by Nick Hollin
‘There you go,’ says Sam, pointing up at the monitor, where a picture of her and Katie is behind a scrolling feed. ‘Now we need to utilise your expertise.’
‘Are you police?’ asks Danny, not daring to look up at the screen for too long, where the answer to his question is written in bold.
‘We are. But I am also a friend of your former employer. Somebody who is sadly no longer with us.’
Danny opens his mouth, revealing his disbelief and yellowing teeth.
‘That’s right,’ says Sam. ‘Carl Watkins. I know exactly what you used to do for him and I need you to do the same for us now.’
This time Danny manages to get a single word out. ‘Why?’
Sam gestures towards the newsfeed again. ‘Because if you don’t, then you will be in just as much trouble as we are!’
Forty-Three
Nathan is rolling around the floor of the shipping container, inching his way across to each wall. He finds nothing new, but deep down he knows that he’s just trying to distract himself from his thoughts. Even thoughts of Katie haven’t eased his discomfort the way they usually do. On the contrary, he’s started to picture her life without him, blaming herself, hating herself. He’s tried to scratch some words into the floor with his nails, some way of letting her know that it’s okay, that he didn’t suffer, and that she has to go on without him, but the floor is too hard and his nails too short, and all he’s succeeded in doing is open up the breaks in his fingers.
The pain seems to be everywhere now. His head is spinning violently and the whole of his back feels like it’s on fire. He wants to cry, but it seems he’s too dehydrated for that. His throat is parched and his skin feels like it’s being sucked into his bones.
Exhausted, he finally stops moving, unable to take it anymore. He hasn’t felt this drained of energy since he lay on the kitchen floor of his family home, cradling his mother’s lifeless body. She had taken her own life, but he doesn’t even have that option. Still, the part of him that has been scared this might be his life for days or even weeks to come, while he starves to death, is now content that the end is coming far sooner than that.
In time. The answer is there, in those two short words. It had also been in the confidence with which his captor said them. She had known, even as she departed, what his fate would be. He lies perfectly still, trying to feel the movement of blood around his body. More specifically, he’s trying to figure out what might be in that blood. He knows he was drugged before; he can vividly remember the hand being placed over his mouth and the sweet smell of chloroform and whatever else was in the mixture before he slipped into darkness.
He can picture the scene where that had happened. Discounting the glimpse of light as his captor slipped away, the view of the countryside on top of the hill with the twisted oak will most likely be the last view he will ever have of this world. Not bad, as things go.
Certainly better than his twin had managed, slicing his own throat in an abandoned warehouse. Better than his dad, staring at the ceiling in the family bedroom. Better than his mum, looking down at the carefully arranged table in the kitchen – a meal for the children, a photograph and the briefest of notes. Better than Ben Peters, in a derelict house that spoke of his tragic life. Better than Dr Nigel Hartham, propped beside a bin down a rubbish-filled alleyway. Better than Thomas Shaw, staring at the floor in the hallway of his home, watching his blood pool around him.
Nathan knows that they will all be equal soon, though. He knows for certain that he will be joining them, because as he’s been thinking, he’s carefully worked his way around every inch of his body and he’s come to the beginning of the end. There’s hardly any part of his body that isn’t in pain, but at the centre of the inside of his elbow that discomfort is tellingly focused. Like a pinprick. Like the point of a needle.
Forty-Four
‘That’s more than fifty different names for Max we’ve been offered now,’ says Sam, staring up at one of Danny’s screens as he scrolls through a social media feed. ‘Why would people make stuff up, when they know somebody’s life is at risk?’
‘I imagine there’s a few of them they’re not making up,’ says Katie. ‘I have a feeling Max has been living several lives.’ She looks down at the list she’s started to compile of details that people have been sharing not just with the authorities, but with the internet. Some have even posted photos with the same woman, but she’s never centre frame and her appearance is remarkably different in each.
‘She’s not been charged under any of the names I’ve tried,’ says Danny, rolling his chair between different keyboards, his fingers dancing across the keys. ‘Not by the police. Not even for buying anything online.’
‘She must have inherited a few of her dad’s tricks,’ says Sam, sadly. ‘Certainly for deception.’
‘Her name probably isn’t going to lead us to Nathan, anyway,’ says Katie. ‘Maybe if a landlord, or whoever sold her the place where Nathan is being held, sees her photo.’
Sam turns away from the screens. ‘Even if he does, it’s probably going to be lost in the avalanche of information. There’s no way of sifting this. Even if there were fifty of us on the job.’
‘They’ll be having the same problem back at the station,’ says Katie, checking her phone again. She’s not missed any calls. There have been no calls. Clearly no breakthrough, and it’s been more than an hour since the blogger’s message came in. Exactly how quickly was Nathan fading? How much longer does he have? She looks down at Danny, who seems to be enjoying the challenge, and she wishes she could be so emotionally detached. ‘I take it there’s no way you can find out who the blogger is, or where they’re blogging from?’ she asks him. ‘We’ve had plenty of our guys try, but they say she’s too good.’
‘From what I’ve seen, they’re right. No way even I’m getting you anything of value within the next few hours, even putting all my effort into it.’
‘Then let’s focus elsewhere,’ says Katie. ‘What about the death of the mother? It was thirty years ago. Maybe twenty-five. Maybe twenty. We don’t know.’ This time Katie considers the list of deaths that she’s made from their searches. It seems endless. So many people have died in remarkable ways, in terrible ways. This is not news to Katie; she’s had a better view than most of the injustices and misfortunes of life. But the scale of it seems overwhelming. Of course, they can narrow it down to former policewomen, but still there’s nothing that jumps out at her, and anything they’ve pursued has quickly led to disappointment.
‘Questions,’ Katie continues. ‘Questions will bring us the answer. Why did she kill her dad, for example? What had Carl Watkins done that was so unforgivable?’
‘He deserted her mother,’ says Sam. ‘Left her to suffer. Maybe even introduced her to drugs.’
Katie is surprised to hear Sam talk so negatively about a man she’s always defended. But then Katie imagines Sam had never been blind to the truth; she’d just accepted that truth, learned to live with the man, perhaps even to love him.
‘But how did Carl meet the mother? Might she have arrested him?’
‘Would that be too long ago to be on the database?’ says Sam, spinning round.
‘We can give it a go,’ says Danny, dragging up records from well before he was born.
‘There,’ he says, pointing up at one of the screens. It takes Katie a moment to follow his finger, but eventually she can see the names. ‘Two arresting officers for possession. One a bloke. One—’
‘Margaret Ames,’ says Katie, breathlessly, bouncing on her tiptoes as a surge of adrenaline seems to lift her up and off the floor. ‘Can we search for what’s happened to her?’
Danny is on it already, hunting through news databases and the death register. The three of them are scanning the text that pops up, searching for the name Ames, looking for confirmation that they might have found the right person.
‘That’s it!’ says Sam, reaching up to jab the screen so hard that for a moment it looks like
it’s going to fall from its support. It’s an article from a local newspaper, describing the overdose of a former policewoman, leaving behind a young daughter.
‘The body was found in a scrapyard,’ says Katie, reading quickly as her heartbeat rises. ‘The same scrapyard where she arrested Watkins.’
‘Does that mean he killed her?’ asks Danny.
Sam doesn’t answer, but Katie can see the acceptance on her face. She imagines Sam has now realised what Carl Watkins really was. She thought she’d known the truth, found something under the surface that she’d been unable to resist, but several more layers have been stripped away, and now Sam can see, as Katie had always been able to see, what a hideous, manipulative man he had been.
‘Let’s ring it in,’ says Katie, lifting up her mobile as she heads for the door.
‘No,’ says Sam. ‘That’s not far from here. We can get there first.’
‘But it might be a big place,’ says Katie. ‘We need as much backup as possible. And Nathan will need medical assistance.’
‘Put the phone down,’ says Sam, as she lifts the car keys. ‘You’re wasting time. Agree we go alone, or find your own way.’ The coldness has returned to her face, and Katie knows exactly what she’s thinking. After realising what a monster Watkins had been, Sam has shifted rapidly from seeking revenge for someone she’d cared about, to a desperate need for self-preservation.
‘There might not even be any evidence of what she knows,’ says Katie. ‘Or there might be far more than you could possibly destroy. And don’t forget, the police are already talking to Tristan.’
‘There’s no connection between me and him. I was careful.’
‘But not so careful as to not admit your collaboration with Carl Watkins to me, or to Nathan. And Danny here is now a witness, too. Are you going to get rid of us all?’
The young man instantly turns and rolls back on his chair. Katie is staring straight at Sam, but she’s already had a good look for potential weapons, something to disable her. Something to get those keys. But then part of her is convinced that she doesn’t need a weapon, because her desperation is at a level where nothing is going to stop her if she takes that step forward.
‘Don’t be as bad as him,’ says Katie. ‘And don’t give the bitch behind this what she wants. And you know this is it. We might have done some bad things. We might have told a few lies, but we’re still on the right side. The same side.’
For a moment, Sam remains just as she had been the first time they met, when she walked into the interview room and sat silent and emotionless. But then her features twitch and twist, and Katie sees the kind of transformation she’s seen so many times on the faces of criminals bombarded by the facts she’s so carefully collated, confronted by the truth she’s revealed. It’s too late. There’s no way out. The past is the past. But it will also inevitably shape the future.
‘Call them,’ says Sam, turning for the door.
Forty-Five
Nathan knows he’s slipping away and that he won’t be coming back. He knows because of that tiny prick on the inside of his elbow. He knows because his decline is far too sudden. It’s not normal. It’s not natural. There’s something in his system that’s dragging him down. The squeeze on his chest is constantly tightening. It’s robbing him of oxygen. It’s robbing him of hope.
There will be no more light. There will be no more Katie. The only question is, what comes next? He’s given this a lot of thought. He had a whole year up in Scotland to contemplate his death. Although most of the time all he longed for was nothingness, there had been days when he’d convinced himself that there was a heaven and he was going to make it there, because actions, not thoughts, were what counted in the end. Now he’s surely heading to hell. Might Thomas Shaw be waiting for him there? Or might this be hell already – a continual reflection on what he’s done?
The answer to that is as sudden as it is unexpected. With a screech, the door to his right is opened, and silhouetted in the doorway he can make out a small woman.
‘Katie?’ Nathan calls out, weakly.
‘Not long.’ The words are not whispered now, but it’s not Katie; it’s the voice of his captor. ‘It seems I underestimated the two of them. You were supposed to be dead already.’
He feels the weakness in his body again. ‘Have you drugged me?’
‘With the good stuff this time,’ she says, tapping her pocket ‘Slow-acting, but irreversible in the quantity I’ve given you. I had a little left over from Dad.’
‘Your dad?’ he asks. Even though he knows his time is running out he wants to keep her talking, hoping that Katie will be here soon, trying to ignore that word, irreversible.
‘Not scientifically proved, but I certainly believed him to be. Mum never got a chance to tell me his name, and when I finally tracked down the most likely candidate, well, sadly he didn’t have long to live. Still, I think we both saw enough of each other, saw the similarities in our features, and our personalities.’
Nathan can’t see those features himself, the woman remaining in silhouette, but he no longer has any doubt who she was to Carl Watkins.
‘You held back,’ he says. ‘When you hit him. Was it with the spade you used to dig the hole?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘I think you were intending to kill him, but you hesitated. Which is why you had to use his drugs.’
‘Drugs that he had probably brought to finish me off. Unlike you, he didn’t have the balls to use a gun. This gun.’ She adds to the silhouette by holding out her hand and the unmistakable shape of a pistol. ‘So he’d have injected me with something, made me look like a junkie, despite all I’d done to try and kick the habit. Then he’d have dumped my body somewhere. Treated me like scrap.’ She laughs and turns to look over her shoulder at the partly open door. ‘Just like he did with Mum.’
‘He killed your mum?’
‘Several times. She was a good policewoman before he got into her head. He was like a poison. It seemed appropriate in the end that I used the poison that had made his fortune to finish him off.’
‘But the spade was what you’d intended,’ Nathan says. His voice is still weak, and his body weaker, but he’s finding the strength for this from somewhere. ‘You wanted to hit him with the same frenzy you’d used on Dr Hartham. You’d dug the hole and led him over to it. Maybe you told him you had something buried there.’
‘Evidence,’ she says. ‘And that’s exactly what it turned out to be in the end. Evidence of what he’d done to my mum.’
‘You found killing Steven Fish easy?’ says Nathan, thinking back to pictures of the headless corpse.
‘The so-called boyfriend? That was nothing personal. Not in relation to him, anyway. It was just a way of sending a message to Dad. Let him know what was coming his way.’
‘But you couldn’t kill him how you wanted to. It’s not easy killing family, is it? No matter who they are. No matter what they’ve done.’
‘Whereas you found shooting Thomas Shaw easy enough. I hoped one of you would lose the plot over there. You, Sam, Katie, you all had so much potential.’
‘You planted the drugs at his house? And the gun?’
‘I made sure they were there. Made sure he was high. And scared. And ready to attack anyone who came for him. You supposedly know all about getting into people’s heads. Well, his was extremely easy to get into. Via his bed, that is.’
‘What about my brother?’ asks Nathan. ‘Did you understand him?’
‘We understood each other,’ she says. ‘He was the only one. He will always be the only one.’
‘How did you meet?’
She laughs at this, and he can just make out a crossing of her arms. ‘He caught me. He did what you were scared to do. He looked at the evidence from Steven Fish and he tracked me down. He would have been a far better detective than you.’
Nathan sighs. ‘For a long time I thought he was a far better person than me.’
‘And you were right, he was. He was because
he was true to himself.’
‘And what a world it would be if we all gave in to those instincts,’ says Nathan, sadly. ‘So did you live on the houseboat with him?’
The woman takes a few steps back to the door and peers out through the gap. Nathan can hear sirens in the distance.
‘For a while,’ she says. He can see part of her face now. She has shoulder-length brown hair and attractive features. She has none of the physical strength that Carl Watkins had. But all of the casual menace. And it’s not just in the way she’s leaning against the doorway of the shipping container while half of London’s police force is no doubt racing towards her; it’s the gun that’s now swinging from the tips of her fingers. ‘It was never going to work,’ she says, finally, leaning her head back and tapping it slowly against the door frame. ‘Christian and I had so much in common, but we still weren’t the same.’
‘Like a twin, you mean?’ says Nathan. He’s been straining to lift his head from the ground to get a better look at her, but now he lets his head fall. At the same time, he can see the gun turning towards him.
‘All he ever needed was you. And yet you walked away.’
‘I didn’t want to infect him with the darkness that was inside of me. I had no way of knowing it was in him, too.’
‘Perhaps if you’d hung around. Perhaps if you’d talked.’
‘You’re right,’ says Nathan. ‘I deserted him. I left him alone to become a monster. The same way your dad left you. And then there’s Richard Evans. Was he helping you with your addiction?’
‘Until he did exactly the same fucking thing all men do. They start thinking too much about themselves.’
If he had the strength Nathan might argue that, because all he’s thinking about at the moment is the gun and about Katie, who will no doubt be at the head of those racing to try and save him.
