fifty-eight

“You must be Kim Slade.”

He stuck out his right hand. I clung to the strap of my bag with both hands.

“Nicholas Vellender?” I said.

“Call me Nick.” His smile disarmed me. Intellect shone through his eyes. Charming, he didn’t appear in the least shy or hostile. Perhaps he’d grown up. Perhaps he was innocent. A snatch of conversation marched into my mind, Jim talking about psychopaths.

“It is Kim, isn’t it? Paris told me all about you.”

I bet she did. “Can we talk?” I said.

“Here?”

“Somewhere more comfortable?” And busy, maybe crawling with shoppers.

“Tricky.”

“Why?”

This time his smile was cool. “I don’t really exist.”

For a scary moment I thought I was delusional. “You’re flesh and blood to me.” To be sure, I stretched out stiff fingers and grazed his sleeve. He was real all right. Eyes alive, he laughed.

“You understand my situation. Cops will be all over me if I show my face.”

I appreciated his dilemma. Outside in the street would have to do.

With no intention of being lured somewhere else, I walked away a little, indicating he follow, which he did. It was growing darker by the minute, rain clouds gathering, the sky dark purple at its core like an old self-inflicted bruise, done to shift the blame and turn an abuser into the abused.

A storage facility flanked by wrought iron gates set back from the pavement under a brick-built arch provided a makeshift shelter. I walked beneath it and pressed my back against the railings. Nick Vellender did the same. To the outside world, we were two friends having a chat, nothing more extraordinary than that.

“Why the deception?”

“Long story.”

“I’m listening.”

“Didn’t Paris tell you about Otto?”

“I’m not interested in what Paris told me.” I wanted to know why Nick Vellender put his sister through hell. I wanted him to explain. I wanted to find out if he was a murderer, to say the words that would condemn him.

“Otto is a tool.”

“Many fathers are—”

“He’s not my father.” His protest cut with contempt.

“Okay, you hate him. I get it.”

“No, you don’t. You couldn’t.”

I turned to him and noticed the set of his jaw, the tendons in his neck. Was this how I appeared to others when describing the relationship with my father? Yet Nicholas Vellender’s expression said so much more. His eyes shone with something akin to religious conviction, maybe mania. At that moment I believed he could kill.

“What did he do to you?”

“A total mind-fuck.”

“Be more explicit?”

“Okay,” he said, his voice compressed. “How about this? I’m a vegetarian. Can’t stand the smell of raw meat. Makes me heave. One day, Otto brings home a dead deer, with head, antlers, hooves, and hair. The works. It had been shot and I reckoned its heart had only just stopped pumping. God knows where he got it. Under his instruction, he ordered me to butcher it in our kitchen. Do you know anything about disembowelling? The volume of blood. The stink. The crap. It took me hours to skin, gut, and carve it up. I was twelve years old. Apparently, he wanted to teach me to man up.”

Troy Martell’s mutilated carcass, raw and bleeding, flashed through my mind in vivid detail. Hair prickled on the back of my neck and up my arms. My throat constricted. I forced myself to speak.

“Did Otto subject Mimi to the same treatment?” I knew what Paris had told me, but I wanted to hear it from Nicholas.

“Mimi was safe.”

“But she wasn’t, was she?” Ditched in a dysfunctional family, she was anything but.

He frowned, not getting it.

“Why the hell didn’t you let her know you’d left of your own free will, that you were alive and well?” I was angry and it showed. “How much would that have cost you?”

“Everything.” He didn’t shout it. His voice was low and plangent, like the sound of a lonely wind wailing across an abandoned valley.

I ignored the insistent voice in my head that told me to leg it, mainly because I couldn’t move. Paralysed, in fact.

Resting the parcel down by his feet, he fumbled in his pocket. I braced, half expecting him to produce a knife. Instead he produced a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”

“Thanks.” I attempted to mask the tremor in my hand, the terror in my voice.

He took one too in his left hand, lit mine then his. I hadn’t smoked in God knew how many years, and inhaled deeply, letting the cool taste and rush flood my airways. A bit like riding a bike, you never forget.

“Mimi,” I said, exhaling, dragging him back to what mattered most.

“I was at her funeral.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“But I saw you.”

Too late to check my astonishment, he smiled at my surprised response. “You were sitting in that wooden shelter near the church,” he said. “I watched as Paris fell to the ground and saw my prick of an excuse for an adoptive father slope off with his tail between his legs. Brilliant. That’s when I split.”

“Mimi needed you when she was alive, not when she was dead.” I failed to mask my fury.

A zealous light briefly entered his eyes. Underneath the cool, composed exterior, there was a twitchy undertow. “It wasn’t possible.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Honestly,” he said, serious and sad. “It was for the best.”

I pretended to understand. We stood and smoked, my cover for thinking up my next play. There were two reasons Nick Vellender spared me the time of day: one was straightforward protection, the second more complex. So far, he’d managed to outsmart everyone but me, and that intrigued him. I was back to psychopaths again. According to Jim’s assessment, Nick Vellender ticked all the boxes.

“You’re obviously close to Paris.”

“She’s a good person,” he said. “A better mother than my birth mother, that’s for sure.”

“And Troy Martell?”

“He never figured.”

“You realise he’s dead?”

“Paris said. What’s he got to do with me?” Cool and self-possessed, Nick stroked one side of his moustache with an index finger. I pushed myself upright, turned, and looked him straight in the eye.

“What?” he said with a half smile. “You think I killed him?”

I’d no idea what I’d do if he grabbed me by the throat, slipped a blade into my gut or between my ribs, or confessed. Adrenalin shot through my veins in hot spurts. Flight seemed a better option than fight. I curbed another sudden instinct to beat it.

He snickered, amused. I didn’t find it funny. “Hey, I’m a pacifist, man. I don’t believe in killing people. Syria and all that terrorist jackass stuff is for morons. Fuck,” he chuckled, hugely amused by my preposterous idea.

“Then why the interest in Japanese death rituals?” I challenged, my face stony.