The police cordon is still out the front of the first victim’s house, as is a police car, the driver of which Katie recognises as a young PC she very nearly slept with on a drunken night out. The recognition is mutual and also useful, as she’s able to shepherd Nathan by without a word. They’d come to the house of Sally Brooks, rather than the more recent victim, to avoid the crowds that she knew would still be there. She also wanted to take him to the place where the body had been marked as his had been marked; one at birth, the other at death.
The house is small. Far too small for two children, she thinks as she moves down the hallway, stepping over a floppy doll with no head. She doesn’t remember seeing it before, but then there are plenty of toys scattered around. Nathan suddenly seems unsteady on his feet, and she has to take more of his weight as she guides him forward. Strands of his hair are stuck to his forehead, and his hands are balled against his cuffs.
They head towards the kitchen, passing a tiny living room with more toys scattered across the carpet and allowing a glance at a school photo on the wall. The sweet photo of the two girls seems to both strengthen and weaken Katie at the same time as she thinks of the ones she used to bring home to her dad every year, where she’d tried but always failed to follow the photographer’s instructions. Like her, these girls will have trouble remembering the one person who will never get to see them grow up.
The forensics team have been and gone, but there’s plenty of evidence of their work: dusted surfaces, measurement sticks and chalk footprints of items that have been taken away. One of those things was the knife; the other, the body, twisted into a pose, like the second victim, Sarah Cleve.
She watches Nathan carefully, remembering that little smile when she’d fed him beans last night. This time his face is pale, stretched in disbelief.
‘Along with the chocolate mark,’ he says, his hand hovering at his waist, ‘was the stomach…?’
‘Not lots of little cuts like the second victim,’ she says, the image flashing up again, causing her to swallow hard. ‘But the same circular pattern made with her intestines, which had been pulled out and carefully arranged into a spiral.’
He nods a couple of times, then goes through a sudden and familiar transformation. His face becomes expressionless and his shoulders sag forward as he releases a long breath. He remains frozen in this position for thirty seconds or more until his body starts to jolt and buckle. It would be easy to believe he were having a fit, were it not for his eyes darting around the room, taking in everything, then closing tightly.
She steps silently away, knowing better than to disturb him. She can hear a bird calling outside; it seems incongruous, as does the gentle ticking of a cat-shaped clock on the wall. It feels as though everything should have stopped.
For a moment, she wishes she could stop everything, to curl up in the corner of the room and give up, as she has so many times of late. Her stamina always came from her dad, but his, too, has now ebbed away, the Alzheimer’s leaving him just a shell. She’s picturing him now, wondering if she shouldn’t have gone to visit, but she knows it wouldn’t make any difference, beyond easing her guilty conscience.
Caught up in her own thoughts, she almost misses Nathan slowly moving forward. He knows what to avoid, what not to touch. He might have forgotten many things, but professionally it appears he is still intact. He walks over to the far side of the kitchen, arms outstretched. She wants to ask him what he’s doing, but thinks better of it. He crouches down and touches the front of the fridge, close to where a tiny streak of blood can still be seen. Then he raises his finger a few inches and lightly taps the door. She had been the one to spot the blood in the swirls of colour of a child’s painting, and it seems Nathan has also somehow spotted it, even with the picture no longer there. He stands and moves to the far corner of the kitchen, touching an already printed work surface, before tapping the top of a half-eaten bag of bread, twisted tight. Then, with the knuckle of a single finger for balance, he rises on tiptoes and leans over, peering down into a shiny toaster. He drops down and turns towards her with a nod. She joins him, her heart racing as she pulls on a pair of latex gloves. She follows his lead and leans over the toaster. At first she can’t see it, it’s clogged up with so many burnt crumbs, but finally she spots the pale corner of a piece of paper. Next to the toaster is a pair of wooden tongs, like an oversized pair of tweezers, used to pull out things that are too hot to touch. With effort, she manages to slip them down the nearest gap and grab the paper, drawing it slowly out. Strangely, ridiculously, she’s reminded of the child’s game, Operation, she would play as a kid and half-expects an electric buzz to sound as she brushes the sides. The paper finally comes free and she lifts it, holding it up in the air while she retrieves a small evidence bag.
‘We need to read it,’ says Nathan.
‘We need to do this right.’
‘I don’t have time,’ he says in a monotone, glancing up at the clock, a way to remind her there’s just two days more.
‘There could be fibres on here, some tiny clue.’
‘That is the clue,’ he says, gesturing at the paper. ‘And it’s far from tiny.’
Once more she senses this could all be part of his game: bring her back here to the scene of his crime and find a clue that nobody else has been able to, then push her into breaking the rules. ‘You know who left it?’
‘No,’ he says, lowering his head. ‘But it seems he knows me. Beans and sausage on toast is my favourite… I’ve been eating it up there.’ Nathan points to the ceiling to signify the long journey north.
‘So, he’s been watching you in Scotland?’
He quickly shakes his head, and she can see what she takes to be a flash of frustration, annoyance that he might have just slipped up. ‘I told you, nobody has been there other than you. Even if they had, they couldn’t have seen what I was doing. I’ve never opened the shutters.’
‘And you haven’t been outside?’ she says tentatively, thinking of the tracks around the house.
‘Not to eat.’
He lifts his hands to cover his face, fingertips digging into his skin. Instinct is telling her he’s holding back, pretending to be lost and confused. She finds herself looking across at the toaster, retracing the connection he had somehow made. ‘How did you keep the bread fresh? Did you have a freezer up there?’
‘I-I meant from before. I used to eat it before.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ she says. She’d always been very careful about what she was eating: plenty of greens, plenty of raw, anything to try and gain an advantage in her work. Nathan had eaten whatever and whenever he’d liked, always ravenous after they’d visited a crime scene.
Their diet might have been different, but their commitment to the work had been the same. Late nights, weekends – it seemed to be all they were living for. Katie had even stopped visiting her dad regularly, choosing instead to go through old case notes with Nathan, searching for clues. As a result, she’d missed the clues with her dad, and the very first signs of his decline.
Perhaps it’s remembering this that causes her to push on, to touch upon a subject that she knows will upset him. ‘Do you mean you ate them when you were a child?’
The look he gives her is one of shock. She’d agreed from the very start of their partnership that she wouldn’t pry into the upbringing that had obviously troubled him. Even after he’d gone she’d resisted her natural urge to go digging around behind his back; wanting to forget him, scared she might find further evidence of how damaged he really was.
‘You used to be good at keeping promises,’ he snaps.