‘It’s not there,’ says DS Peters, nodding towards the victim then looking away. ‘Perhaps the other mark didn’t mean anything.’
Katie is sure she knows better. She doesn’t believe in coincidence. What she has always believed in is working as a team, sharing every thought and feeling, no matter how insignificant it might seem, and yet what she’s thinking and choosing to keep to herself right now is far from insignificant.
‘Could something have leaked?’ she asks, weakly. ‘Could this be a copy?’
DS Peters nods towards the kitchen. ‘Do you really want two people out there to be capable of that?’
She lowers and shakes her head at the same time, embarrassed by her suggestion, by her desperation. She’s known all along that Sally Brooks’ killer would strike again, and yet now that it’s happened she feels utterly unprepared. She has no idea where to begin, no instinct to go on other than to do what she’s never done in her eighteen years of service and walk away. Even when she pictures the other victims – the parents, the husbands, the boys and the girls – she finds no strength, no inspiration. All she can think to do is apologise. She turns towards the body, intending to do just that. She crouches down, struggling to keep her knee from the floor, and starts to whisper something in private, stopping abruptly when she spots a mark below Sarah’s right nipple. She blinks a couple of times and inches closer, focusing on two tiny dots on the skin. They could so easily be ignored, dismissed as two more among the many moles on this woman’s body. But just as with the first victim, Katie knows better.
She reaches out to point, to share, then quickly pulls her arm back, lifting it to rub the back of her neck which has broken out in a sweat. The significance of her discovery is hitting home, bombarding her with possibilities that leave her breathless. Wordless. The room around her is starting to spin, and she stands up quickly for fear of contaminating the scene. She stumbles forward and for a moment believes she’s going to fall on the victim, but at the last second, a powerful arm grabs hold of her, stands her up and leads her out into the garden.
DS Peters gives her time. He’s always given her time, as well as trust and respect. All the things she’d struggled to earn from the others. When he does speak, it’s with a soft and understanding voice.
‘This isn’t easy for any of us,’ he says, swallowing hard, and she’s reminded that he was the one who had to break the news to the husband. ‘Which is why we need to work together.’
She steps back from his grasp and considers his stare, wondering if he knows that she’s been holding back, but all she sees in his eyes is concern.
‘The team is still with you,’ he continues. ‘Those that you aren’t always winding up.’ He nods towards Dr Parker, who’s watching her closely from inside the house.
‘It’s the one thing about him that’s hard to resist,’ she says, giving him a grin and a wink, before turning back to Peters.
‘We all know what you went through with—’ He breaks off, not needing to name the case, even though it’s been more than a year. ‘Perhaps this is your chance to get back on track. I mean, you saw those little boys. And the girls, last week…’
Katie nods; she’s already there, thinking of the previous body, of crouching down to inspect the skull-shaped mark on the mother’s inner thigh. There can no longer be any doubt of what it had represented, not now she’s seen and recognised the two little marks on the second victim. The only certainty in all this swirling madness is where she needs to go. She’d thought it would never happen, that she would stick to her promise; it was the least she could do after all she’d put him through. But this – she stares through the open door into the kitchen, seeing the flash of a camera from the forensics team, then an image of the scene just as sharp in her mind – this has changed everything.
Four
Nathan sits alongside the wall of muddy stripes, staring at the tiny centre of the spiral and telling himself out loud over and over that he’s very nearly made it. He’s perched on the edge of the uppermost stair, and his legs and arms are drawn in as if trying to stop himself from leaping forward. It’s a thought which has certainly crossed his mind, and the daydream had been a bad one. He’s had several of late, moments of madness in between the routine, but this was so terrible, so vivid, so real, that the moment he’d woken from it and found his breath he’d started searching his entire body for cuts. Not that it was his body that had been under attack.
He stares at the filthy lines on the wall and counts them again, just to be sure. Perhaps knowing there’s only three more days is the source of the problem, because some part of him, that part of him, isn’t going to go without a fight. In a container in his hand is the last of the sleeping pills. He’d come here with hundreds, four hundred to be precise, legally, and not so legally, acquired. He’d foolishly believed that one a day would do the trick, but some nights he’d needed to swallow down two or three just to keep things quiet. Now there aren’t enough.
A week ago, he was in the middle of heating a tin of beans and sausage – an old favourite, a treat – and was absent-mindedly playing with the lid, running the sharp edge across the inside of his wrist, remembering the last time, thinking of the next time, when he’d felt himself drifting away suddenly, drifting into a vision, and to both his horror and delight he realised there was nothing he could do to stop it. The lid of the tin had become a knife, and ahead of him was a woman, just visible through a cloud of filthy stripes spiralling towards her centre where he knew, without a trace of doubt, that he was going to plunge every inch of the blade. Either side of the woman was a child, seemingly identical in almost every way except that one wore a look of absolute horror while the other was smiling just as broadly as he was.
After it was over, and the excitement had left him, he’d cried his eyes out on the kitchen floor as he drew the tin lid across his wrist, following the lines he’d made there before. He’d known he had to stop before he’d even started. It was still too early; he hadn’t reached the centre of the circle; he hadn’t achieved the perfect symmetry.
Five
Katie pulls the car to the side of the road, telling herself it’s to give the car’s suspension a break, but in reality she’s having doubts and needs a moment. She’s been playing DS Peters’ words over in her mind, convincing herself that this case could be her salvation, the one that will bring her back from the edge. But to do so she will have to work with someone who’s already fallen over it. She pictures him and tries to remember the good times, but it’s like that period of their lives has been erased, overwritten by everything that followed.