by Nick Hollin
He shakes his head violently, wiggling his feet inside the slightly oversized trainers Katie had given him, feeling the hardened skin from all that running and reminding himself that he had evidence. Every single day he ran and drew a mark on the wall, proof that he was all the way up there in Scotland, waiting for both the year and his life to end, and never down here, killing people.
‘We don’t have any suspects yet,’ says Katie, looking away.
It’s clear that if that’s what he is to her, she’s not sharing this information with her team.
‘But we do have another murder to talk about.’
He can hear her stand up and move towards the far wall, breathing out slowly.
‘A week ago, another mother of two, this time with young girls, was killed in an almost identical way.’
Nathan can feel his forearms tighten and, for a second, fears he’ll find a way to pop the cuffs open. ‘With the same marks?’
Katie doesn’t answer immediately, instead she shifts uneasily on her seat, the briefest of looks at the man sitting next to her.
‘This is about you and me, Nathan,’ she says, locking onto his gaze. ‘It might be somebody we’ve come up against before. He knows about the work we’ve done. It’s like he’s taken elements from each of the crimes we’ve investigated together and sewn them into the crime scenes.’
‘Each?’ says Nathan, lifting his cuffed hands and bending back his fingers, unable to hide the tremor in his voice.
‘Not that,’ she says, making the connection. ‘But many of the others.’
Nathan lowers his head and closes his eyes, wishing he could shut it all out, maybe take a sleeping pill as he’d done so many times to block the images he’d started seeing at night: bodies broken and ripped apart, elements from all of the crimes he’d ever investigated. But there’s hope in the way Katie has started looking at him again, as if he’s a partner, not a suspect. He doesn’t know what’s suddenly caused things to change back, and he’s not about to ask, but it’s made him more confident in his innocence, too, reminding him of the remarkable things he used to be able to do: the things he could see that he should never have been able to see; all the crimes he’s acted out that he never committed; all the killers he’s put away.
‘Bollocks to this,’ Katie says, standing up, the metal chair scraping across the floor, creating a high-pitched screech that causes him to flinch. ‘I’ve not lost it completely. There’s no point wasting what little time we have here. Nathan and I are going to go and do what we’re good at.’ She turns to the bigger policeman, who looks as uncomfortable with this idea as he had with her sudden outburst. ‘Relax, Mike, this is entirely on me.’
The words take their time again, fighting their way from ear to understanding. When Nathan finally figures out what’s happening he grips the table leg tightly and lets out a groan. He’s already picturing the things they’ll see. He’s horribly vulnerable here without his routine, and he knows that as soon as they step outside the door, as soon as they step back into the world he had thought he’d left behind, it will only get worse.
Eleven
‘What the hell has happened to you?’
It’s a familiar question, one Katie has asked herself on a hundred occasions, staring into the mirror at a woman she barely recognises. This time, however, the words are coming from her boss. He’s a big man, broad at the shoulders and fighting the spread, dressed as immaculately as ever in his tightly pressed uniform, his hat tucked under his arm.
‘I think you’re aware of the difficulties I’ve been having,’ she says, maintaining the flat tone that she knows annoys him most.
‘That’s not what I’m talking about. You know full well we’ve given you more than enough support in that area.’
‘You can name him, you know,’ she says, moving in closer. ‘He was a friend of yours.’
The big man coughs and inches back. ‘All I’m saying is you could have taken some leave, should have…’ He stops himself just in time, perhaps seeing her anger rising to dangerous levels. ‘Instead you insisted on working.’
‘And commitment to the job is a problem, is it?’
‘The problem,’ says Superintendent Taylor, seeming to gain another couple of inches in height, ‘besides your general attitude, and the rumours I’m constantly hearing of inappropriate behaviour, is that your work is not even close to what it used to be. I could forgive almost anything if you were still bringing me the results.’
‘My partner is back,’ she says, nodding towards Nathan, who’s standing at the end of the corridor outside the interview room, shuffling from foot to foot. ‘We’ll get you what you want.’
‘There’s plenty of questions to answer there, too,’ says Taylor, not turning to look and lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘Where has he been? I understand the work took its toll and he needed to get away, but I think you also know…’ This time he does glance over his shoulder. ‘Well, I’ve always felt he’s the type that needs to be supervised.’
‘I know what you felt, sir,’ says Katie, placing just enough emphasis on the sir to let him know it hasn’t come from respect. ‘But you always trusted me, trusted my view on him. That view hasn’t changed.’ She struggles to hold her boss’s gaze, and to keep it from Nathan, scared whatever doubt she might still be feeling could reveal itself on the surface. ‘Or perhaps,’ she adds, ‘you just trusted in the results.’
‘Your dad brought the results.’ The superintendent pauses and the uncomfortable cough returns. ‘He was the best detective I’ve ever worked with. Achieved so much without ever letting his standards slip, without ever crossing a single line.’
‘Yes,’ says Katie, with a sigh that she hopes disguises her discomfort. ‘I’ve heard it from you and many others. What’s your point?’
‘My point,’ says the superintendent, running a hand across his crown from a ruler-straight parting as he looks down at his shoes, the tips polished to a sharp reflection, ‘is that he’d hate to see you this way.’
‘And I hate to see him how he is now,’ says Katie, lifting a hand to her knotted mess of hair. ‘But I guess that’s life.’
‘You know what this case represents for you, don’t you, detective? There have been more than enough warnings.’
‘More than enough,’ she says. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.’
* * *
Katie takes a step into the room. When she turns to urge Nathan to follow she finds his eyes are on everything but the body ahead of them, taking in every spotless corner and polished surface, blinding himself on the lights above. They’re alone in the mortuary, the coroner making a swift exit for a cigarette break when he saw the cuffs on Nathan, so Katie grabs Nathan and pulls him up to her, waiting till his eyes finally settle on hers.
‘Sarah Cleve,’ she says, pointing towards the table in the centre of the room. ‘Two days ago.’
‘How do you know it’s the same person responsible?’
‘Come, and I’ll show you.’
She pulls at the handcuffs again, but this time he resists. ‘I can’t.’
‘Of course you can,’ she says firmly. ‘What are you afraid of?’ She sees him glance across at a tray on the far side of the room filled with an array of objects for cutting bodies apart and wonders if she has her answer.
‘Can you tell me what you’re feeling?’ she asks, tentatively.
‘No,’ he says, turning his eyes to the floor, where his feet are twisted awkwardly inwards.
She wonders if she even wants to know.
‘You’re the only one who can help us here, Nathan. We were a team. We did good together.’
‘I’m not that man anymore,’ he says, slowly shaking his head. He sneaks the briefest of looks at the body, but it’s enough to send him stumbling backwards into a low table behind, his arm shielding his eyes and face. ‘I can’t.’
‘Of course you can. You’ve seen far worse.’ She’s thinking of those bodies now, perfectly slice
d from head to toe, decapitated, bottomless, burnt to a crisp, squashed to something resembling a pizza, a pool of ooze identifiable only by the smell.
She waits for him to look up at her. It takes a long time, but she stands there patiently. When he does finally catch her eye, she directs him downwards with her finger, towards the inner thigh of the corpse, then traces a shape in the air just above it.
‘The first body had something here painted in chocolate icing,’ she says. ‘It matched the birthmark I saw on you the other night. I’d also caught a glimpse of it before, a long time ago…’
She feels the heat on her cheeks as she watches him reach back and grip the edge of the flimsy-looking table, forcing it to take so much of his weight it’s a wonder the legs don’t buckle like his.
‘That’s why I needed to come and get you. I haven’t told the rest of my team everything yet, not until I know more, but this is about us. And I can’t deal with it alone. I need you. I need the old you.’
She imagines he’s tried to forget this part of himself over the last year, but he cannot have lost his special gift for reading the behaviour of the killers they hunted. He offers the briefest of glances; then, twisting his head, eyes widening, he takes a few tentative steps forward. He stops a stride short of the table, his shackled arms held out towards the stomach where the hundred tiny cuts spiral in towards the belly button.
‘What the fuck is that!’ he whispers, sliding slowly towards the floor, suddenly white as the room. ‘He can’t have…’
‘Who can’t have…? What have you found?’ Her voice is rising as the questions return. Has he fooled her again? Has she fooled herself? She wants to ask him straight out, to take one of his fingers and bend it back until he talks, to use the case that had once ended his deceit to make him reveal the truth to her now. But she can’t.
Instead, she leads him silently outside, watching him drawing in the cool morning air and doing the same herself. He doesn’t speak for more than five minutes, but she gives him all the time he wants because this isn’t so different from the old days. Back then he would stand over a crime scene as though he were asleep. Then would come the tiny twitches in his body, the twisting of his arms and balling of his fists. Sometimes he would even cry out, drawing the attention of those around him, before she learned to make them leave. It was the words that followed that would delight and frighten Katie in equal measure. It was as though she were listening to the killer recounting his crime, revealing his mistakes.
‘It’s impossible,’ Nathan says, finally.
‘What is? What did you see in there? Did you recognise those markings on the stomach?’
He lifts his forefinger then lowers it a few inches, as if drawing a line in the air. He repeats this action several times, before suddenly re-emerging from whatever trance he’d entered and vigorously shaking his head.
‘No. No, it means nothing to me. I’d just forgotten… forgotten how bad…’ His eyes snap across to hers, pleading. ‘Take me back.’
Katie feels the anger rising, threatening to spill over. She won’t be taken in by his acting this time. He’s hiding things from her. He had recognised the pattern on the stomach of the victim. Even back at the station, when he claimed not to know the caravan park where they’d found the first victim’s car, it had been a lie. She’d kept that from her colleagues; she’d kept all her suspicions to herself, holding on to two hopes. First, that her instinct hadn’t failed her. Secondly, that solving this case might save them both. There will be no solution to any of this if he packs up his lies and heads back to Scotland.
‘Sarah Cleve had two young boys,’ she says, her voice shaking with emotion. ‘Tate and Felix. One of them has long-standing health issues. He’s small, and weak. Sarah was a nurse, caring for cancer patients, which is how she met her husband, someone she had helped to survive. She loved Pinot Noir, tending her roses, Philip Glass and the Times crossword.’ Back in the day she would feed these details into Nathan so he could use them to populate his reimagining of the scene. This time, she wants him to choke on them. ‘We can go and see all this if you want, we can see what you’re walking away from.’ She’s almost shouting now, desperately fighting the urge to grab him by the collar and shake him, aware that she’s being watched by the coroner as he stands leaning against a doorway with no cigarette, and no idea, she imagines, which of the two of them he ought to be scared of now. ‘And what the fuck are you going back to? That wasn’t a life. That certainly wasn’t your life. And you’re forgetting that I know you. Okay, so there were bits you manged to hide, but not everything. You were never satisfied, always pushing, always learning. How can you bear to lock yourself away up there—’ She stops abruptly, aware that Nathan has lifted a hand. It’s his right hand, several pale lines of scarring on his wrist evidence of those times when he really couldn’t bear it.
‘It’s not my home I want to go back to,’ he says.
He looks up and holds her stare, and she can see she’s read it all wrong yet again.
Twelve
The police cordon is still out the front of the first victim’s house, as is a police car, the driver of which Katie recognises as a young PC she very nearly slept with on a drunken night out. The recognition is mutual and also useful, as she’s able to shepherd Nathan by without a word. They’d come to the house of Sally Brooks, rather than the more recent victim, to avoid the crowds that she knew would still be there. She also wanted to take him to the place where the body had been marked as his had been marked; one at birth, the other at death.
The house is small. Far too small for two children, she thinks as she moves down the hallway, stepping over a floppy doll with no head. She doesn’t remember seeing it before, but then there are plenty of toys scattered around. Nathan suddenly seems unsteady on his feet, and she has to take more of his weight as she guides him forward. Strands of his hair are stuck to his forehead, and his hands are balled against his cuffs.
They head towards the kitchen, passing a tiny living room with more toys scattered across the carpet and allowing a glance at a school photo on the wall. The sweet photo of the two girls seems to both strengthen and weaken Katie at the same time as she thinks of the ones she used to bring home to her dad every year, where she’d tried but always failed to follow the photographer’s instructions. Like her, these girls will have trouble remembering the one person who will never get to see them grow up.
The forensics team have been and gone, but there’s plenty of evidence of their work: dusted surfaces, measurement sticks and chalk footprints of items that have been taken away. One of those things was the knife; the other, the body, twisted into a pose, like the second victim, Sarah Cleve.
She watches Nathan carefully, remembering that little smile when she’d fed him beans last night. This time his face is pale, stretched in disbelief.
‘Along with the chocolate mark,’ he says, his hand hovering at his waist, ‘was the stomach…?’
‘Not lots of little cuts like the second victim,’ she says, the image flashing up again, causing her to swallow hard. ‘But the same circular pattern made with her intestines, which had been pulled out and carefully arranged into a spiral.’
He nods a couple of times, then goes through a sudden and familiar transformation. His face becomes expressionless and his shoulders sag forward as he releases a long breath. He remains frozen in this position for thirty seconds or more until his body starts to jolt and buckle. It would be easy to believe he were having a fit, were it not for his eyes darting around the room, taking in everything, then closing tightly.
She steps silently away, knowing better than to disturb him. She can hear a bird calling outside; it seems incongruous, as does the gentle ticking of a cat-shaped clock on the wall. It feels as though everything should have stopped.
For a moment, she wishes she could stop everything, to curl up in the corner of the room and give up, as she has so many times of late. Her stamina always came from her dad, but his, too, has no
w ebbed away, the Alzheimer’s leaving him just a shell. She’s picturing him now, wondering if she shouldn’t have gone to visit, but she knows it wouldn’t make any difference, beyond easing her guilty conscience.
Caught up in her own thoughts, she almost misses Nathan slowly moving forward. He knows what to avoid, what not to touch. He might have forgotten many things, but professionally it appears he is still intact. He walks over to the far side of the kitchen, arms outstretched. She wants to ask him what he’s doing, but thinks better of it. He crouches down and touches the front of the fridge, close to where a tiny streak of blood can still be seen. Then he raises his finger a few inches and lightly taps the door. She had been the one to spot the blood in the swirls of colour of a child’s painting, and it seems Nathan has also somehow spotted it, even with the picture no longer there. He stands and moves to the far corner of the kitchen, touching an already printed work surface, before tapping the top of a half-eaten bag of bread, twisted tight. Then, with the knuckle of a single finger for balance, he rises on tiptoes and leans over, peering down into a shiny toaster. He drops down and turns towards her with a nod. She joins him, her heart racing as she pulls on a pair of latex gloves. She follows his lead and leans over the toaster. At first she can’t see it, it’s clogged up with so many burnt crumbs, but finally she spots the pale corner of a piece of paper. Next to the toaster is a pair of wooden tongs, like an oversized pair of tweezers, used to pull out things that are too hot to touch. With effort, she manages to slip them down the nearest gap and grab the paper, drawing it slowly out. Strangely, ridiculously, she’s reminded of the child’s game, Operation, she would play as a kid and half-expects an electric buzz to sound as she brushes the sides. The paper finally comes free and she lifts it, holding it up in the air while she retrieves a small evidence bag.
