Nathan sits up suddenly, causing Katie to flinch and send the car veering to the left. She pulls it back in line and looks across. Her head is throbbing, and the lights on the motorway seem painfully bright. Nathan stares out of the window, breathing deeply.
‘Where are we?’
She’s about to tell him they’re ten miles out of London on the M4, before realising it’s probably not specifics he’s after, not having woken from twenty minutes’ sleep. ‘We’re travelling to the address that Markham left on my computer.’ A Google search on her phone had revealed nothing about the address, and she’d quickly decided against sharing with the rest of the team. DS Peters was already getting too protective and would never have kept the information to himself. The superintendent would have wondered why she was ignoring his orders, yet again.
‘What happened to the BMW?’ asks Nathan, and this time she doesn’t look across.
‘The same thing that happened to the flat.’
‘Paying for your dad’s care?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’d do anything for him, wouldn’t you?’
She can’t see his expression clearly in the low light, but she can hear something’s different. When they’d got in the car and he’d slumped into the corner she’d likened it to a computer shutting down. Now it appears he’s rebooted.
‘You need to tell me,’ he says.
‘Tell you what?’
‘About your dad.’
‘What about him? He’s ill. He’s not getting better.’
‘There’s something else. What are you protecting him from?’
‘We don’t talk about family, remember?’
‘And what the fuck do you think we’ve been doing these last two days?’
‘This is different.’
‘No, it’s not. If there’s a connection – and I think you know there is – then you have to trust me. My brother’s life is at stake here.’
‘It’s not trust,’ she says, realising the car’s been picking up speed and taking her foot off the pedal. She sucks in several deep breaths to help ease the flow of words past her lips, but all it does is make her feel light-headed. ‘You know all that running…’ She spins a finger in the air between them, then snaps it down when she spots her mistake. ‘The way you were shutting stuff out. Well, that’s what I’ve been doing, trying to keep my distance from thoughts, from possibilities that threaten… from everything.’
She catches him glancing at the bag on the back seat again.
‘Maybe it’s time for us both to take a risk,’ he says. ‘I reckon I could now, now I know about Christian.’
‘What if that’s exactly what Markham wants? To push you over the edge.’
‘What I want,’ says Nathan, his words suddenly softening, ‘what I need, is to be able to trust you. We had that before, but it was professional. It wasn’t… it wasn’t enough.’
‘It wasn’t,’ she says. Then, after a long pause: ‘The guy I’ve been talking to at my dad’s new home said the same, told me I needed to start sharing with people I cared about. The problem was, I first needed to admit there were people I cared about.’ She puts on the wipers, as if that’s the reason she can no longer see the road ahead. ‘I couldn’t even tell Dad how important he was to me, not back when he would have understood. And then there was you…’ She’s glad for the low light, offering only little glimpses of her troubled face. ‘I just left you in Scotland. Dumped you there without a word. Yeah, I was hurt that you hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me how you were suffering. But I knew. I wasn’t blind. Just like I saw the change in my dad thirty years ago. And yet I never asked him, and he never spoke about what he’d done, not until the Alzheimer’s had torn away the barriers.’
‘What had he done?’
‘The right thing,’ she says firmly. ‘The only thing he could have done. He had no choice, I’m sure of it.’ She slams a hand against the steering wheel. ‘Jesus, he was always so principled, always so strong.’ She looks across at Nathan. ‘At least as strong as you.’
Nathan gives her a look of horror, starting to understand.
‘The right thing,’ she repeats.
‘What did he tell you?’
‘Next to nothing. I haven’t really allowed him to. I went this evening, before I visited Markham.’ As she mentions his name she reaches for her throat, feeling a slight tackiness where she’s failed to wash off all the chocolate. ‘But I’ve only been to the care home maybe half a dozen times, and when I’m there I spend more time talking to Dad’s carer than Dad. He’s a good listener, more like a therapist really.’
‘Was that the guy you said you’ve been seeing?’
‘Until I fucked things up.’ She feels herself flush, remembering the drunken night she’d lost control. ‘Then I went back to the work again, taking refuge in other people’s nightmares.’
‘Only now those nightmares aren’t just other people’s,’ says Nathan.
She sighs, realising she’s pushed the car back over the speed limit, as though if she drives fast enough she might leave her past behind. And maybe they could? They could carry on driving all the way to Scotland to live in a house and run rings around it. But what would it achieve?
‘You need to tell me what you know about your dad’s crime. It’s important.’
‘I don’t know much.’
‘I don’t think that’s true,’ says Nathan. ‘You couldn’t have resisted.’
‘I managed to resist looking into your past,’ she says, glaring across, ‘when I had similar doubts. And he’s my dad. He made me who I am. This will potentially change who I am. That’s why I’ve started to doubt my instinct. I mean, if I couldn’t even see the truth about my own dad.’
‘The truth is what you need,’ says Nathan. ‘Look at what I believed my brother had done.’
Katie pushes herself back in the seat, feeling the acceleration rising again, wondering if it’s ever going to stop. Then she takes back control, lifting her foot from the pedal and allowing the car to cruise. ‘A twelve-year-old girl was murdered. She went missing from the back garden of her parents’ house. No witnesses, no clues, nothing to go on at all. Dad was part of the team that found the body. And then another girl disappeared, same age, same method. Of course, everyone was in a panic, desperate to find her before it was too late. My dad and his partner were good detectives. That’s what everyone who’s ever worked with them has told me. The trail took them to an old grain barn in the middle of nowhere. They found the girl alive, but the man who’d taken her died trying to get away.’ She pauses, takes a breath, grips the steering wheel tightly. ‘He had a fall.’
‘And your dad changed after that?’
Katie nods. ‘He was never the same. I’d always been troubled, angry, withdrawn, but it was like he gave up fighting me, stopped trying to tell me what I was doing was wrong. Jesus, he wouldn’t even look me in the eye. I think he was just as cold with Angie, which is why she didn’t hang around long after.’
‘Angie?’
‘She helped raise me. She was okay, I suppose, did what she was meant to with feeding me and keeping me safe, but like I say, as soon as Dad changed, and as soon as I was old enough to take care of myself, she was off.’
‘What about your mum?’ asks Nathan, tentatively.
‘Left the world the same day I came into it.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
She shrugs. ‘It was far harder for Dad than me. I had no idea what I’d missed out on.’
‘What makes you think he took someone’s life?’
‘Because he told me.’ She runs a tongue across her drying lips. ‘“I murdered him”, that’s what he said. I looked across, and he was standing at the window staring down, his two hands pressed against it. I asked him what he was talking about, but he’d slipped away again. It wasn’t hard to figure out what case he was referring to – I’d seen how it had affected him at the time and I guess I’d always had my doubts.’ She pushes herself back in her seat, sucking in a long breath and lifting her chin.