by Nick Hollin
‘Cuffs,’ he says.
It takes her a moment to understand, even longer to agree. When the cuffs are on he starts to breathe more easily. He can only see the back of her head as she fumbles for something in the centre console, but it’s clear she’s changed. She’s always looked so immaculate, a reflection of the precision of her work, but now her hair is tangled and her clothes look like they’ve just been lifted from the floor.
‘I’ve got to phone in,’ she says, revealing what she’s been looking for. ‘I had no reception before, and if someone has been back at your house my colleagues will need to take a look.’
‘No!’ he says, reaching out. ‘No calls. No colleagues.’
He can picture them now, picking through his stuff, filthy fingers on previously spotless surfaces; touching his books, wondering, and perhaps laughing at the life he had been living; nothing dirty, nothing sharp, no temptations, no links to the past. Although it’s the future he’s thinking of now, of the perfect plan that must be protected at any cost.
‘I was alone,’ he says. ‘There was never anybody else.’ He checks the cuffs again and tests their strength as he sneaks another glance from under the blanket. It’s more than her appearance that is different; now she’s taking risks she would never have taken, acting out of desperation, not desire. He wants to understand what’s wrong. And he can’t resist the urge to help.
‘You have to promise me three things.’ He doesn’t wait for her to agree, but continues while his voice still holds firm. ‘First, you will not tell anyone about that place. Not now. Not ever. Second, I will be back there in three days whether or not I’ve helped you. Finally, you will never come and check on me again.’ As he waits for her reply he buries his head in the blanket, shutting out any trace of light.
Nine
They arrive in London at a quarter past five in the morning, having driven for more than six hours. For the final three Nathan has been sitting upright, staring out of the window like a child seeing the world for the first time. He’s wearing the clothes she found in the boot – handed over with a blush and no explanation – and the cuffs he’d demanded. He seems far more relaxed since she put them on him and agreed to his terms. She, on the other hand, is having trouble wrapping her head around what might happen when her three days are up, unable to ignore the lines of thickened skin she’d felt on his wrist.
Her most basic questions have gone unanswered so far. It makes her want to shake him. It makes her want to scream. What holds her back are the glimpses, the occasional moments when she glances in the mirror and sees who he used to be, sitting up straight, his eyes wide and alive, seeming to catch and process everything. This was how she’d seen him the first time they’d met; it was what had willed her to approach him.
‘I’m taking you to my flat,’ she says. It’s not what she wants to do; she wants to get on with the investigation straight away; if they have less than three days to try and catch this monster then every second counts. But they’ll have to wait to visit the crime scenes, and by making contact with her team she’s given up a number of freedoms already.
She’s been ordered into the station at 11 a.m, which means they’ll be staring at Nathan, wondering and drawing their own conclusions. Despite his betrayal, despite her fear of him, she feels protective.
‘You can get washed and dressed into clothes a little better fitting.’ She hates that there are more men’s clothes at her flat, but she’s not about to waste her breath on lies, not when all she has to do is look in the rear-view mirror to see how far they both have fallen.
They’re on the edge of the city now, fields replaced by streetlights, tower blocks, high walls, fences and graffiti. She remembers how he’d told her once that he loved the city at night, loved walking while it slept and soaking up the stillness. It reminds her of what she would have done as a child, sitting at her bedroom window, looking out at all the shimmering lights below, wondering when, and sometimes if, her dad would return.
They arrive half an hour later. She’s taken a couple of calls from DS Peters during the journey, keeping up to speed with developments, but remaining vague about her own movements. She feels herself getting sucked back into Nathan’s draw, like she needs to be fully committed to him, to his craziness, to his secrets, and everyone else is pushed to one side. It used to be a winning combination; now there are no such guarantees.
* * *
Her home is not a home. Six months back she was forced to move from her beloved riverside apartment in Kingston to a far cheaper part of town. Inside the poky seventh-storey flat are half-unpacked boxes piled up in the tiny entrance, food and plates spread across what little surface space is available in the kitchen and empty booze bottles that have even made it to the bathroom. She thinks of the other guys she brought back (before she started insisting on going to their places instead) and the look on their face as they took it all in in the light of day. If they’d known what she’d done for a living they might have asked questions, wondered where all the money had gone, but she’d kept quiet about that, kept quiet about everything, other than her desire for them to hurry up and leave.
She’s annoyed to find she cares far more about what Nathan thinks than any of those strangers. Not that she tries to explain. She can put on an act, just as he had done, pretend this is normal, pretend this doesn’t bother her, pretend that she doesn’t blame him for his part. Not that there’s any need; he seems totally oblivious as she guides him to the sofa still clinging on to the blanket she’d thrown over his cuffs, her every touch making him flinch.
She thinks for a moment about turning on the TV like she normally would on returning from work in the early hours and knowing there’s no chance of sleep, but she worries it might be the news, or a violent thriller, and what such scenes might trigger in Nathan.
Leaving him curled up in the corner of the sofa, Katie goes to the kitchen where she pulls out a tin of beans, pausing as she peels back the lid. She runs her finger along the edge, pressing far harder than necessary to test its sharpness and feeling the skin part, just as it might have done on her neck. She shakes off the image and puts on a plaster as the beans start to boil, then, apologising for not having anything else in the house, places the food in front of her guest, watching carefully for his reaction. The smile makes her skin crawl. It’s the same smile she’d seen when he’d finally let his mask slip, when they’d stood together over the headless body of Steven Fish. In all her years as a detective she’d never seen a crime scene like it, and when she’d turned to Nathan for support, that same terrible smile had appeared before her.
He eats slowly, his cuffed hands rising and falling, and when he’s done he pushes the plate away. He yawns, and she points a shaking arm at the bathroom, wondering what kind of monster she’s invited into her house.
While he’s in there she stands with one ear to the door, listening to him scrub at his skin. The water stops, and she hears him open the medicine cabinet. She’s about to knock, to ask what he’s up to, when he appears in the doorway holding out his hands, one of which contains two white pills.
‘To help me sleep,’ he explains, looking at her with heavy eyes that suggest he’ll need no assistance.
‘But we’ve only got a few hours.’
‘Before what?’
‘Before we begin.’
He nods and turns away, carefully placing the pills at the back of the sink.
When he’s in bed and wrapped up under her dirty sheets, she reaches for the light.
‘One more thing,’ he calls out, lifting his cuffed hands.
‘Of course,’ she says, reluctantly stepping forward and reaching into her pocket for the key.
Nathan shakes his head and jabs his hands towards the door. ‘I want that locked too.’
‘The key is just here,’ she says, gesturing towards it.
‘From the outside,’ he says, pulling the sheets up over his head.
* * *
As the lock clicks she fe
els the relief. At the same time, she’s telling herself to trust her instinct, to believe that it hasn’t left her entirely and that he’s still there somewhere behind that sickening smile. Yes, he had fooled her over the years, but there’s no way he could have done those things to those poor women, no way he could have walked all those miles to the nearest town to catch a bus to the nearest city, then hired a car, or jumped on a train for the long journey south. There’s no way he could have piped chocolate icing onto their bodies so that she, and she alone, would know she had to see him. There’s no way that those marks on his wrist were a sign of guilt, evidence of a struggle with internal demons, a struggle he had already lost. There’s no way that, when she takes him to the crime scenes, she’ll be taking him to places he’s already been. No way, she thinks, bending back her fingers till the knuckles pop.
Ten
Nathan sits in the interview room in a pair of cuffs, sweating and twitching like the guiltiest man who’s ever been invited in there. He’s wearing a pair of corduroy trousers, a pale blue sweatshirt and Nike trainers. All are in need of a wash but fit him well. He’d watched Katie retrieve them from the bottom of her wardrobe, a wardrobe that most of her other clothes hadn’t seemed to make it to. He’d wondered for a moment why she had men’s clothes in there and had felt the tiniest flutter in his chest, although that was nothing in comparison to the swirling in the pit of his stomach once he’d found out where they were going. He’d wanted to protest, to demand that she agree to a few more promises, but it was clear from the look on her face that the time for negotiation was over.
She’d maintained that same look in the hour it took them to eat breakfast, get dressed, trim his beard to an acceptable length and drive to the police station, and she’s wearing it still as she sits on the opposite side of the table from him. The one thing he had been able to insist upon was keeping the cuffs. On the way through the building several concerned-looking colleagues had pulled Katie to one side. He can’t for the life of him imagine what explanation she could have offered.
Back when he was working as a criminal psychologist, he only ever came to the station when he had to. He remembers how increasingly hard it had become to look into a killer’s eyes, knowing how close he was to being just the same as them. Worse even; most of them had motive, most had something to gain, most had limits to their imagination.
The room they’re in is small and dark, with no windows and a very thick door. It reminds him of the psychiatric units he’s helped to send so many people to, and of the times he’d considered finding a way to get himself locked up in there as well. What held him back was the thought of losing control, not of his freedom but of his story, and the one person who could never find out about his madness.
The man sitting next to Katie is in his late fifties, maybe older, well over six foot, with a broad nose, bad skin and a gut pushing his shirt to the limit. Nathan vaguely recognises him from the last time, but he can’t put a name to the face even though Katie introduced him when he entered the room. She’s leaning across the table towards him, and he can tell she’s on the verge of clicking her fingers in front of his face to get his attention. As in the old days, she is the exact opposite of him: all focus and no distraction from the job at hand. The difference is that this time he has no idea what that job might be.
‘Yesterday, a body was found in West Molesey,’ says Katie. ‘It was a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two, Sarah Cleve. I don’t suppose that name means anything to you?’
He shakes his head and pushes out a long breath. During the long journey down, and the hours lying fully awake in Katie’s flat, he’s had time to work through the possibilities, to try and figure out why Katie might have felt the need to hold back, and he’d managed to convince himself there was a personal connection, that the victim was going to be someone he knew. Unfortunately, the relief he now feels at that not being the case slips out in the faintest smile.
But when he looks up at Katie the smile disappears.
‘Her two little boys were with their father,’ she spits through gritted teeth. ‘And thank fuck they weren’t there. Thank fuck the neighbour found her. Thank fuck they couldn’t see her, because it was…’ She looks away, at the same time revealing a face he’d almost forgotten, a face that betrays both anger and unbearable sadness. It’s the face she would always adopt when standing over a body with him by her side, trying to figure out where they might go next. ‘It wasn’t pleasant,’ she continues, calming slightly and running a hand through her hair, but he’s already picturing the body of a thirty-eight-year-old mum, twisted and torn apart. He’s already calling on all the other images of bodies, real and imagined, that he has stored in his brain to make a collage of the perfect murder, not one inch of the flesh untouched, the insides out and spread across the floor.
Katie is looking down at her notepad. ‘We’ve just found the car. It was dumped at the Four Oaks Caravan Park on the outskirts of Henley.’
When she looks at him he can tell she’s searching for a reaction to this information. He hadn’t been expecting to have one, not now he knows the victim is a stranger, but the name triggers a memory which rushes into him without warning. Suddenly he can see all four members of his family squeezed inside a tiny CI Sprite caravan, their Volvo 240 Estate parked alongside. Bacon and eggs for breakfast, cooked on a stove outside. Long walks, early nights, games of chess and bedtime stories, barked orders, stifled giggles, secret pacts, a sense of security, a sense of eternity. Again, there’s nothing he can do to stop the smile spreading. Then he hears the screech of a chair, and he’s back in the room.
‘You know the place?’ asks Katie, leaning across the table so close he can smell the same soap he’d used to scrub his own skin earlier that morning. Distracted by this connection between them, he fails to respond immediately, and when he finally does, implored by Katie’s wide-eyed stare, it’s not the answer he’d intended to give.
‘No.’
‘You’re sure you don’t?’ she asks.
‘I’m sure.’
‘And you don’t know the woman?’
The images flash up again in his mind. He swallows hard, his feet shifting constantly under the table as he desperately tries to picture himself running circles round his house. But he feels so far away from there now.
‘I thought you were going to help!’
‘I’ll help when I can.’
‘Where were you the day before yesterday at around eight in the evening?’
Nathan can clearly see the truth of it now: she thinks he might be guilty. He realises it’s probably all his fault; he had warned her not to trust him and he knows his behaviour is strange. There’s also the way he was acting a year ago. He might never have shared his darkening thoughts and desires, but once he’d seen the body of Steven Fish, once he’d seen what losing control really looked like, he’d started to feel himself letting go. In that split second Katie spotted the change and saw him for what he really was. It was why she’d agreed to let him live in isolation, why she’d agreed to break off all contact without even saying goodbye. She’d probably believed him capable then, but hoped he might never act on his impulses. Now she’s dragged him back, believing that’s exactly what he’s done. Nathan knows there’s every reason for her to suspect him, and yet, despite it all, despite his behaviour, despite knowing himself and how close he has come to committing such a crime, he feels utterly betrayed that she’s questioning him like this. That she of all people can think he would ever let the monster inside him win.
‘I was at home,’ he snaps, ‘where I’m returning very soon.’
‘I thought you came down to help us find this monster?’ This time it’s the other policeman speaking.
‘So did I,’ Nathan says quietly, pulling at his cuffs.
‘Have you ever seen me naked?’ asks Katie.
It’s a question that takes him by surprise, and he can’t quite look her in the eye.
‘No,’ he says. He wonders if this
is for the record, something to set things straight with her boss and end the speculation that had started to grow the longer the two of them worked together.
‘The man we’re after has.’ She presses a finger against the base of her left breast. He follows this movement out of the corner of his eye, feeling his cheeks blush. He looks across at the other policeman, wondering if he’s feeling similarly embarrassed. Instead, he finds the older man staring at Katie with a look of confusion, as if this is news to him too.
‘There are two marks on the second body that exactly match moles on my chest,’ says Katie. ‘They were made with dabs of chocolate icing.’
Nathan instantly thinks back to the chocolate he’d been given in the car: a test, no doubt, and another connection to the crime. Before he can stop himself, he licks his lips, thinking of that sweet taste, a taste that he’d frequently turned to when feeling stressed. It took him back to his childhood, when a chocolate bar had been waiting for him every day after his return from school. Then he thinks of the chocolate on Katie’s body, and this time manages to keep his tongue under control, in part because he knows she’s looking now, but also because his mouth has suddenly gone bone dry.
It was only a few months back, so he should have remembered straight away, but with all the distraction, with the running and the reading and the sleeping through the night, his mind can’t call on memories the way that it used to. He’s seeing it clearly now, though, every detail of the daydream that had risen as he’d stood stirring a pan of beans on the hob. It had been a frenzy, an ecstatic blur of blood and guts and, at the end, when everything was still, including the woman who had been at the centre of it, he’d marked the body with melted chocolate, following the path of the filthy streaks on the wall, spiralling round and round.
