He closes his eyes, knowing he’s seen more than enough. Now he has to let go. He leans forward and stares down at the floor, a tiny drop of sweat landing between his shoes. He tucks an imaginary strand of hair behind his ear, picturing his brother’s hair as it had been; tidier and shorter than his own, parted on one side. His head lowers further, his chin almost touching his chest, and he can feel himself slipping, starting with the tiniest twitch at the tip of his fingers, then spreading like a poison down his arms and into his chest, ice cold and unrelenting.
He was only eight or nine years old when he first discovered he could think so convincingly as someone else, putting himself in the place of a sportsman, or adventurer, or musician, or sometimes just a son impressing his father. The longer he did it the better he got, to the point where his imagined train of thought felt so perfectly real he could almost be living it. All he needed were details and room in his head to truly believe. It had made him a formidable actor, until he started losing control.
Today will be his greatest challenge yet, since the person’s mind he is attempting to occupy is a killer he knows almost as well as he knows himself. Here he can see out through eyes that are the same, down the bridge of a nose the same, past a fringe the same. Part of him wants to stop, but the other part of him has already taken its first step…
He’s standing, tucked into the hedge with a rose bush behind him and thorns digging into his legs. He should feel pain, but he doesn’t feel anything but excitement and anticipation. He stares at a tiny window in the distance. There’s a woman there – beautiful, black hair, pale skin – washing plates in yellow gloves. He looks down at his own hands, a long knife with a serrated edge in one, a tiny tremor in the other. He looks up at the window; the woman is still there. The faintest whisper in his heart is wishing she’d disappear, that she’d see him and he’d run, but he knows he won’t be going anywhere. She’s smiling. He can’t believe he didn’t notice before, because it’s so broad, so beautiful and so strangely familiar. He starts to walk forward, tingling with desire, telling himself to stop.
He crouches down by the side of the window, still unseen. He can hear music, an old song from the fifties or sixties, but it’s one he knows well. He looks down at his feet, a pair of unremarkable black shoes, unpolished, size 10…
Things are suddenly cloudier than they were before. Part of him is relieved, part of him enormously frustrated. He stares harder and finally the image sharpens. He can see his trousers are blue jeans, dirty on the knees. His sweater is black and frayed at the sleeves. The whole outfit strikes him as cheap – the sort of thing he wouldn’t mind getting dirty; the sort of thing he’d be happy to throw away. He’s caught a tiny strand of the sweater on the rose bush. He stares at it, but doesn’t remove it, knowing he needs it, needs it for this… He can see his feet in the soil below, can see the depth of the mark he’s left, and the longer he looks the more rounded his stomach seems. He follows the line of it with his free hand and it disappears. Although now it’s the hands that don’t look right: dirty and lined, rough on the knuckles. He twists them and bunches them and they slowly return to what he’d seen before. He tries to look for a reflection in the window ahead of him, but there’s nothing there: he’s invisible, even to himself.
He moves confidently round the side of the house, past a well-tended lawn and carefully weeded flowerbeds. Flattening flowers as he goes, sometimes bending to slash at them with his knife. Open flower heads litter the floor. And there are more footprints. Still too deep.
On the patio behind the back door is a brightly coloured bike, a hula hoop and a tiny plastic hedgehog. The door is partly open, just an inch or two; he reaches out, pulling to make the gap large enough to squeeze through. The music has stopped. There are no birds, no wind, no cars in the distance, no sound of singing, no sound of his heart.
He’s in the house; more toys spread out on the living room floor. There’s a soft, floppy doll ahead of him, and he stops to pick it up, tucking it into his pocket. As he moves forward his boot makes contact with a Lego brick, sending it spinning away. Again, there’s no sound. Although when he looks up towards the kitchen it’s clear that there should be. The woman at the end of the hallway is staring straight at him; her mouth is stretched wide in a scream, the rest of her body completely frozen.
He’s moving quickly now, although not as fast as Nathan wants, not as fast as Nathan would himself. The knife leads the way. As he continues down the hall he allows himself time to consider the photos on the wall, images of two small girls smiling out at the camera. The woman in the kitchen has turned for the door; she’s slipping and stumbling and crashes into the cupboards. He rushes forward as if trying to catch her, but his movement is clumsy and surprisingly slow, and his own feet slip twice on the mud still caked to the soles. The woman turns to look at him, her eyes wide, her open mouth now twisting hideously as the blade enters her neck. An arc of blood sprays across the floor, onto his shoes and his trousers and onto a painting pinned by a magnet to the fridge door. He stares at the child’s brightly coloured work of art, seeing his addition, before turning back to the woman. Her mouth is full of blood and her body is motionless, twisted unnaturally down on the tiles, although the mouth is still moving, still trying to shape sounds. But it’s in her eyes he sees the truth, the reflection that hadn’t been there before, badly blurred but unmistakable. The man there is nothing like him, or his brother.
Nathan rises at such speed he almost topples backwards off the chair, tearing down a few of the photos as he tries to steady himself. He drops into a crouch, elbows pressed against the wall behind, his eyes darting left and right, his breath short, sharp and wild like an animal’s. He wishes he could have stayed there for ever in the blood, but there’s something important he needs to do. He reaches for the door handle, only to find it locked and that he is trapped in a devastating space between reality and fantasy. He rests his head against the door as an unspeakable feeling of loss and helplessness washes over him. Outside, he knows someone’s life is in terrible danger.
Twenty-Three
Katie stands staring up at a window, one of many in a large building ahead of where she’s parked. She knows the exact one to look at because she’s been here before, sitting in this very spot, looking up and wondering if she has the courage to go in.
She has another question troubling her today. Did she do the right thing in leaving Nathan alone in her flat? Might it change him, as he had always feared? Might it lead him to hurt others? Or make him even more likely to hurt himself? She might have removed details of the murder that she thought would be the most damaging, but was that just a selfish act to ease her conscience if he can’t cope? She fights the panic, remembering the way he’d looked at her when he’d said goodbye. She knows what it sounds like when that goodbye is for ever: she’d heard it in her dad’s voice once before.
She pops open the door of the car, feeling the cool of the late evening air. At the main door to the building she’s met with a smile as broad as you would hope for with all the money she’s paying, although it slips when the woman behind the desk hears what she wants.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, turning towards the clock on the wall behind her, ‘but the visiting hours are—’
‘I know what they are.’ Katie cuts her off. She reaches into her pocket with a sigh and brings out her warrant card.
‘Really?’ says the woman, her concern growing. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Just a case I’m working on,’ says Katie. ‘It’s become… personal. And I wanted to check…’ She points upwards.
‘I can assure you that the security here is of the highest level,’ says the woman, gesturing towards a camera in the corner of the room, then down the corridor ahead at a shut door with a keypad entry system.
‘Nevertheless,’ says Katie, moving towards that door as she slips her warrant card away.
* * *