But there’s a problem.

It’s just him.

Alone.

No one else.

Just Nathan and Michał. One killer, one victim.

I try to move, but I’m frozen to the spot. There’s something holding me back. Like someone’s wrapped their arms over my shoulders and is keeping me there, like the time Dad bear-hugged me to stop me from chasing after Dawid in the garden. Even though I was smaller than him, only by a few inches, I was still prepared to give it to him as good as he gave it.

Just like now.

I’m fired up. I need to know what’s happened to Michał. I need to know why he’s not moving.

Eventually, after ten, twenty seconds, I feel the restraints begin to release, their grip loosen. And I step forward. I move closer.

One step becomes two.

Two becomes three.

And before I know it, I’m running, sprinting, charging towards Nathan Burrows. As soon as the little fucker sees me coming, he turns and sprints away. But this time I give chase. I follow him to the back of the playground, through a small, bush-lined alleyway. Brick and rubble from the construction work that’s been going on nearby litters the ground. Canopies of brambles and vines dangle from above. The sound of his footsteps followed closely by mine echo down the path. At the end is a soft, dull, pathetic sodium glow. Otherwise, we’re covered in darkness, relying on the abilities of our eyes to see through it all, to make out the fuzziness and shapes.

But Nathan’s quicker than me. He’s pulling ahead. I have no chance. Five, six years he’s got on me.

At the end of the alleyway, he makes a left turn. Before I get to it, I trip, my foot snagging on an upturned slab or piece of stone, my body going arse over tit, destroying my lunchbox and water bottle in the process. But I don’t care about any of that. I need to follow him. I need to chase him.

After I haul myself to my feet, I stumble to the end of the alleyway, feeling pain swell in my knee and hands. It’s nothing compared to the pain Michał felt, I tell myself. But by the time I get to the street lamp, Nathan Burrows has gone, disappeared, vanished into the half-light of the street.

It doesn’t take me long to think of Michał, so I turn and head back towards him. For a moment, I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d stayed where I was. I wish I hadn’t even left school.

I wish I hadn’t been late in the first place.

He’s lying there on the ground, coat off, shoes discarded, trousers down by his knees, bag thrown to one side, its contents upturned and littered about the tarmac. My eyes move from the top of his body, down. Large chunks of his skull are missing, and his thick blond hair has become matted with the colour crimson, the white chunks of his exposed brain and bone matter glistening damply in the low light. His eyes – his fucking eyes – have been bashed in with bricks and battery acid poured into them. The evidence of it is sitting on his face and in the crease of his chin. Two of them, dented from where they’d been split open by a rock or a brick.

The top half of his body has been left alone. It isn’t until I get to his lower half that I want to be sick. His penis – something I’ve never seen before, except for when we used to share baths together as toddlers – has been hacked at, maimed with a knife. Blood continues to trickle from it as though it’s the last piece of him that’s alive.

Tears begin to well in my eyes as I look down at my dead brother, the images of his body slowly becoming ingrained in my mind, open to thirty years of torment and interpretation. I want to look away. I know I should, but I can’t. Something, like my father’s arms around me in the garden, compels me to stay, to look. To soak in the debt I owe him. To absorb the nightmares and guilt I know will haunt me for the rest of my life.

I was too late.

I could have saved him.

I should have saved him.

CHAPTER FIVE

Tomek pulled the covers off his body and swung his legs out the side of the bed. On the bedside table next to his head was his phone, plugged in and charging. He prodded it with his finger, saw that it was a little before four am, and unplugged it. Sleepily, yawning and scratching his armpit, he headed towards his wardrobe on the other side of the room. Abigail was fast asleep, the gentle sounds of her breathing (you could never call it snoring, never; she refused to believe she did it and had done all her life) expelled through her nostrils. She looked so peaceful when she slept, but he knew she could wake up at any moment. She was one of the lightest sleepers he knew. Subtle movements were important.

Planting both feet firmly on the carpet, in the spaces that didn’t contain any creaking floorboards, Tomek pinched the handle with his fingers and gently caressed it open. Now and then – at twenty degrees, forty, eighty – the hinges screamed at him. Each time, he glanced back at Abigail, but she remained asleep, undisturbed by the sounds. The IKEA wardrobe was a mess: at least a dozen pairs of shoes chucked in the bottom playing their own game of Jenga; pants and socks messily crammed into a small cubbyhole; too many hangers and clothes for the rail that ran across the top. But what he was looking for was in the top cubbyhole, shoved in firmly at the back. He’d put it there for safekeeping. Out of Abigail’s and Kasia’s prying eyes. He fished inside the hole and removed the item. Then he took it into the living room, being careful not to crash on any of the floorboards. At the dining room table, he pulled out a chair and sat, placing the item on the surface.

It was a thin envelope: a letter from HMP Wakefield, a letter from Nathan Burrows. It had come that morning, during his day off, while Kasia was at school. He’d held it for ten minutes, staring at it, deciding whether to open it, the words of the first letter he’d received playing in his mind. In the end, he’d left it. It wasn’t worth ruining Abigail’s big evening. He hadn’t wanted to be distracted. But after the nightmare he’d just had…

He was sure there was a connection: the second killer, the one who’d been locked inside Tomek’s brain since that afternoon thirty years ago, had been missing from his nightmare. Just as Nathan had said it would.

There was nobody else there, Tomek. I killed him all on my own. You’ve been imagining it this entire time.

Tomek inhaled deeply before turning the letter over and opening it with his thumb. As soon as it was out of the envelope, he held his breath and wasted no time in reading it:

Deerest Tomek,

Please axcept my apologees for the delay. I have been bizzy here in Wakefield. They have opened up a new bizness learning development corse and I have gone to a few of them to try to learn about bizness. But I’ve been struggling with the reading materials. I’m slowly learning, and I hope you can foregive me. Please be patient. I have my cell mate who helps, but sometimes he is just as bad.

Anyway, how are you? How is Kasia? How is Abigail? I saw in the news about her promotion. Please tell her I said congratulations. I bet she is very pleased and proud. You should be as well.

Last time, I meant to ask how your parents are doing? How have they been keeping? If they would like to come visit me, they are more than welcome. I’m not going anywhere! Perhaps you could all make a nice family day out of it. Don’t forget to invite Dawid along as well. Did Dawid ever tell you that he came to visit me once? It was many years ago now. We talked, we discussed. There were things he wanted to know, and so I told him. Don’t worry, I told him the same as I told you. That I’m sorry to say I killed Michał alone. There was no one else with me. Sometimes I think it would be better if there was, you know? So I could share some of the guilt I feel for what I did to your brother with them, but I will never have that luxury. I am sorry that you thought this for so long. It must have been so painful for you all this time. I want to make it up with you. That is why I wanted to open the dialog. Please reply. I do hope that you can find the time. I know you are a bizzy man but it would be nice to speak with you again. If you ever would like to talk over the phone, as it can be much much easier, I have just got a new number – don’t tell the guards! Ha ha! I have put it on the back of this letter for you. Please do not lose it. I miss your voice and would like to hear it again.

Thinking of you.

NB

Beneath Nathan’s initials was a signature, and sure enough, on the reverse was a mobile number. Eleven digits, written in the neatest possible handwriting so there could be no confusion, no possibility that Tomek entered the wrong number in his phone.

Cunt.

Cuntcuntcuntcuntcunt.

So many thoughts, so many emotions rattling inside his head. He suddenly felt sick, a deep knot tightening in his stomach (and it wasn’t the food). Then the sensation passed almost as quickly as it had started, and he was greeted by an old friend: rage. The same emotion he’d had when he’d read the first letter. He’d wanted to leap into the document and strangle Nathan as he wrote it. He’d wanted to tear his eyeballs out and shove battery acid in them. He wanted to get retribution for the atrocious things he’d done to his brother.

That reminded him.

The other one.

Dawid.

That little fucker, visiting Nathan without telling anyone. What had they discussed? What had Dawid asked Nathan? And why had he kept it from them for all these years? Had he expected nobody would ever find out?

Tomek had the sudden urge to pick up the phone and ask him, to find out the answers to those questions and more. But it was too early, still dark outside. It would have to wait, a conversation for another day.

He looked at the letter again, reading it through once more. He was concerned by three things: one) Dawid’s secret meeting with Nathan Burrows, two) how Nathan had known about Abigail’s promotion when the news had only broken the week before, and three) that he was starting to believe Nathan. He was seriously considering the possibility that there hadn’t been another killer, that he had imagined it that afternoon and in the thirty years since.

He closed his eyes and cast his mind back to the nightmare he’d just had; it had been so vivid, so visceral. It had been one of the clearest nightmares he could ever recall. And yet, had any of it been true? How much had been fact, how much a fiction created by his brain and subconscious? All this time he’d pictured a second killer there. But perhaps there was a reason why he’d never been able to see the face clearly. Perhaps there was a reason the police had never found a second killer or any evidence suggesting someone else had been present. What if Tomek’s fractured and fragile mind had conjured him up, a literal figment of his imagination, an innocuous and generic shape his brain had warped and manipulated into a figure? It was a question he’d wrestled with countless times over the years, and now his latest, his clearest nightmare to date, was pulling him in the other direction. Away from his identity.

And the name, Charlie, the name he’d heard during a nightmare once that had sparked renewed hope – what if that was wrong as well? More recently, that was a question he’d tried to grapple with, one that he had a little less faith in, only because it was the same name as someone who’d been involved in a murder investigation at the time, and he had convinced himself that it had been his subconscious calling out to him. Why, after thirty years, would a name come to him all of a sudden? It didn’t make sense. He knew the brain worked in mysterious ways, but they weren’t that mysterious. There was usually something behind what went on.

He was beginning to think that none of it had been real at all.

As he was about to tear the piece of paper in half, he heard a sound; the living room door creaking open, followed by the sounds of nails scratching on wood. Tomek swivelled on his feet so fast he felt his spine buckle under the pressure.