‘What have you done?’ she says, pressing her face up close to his, so close he cannot avoid her stare. The connection is instant, frightening, thrilling as his eyes finally focus on her. She’d always believed she could spot a killer; she looked at a suspect and felt the truth in her gut. Now she’s not so sure. Seeing the change in Nathan had been bad enough, knowing she’d fooled him for all those years. Then came the conversation with her ailing dad. Not a conversation, just three mumbled words, but words that had made her doubt everything.
She’s about to ask Nathan again what he’s done, to push a finger into his chest and pressurise him the way she has so many suspects in this past year, but she can’t escape the fact that he isn’t like the others: he’s like nobody else that she’s ever known.
‘I need you,’ she says.
She can hear him draw in a long breath, the first breath she’s heard him take, and it seems to instantly bring him back to life. He wraps his arms around his legs and draws them in so tight she half-expects to hear something snap.
‘I’m not coming back,’ he says firmly.
‘Just one more case.’ She wants to put some distance between them, some room to explain, but she knows if she moves that he could slip back inside and bolt the door. She’d never get him out again, not on her own, and the last thing she wants to do is involve anybody else.
Her next move is swift and precise. Slapping his hand off her arm, she reaches round and grabs him by the ponytail and drags him out into the gravel. When she forces his arm behind his back he does little to resist as she pushes his skinny arm up high onto his shoulder blades and shoves him towards her car. As she moves, she hears herself saying out loud, over and over, ‘It’s for the best…’
He thumps into the side of her Rover. There’s a tiny struggle, but nothing she hasn’t dealt with a hundred times before in her job, and, within a matter of seconds, Nathan is sprawled across the back seat. She gives up telling herself it’s for the best, focusing instead on what she might have missed, returning to the possibility that the real killer is out there hiding in the darkness, laughing at the things he’s pushed her to do. She retreats quickly, spinning round to search for any movement in the moonlight. There’s nothing. And back in the car Nathan’s fight is over, slumping into something that she hopes is sleep.
Before Katie climbs into the driver’s seat, she rushes round the car to check the boot, which is full of the clothes she tossed in there a few weeks ago: filthy clothes from a filthy night with another man whose name she can’t remember. She feels a flush of embarrassment at the latest bit of evidence of her life’s decline. At least these clothes might now come in useful, she thinks, climbing back in the car. She turns the key with a whispered prayer, and the Rover coughs a couple of times before roaring into life.
Eight
Nathan opens his eyes, feels the pain and closes them instantly. Something is terribly wrong. He is not in his bed. In fact, he’s not in his house at all. He lies still, barely even daring to breathe, but the headache and the churning in his stomach compel him to draw into an even tighter ball. He becomes aware of a steady rocking, of something digging into his back and of the surface beneath him falling away at the side. If he moves, he would slip over the edge.
There’s a smell beyond his own that he is fearful of. It’s a smell from his childhood. He opens his eyes at the familiar crackle of wrapping.
‘Chocolate?’ comes a voice from out of nowhere that instantly feels too close. He can hear rustling, and he moves to cover his ears. ‘Are you okay? Do you know where you are?’
He does, finally. He’s recognised the whine of an engine and the suspension creaking under him. He’s also started to remember where he was before: he was standing naked in the doorway to his house, and she was in front of him, her face only inches away. He was holding the tin lid above him, ready to drive it rapidly down.
‘Take me back!’ he cries.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I can’t.’
Under the edge of the blanket he can see the door, and imagines it being flung open and his body tumbling out onto the road. He doesn’t care about the damage to himself – as long as it’s terminal – but he can’t bear the thought of her standing over him, thinking it’s her fault.
‘I don’t want you getting hurt.’
It’s the truth. He doesn’t want anyone hurt, but especially her, because he knows who she is; he can picture her as clearly as she was a year ago. And he knows it was a year, almost to the day, because she was there at the beginning of what was supposed to be the end.
The car jumps and shudders underneath him and he can feel the swell of blood in his head as they turn sharply and pull to a stop. He hears her seat belt pop.
‘I need you with me because I need your help. A new case… a final case.’
Her words continue to tumble over and over in his mind. It’s like hearing a foreign language. The only voice he has heard in the last year has been his own, as he worked his way through the pile of children’s books or found himself shouting at his own reflection.
‘I don’t know what he wants from us,’ she continues. ‘But this is definitely about us. He left some clues, some terrible…’ she pauses again, and he knows she’s filtering out the bad stuff. ‘You have to believe that I didn’t want to come here. I was going to stick to my promise. I keep my promises.’ She clears her throat, and her voice moves further away. ‘But this is, this is… as soon as you see you’ll understand.’ He can hear the emotion thickening her voice, and he wants to reach out to offer comfort, but one hand is firmly gripped within the other. ‘What do you need?’ she asks, her voice firming. ‘A drink? Food? I’ve got some clothes in the boot. They’re not clean and most likely a little big, but they’ll do for now.’
He can hear something being placed down in the footwell. The proximity of her fingers makes him roll away so that he’s pressed against the back of the seat, but also so that the blanket gets twisted and his legs and the top of his head are revealed. At least the things he fears most remain covered – his sharpening eyes, his darkening thoughts. The desire has been there from the moment he woke in the car, a threatening whisper in the background that is now beginning to find its voice.
He reaches out and touches the edge of a plastic water bottle, snatching it back under his blanket.
‘Have some chocolate, too,’ she says.
‘I need to go back.’
‘You’re the only one that can help me with this.’
‘I need to go back!’
‘It won’t be long. Just give me a day or two. Three at most.’
‘Back!’ he says. The focus had been on nothing but keeping his hands under control, but now he finds he’s let go of the water bottle and is bending his fingers back further and further. It’s an act that takes him to the crime scene that had changed everything.
‘I know this is a risk,’ says Katie. ‘For you and for me. But it has to be taken. There is no choice.’
He can hear the aggression and remembers the danger he had seen in her too. He feels something approaching fear and this time embraces it.
‘You don’t understand,’ he says.
‘Of course I fucking do! Do you think I would have left you back there otherwise? It’s you that doesn’t understand. This case can save us.’
‘Only one thing can save me…’ he says softly, releasing the tension on his fingers and moving to the scars on the inside of his wrist.
‘Three days,’ says Katie. ‘That’s all I’m asking. And you know me, you know I can keep you out of harm’s way for that long. I won’t let you out of my sight. And then I’ll bring you back.’
Three days. It can’t be coincidence; she had taught him not to believe in those. He can also see an opportunity. He can trust her. Up until her breaking the promise to never come back, he’d trusted her more than anybody else. Perhaps this visit was meant to be. One last chance to do something right.
‘Cuffs,’ he says.