‘Jesus!’ she says, far too loud, before lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘Your mum was J.M. Priest?’
He doesn’t answer; he doesn’t need to. Just like in those gruesome books she would so hungrily read, she can see a story opening up in front of her that both horrifies and fascinates in equal part.
‘How did your mum die?’ she asks, more bluntly than her training would have allowed. ‘It’s important,’ she adds, as if to reassure herself and justify the coldness.
Nathan eventually points across at the pot of pills on the dresser. ‘The day cancer took my dad,’ he says weakly, ‘she called us home, and I found her in the kitchen with a note: the same note…’ This time he nods towards the scrap of paper she’s carefully folded up and placed inside an evidence bag. ‘I thought for a long time that she simply couldn’t live without Dad, and I guess in a way I was right, because he had always been there to keep her in line, to keep us all in line.’ He closes his eyes, flinching slightly as the images come to him. ‘Our family solicitor called me into his office not long after they were gone, and I remember the look on his face was like he was the one that had lost his parents. He handed me a book by J.M. Priest, and within its pages, between the words I knew so well, was the will of the woman I suddenly realised I hadn’t known at all.’
‘So, you think she was just like…?’
‘Yes.’ His answer is far firmer than her tentative question. ‘I may not have known her, but I knew the person that had written those novels, and I knew the darkness that was inside of me. She had the same desires; she knew without Dad beside her that she was going to take a life and, in the end, I guess she only had one choice.’ He’s looking at his wrist, the faintest smile on his lips.
She reaches out and grabs that wrist, pinching it just below the cuff. ‘You can be different.’
‘I started to take comfort in her words,’ he says, as if he hasn’t heard her. ‘“So sorry to have left you alone”. It meant she believed it was she and I that were afflicted, that Christian only looked like me.’ She feels his forearm tense under her grip. ‘That’s why this…’ He tips his head back and lets out a breath so long it could be his last. ‘It doesn’t make sense. I know him. I knew him. He was the one without complications, the one who dealt with everything that had happened and moved on. That’s why I was happy that we were seeing less and less of each other. Why I was delighted when he moved to Cornwall. I thought the distance would keep me from contaminating him.’
Suddenly Nathan whips his arm away, jumps to his feet and draws back the carefully made sheets on the bed. In the centre of the pink sheet is a small copper key, and it’s in his hand before Katie can say the word ‘gloves’.
‘How did you know?’ she finds herself asking again.
He stares at the key, twisting it slowly in his fingers. ‘When we misbehaved,’ he nods towards the bed, ‘that was where we were told to sit. It was our version of the naughty step.’
She nods as if it makes sense, but the leap in logic still worries her. ‘But how did you know?’
The key remains held in front of his face, and she can see it start to shake.
‘I just thought about what I would have done.’ She struggles to hear the next whispered words, and doubts she was ever intended to. ‘We are the same.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘The basement,’ he says, looking down at the floor as if he can see straight through it.
She feels that familiar tightening in her gut, just like she felt when DS Peters had called her yesterday, knowing that they’ll soon be standing over another body. ‘What are we going to find down there?’
‘I guess it’s time to stop imagining,’ says Nathan, pushing past her and heading for the door.
Nineteen
The door down to the basement is well hidden. Nathan remembers the first time he and his brother had stumbled across it, tucked away behind an old dresser. The key had been in the lock back then, and they’d turned it with a sense of almost unbearable excitement. There’s no excitement this time as the lock pops and the door swings open. Katie drags Nathan back, insisting she go first, but he surges on as they both squeeze into the narrow entrance.
Katie pushes ahead holding a torch out in front, so he doesn’t bother reaching for the well-hidden switch, imagining how much worse the scene will look if he sees it all at once. He follows Katie down the stone stairs into the darkness, shifting sideways with both cuffed hands on the rickety banister.
The other policemen are close behind, and he can tell they want him out of the way, but still where they can see him. He’s caught them staring. He wonders how much they’ve been told, perhaps that he’s the twin of a monster, perhaps that he’s the biggest fool on earth. Of course, it’s not so different from before, when they used to look at him as a fraud, a guy who just got lucky on a few cases, or a practitioner of the black arts.
He follows Katie’s torch beam as it pans quickly from left to right. He can see the shelves stocked with his dad’s favourite wine – a bottle of which is clearly missing. On the other side of the room are boxes of old toys piled high, and two little bikes, one black, one white, leaning against each other. Katie is shuffling forward, barking orders for the others to hold back and leave the door open for extra light. Her beam strikes the far wall and finds nothing, drops to the floor and reveals only dirt. When she lifts the torch again, this time to the far-right corner of the room, there’s a flash of white and the beam returns, moving swiftly up and down. A human skeleton floats in mid-air. It’s only as they move tentatively forward that Nathan can see it’s held together by a wire frame.
‘Is this what you were expecting?’ asks a breathless Katie.
Nathan shakes his head before realising he needs to speak. ‘There will be words.’
Katie finds them instantly, spelt out on the floor at their feet, each letter carefully arranged in baked beans.
I MARK THEM SO YOU KNOW
Katie’s beam returns to the skeleton, picking out the skull and following a long trail of brown piped along the jawbone. Katie steps closer, but Nathan doesn’t move. He knows what this is – it’s exactly as he had predicted up in the bedroom – a discovery that at once confirms his suspicions about his brother and solidifies the fears he has about himself. This is not the latest victim. It’s the first. He knows this for a fact. He knows because it’s the very first murder that he would have committed, had he lost control.
‘You think he took it from a hospital?’ Katie asks.
His lips feel as numb as the rest of him as he mumbles the words. ‘From a doctor.’
‘How could you possibly know that?’
He realises she’s misunderstood. ‘From under a doctor’s skin.’
Now she turns to look at him, and he feels himself sinking back into the darkness.
‘Who is it?’
‘The man who failed to spot Dad’s cancer.’
Katie turns back towards the skeleton. ‘And what’s the significance of the chocolate icing mark?’
Nathan can feel his fist bunch by his side as it had more than twenty years earlier, just a month before his father’s death. ‘It’s where I split the doctor’s jaw after I realised what he’d done. Or, what he hadn’t done.’
‘The other marks weren’t related to the victim bearing them,’ she says. ‘They were marks on you and me. How can you be certain there’s a genuine victim here, and not just a skeleton stolen from a school or hospital?’
The answer again comes to him far too quickly, as if a message is being transmitted through the darkness from an outside source. It’s cold in the basement, but not as cold as his shivering suggests.
‘Look inside.’
‘What?’
Nathan is staring down at his feet, or what little he can see of them, trying desperately to see nothing other than the faint outline of someone else’s shoes.