‘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 wider 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.