Michael Robotham - Suspect

Lifting myself onto my knees, I start crawling. Bobby has disappeared. Metal shavings dig into my hands. Broken concrete and rusting drums are like an obstacle course. As I reach the entrance I can see a fire engine beside the canal and the flashing lights of a police car. I try to shout but no sound emerges.

Something is wrong. I've stopped moving. I turn to see Bobby standing on my coat.

"Your fucking arrogance blows me away," he says, grasping my collar and lifting me to my feet. "You think I'd fall for your cereal-box psychology. I've seen more therapists, counselors and psychiatrists than you've had crappy birthday presents. I've been to Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, Rogerians-you name it-and I wouldn't give any of them the steam off my piss on a cold day."

He puts his face close to mine once more. "You don't know me. You think you're inside my head. Shit! You're not even close!" He places the blade under my ear. We're breathing the same air.

A flick of his wrist and my throat will open like a dropped melon. That's what he's going to do. I can feel the metal against my neck. He is going to end this now.

At that moment I picture Julianne looking at me across her pillow, with her hair mussed up from sleep. And I see Charlie in her pajamas smelling of shampoo and toothpaste. I wonder if it's possible to count the freckles on her nose. Wouldn't it be a terrible thing to die without trying?

Bobby's breath is warm on my neck-the blade is cold. His tongue comes out, wetting his lips. There is a moment of hesitation-I don't know why.

"I guess we both underestimated each other," I say, inching my hand inside my coat pocket. "I knew you wouldn't let me go. Your kind of vengeance isn't negotiable. You've invested too much in it. It's the reason you get up in the morning. That's why I had to get off that wall."

He wavers, trying to work out what he hasn't prepared for. My fingers close around the handle of the chisel.

"I have a disease, Bobby. Sometimes I have difficulty walking. My right hand is OK, but see how my left arm trembles." I hold up the limb that no longer feels as if it belongs to me. It draws his gaze like a birthmark on someone's face or a disfiguring burn.

With my right hand I drive the chisel through my coat into Bobby's abdomen. It strikes his pelvic bone and twists, puncturing the transverse colon. Three years at medical school are never wasted.

Still holding my collar, he falls to his knees. I swing around and hit him as hard as I can with my fist, aiming for his jaw. He puts his arm up, but I still manage to connect with the side of his head, throwing him backward. Everything has slowed down. Bobby tries to stand but I move forward a pace and catch him under the chin with a clumsy but effective kick that snaps his head back.

For a moment I stare at him, crumpled on the ground. Then, crablike, I scuttle across the courtyard. Once I get my legs moving, they still do the job. It might not be pretty, but I've never been Roger Bannister.

A police-dog handler is searching for a scent along the canal bank. He sees me coming and takes a step back. I keep going. It takes two of them to hold me. Even then I want to keep running.

Ruiz has me by the shoulders. "Where is he?" he yells. "Where's Bobby?"

My mother made the best milky tea. She would always put an extra scoop of tea leaves in the pot and another slurp of milk in my cup. I don't know where Ruiz managed to find such a brew, but it helps to wash the taste of blood and petrol from my mouth.

Sitting in the front seat of a squad car, I hold the cup with both hands in a vain attempt to stop them from trembling.

"You should really get that seen to," Ruiz says. My bottom lip is still bleeding. I touch it gingerly with my tongue.

Ruiz takes the cellophane off a packet of cigarettes and offers me one.

I shake my head. "I thought you'd given up cigarettes."

"I blame you. We chased that stolen bloody hire car for near on fifty miles. Found two fourteen-year-olds and a kid of eleven inside it. We also staked out the railway stations, airports, bus terminals… I had every officer in the northwest looking for you."

"Wait till you get my invoice."

He regards his cigarette with a mixture of affection and distaste. "Your confession was a nice touch. Very creative. I had the press hyenas sniffing everything except my ass-asking questions, talking to relatives, stirring up the silt. You gave me no choice."

"You found the red edge?"

"Yeah."

"What about the other names on the list?"

"We're still looking into them."

He leans against the open door, studying me thoughtfully. The glint of sunlight off the canal picks up the Tower of Pisa pin in his tie. His distant blue eyes have fixed on the ambulance parked a hundred feet away, framed against the factory wall.

The pain in my chest and throat is making me feel light-headed. I wince as I pull a rough gray blanket around my shoulders. Ruiz tells me how he spent all night checking the details from the child protection file. He ran the names through the computer and pulled up the unsolved deaths.

Bobby had worked in Hatchmere as a council gardener up until a few weeks before Rupert Erskine died. He and Catherine McBride attended the same group therapy sessions for self-mutilators at an outpatient clinic in West Kirkby in the mid-nineties.

"What about Sonia Button?" I ask.

"Nothing. He doesn't match the description of the pusher who sold her the drug."

"He worked at her swimming club."

"I'll check it out."

"How did he get Catherine to come to London?"

"She came for the job interview. You wrote her a letter."

"No I didn't."

"Bobby wrote it for you. He stole stationery from your office."

"How? When?"

Ruiz can see I'm struggling. "You mentioned the word Nevaspring sewn into Bobby's shirt. It's a French company that delivers water coolers to offices. We're checking the CCTV footage from the medical center."

"He made deliveries…"

"Walked right past security with a bottle over his shoulder."

"That explains how he managed to get into the building when he arrived so late for some of his appointments. He must have stolen the stationery and then written to Catherine, inviting her to apply for the secretarial job. What about the letter-the one that arrived at the house?"

"She wrote dozens of them to your friend Dr. Owen. Bobby must have come across one of them and changed the address."

Across the waste ground, visible above the broken fence, Bobby is lying on a stretcher. A paramedic holds a transfusion bottle above his head.

"Is he going to be OK?" I ask.

"You haven't saved the taxpayers the cost of a trial, if that's what you're asking."

"No."

"You're not feeling sorry for him, are you?"

I shake my head. Maybe one day-a long while from now-I'll look back at Bobby and see a damaged child who grew into a defective adult. Right now, after what he did to Elisa and the others, I'm happy to have half killed the bastard.

Ruiz watches as two detectives climb into the back of the ambulance and sit on either side of Bobby. "You told me that Catherine's killer was going to be older… more practiced."

"I thought he would be."

"And you said it was sexual."

"I said her pain aroused him, but the motive wasn't clear. Revenge was one of the possibilities. You know it's strange but even when I was sure it was Bobby, I still couldn't picture him being there, making her cut herself. It was too sophisticated a form of sadism. But then again, he infiltrated all those lives-my life. He was like a piece of scenery that nobody notices because we concentrate on the foreground."

"You saw him before anyone else did."

"I tripped over him in the dark."