‘You mean, they’ll think it was my brother? I can’t let that happen.’
‘I’ll let DS Peters know,’ says Katie. ‘Hopefully he still won’t need you until the morning, by which time some of that alcohol might have left your system.’
Suddenly the world around Nathan swims, a little reminder of what he’d somehow forgotten. ‘It worked,’ he says. ‘The drink. It allowed me to see what I was too controlled to see when I was sober. My brother is innocent.’ He sinks lower into his seat and his voice weakens as the truth hits home. ‘I betrayed him. I thought he was like me.’ He presses his head back. ‘And you’ll know what I’m truly like when you’ve read that journal. I’m a monster.’
She turns to look at him now, her face occasionally lit up by flashes of passing streetlights.
‘Just words,’ she says softly.
‘Words that represent feelings.’
‘But not actions.’
‘Not yet.’
Katie squeezes the steering wheel and stares straight ahead. ‘Recent events,’ she says, a hand coming up to her throat, then dropping down again, ‘have opened my eyes to a few truths. And you’re not the only one feeling guilty for blaming someone, someone…’ She looks away, as if checking the side mirror, but there’s nobody on the road behind. ‘Important. I told myself I was mad at you when you went away because you’d hidden how you were struggling, because you’d been putting on an act for me, for everyone. The truth is I don’t think I ever fell for it. I could see that struggle; I just chose to ignore it and keep on pushing because I was getting what I wanted.’
‘What we wanted,’ Nathan corrects her.
‘I think the real reason I was mad at you was because you couldn’t go on…’ She lifts her fingers from the steering wheel, bending them backwards. ‘And because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go on without you.’ Now she checks the rear-view mirror, and this time Nathan knows exactly what she’s looking at. ‘So, who’s the monster really?’
Out of the corner of Nathan’s eye he can see a plastic bag tucked down in the footwell behind the driver’s seat: the bag that Katie took from the flat – the bag with contents he must never see. ‘It’s not Christian,’ he says. ‘We’re not the same.’
‘None of us knows what we’re really capable of,’ says Katie, her attention once again fixed on the road. ‘And none of us is entirely the same. I always thought I was like my dad: driven, decent, moral…’ She releases a long, uneven breath. ‘But now…’
‘Now you’d do anything to make this stop, maybe even take a life. Is that what you’re trying to say?’
‘Maybe.’
Nathan can see, even with her face turned away, that he’s got it wrong. That wasn’t what she’d meant at all. He can also see that she’s not about to correct him with the truth. They sit in silence again, his previous elation now a gnawing worry for the only two people in his life he cares about. He starts to knead one hand inside the other, a burning sensation at the tips of his fingers and an itch related to the plastic bag behind him that he can’t even bring himself to look at directly. The discomfort sharpens his thoughts, bringing them to a possibility that he had somehow overlooked.
‘Markham’s plan was to make Christian take the blame,’ he says slowly, as his fear starts to build. ‘So there’s no way he could allow him to come forward and provide an alibi. He needed to make sure my brother was silent.’
‘But he wasn’t silent. You spoke to him on the phone.’
‘Markham could have taken him since.’ He pinches at the hardened skin of his scars.
‘He’s not dead,’ says Katie.
‘No,’ Nathan agrees, his thumb now resting on the inside of his wrist, checking for a pulse which isn’t hard to find. ‘I’d know if he was.’
Katie takes her hand from the steering wheel and lightly places it on the back of his.
‘If this is Markham, though…’ she says. The if makes Nathan pull his hand away, turning towards the window. ‘I’m sorry,’ she continues, ‘but we have to keep asking the right questions. Like, why would Markham be doing this to us? He has no connection to me as far as I can tell, and if anything, he should be grateful to you and your brother.’
He leans towards her, jabbing a finger into his temple. ‘It doesn’t have to make sense! You should know that. I definitely know that.’
‘How did Markham end up working for you?’
‘Christian put an ad in the paper.’
‘When was this?’
‘I don’t know exactly. Not long after you and I had started working together, and so by that point,’ his fingertips prickle and he gives his hands a shake, ‘by then I’d decided I couldn’t risk seeing Christian. He couldn’t know what I was like.’
‘Couldn’t Christian have found your journal?’
‘No,’ he says sharply. ‘He doesn’t know about me.’ He’s run through the possibility so many times, piecing together old conversations, fleeting looks, unanswered questions, and not once has he suspected that his secret has got out. He’d given up everything to keep it that way: his friends, his name, even his relationship with his brother. Given that sacrifice, a lifetime of effort and a memory that can call up a million details of much less importance, it makes no sense that he can’t remember where he last left the journal. But then the lingering ache at his temple where he’d jabbed it with his finger reminds him of his own words: it doesn’t have to make sense.
Katie brakes hard before pulling over into a side road. There are no street lamps and he can see little more than her outline.
‘I know you want me to trust your brother, but I have to work with the evidence. We’ve been here so many times before, and on each of those times you’ve been right, but we’ve always needed evidence, and when it’s this close, when it’s family…’
‘I know,’ says Nathan. ‘I know.’ He places a fist against his forehead, lightly tapping it over and over. ‘Jesus, how often have we sat talking to family members, listening to them defend their loved ones to the last, blind to the evidence in front of them.’ He stares at Katie, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, and he can see her lift her hand to her shoulder-length hair, tucking it behind her ear. It’s something he remembers from before: an action that he’d recognised as a need for distraction. And this time it has distracted him, taking him away from concerns about his brother. He reaches up and switches on the light, catching the startled look from Katie as she retreats from his outstretched arm.
‘It’s okay,’ he says, reaching towards her and pushing back the hair. It reminds him of a girl he’d known in his teens. She’d been clever, beautiful, funny, and he’d hoped that the light she brought to his life might somehow counteract the dark that was descending. For a while it had worked, and he’d started to believe he might be okay, but then had come the intimacy, the time spent alone, and he’d realised that breaking her heart by walking away was far better than what he was imagining doing to her.
Lost in the memory, he almost misses what he’s exposed in this intimate moment with Katie. With her hair pushed back he can see that the line of chocolate icing on her neck is not only at the front. He follows it with his finger, and she lets him, until he reaches a point at the back where the two meeting lines are wrapped around each other.
‘What is it?’ she says.
‘I don’t know. A link to another case, perhaps.’ He reaches under his hair, still held at the back by a single rubber band. ‘I don’t remember seeing it on the wall in your flat, but did any of the victims wear a necklace with a fastening like twisted wire?’
Katie reaches up instantly and turns off the light, but not before he catches the look of confusion quickly turning to terror.