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

by Nick Hollin

  ‘Past business,’ says Sam. ‘Business that will have dried up for you a couple of years ago.’ She leans out of the open window and peers down the drive at the house. ‘Although you still seem to be doing okay.’

  Katie can see the flash of fear on the man’s face, but it’s quickly hidden and he offers a smile. ‘I think you might have the wrong address.’

  Sam reaches into her pocket and pulls out her identity card. ‘I’m Samantha Stone from the National Crime Agency. This lady with me is…’ Sam stops and sits back, allowing the man a better view of Katie. ‘If you’ve been following the news at all recently, I think you’ll be able to figure out for yourself who she is.’

  ‘Indeed,’ says the man. There’s a trace of sweat on his top lip. ‘I’m still not sure what you’re doing here. You’re right, my name is Tristan Hunter, but I gave up my business not two, but almost ten years ago, and yes, I was fortunate and it was profitable, as legal work tends to be, but—’

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t have time for this,’ says Sam, cutting him off. ‘I know exactly what you’ve done for the past decade, and I know exactly who you used to do it for. I’m not here to arrest you. I just want you to answer a few questions for us about Carl.’

  The name Carl seems to send a shiver through Tristan and he stumbles slightly before correcting himself, pushing his shoulders back and narrowing those remarkable blue eyes.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry if you’ve driven a long way, ladies, but there really has been an unfortunate mix-up. I don’t know this Carl you’re referring to.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ says Sam sharply, before popping open the door. ‘I think I will arrest you. Money-laundering will do for now. And I can easily track down those accounts in the Cayman Islands. Carl gave me the numbers for safekeeping. Don’t worry about your family – Christina and Seb, was it? – you can give them a call from the station, explain to them… Well, I think you might have quite a lot to explain to them. Carl told me you’d never let them in on your little arrangement. It appears he didn’t let you in on ours either, but then that’s hardly surprising – you don’t last as long as he did in the drugs game without being strict on who you share your secrets with.’

  Tristan opens his mouth and then closes it again. He’s taken two steps back and Katie wonders if he’s going to try and escape. She reckons he must be in his mid to late fifties, but is in good shape and would probably be able to keep up a good speed for a while.

  ‘I’ve spent the last six months running and up and down mountains in Wales,’ says Katie. ‘There’s absolutely no chance you’ll get away.’

  ‘Nor is there any need to run if you simply answer a few questions for us,’ says Sam, pulling her door closed again. ‘You can return to your gardening and your family and nobody will ever know we had this conversation.’

  ‘Do you promise?’ asks Tristan, eyes widening.

  ‘I try not to make promises. I tend to break them. But you’re a clever man, very highly regarded by Carl for your careful reasoning and weighing up of risk. Surely you can see what the correct course of action is here?’

  Tristan’s shoulders sink, and after glancing back at the house a couple of times, he asks quietly, as if those within the house, more than a hundred yards away, might hear him, ‘What was it you wanted to know?’

  ‘I want to know about the women in Carl’s life.’

  Tristan almost laughs at this, but his features still seem too tight to allow him to. ‘Clearly he was careful with his secrets. I was starting to think you knew everything about him.’

  ‘He wasn’t gay, if that’s what you’re suggesting,’ snaps Sam.

  ‘He wasn’t? Well then, I must have got confused when he told me he’d fallen in love with a man. I must have been misled when I saw him cry when he told me that the relationship had ended, just a week before he disappeared.’ Tristan looks down and considers the dirt on the toes of his boots. ‘They are saying on the news that they’ve found his body. Maybe he died of a broken heart, but my bet would be suicide.’

  ‘Then you’d lose that bet,’ says Katie, leaning across to get a better view. ‘And you’ll lose your freedom if you’re not careful about what you say.’ Katie can feel the heat coming off Sam with the revelation about Carl’s sexuality. ‘Just tell us about the women. This one, for example.’ Katie reaches into her pocket and pulls out her mobile, scrolling through to the photo she’d taken of the social media image from the bar. She uses her thumb and forefinger to enlarge the photo, focusing on the woman in the background behind Thomas Shaw.

  Tristan takes the phone and holds it up close to his face to inspect it. Even with glasses on he’s still clearly struggling. Or at least pretending to do so.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I can’t make her out properly.’

  ‘I warned you before about wasting our time,’ says Sam, grabbing back the phone and tossing it onto Katie’s lap.

  Katie looks at the picture herself, the nagging sense that the woman looks familiar somehow instantly returning. She also has the feeling that she’s just read something online that could connect the dots. In the background she can hear the conversation between Sam and Tristan continuing, threats and protestations, but she manages to drown it all out as she breathes deeply and allows herself to sink into her thoughts. Her inspiration for this is of course Nathan, watching him slip from reality into fantasy so successfully. She makes her way through the things she’s just read on the blogger’s site, the comments from others, the pages from the journal and the words from the blogger herself, a person that Katie is now a hundred per cent convinced is the killer. And it’s when she accepts this possibility that the significance of one sentence in particular leaps out at her with such startling clarity that she lets out a gasp which instantly silences the other two.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asks Sam.

  ‘The blogger,’ says Katie. ‘She said, I lost my dad coming up for two years ago and I know how much it hurt. If she is the killer, then who do we know who died around then?’

  As she says this Katie is considering the photo on the screen again and finally she’s seeing the reason for the familiarity. It’s in the eyes. Many times Katie had stared into Carl Watkins’ eyes, as they’d weighed each other up, as he’d stared her down and then offered a wink on his way out of the interview suite. He’d been accompanied by various lawyers on those days who’d seemed competent enough, but Katie knows that the two people she’s with now were the real reason Carl was able to escape conviction time and again.

  ‘Carl Watkins didn’t have a daughter,’ says Sam, ‘if that’s who you’re thinking of.’

  ‘Actually,’ says Tristan, ‘he did.’

  Instantly the fight seems to leave Sam again, with further confirmation of how much Carl had been keeping from her. But in Katie it’s growing, along with the belief that they’re closing in on a solution to the case. But will it be too late to save Nathan?

  ‘You met his daughter?’ she asks, quickly.

  ‘I’m not even sure Carl ever met her. He only mentioned her once, right at the end, when he’d told me about losing his boyfriend. He was drunk and out of control. He said the baby was a mistake, the result of a relationship with a woman he’d known thirty years ago. A junkie.’

  ‘No names?’ says Katie, before remembering what Richard had told them about his patient. ‘Maxine, for example?’

  ‘It might have been Maxine, or Max. I can’t remember, I’m afraid. I’d had a few drinks myself. Carl was so down. I mean, over the years he’d dodged a few bullets. Literally on a few occasions, and certainly with the cases I was involved in. I’d be advising him to plead guilty, to make a deal, when he’d suddenly come up with information that there’s no way he should have known and he’d walk out of there scot-free.’ Tristan looks in at Katie. ‘I was never there, for obvious reasons, but I believe you were.’

  ‘Just focus on what information you can suddenly come up with,’ says Katie, sharply, ‘if you�
��re wanting to walk away scot-free.’

  Tristan pushes a hand through his hair, his long fringe falling across the front of his eyes, but Katie can still see the moment when the revelation comes to him. ‘The mother was a policewoman.’

  ‘I thought you said she was an addict,’ says Katie.

  ‘I think that was after. He said he’d used this woman, tricked her into giving him stuff, then he’d walked away. She’d kind of lost it, I think. Maybe there were mental health issues. I really don’t remember.’

  ‘And that’s all?’ asks Katie, glancing across at Sam again. To the casual observer Sam would appear untroubled, but Katie has been around her long enough now to know when she’s badly hurting.

  ‘I have nothing else,’ says Tristan. ‘I promise you.’

  ‘Then get back to your family,’ says Sam, pushing the car into reverse.

  ‘I think I should drive,’ says Katie, as they clip the verge on a country lane, having avoided a tractor at the very last second.

  ‘I think you should answer the phone,’ says Sam, nodding at Katie’s lap. When she looks down Katie can see that the screen has lit up.

  ‘Hello?’ she says.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ asks DCI Ken Stocks. ‘No, scrub that question, I know exactly where you’ve been.’

  ‘What do you mean, you know where we’ve been?’ asks Katie, checking her side mirror, wondering if they’d been followed all along. But then, given the speed they’d been travelling, there’s no way anybody could have kept up.

  ‘Check our favourite blogger’s site then phone me back,’ says Stocks, before hanging up.

  Forty-One

  BLOG: Seeing Red

  The anonymous, unfiltered truth about crime and the criminal justice system

  * * *

  This is getting properly crazy. I thought it was over, at least for me, because the last page torn from Nathan’s journal had been sent. But now something else has arrived, and I can see we’ve barely even started. It’s a photo, but the internet here is too slow and uploading it will take time we don’t have. It seems I was right before: Nathan is in trouble. So all I’ll say is that this photo, supposedly taken just a few minutes ago, shows DS Katie Rhodes and Sam Stone from the National Crime Agency chatting to a man outside the gate of his home. He’s a grey-haired guy in glasses who I wouldn’t have recognised if it wasn’t for the text accompanying the photo:

  * * *

  A retired solicitor arguing with a senior figure from the NCA. What, or rather who, could possibly connect these two? Drugs? Corruption? The answer to this and so much more is with our friend Nathan Radley, along with the antidote to the drugs he’s taken. To find him, go to where my mother was killed. I suggest you get there fast, because poor Nathan is rapidly fading. I wouldn’t get there too fast, though, or you might bump into my gun and me.

  * * *

  I told you it was crazy. If you can help, please do, because I’m not convinced that everyone on the police force will be trying their hardest. It seems to me that with all this talk of corruption, they have far too much to lose.

  Forty-Two

  ‘We can’t go back,’ says Sam, dropping the phone on which they’ve read the blogger’s web page back into the centre console.

  ‘We have to!’ says Katie. ‘We have to find Nathan. I know it doesn’t help you, but please.’ She can hear the desperation in her voice and feel the tears of frustration in her eyes.

  ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t going to help,’ says Sam, starting the car. ‘Clearly I am.’

  They’ve been parked on a roadside verge, not too far from Tristan Hunter’s home.

  ‘Whether there is evidence or not, there’s no way I can get out of this. I’m not even sure I want to anymore. But while I have lost, there’s no fucking way I’m letting this woman win.’ Sam jabs her finger at the mobile screen, at the same time revving the engine loudly, before pulling out onto the road and accelerating hard. ‘But we can’t go back to the office. They won’t let us work this case, not in the way we need to. We have to trust them to do what they can while we do our thing out here.’

  ‘But what are we going to do? We can’t look through the whole of the journal, not in three to four hours.’ Katie swallows hard, considering the time. She thinks of Nathan slowly struggling with his breathing, and her own breathing becomes strained.

  ‘We don’t need the journal. Leave that to others. If there was an obvious connection to a crime, I think somebody out there among the thousands that have read his journal would have already spotted it. Maybe it’s just meant to throw us off track. We have to stop playing by her rules.’ Sam makes a sudden adjustment to get the car back in line, her attention obviously not on the driving. ‘The point is, we already know quite a lot about this woman, based on what Tristan told us.’

  ‘You’re right,’ says Katie. ‘We have a photo of her. And we have what Richard and Tristan were able to tell us.’

  ‘It’s also likely, given that the blogger and killer are one and the same, that she was nearby ten minutes ago. That’s most likely why she couldn’t download the photo quickly, because she’s working on her phone.’

  Katie looks in the mirror, then scans their surroundings – open countryside, hardly any cars. ‘Might that make it easier to track her?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sure the guys back at the station are already on it.’

  Katie nods. ‘Let’s check.’ She draws in a long breath, composing herself and finding her focus. Then she reaches for the mobile and presses redial.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ asks Ken Stocks, having answered on the first ring. ‘What’s this about Sam and the solicitor?’

  ‘It’s not important,’ says Katie. ‘Not right now. All that matters is finding Nathan.’

  ‘You sure Sam wants us to do that?’

  ‘Just listen!’ she cries, allowing the emotions she’d successfully suppressed to get the better of her for just a moment. ‘We’ve confirmed that it is the woman in the photo behind Thomas Shaw that we’re after. She’s Carl Watkins’ daughter. Although I don’t think she played much of a part in his life.’ Katie pictures the pale white top of the drug dealer’s skull in the ditch. ‘Only his death. Her name may be Max, or Maxine, as Richard suggested. We should be able to get the rest if you share the photo with the press. In fact, get it out to everybody.’ Katie closes her eyes and in an instant works her way back through the conversation with Tristan. ‘We believe her mum was a policewoman, who will have given birth about thirty years ago. The mum suffered from mental health issues and was more than likely a drug addict. If her death was newsworthy and made it into Nathan’s journal, then it must have been unusual. A suicide, perhaps? Although it might just have been the local papers, and we do believe we’re looking at London or close by.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Get a car out to the solicitor’s house. His name is Tristan Hunter.’ Katie gives the address. ‘He won’t be a happy man at the moment, and will no doubt be reluctant to share, but see if he knows anything else. And check whatever cameras are around, because there’s a good chance Max, as I guess we’ll have to call her for now, was close, and given the lack of traffic around here, we might be able to identify her car.’

  ‘Are you coming back to the station?’ asks Stocks.

  ‘No. We’d be a distraction. And I want to know you’re focused on the right things.’

  ‘But I can’t just ignore these corruption allegations.’

  ‘Point proved,’ says Katie firmly, looking at the clock on the dashboard, the hands of which seem to be moving far too quickly. ‘Let’s just concentrate on Nathan. For now. Ask all the question you like about me and Sam when this is over. Now call me back as soon as you have anything.’

  Katie hangs up and turns to Sam. ‘This isn’t going to work,’ she says. ‘We don’t have the systems they have, the databases, the links to the cameras.’

  ‘We do.’ Sam indicates, taki
ng them away from the A-road back into London. ‘Thanks once again to Carl.’

  Fifteen minutes later, and they’re pulling up outside a block of flats in an area on the outskirts of London that Katie doesn’t believe she’s ever been to before. Once more Sam has ignored all her questions, and so Katie has given up asking them, choosing instead to focus on an internet search on her phone. The trawl of news items from thirty years ago has offered little, and again she starts to wonder if anything they’ve been given is true. That is, apart from the threat to Nathan’s life. About that she is in no doubt.

  The two women are quickly out of the car and heading for the block of flats. An old lady holds the front door open for them, and her gaze lingers a little too long on the scars on Katie’s cheeks. Still, she doesn’t have time to worry about being recognised.

  Bouncing off the walls as they run up four flights of stairs, they arrive panting at a door that Sam starts to beat her fist on. It seems to take forever before the door is opened and a ghostly white male in his mid to late twenties, wearing colourful shorts and nothing else, stares wide-eyed at them.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asks. ‘And what the fuck happened to your face?’

  For a moment Katie thinks he’s talking to her and instantly moves to cover her scars, then she remembers the muddy mark on Sam from their fight in the woods. Sam lifts her hand and finds the now dried mud, licking her fingers and quickly rubbing the mark off. Then she barges past the man in the doorway, calling back, ‘Don’t you watch the news, Danny?’ before he can protest. He hurries after her down the hallway, with Katie left to close the door behind them.

  In the living room, computers are stationed everywhere, cables snaking across the floor, all of the monitors on and giving out information. One of them is showing a twenty-four-hour newsfeed.