‘Don’t go.’
He should have seen it coming. Perhaps he had, perhaps he’d wanted to hear her say it; although now that she has he wishes she hadn’t.
‘It’s not just faith in my instinct that faded while you were away.’ She stands in front of him, pushing her shoulders back and brushing a stray strand of hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She had always been beautiful. The rumours of a romance between them had spread quickly, an obvious way to explain the closeness between them, and on weaker days, on days when for just a moment he forgot himself, Nathan had started to imagine it too.
‘It’s only since you’ve come back,’ Katie continues, ‘that I’ve started to remember there might have been more.’ The two of them stare at each other for a moment, neither blinking, neither seeming to breathe. Then Katie turns away. For a moment he thinks she’s going to reach for a bottle of wine, perhaps even finish the dregs of one of the old ones on the side, but her hand darts to the right at the last second, picking up a glass which she then fills with water. She takes a big swig and then returns to him, peeling off her marigolds and offering an enthusiastic nod. ‘Right,’ she says, clapping her hands together, as she would always do to silence the room back at work. ‘It’s time to hear your insight.’
‘It was never insight,’ he says, spreading his hands out on the tabletop and slowly pushing them away, trying to knead out the tension he can feel building again. ‘Just a dark imagination.’
‘A gift.’
A nail catches on a groove in the table and he continues to pull, enjoying the tug of flesh. ‘A curse.’
‘You could see somebody,’ she says hesitantly. ‘I have. It helped, for a while.’
‘You gave up?’
She runs a hand down either side of her trousers as if ironing out non-existent creases. ‘I made a mistake.’
Nathan spots the tiniest look across at the bedroom door, and he thinks he understands. A silence settles over the room. In the distance he can hear the steady stream of traffic, and he’s reminded that it’s not just him and Katie: there’s a whole city out there, millions of lives, all with their own complications, secrets and desires.
‘I’m not sure I can go to the station again,’ he says, gripping the edge of the table, his bare feet pressed firmly to the floor. ‘But I need to see everything we have on this case.’
‘Fine.’ She gestures for him to move towards the kitchen door and he does so, passing very close to where she’s standing.
Joining him in the living room, she points to another door that he’d somehow missed before, part hidden behind a colourful drape. She moves across and pulls it back, drawing out a key from behind a stack of paperbacks on an overcrowded bookcase. They’re adult books, thrillers by the looks of it, and he finds himself giving them a wide berth, even though he suspects that what’s beyond the now-open door, in the darkness that’s been revealed, will be far more dangerous.
Fourteen
Katie lifts a finger towards the light switch, before quickly withdrawing it, suddenly convinced she’s made a terrible mistake.
‘On second thoughts, I’ll bring the stuff out to you,’ she says, trying to block him with her arm.
But he’s already moving past, stepping through the doorway into the darkness. She reaches out to pull him back, as if this black hole might absorb him for ever, but he slips through her grasp. He flicks the switch and the room ahead is flooded with the blinding light of a naked bulb. She lifts a hand to shield her eyes, then lowers it to cover the whole of her face.
She doesn’t need to see the room; she can place every item in it in her head. Unlike the rest of her flat, everything is exactly where it should be. In the centre is a swivel chair, lopsided and broken, discarded from someone’s office at the station. The floor is bare wood, sanded down and painted white. The walls are also white, but there are only occasional glimpses of it. Floor-to-ceiling – and parts of the ceiling – are covered in photos, printouts of data, maps and reports. There are many flashes of colour, with little bits of tape and string, and plenty of red on the images. Tucked in the corner is a metal filing cabinet, another reject from the office, from a time before computers took over, back when she was new to the job and she believed she would solve every case. The room is so tiny that when she stands in the middle and spreads her arms she can practically reach each wall. She remembers the day she first looked around the flat, how the letting agent had tried to hurry her on, waving her past what seemed to him little more than a walk-in cupboard, saying a few words about storage space. But the windowless room had struck a chord with Katie, and she’d pushed her way past the agent, standing with the light off, picturing how it might eventually be.
She feels as if she ought to offer an explanation to Nathan, something to make her feel a little less exposed, but when she removes her hand from her face and turns to him, she realises he’s likely suffering far more than she is. He’s looking at the forensics from a case that fills almost half a wall: lab reports; phone logs; witness statements; handwritten notes and, at the centre of it all, the photos. Some show the head. Some show the body and the curls of peeled skin. And one colour image shows a hand, the wedding-ring finger of which has been snapped back.
‘You never caught anyone?’ he says, without looking across.
She realises now that he hasn’t asked before, even though the Steven Fish murder must have been on his mind from the very moment they met. One more thing he’s been holding back.
‘I tried,’ she says. ‘Everything.’ For all the unsolved cases in this room, this had seemed the most important because it represented the start of her decline. She’d thought if she could solve it that the others would follow; that her confidence, and her instinct, would return.
‘What are all these?’ asks Nathan. He continues staring, unblinkingly, at the photos.
‘Cases from the past year,’ she says, before adding quietly, ‘unsolved.’ She points at the nearest, hoping to pull Nathan’s attention away. ‘This was a man in his seventies who had his throat slit on the way back from visiting his wife’s grave.’ He was the first of the year’s failures, and she remembers clearly the frustration at having to move on, and how even then she’d felt like something inside of her was slipping, like she was losing control of something fundamental. ‘This,’ she continues, stepping to her right and jabbing a finger noisily against another image, ‘was a teenage boy who was shot in the stomach. We were close to an arrest, but I…’ She lowers her head again, shaking it slowly.
‘Throat and stomach.’
Katie looks across at Nathan and can see he has finally left the image of the hand and is staring at the latest additions, photos and documents that have covered up others. The light above almost seems to have been angled in on them, bringing out the vivid red of the blood. Nathan leans towards a photo of the body of Sally Brooks.
‘I’ve made the connection, of course,’ she says. ‘But I don’t think it was the same man.’
‘It can’t be,’ he says, vigorously shaking his head. ‘But I do think he is mocking you for these failures.’
She shoots Nathan a look, unable to suppress her anger. ‘You think you could have done better?’
‘I think we could, yes.’ He turns back to the image of the teenage boy lying on the filthy floor of an alley, still clutching his stomach as he’d watched his life spilling out of him.
‘It’s not too late,’ says Katie.
‘This case,’ says Nathan, lining himself up with Sally Brooks again. ‘One final case, like we agreed.’
‘Fine,’ says Katie, with another flash of anger. ‘But to solve it we can’t afford to shut ourselves off from the others. What if he’s doing this because of something we were involved in years ago?’