Dark Lies

by Nick Hollin

  She throws water on her face, then, almost without thinking, starts to rub angrily at the chocolate icing on her neck. Even this past year, when she’s never been more desperate to make things right, to find a way to get the results she craves, she’s never tampered with or destroyed evidence. She’s always followed the process and never been anything less than the policeman she’d always thought her dad had been. But now… She closes her eyes and releases a breath that seems to empty her of far more than a lungful of air.

  Lifting her eyes to the mirror to check it has all been removed, she sees another version of herself reflected back. A second photo has been printed out and stuck up, this time of her from the early days, when she too looked younger, when she too could wear a smile. But that smile has been broken by a thick line of smeared chocolate icing running north to south across her lips.

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ says Nathan, and she turns to see him standing in the doorway. ‘What does that mean?’

  Katie starts to work through the possibilities, alarmed at how easily her mind settles itself to the task. Although this feels like the lowest point, she also knows this has moved them forward, towards the end, somewhere closer to a final understanding. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out her mobile, starting to punch in the only number she’s ever dialled of late. Then she looks at the photo of herself again and stops.

  ‘He’s warning us not to share what we’ve found here,’ she says, lifting a finger to her lips and mirroring the line on her image. ‘Did you see the other…?’

  He nods.

  ‘Maybe that will only happen if we don’t do what he wants.’

  ‘But it’s evidence,’ says Nathan, and she can see him on the fringes of the mirror. ‘It’s proof of Christian’s innocence.’

  ‘You know it’s not that,’ she says, looking down at the sink, seeing and feeling how her insides have been emptied out. ‘Not definitive. And until they’ve done the tests they’ll only have your word as to who the fingers in the kitchen belong to.’ As she says this she realises the same applies to her. But she’s finding the old trust now, shaping her thoughts and ambitions around it, even if those ambitions are forcing her to lie.

  ‘Why would he want them knowing about this?’

  She’s still staring at the sink, seeing more than the contents of her stomach. There’s the chocolate icing, too, evidence she has destroyed, and perhaps evidence of why she’s been so quick to come up with this need for secrecy. She looks away and considers her flat, sees the room with the door ripped off its hinges.

  ‘It would be the final straw,’ says Nathan, as if reading her mind. ‘If your colleagues discovered what you’ve got hidden here.’

  ‘Which might explain Markham’s need for silence,’ she says. ‘He wants us to keep working the case.’

  ‘Or he wants us to keep working alone, not trusting the others. Not trusting anyone.’ Nathan grabs her by the top of her bicep. ‘We need the others. We’ve always needed them. And right now they’re wasting time looking for the wrong man!’

  ‘Hang on,’ says Katie, lifting the phone again and typing in the same number.

  ‘Uncanny,’ says DS Peters, when the connection on the phone is made. ‘I was literally about to give you a call. I know you should be sleeping but I thought you might want to hear this.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He’s never been married. At least not under the name of Markham. And when we dug a little deeper, things didn’t stack up. The records aren’t so good twenty-five years ago, but it appears he did change his name at some point.’

  ‘So we don’t know if he has any living relatives?’

  ‘According to the neighbours he’s a loner. Doesn’t speak to them. Doesn’t speak to anybody.’

  ‘Markham is our man,’ says Katie.

  ‘Hang on,’ says DS Peters. ‘I know what you’ve been through, it was horrible, it was…’

  She can hear him swallow and finds herself feeling a greater discomfort for what she seems to have put him through.

  ‘But you didn’t actually see him attack you, did you?’

  The story is there – she’s formed it in a flash. It’s simple, simple enough to be believed. She only has to say that she saw more than the boots and the jeans after she’d been hit, that she caught a glimpse of him reflected in the television screen. The smack on the head will explain the confusion and the delay in the memory returning. And what harm could it do? It will simply steer the investigation in the direction she now knows is right, save her team time and effort in the background checks. Time that might even save Christian’s life. She lifts a hand to the back of her head, carefully touching the spot where she was struck. It’s just above the point where the chocolate lines crossed like barbed wire, just like the necklace she once saw in the hand of her dad.

  ‘Are you still there, boss?’

  She looks down at herself, wondering at the question. So much of her identity seems to have disappeared in this past year.

  ‘No,’ she says, firmly. ‘I didn’t see him. But there’s still plenty to suggest that it was Markham. He was holding the likely weapon when I arrived. And it happened in his house: a house that he insisted I travel to alone; a house from which he has disappeared, with no evidence of any kind of struggle.’ She’s also thinking of the carrots, cut up carefully on the side in Markham’s kitchen, so reminiscent of the fingers on the table behind her. ‘Are his prints on the journal?’

  ‘They are,’ says DS Peters. ‘Although they’re not on our system. He can’t have previous, name change or not.’

  ‘Or he simply hasn’t been caught.’

  Out of the corner of her eye she’d seen Nathan shift uneasily at the mention of his journal.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, finding strength in her voice and in her convictions. ‘You told me this was my case, mine to solve, and my instinct is telling me that it’s Markham. Find him and we find our killer.’

  ‘All right. It won’t be easy convincing the Super to focus our efforts on finding Markham. You know what he thinks. You know what he believes. Every bit as strongly as you. But it’s good…’ He pauses. ‘Good to have you sounding like your old self again.’

  ‘Ring me if you have anything new.’

  ‘Will do,’ says DS Peters, and they both hang up.

  She looks across at Nathan, who’s been standing close enough to hear every word.

  ‘This isn’t your old self,’ he says. ‘You would never have kept quiet. You’d have been scared of the court case, of the omissions, of the lies. I’m not even sure,’ he looks over her shoulder at the photo taped to the mirror, ‘that we’ve read this right. What if it’s not a warning of silence, but a prediction?’

  She holds his stare, feeling her hand rise to the back of her neck. ‘I’m trying to save your brother.’

  ‘Are you?’ he asks, as her hands start to rub at the skin.

  She turns her back on him and stares at the image, seeing her old self, a self whose intentions he would never have doubted.

  ‘What case were we celebrating?’ she asks.

  ‘Mark Todd, the guy who killed that homeless man in Isleworth.’

  ‘That’s right,’ says Katie, and it all comes back to her in an avalanche of detail. ‘It was snowing at his funeral.’

  ‘And we were the only ones there.’

  ‘That’s because his only friend was still being held by us. Taylor was convinced.’

  ‘Until you found the knife.’

  ‘And you found Mark Todd. God, no wonder we were smiling: Taylor looked like such an idiot.’

  ‘To us,’ says Nathan. Katie glances over her shoulder and can see he’s perched himself on the edge of the badly stained bathtub. ‘But he soon made it look like another one of his successes.’

  ‘We never did this for the plaudits,’ says Katie. She’s staring at the photo of herself again, her hair and make-up as immaculate as ever, although the shade of lipstick she always wore doesn’t look quite right. S
he moves her head from side to side, checking that it isn’t just an effect of the bare bulb hanging above them. And then she sees it.

  ‘Shit!’ she says, rushing out through the door and over to a desk on the far side of the living room, knocking over an empty wine bottle on the way.

  There’s a well-worn computer on top. She hits a button on the front of the base unit and it whirrs and whines as it starts up.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asks Nathan, moving up close behind and peering at the far-from-flat-screen monitor.

  ‘He used my printer for the photos. I could see the same faded strip that always shows.’ She leans to one side and considers the USB port. ‘But those photos weren’t on the computer. I…’

  ‘Removed them?’ asks Nathan, and she replies with an embarrassed nod.

  The prompt for a password appears in the middle of the screen and she hesitates before typing it in, fearing that Nathan will follow the movement of her fingers as they spell out his name and the name of the location where they first met. Over the years it had seemed to Katie like a place of birth, where she’d first started to be who she had wanted to be. She’s a long way from there now, but at least she’s thinking again, seeing things more clearly, making the connections that have eluded her in the past twelve months.

  ‘How does he know all this?’ she asks, loading up a search engine then checking the history. She gasps when she sees the last entry, quickly double-clicking to bring it back up. A route planner has been uploaded, showing an address in Yorkshire three hours’ drive away, according to the website.

  ‘We need to go,’ she says, already peeling off her paper suit and moving towards the bedroom where she’ll find more clothes for them both.

  ‘Do you think he’s made his first mistake?’ Nathan calls out.

  ‘We’ll find out when we get there.’

  Twenty-Eight

  Nathan sits up suddenly, causing Katie to flinch and send the car veering to the left. She pulls it back in line and looks across. Her head is throbbing, and the lights on the motorway seem painfully bright. Nathan stares out of the window, breathing deeply.

  ‘Where are we?’

  She’s about to tell him they’re ten miles out of London on the M4, before realising it’s probably not specifics he’s after, not having woken from twenty minutes’ sleep. ‘We’re travelling to the address that Markham left on my computer.’ A Google search on her phone had revealed nothing about the address, and she’d quickly decided against sharing with the rest of the team. DS Peters was already getting too protective and would never have kept the information to himself. The superintendent would have wondered why she was ignoring his orders, yet again.

  ‘What happened to the BMW?’ asks Nathan, and this time she doesn’t look across.

  ‘The same thing that happened to the flat.’

  ‘Paying for your dad’s care?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’d do anything for him, wouldn’t you?’

  She can’t see his expression clearly in the low light, but she can hear something’s different. When they’d got in the car and he’d slumped into the corner she’d likened it to a computer shutting down. Now it appears he’s rebooted.

  ‘You need to tell me,’ he says.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘About your dad.’

  ‘What about him? He’s ill. He’s not getting better.’

  ‘There’s something else. What are you protecting him from?’

  ‘We don’t talk about family, remember?’

  ‘And what the fuck do you think we’ve been doing these last two days?’

  ‘This is different.’

  ‘No, it’s not. If there’s a connection – and I think you know there is – then you have to trust me. My brother’s life is at stake here.’

  ‘It’s not trust,’ she says, realising the car’s been picking up speed and taking her foot off the pedal. She sucks in several deep breaths to help ease the flow of words past her lips, but all it does is make her feel light-headed. ‘You know all that running…’ She spins a finger in the air between them, then snaps it down when she spots her mistake. ‘The way you were shutting stuff out. Well, that’s what I’ve been doing, trying to keep my distance from thoughts, from possibilities that threaten… from everything.’

  She catches him glancing at the bag on the back seat again.

  ‘Maybe it’s time for us both to take a risk,’ he says. ‘I reckon I could now, now I know about Christian.’

  ‘What if that’s exactly what Markham wants? To push you over the edge.’

  ‘What I want,’ says Nathan, his words suddenly softening, ‘what I need, is to be able to trust you. We had that before, but it was professional. It wasn’t… it wasn’t enough.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ she says. Then, after a long pause: ‘The guy I’ve been talking to at my dad’s new home said the same, told me I needed to start sharing with people I cared about. The problem was, I first needed to admit there were people I cared about.’ She puts on the wipers, as if that’s the reason she can no longer see the road ahead. ‘I couldn’t even tell Dad how important he was to me, not back when he would have understood. And then there was you…’ She’s glad for the low light, offering only little glimpses of her troubled face. ‘I just left you in Scotland. Dumped you there without a word. Yeah, I was hurt that you hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me how you were suffering. But I knew. I wasn’t blind. Just like I saw the change in my dad thirty years ago. And yet I never asked him, and he never spoke about what he’d done, not until the Alzheimer’s had torn away the barriers.’

  ‘What had he done?’

  ‘The right thing,’ she says firmly. ‘The only thing he could have done. He had no choice, I’m sure of it.’ She slams a hand against the steering wheel. ‘Jesus, he was always so principled, always so strong.’ She looks across at Nathan. ‘At least as strong as you.’

  Nathan gives her a look of horror, starting to understand.

  ‘The right thing,’ she repeats.

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘Next to nothing. I haven’t really allowed him to. I went this evening, before I visited Markham.’ As she mentions his name she reaches for her throat, feeling a slight tackiness where she’s failed to wash off all the chocolate. ‘But I’ve only been to the care home maybe half a dozen times, and when I’m there I spend more time talking to Dad’s carer than Dad. He’s a good listener, more like a therapist really.’

  ‘Was that the guy you said you’ve been seeing?’

  ‘Until I fucked things up.’ She feels herself flush, remembering the drunken night she’d lost control. ‘Then I went back to the work again, taking refuge in other people’s nightmares.’

  ‘Only now those nightmares aren’t just other people’s,’ says Nathan.

  She sighs, realising she’s pushed the car back over the speed limit, as though if she drives fast enough she might leave her past behind. And maybe they could? They could carry on driving all the way to Scotland to live in a house and run rings around it. But what would it achieve?

  ‘You need to tell me what you know about your dad’s crime. It’s important.’

  ‘I don’t know much.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ says Nathan. ‘You couldn’t have resisted.’

  ‘I managed to resist looking into your past,’ she says, glaring across, ‘when I had similar doubts. And he’s my dad. He made me who I am. This will potentially change who I am. That’s why I’ve started to doubt my instinct. I mean, if I couldn’t even see the truth about my own dad.’

  ‘The truth is what you need,’ says Nathan. ‘Look at what I believed my brother had done.’

  Katie pushes herself back in the seat, feeling the acceleration rising again, wondering if it’s ever going to stop. Then she takes back control, lifting her foot from the pedal and allowing the car to cruise. ‘A twelve-year-old girl was murdered. She went missing from the back garden of her parents’
house. No witnesses, no clues, nothing to go on at all. Dad was part of the team that found the body. And then another girl disappeared, same age, same method. Of course, everyone was in a panic, desperate to find her before it was too late. My dad and his partner were good detectives. That’s what everyone who’s ever worked with them has told me. The trail took them to an old grain barn in the middle of nowhere. They found the girl alive, but the man who’d taken her died trying to get away.’ She pauses, takes a breath, grips the steering wheel tightly. ‘He had a fall.’

  ‘And your dad changed after that?’

  Katie nods. ‘He was never the same. I’d always been troubled, angry, withdrawn, but it was like he gave up fighting me, stopped trying to tell me what I was doing was wrong. Jesus, he wouldn’t even look me in the eye. I think he was just as cold with Angie, which is why she didn’t hang around long after.’

  ‘Angie?’

  ‘She helped raise me. She was okay, I suppose, did what she was meant to with feeding me and keeping me safe, but like I say, as soon as Dad changed, and as soon as I was old enough to take care of myself, she was off.’

  ‘What about your mum?’ asks Nathan, tentatively.

  ‘Left the world the same day I came into it.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  She shrugs. ‘It was far harder for Dad than me. I had no idea what I’d missed out on.’

  ‘What makes you think he took someone’s life?’

  ‘Because he told me.’ She runs a tongue across her drying lips. ‘“I murdered him”, that’s what he said. I looked across, and he was standing at the window staring down, his two hands pressed against it. I asked him what he was talking about, but he’d slipped away again. It wasn’t hard to figure out what case he was referring to – I’d seen how it had affected him at the time and I guess I’d always had my doubts.’ She pushes herself back in her seat, sucking in a long breath and lifting her chin.