie suddenly wants to slow him down, or shut him up in case he says too much. Perhaps spotting the concern on her face he appears to realise this himself, visibly paling and wrapping his arms across his front, holding his confession in. ‘Nightmares, as well,’ he adds, and Katie’s wondering if he’s written about imagined murders, possibly even murders similar to those they’re investigating now.