S White - Hermit

‘May I ask you about your early life, Mr Whittler?’

He scratched at his bites again, but absent-mindedly, as though he did this so often it was subconscious. She took his silence as not quite assent, not quite dissent: she edged across the highwire in between.

‘You were born near here?’

He looked up towards the ceiling momentarily; the information appeared to be a reach, and she wondered why. Again, she thought of Bill and his view that Nathan would be hard to catch in a lie. But this information could be – was being – checked.

‘Yes, in Earlville. Or rather, in the ambulance on the way to Earlville. So I’m told.’ This last was added as if the source were unreliable and he couldn’t be held responsible for it. She took it as an indication that he didn’t want to spill anything that was untrue.

‘Are your family still in the area?’

‘I don’t know. They were.’

Dana stared evenly at him.

‘I’m sorry, Detective Russo. I didn’t mean to sound short. I simply don’t know if they’re still there. They were the last time I looked. But that, as I’m sure you’ll discover, was a while ago.’

Something thrummed in Dana’s blood: her sixth sense that she was close to something that mattered. ‘How long ago would you classify as “a while”?’

Nathan looked at his fingers; it made her look at them, too. Elegant, long, neat; they lacked callouses or any other signs of heavy manual work. If Dana had seen a photo of them, she would have assumed he was an office worker – it fitted with his pale skin. He looked the indoors type.

‘It’s 2019 now, isn’t it?’ he asked. Dana nodded in reply; he would have seen only the edge of her shadow moving. He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, then, the last I heard from my family was fifteen years ago. Yes, fifteen.’ He tilted his head to one side, as if history could slosh into it.

Dana was finding her way towards something here, but it was groping rather than striding.

‘So you lost contact in 2004, is that correct?’

‘That autumn, yes. We had a farm, about halfway between Carlton and Earlville. I was living with my parents, Martin and Pamela, and my brother. Jeb.’

His voice quivered towards the end. He flicked a look at the mirror. Perhaps, thought Dana, he’s shut them out of his mind for so long, and now they’re creeping back. Maybe he knows exactly what information he’s giving out and what the consequences are. He’d know he’ll be traced through that, and surely they’d have a fix on who he is and where he’s been in the last fifteen years. She wondered why he was so confident in giving the information: it jarred with his reticence and seemingly acute need for privacy.

‘Would you like us to contact any of your family?’

Nathan puffed his cheeks and sat back. His skin flushed and she saw his neck muscles tighten. He took thirty seconds to recover his poise. She saw how much he’d been rattled. Dana let the moment stretch. She had the feeling that any silence from Nathan was not a signal that nothing was happening. It resonated for him in a different way: it was a period of noiseless reflection, not an absence of thought.

After a minute or so, he replied. ‘No… no, I don’t think so, thank you, Detective. I can’t imagine they’ll want to… no doubt they’ll find out that I’m here, but I don’t think I need to waste anyone’s time actively telling them so. I’m sure you’re very busy.’

Each sentence rolled off the last; by his previous standards, it felt very deliberate – almost tactical. Dana often interviewed people who had family problems, but it rarely slid through her own skin. Nathan’s flustered reaction somehow seemed to chime with what she might say, given the same quandary.

‘So, fifteen years ago you lost contact with your family. Was there some kind of falling-out?’

Again there was a stiffening, one he tried to hide by coughing unnecessarily. She mentally closed off a box in her strategy and knew to keep away from the subject – pushing it again at this stage would, she felt, prompt only resistance or shutdown.

‘Not really a falling-out, no. I mean, not one incident. It was me that left the family home. Families don’t always work out, do they, Detective?’

She wrote slowly, unsure if Nathan was merely fishing randomly or if he’d seen in her features something he recognised – some form of alignment. The direction of the conversation was beginning to bother her, starting to veer off on to swampy ground.

Nathan scratched at his palm, where the blood had pooled before. Seeming to believe that some was still there, he ran a fingernail along his fate line and studied it, looking for detritus.

‘No, not always. When we bumped into you, Mr Whittler, you were in Jensen’s Store, on the Old Derby Road. Had you been there before for any reason?’

Nathan shifted his weight, leaning forward slightly and resting his elbows on his knees. Now his face was level with the edge of the table, though his focus remained on his bloodless palm.

‘Yes, every now and then. For supplies, you know. They have a lot of useful things in that store.’

Dana noticed that he had slipped into adding irrelevant details; almost as if he thought this was what a conversation would sound like. She sensed that if she waited…

The silence unravelled and stretched.

One minute became two. Became three.

Inside her head was a roaring rush, a desperation to start asking further questions. Dana made herself be still. She looked evenly at the top of his head, focusing on her breathing and the widow’s peak in his hair. His shoulders rose and fell: she noted the moment at which a slight judder infected the movement. The shudder became stronger, until he leaned back with tear-rimmed eyes. Still he wouldn’t look at her; his vision slid to the wall with the mirror and appeared distraught at what it found. She could see tears sliding down his cheeks, snot appearing at one nostril. His voice trembled when he finally gave way.

‘I’ve… done terrible things, Detective. I’m so ashamed. So… ashamed. I knew it wasn’t right, but I kept going, I kept on… terrible. I had no right, no right at all.’

He ran a forearm across his mouth and forced himself to gaze blearily at her shadow. ‘At the store… is he…?’

‘He’s dead, Mr Whittler. He’s dead.’

Dana took a deep breath when she closed the door on Nathan. It had taken five minutes for the silent crying to stop. He now had a sandwich, some tissues and a paperback she’d commandeered for him. They both wanted a break, but he didn’t wish to go back to his cell. Bill was eager for feedback but realised she needed a moment.

She felt in her pocket for a second, shook her head and took a deep breath.

‘Told you so,’ Bill called to her as he approached. ‘That’s why you’ve got this and Mike hasn’t: Whittler’s a nightmare to open up. Could take days, and we only have a few hours.’

She nodded, exhausted already. Some of it was holding the Day at bay, but much of it was Nathan Whittler. He required total concentration; she believed the devil would be in the detail: where his fingers were touching, a quiver in his voice on a key word, what went unsaid.

The corridor had a series of skylights – illumination without compromising security – and they walked through cylinders of muted daylight. The main custody suite was quiet now: two overnight drunks and a burglary suspect had been kicked out after an early breakfast. Simpson, the custody officer, smiled at Dana as she passed. He liked her – she never asked him to bend the rules, was scrupulous about paperwork and gave him plenty of notice when she wanted to speak to a prisoner. He worked eleven-hour shifts without daylight: anyone who played the game properly was okay in his book.