He feels the urge to run but he has no idea where he’s heading. There is a maze of corridors ahead with no signs. He wonders about calling out to Katie, but he doesn’t want to warn Markham of his location. If he had a phone he would ring her; if he could find a member of staff he would ask for the location of her dad’s room. He feels like a child lost in a supermarket, trying to be brave but on the verge of tears.
Suddenly he hears a scream. He tells himself it could be anybody, but something in his core knows that it’s Katie. He runs towards the sound, bouncing off the wall as he takes a corner too fast. And suddenly he’s not alone: a young man is moving quickly alongside him, and this man seems to know where he’s heading. They don’t say anything to each other, saving their breath for a huge flight of stairs ahead. At the top, Nathan feels his legs start to give way, but still he carries on, following the young man who he spots is wearing a polo shirt bearing a logo matching the one on the sign out the front. As they sprint down a seemingly endless corridor he pictures Katie laid out in a pool of blood, her limbs twisted, her beautiful face pale and still. He shakes his head, forcing the vision away and, as they skid to a stop in the doorway of the furthest room, the reality presents itself. Katie is standing over by a table in the corner of the room, almost fully obscuring whoever is sitting beside her. The only thing Nathan can make out is an arm, hanging down and horribly slack. He rushes forward, almost tripping over the edge of a thick rug, desperate to see whose body it might be.
She steps out of the way, and he looks down at the elderly man slumped over the small table, his head twisted sideways, his left cheek flat on the surface. Poorly arranged above his pale, skinny face is a shoulder-length blonde wig. In front of him, at the centre of the table, is an empty container of pills. The whole scene is almost exactly as Nathan remembers it: the pale blue blouse and loose black trousers; the tights with the heel missing on one side; even the smell, the distinctive, sweet scent of his mum’s perfume. And then there are the final details: the note on lined paper, words written in bold, and a photo he’d somehow overlooked before, as if it wasn’t there, as if it couldn’t be there. He starts to blink over and over, his brain unable to process the information, or perhaps over-processing, adding things that cannot be, blending two different moments in time.
‘It’s impossible,’ says the young man he’d run to the room with, and all Nathan can do is nod his agreement. ‘I was here half an hour ago. Mr Rhodes was sitting by the window. He was fine.’
‘He still is,’ says Nathan, finally taking in the additional details; the very things that were missing from the day he’d found his mum, even though he’d prayed for them over and over.
Katie spins round to look at him with tear-stained eyes turning to anger. ‘What the hell are you—?’
‘He’s breathing,’ he says, cutting her off, still feeling disconnected from the scene as he continues to struggle with how so much of it, just as the young man next to him had suggested, is impossible. He sees a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye as Katie reaches down towards her dad’s neck, fingers fumbling for a pulse. Then she’s pulling him up and off the chair, falling onto the floor with the big man on top of her. It looks – remarkably, appallingly – as Nathan imagines it must have done when he’d grabbed his mum twenty years ago to the very day. Only there’s movement here; the old man, who Nathan can now see looks a lot like his daughter, lets out a sound, and his eyes slowly open, settling flatly on a point somewhere in the far corner of the room.
‘Dad!’ cries Katie, pressing her face against his, soaking him in tears that he clearly doesn’t understand. ‘Oh, thank God!’
‘No,’ says Nathan, as he takes a step back, staring at the single object on the desk that shouldn’t be there, that cannot be there no matter how carefully he works things through in his head. ‘Not God.’
Thirty-Two
The two of them are slumped down on yet another step. It’s narrow and their legs are touching. Katie wonders if Nathan’s even noticed. He’s clearly churning things through in his mind, troubled by something he’s yet to explain. She has her own questions, her own impossibilities – like how could Markham have got to the care home ahead of them and found time to arrange such an elaborate scene? He can’t have set it up in advance, not if the young care home worker had seen her dad just half an hour before. And what was the meaning to all of this? Is the final, terrible message soon to be delivered?
She didn’t think she could hate Markham any more; she’d happily take a knife to his neck and draw it slowly across while smiling and staring into his cold dark eyes. Fuck the law, there’s no place for that here. Now she totally understands what led her dad to kill a man all those years ago, and she wants to go upstairs and tell him once again that she understands, that they’re – she hesitates as the feeling takes her – the same.
The moment she rises to her feet a voice barks across at her.
‘Are you insane, DI Rhodes?’
She sighs and doesn’t look up.
‘This is a mess, a diabolical mess, and you know full well who has to clean it up. It’s all right for you, running around with your mad little friend, finding bodies then fleeing the scene, but I—’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says, cutting him off and closing her eyes to feel the warmth of the sun on her forehead. She knows she’ll only get a few moments rest before the chase is on again. Unless they arrest her, physically prevent her from looking, she’ll be following this through to the end. No matter what. ‘I came here to try and save my dad.’ She finally turns and faces her boss’s rage. ‘Do you remember your old friend?’
‘Very well,’ he says. ‘I reckon I’ve been here more than you have.’ He’s said this proudly, shoulders back, but it’s clear he’s seen the change in Katie because he leans forward, face flushing, not with rage, but with something that almost makes him look human. ‘I understand you may have been right about Markham,’ he says softly. He pauses and casts a look up towards the second floor. ‘What on earth possessed your father to let him go?’
‘Possessed might be the right word,’ she says, following his gaze. She wonders if Superintendent Taylor has heard the whole of the story – how her dad threw a man from the top of a building – and she feels the tiniest fizz of excitement, believing there could be a way to keep it under wraps. Until, that is, she realises it doesn’t matter anymore because her dad will always be held to account for a greater crime: as the man who let ‘The Cartoonist’ go free.
‘This needs to stop,’ says the superintendent. ‘Today.’
‘I think it was always intended to,’ says Katie.
‘Why the hell didn’t you tell us what you were doing?’
‘We were warned. He said he had Christian.’ She hesitates, looking at Nathan, motionless on the step ahead. ‘And he left proof that he has him, back in my flat.’ She knows she’s giving away far more than the location of the fingers; that her colleagues will wander through that poky little place, littered with the evidence of a life of which she’s not proud, and find the room that will likely guarantee the end of her career.
‘What the hell is Markham up to?’ says Superintendent Taylor, turning away, hat as always tucked under his arm. ‘And more importantly, where is he?’
‘He could be anywhere. He’s already doing the impossible. There’s no way he could have got from High Wycombe to here and arranged that hideous display before we arrived.’ She keeps her back to the building, trying to shake off the memory of the moment she’d found her dad.
‘Hideous indeed,’ says Taylor, a hand tightening on sharply pressed trousers.
‘He had to be near Tracy’s house,’ she continues, ‘to know when to text to tell me he was watching, and no doubt enjoying, the unravelling of his own daughter’s life once again.’