The Goodnight Song: An absolutely heart-stopping and gripping thriller

by Nick Hollin

  ‘DNA on the houseboat,’ he says. Even he’s not trying to be clever now. Just the facts, delivered straight. ‘Only two samples. One male. One female. Male is Christian Radley. As for the female, we have no matches on the databases so far. There’ll be more to come soon enough, but most likely not a name.’

  ‘It might not even be the killer,’ says Taylor. ‘He might simply have had a girlfriend who never knew what he was like.’

  ‘But when it came out in the news…?’ says Stocks.

  ‘Then he might have killed her.’

  ‘She came back and removed things from the houseboat,’ says Katie, annoyed at having to explain things that she sees as obvious.

  ‘Perhaps she was ashamed,’ says Taylor. ‘She might not want to be publicly associated with his crimes. Or maybe she thinks we’ll believe she was involved.’

  ‘Trust me, it’s her,’ says Katie firmly. She points at the material that surrounds them. ‘All of this is her.’

  ‘There’s something we’re missing,’ says Sam, leaning against a wall, seeming not to notice or care that, pinned to the same wall, are photos of Steven Fish’s decapitated corpse.

  ‘Carl Watkins,’ says Katie, seeing Sam flinch out of the corner of her eye. ‘Whoever is doing this, most likely a woman, has a close connection to Carl Watkins.’ She points up at the photos of his body. ‘He was killed with a restraint that we haven’t seen with the others.’

  ‘Other than Ben Peters.’

  ‘It’s drugs,’ argues Ken Stocks. ‘That’s what connects those two.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s the connection,’ says Katie. ‘But I’m not sure it’s the motivation.’ She’s good like this normally, when the pressure is high, but this is too high; this is Nathan’s life, and she can’t stop thinking about that. It’s clouding her judgement. What will she do without him? ‘Love,’ she says quietly. ‘I think somewhere in among all this horror is a crime of passion.’

  ‘You don’t think the killer found another partner?’ asks Taylor.

  ‘I’m willing to bet the killer has had several. Thomas Shaw being one of them.’

  ‘The secret girlfriend,’ says DCI Stocks with a grunt. ‘Secret from us until a short while ago.’

  ‘It was the police connection,’ says Katie, glancing at Sam. ‘I don’t believe it now, I think we were being misled with that, but at the time that intelligence needed to be limited distribution.’

  ‘Agreed,’ says Stocks, his face starting to flush. ‘But I should have been part of that small group.’

  ‘I ordered her not to involve you,’ says Sam. ‘I’m not at liberty to share the details, but there remains the possibility of corruption at the highest levels within the force.’

  ‘Are you looking at me?’ says Stocks, jabbing his chest so hard with his finger he forces out a noisy breath.

  ‘Everybody,’ says Sam, stretching her arms wide, before wrapping them around herself. Katie can’t help but admire the front of the woman, to stand and all but accuse the others without showing a trace of her own guilt. ‘But those are questions that will have to be put on hold for now. Our focus is on finding the killer.’

  ‘Our focus is on finding Nathan,’ says Katie. She clicks her fingers and then points at the sergeant. ‘Have we had any luck with the traffic cams, trying to track Shaw during his journey from his mum’s house to his home?’

  ‘Limited,’ says the sergeant, shifting his balance from one foot to the other. ‘We were able to track his car for part of the journey, but the images weren’t good, and while there’s a chance he wasn’t alone, it’s impossible to tell.’ As he speaks, he moves over to a desk and hunts through a pile of printouts. ‘Shaw pulls over at one point, perhaps to make a call, although we haven’t been able to tie it into his phone records.’

  Katie sighs. She realises she’d pinned her hopes on getting lucky, a freak shot of a passing car with a freeze-frame sharp enough for a positive identification. A trawl of social media has provided them with plenty of potential shots of women wrapped around Thomas Shaw, but nobody that’s given him the same look of excitement and fear that can be seen in the selfie taken in his car. She moves across the room, unable to stand still anywhere for long, unable to stop looking up at the clock on the wall by the door, which keeps screaming at her to get on with it!

  ‘Why don’t we go public?’ she says. ‘Nathan’s face is well known.’

  ‘We might not need to go public after the blogger’s latest post,’ says Taylor. ‘He or she more or less said they were worried about Nathan being taken.’

  ‘It’s a she,’ says Sam. ‘And they’ve definitely got a crush on Nathan. An obsession, even.’

  ‘Does that stop them being a he?’ asks Stocks.

  ‘Of course not,’ says Katie. ‘Nor does it stop them being the killer. In fact, if we are looking for Christian’s old girlfriend, then she’s more than likely to have an obsession with the twin that’s still alive.’ As she says this, Katie finds herself desperately praying that Nathan is still alive.

  ‘So the blogger is also the killer?’ says Taylor, looking at Katie, then up at the printouts of the blogger’s posts.

  Katie shrugs. ‘It would certainly explain why we’ve got six officers failing to track down their location, and yet the killer is supposedly able to drop the blogger an email at their private address whenever they see fit. Plus, the blogger, in addition to sounding increasingly unstable…’ Katie draws in a breath and hopes she’s not starting to do so herself, ‘…has gone out of their way to make us believe the killer was a man. I think that was all part of the deception in the build-up to taking Nathan. That’s not to say there haven’t been truths in there. In fact, I’m sure I’m missing something important.’ Katie looks at the printouts again, but the words seem to swirl in front of her.

  ‘But why send this final message, if that’s what it is?’ says Sam, gesturing at the blogger’s post that at present is only on the computer screen. ‘Are they trying to tell us something with this? Are they giving us clues? Or are they enjoying the game too much?’

  ‘They’re enjoying mocking us,’ says Stocks, with another thump on the desk next to him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Katie. ‘On the other pages of the journal Nathan was able to identify locations that his brother had written down. But there doesn’t appear to be anything on this last one.’ Katie looks away from the computer screen and stares up at the ceiling. ‘Maybe she’s not playing anymore. Maybe that really was the finale, as she’s called it.’ She feels her stomach sink. She’s never felt so empty, so hopeless, so lost. ‘Christ, I wish I knew what she looked like. There’s a chance she’s got, or at least once had, a bob haircut, a bit like…’ Katie casually gestures towards Sam, who’s grabbed the pile of social media hits, flicking through them for the second time. She drops them heavily back on the table in front of Richard.

  ‘There’s nothing jumping out.’

  ‘We’re clutching at straws,’ says Stocks.

  ‘Of course we bloody are,’ Katie snaps back, looking up at the clock again. ‘But you’re going to have to go out and face the world’s press soon, tell them how we’ve got it all wrong and that one of our team has been taken. Wouldn’t you prefer to be able to tell them, and with an element of truth, that we’re already pursuing leads? Or would you rather just tell them that we’ve given up?’

  The look on Stocks’ face tells her that there’s still plenty of fight in him.

  ‘Just do what you have to do,’ he says.

  Sam moves over to the wall on the far side, this time looking at the images of Dr Nigel Hartham.

  ‘Who is meant to be suffering the most here?’ she asks.

  Katie wants to tell her she knows exactly who’s suffering the most: Nathan, who’s probably being tortured right now, who is perhaps already dead, but then she reminds herself of what Carl Watkins had meant to Sam.

  Katie is pulled out of her musings by a voice behind her. She turns to find that Richard
has moved over to the pile of social media photos that Sam has just dropped on the table.

  ‘I might be wrong,’ he says, pointing at the image on top, ‘but I think I know this woman.’ Katie and Sam rush across and find the old doctor’s crooked finger picking out a woman in the background. The shot is taken in a crowded bar. Thomas Shaw is at the front of the image, but the face Richard is pointing at belongs to a woman right at the back. Everyone else in the photo is smiling and appears lost in their little groups, but this woman is looking in the direction of Shaw with a focused stare. She has a pale face and shoulder-length hair.

  ‘How do you know her?’ Both women rush to ask the question at the same time.

  ‘She was a patient, or rather someone I helped for a while. Maxine something. I’m not sure I ever knew her surname. She was not well. In fact, she was terribly troubled. And she was an addict.’

  ‘Like Ben Peters,’ says Taylor, joining the group and registering a similar level of excitement.

  ‘But she’s not even with Shaw,’ says Stocks. ‘Aren’t we supposed to be searching for a girlfriend?’

  ‘And maybe that’s what she became,’ says Katie. ‘If you look at the date from the metadata, this was taken months ago. Maybe she was checking him out, choosing the perfect man to use. Just as described in Nathan’s journal.’

  ‘I might be wrong,’ says Sam, lifting the photo up and holding it close to her face, ‘but there’s something about her face. I reckon I might have seen her before too.’

  Katie grabs the printout from Sam and searches for recognition herself, and while there’s nothing definitive, she agrees that there is the faintest hint of familiarity. Perhaps it’s simply in the stare. She’s seen that stare from so many criminals in so many interviews. Normally it’s big men trying to intimidate her, but this time it’s a woman in a photo who can’t be more than five and a half feet tall.

  ‘Do you have an address, Dr Evans?’ asks Ken Stocks.

  ‘I’m afraid not – it was more than ten years ago. And she didn’t have an address back then. She was homeless.’ The doctor nods. ‘Yes, I remember now, she was living on the streets. She overdosed and I managed to bring her back from the brink. This was just before Thomas Shaw’s dad, before I failed to save him.’

  ‘How long were you in contact with her for?’

  ‘Several months. I wanted to make sure she was doing okay. The problem was, I was far from okay by then. My PTSD had taken over, and I needed to get away. I admitted to her that I couldn’t cope and that I had to make a clean break.’ The old man seems to crumple and Katie grabs hold of his arm and sits him on the table behind, ignoring the papers that fall to the floor. ‘What if I’d stayed?’ he asks, looking up at the images of the victims on the walls around him. ‘Could I have helped to avoid all this?’

  ‘Might she have known Ben Peters?’ asks Sam, ignoring the doctor’s question.

  ‘Perhaps,’ says Richard. ‘She might have seen him briefly when he was hospitalised. But they wouldn’t have interacted. He didn’t interact with anyone.’

  ‘Would that have given her motivation to kill him?’ asks Taylor.

  ‘Perhaps his death was supposed to be an act of compassion,’ says Katie. ‘An end to his suffering. Or perhaps it was just envy.’ She turns to Richard. ‘You kept on treating Ben, didn’t you? After you’d left her, when you said you couldn’t cope, you kept treating him.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have known that. Not unless she’d come to Wales. It was a secret.’

  Katie considers this, and the answer comes to her almost instantly. ‘Coincidence,’ she says, rubbing her stomach. ‘If there’s one thing I don’t believe in, it’s coincidence. Everything happens for a reason. If she holds some kind of a grudge against you and me and Nathan, then she would have wanted us together. She would have created a situation where we had to come together. She must have known I already knew about you, about where you lived, because of Ben. All she had to do was find a motivation for me to go to you, to a doctor.’

  ‘Food poisoning!’ says Richard. ‘You think she did that?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. And then she killed Mike Peters to bring us back to London, to start all this,’ Katie gestures to the photos behind her, ‘this madness.’

  ‘And we’re going to make sure she doesn’t get her finale,’ says Sam, grabbing Katie’s hand. Katie is so surprised by this, she doesn’t struggle as she’s pulled towards the door. ‘We are not going to let Nathan become another victim. Don’t share her photo with the public!’ Sam shouts back to the others, with her familiar authority. ‘Not yet. We’ll call you soon.’

  Thirty-Nine

  Nathan is getting used to the dark. He has no watch, and therefore no way of knowing how long he’s been tied up, but he reckons it must be at least two hours. There are aches and pains beyond the injuries he already has, and although some time has passed, if anything the effects of the drugs that had knocked him out seem to be getting worse.

  His fear now is for Katie. Might she be the next one to be attacked? Worse still, might she be putting her life on the line to come and save him? Or is some complicated plan being acted out, which will bring Katie here to find him? If there is a connection between the unidentified woman and Christian, and if she’s the one who has been stealing scenes from Nathan’s dark imagination, he can’t bear to think what she might have planned for her final act.

  In time. He still can’t forget those words. Nathan is trying to cling on to the hope that what he’d said to the woman is true: that Katie and Sam have time to hunt her down, that they will try something unexpected and not fall into another one of her traps. Perhaps there is also something he can do. Of course, physically there’s nothing, not tied up with knots on his wrists and ankles that he’s tested over and over, but then almost all of Nathan’s successes have resulted from what he’s been able to do in his mind. And what better place to be able to concentrate than in a dark and silent room.

  He shuts his eyes and tries to summon up all the memories that he’s been pushing down for the past twenty years. Can he figure out what’s on the final page that was torn out of the journal? Would that help him? Or might that merely give him a description of his fate? Nothing comes.

  He rests the back of his head against the door. It’s cold and hard. Metal. Every wall he’s found is metal, and given the dimensions, the echo from his words and the screech of the door being opened, he’s pretty sure he’s in a shipping container. That would explain why he’s sweating and struggling to breathe, along with whatever drugs are still in his system. He’s tried pressing his mouth up against the tiny gap between door and wall, to draw in more air and to shout out for help, but there’s been no response. There’s been no sound at all. What if this is it? What if he’s heard his attacker’s final words? What if these metal walls are like the walls of a coffin, his coffin? He may never see daylight again.

  Forty

  ‘I’m going to kill her,’ says Katie, as Sam accelerates hard down an A-road headed out of London. ‘When we find her, I am going to kill her.’

  ‘You’ll have to get there ahead of me,’ says Sam, barging her way between a lorry and a white van. The van driver screams something out of the window and for a moment it looks like he’s going to give chase, but Sam is travelling far too fast. At first Katie had found it frustrating they were in Sam’s private car, no blue light, no siren, but with such aggressive driving it’s made little difference in the end.

  Not that she knows where they’re heading at such speed. In the ten minutes that have passed since they left the police station, Sam has refused to reveal this information. Katie knows it’s a question of trust, and while that’s the last thing she’s ever felt for this woman in the few days they’ve been together, she’s now starting to think that Sam represents her only hope. There’s a level of single-mindedness and determination in Sam that Katie recognises in herself. After the discovery of Carl Watkins’ body, Katie had seen some of that drive and energy
disappear, but it’s back now, in full force.

  Katie spends the next twenty minutes silently checking her phone, waiting for the guys back at the station to call, looking for a new post on ‘Seeing Red’, looking through the thousands of comments about it on other sites for clues.

  She looks up when the engine stops, and finds they’ve pulled up to a set of high metal gates. When she peers through them and down a twisting drive, she can just make out a beautiful stone cottage with a pale blue door. It reminds her of the sort of house she’s dreamt about living in after she and Nathan had left Wales and returned to London. Something on the outskirts of the city, within commuting distance if she wanted to go back to work, something she could start a family in. Perhaps she could picture it without a child, in time, but without Nathan…

  ‘Who lives here?’ Katie asks, desperately trying to get her mind back on the job.

  ‘You’ll find out. I doubt he’ll be long.’

  ‘Do we even know if he’s in?’

  Sam points up at a little camera halfway up a tree, behind the gatepost to their right. ‘That just moved,’ she says.

  ‘So we aren’t trying to surprise him.’

  Sam smiles. ‘Oh, I imagine we’ll still be able to do that.’

  A couple of minutes later and a side gate, surrounded by thick ivy, is pushed open, revealing not only a series of unfastened locks, but a tall, slim gentleman in gardening gloves, holding a sharp-looking pair of shears. His long grey hair is slicked back from his handsome face, and piercing blue eyes behind a pair of spectacles seem to dance with intelligence.

  ‘Can I help you ladies?’ he asks in a refined voice.

  ‘I hope so,’ says Sam. ‘We’re looking for Tristan Hunter.’

  He raises one eyebrow. ‘Can I ask what it might relate to?’ As he asks, the man lifts a hand to his cheek, touching the point where Katie realises Sam still has a muddy mark. Not very professional, but then Katie doesn’t believe this is an entirely professional visit.