‘What about the chocolate icing on your throat? What was the significance of that mark?’
‘I skipped school once, more than once, but on this occasion I followed Dad, desperately wanting to see what he did with his days, all the things he wouldn’t share with me when he got home. I wanted to see why he’d been acting so strange. Only, he didn’t go to work. He went into town and met up with a girl – a girl who didn’t look much older than me. I remember thinking… Jesus, I remember thinking all kinds of things!
‘I confronted him that evening. I asked him if he was some kind of pervert. I asked him if I had a sister he wasn’t telling me about. I thought that might explain why he’d been so cold towards me. He just told me it was to do with the murder case he’d been working on, someone he had saved.’
Katie thumps the door, letting out a fraction of her frustration. ‘Christ, I said some horrible things in return, things I’d somehow managed to forget until now… But there were two things I’ll never forget: Maclean was the name of the man Dad had saved the young girl from, I got a glimpse of the case notes on his desk. There was also a necklace in a box there, a necklace with a twisted fastening. I thought at first it was for me, his own way of saying sorry, of proving that I was more important than anything at work, but the next time I followed him I saw him give it to the girl.’
‘Markham knows this,’ says Nathan. ‘Which means he must have something to do with the Maclean case. And we have evidence.’ He turns to look at her. ‘Or rather, we did. You washed it away.’ He’s holding his throat, although it feels very much like he’s squeezing hers. ‘We need to share this with your team.’
‘The photo back at the flat warned us to keep quiet,’ she says, lifting a finger to her lips.
‘You’re protecting your dad.’
‘Of course I fucking am! It would destroy him. His reputation is all he has left. He might have lost who he is in the present, but I can protect his past. I owe him that. I owe him everything.’
‘But my brother!’
‘I know,’ she says, ‘I know. But you also have to remember that Markham gave us the clue. This is what he wants: to hurt us the way he’s hurt the other families.’ She slows a little and looks across at Nathan, seeing his frustration, feeling his pain.
‘Fuck it!’ she says, pulling her mobile out of the centre console. ‘Let’s do what’s right. Alex Maclean, 1987. Tell them to look into it, just in case. Tell them about the mark on my neck. Tell them I destroyed it. Tell them…’
Nathan looks up at her, then down at the phone, the screen illuminating his face. ‘No,’ he says eventually. ‘You’re right. We can’t risk telling them anything yet.’ He lifts a finger to his lips and holds it there. ‘Let’s wait and see what’s at this address first.’
Katie nods and takes back the phone, the speed building under her foot again. She tries to convince herself she really was doing what was right in offering Nathan the phone, in risking everything, but the truth is she’d always known he wouldn’t make the call. Worse still is the sense that they’re using each other. He needs her to help find the man who may have already killed his brother. She needs him to shut that man up for good.
Twenty-Nine
There can no longer be any doubt. Nathan knows exactly where he’s heading. It’s where he would always head when he couldn’t find a way to distract himself. He’s just never, in all his endless imaginings, come up with a murder that felt so justified.
He’s pulled out of his thoughts by the phone between them buzzing into life. Katie snatches it from under the dashboard and opens up a message. It’s almost four in the morning, so Nathan expects it can only be work-related, but the twist in Katie’s face says otherwise.
‘What is it?’ he asks.
Katie throws the phone down and it bounces off the centre console and disappears into the footwell ahead of him. He thinks about reaching for it, but he hears her bark an order to open the glove box as she swerves towards the hard shoulder.
He does as instructed, confused and a little scared, suddenly imagining another part of his brother’s body will be in there – a tongue, an ear, a curl of skin sliced from his back. But instead there’s a book. He pulls it out and she snatches it from him, bringing the car to a stop and switching on the light above them. It’s not at all what he’d expected: it’s a children’s book with a brightly coloured illustration of a Christmas tree on the cover and a title he can’t make out. Katie sits with it on her lap, her eyes wide, her hands shaking. It reminds Nathan of the books he escaped into in the early days up at his cottage in Scotland. But this is not one of his. Katie carefully opens the book and, with a trembling finger, follows the handwritten inscription:
YOUR FATHER SAYS IT’S TOO EARLY FOR PRESENTS, BUT I JUST CAN’T WAIT FOR YOU TO COME, MY LITTLE KATIE. WE’RE GOING TO HAVE SO MUCH FUN TOGETHER!
The bottom right-hand corner of the page is blackened with yellowing fringes, a clear sign that someone has tried to set it alight. Above that are words written in a smaller hand. He needs to lean in closer to make them out, his head only a couple of inches from Katie’s. It’s not the same writing as on the notes they’ve found before, but far more upright and angular:
I don’t make mistakes. See you at the end.
Thirty
It’s started to get light outside. It’s also started to rain. The wipers on Katie’s dad’s old car are struggling to keep the windscreen clear. How could Markham have known about the book from her mum? She hadn’t known about it until she was in her teens, finding it in a pile in the attic. She’d waved it at her dad, and he’d told her he’d never seen it before. She’d kept its contents a secret, the only secret she had ever shared with her mum until, one day, when she’d let her temper get the better of her, she’d taken a lit cigarette (one of the many secrets she kept from her dad) and put it to the corner. She hadn’t let it burn for long.
When she thinks about Markham touching it, she feels what little control she has left starting to slip, hammering her hands against the steering wheel. Nathan has his head pressed into the glass of the passenger door. He hasn’t moved for a few minutes.
‘You think it’s a trap?’ he says, without lifting his head.
Katie finds herself looking across at the glove box to where the precious but now defiled book has been returned. ‘Of course.’
‘Do you think he means see you at the end of the journey?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Do you think Christian will be there?’
‘Again, I don’t know.’
‘What do you think he’s done to Christian?’
‘Don’t!’ she says sharply. ‘We need to keep our focus.’
‘You think I don’t have focus?’ says Nathan, turning to look at her.
It’s when she looks back at him that Katie really sees the torment and the bubbling rage, and she finally understands. She’s calm because one of them needs to be. It’s how they’ve always worked, it’s why they’ve worked, because they’re opposites, because they’re a team.
* * *
The closer they get to the address they’ve been given the more privilege they see, until eventually they find themselves crawling down a tree-lined street of huge detached houses. They find the number seventeen on a tall brick gatepost at the end of a snaking drive. Although there’s a gate with a keypad, it’s not shut and they drive straight in, deep gravel crackling under the tyres. In front of the house, a 1970s red-brick building that must have at least half a dozen bedrooms, is a tall, broad man with swept-back grey hair. He’s standing next to a bag of golf clubs he’s loading into a shiny black BMW. The sight of the clubs takes Katie back to the twisted body of Sarah Cleve.
She pulls alongside and winds down the window and asks warily: ‘Who are you?’
‘You’re fucking kidding me!’ he says, a rough voice that speaks of sixty a day and a whole lot of shouting.