Dark Lies

by Nick Hollin

  ‘There were never any other suspects? No footprints, no fingerprints, no DNA?’

  ‘None of the first two, but I imagine plenty of the latter. We’ve not gone back to check it, though. We had no need. We found the right guy.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ asks Nathan, a sudden and unwelcome interruption that brings a glare from Katie.

  ‘Because we caught him at it,’ he snaps, ‘with another little girl.’

  Katie allows a moment of silence, as she has done in so many formal interviews, finding the perfect point at which to change direction. She studies her hands, considers the scratches and scrapes she’s received in the last few days. ‘Are you ready to tell me the truth now?’ she says finally, calmly. ‘Trust me, it doesn’t need to go any further.’

  ‘What the hell are you on about?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Malcolm, but I think it’s time.’

  Barclay opens his mouth to protest, then closes it again. His broad shoulders rise and fall, sinking lower with every breath. ‘They said you were like him, always following every rule, but never knowing when to stop, always pushing for the answer…’

  ‘No matter the cost,’ says Katie, nodding for him to continue.

  ‘I did it for Simon,’ he says eventually. ‘And for you. You were everything to him.’ He reaches for his tea, but his hand stops short. ‘Your dad and I went there on a hunch; he always had such good instincts. We got separated looking around the farm, and when I walked into the grain barn and saw your dad holding the girl, I thought he’d just untied her and that monster had got away. But then he nodded up towards a metal gantry by the roof. “Call it in,” he said. “One man. Dead.” I asked him if he was sure, and this time he looked towards the ground outside the window. I didn’t bother to go and check if he was right. I asked if he’d fallen, and your dad just shook his head. I couldn’t believe it. Or rather, I could believe it because of the way he’d been talking in the days before. The death of Emma Pritchard, a girl the same age as you, had done something to him, made him… different.’

  ‘What about the second girl?’ says Katie, feeling the need to move things along. ‘She must have kept quiet too.’

  ‘She’d been drugged, and only came round a few minutes later.’

  ‘By which time you’d agreed to make up a story?’

  ‘Listen, I don’t feel any guilt about it. The guy deserved to die. He would have killed Tracy, there can be no doubt. And he had previous, plenty of it: violence, drug use, assault, even rape of a minor.’ He catches her eye and tries to summon up a smile. ‘I think your dad used to meet up with her sometimes.’

  Katie nods but doesn’t say a word, her hand coming up to her throat again, her fingers following the line of an imaginary necklace.

  ‘We both used to get Christmas cards,’ Malcolm Barclay continues. ‘I guess they stopped when she wanted to stop thinking about it and move on with her life. Which is a good life from what I can tell, from my own enquiries.’

  ‘So you know where she is now?’ asks Nathan.

  ‘I do. She’s got a wonderful family. Two lovely girls.’

  Both Katie and Nathan look at each other at the same time, eyes wide, mouths partly open, as if about to say something but not daring to do so. Malcolm pushes himself forward in his seat.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ he asks. ‘What haven’t you told me? Does this have something to do with his brother?’ He looks across at Nathan, eyes narrowing.

  ‘No,’ says Katie, with a calming gesture. ‘I promise you this is purely to do with my dad. It’s just,’ she shakes her head, ‘we couldn’t help thinking… when you hear about a young woman with two kids…’

  Malcolm sits back in his chair, still not looking convinced but less agitated than he was before.

  ‘Somebody needs to catch that monster,’ he says, his eyes not leaving Nathan.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve seen in the press,’ says Nathan, holding his stare. ‘But that monster is not my brother.’

  Katie worries for a moment that he’s about to give the game away, but he appears to have pulled himself back under control and the only damage done is to a biscuit he’d been holding out of politeness that is now a pile of crumbs in his palm.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could give us Tracy’s address?’ she says.

  ‘No,’ says Malcolm, firmly. ‘She took on a new identity and a new life. Nobody is supposed to know what she went through. I’m not even sure her husband does.’

  ‘We will be discreet,’ says Katie, trying not to let the desperation seep into her voice. ‘We’ll wait until the husband and kids are out. Or maybe we could ring ahead?’

  ‘I don’t have the number. Look, I’d love to help you, but—’

  ‘Please, Malcolm.’ She waits for the tears to come, wiping her nose with her sleeve. ‘I promised him; I promised Dad I would find her and see for myself that she was okay, that some good had come out of what happened. And he understood. It made him smile. Such a rare thing. Such a beautiful thing.’

  Malcolm Barclay smiles too. There’s plenty about him that reminds her of her dad: a big man, a strong man with a good heart. He looks across at the family photos again, then back at Katie.

  ‘You swear you won’t let her see you?’

  ‘I swear,’ she says, placing a hand on her chest, covering the moles that started all of this.

  He gets up and leaves the room, returning a couple of minutes later with a Post-it note and a hastily written street name. He passes it to her, then places his hand on her shoulder, giving it a squeeze. She looks up, and he looks away. ‘Say hello to your dad from me. I’ll try and make it across there very soon.’

  They thank him and leave, walking down the long gravel drive and back to the car. It has started to rain heavily now and they both make a show of wanting to get out of it, picking their pace up, aware that they’re being watched from the living room window.

  * * *

  Back in the car they’re forced to endure a seemingly endless drive out of the estate, passing over the speed bumps and sticking to the twenty-mile-an-hour limit. Once clear of that, Katie hammers her foot to the floor.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine,’ she says over the scream of the engine.

  ‘Markham can’t have known we’d get Tracy’s address,’ says Nathan, his body shifting backwards and forwards in the seat, as if that might help the old car to go faster. ‘Or make the possible connection.’

  ‘No,’ says Katie, then again for reassurance. ‘No.’ Her driving is reckless, but they’re making good time. Then, suddenly, she takes her foot off the pedal. ‘What if the address was what Markham needed? What if he’s using us to find out where Tracy lives?’

  ‘I don’t think he needs us to help him with any information,’ says Nathan, gesturing for her to pick up speed again. ‘That bastard already knows everything.’

  ‘This is going to be like Mark Brooks all over again,’ says Katie quietly, remembering the little girl’s face as she clung onto the doll. ‘Markham’s found a whole new way to torture.’

  * * *

  They reach the outskirts of High Wycombe in just over an hour and a half, and five minutes later, thanks to directions from her mobile, pull up outside the address Malcolm Barclay had written down. The house is a small semi with a neat front lawn and a people carrier in the drive.

  They rush up the pathway, passing a row of roses, and hammer on the door. Katie had thought about asking Nathan to stay in the car to avoid being seen, worried about how Tracy might react, but he was out of the car before she even had the chance to speak. Instead, she pulls out her warrant card, holding it up ahead of her so that Tracy might know from the outset that there isn’t a threat. There’s no response. She tries again and reaches forward to try to grab the handle, finding it locked. She presses her face up to the frosted glass, then steps out onto the front lawn to peer through the living room window, spotting no movement inside.

  ‘She might be out,’ says Na
than.

  They both look back at the car in the drive, then hear a key in the lock. Katie moves in front of Nathan and lifts her card again. She’s so tired she’s struggling to hold it there, almost as much as she’s struggling to hold her smile.

  The door opens and a petite blonde woman of around forty-five peers past the edge of the door. Katie can’t help but stare, carried back all those years to the time she’d seen her dad with this same person, then just a girl. She remains silent, only vaguely aware of Tracy’s eyes flicking from her to Nathan and back again. It’s only when Tracy takes in the warrant card that her face drops.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she says, lifting a hand to her mouth. ‘Not the children!’

  ‘No,’ says Katie, snapping out of her daydream. ‘It’s nothing like that. And I’m so sorry if we startled you. As you can see I am DI Rhodes, and this is my colleague, Nathan—’ She cuts herself off before it emerges. ‘My dad was a policeman, DS Simon Rhodes. You perhaps know him from a few years back?’

  The door has swung open further, revealing dirty knees, a pair of gardening gloves and a mud-encrusted gardening fork which Tracy is holding out like a weapon.

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘My dad’s not very well. He hasn’t been for a while. We can no longer… communicate. One thing he did say was that he wanted to know how you are doing.’ Any guilt she might feel at yet another lie is soon eased by the relaxation on Tracy’s face.

  ‘You’d better come in.’

  Katie checks over her shoulder. It’s the middle of the day now and there’s nobody around apart from an elderly woman in the distance and a teenage boy being dragged along by a German shepherd. It’s not enough to let herself relax, even when she sees the interior and feels the warmth of the family photos lining the brightly coloured walls. Even when she sinks into the comfortable sofa and hears the soft purring of a cat sleeping in the corner. Why have they been led here? What interest is this to Markham after all these years? She finds herself searching the photos again, desperate for an answer to present itself. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Nathan is doing the same, sucking up the details, absorbing the life and no doubt processing all that information at a frightening speed. She hopes he’s going to be the first one to talk, that he’ll spot something that will send them racing off elsewhere, as far away from all this as they can possibly get. But it’s Tracy who speaks first, returning from the kitchen with a pot of tea and three mugs decorated with roughly painted animals.

  ‘I should have gone to visit him,’ she says. ‘But he told me not to. He said I should focus on…’ She lifts her arms and offers a broad sweep of the room. ‘Still, I wish I had done. I wanted to, and I definitely would have if I’d known he was ill.’

  ‘He would have understood,’ says Katie, instantly regretting her choice of tense. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘At least a decade ago. I remember you’d just got a promotion. He always talked about you when I saw him. He was so proud.’

  She smiles, and Katie tries to match it, but these are things about her dad that she didn’t know and will never hear about from him. She only vaguely remembers the promotion, and her dad had never expressed anything other than disappointment at her ignoring his advice and joining the force.

  ‘He was like a dad to me,’ Tracy continues, before holding a hand up to her mouth. ‘I mean, not like… he only dropped in every month or so.’

  More frequently than he did for me, thinks Katie, looking away to try and hide her distress. Her attention falls again on the photos in the corner, and she finds herself unable to shake off the sense that she’s close to something important. Climbing to her feet, she heads for a photo of a young girl that Katie had originally taken to be one of Tracy’s daughters. The closer she gets, the tighter the cold grip on her heart squeezes. It’s actually a photo of Tracy, she can see that now, and she can also see that hanging round the then teenager’s neck is a chain she suspects had a twisted fastening at the back. Worse still, there’s a resemblance she hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘I’m glad my dad was able to help,’ Katie says, fighting to keep her voice flat and calm. ‘Is yours not around anymore?’

  ‘No,’ says Tracy, failing to hide the shift in her own emotions. ‘He left when I was young.’

  ‘Went back up North?’

  ‘How did you know…?’

  ‘I thought I heard a trace of an accent in you,’ says Katie, forcing a smile.

  ‘That’s impossible. We moved down when I was a baby.’

  ‘My mistake.’ Katie moves across to a table full of photos, leaning forward and carefully making her way through each one. ‘Is he anywhere here?’

  ‘Mum wouldn’t allow it.’

  Katie doesn’t want to push too hard. She knows she’s already making Tracy suspicious of her. This woman is a survivor, has built a life far more stable and, she’s certain, more rewarding than her own. She could very easily, and selfishly, damage it by being too reckless and too desperate for answers. She knows now that this is what Markham will have so carefully worked out: the next stage of his plan. But perhaps she can resist.

  ‘There are no photos of him at all?’ It’s Nathan that’s broken the silence, leaning in close.

  ‘Why?’ Tracy’s voice tightens. ‘Why are you so interested in my dad?’ She’s retreating to the far side of the room, giving herself time and space to think, looking at Nathan properly for the very first time. Katie is waiting for the penny to drop, but there’s nothing.

  ‘Do you watch the news?’ she asks, already thinking she knows both the answer and the reason.

  ‘Why? Are you saying my dad’s been on there?’

  Katie’s thoughts are tumbling over and over. She wishes she didn’t have to do this, and again she wonders if she might just walk away, forget about it all and give up for once. She’s so caught up in the possibility that she misses Nathan moving across to the sofa. When she turns, she can see he’s holding up a remote control. He punches in the number for a twenty-four-hour news channel and of course the story of ‘The Cartoonist’ is there, headline news.

  Tracy stares at the screen for a few seconds, eyes not blinking, not moving an inch. Then she’s staggering away, folding her arms across herself, her back pressed up against the patio windows leading out to her garden. All the time she’s looking back at the screen, at the photos and at the banner headlines scrolling across the screen and spelling out the terrible crimes that have been committed. The photo used was of Nathan as he’d been a few years earlier, cut from an image of Katie’s investigations team. He’d stood apart, barely in frame; the reluctance to be there was written all over his face.

  ‘This is the man we’re after’s brother,’ says Katie, pointing at the TV and then at Nathan. ‘He is a criminal psychologist. He works with the police and is helping us to find both his brother and—’ She cuts herself off, realising there’s no need to continue. The image of Markham has already flashed up on the screen. It’s an old photo of a younger man, likely the only photo her colleagues could get their hands on. It might not be ideal for a public response, but Tracy’s is immediate.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ she says, grabbing at the curtain behind her as if that might hold her up. ‘Whatever you think he’s done.’ She turns her attention to Nathan. ‘He would never…’ Her breathing has quickened. ‘He promised me.’

  ‘Promised what?’ says Katie. ‘When?’

  Tracy spins suddenly, trying to get a look at the garden as if she’s heard a noise out there, her hands shaking uncontrollably against the glass. Katie wants to pull her close, but she can tell she’s petrified of everything and everyone.

  ‘Do you know what this will do to your father?’ says Tracy, with a desperate stare in Katie’s direction.

  ‘Please,’ says Katie. ‘We just need to know where he is.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replies, sinking down. ‘I haven’t seen him since…’ she pauses again, grips t
he curtain tighter, ‘since a long time ago.’

  ‘Perhaps your mother?’

  ‘My mother is dead.’ She sinks further so she’s curled into a ball, her arms wrapped around her legs, dragging them in. ‘But you’re wrong. He wouldn’t… He promised. He swore on his life it wouldn’t happen again. That’s why your father…’

  ‘What happened?’ says Nathan firmly when she doesn’t go on. ‘You have to tell us.’

  But she doesn’t speak. Nathan’s hands are stretched out towards Tracy, but Katie moves across and blocks his path, her mind suddenly clear – the way it always was when they were approaching a solution.

  ‘Your dad was there, wasn’t he?’ she says, unable to prevent a gasp as she finally recognises the truth. ‘He was in the barn the night you were attacked.’

  Tracy pulls her limbs in further; before she lowers her head to her chest she offers a single nod.

  ‘Did he attack you?’

  ‘No,’ she says, her voice childlike.

  ‘Who was the man that died?’ asks Katie.

  ‘Evil.’ She looks up suddenly, eyes wide. ‘Pure evil. He killed the other girl. It was like that bastard had control over Dad, could make him do whatever he wanted. Dad never actually touched me on that day, he just stood there like a zombie, like he couldn’t believe who he had become. He was never like that before. He was a good dad.’ The tears come again, and Katie needs to know more before she can console her.

  ‘How did Alex Maclean die?’

  Tracy visibly shakes at hearing the name. ‘Like they said,’ she manages eventually. ‘Your dad chased him up to the roof. And then…’ One hand comes up towards her ear, as if to try and block the sound she’s reliving. ‘There was a scream.’

  Katie has interviewed enough witnesses over the years to know when they’re holding back, and she knows she must push on, right to the end.

  ‘You heard more,’ she says.