S White - Hermit

‘The inevitable happened and I knocked some packets of something on to the floor. They landed with a dull kind of thud. Sugar or flour, or something like that. And he laughed. He actually laughed. My plight was funny. He found my distress funny. I shuddered again. And something in me switched. Old, familiar feelings; a fear I’d hidden away was resurfacing. I’d thought I was past it, but instead it started to cloud my judgement.

‘Now, I was going to use the torch. It was stupid to fumble around in the darkness. He knew I was here, knew where I was and where I needed to go. Suddenly, I wasn’t prepared to take it any more. I wasn’t going to have my life torn off me again, Detective. It wasn’t fair the first time, and it wouldn’t be fair now. I wanted to be left alone, and now I wouldn’t be. It would be like it was before; like the thing I’d run from; like the thing I couldn’t take.

‘I flicked on the torch and found a set of kitchen knives. I could open the packet with my gloves on; it wasn’t too fiddly. I tore open the packaging and got a knife in my grip. The middle one, naturally. I felt a bit more in control, then; proactive. Then, torch off.

‘I don’t know that I felt any braver, Detective, but I felt a little more decisive. Adrenaline, probably. I imagined that I could actually come out even from the encounter. He might back off if he knew I was waving this thing around. He might think me a danger, especially if I was behaving as wildly and desperately as I felt. He could, I hoped, step back and consider I wasn’t worth the hassle. Part of me knew that would never happen, but all the same. Sometimes, you hope, don’t you?

‘I didn’t think it was worth delaying. It would start getting light, and I felt this adrenaline might be the only advantage I had. I wasn’t going to win a fair fight, Detective, I already knew that. I never could. But I had the knife, and maybe he had nothing. Perhaps he thought he could swat me away, deal with me through fear and surprise. So I called out. Said I only wanted to get out through the window and I’d never come back. And I had a knife.

‘He chuckled. A low, back-of-the-throat chuckle. Like he’d seen something quirky at the end of the news – something like that. He wasn’t scared: I wasn’t intimidating him. Of course I wasn’t. In my heart of hearts, I already knew that. In fact, it probably made him come and get me.

‘Suddenly I could hear steps. Tentative at first, then stronger. I was fumbling for the torch – I thought I might blind him with the beam and be able to get past. I saw his silhouette flash past the window. It terrified me. I thought, this is it – this is my chance, now he’s moved. I knew roughly where the window was: I could make out the edges of the glass now. Dawn was coming.

‘I don’t know how he did it, Detective. How he knew where I was. If he did. Maybe he was as shocked as me. But we collided. I felt our chests hit. I felt a flicker of his hand, or his finger, brush my face. He was that close: he was in front. Now he knew where I was, I had no chance of escaping. It was over. Everything was over. Fifteen years, and my life was falling away again. All the life I built; it went to pieces in three seconds – the time it took for him to bump me, reach out for me. And for the knife to go in.

‘I had no idea, Detective. No real idea. I knew he was near and in front, but he might’ve backed off and been two metres away. I held the knife tight and shoved it into the darkness. Just wanted him to go away, or maybe get hurt enough to back off. I didn’t know I’d struck anything until I felt my knuckle against his clothing. Maybe the gloves… it’d gone in so clean, so fast, so sharp. I never would have believed it. The knife was jammed into him, and it went through like I was stabbing water.

‘He tipped towards me and we sort of tumbled over. I got him to the ground, on his back, I think. Something fell on the floor. So I groped around his chest, trying for the knife. He didn’t make a sound. Nothing… then there was a light on my face.’

Nathan stopped. Red-faced, sweating, his hands cupped, and shivering in the warmth of the room. He shook his head while Dana sat silently.

‘Why did he have to be there, Detective? Why did he have to be there?’

The room felt heavy; the air refused to budge. Dana tried to control her breathing, tried to think. What she asked now would be crucial at trial; she couldn’t afford to blow any holes in the case. She needed to ask questions that clarified, gave Nathan no way to back down from this confession.

And yet her internal radar was firing to wake the dead. Something in the back of her mind was screaming. She thought it might be her own imminent nervous collapse, chiming through at exactly the wrong moment. But no, it was worse than that. So much worse.

She thought back to what Nathan had said earlier in the interview: about his confession needing context. She’d taken it at face value – that she needed to know what sort of person he was, the privations that had shaped him, the way he’d built a life in solitude, his fear of return. All of that. All of that would shape her feelings about why he’d killed.

But perhaps she’d been wrong.

Something tiny, a seed of an idea, took root in the recesses of Dana’s mind. It began to move, slipping forward and then finding momentum. Faster, closer, gaining credence, accelerating: it gathered and pushed and then exploded into her consciousness. She frowned. It wasn’t, couldn’t be.

Yes .

Yes, it was .

Monstrous and grotesque but, quite suddenly, she was certain she was right. Never more certain in her life.

She’d been stupid. Colossally, unforgivably stupid. It was entirely her own fault. She’d stopped seeing Lou Cassavette. She’d committed the cardinal sin of ceasing to really see him. He was a victim and a human being, with all the complexities that implied. But instead of truly observing that, she’d turned him into data. He’d become instead the focal point on a whiteboard diagram; a name; a set of bank accounts and telephone records; a husband to a faithless wife; a failing businessman; someone who’d married up.

Lou Cassavette had saved her life this morning, by dying. This is how she’d repaid him.

In all that information, she’d forgotten – or never bothered – to take a really good look at Lou Cassavette. Her glance at the scene, lifting the sheet while the ‘twins’ held the stretcher, had been cursory. Unprofessional. Dumb.

In the darkness, in silhouette, in desperation, in the shadow of fifteen years of solitary brooding: Lou Cassavette would look exactly like Jeb Whittler.

Nathan believed he’d killed his brother. He still believed it now.

She hesitated, unsure how to approach it. The confession was fine – it was detailed, it was coherent; it tallied with all the forensics she’d seen and all the things they already knew. It would stand up. There was no doubting that Nathan had done it. Except, he didn’t quite know what he’d done. He thought it was fratricide.

‘What happened when the officers discovered you, Mr Whittler? Can you tell me in exact detail, please.’

Nathan looked perplexed. Presumably he was expecting follow-up about the killing, not its aftermath. Perhaps, she thought, he was wondering why she was being so pedantic about the actions of the officers.

‘Uh, their torchlight was in my face. Totally blinding, Detective, after all that darkness. All I could see was white, and green blotches. I fell back a little, away from his body. Their torches bobbed and I realised they were coming towards me. They grabbed my arms and dragged me on my backside around the corner to the next aisle. Then I was on my stomach and handcuffed behind my back.