by Nick Hollin
‘You’re twins!’ she says, turning to face the grown-up version of one of those boys.
‘But we’re not the same,’ is all he says in response, not looking at the photo.
She hangs up on DS Peters. Placing the frame carefully back on the table, she returns to the centre of the room, never once turning her back on the door through which a second Nathan might pounce at any moment. She dials the mobile number she’s just been given for Christian, half-expecting to hear it ringing behind her. She spins round, but the line is dead.
‘He must have been to Scotland,’ she says, working through what she already knows. ‘To check on you. How else would he know what you look like now?’
‘Because we have a connection. Because we’ve always done things like that – chosen the same cars, clothes, haircuts – without having spoken to each other.’
‘You recognised the caravan park I mentioned. You recognised the writing at the first victim’s house, and the reference to your favourite childhood meal, a meal you both enjoyed, perhaps? I think you also recognised the pattern carved into the victim’s chest, possibly something related to your life in Scotland. You swore to me that nobody had been up there to see you, that they couldn’t have seen you. So, either you were wrong about that, or you’re right about this connection to your brother.’ She hates herself for carrying on, for ignoring his pleading look, his open hands in front of his face, the scars on his wrist, but she knows there’s still fight in him.
‘I think what we’re doing here is exactly what the real killer wants us to do. To doubt each other. To doubt our own flesh and blood.’
For a moment Katie’s thoughts turn to her dad, but she cannot allow the distraction.
‘I need to know everything about your family,’ she says. ‘Perhaps it’s best you tell me before the others get here. Let’s start with your brother.’
Nathan looks as if he’s about to protest, his arms now folded, his chin low, but he offers a reluctant nod. ‘I don’t know much,’ he says, ‘not anymore. We’ve been apart for the last few years, for the past…’ He tilts his head, as if searching for a number, but Katie doesn’t doubt he could give her the very day. ‘It was just before you and I started working together. It’s not that Christian and I don’t get along, it’s… well, it’s complicated, so complicated I couldn’t even explain it to him.’ A plane passes low overhead. ‘I decided in the end to tell him a lie. I convinced him I was living undercover, that I’d changed my name and my appearance and that if we got in contact beyond the occasional phone call it might put his life at risk. Perhaps he sensed that there was something wrong, or perhaps it’s because…’ He casts another look over at the family photos and then at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. ‘This is a significant time for us. And it would make sense for him to think I might do something…’ He reaches for his wrist, running a shaking finger across the scar. ‘Whatever the reason, he’s come back, and here is the most obvious place to start trying to find me. He’s probably worried how I will react because I made him swear that he would never come for me.’ Nathan pauses and waits for Katie to nod in acceptance of her own failure to respect this same request. ‘He’s probably trying to check on me without me knowing, to see for himself that I’m doing okay. That’s probably why he lied to me about where he was and why he was worried about bumping into Markham. If he looked scared it’s likely he’s worried he’s blown my cover, that he’s put me and his family at risk.’
‘Family?’ says Katie, cutting him off. ‘Your brother has a family?’
‘A wife and a kid.’ As he says it, she can see the fear grip him as suddenly as it had gripped her.
‘Are you sure you don’t have an address for them?’ she asks, pulling out her mobile again.
‘I’ve never been there.’
‘Okay,’ she says, placing a gentle hand on his arm. ‘Let’s go outside. Some air will do us good. And my team will be here soon.’ It seems strange to refer to them as her team when for so long they had been his too. Although they had never quite accepted him and his unusual ways. Most were scared of his talent, despite the successes it won them. Nathan looks scared now, too: scared of what they might have already uncovered, scared of what it might mean for him. He holds out his hands, and she’s happy to slip the cuffs back on, wishing she could be doing the same to his twin.
* * *
Ten minutes later and Katie is standing at the top of the stairs leading up to the front door, watching her colleagues arrive. They’ve pulled up into the drive, tucking the black BMW up alongside the rusty old Citroën. She waves them in, walking down the steps to meet them and keeping a close eye on Nathan.
‘Watch the front,’ she says to DS Mike Peters. She can tell he wants to ask a hundred questions, but instead he slowly rubs his balding head. Alongside him is DC Alice Jones, a newbie who looks far calmer than her colleague.
‘You take the back, but watch from there,’ says Katie, pointing over at the barred gate on the side of the house. ‘We’re keeping this low-key for now, but shout as loud as you can if you see anything. When the others get here, double up. There’s no reason to believe anyone is still here, but I’m not taking any risks.’ Trying to look casual for the benefit of neighbours, and working through the best course of action, she only notices DC Jones’ confused stare at the very last moment. She follows her gaze over to Nathan, sitting on the steps, his hands hidden by his legs but clearly in cuffs to anyone with a trained eye.
‘Good spot, Alice! That’s exactly who you’re looking for. Another one of him.’
‘But…?’
‘Identical twins,’ explains Katie. ‘This one works with us. Nathan is going to stay with me at all times. And… Can I?’ She points at DS Peters’ fluorescent bib and, understanding immediately, he takes it off. She holds it up in front of them. ‘Make sure to let the others know that Nathan has this on.’
They nod in agreement and move to their positions while Katie walks over to Nathan, draping the oversized bib across his shoulders. ‘One day we’ll get you some clothes of your own. But to avoid confusion…’
‘Christian is not hiding here,’ he snaps. ‘At least give me credit for knowing that much.’
‘Okay,’ she says calmly. ‘But keep it on anyway, just to be safe. Now, there’s definitely no other way to get out?’ She points towards the small door down the side that they’d walked past on the way to the garden. ‘Just the conservatory where we bumped into Markham, and the front?’
‘That’s all,’ says Nathan, pulling against her restraint.
She can feel him jump at the sound of a car door slamming and turns to see five more men clambering out. They couldn’t look more like police officers if they tried, and she can almost feel the curtains twitch around her. The Internet will be alight with gossip in no time, but she’ll have to deal with that later. Right now her priority is finding Christian.
‘You two, outside,’ she says, pointing at those she knows to be the least experienced. ‘You three, with us.’ She steps inside the house and somehow it feels colder. She stares down at the pile of mail, making a mental note to get someone to look through it later. Then she addresses the three policemen who’ve followed close behind.
‘We stay together at all times,’ she says. ‘If you hear a sound you say so and we all go and have a look. Let me be one hundred per cent clear: you do not go wandering off to investigate. If you think you’ve found something of interest, you say, “I think I’ve found something of interest”, and you leave it there for me to come and have a look. I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m stealing all the fun, but that’s just the way it is. If you see anybody in here then you run and let the whole fucking world know what’s going on. Am I understood?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
She can see it in the eyes of the men in front of her: they know it, and she knows it. It’s been a while, but she’s beginning to sound like her old self again.
Seventeen
Nathan sits perfectly still while his thoughts continue to surge and swirl. If his brother is guilty, it changes everything. It takes what he had imagined as a perfect life, walking on sunny beaches with a wife and son, and drapes it in a darkness even deeper than his own. He tells himself it can’t be true, that Christian can’t have kept his true nature hidden from him all these years. But then, hadn’t he been confident he’d done exactly that himself?
He lifts the cuffs in front of his face, watching as they slide down and reveal the lines of scarring on his wrist, realising that he was mistaken before and that not everything will change if Christian is guilty. He still needs to carry out his plan. He doesn’t have to worry about his brother finding out anymore, though. In fact, perhaps he ought to make sure he does so that Christian understands this has to stop, one way or another. It’s a thought that takes him back twenty years, to a kitchen table a short distance from where he’s standing and a note written on squared paper, a note he’s always been convinced spoke of a similar madness.
‘I could be wrong,’ he mumbles to himself as he, Katie and the three officers enter through the front door, the mail spread out ahead of them. ‘Wrong about it all.’ He moves tentatively. Old catalogues and letters are slipping left and right under him, and he’s certain he’s soon going to come crashing down.
They move quietly into the hallway. His dad’s study is directly to their left. Nobody else was ever allowed in there; even after he died Nathan had never dared as he does now. It’s smaller than he’d remembered it, filled from floor to ceiling with dusty books, stacks of newspapers and files of his legal case notes. It’s obvious there’s nobody else in here, but he does double-check under the desk to be sure. As boys, Christian had always been the best at hiding, often staying in his chosen spot for half an hour or more, while Nathan had searched and shouted, growing increasingly angry. Whenever he finally revealed himself, Nathan often seeking out their mum to insist that he do so, Christian always emerged from the strangest places with a broad smile. It’s that smile that Nathan is picturing now as he turns back towards the hall, back towards further possibilities. As he approaches Katie, who has been directing things outside the study while clearly keeping an eye on him, his attention is drawn to a series of books on a shelf above the door, and his blood runs cold. They’re out of reach, even on tiptoe, and he has to drag a chair across to pull the first one down. The cover is black with tiny red slits circling round and round towards the centre.
‘You know these books?’ asks Katie, stepping forward. ‘Of course you do,’ she corrects herself. ‘Everyone does.’
Nathan doesn’t say a word; he’s slipping back more than twenty-five years to when he was fifteen years old and standing in a bookshop, holding the same book, somehow knowing before he’d even turned a page that the author would speak to him directly.
‘Did you like his books?’ Katie asks again, standing in the doorway, not crossing the threshold.
‘His?’ says Nathan, finally looking over.
‘J.M. Priest. I read them when I was younger, under my duvet at night, desperately hoping I wasn’t caught.’ She pauses, running a hand through her hair, clearly uncomfortable at opening up about her own past. ‘Bizarrely, it was one of the things that first got me thinking about police work,’ she continues, ‘maybe even more than following in Dad’s footsteps. I couldn’t bear the mystery of not knowing who Priest was; I needed to find out so I could thank him for all those dark and twisted stories, and so I could find out why he suddenly stopped. Actually, there’s no mystery in that last part. He’ll have been too busy spending his fortune to write.’
Nathan finds himself looking upwards again, not at the shelf of books, but as if seeing up through the walls to the full extent of the house on Richmond Hill that he’s never sold, that he’s never had to sell. Distracted, he misses Katie reaching forward and snatching the book from his hand. He’s about to protest when he realises that she’s looking at the swirling pattern on the cover.
‘Of course!’ she says, holding the book up. ‘How could I have forgotten?’
‘My brother never read that sort of thing,’ says Nathan, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘But he did know about them?’
‘You said it yourself,’ he says, pushing past her to get out of the room and away from the conversation. ‘Everybody does.’
The next room is the kitchen, but he’s not ready yet. He might never be ready to go back in there. He stands just outside with his head lowered, listening for sounds of a struggle or retching, but instead the policemen are out a minute later. He’s relieved. If there had been anything to find, he’d felt certain that would have been the place to make the discovery. The kitchen was where his family would get together, enjoying meals at the large table in front of the window. The kitchen was where his family was ripped apart.
He stumbles towards the stairs. He knows the way Katie’s mind works, knows she wants to be methodical, but she’s also always been willing to follow his lead. He climbs the stairs slowly, amazed and not a little disconcerted by the breadth of them, so different to those in his tiny Scottish cottage. On the walls hang a series of oil paintings depicting previous generations of his family going back hundreds of years. They had fascinated him as a child and bored him as a teenager; now, at the age of forty, he finds he’s looking again. In particular, at the general in full uniform rising majestically on his muscular steed, wondering what elements of his and now perhaps even his brother’s personality could be blamed on this man.
Before reaching the top of the stairs he stops and ducks sideways to shoot a look round the corner. Again he’s remembering all the places his brother would hide as a child, often leaping out and startling him. Of course, they’d soon learned to stifle their screams and giggles for fear their dad would come; heavy footsteps on the stairs and the promise of a smack with whatever book he’d been distracted from reading.
Katie is ahead, and Nathan hurries after her with the other three policemen close behind him. The first room they pass is the guest bedroom. He allows the three policemen to go in and can hear them searching cupboards and finding nothing. His focus is on the two rooms at the end of the corridor: his room, then his brother’s room. His room is exactly as he’d remembered: an eighteen-year-old’s hideaway, with the dark blue paint he’d fought for barely visible beneath the posters of depressing bands and flyers for the various theatrical shows he’d become involved in. Around the age of sixteen, when dramatic changes were taking place in body and mind, acting seemed a far simpler and more productive way of avoiding the thoughts that were troubling him. He remembers the release of getting lost in the parts, often to the point where he didn’t want to come back.
Framed and hung high on the far side of the room is his acceptance letter from RADA. His proudest day: the day he’d started to believe he could build a successful life out of pretending to be anyone but himself.
The bed is made and, save for the layer of dust and the moth-eaten curtains, the room looks tidy in a way that it never would have back when there was life in this house. He never kept his things in order, clothes and books and CDs strewn across the floor to his mother’s despair and his father’s rage. A mess to reflect the chaos in his head. Crumpled trousers, unruly hair, T-shirts adorned with skulls and troubled lyrics. Everyone thought he would grow out of it, but it only ever got worse.
He’s so wrapped up in the memories this room has stirred that he only notices Katie behind him when she accidentally knocks a lone trophy from a shelf. It would normally have been holding up a row of books, but those books were the only thing from the house he’d taken with him to Scotland, boxed up and put in the back of Katie’s car. How he wishes he could escape into one of those childish tales right now…
‘You never told me you were good at rugby,’ says Katie, looking at the trophy and carefully placing it back on the shelf. She seems to have relaxed now they’ve reached the final rooms and it’s clear they are al
one.
He remembers his teammates had called him a madman while offering congratulatory slaps on the back. His only focus has been on winning, no concern for the welfare of himself or others.
‘We need to find something that shouldn’t be here,’ he says, returning his focus to the room.
Katie’s previous calmness disappears in an instant. ‘Why?’
‘Something doesn’t feel right.’
‘What sort of thing?’ says Katie, talking in that soft, persuasive voice she always used when he was slipping away into the thought process of their suspect.
He stares at the wall ahead, thinking about who used to sleep on the other side, and tucks his hands down by his sides so Katie can’t see how badly they’ve started to shake.
‘What if I was wrong about Christian?’
‘You think he’s guilty?’ says Katie.
‘No,’ he says sharply. ‘What if I was wrong about why he looked scared? What if he was being followed? What if the killer thought he was me?’
‘Even you don’t look like you anymore,’ she says, and he’s aware that she’s pointing at a long mirror in the corner of the room. ‘I could easily have walked past you in the street. So unless this killer saw you in Scotland…?’
He can picture her face, one eyebrow raised, waiting for his response. In the end, all he does is hover his cuffed hands above his stomach and move them slowly round, following the path of dirty marks he remembers so clearly from his other home.
‘He must have done.’
‘Unless that was from the J.M. Priest book.’
He looks down at the floor again, the place he’s always looked for inspiration, and another terrible possibility presents itself.
‘What if it wasn’t a mistake? What if he was targeting Christian?’ He twists the fluorescent top he’s been given, as if that might help wring out the tension in him. ‘Maybe he knows it’s the best way to hurt me. The only way.’ He glances down at his wrist, then back up at Katie, recalling his brother’s words in their phone call: I take it there’s no special person in your life… I thought maybe you could find yourself a nice policewoman, someone who understands that world, who could protect themselves.
