Chapter 2
EDINBURGH, THREE YEARS LATER
Monday
‘Are you nervous?’ Ruth Campbell asked.
Liam Brodie looked down at her face and smiled. ‘You asked the same thing on this day exactly one year ago and the answer is still the same: I’d rip the bastard’s head off if I could.’
‘That’s a no, then.’ She smiled at him.
‘That’s a no.’
She pulled him closer and hugged him before gently pushing him away and brushing toast crumbs off his tie. ‘You should eat eggs for breakfast,’ she said to him. ‘No carbs.’
‘It’s much easier to toss a couple of slices of bread into the toaster.’
She smiled and shook her head.
‘Anyway, how are you dealing with all of this?’ he asked her.
She gave him the same look she had given him the last time he asked her.
‘I hate having to go and talk to him. I deal with people who have addictions, who are feeling grief taking over their lives and others who just need somebody to talk to, to help them get through life. I don’t need to be talking to somebody who killed women.
However, as a subject, he’s fascinating.
My boss told me we could learn about human behaviour from Kane, so that’s why I go. ’
He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘My boss wouldn’t have asked if he knew you couldn’t handle it.’
‘I know, Liam. Gabriel Kane is such a bastard, and I have to let him think he’s gaining the upper hand.’
He dropped his hands. ‘I told you before, if you want out, then just say the word and I’ll tell Cross to shove it.’
She nodded.
Detective Superintendent Rob Cross had spoken with Ruth three years ago, when Kane had said he would talk only to her. Quid pro quo: if they ever wanted to get some of Kane’s victims back.
Meeting after meeting took place, bouncing ideas back and forth, and the chief constable herself had stepped in and told Cross to make it happen.
Brodie picked up his coffee from the kitchen countertop and finished what was left.
‘I have to go and brush my teeth,’ he said. He went through to the bathroom and took his brush from the glass on the sink. Ruth had slowly started leaving more and more of her things here over the past three years: the transition between staying overnight and moving in with him.
He started brushing his teeth and looked at the grey hairs starting to appear in his hair. Stress, Ruth had said. He had scoffed at that, telling her that thick hair ran in his family, and he would rather have that than go bald early.
It was three years to the day since Dr Gabriel Kane had stabbed him. ‘I was trying to kill you, Liam,’ he had said later on. ‘Nothing personal. I just wanted to escape. And if it wasn’t for the help of your DI, I would have achieved it.’
The man had locked eyes with him when he had spoken the words, a smile playing on his lips, but the depth of the evil in his eyes seemed to go on forever.
Kane’s stature wasn’t what Brodie would have called big, but what he didn’t have in size, he more than made up for in cunning and tenacity.
That first time Brodie had spoken to him in the psychiatric hospital had been the first time since that night in the book depository.
He had wanted to tell Kane, to shout in his face with only inches between them, ‘If I hadn’t moved the way I did, I would have died.
You fucking missed! And now I’m still here, breathing God’s fresh air, and you’re in a cage, going to spend the rest of your life in it. ’
He had kept quiet instead. And, of course, the cage was a room with a table in it. Screwed to the floor. A bed was in one corner of the room, and a table and chair near it, also screwed to the floor.
Three years later and Kane was in a room that would have put some hotels to shame. He had worked his way up the earning ladder, as it were.
He had revealed two more bodies. Helpless victims. Women he had overpowered and strangled before burying them. Revealing the first victim’s location on the first anniversary of the attack. The next one on the second anniversary. The reveal planned months in advance, but not the destination.
Kane had said he would give them back to the family in return for some special considerations, carefully negotiated by the chief executive of the hospital.
That’s when Brodie had met Ruth for the first time, just after Kane had first been incarcerated. She had been called in to talk with Kane. As a forensic psychiatrist, it had been her job to talk with Kane long before he would be taken out so he could show where the body was hidden.
That was when Brodie had started working with her, although it was DI Lucy Warren who had initially spoken with Kane. Then Kane had demanded that Brodie be brought on board or the whole thing would be called off.
The bigwigs had almost pissed themselves, the chief herself saying – and Brodie remembered her face when she had said it in front of him – ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers.’
Then the minister for justice had got involved and suddenly Brodie was a pawn in Kane’s little game.
He had got to know Ruth Campbell better, little by little, first over a coffee in a café on Morningside Road, poring over notes, sharing opinions, Lucy Warren with them at first, but then she had seen what was happening between her boss and the psychiatrist.
‘I’ll leave you two alone,’ she had said one evening, smiling as she got up from the table and leaving. But before she did, a look passed between her and Ruth. A look that said she didn’t want to be a third wheel.
‘You don’t have to go,’ Brodie said. ‘I’ll give you a lift home.’
‘I have my own car, remember? Thanks anyway, boss.’
Ruth had carried on, poring over the notes as though nothing had happened. Then she had invited him along to her flat, for a coffee that tasted better than this place. And it was free.
‘I hate the way Kane thinks he’s getting one over on us,’ Brodie said now.
‘He has to think that way, remember? If he doesn’t then he might not reveal the location of the next victim.’
‘He’ll do it just to have his little day out into the country.’
Brodie’s phone rang.
‘Hello?’ He listened for a moment. ‘Can’t you put her off?’
Ruth didn’t hear the other side of the conversation.
‘Right. Tell her no direct contact with Kane. I mean it. Reiterate it, or it will be the last time.’ He nodded a few times. ‘Okay, Lucy, thanks.’ He cut the call and put his phone back in his pocket. ‘That was Lucy, if you hadn’t guessed already.’
‘I didn’t have to guess; you said her name out loud and I don’t have hearing problems.’ She smiled at him.
‘That… woman from the cable TV news station who writes to Kane asked him if she could tag along today, and now he not only agreed, but made it a condition.’
‘We’ve done so well to keep the press at bay, but it was bound to happen one day.’
‘I told you, he’s getting some power back and he’s manipulating us.’
Ruth shook her head. ‘He’s not. I spoke to the reporter. Her name’s Catherine Wheeler. I agreed to talk to her.’
‘What? Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘It was the clinical director’s idea. Kane brought up Catherine’s name, and Director Lake thought it over and asked me to liaise with Catherine, just to feel her out, as it were.’
‘Have you seen this woman on TV?’ he asked. ‘She’s all smiles and false teeth but she’s like a shark.’
‘She’s not, she’s very nice.’
‘Just don’t go swimming with her.’ He looked out of his living room window.
His flat was down at Western Harbour in Newhaven, one of the blocks of new flats.
His place looked out over the water, across the Firth of Forth to Fife.
He mentally pictured where his stepson would be, geographically, and thought about how he was doing in Kelty.
Eric was twenty-seven now, and had multiple sclerosis. He had first come into Brodie’s life when he was a toddler, as Brodie started dating his mother, and he had become his stepson the day he married Fiona, and their bond had grown over the years, so much so that he regarded Eric as his son.
Now Eric was living with Chrissie in Kelty, near his grandmother, Fiona’s mother. The old woman was getting on now, and was happy to see her grandson every day.
‘I’ll give Eric a call later,’ he said out loud, more to himself than to Ruth.
‘He’ll like that,’ she said, picking up her own coffee mug and taking it through to the kitchen.
‘I like it here,’ she said, coming back into the room.
Brodie was still standing looking out over the sea, watching as a plane came in for its final approach to Edinburgh Airport, gliding in over the Forth, lining up with the runway.
‘We should get away for a wee while,’ he said as she put her arm around his waist.
‘I’d like that. A little bit of sun and getting burnt in places that don’t normally see the light of day.’
‘I’m only wearing swim shorts,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to be flaunting my boyish good looks on a foreign beach.’
‘True. We wouldn’t want there to be an international crisis.’
‘I knew you’d understand.’ He touched the small scar that ran along his chin where a knife had caressed his jaw.
A souvenir he always carried with him, a reminder of the first time a psycho with a blade had tried to kill him.
When it was still raw, it had made him feel self-conscious, but his late wife, Fiona, always told him it never made a difference to her.
Ruth laughed and he kissed her on top of her head and she let him go.
‘Come on, let’s get up to the hospital,’ she said.
He looked at his watch. ‘There’s plenty of time. Let’s go and get a free roll first.’