These words have power: they rob him of strength and breath, they carry him back in time. In an instant he’s picturing the kitchen table, broad, wooden and heavily scarred. In one corner is a photo of father and son; in the other a small sheet of paper with blue lines running horizontally and vertically. Soaking through the surface of that paper, written in the darkest, thickest ink, are the very words he’s just heard.
He shakes off the image, dragging himself back to the present. ‘You’re not alone, though, are you?’ he asks, while reaching out towards the mirror, fingers outstretched. They curl back towards him when he remembers the other reason for making this call. ‘You still have your wife?’
‘My wife?’ He hears a snort at the other end of the line. ‘Can you even remember her name?’
‘Of course,’ he says, desperately trawling through previous conversations, searching for descriptions of a life he’s only ever heard about in telephone calls. Once or twice he’d wondered about looking for further evidence online, to confirm that at least one of them was getting it right, but he feared, despite how careful he’d been covering his tracks from the very beginning, that in doing so he might somehow inspire his brother to do the same.
‘Your wife is called Karen,’ he says, finally dragging her name up from the depths. ‘And your son is Oliver. He must be two now, isn’t he?’
‘Almost three.’ The sadness returns to the other voice, and Nathan can feel the weight of it right at his core. ‘I’m afraid I still haven’t told him about his uncle. It just seems too hard to explain.’
‘I think one of us is more than enough for him,’ he says, again adding a tentative laugh. This time there’s no laughter back, and he curses himself for his clumsiness. Their conversations have grown increasingly awkward over the years. Sometimes it’s seemed like a crime against nature, to have taken something so perfect and torn it apart, but when he pictures the scene in Cornwall – the sun, the beach, the wife, the child – it’s enough to know such a life exists because of him, because he has been no part of it, because he made the choice to stay away.
‘I take it there’s no special person in your life, big bro?’
‘Sadly, no,’ he says. ‘For the very reason you and I are talking like this, not sharing a beer, not staring out at the sea.’
‘I thought maybe you could find yourself a nice policewoman, someone who understands that crazy world of yours?’
In wondering how his brother might know about Katie he arrives at a possibility far less troubling than the one that had inspired him to make the call. ‘You’ve not been talking to anyone, have you, trying to find out what I’m up to?’
‘You know I wouldn’t put you at risk like that.’
‘Not even an innocent conversation with a stranger, telling him about us, about what we’ve been through?’
‘Jesus, Nathan, I haven’t even dared speak to my wife about you!’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Nathan, reaching out towards the mirror again, imagining his hand resting on the other man’s shoulder and giving it a gentle squeeze. ‘If there was another way.’
‘Of course there’s another way! Trust me. Tell me where you are. Tell me who you are. Let me at least imagine your life.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Nathan says again. ‘I can’t yet.’
‘Yet?’ says his brother. ‘So, this isn’t for ever?’
‘Of course not,’ he says, staring down at the scars on his wrist. Wouldn’t it be easier to give in? To go and see him and his family and be a part of their lives? He shakes his head with such force he loses balance and knocks the nearby table where Katie has left him a glass of water. It wobbles and clinks against the metal upright of the bed lamp. He peers over the corner of the bed at the door, waiting to see the handle move, but instead he can just pick out the faint murmur of a television. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go now. But I need you to know—’
‘The same,’ says his brother. ‘Always the same.’
He lets the handset fall to the floor and with the last ounce of energy he can muster he climbs to his feet and falls sideways on the bed, burying his head into the hastily drawn sheets. Now he realises the true reason he had to make the call. It had nothing to do with the case, with answering a doubt that had evaporated the moment he’d heard his brother’s voice; the same way his agreeing to come down here with Katie has nothing to do with solving murders. He just needs to know that the people he cares about are going to be okay.
With Katie, he only needs to look around this room, a room that belongs to a completely different person to the one he left behind, to know that there’s plenty of work to do. He’d felt such guilt for having tricked her into believing he was coping, for putting on an act, but isn’t this proof she was doing the same? All those years he’d fed off her strength, off her control, off her order, and now…
* * *
He wakes in total darkness, unable to see a single thing around him, but he believes he can picture it: the closed blinds; the cracked ceiling above him; the swirling mural out on the stairway. The sheets under him certainly feel right, soaked in sweat and dragged up towards him from all directions. He rolls over, spreading out one arm to find the edge of the bed. He always likes to know how close he is to falling. Both of his wrists are sore, and his legs feel like they’ve run even further than usual. His head hurts, too, a dull pain on his jawline that sinks into his teeth. And he’s hungry. He’s often hungry, but this time he really does need to fill his stomach, and the exact meal has taken shape in his mind, a childhood favourite, straight out of the tin…
He sits up suddenly and throws himself at the edge he’s just found, not knowing where he’s going to land, just wanting to get into a corner, to get out of the way of a series of images that he desperately hopes are nothing more than the usual tricks of his mind. He falls against something hard, his forehead crashing into it, a flash of pain in the darkness. He dabs at the centre of that pain with his fingers, finding a wetness there. It could be sweat, but this feels thicker and warmer and it’s running down past his eye and across his cheek. Suddenly a click and a square of blinding light appears ahead of him. He turns his head away and lifts his hands to cover his face, the pain on his forehead now coming in frequent waves. The light is everywhere, and there’s a voice, distant but still far too close.
‘What are you doing?’ says a woman.
He has a name for that woman. He has a face, too, although he’s still refusing to look at it. And the rest he’s tried to push back, but it’s all crashing in, forcing him further and further into the corner.
‘What are you hiding from?’ she says.
His arms are tucked behind his back, and he can feel a numbness in his fingertips, like they’re no longer his, like he’s losing control.
‘The handcuffs,’ he says. ‘Please. Please I need them.’
‘No,’ she says firmly, refusing to move away.
If anything, she’s moving closer, so close he can feel her breath on his closed eyelids.
‘No more of this bullshit, Nathan. I think you heard me in the car yesterday. And I think you know it was the truth. If this doesn’t work, if we don’t work…’
He feels something being placed on his thighs, and when he opens his eyes his worst fear is confirmed. It’s a carving knife. He tries to push back, to make it slip away, but she’s pinning his legs down with her own and he can’t move.
‘We all have dark thoughts,’ she says. ‘I’ve had plenty of late. In fact, you only need to look around you,’ she pauses, as if waiting for him to do so, but he’s keeping his eyes shut tight. ‘Well, you don’t need to look, not you, not with your memory. You’ll have absorbed the whole place the moment you entered, and you’ll remember in impossible detail what my old place was like. Compare the two and you won’t need to do that special thing you do to get inside people’s minds. You’ll see how I’ve slipped, almost at the very same moment you did.’