Chapter 58 Elin

58

Elin

Parque Nacional, Portugal, October 2021

Elin watches as Steed rubs a hand across his face before dragging his gaze up to meet hers.

‘Kier,' he starts, nodding. ‘Kier's my sister, my twin.'

The words sit there, loaded, in the space between them, and Elin senses that he expects her to do something with them, but she doesn't know what. ‘I know she is.' Her heart is drumming inside her chest. ‘I saw a photo of you with her, but I don't understand.'

‘She came to you, needing help, and I thought, I thought—' He breaks off, tears welling up again, at the back of his eyes.

Absorbing his words, Elin's hit by a sharp sting of realisation.

This is where their stories collide. Hers, Kier's.

That flicker of recognition she felt, it had roots. Roots in something concrete.

But in what? Replaying his words: She came to you, needing help , she racks her brains again, but still nothing comes .

‘Look,' she starts. ‘When Isaac showed me a photograph of Kier, I thought maybe I recognised her, but I don't remember how.'

‘You don't remember speaking to her?' Steed interrupts, searching her face.

Elin senses something desperate in his gaze that makes her want to say: Yes, I know her, and I get this, and I can explain, and we can fix whatever this is.

This was exactly what she feared when she'd looked at Kier's photograph, had that first stirring of recognition – that she'd done it again, that her mind had blocked something out. Missed something vital.

‘ No, I don't, I'm sorry.' Elin swallows, her mouth dry. ‘But we deal with so many people in the job, don't we? There's no way we're going to remember them all.'

Steed pulls out his phone, holds it up. A photo of Kier fills the screen. ‘Look. You used to run past her van near the beach, you used to talk to her.'

He keeps scrolling. Images flicker across the screen.

Kier. The van. More Kier.

Photographs Isaac had shown her before.

Elin stares, willing that flicker of recognition she'd felt to develop, but still, nothing comes. ‘No, I'm sorry, I can't place her, not properly.'

‘Her hair might have been different, she's always changing it, but her face is the same. Her smile.'

Elin takes the phone from his hands, aware she needs to close this down. How he's speaking – so fast – the odd look in his eye, she doesn't like it.

Scrolling through the images, she overlays them with his words: Van. Beach. A different haircut perhaps.

This time, as she focuses on Kier's face, the vague outline of a memory pulls clear.

Someone parked up near the beach, a dog …

Elin tries to follow the thought process through, but the memory disperses .

It isn't a surprise. She's dealt with all kinds of issues with vans over the years, campsite disturbances, problems with parking illegally near the beach.

How is she meant to remember this one person?

Steed's staring at her intently. A creeping sense of panic sets in.

‘Look, I need more detail so I can understand what exactly it is you're trying to ask.'

‘Kier thought someone was following her.' His voice is flat. ‘Watching her. It escalated. The van got broken into, she was frightened. She came to you, wanted to report it, for something to happen, but nothing did. You messaged, arranged to meet, but never showed. Kier kept trying to get hold of you, but you didn't get back to her.' He's speaking so fast now the words are running into one another. ‘And I kept thinking, you can't do that in our job, you can't make that kind of mistake. The stakes are so high, aren't they? You miss a callback, you're late to something, and it could be the difference between …' He tails off, breathless.

Elin picks over his words. Though she can't even grasp a thread of what he's saying, guilt, hot and rancid, sits at the back of her throat. She, more than anyone, knew what it was like to feel on the brink. That there's nowhere left to turn.

Steed's voice splinters. ‘I kept thinking, you know, about why she left, if it's because she didn't feel safe. And I tried to work out if she hadn't left, whether she'd have ended up here.'

‘When was this?'

‘July 2018.'

Elin falters, everything pulling into clarity with an abrupt, sickening focus.

‘But that … that was when everything started falling apart. The Hayler case, my mum … I was hanging on by a thread.' Not even a thread, she thinks, remembering the raw, awful pain of it. The desperation. Fear.

Looking back now, it's hard to fathom how far she'd sunk below the surface. She remembers numbness and tears. That strange, dragging feeling, as if someone had her by the ankles and was pulling her under.

Memories are hazy, and some aren't even there at all. Whole days, gone, just lying on the bed, not even looking for a way out because she didn't possess the ability to look.

Her world became distilled to only the immediate; the things around her. Coffee and crinkled bedsheets. Books.

All she can really remember in any detail is a sense of things unravelling faster than she could try to haul them back in. She tried to hold on, but sometimes it felt like she had the loosest grip on the world. Barely a fingertip.

Elin's voice fractures. ‘That time, I wasn't there for anyone. I'm sorry that I didn't get back to her, if I missed something.' She'd dropped the ball during that period, and many times. It's why she'd taken the career break. It's highly plausible that Kier had slipped through the net.

Pulling her gaze up to meet Steed's, she's taken aback as his expression shifts, his eyes softening. Heat, flaring in ragged patches up his neck.

‘I know,' he says finally. ‘What happened with Hayler. How it affected you. Once we started working together, I got it.' The heat is spreading now, reaching his cheeks. Livid, blotchy patches.

Working together. Something doesn't make sense.

Why hadn't he talked to her about Kier when he first started on the team?

He must have known the connection then.

‘Why didn't you tell me any of this before? We could have talked it through.'

Steed glances away, a pulse ticking in his jaw. ‘Because I,' he says finally, ‘I wanted you to know what it felt like' – his face crumples – ‘to have someone watching you, like they were watching her.'

Elin recoils, his words like a punch to the chest.

It was him. All this time.

The tweets. The troll.

It was Steed.