He turns back to Katie and reaches out to touch her face. There are things he wants to tell her, things that might have made a difference to them both. He draws a finger down her cheek, desperately trying not to look at the neck and see the very point where her life was ended. Even on the periphery of his already tear-stained vision he can tell that it isn’t as bad as his imagination would have him believe. He dares to look closer and sees that he was right; the line is too thin, no white of the windpipe, no tear of the skin at all. It’s also too dark, like congealed blood, like… He touches the line with the point of his finger and then slips it into his mouth. In his fantasies he’s gone this far, drunk the blood that he’s been so desperate to spill and found it wonderful, found it sweet – but this is too sweet. Chocolate. He lets out a triumphant cry, lowering himself towards her mouth, tilting his ear to listen, one arm lightly resting on her chest, the other holding the knife behind him. Then, as he searches for her breath, a blow to his ribs takes all his away.
A split second later something strikes him across the back of his neck, sending him tumbling off Katie and into the side of the cupboards. It had been a trap. He was the target all along. The thought fills him with a sudden strength and a murderous rage. He tries to get up, but he’s kicked again and this time there’s screaming, a man’s voice he half-recognises, repeating the very desires that are lighting a fire in his own mind: ‘I’m going to tear you apart, dig your eyes from your sockets, rip your head from your shoulders.’ He feels for the knife, but it’s no longer in his hand. Just as he’s thinking about punching his way out, his arm has been flipped over and squeezed against the floor, his other tucked underneath him and his face pressed against the tiles. In front of him, all he can see is something that looks bizarrely like the tip of a carrot.
He tries to roll, but there’s a boot pinning him down and that voice again, shouting words in a wall of rage that he can’t translate, or even separate. He realises he’s outmatched and it terrifies him.
Nathan feels his muscles slacken, certain that this is where it ends for him. He’d wanted it to be tomorrow, to disappear in his own, quiet way, but now he knows he’ll soon be carefully arranged on this very floor, turned into another cartoon for people to photograph and investigate.
He’s slipping away, drifting somewhere he hopes will be more bearable, when a woman’s voice cuts through everything.
‘Don’t kill him!’
It’s Katie. He wants to tell her to stop. He wants to tell her to run. But now she’s screaming. He hopes she’s somehow found his knife and will be able to defend herself. But he can’t hear her moving above the sound of his attacker panting and waiting to land another blow. Then, suddenly, he is released and Katie’s voice floats above him.
‘It might be Nathan,’ she says. ‘It might be Nathan.’
Twenty-Five
‘What an all-fucking-mighty mess,’ Superintendent Taylor barks as he climbs into the front passenger seat of the police car and tosses his hat on the dashboard.
Katie is slumped against the door in the back. She doesn’t respond. She’s not sure she can. Her head is throbbing, but she’s not telling anyone that, either. She knows something terrible has happened, something that should have marked the end of her life, but she can’t come to terms with it yet. The problem is, if she’s going to use it to her advantage, she needs to find a way to talk. She pictures the moment she’d found Nathan standing on the doorstep of his house in Scotland; she pictures the moment she’d found her dad standing on the doorstep of their family home, both distant, silent, lost; both so removed from the person she knew was trapped inside.
Her still-throbbing head starts to tip forward, and she desperately wants to fall to the floor, to curl up and search for somewhere, anywhere, where she doesn’t have to do anything, to think of anything ever again. Then, just as she’s convinced it’s going to happen, she hears Nathan’s voice beside her, strong and alive.
‘Have you got Markham’s description out to the press?’
‘We’ve done what’s necessary,’ says the superintendent. ‘His and Christian Radley’s images are being circulated.’ He reaches for his hat, picking it off the dashboard, dusting it down.
‘Why the hell are you involving my brother in this?’ says Nathan, pushing himself between the two front seats. ‘We know it wasn’t him.’
‘Do we?’
‘I worked the evidence and played it through in my mind. The killer is older, less able, overweight—’
‘Like Markham, yes,’ the superintendent cuts him off. ‘I’ve never failed to be amazed by your imagination.’
‘That imagination has built your fucking career!’ screams Nathan.
‘And it’s going to end it,’ Superintendent Taylor says calmly, ‘if I don’t recognise the conflict of interests here.’
‘What about what Katie saw? The boots. His trousers.’
‘That doesn’t prove anything.’
Nathan hesitates. ‘Christian was always pristine.’
‘Detective Inspector Rhodes,’ says Superintendent Taylor, twisting the rear-view mirror to catch her eye in the fast-fading evening light, ‘has passed on what you were able to tell us about Christian.’ He twists the mirror back, lining it up with Nathan. ‘Your brother appears to have pulled the same trick as you: changing his name and vanishing from our systems twenty years ago.’
Nathan opens his mouth as if keen to dismiss this as impossible, then closes it again, brow furrowing. ‘You couldn’t find his wife or child, either?’
‘No trace at all, of him or his family.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ says Nathan, with the faintest smile. ‘I guess the three of us were always the same.’
‘Three?’ says the superintendent, twisting in his seat to look directly at Nathan for the first time. ‘Please don’t tell me you have another brother?’
‘My mum,’ says Nathan, all trace of the smile gone.
‘And she hid her identity from the authorities too?’
‘From the world.’
The superintendent now twists to try and see Katie, but she’s slipped back down in her seat.
‘I changed my identity to protect my brother,’ Nathan continues, ‘so that he didn’t follow me into this. I lied to him. I said I was using my acting skills to work undercover and as a result had taken on another life. I said the people I was up against would think nothing of taking out whole families if my cover was blown. I told him it was enough for us to stop seeing each other. He obviously decided to do more.’
‘Don’t tell me you believe this?’ says the superintendent, stretching further to try and see Katie, the strain registering on his face.
She rubs the back of her head, pretending not to have heard the question. She’s still not ready to reveal Nathan’s true motivation for ending contact with his brother, to reveal the darkness that – she reminds herself of the poor homeless man whose identity Nathan had taken – had maybe already led him to take a life. She fears she’s going to be asked again, to be forced to take sides as she was when she first started working with Nathan and so many of her colleagues expressed their doubts about his unusual methods. However, in keeping his secret, hadn’t she already chosen a side?
‘When has he ever let us down?’ she asks, pushing herself up, her leg pressing against Nathan’s.
‘How about the day he ran off without any explanation?’
‘Only because he pushed himself to the brink of madness for us,’ she snaps back, causing her head to throb.
‘The brink?’ the superintendent replies, raising one eyebrow.
Katie forms a fist and opens her mouth.
‘I’m going to forgive you your previous outburst,’ says the superintendent, getting in ahead of what would have been another. ‘Because of what you’ve just been through. But I’m sick to death of us having this conversation. What the hell happened to the model detective who followed the process and always had everything in line, who was just like her dad?’
‘You know nothing about my dad,’ she says, then wishes she hadn’t, remembering that she too might not know him as well as she’d once believed.
A knock at the window, and DS Peters leans in. She can just make out a mobile phone in his hand. ‘Sorry for interrupting, sir,’ he says. ‘But we’ve done an initial background check and Markham is who he says he is.’
‘Hallelujah!’ says the superintendent, slapping the dashboard. ‘Finally, somebody is telling the truth.’
‘The truth about who he is,’ says Nathan, still leaning between the two front seats. ‘But it’s what he’s done you should be worried about.’
Superintendent Taylor gives a dismissive grunt. ‘There are things he couldn’t have known.’
‘And things my brother couldn’t have known, either,’ says Nathan, lifting a hand to slap the left side of his chest.