by Nick Hollin
‘Are you okay?’ she asks.
‘I need detail,’ he says. ‘Has Miles Parker taken a look at Carl Watkins yet?’
‘We’ve got an initial assessment,’ says Katie. ‘Of course, as ever Parker is reluctant to commit fully, but it looks like we might have been wrong about Watkins’ killer being a different MO. It actually looks like a mix of Ben Peters and Dr Nigel Hartham.’
‘You mean, he was given an overdose of drugs?’
‘A mix of various. Heroin, tranquillisers and others that haven’t yet been determined. Injected after a smack over the head.’
‘But the smack over the head didn’t kill him?’
‘I don’t think so. It was a hard hit, but not hard enough. And he’d been carefully positioned in the hole they dug him out of. In fact, he’d been arranged like he might have been if he’d been buried. Only he was upright.’
‘A bloody big hole to dig,’ says Nathan, looking down at the mud in front of him.
‘Yeah,’ says Katie. ‘They certainly took their time.’
‘Anything else found at the crime scene?’
‘Photos don’t show much,’ says Katie, and Nathan can hear that she’s moved across to the wall to look at them. ‘If the killing took place close to when Watkins first disappeared, not long after the death of Steven Fish, then it’s hardly surprising there’s not much left for us to work with.’
‘Can this really be the same killer as Fish’s?’ asks Nathan, working through a gallery of images in his own mind. They’re images he’d avoided for so long, a crime that he simply couldn’t bear to consider fully. But what has he got to lose now that he has finally taken a life?
‘I still think we should be considering…’ Katie lowers her voice. ‘Well, you know what I think.’
‘Is she there?’ he asks, not daring to use Sam’s name, worried that she might have moved across next to Katie to listen in on the call. She always seems to be close.
‘No. I haven’t seen her all day. What about you? Are you alone?’ asks Katie.
‘No, there are two policemen here.’ As he says this he recognises the feeling that’s been troubling him since his arrival. It’s the same feeling he’d had back at his parents’ graves. There’s somebody out there, watching him. Of course, as with the cemetery, there’s a chance someone in the press had guessed that he or Katie might come here, but there’s also a chance it’s not the press at all. And then there’s the photo uploaded to the blogger’s page. The killer had been at this very location, watching them. He considers sharing his suspicion with Katie, but he doesn’t want to worry her. He’s also not entirely sure this isn’t what he was hoping for, the ultimate reason for coming back.
‘I have to go,’ he says.
There’s a pause, a moment when he thinks Katie might say something to make his heart quicken, and maybe think again about the risk he’s taking, but in the end all she offers is, ‘Keep in touch.’
He feels the urge to say something more himself, as if the final words of their call might be important, but instead he hangs up.
He’s thinking about the coldness that’s developed between him and Katie as he stares down into the ditch, trying to figure out the emotions of a killer and what they were thinking as they brought an object down on the back of Carl Watkins’ head. Dr Nigel Hartham’s skull had been mashed to a pulp. Had that been with a different weapon? Or from a different motivation? And were drugs used because of who Watkins had been? Were they his drugs? Heroin would suggest as much. Or was the mix used because it meant that he would suffer less?
Nathan’s thoughts return to his brother. If they were right that Christian had shared his life with someone, at least for a while, then what kind of person might that have been? It could easily have been a guy. It could have been Steven Fish. But Nathan is reminded of the houseboat, and just how much his brother had wanted to be like him. Wouldn’t he have wanted a partner who looked like his own? Who did the same sort of job? In support of this is the evidence of Vicky Shaw. Her son had a new girlfriend, a woman he’d told her worked for the police, a woman Thomas Shaw was scared of. Might Christian and Watkins and Shaw have been seeing the same woman?
Sam. He keeps coming back to Sam. She’s impossible to read, but not impossible to like. There’s something about how closed she is that’s drawn him in. Would his brother also have been attracted to that? Or was it the side of Sam that she’s keeping hidden from Nathan what caught Christian’s eye? She has so much control, but also the potential to lose that control completely. And she has no moral boundaries, not when it comes to Carl Watkins.
Nathan returns his focus to that very person, to a man whose avoidance of justice due had so angered Katie. He tries to picture his partner with some kind of bat, seeking out justice. It’s not such a stretch. But then would she have held back at the strike? He looks down into the hole Watkins had been found in, and the darkness at the bottom seems to soak into Nathan. It’s the place of burial, but not the point of attack. Where might that point of attack have been? How could a man as clever and careful as Carl Watkins have been lured out here and then clubbed over the head?
Nathan starts to walk, wanting to be away from the view of the police car, where he’s sure they’re watching him, judging him. He starts to climb the hill towards the twisted oak. He looks down to see if the mud from his previous visit is still on his boots, forgetting for a moment that he’s been given a whole new outfit, that everything has changed since then. His other boots were covered in Thomas Shaw’s blood. As were his other trousers. And when he looks hard enough at the boots and trousers he’s wearing now – all brand new – he’s certain he can still make out those bloodstains.
He passes the first tree with Ben Peters’ initials carved on the other side, then the big oak with the ‘C’ for Carl Watkins. He keeps walking, right up to the top of the hill and over, continuing down the side of the farmer’s field where they’d found the footprints, size eight, from whoever had been watching them last time around. Might they have come from the blond-haired man who had driven the two of them halfway to the school, then disappeared, only to appear again after they’d been attacked? Did Sam have an accomplice? Might Shaw have been her accomplice? Had she hung back, hoping that Katie or Nathan would attack him, silencing the only man who could identify her?
When he’s walked for almost a mile, and he’s well out of sight of the policemen, surrounded on all sides by dark woodland, Nathan stops and finally accepts what it is that he’s doing. He hasn’t come here to find things. He’s come here to be found.
He lets his arms hang loosely by his sides and closes his eyes, just as he would have done when looking to find his way into a killer’s mind. And that’s the intention here, not to make that connection – he knows he can’t do that anymore – but to give the appearance of making it. If he can play the part, if he can convince whoever is watching him that he’s found something, that he’s understood, then perhaps they will come out from wherever they are hiding. He has no weapon. He has no defence. And yet still he’s happy to play this game. Is it a form of suicide? Is it a form of madness? Is it a desperate need to know the truth about the man he has killed?
Impotent. That’s how Nathan feels, now he can’t make the connection, now he can’t use the gift that had given him his identity for so many years. He thinks back to the night that it had been lost to him, another night he had felt impotent. He had proved to his brother that he wasn’t a killer when he’d failed to bring a metal bar down on his head, failed to protect the woman he loved. That single moment had cost him so much. In refusing to destroy the only family he had left, he had destroyed any chance of having his own family in the future.
‘Family,’ he says, quietly, his fingers twitching. The word has always carried such a weight of feeling, and even more so now.
His eyes squeezed shut, he tries to focus on his performance. He’s supposed to be in a trance-like state, drifting into another person’s mind, then playing out t
he crime in hideous detail. He’s reminded of the smile that had spread across his face as he’d stood looking at the body of Steven Fish. He’s not smiling now, not as himself or as the killer. The killer took no pleasure in the murder of Carl Watkins. He knows that much. There was rage and hate, but there was also confusion and restraint compared to the murders of Steven Fish and Nigel Hartham, perhaps even the same confusion and restraint that Nathan had felt standing over his brother with the metal bar raised above his head.
Nathan positions himself on the dirt track facing back down the hill, imagining himself standing behind the muscular figure of Carl Watkins. He flexes the fingers on his good hand, the right hand, the same hand that will bring a rounded object down on the back of Watkins’ skull. And when he stops trying, when he simply allows his imagination to take over, he can feel that object, feel the weight of it, feel the intent. Way back at the beginning, when he’d first found himself losing his grip on his own reality and seemingly drifting into another’s, he’d pulled himself back, petrified of where it might take him. Ten years on and he doesn’t flinch, just relaxes his shoulders and lets go.
I can’t do this. If I do this, then there will be nothing left. And he’s waiting for me. He’s willing to talk to me. Perhaps words will take us where we need to go. But then it didn’t work before. There were only lies. I can’t bear to hear any more of those. And look at him, look at the way he’s standing. He knows I’m here, but he hasn’t even bothered to turn around and face me. He’s rejecting me. Again.
I have to do this. This is who I am. This will prove who I am, prove my independence. I don’t need him. I’ve never needed him.
That didn’t feel right. I’ve done this before, loved this before, but that was not the same. Steven Fish. Steven Fish meant nothing to me. He died only because of what he meant to Carl. With him it was easy, natural, fun. This is… This is… At least I hit him hard enough to knock him out. But he’s not dead. There was too much tension in my arms, too much happening in that single second of contact. It was the past, the present and the future all coming together.
Oh, God! It’s only now I’m able to stand over him that I can see what he was looking at, staring down at. I thought he was rejecting me, but he was looking at the hole, the hole I had spent so long digging. And he must have known what it was for. And yet he didn’t move. Did he think he deserved this?
He does deserve this! And I can’t stop now. If I let him live, then everything is over for me. And I’m not ready to give up yet. I’m still young. I’m still fit. But can I hit him again? Harder? Hard enough?
Drugs. Drugs are the answer. They’re what brought us here. They’re what’s ruined everything. He has some with him. For me? To get rid of me? No. No, I don’t want to believe that. I won’t believe that. But I will use those drugs. And he won’t feel a thing. He’ll just drift away.
* * *
Nathan is back in an instant, his eyes wide, gasping for air as if he’s been underwater for a long time. He hadn’t expected to go there. He hadn’t expected to be able to make that connection, but now that he has, he can see what’s happened. He is a killer now. He had doubted it before. He had proved himself incapable. But Thomas Shaw has changed all that. And what has he learned? There’s something important there. Something key. But it’s frustratingly just beyond his grasp for now. He doesn’t move, not an inch, for fear that it will take him away from where he was before, from that understanding. And he closes his eyes again, longing to return. But he’s distracted by a sound from behind. He’s been away from reality too long, and only now remembers his initial plan. He had come up here to bring somebody out of hiding. He had come here to be attacked.
The hands grab him before he has a chance to move, one round his neck, one pressed across his mouth. At first he wonders if they’re trying to keep him quiet, to prevent him shouting out to the policemen down the hill. But before he can dismiss that as a ridiculous thought, with their car being more than a mile away, he smells the chemicals and feels the soft cloth on his lips and realises he’s heading back down into darkness.
Thirty-Five
‘I can’t get hold of him,’ says Katie, fighting the urge to fling the mobile across the room in frustration. ‘I’m going to have to go down there.’
‘Down where?’
Katie spins round to see Sam entering the room.
‘Where have you been?’ asks Katie.
‘I’ll take that as “do you mind if I ask where have you been, ma’am?” If you must know, I’ve been investigating potential links between Carl Watkins’ former suppliers and the cocaine found at Thomas Shaw’s house.’
‘Let me guess – there’s a match.’
Sam raises an eyebrow. ‘You seem surprisingly disappointed.’
Katie sighs and looks across at Superintendent Taylor. He’s just come off several phone calls himself, many of which she’s certain will have been showering his team with praise for solving a multiple murder, including that of Mike Peters, a serving police officer. She hasn’t seen him so happy in a long time. One of the main reasons she hasn’t yet shared her doubts.
‘I’m just tired,’ she says. ‘And concerned about where Nathan has gone.’
‘You think he might have done something stupid?’ asks Sam.
‘No,’ says Katie, quickly. ‘He just had a few lingering questions about the case.’
‘And where did he go with these lingering questions?’
‘Where Carl Watkins was found.’
‘I see,’ says Sam, with the faintest trace of unease, as she moves across to consider photos of that very scene. Although not, Katie notes, the photos of Watkins’ exhumed skeleton.
A junior detective enters the room, her face a little flushed. ‘Sorry, sir, and ma’am, ma’am,’ she says, nodding at Sam, Superintendent Taylor and Katie, ‘but I’ve just had a call from the two officers who were watching the location where Carl Watkins was discovered. They said that Nathan Radley had arrived to do some work.’ The detective looks at Katie again. ‘I’m sure you were already aware of his being there. It’s just that he went up over the hill more than two hours ago and he hasn’t yet come back to his car.’
‘Tell them to get out there and look for him!’ says Katie. ‘Ring in instantly if they find him. We’ll be there as soon as we can.’
‘I’ll drive,’ says Sam, heading for the door, with Katie following close behind. The senior policewoman turns to look at Katie as they half walk, half run down the corridor. ‘What do you think this means?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Katie, considering Sam’s blank expression again. ‘But I have my suspicions.’
They arrive in less than half an hour, having weaved through the traffic with the sirens blaring. There’d been no lights and no traffic for the last few miles, just a near collision with an overly wide tractor and a scrape down the side of a hawthorn hedge.
Two policemen are standing at the top of the hill and Katie slips and slides in the mud as she runs up to talk to them. It reminds her of the hills she’d run up in Wales with Nathan. It reminds her that she could not bear to lose him.
‘Any luck?’ she asks, panting.
‘We were just about to phone,’ says one of them. ‘We found this,’ he walks them a couple of hundred yards ahead, close to the point where Katie had found the footprints and the broken mobile before. There are now more footprints and another phone, not broken, a phone Katie recognises as the one she had given Nathan, the one she had spoken to him on just an hour before. The older policeman then gestures ahead at some flattened grass and two intermittent parallel grooves in the mud.
‘They stop a short distance into the woods over there,’ he says, pointing towards a dark mass of trees to their right. Katie starts walking, following the lines herself. They lead her deep into the wood. Sam has taken her time to catch up, but is alongside her now, looking around.
‘Looks like he was dragged here.’
‘Yes,’ says Katie. She doesn’
t make eye contact with Sam, focusing instead on the footprints that have accompanied the drag marks. They’re not the size eights they’d seen before. They’re smaller than that, but slightly bigger than Katie’s size four. Katie glances behind Sam and can see she’s left a virtual match to these new prints as she’s walked up to join them, but Katie keeps this to herself.
‘Where next?’ asks Sam. ‘We never followed up on the possible sighting before, did we, not after our attention was drawn to the bottom of the hill.’
‘No, we didn’t,’ says Katie, quietly. She’s started moving again, heading for an area where a little more sunlight is being allowed through the canopy. She soon comes to a pile of logs, not freshly cut, but probably from trees felled within the previous year. Next to the logs is a poorly defined track, heavily rutted, but with obvious new tyre markings. Katie and Sam follow the track for half a mile until they come to tarmac road. There are no cars passing in either direction, but it’s well maintained, and from a rough approximation of their position, Katie is reasonably sure it leads back to the main road.
‘You did well to find this,’ says Sam, blankly.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Katie snaps back.
Sam folds her arms and takes a moment before speaking, as if measuring her words carefully. The way Katie might in an interview room, before going in hard. ‘It’s no secret you wanted Carl dead.’
‘Whereas it was a secret that you and Carl were working together. Perhaps a secret he wasn’t willing to keep. Or maybe he just betrayed you.’
Sam’s arms are folded tighter still. ‘I didn’t kill Carl Watkins.’
Katie faces up to Sam. She’s standing barely a metre away. The two women are a similar height and build, but only one is wearing an expression of rage. ‘I don’t give a fuck about Carl Watkins! The only thing I care about is finding Nathan. And if I discover that you had anything to do with Nathan’s disappearance…’ She’s closed the gap and raised her voice, but Sam hasn’t retreated.