My heart sank.
He seemed to be stuck on this. I was scared he was past reasoning with. Terrified we had no way out.
The police weren’t coming. Sam hadn’t called them. I was furious with him for lying to me; I was wounded, hurt. How could he not have trusted me? How could he not have got that this wasn’t all in my mind?
I knew my anxieties had been spiralling lately. I understood it was something I hadn’t got a handle on, despite Sam’s guidance and help and, yes, the meds I was on. What I hadn’t appreciated until now was quite how worried Sam must have been about me. I hadn’t realized things had got that bad.
Outside of these walls, the only person who had any understanding of our predicament was John, but John’s understanding was tangled and confused. He’d been upset and distressed enough to leave his living room when I was fighting with Donovan, but it was a huge stretch to think he might try to raise an alarm now that we’d left his home.
This is on you.
You have to think of something. Anything.
You have to dig yourself out of this pit.
‘Oliver Downing,’ Donovan said.
‘Who?’
He growled deep in his throat, shaking his head ominously, his whole demeanour suggesting he was seething inside.
‘Look, we obviously don’t know who that is,’ Sam told him.
‘DNA,’ Donovan replied.
‘Excuse me?’
He grimaced and adjusted his stance, taking a moment to contemplate the makeshift dressing he’d applied to his wound. I could tell he was concerned by the blood he was losing. I wondered if it would make his actions even more rash.
‘I took a sample of DNA,’ he said. ‘From Louise. That text I just got was a progress report from a lab I’m using. Shouldn’t be too much longer now before I get some preliminary results. A rush job, admittedly. Not something that would stand up in court. But it’s going to be enough to tell me the sample matches the DNA found at the scene.’
‘Scene?’ I asked.
He looked up at me. ‘The crime scene. On the balcony. Below the roof.’
His face was pinched, his voice tight. I could tell this all meant a great deal to him. I could see how invested he was.
I just didn’t know what it had to do with me.
‘Somebody fell?’ Sam asked him.
‘Oliver fell.’
‘And you think this has something to do with Lucy?’
‘With Louise. Yes, I do.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of what I do, Sam. Because of who I am. I’m an intelligence officer with the British Army. I just got back from a long posting overseas. I’m skilled in finding out information. Usually information other people don’t want me to find. Layman’s terms, I’m an investigator. A specialist one. And like any investigator, I follow clues. And on this occasion all the clues led me to one place. Here. To Louise.’
I glanced at Sam. He seemed to be as lost as I was.
An intelligence officer. Could that be true?
In my mind I cycled back through Donovan’s behaviour since he’d been in our home. I thought about his attitude. His bearing. There were times when he’d been violent, terrifyingly so, but hadn’t I also had the sense that he was holding himself in check, as if he was following some sort of inner rule book or code?
I wondered now if that could be because of military training. I supposed it could also explain how he’d been able to subdue and drug Bethany so swiftly, how he’d disarmed me when I’d come at him with the keys, the restraint hold he’d put Sam in, even the way he’d quizzed and pressured and probed me. But what could any of that have to do with us?
‘You have to listen to me,’ I said slowly. ‘If this man—’
‘Oliver.’
‘If he fell, that had nothing to do with me.’
‘Your DNA will show otherwise.’
I didn’t say anything to that.
I was beginning to think it was futile trying to reason with him. My attention would be better focused on other things.
Like the knife he’d taken from the drawer. It was on the countertop and his hand was resting lightly on it.
But he wasn’t holding it properly.
He seemed more preoccupied by the wound I’d inflicted. He’d clamped his other hand over it again and he was pulling a face and snorting air, cursing under his breath.
We were only three metres apart.
My feet were resting on the metal crossbar towards the bottom of the stool I was perched on.
I looked again at the knife and rocked my toes forwards, exerting some pressure onto the balls of my feet.
‘It was under his fingernails, by the way,’ Donovan said, closing his hand over the knife handle, sliding it off the countertop. ‘Only traces, but enough. That tells me he scratched his attacker. Hard. When she pushed him. Before he died.’
Something curled up inside me.
I felt a sudden tightening of the scar on my arm.
I knew he couldn’t see it. Not right now.
But he’d obviously seen it earlier when he’d rolled up the sleeve of my jumper and stuck a needle in me.
And from the way he was staring at me – through me, almost – I understood he was telling me exactly that.
‘He’s dead?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I had nothing to do with any of this,’ I told him.
‘If what you’re saying is true, the police would have investigated,’ Sam added.
‘Oh, you’re right, they did.’
‘So?’
‘So nothing. Oliver went up to the roof with a mystery woman. Witnesses confirm that. The police got a description but nobody knew who she was. It was a big party. Lots of people.’
A little of my certainty ebbed away.
A big party.
Lots of people.
Discomfort churned inside me. The scar on my arm seemed to shrink and contract.
I thought about the blanks in my memory. The gaps.
One day it will all come back to you.
But I didn’t remember a roof. All I remembered, and then only barely, was the music and the lights and the attack on me in the bathroom.
And your arm.
The scratch you can’t explain.
And then another thought. A sudden one.
‘What did he look like?’ I asked. ‘Oliver?’
Donovan considered my question. He took his time over it, resting the point of the knife on the countertop, twirling it from side to side. Then he hummed, picked up his phone and tapped it several times with his thumb. He scrolled for a moment, then tapped once again.
He turned it to show me the screen, the same way he’d turned it before when he was showing me the photo he’d taken of me upstairs.
Only this time the screen was speckled with blood and the image he was showing me was quite different.
I found myself staring at a photograph of a handsome young man in outdoor gear. His hair was windswept. His skin was flushed. He was smiling with a moorland scene behind him. I got the impression the photograph had been taken during a hike.
Seeing him increased the churning in my blood.
I didn’t recognize him. It wasn’t as simple or as concrete as that. But I felt something. A stirring. An intangible sense of a connection, somehow.
A pressure was building in my head, like the beginning of a migraine. A strange tingling across my skin.
And then a bright flash behind my eyes. Stinging. Blinding.
And . . . something.
‘What is it?’ Donovan asked. ‘What’s happening to you?’
I groaned. Pressed the heel of my hand against the side of my head.
I didn’t want to white-out again.
I couldn’t.
But I also sensed I was close to something.
‘Talk to me,’ Donovan said.
I bared my teeth and squinted at the photograph again.
The man featured in it – Oliver – looked tall and physically imposing. Like the blurred, dark figure who’d attacked me.
With the metallic rasping voice.
‘I’ve been watching you.’
Another painful flash.
And a flicker of darkness behind it.
In my mind’s eye I glimpsed a smudged and indistinct vision of a face, of movement, of someone crowding in on me.
Was it possible that Oliver had been the man who’d assaulted me in the bathroom?
‘Louise?’
I winced and massaged my temples.
I didn’t know if it was possible, but if it had been Oliver, then it could explain something else. Part of the reason the attack had been so frightening was because it had been apparently motiveless. But perhaps it had been inexplicable because the man who’d attacked me had been tragically unbalanced. Perhaps he’d lashed out because it had been the precursor to a more terminal crisis.
‘How do you know he was pushed?’ I asked.
He tensed. ‘You’re suggesting he jumped?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s where the police got to. Oliver had some issues. A history of clinical depression. They decided he could have got the blood under his fingernails another way.’
My way, I thought. With what happened to me in that bathroom.
‘So they stopped looking.’ His jaw stiffened as he put his phone away, still gauging me intently as I stopped rubbing my temples and lowered my hands. ‘Nobody’s been looking into this properly until I got back from my posting.’
He twirled the knife around some more, the blade grinding against granite.
‘But I know he didn’t jump. I know he was working through his problems. And he had a lot to live for. Everything a young guy could possibly want. He’d just moved into an apartment he shared with his sister. My sister, too, as it happens. That’s why I know he had to have been pushed. Because Oliver was my little brother.’