‘He could have used a camera. We’re currently checking the neighbour’s house.’
‘Maybe,’ she says, sensing Nathan’s discomfort on the step below her. And it’s his discomfort that’s now holding her back, keeping her from sharing her strengthening belief that she knows exactly how ‘The Cartoonist’ could be in two places at once. Yet again, she finds she’s deceiving her colleagues, deceiving her boss, and risking lives in doing so. Yet again it seems she cannot resist.
‘Any joy on the family doctor?’ she asks.
‘We’ve discovered he was formerly a surgeon.’
‘What sort?’
‘Plastic. Supposedly a good one, too, but the misdiagnosis and death of Nathan’s father, a family friend, seems to have put an end to his career. He went to live abroad, in the South of France and then Spain, before disappearing off the radar completely a decade ago.’
Katie releases a long breath. The pieces are almost all in place now, and yet there’s something simple eluding her amid all the bluff and deception from Markham. At moments like these on previous cases she’s had a chance to talk to Nathan and together they’ve found the solution, but he’s the very last person she would talk to now. She looks across, feeling a mix of frustration and sympathy for the man sitting on the step, legs tucked up close to his chest, head pressed into his knees. She’s about to turn away and speak to her colleagues when his head shoots up and he looks at her with such a glare that she stumbles back and almost topples off the edge of the steps. She’s certain he’s seen it too, worked through the few facts that are known to them and come to the same unbearable conclusion.
‘It’s impossible,’ he says, now facing the superintendent.
‘What is?’ asks Taylor, as alarmed by this interruption as Katie.
‘It’s the photo, you see,’ he says, seeming not to care that they don’t see, or that his voice is barely a whisper. ‘Markham couldn’t possibly have known about that. Nobody knew about it.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asks Katie, unable to soften the question, wondering, hoping, that she’s somehow read it all wrong. ‘The photo on the table up there?’ She jabs a thumb over her shoulder at the building behind. ‘You said that was nothing, meant nothing.’ If she hadn’t been distracted by her dad, by the relief of finding him alive, she might have spotted the lie. It would have been there in Nathan’s horror, the very horror she’s seeing now. He draws his legs in even further and wraps his arms around them as if suddenly cold. And he does now seem to be shaking, despite the warmth of the midday sun. ‘I’m sure you’ve figured out why your dad was dressed up like that.’ He pauses, but neither takes the chance to draw a breath. ‘And Markham got it almost exactly right. Including the note with “So sorry to have left you alone”.’ He starts to shake his head violently. ‘But it’s the photo. The photo is an impossibility.’ He looks up at her now, his eyes wide and once again childlike, desperate for understanding. ‘I took it away the moment I found her in the kitchen. I slipped it into my pocket.’
‘It was a photo of your brother and your dad,’ says the superintendent. ‘Might it have been a warning? You said he’s being held.’
‘It wasn’t Christian in the photo. It was me. Just me. That’s why I couldn’t leave it there for my brother to discover. It was madness, I know, an overreaction, but I couldn’t bear to think of Christian believing he’d been excluded, not right at the end. I didn’t even dare to write about it in my journal, so Markham couldn’t have known, he couldn’t…’
‘Is it exactly the same photo?’ asks Katie, inching along so she can get a better view of Nathan.
‘No. I burnt the original,’ he says, instantly reminding Katie of the inscription in the children’s book from her mum. ‘Every time I looked at it I could see Mum lying there. Or Dad with his arm around my shoulders, strong, unbreakable, the man I always wanted to be.’ She watches Nathan’s shoulders rise and fall as he sucks in a long and unsteady breath. ‘But the photo Markham left was close enough, close enough to tell me he must have been there the day Mum died.’ He lifts his head again, shielding his eyes from the sunlight then turning to Katie. ‘I do this, or whatever it was I used to do, because of that day, because I simply hadn’t seen it coming. But what if it was all a lie? What if she had no intention of taking her life?’
‘You’re suggesting Markham killed her?’ She can’t help but shake her head, can’t help but dismiss his theory, while risking giving her own away. ‘Your mum died more than fourteen years before he started working for you and your brother.’
‘But what if that’s why he started working for us? He wanted to come back, to revisit the scene of his crime, to see us, to see what he’d done. He’s most likely been watching his daughter, too, and not just over the neighbour’s wall.’
‘What’s the connection, though?’ says Superintendent Taylor. ‘What could he have had against your family back then? It seems a terrible coincidence.’
Nathan shrugs. ‘The novels? Maybe he knew. Maybe he blamed her for putting those ideas in his head, same as he blamed Katie’s dad for giving him the opportunity to act them out.’
‘What novels?’ asks Superintendent Taylor.
Katie looks across at Nathan, and he nods assent. ‘Nathan’s mum was J.M. Priest.’
The superintendent’s surprise is clear, and he stands in stunned silence for a moment before slowly shaking his head. ‘It’s seems like too much coincidence that you two were linked to this guy all the way back then.’
‘I agree,’ says Katie, biting her lip and turning away, the growing sense of certainty in her own deductions threatening to overwhelm her. She needs distance, some time and space to breathe and think, and she needs to do what she was intending to do before: to go and hold her dad and tell him how proud she is of him, how much she loves him.
She’s heading towards the open door, no hesitation, no explanation, when her phone starts to ring. She pulls the mobile out of her pocket, somehow hearing the voice before she’s even accepted the call.
‘That were cruel of me, lassie.’ She turns back towards the others, pressing the speakerphone button, with an expression on her face that tells them they need to shut up and listen. ‘I think I might have got a little carried away. But your dad didn’t seem to mind. Not much of talker, to be honest. Being a murderer must have taken its toll.’
Katie is surprised at how calm she sounds when she speaks. ‘The greater crime was letting you go.’
‘I’ll admit that has turned out badly for a few people. Tracy were convinced that Alex Maclean was the evil one, that he had a kind of control over me. I guess kids are a bit blind to their parents’ faults. A bit like you, eh, Nathan, not seeing what your mum was really like. Funny how she was happy to share her darkest thoughts with millions, and to make millions from it, while leaving you to think you were all alone.’
Katie turns to stare out across the vast expanse of lawn to the surrounding trees, desperately trying to find the calm of before. She has at least managed to maintain her professionalism, helped perhaps by the proximity of her boss, who’s moved in close to the phone, hat in his hand. Perhaps she’s also been helped in a strange way by Markham, because for all the terrible things he’s saying his voice has remained flat and emotionless throughout, like they aren’t his words. Like he’s possessed.
‘What do you want?’ she says.
‘I want the two of you, to be honest. I want you to become who you were always destined to be. You’re just like your dad, Katie, you want to take the law into your own hands and—’