She can feel him jump at the sound of a car door slamming and turns to see five more men clambering out. They couldn’t look more like police officers if they tried, and she can almost feel the curtains twitch around her. The Internet will be alight with gossip in no time, but she’ll have to deal with that later. Right now her priority is finding Christian.
‘You two, outside,’ she says, pointing at those she knows to be the least experienced. ‘You three, with us.’ She steps inside the house and somehow it feels colder. She stares down at the pile of mail, making a mental note to get someone to look through it later. Then she addresses the three policemen who’ve followed close behind.
‘We stay together at all times,’ she says. ‘If you hear a sound you say so and we all go and have a look. Let me be one hundred per cent clear: you do not go wandering off to investigate. If you think you’ve found something of interest, you say, “I think I’ve found something of interest”, and you leave it there for me to come and have a look. I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m stealing all the fun, but that’s just the way it is. If you see anybody in here then you run and let the whole fucking world know what’s going on. Am I understood?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
She can see it in the eyes of the men in front of her: they know it, and she knows it. It’s been a while, but she’s beginning to sound like her old self again.
Seventeen
Nathan sits perfectly still while his thoughts continue to surge and swirl. If his brother is guilty, it changes everything. It takes what he had imagined as a perfect life, walking on sunny beaches with a wife and son, and drapes it in a darkness even deeper than his own. He tells himself it can’t be true, that Christian can’t have kept his true nature hidden from him all these years. But then, hadn’t he been confident he’d done exactly that himself?
He lifts the cuffs in front of his face, watching as they slide down and reveal the lines of scarring on his wrist, realising that he was mistaken before and that not everything will change if Christian is guilty. He still needs to carry out his plan. He doesn’t have to worry about his brother finding out anymore, though. In fact, perhaps he ought to make sure he does so that Christian understands this has to stop, one way or another. It’s a thought that takes him back twenty years, to a kitchen table a short distance from where he’s standing and a note written on squared paper, a note he’s always been convinced spoke of a similar madness.
‘I could be wrong,’ he mumbles to himself as he, Katie and the three officers enter through the front door, the mail spread out ahead of them. ‘Wrong about it all.’ He moves tentatively. Old catalogues and letters are slipping left and right under him, and he’s certain he’s soon going to come crashing down.
They move quietly into the hallway. His dad’s study is directly to their left. Nobody else was ever allowed in there; even after he died Nathan had never dared as he does now. It’s smaller than he’d remembered it, filled from floor to ceiling with dusty books, stacks of newspapers and files of his legal case notes. It’s obvious there’s nobody else in here, but he does double-check under the desk to be sure. As boys, Christian had always been the best at hiding, often staying in his chosen spot for half an hour or more, while Nathan had searched and shouted, growing increasingly angry. Whenever he finally revealed himself, Nathan often seeking out their mum to insist that he do so, Christian always emerged from the strangest places with a broad smile. It’s that smile that Nathan is picturing now as he turns back towards the hall, back towards further possibilities. As he approaches Katie, who has been directing things outside the study while clearly keeping an eye on him, his attention is drawn to a series of books on a shelf above the door, and his blood runs cold. They’re out of reach, even on tiptoe, and he has to drag a chair across to pull the first one down. The cover is black with tiny red slits circling round and round towards the centre.
‘You know these books?’ asks Katie, stepping forward. ‘Of course you do,’ she corrects herself. ‘Everyone does.’
Nathan doesn’t say a word; he’s slipping back more than twenty-five years to when he was fifteen years old and standing in a bookshop, holding the same book, somehow knowing before he’d even turned a page that the author would speak to him directly.
‘Did you like his books?’ Katie asks again, standing in the doorway, not crossing the threshold.
‘His?’ says Nathan, finally looking over.
‘J.M. Priest. I read them when I was younger, under my duvet at night, desperately hoping I wasn’t caught.’ She pauses, running a hand through her hair, clearly uncomfortable at opening up about her own past. ‘Bizarrely, it was one of the things that first got me thinking about police work,’ she continues, ‘maybe even more than following in Dad’s footsteps. I couldn’t bear the mystery of not knowing who Priest was; I needed to find out so I could thank him for all those dark and twisted stories, and so I could find out why he suddenly stopped. Actually, there’s no mystery in that last part. He’ll have been too busy spending his fortune to write.’
Nathan finds himself looking upwards again, not at the shelf of books, but as if seeing up through the walls to the full extent of the house on Richmond Hill that he’s never sold, that he’s never had to sell. Distracted, he misses Katie reaching forward and snatching the book from his hand. He’s about to protest when he realises that she’s looking at the swirling pattern on the cover.
‘Of course!’ she says, holding the book up. ‘How could I have forgotten?’
‘My brother never read that sort of thing,’ says Nathan, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘But he did know about them?’
‘You said it yourself,’ he says, pushing past her to get out of the room and away from the conversation. ‘Everybody does.’
The next room is the kitchen, but he’s not ready yet. He might never be ready to go back in there. He stands just outside with his head lowered, listening for sounds of a struggle or retching, but instead the policemen are out a minute later. He’s relieved. If there had been anything to find, he’d felt certain that would have been the place to make the discovery. The kitchen was where his family would get together, enjoying meals at the large table in front of the window. The kitchen was where his family was ripped apart.
He stumbles towards the stairs. He knows the way Katie’s mind works, knows she wants to be methodical, but she’s also always been willing to follow his lead. He climbs the stairs slowly, amazed and not a little disconcerted by the breadth of them, so different to those in his tiny Scottish cottage. On the walls hang a series of oil paintings depicting previous generations of his family going back hundreds of years. They had fascinated him as a child and bored him as a teenager; now, at the age of forty, he finds he’s looking again. In particular, at the general in full uniform rising majestically on his muscular steed, wondering what elements of his and now perhaps even his brother’s personality could be blamed on this man.