‘But it’s evidence,’ says Nathan, and she can see him on the fringes of the mirror. ‘It’s proof of Christian’s innocence.’
‘You know it’s not that,’ she says, looking down at the sink, seeing and feeling how her insides have been emptied out. ‘Not definitive. And until they’ve done the tests they’ll only have your word as to who the fingers in the kitchen belong to.’ As she says this she realises the same applies to her. But she’s finding the old trust now, shaping her thoughts and ambitions around it, even if those ambitions are forcing her to lie.
‘Why would he want them knowing about this?’
She’s still staring at the sink, seeing more than the contents of her stomach. There’s the chocolate icing, too, evidence she has destroyed, and perhaps evidence of why she’s been so quick to come up with this need for secrecy. She looks away and considers her flat, sees the room with the door ripped off its hinges.
‘It would be the final straw,’ says Nathan, as if reading her mind. ‘If your colleagues discovered what you’ve got hidden here.’
‘Which might explain Markham’s need for silence,’ she says. ‘He wants us to keep working the case.’
‘Or he wants us to keep working alone, not trusting the others. Not trusting anyone.’ Nathan grabs her by the top of her bicep. ‘We need the others. We’ve always needed them. And right now they’re wasting time looking for the wrong man!’
‘Hang on,’ says Katie, lifting the phone again and typing in the same number.
‘Uncanny,’ says DS Peters, when the connection on the phone is made. ‘I was literally about to give you a call. I know you should be sleeping but I thought you might want to hear this.’
‘Go on.’
‘He’s never been married. At least not under the name of Markham. And when we dug a little deeper, things didn’t stack up. The records aren’t so good twenty-five years ago, but it appears he did change his name at some point.’
‘So we don’t know if he has any living relatives?’
‘According to the neighbours he’s a loner. Doesn’t speak to them. Doesn’t speak to anybody.’
‘Markham is our man,’ says Katie.
‘Hang on,’ says DS Peters. ‘I know what you’ve been through, it was horrible, it was…’
She can hear him swallow and finds herself feeling a greater discomfort for what she seems to have put him through.
‘But you didn’t actually see him attack you, did you?’
The story is there – she’s formed it in a flash. It’s simple, simple enough to be believed. She only has to say that she saw more than the boots and the jeans after she’d been hit, that she caught a glimpse of him reflected in the television screen. The smack on the head will explain the confusion and the delay in the memory returning. And what harm could it do? It will simply steer the investigation in the direction she now knows is right, save her team time and effort in the background checks. Time that might even save Christian’s life. She lifts a hand to the back of her head, carefully touching the spot where she was struck. It’s just above the point where the chocolate lines crossed like barbed wire, just like the necklace she once saw in the hand of her dad.
‘Are you still there, boss?’
She looks down at herself, wondering at the question. So much of her identity seems to have disappeared in this past year.
‘No,’ she says, firmly. ‘I didn’t see him. But there’s still plenty to suggest that it was Markham. He was holding the likely weapon when I arrived. And it happened in his house: a house that he insisted I travel to alone; a house from which he has disappeared, with no evidence of any kind of struggle.’ She’s also thinking of the carrots, cut up carefully on the side in Markham’s kitchen, so reminiscent of the fingers on the table behind her. ‘Are his prints on the journal?’
‘They are,’ says DS Peters. ‘Although they’re not on our system. He can’t have previous, name change or not.’
‘Or he simply hasn’t been caught.’
Out of the corner of her eye she’d seen Nathan shift uneasily at the mention of his journal.
‘Listen,’ she says, finding strength in her voice and in her convictions. ‘You told me this was my case, mine to solve, and my instinct is telling me that it’s Markham. Find him and we find our killer.’
‘All right. It won’t be easy convincing the Super to focus our efforts on finding Markham. You know what he thinks. You know what he believes. Every bit as strongly as you. But it’s good…’ He pauses. ‘Good to have you sounding like your old self again.’
‘Ring me if you have anything new.’
‘Will do,’ says DS Peters, and they both hang up.
She looks across at Nathan, who’s been standing close enough to hear every word.
‘This isn’t your old self,’ he says. ‘You would never have kept quiet. You’d have been scared of the court case, of the omissions, of the lies. I’m not even sure,’ he looks over her shoulder at the photo taped to the mirror, ‘that we’ve read this right. What if it’s not a warning of silence, but a prediction?’
She holds his stare, feeling her hand rise to the back of her neck. ‘I’m trying to save your brother.’
‘Are you?’ he asks, as her hands start to rub at the skin.
She turns her back on him and stares at the image, seeing her old self, a self whose intentions he would never have doubted.
‘What case were we celebrating?’ she asks.
‘Mark Todd, the guy who killed that homeless man in Isleworth.’
‘That’s right,’ says Katie, and it all comes back to her in an avalanche of detail. ‘It was snowing at his funeral.’
‘And we were the only ones there.’
‘That’s because his only friend was still being held by us. Taylor was convinced.’
‘Until you found the knife.’
‘And you found Mark Todd. God, no wonder we were smiling: Taylor looked like such an idiot.’
‘To us,’ says Nathan. Katie glances over her shoulder and can see he’s perched himself on the edge of the badly stained bathtub. ‘But he soon made it look like another one of his successes.’
‘We never did this for the plaudits,’ says Katie. She’s staring at the photo of herself again, her hair and make-up as immaculate as ever, although the shade of lipstick she always wore doesn’t look quite right. She moves her head from side to side, checking that it isn’t just an effect of the bare bulb hanging above them. And then she sees it.
‘Shit!’ she says, rushing out through the door and over to a desk on the far side of the living room, knocking over an empty wine bottle on the way.
There’s a well-worn computer on top. She hits a button on the front of the base unit and it whirrs and whines as it starts up.
‘What’s going on?’ asks Nathan, moving up close behind and peering at the far-from-flat-screen monitor.
‘He used my printer for the photos. I could see the same faded strip that always shows.’ She leans to one side and considers the USB port. ‘But those photos weren’t on the computer. I…’
‘Removed them?’ asks Nathan, and she replies with an embarrassed nod.
The prompt for a password appears in the middle of the screen and she hesitates before typing it in, fearing that Nathan will follow the movement of her fingers as they spell out his name and the name of the location where they first met. Over the years it had seemed to Katie like a place of birth, where she’d first started to be who she had wanted to be. She’s a long way from there now, but at least she’s thinking again, seeing things more clearly, making the connections that have eluded her in the past twelve months.
‘How does he know all this?’ she asks, loading up a search engine then checking the history. She gasps when she sees the last entry, quickly double-clicking to bring it back up. A route planner has been uploaded, showing an address in Yorkshire three hours’ drive away, according to the website.
‘We need to go,’ she says, already peeling off her paper suit and moving towards the bedroom where she’ll find more clothes for them both.
‘Do you think he’s made his first mistake?’ Nathan calls out.
‘We’ll find out when we get there.’
Twenty-Eight