Dark Lies Read online

  He hasn’t heard the name in so long it takes a moment for him to realise that’s what he can hear, and it’s unmistakably her voice. The whole of the outside world is pressing in on him, suffocating him in the corner of the room, but, like the true evil that it is, never finishes the job.

  The desire is rising like he knew that it would: his only surprise is that it’s taken this long. Perhaps it’s the sleeping pill, or the shock of the unexpected, or maybe it’s down to the swirling lines on the stairway, a visual reminder that he needs to hold on. The problem is, he’s not seeing that wall anymore. He’s seeing images of the woman outside, terrible, twisted, blood-soaked images in which she’s crying, images in which she’s screaming, images in which she can no longer do anything at all. And they’re coming faster and faster, like he’s running through a reel – click, click, click – desperately seeking the perfect snapshot to feast his eyes on, to act upon. He looks down at his hand and finds his fingers fully extended, and a name on his lips: Steven Fish. He should have known it would come to this, should have known that his worst nightmare, the discovery that had led him here, would return to guide his actions.

  Suddenly he’s up on his feet, the sweat-soaked sheets falling away. He’s naked, as always, but his body doesn’t feel like his own and he’s no longer in control; he’s moving forward, towards the door, down the stairs, into the tiny kitchen. He’s picking up the lid of the tin from the side and passing through the room with the children’s books that can’t help him now. When his arm reaches out to open the locks he tries to order his other arm to make it stop, but a decision has been made without him. Before the final bolt is pulled back he feels for the edge of the tin lid, feels its sharpness and its potential.

  This is it, he thinks, unstoppable, irresistible; but, as the door swings open and he steps out into the moonlight, he starts to feel something else, something so strong that it loosens his grip. On the lid. On the doorframe. On everything.

  Katie.

  Seven

  ‘Nathan?’ Katie almost trips on the ridge of gravel she’d stepped over to get to the door as she takes two paces back. ‘Nathan, what’s wrong?’

  She already knows the answer, and she knows she won’t be hearing it from him. The evidence is there in his eyes – eyes that had once sparkled brilliantly but now hold the same flat stare as the bodies that have brought her here. She thinks of those victims again; she’s been thinking of them for most of the six hours it’s taken her to get up here, talking to them, making promises she knows she can’t keep. Not without Nathan.

  He’s completely naked, standing with his hand held high above his head, his knees bent as if he is carrying a great weight that’s pushing him down, even though his fingers appear to be empty. She ought to feel threatened, but the sight just makes her sad.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  No reaction, just a slow descent to the floor. She wants to move forward and grab him, to hold him up, but something makes her stop. He looks so different to how she had imagined, and she’s pictured him plenty of times over the past year. He had always been small and slight, but now he looks like a marathon runner, with skin pulled tight over every muscle. No, she corrects herself, not a marathon runner, not with hair past his shoulders and a beard to match; he looks like a castaway. She uses the tip of her shoe to prod the strange circular track she’s seen around the house, wondering if this might represent his island, the very edge of his world. She takes another step back, wanting to run from what she now sees has been a terrible mistake, one for which she holds herself entirely responsible. Looking down she spots her shoelace, snapped after she had very nearly snapped herself, when a photograph of two little schoolgirls had come to her rescue.

  ‘You know who I am,’ she says, moving forward again, feeling braver. ‘You know what we’ve been through, together. I’m sorry I had to break my promise, but I had no choice. I thought you were in danger.’ This had not crossed her mind before, and now she starts scanning her surroundings, searching for movement, searching for a sign that she might have been followed. There’s nothing. Not a breath of air, not the tiniest twitch in the leaves on the trees.

  She’s just a couple of feet away now, staring down at his face and able to see a little of the man he had once been. His raised arm is shaking. She tentatively reaches out towards him, uncertain of what she hopes to achieve but acutely aware of the dangers. Her hand makes contact with his chest, and she can feel his heart beating at an impossible speed.

  ‘Go!’ he says, through tight lips. ‘Before you get hurt.’

  ‘But it’s me, Katie,’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t hurt me.’

  Even as she says it she’s no longer sure. She’d told herself she’d know the truth when she looked into his eyes, but she feels just as blind to the threat as she had in all their years working together. It was only at the end, when they’d found the tortured, headless body of Steven Fish that he’d allowed his mask to slip.

  When she’d left him here, she hadn’t even said goodbye. As she climbed into the car she’d caught him looking at her the way only a few individuals in her life ever had; people even Nathan, for all his loathing of over-simplistic terms, would have described as psychopaths. He’d told her to never come back, and she’d happily promised not to.

  He’s not looking at her that way now; he’s not really looking at anything, but she fears at any moment his stare could sharpen. She’s been attacked before, she’s been punched, and kicked, and strangled, and shot at; she’s even been stabbed and left for dead on the street. The difference, she considers, with a brief glance over her shoulder, is that help was always minutes away. Nobody is going to be able to help her here. Nobody even knows where she is.

  What a difference a year makes; once she would have done everything by the book, told her whole team where she would be and had backup on standby. But Nathan is not the only one who has changed since the Steven Fish case.

  ‘You’re not going to hurt me,’ she says again.

  Her professional training starts to kick in at last, as the little voice at the back of her head insists that something isn’t right. She begins working through what she’s seen and what she might not have seen, crouching down to peer at the shadows below Nathan’s waist. The first and only time she’d seen this part of his body was when he’d showered back at her flat, and she’d been unable to resist peering through a gap in the door at a man she had always been fascinated by. This time there’s nothing sexual about her search.

  The skull shape at the top of his thigh emerges from the darkness. She’s transfixed by it, just as she had been when she’d spotted an identical mark drawn in chocolate icing on the body of the first victim. The memory of it makes her stumble backwards, reaching for her breast, for the two moles, for her own connection to the second victim. The action triggers a thought, a possibility she can’t believe she hasn’t considered. What if she’s been tricked? What if her every action has been predicted? What if two mothers had died purely to bring her to this place, to bring her and Nathan back together? She can barely bring herself to ask: ‘Are we alone?’

  No response. Not even a flicker. Even in the daylight there would be so many places for someone to hide: behind a tree; behind the boulders on the bank of the river; round the side of the small stone house; in the house. And she is unarmed.

  ‘Where?’ she manages to ask in a whisper, hoping he might give her a clue, just the tiniest twitch. He offers nothing. She can feel the anticipation of attack crawling across her shoulders, but she won’t back down, won’t run, no matter what. She rises to her full height and takes a step forward.

  ‘Let’s cut the crap!’ she barks out at the darkness, her words stronger now and echoing deep into the valley. She holds her arms out and is relieved to find they’re not shaking. ‘It’s just me. No weapons. No way of contacting anybody else. So, let’s talk.’ She can hear the tiniest of fractures in her voice as her mind flashes up a series of images. She stretches her arms wi
der and finds her head tipping back as she slowly spins, her feet scuffing the dirt. She’s opening herself up for a gunshot.

  But there’s nothing. After a while she starts to feel ridiculous, lowers her arms and lets out the breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. She turns back towards Nathan and is shocked to see him slumped in the doorway, his head so far forward it’s almost touching his knees. Without thinking, she rushes forward to him and then freezes; her instinct is telling her to pull her arm back before she loses a finger, a hand, her life, but she knows there’s something more important, something she will not leave without: Nathan.

  She searches the shadows behind him, seeing only a chair and two piles of books. She swallows hard and grabs Nathan’s forearm. He flinches at the touch, but nothing more. She inches her way towards the wrist and stops just short, letting out a gasp. There’s a jagged line on the surface of the skin, but no blood. She lets go of his wrist and moves to his neck, pressing her fingers against it, trying to find a pulse beyond her own.

  She never finds it. She doesn’t need to. Nathan’s hand is crawling across the carpet like a spider towards an object she can’t yet make out in the darkness. She shifts to one side to get a clear view and can see it’s a circle of metal, the lid of a tin can, perhaps. Small, but sharp. Sharp enough to kill. Once more, everything is rewritten in an instant – the skull-shaped mark, the words of warning, the hand posed above the head. What if Nathan knew she’d caught a glimpse of him through the bathroom door? What if he’s as damaged as she’d feared he might be when she’d agreed to leave him in this prison? What if he’s taken that next step from fantasy to reality, from criminal psychologist to killer?

  She shoots out a hand and pushes the tin lid away and he grabs her arm, suddenly strong again.

  ‘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 beginn
ing 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.