‘Mrs Prentice was pressurising her into committing suicide.’ He dropped heavily into the padded office chair, visibly relieved to be seated again. ‘Must have been interfering with her love life having a kid that dependent. That’s the usual reason people want to get shot of their sick relatives. Don’t want the hassle of caring for them. They make out it’s an act of mercy but it’s selfishness pure and simple.’
‘What makes you think the pressure was coming from Dawn?’ Zigic asked. ‘Holly was old enough to make her own decisions.’
‘No teenage girl knows what’s best for her,’ Fletcher said, then his face dropped. ‘Was? What do you mean “was”? What’s happened to her?’
‘Holly’s dead too.’
His head sagged as if his neck was broken. ‘We should have been pushier. We could have saved her.’
‘From what, Mr Fletcher?’
‘From her bloody parents,’ he snapped. ‘They were trying to get her over to Dignitas. They had her campaigning for it. Lucky for her even those murdering Swiss bastards won’t kill a child.’
Zigic glanced at Ferreira but she looked as confused as he felt by the sudden swerve in Fletcher’s rambling.
‘They were manipulating everything,’ he went on, talking fast. ‘I don’t even think she wrote half of them blog posts. People like Holly recover, they’ve got the tenacity. Do you really believe someone like that just gives up? They wake up one morning and decide they want to kill theirselves? Bollocks, do they.’
‘We’ve seen nothing to suggest that Mr and Mrs Prentice were doing that,’ Zigic said.
Fletcher snorted. ‘Then you’ve not been looking very hard.’
He spun around in his chair and started clicking through bookmarked links on his computer until a page opened with a video screen set at its center: Holly in her motorised wheelchair, seated in a light-filled conservatory with a sun-baked lawn unfolding beyond the windows. Dawn was sitting on her right, Warren on her left, clutching her hand.
Fletcher hit Play and Holly’s voice came out of the speakers, strong and sure, as if she was reading from a script:
‘It should be unthinkable in a civilised country that people who are doomed to live limited lives have no option for ending them. Our families have to watch us suffer, they have to do everything for us and I’m grateful –’ she strained to turn towards Dawn, who was staring dead ahead – ‘I am grateful to my mother for her selfless care. But it’s my life and nobody should be able to dictate the length of it. If I was able-bodied and wanted to die I could. As it is I’m reliant on the kindness of my family and the people they pay to care for me. And I have no life. I have no future. Or not the one I wanted before the accident that put me in this chair. I will never walk again. Everything I loved in my life has been taken away from me and I don’t want to go on if I can’t do the things which defined me.’
Fletcher nodded. ‘Look at them.’
Dawn was statue still. Warren watched Holly talk with unmistakable pride, rubbing her hand with his thumb.
‘There needs to be a change in law,’ she said firmly. ‘Tens of thousands of people are forced to endure pain and anguish as incurable illnesses slowly rob them of their mobility and their mental faculties. Their families and friends have to watch this happen, powerless to ease their suffering, and when they do – if they can bring themselves to make that horrific choice and help them end their lives – they face prosecution. A mercy killing is just that. It is a
mercy
I, and thousands of people like me, are begging to be given.’
Warren wiped his eyes.
‘We are not asking for anything unreasonable, just the same right to decide the course of our lives and deaths as the able-bodied enjoy.’
The video ended abruptly and Fletcher turned back to them. ‘Does that look like a good mother to you?’ Fletcher stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘She’d have put a pillow over that girl’s face in a heartbeat.’
‘Why didn’t she then?’ Ferreira asked.
‘I reckon she was scared of getting arrested. That’s why the likes of her need Dignitas, it saves them getting their hands dirty. But they’re still murderers.’
Zigic looked at the faces, frozen on screen. Dawn’s gaze had drifted off camera, Warren’s eyes were closed, and only Holly stared back at the viewer, her chin thrown up, all defiance. If Fletcher saw a manipulated victim and a cold-hearted mother it said more about him than any of them. Zigic saw a strong young woman who believed she could change things with determination and debate; an idealist in straitened circumstances.
They couldn’t ignore the questions this threw up, though.
Fletcher stroked the grey stubble on his sagging cheeks, deflated now that he’d presented his evidence. Could he have murdered Dawn? Zigic wondered. He was getting on but he was a big man and the offences on his record showed he wasn’t shy of using violence to further his cause either. He’d spent thirty years threatening lives and orchestrating campaigns of violence and intimidation for the sake of animals locked in cages behind twelve-foot-high walls and electric gates. Who was to say how far he’d be prepared to go to save a child?
‘We should discuss this further at the station, Mr Fletcher.’
The man got to his feet, knees cracking. ‘They tell you to be polite now, don’t they? But you’re not fooling anyone. I can see the psycho in you, son.’
He went upstairs to get dressed and Ferreira called in Hale and Bright to keep an eye on him. When he was changed they took him outside to the car, Bright placing a firm hand on top of his head as he manoeuvred him into the back.
‘What do you think?’ Ferreira asked. ‘Has he got it in him?’
‘He’s capable,’ Zigic said. ‘But why kill Dawn and then let Holly die when he claims he wanted to protect her?’
‘We can put him in the category of people who knew their routine, wouldn’t you say? He was hanging around the house enough to know the nurse should have found her.’
Zigic looked into Fletcher’s battered old Passat, the dingy interior and the very clean footwell, eyes automatically going to the console now he knew what was underneath it. Those stains that looked like lots of different fluids but almost always turned out to be blood.
‘Call forensics,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what Fletcher was so determined to clean up.’
They’d been in the car for hours, no radio, no conversation, just the sound of the engine and a slight squeak whenever Rachel braked.
It was squeaking now, as she slowed down and turned into the car park of a low, brown-brick hotel next to the gutted shell of a fast-food restaurant with grilles over its windows. A man was standing smoking outside the main doors. He threw the cigarette aside as Rachel parked up and went back in.
She twisted in her seat. ‘We’re staying here tonight, Nathan.’
‘Why?’
‘So we can talk.’
About Dawn.
Rachel unbuckled his seat belt. ‘We’re going to walk into this motel and you’re going to behave yourself. No acting weird, no talking to anyone. And don’t even think about running.’
The roar of the motorway was deafening when he got out of the car and he stood watching the traffic, rocking slightly, feeling the thrum of the wheels under his feet and the tug coming off the road, until Rachel grabbed his hand and pulled him after her, heading for the big reception sign.
She hardly spoke to the man behind the desk and when she did her accent was different, like someone from home.
The man asked if her son was okay and Nathan glared at him.
‘Yeah, he’s just a bit rough, like. Carsick.’
They went along a corridor and up a stairwell that smelled of lemons, through another corridor to the last doorway on the right which she opened up with a plastic card.
‘After you.’
Nathan went in.
It was a big room with two small beds and immediately he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight, couldn’t risk it when she would be close enough to hear him talking in his nightmares. He might say something she could use against him. Or she could say he had and he wouldn’t know whether it was true or not, wouldn’t know which lie to tell to fix the problem.
‘Sit down then, we’re not going anywhere.’
She unpacked the bags of food, bringing out sandwiches and crisps, opened a bottle of water and drank it down in one go.
‘Do you want something to eat?’
‘No.’
‘You need to eat.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
Nathan sat down on the bed under the window, his back against the wall.
The room was getting smaller. He noticed the stains on the carpet and the smudges on the paint, a boot mark on the back of the door as if he wasn’t the first person to be locked in here against his will.
Rachel pulled the chair out from under the table where the television was and sat down on it with her feet up on the end of his bed. She looked tired but he knew he still needed to be careful. He couldn’t see her gun but it was there, under her shirt, tucked away around the back so the man on the reception desk wouldn’t catch sight of it and know what she was.
‘Why did you run away, Nathan?’
‘I dunno.’
She sighed. ‘Look, whatever you tell anyone else, you have to tell me the truth. I’m the only person who cares what happens to you now. So don’t make this harder than it needs to be.’
He brought his knees up to his chin, wrapped his arms around his shins, making himself as small as he could.
‘The police are going to ask you these questions and we need to sort out what you’ll tell them.’
‘I don’t wanna talk to them.’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t want that either but we won’t be able to avoid it,’ she said. ‘They know about you. Thanks to Julia.’
What had she told them?
She wouldn’t say anything.
Rachel was lying.
‘You liked it at Julia’s, didn’t you?’
He nodded.
‘So why would you run away?’
‘I was scared.’
‘What of?’
He couldn’t tell her.
‘Your nan told me what you wanted to do,’ she said. ‘Is that why you went home?’
It was and it wasn’t but he nodded because he thought that would be enough.
‘Okay. We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we? You know there’s no way around the situation. You can’t make it go away with talking. I thought you understood that by now.’ She brushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘Especially after what happened to Tyler.’
Nathan dug his fingertips into his legs until he hit bone.
Nobody fucked with Tyler. Grown men backed down from him when he gave them his hard-eyed stare and the threats they threw about turned into apologies and wary smiles. Tyler smiled along with them but he didn’t forget. Always caught up with them in the end.
Then someone caught up with him.
No. Forget about Tyler.
If Tyler was tougher he’d be the one in here with Rachel, but inside wasn’t like outside and even when they said you were safe – watched, segregated, protected – you weren’t really. You were only as safe as the people guarding you wanted you to be.
At least Rachel wanted him safe.
‘Why now?’ she asked. ‘You could have run off whenever you liked. Julia wasn’t strict with you. So why did you run away now?’
He didn’t have an answer.
‘It’s because of Dawn, isn’t it?’ She stared at him, didn’t blink, as if she was boring through his skull, into the place where he kept his darkest secrets. ‘Dawn was murdered and then you ran away.’
‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘But you took the knife from her house?’
‘Yes.’
‘After she was killed?’
He started rocking back and forth, spine hitting the wall but not so much that he couldn’t stand the pain.
‘Stop that!’
He stopped.
‘Did you see her dead?’
Dawn on the kitchen floor, lying in her own blood, soaked in it. Bile in his throat but he wouldn’t be sick. Not there. He wouldn’t make her even dirtier than she already was.
Don’t look at her.
Nathan closed his eyes. Saw the knife in his hand and the blood on his shoes.
‘You need to tell me the truth,’ Rachel said, voice soft, encouraging, the way she was at the beginning, trying to coax that other, earlier truth out of him.
That was in a hotel room too. Some hotel like this one and just the two of them there, but he knew now she was recording every word he said then and maybe she was doing the same thing here. Trying to make him think this place was safe, telling him only the truth could protect him, but she was lying because it’s what she did. Lied to get what she wanted even if it killed someone. It killed Tyler.
But she wouldn’t stop asking. Not until he told her what he’d seen.
‘The man,’ he said.
She cocked her head. She knew that was true.
‘What man?’
‘At Dawn’s. In a car. I saw him. I thought he was coming to get me.’
‘Did you recognise him?’
‘No.’
‘Think, Nathan, I need you to be sure. Did you recognise him from home?’
‘I dunno.’ That was the truth too. ‘Maybe. I never got a good look at him.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘An old man. In a red car.’
Rachel thought about it for a moment and he kept looking at her, trying to decide what she was thinking.
‘Why would he be at Dawn’s house if he was looking for you?’
‘I dunno. I went round there.’
‘You weren’t supposed to.’
‘Julia said it was okay.’
She reached behind her for another bottle of water. ‘Did he kill Dawn?’
He shrugged.
‘That’s not an answer. Did you see him do something to her?’
‘I only saw him outside.’
‘Okay, that’s good. We’ll tell the police that much. You saw someone who might be responsible. That should keep them happy.’ She opened the bottle and took a long drink. ‘Do you see, Nathan? This is just like before. We need to have a good story. A simple story we can tell them so they leave you alone.’
‘I can do that,’ he said.
‘I know you can. You’re a very smart boy.’ She smiled at him and for a split second he thought it was a real smile and he found himself matching it. ‘And because you’re smart you know I know you were in Dawn’s kitchen after she was murdered or else you wouldn’t have her blood on the shoes you’re wearing right now.’