‘You mean a relative?’ says Nathan, a suggestion he seems to instantly regret.
‘Perhaps of someone we put away, yes,’ says Katie. She’s already worked her way through that lengthy list, but she knows there might have been something she missed.
‘I don’t think so,’ says Nathan, his voice suddenly sounding distant. ‘I believe it goes further back than us.’
‘What makes you say that?’ she asks, although she already has a suggestion, taking her back to a place she’d sworn she wouldn’t go. ‘The clue in the toaster? The toast? Are you talking about your childhood?’
Nathan doesn’t say a word. He’s within reach; he couldn’t be anything else in this room. Katie has to fight the urge to grab his shoulder and reverse him, to look into his eyes and demand he do what she’s far from willing to do herself – to talk about the distant past.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, eventually. ‘I had a thought. But I was wrong.’
‘Don’t you fucking dare!’ she says, leaning in. ‘I brought you here, I showed you my failings, showed you how I couldn’t fucking cope without you. Why?’ She doesn’t wait for the answer, although he might well be able to give it, knowing her as well as he does. ‘Because nothing else matters.’ She moves in close so they’re both just inches from the picture of Sally Brooks. ‘Nothing matters but making him stop.’
‘Exactly,’ he says quietly as he turns and walks out of the room. ‘Which is why we need to go.’
‘Where?’
‘The last place in the world I ever wanted to return to.’
Staring at the back of his head, she’s again reminded of how little she knows about this man. While she’s always been thorough in researching her work, considering every last detail in an attempt to understand the whole, with personal matters she’s barely scratched the surface. She doesn’t need a professional to tell her why, although the one she’d been casually speaking to at her dad’s care home had made it nice and clear. And it’s in considering that man’s words, the source of her own pain, and the places to which she would least like to return, that the answer comes to her, accompanied by the image of six words scribbled in thick ink on a scrap of square-lined paper: Home is where the heart is.
Fifteen
Perhaps it was inevitable that he would come back to this place; it might have been his plan all along to return one last time before his three days were up. Or perhaps he’s answering a genuine concern that someone else has been here, raking through his past to use it as a weapon against him, making him think unthinkable things, to believe he might have committed these crimes. And then to start imagining something far worse.
The house is a huge Georgian property on top of Richmond Hill, not more than two minutes’ walk from the park. Nothing seems to have changed since he was last here. He’s amazed and in a way disappointed to see the front door hasn’t been caved in and all the contents taken. It would have been obvious to any burglar scouting potential targets that the car in the front drive, an ageing Citro?n, hadn’t moved in a long time, and peering through cracks in the dusty curtains would have revealed that the house had been unoccupied for just as long. Maybe it was the garden that had saved the place, the immaculate lawn and carefully maintained flowerbeds giving the impression that someone was still around to care. Perhaps the old guy they’d employed to come once a week had been mistaken for the owner. He had, from Nathan’s memory, looked like the sort of eccentric who might live in squalor on the inside while maintaining a kind of splendour on the outside. Whatever the reason, the house looks untouched and so, realising he still needs a key, he lifts a plant pot containing a recently deadheaded rose and slips one out from underneath.
Even after the door is unlocked he needs to use his shoulder to barge it open, such is the mountain of post behind it. There must be menus for every restaurant in the area, many of which will be long out of business; there are local papers, for which he imagines the same is true; there are bills, letters, postcards, presents, even leaves blown through the letterbox on the windiest of days; and there are large white squares, often lying in twos: one for him, one for his brother. He swallows hard as he steps over a pair by the far wall, seeing a number 20 handwritten in the corner of an unopened card: a reminder not of the birthday that hadn’t been celebrated, but of the twenty years since he last entered the house. Yet more evidence of the perfect symmetry of it all.
As they move to the base of a small set of stairs, confronted by clouds of dust and a damp and musty smell, he looks across at Katie and wonders if she’s surprised by this place he’s brought her to. He has no idea how much she knows about his family. Before, he could almost have guaranteed it was nothing, but he knew she was more than capable of finding things out behind his back and the last year had given her every reason. His own particular skill for reading people assured him she would respect his wishes, as did the similar request for privacy she’d made in return.
‘What are we looking for?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, although as he stands there, barely inside the house, he feels like he’s seeing everything. To his right is the corner where he would fling his school bag and kick off his shoes. To his left is the place he stood punching the air on the day he got his acceptance to RADA. Ahead, at the base of the stairs, he can see the rug he’d tripped over while doing some acting a few years before the RADA letter, running around pretending to be a policeman, a fall that had resulted in a deep cut to his chin. He lifts a hand to feel for a scar, then realises there’ll be nothing there. Not because it has long since healed, but because it was never there in the first place – he wasn’t the one who got hurt. The mistake is not surprising: the line between him and his brother was always so blurred that he has difficulty remembering who did what; although he does now recall that he wasn’t the policeman. He was never the policeman.
As they reach the top of the steps and enter the hall he looks to his left, seeing the kitchen door still closed. He reaches for the edge of a cabinet to balance himself and when he pulls his hand back he can see he’s left a sweaty palm print. He moves hurriedly ahead, not sure where he’s going, just wanting to be away from that room.
The lounge seems even larger than it did when he was a child. The ceiling is high, with ornate plasterwork and a huge chandelier. The walls are lined with hundreds of books, many of them leather-bound and dating back centuries. Tucked in the corner, on an antique table, is the huge family telly. Huge in depth, that is, with a screen that seems ridiculously small compared to modern sets. The ornate rug that covers two thirds of the dark wood floorboards is old and starting to fray at the edges. It’s the same rug Nathan and his brother had lain on as children; most likely it was the same rug they’d been put on as babies, staring up at the ceiling, understanding nothing of the world. Were it not for Katie, he would lie there now.
The huge windows at the far end of the room have the curtains drawn and only a narrow strip of sunlight has made it through. Nathan moves over and readies himself to pull them back. His dad had never allowed them to do so, preferring to sit in darkness with only a lamp by which to read his books. It’s therefore with a sense of rebellion that Nathan grabs the curtains and throws them open.
The face is up against the window, so close that its features are pressed against the glass, squashed, deformed, hideous. A flash of something out of the corner of Nathan’s eye draws his attention down, and he can see a hand holding an object, long, polished and coming to a point.