‘Your dad brought the results.’ The superintendent pauses and the uncomfortable cough returns. ‘He was the best detective I’ve ever worked with. Achieved so much without ever letting his standards slip, without ever crossing a single line.’
‘Yes,’ says Katie, with a sigh that she hopes disguises her discomfort. ‘I’ve heard it from you and many others. What’s your point?’
‘My point,’ says the superintendent, running a hand across his crown from a ruler-straight parting as he looks down at his shoes, the tips polished to a sharp reflection, ‘is that he’d hate to see you this way.’
‘And I hate to see him how he is now,’ says Katie, lifting a hand to her knotted mess of hair. ‘But I guess that’s life.’
‘You know what this case represents for you, don’t you, detective? There have been more than enough warnings.’
‘More than enough,’ she says. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.’
* * *
Katie takes a step into the room. When she turns to urge Nathan to follow she finds his eyes are on everything but the body ahead of them, taking in every spotless corner and polished surface, blinding himself on the lights above. They’re alone in the mortuary, the coroner making a swift exit for a cigarette break when he saw the cuffs on Nathan, so Katie grabs Nathan and pulls him up to her, waiting till his eyes finally settle on hers.
‘Sarah Cleve,’ she says, pointing towards the table in the centre of the room. ‘Two days ago.’
‘How do you know it’s the same person responsible?’
‘Come, and I’ll show you.’
She pulls at the handcuffs again, but this time he resists. ‘I can’t.’
‘Of course you can,’ she says firmly. ‘What are you afraid of?’ She sees him glance across at a tray on the far side of the room filled with an array of objects for cutting bodies apart and wonders if she has her answer.
‘Can you tell me what you’re feeling?’ she asks, tentatively.
‘No,’ he says, turning his eyes to the floor, where his feet are twisted awkwardly inwards.
She wonders if she even wants to know.
‘You’re the only one who can help us here, Nathan. We were a team. We did good together.’
‘I’m not that man anymore,’ he says, slowly shaking his head. He sneaks the briefest of looks at the body, but it’s enough to send him stumbling backwards into a low table behind, his arm shielding his eyes and face. ‘I can’t.’
‘Of course you can. You’ve seen far worse.’ She’s thinking of those bodies now, perfectly sliced from head to toe, decapitated, bottomless, burnt to a crisp, squashed to something resembling a pizza, a pool of ooze identifiable only by the smell.
She waits for him to look up at her. It takes a long time, but she stands there patiently. When he does finally catch her eye, she directs him downwards with her finger, towards the inner thigh of the corpse, then traces a shape in the air just above it.
‘The first body had something here painted in chocolate icing,’ she says. ‘It matched the birthmark I saw on you the other night. I’d also caught a glimpse of it before, a long time ago…’
She feels the heat on her cheeks as she watches him reach back and grip the edge of the flimsy-looking table, forcing it to take so much of his weight it’s a wonder the legs don’t buckle like his.
‘That’s why I needed to come and get you. I haven’t told the rest of my team everything yet, not until I know more, but this is about us. And I can’t deal with it alone. I need you. I need the old you.’
She imagines he’s tried to forget this part of himself over the last year, but he cannot have lost his special gift for reading the behaviour of the killers they hunted. He offers the briefest of glances; then, twisting his head, eyes widening, he takes a few tentative steps forward. He stops a stride short of the table, his shackled arms held out towards the stomach where the hundred tiny cuts spiral in towards the belly button.
‘What the fuck is that!’ he whispers, sliding slowly towards the floor, suddenly white as the room. ‘He can’t have…’
‘Who can’t have…? What have you found?’ Her voice is rising as the questions return. Has he fooled her again? Has she fooled herself? She wants to ask him straight out, to take one of his fingers and bend it back until he talks, to use the case that had once ended his deceit to make him reveal the truth to her now. But she can’t.
Instead, she leads him silently outside, watching him drawing in the cool morning air and doing the same herself. He doesn’t speak for more than five minutes, but she gives him all the time he wants because this isn’t so different from the old days. Back then he would stand over a crime scene as though he were asleep. Then would come the tiny twitches in his body, the twisting of his arms and balling of his fists. Sometimes he would even cry out, drawing the attention of those around him, before she learned to make them leave. It was the words that followed that would delight and frighten Katie in equal measure. It was as though she were listening to the killer recounting his crime, revealing his mistakes.
‘It’s impossible,’ Nathan says, finally.
‘What is? What did you see in there? Did you recognise those markings on the stomach?’
He lifts his forefinger then lowers it a few inches, as if drawing a line in the air. He repeats this action several times, before suddenly re-emerging from whatever trance he’d entered and vigorously shaking his head.
‘No. No, it means nothing to me. I’d just forgotten… forgotten how bad…’ His eyes snap across to hers, pleading. ‘Take me back.’
Katie feels the anger rising, threatening to spill over. She won’t be taken in by his acting this time. He’s hiding things from her. He had recognised the pattern on the stomach of the victim. Even back at the station, when he claimed not to know the caravan park where they’d found the first victim’s car, it had been a lie. She’d kept that from her colleagues; she’d kept all her suspicions to herself, holding on to two hopes. First, that her instinct hadn’t failed her. Secondly, that solving this case might save them both. There will be no solution to any of this if he packs up his lies and heads back to Scotland.
‘Sarah Cleve had two young boys,’ she says, her voice shaking with emotion. ‘Tate and Felix. One of them has long-standing health issues. He’s small, and weak. Sarah was a nurse, caring for cancer patients, which is how she met her husband, someone she had helped to survive. She loved Pinot Noir, tending her roses, Philip Glass and the Times crossword.’ Back in the day she would feed these details into Nathan so he could use them to populate his reimagining of the scene. This time, she wants him to choke on them. ‘We can go and see all this if you want, we can see what you’re walking away from.’ She’s almost shouting now, desperately fighting the urge to grab him by the collar and shake him, aware that she’s being watched by the coroner as he stands leaning against a doorway with no cigarette, and no idea, she imagines, which of the two of them he ought to be scared of now. ‘And what the fuck are you going back to? That wasn’t a life. That certainly wasn’t your life. And you’re forgetting that I know you. Okay, so there were bits you manged to hide, but not everything. You were never satisfied, always pushing, always learning. How can you bear to lock yourself away up there—’ She stops abruptly, aware that Nathan has lifted a hand. It’s his right hand, several pale lines of scarring on his wrist evidence of those times when he really couldn’t bear it.
‘It’s not my home I want to go back to,’ he says.
He looks up and holds her stare, and she can see she’s read it all wrong yet again.
Twelve