by Nick Hollin
He feels the urge to run but he has no idea where he’s heading. There is a maze of corridors ahead with no signs. He wonders about calling out to Katie, but he doesn’t want to warn Markham of his location. If he had a phone he would ring her; if he could find a member of staff he would ask for the location of her dad’s room. He feels like a child lost in a supermarket, trying to be brave but on the verge of tears.
Suddenly he hears a scream. He tells himself it could be anybody, but something in his core knows that it’s Katie. He runs towards the sound, bouncing off the wall as he takes a corner too fast. And suddenly he’s not alone: a young man is moving quickly alongside him, and this man seems to know where he’s heading. They don’t say anything to each other, saving their breath for a huge flight of stairs ahead. At the top, Nathan feels his legs start to give way, but still he carries on, following the young man who he spots is wearing a polo shirt bearing a logo matching the one on the sign out the front. As they sprint down a seemingly endless corridor he pictures Katie laid out in a pool of blood, her limbs twisted, her beautiful face pale and still. He shakes his head, forcing the vision away and, as they skid to a stop in the doorway of the furthest room, the reality presents itself. Katie is standing over by a table in the corner of the room, almost fully obscuring whoever is sitting beside her. The only thing Nathan can make out is an arm, hanging down and horribly slack. He rushes forward, almost tripping over the edge of a thick rug, desperate to see whose body it might be.
She steps out of the way, and he looks down at the elderly man slumped over the small table, his head twisted sideways, his left cheek flat on the surface. Poorly arranged above his pale, skinny face is a shoulder-length blonde wig. In front of him, at the centre of the table, is an empty container of pills. The whole scene is almost exactly as Nathan remembers it: the pale blue blouse and loose black trousers; the tights with the heel missing on one side; even the smell, the distinctive, sweet scent of his mum’s perfume. And then there are the final details: the note on lined paper, words written in bold, and a photo he’d somehow overlooked before, as if it wasn’t there, as if it couldn’t be there. He starts to blink over and over, his brain unable to process the information, or perhaps over-processing, adding things that cannot be, blending two different moments in time.
‘It’s impossible,’ says the young man he’d run to the room with, and all Nathan can do is nod his agreement. ‘I was here half an hour ago. Mr Rhodes was sitting by the window. He was fine.’
‘He still is,’ says Nathan, finally taking in the additional details; the very things that were missing from the day he’d found his mum, even though he’d prayed for them over and over.
Katie spins round to look at him with tear-stained eyes turning to anger. ‘What the hell are you—?’
‘He’s breathing,’ he says, cutting her off, still feeling disconnected from the scene as he continues to struggle with how so much of it, just as the young man next to him had suggested, is impossible. He sees a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye as Katie reaches down towards her dad’s neck, fingers fumbling for a pulse. Then she’s pulling him up and off the chair, falling onto the floor with the big man on top of her. It looks – remarkably, appallingly – as Nathan imagines it must have done when he’d grabbed his mum twenty years ago to the very day. Only there’s movement here; the old man, who Nathan can now see looks a lot like his daughter, lets out a sound, and his eyes slowly open, settling flatly on a point somewhere in the far corner of the room.
‘Dad!’ cries Katie, pressing her face against his, soaking him in tears that he clearly doesn’t understand. ‘Oh, thank God!’
‘No,’ says Nathan, as he takes a step back, staring at the single object on the desk that shouldn’t be there, that cannot be there no matter how carefully he works things through in his head. ‘Not God.’
Thirty-Two
The two of them are slumped down on yet another step. It’s narrow and their legs are touching. Katie wonders if Nathan’s even noticed. He’s clearly churning things through in his mind, troubled by something he’s yet to explain. She has her own questions, her own impossibilities – like how could Markham have got to the care home ahead of them and found time to arrange such an elaborate scene? He can’t have set it up in advance, not if the young care home worker had seen her dad just half an hour before. And what was the meaning to all of this? Is the final, terrible message soon to be delivered?
She didn’t think she could hate Markham any more; she’d happily take a knife to his neck and draw it slowly across while smiling and staring into his cold dark eyes. Fuck the law, there’s no place for that here. Now she totally understands what led her dad to kill a man all those years ago, and she wants to go upstairs and tell him once again that she understands, that they’re – she hesitates as the feeling takes her – the same.
The moment she rises to her feet a voice barks across at her.
‘Are you insane, DI Rhodes?’
She sighs and doesn’t look up.
‘This is a mess, a diabolical mess, and you know full well who has to clean it up. It’s all right for you, running around with your mad little friend, finding bodies then fleeing the scene, but I—’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says, cutting him off and closing her eyes to feel the warmth of the sun on her forehead. She knows she’ll only get a few moments rest before the chase is on again. Unless they arrest her, physically prevent her from looking, she’ll be following this through to the end. No matter what. ‘I came here to try and save my dad.’ She finally turns and faces her boss’s rage. ‘Do you remember your old friend?’
‘Very well,’ he says. ‘I reckon I’ve been here more than you have.’ He’s said this proudly, shoulders back, but it’s clear he’s seen the change in Katie because he leans forward, face flushing, not with rage, but with something that almost makes him look human. ‘I understand you may have been right about Markham,’ he says softly. He pauses and casts a look up towards the second floor. ‘What on earth possessed your father to let him go?’
‘Possessed might be the right word,’ she says, following his gaze. She wonders if Superintendent Taylor has heard the whole of the story – how her dad threw a man from the top of a building – and she feels the tiniest fizz of excitement, believing there could be a way to keep it under wraps. Until, that is, she realises it doesn’t matter anymore because her dad will always be held to account for a greater crime: as the man who let ‘The Cartoonist’ go free.
‘This needs to stop,’ says the superintendent. ‘Today.’
‘I think it was always intended to,’ says Katie.
‘Why the hell didn’t you tell us what you were doing?’
‘We were warned. He said he had Christian.’ She hesitates, looking at Nathan, motionless on the step ahead. ‘And he left proof that he has him, back in my flat.’ She knows she’s giving away far more than the location of the fingers; that her colleagues will wander through that poky little place, littered with the evidence of a life of which she’s not proud, and find the room that will likely guarantee the end of her career.
‘What the hell is Markham up to?’ says Superintendent Taylor, turning away, hat as always tucked under his arm. ‘And more importantly, where is he?’
‘He could be anywhere. He’s already doing the impossible. There’s no way he could have got from High Wycombe to here and arranged that hideous display before we arrived.’ She keeps her back to the building, trying to shake off the memory of the moment she’d found her dad.
‘Hideous indeed,’ says Taylor, a hand tightening on sharply pressed trousers.
‘He had to be near Tracy’s house,’ she continues, ‘to know when to text to tell me he was watching, and no doubt enjoying, the unravelling of his own daughter’s life once again.’
‘He could have used a camera. We’re currently checking the neighbour’s house.’
‘Maybe,’ she says, sensing Nathan’s discomfo
rt on the step below her. And it’s his discomfort that’s now holding her back, keeping her from sharing her strengthening belief that she knows exactly how ‘The Cartoonist’ could be in two places at once. Yet again, she finds she’s deceiving her colleagues, deceiving her boss, and risking lives in doing so. Yet again it seems she cannot resist.
‘Any joy on the family doctor?’ she asks.
‘We’ve discovered he was formerly a surgeon.’
‘What sort?’
‘Plastic. Supposedly a good one, too, but the misdiagnosis and death of Nathan’s father, a family friend, seems to have put an end to his career. He went to live abroad, in the South of France and then Spain, before disappearing off the radar completely a decade ago.’
Katie releases a long breath. The pieces are almost all in place now, and yet there’s something simple eluding her amid all the bluff and deception from Markham. At moments like these on previous cases she’s had a chance to talk to Nathan and together they’ve found the solution, but he’s the very last person she would talk to now. She looks across, feeling a mix of frustration and sympathy for the man sitting on the step, legs tucked up close to his chest, head pressed into his knees. She’s about to turn away and speak to her colleagues when his head shoots up and he looks at her with such a glare that she stumbles back and almost topples off the edge of the steps. She’s certain he’s seen it too, worked through the few facts that are known to them and come to the same unbearable conclusion.
‘It’s impossible,’ he says, now facing the superintendent.
‘What is?’ asks Taylor, as alarmed by this interruption as Katie.
‘It’s the photo, you see,’ he says, seeming not to care that they don’t see, or that his voice is barely a whisper. ‘Markham couldn’t possibly have known about that. Nobody knew about it.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asks Katie, unable to soften the question, wondering, hoping, that she’s somehow read it all wrong. ‘The photo on the table up there?’ She jabs a thumb over her shoulder at the building behind. ‘You said that was nothing, meant nothing.’ If she hadn’t been distracted by her dad, by the relief of finding him alive, she might have spotted the lie. It would have been there in Nathan’s horror, the very horror she’s seeing now. He draws his legs in even further and wraps his arms around them as if suddenly cold. And he does now seem to be shaking, despite the warmth of the midday sun. ‘I’m sure you’ve figured out why your dad was dressed up like that.’ He pauses, but neither takes the chance to draw a breath. ‘And Markham got it almost exactly right. Including the note with “So sorry to have left you alone”.’ He starts to shake his head violently. ‘But it’s the photo. The photo is an impossibility.’ He looks up at her now, his eyes wide and once again childlike, desperate for understanding. ‘I took it away the moment I found her in the kitchen. I slipped it into my pocket.’
‘It was a photo of your brother and your dad,’ says the superintendent. ‘Might it have been a warning? You said he’s being held.’
‘It wasn’t Christian in the photo. It was me. Just me. That’s why I couldn’t leave it there for my brother to discover. It was madness, I know, an overreaction, but I couldn’t bear to think of Christian believing he’d been excluded, not right at the end. I didn’t even dare to write about it in my journal, so Markham couldn’t have known, he couldn’t…’
‘Is it exactly the same photo?’ asks Katie, inching along so she can get a better view of Nathan.
‘No. I burnt the original,’ he says, instantly reminding Katie of the inscription in the children’s book from her mum. ‘Every time I looked at it I could see Mum lying there. Or Dad with his arm around my shoulders, strong, unbreakable, the man I always wanted to be.’ She watches Nathan’s shoulders rise and fall as he sucks in a long and unsteady breath. ‘But the photo Markham left was close enough, close enough to tell me he must have been there the day Mum died.’ He lifts his head again, shielding his eyes from the sunlight then turning to Katie. ‘I do this, or whatever it was I used to do, because of that day, because I simply hadn’t seen it coming. But what if it was all a lie? What if she had no intention of taking her life?’
‘You’re suggesting Markham killed her?’ She can’t help but shake her head, can’t help but dismiss his theory, while risking giving her own away. ‘Your mum died more than fourteen years before he started working for you and your brother.’
‘But what if that’s why he started working for us? He wanted to come back, to revisit the scene of his crime, to see us, to see what he’d done. He’s most likely been watching his daughter, too, and not just over the neighbour’s wall.’
‘What’s the connection, though?’ says Superintendent Taylor. ‘What could he have had against your family back then? It seems a terrible coincidence.’
Nathan shrugs. ‘The novels? Maybe he knew. Maybe he blamed her for putting those ideas in his head, same as he blamed Katie’s dad for giving him the opportunity to act them out.’
‘What novels?’ asks Superintendent Taylor.
Katie looks across at Nathan, and he nods assent. ‘Nathan’s mum was J.M. Priest.’
The superintendent’s surprise is clear, and he stands in stunned silence for a moment before slowly shaking his head. ‘It’s seems like too much coincidence that you two were linked to this guy all the way back then.’
‘I agree,’ says Katie, biting her lip and turning away, the growing sense of certainty in her own deductions threatening to overwhelm her. She needs distance, some time and space to breathe and think, and she needs to do what she was intending to do before: to go and hold her dad and tell him how proud she is of him, how much she loves him.
She’s heading towards the open door, no hesitation, no explanation, when her phone starts to ring. She pulls the mobile out of her pocket, somehow hearing the voice before she’s even accepted the call.
‘That were cruel of me, lassie.’ She turns back towards the others, pressing the speakerphone button, with an expression on her face that tells them they need to shut up and listen. ‘I think I might have got a little carried away. But your dad didn’t seem to mind. Not much of talker, to be honest. Being a murderer must have taken its toll.’
Katie is surprised at how calm she sounds when she speaks. ‘The greater crime was letting you go.’
‘I’ll admit that has turned out badly for a few people. Tracy were convinced that Alex Maclean was the evil one, that he had a kind of control over me. I guess kids are a bit blind to their parents’ faults. A bit like you, eh, Nathan, not seeing what your mum was really like. Funny how she was happy to share her darkest thoughts with millions, and to make millions from it, while leaving you to think you were all alone.’
Katie turns to stare out across the vast expanse of lawn to the surrounding trees, desperately trying to find the calm of before. She has at least managed to maintain her professionalism, helped perhaps by the proximity of her boss, who’s moved in close to the phone, hat in his hand. Perhaps she’s also been helped in a strange way by Markham, because for all the terrible things he’s saying his voice has remained flat and emotionless throughout, like they aren’t his words. Like he’s possessed.
‘What do you want?’ she says.
‘I want the two of you, to be honest. I want you to become who you were always destined to be. You’re just like your dad, Katie, you want to take the law into your own hands and—’
‘You’re right,’ says Katie, cutting him off, certain Markham was going to reveal the truth about Maclean’s death to the superintendent, ‘like my dad – I’m very keen to do what’s best for your family.’
‘Whereas Nathan…’ Markham starts up again, his voice uncertain for just a moment, ‘Nathan wants to live out the pages of that wonderful journal of his I found. God, it’s so much better than his mum’s work. It feels so real. And, of course, it could so easily be real.’ He draws in a long, nasal breath. ‘Come on, Nathan, you wouldn’t believe how liberating it feels.’
‘Is that what you do it for, the liberation?’ says Katie.
‘That and the immortality. You’ve seen the press. Hell, you started the press. I’m “The Cartoonist”! I don’t have to hide away anymore, no name, no family, no reason to hide who I am. It’s all out there now for the whole world to enjoy.’
‘Are you going to come out for us to enjoy?’ she says before she can stop herself, the blood-soaked image of a slashed throat flashing up in her mind, her hand on her neck where the chocolate icing had been, where the knife might have been. And then there are the girls, and Felix and little Tate, still smiling, still fuelling her rage.
‘That’s more like it, detective,’ says Markham. ‘What about Nathan, though? Not hearing anything from him. You sure he’s okay? He doesn’t look too good, slumped down on the steps like that.’
Katie and Taylor’s eyes are scanning the trees in the distance, but her instinct tells her they’re wasting their time.
‘I hope that poor lad doesn’t go the way of his mother. Nasty business that was, to leave two young ’uns without so much as a word. Well, without those few words and a silly little photo. I mean, it’s fair enough if an individual like myself decides it’s time for Mum to go, but…’
Katie is only aware that Nathan’s risen when she feels the phone being snatched from her hand.
‘How did you know about that photo?’