Chapter 60 Elin

60

Elin

Parque Nacional, Portugal, October 2021

Elin looks at Steed, dizzy, disorientated, the gravity of it all hitting her full in the chest, pulling the breath from her.

It was him.

The odd, insidious creepy messages that have tripped her up, made her question herself, came from him – someone she'd believed was a friend.

Neither of them speaks. He looks at her, blinking rapidly.

‘But you can't have,' she says finally, then stops, the sentence becoming garbled.

Steed's face is grey. ‘I did. I'm sorry. I kept telling myself that if you'd done your job properly, hadn't lied, saying you'd help her, then Kier wouldn't have come here, gone missing. There was talk, you know, about Hayler, how you went in without any backup. All the mistakes you made. I put that with this and it … spiralled.' He swallows. ‘I built this picture of you in my head. Someone out of control. Negligent.'

Elin squeezes her eyes shut, struggling to process what he's saying .

He thought Kier coming out here, going missing was her fault … because of her mistake in not getting back to Kier.

‘Now I can see it wasn't just that. My marriage had broken down off the back of Kier leaving. My whole world was crumbling, and I needed someone to blame. You became this' – he makes a noise in his throat – ‘person to pin everything on.'

Elin opens her eyes, still struggling to wrap her head around what he's saying. Blame. Marriage.

Breathing out, he keeps his eyes fixed on the floor. ‘I started, I suppose, to fixate on you.' His voice cracks. ‘The same thing happened after my parents died. I obsessed.'

Thoughts crowd her head, moving through her mind so fast she can't get a grip on them. It's as if he's walked into the van with a wrecking ball, everything that was safe and certain between them now smashed to pieces.

‘But we've been working together for months.' Elin can barely get out the words. ‘I don't get it. Surely you wouldn't want to work with someone …' But as she says the words, the realisation hits her. She recoils, stepping back, away, his face telling her all she needs to know. ‘Working together … that wasn't a coincidence, was it? You planned it.'

‘Elin, all I wanted was to get to know you, try to understand why you—'

‘Understand what? You don't inveigle your way onto someone's team to understand them. You were …' She's unable to say it aloud, thinking about the message he sent her in hospital, the implicit threat lacing those words. ‘You were planning to do something, weren't you? Get me back in some way for not helping Kier?'

‘I don't know.' He blinks.

More questions fill her head. ‘You changed your name.'

‘I had to.' He stutters. ‘I couldn't have the past hanging over me. Not with the job we do.'

‘And you meeting Isaac in Switzerland, after Laure died. Was that orchestrated ? '

A shock wave travels across Steed's face. ‘Look, I was just trying to find out more about you, work out if what I thought about you was true.'

His words don't make sense. Her head hurts from trying to understand it.

Find out more about her. Work out if what he thought about her was true.

‘That's a lie, isn't it? Like working with me, befriending Isaac. It was all part of some plan you had, wasn't it? Payback for what you thought I'd done to Kier. It has to be, because I'm struggling, really bloody struggling, to see why you'd go to all the trouble of getting to know Isaac, to work with me, simply to find out more about me .'

His eyes dart across her face. ‘One thing led to another—'

Elin cuts him off. ‘And what about dragging us out here, to the park? What exactly was the idea behind that ?'

Steed starts rubbing at an invisible spot on his hand. ‘I just wanted your help, to find Kier.' He's rubbing so hard now the skin around it is turning red. ‘I couldn't look into it on my own because the camp knows I'm Kier's brother. If I turned up again, asking more questions, I thought I wouldn't get anything out of them.'

‘So you thought of me,' Elin says dully. ‘Despite all the shit you had in your head about me, you wanted me to help.'

‘But these past few months, I've come to realise that everything I thought about you – it's not true. You're a brilliant detective, Elin, the only person I'd trust with finding Kier. Any other circumstance, I'd have just asked for your help, but I only found out a few months ago that I should seriously start looking for her here. I'd already told Isaac about Kier going missing by then. There was no way of knowing how much he'd told you about her already, if you'd make the connection. I knew once you did, you'd realise I was lying. Want nothing to do with me.'

‘But it's all come out here , the whole story. You knew it had to from the minute I saw you. All you were doing was delaying the inevitable.' Her voice is hot, tight. ‘Or did you think that pulling us out here and then dropping a bomb like that was somehow better ? We'd have no choice but to help you because we were already out here? Invested? '

Steed's face has drained of colour. ‘I don't know. I just hoped you'd understand, that if I explained, apologised, we could then work together in some way, to find her—' His voice splinters, a pleading note creeping in. ‘I just wanted it to be like it was, in the summer, you and me. We made a good team, didn't we?'

Work together.

Was that really what this was about, or did he have another motivation?

Had he planned to get her out here, in the middle of nowhere, to exert whatever kind of revenge he'd cooked up, and then got cold feet? And now he's expecting her to believe this half-baked apology? Manipulate her again so she'll forgive him, help him find Kier?

‘I'm sorry, Elin. So sorry.'

Elin doesn't reply, now dissecting the timeline, trying to understand how it works with what he's told her. ‘But one thing still isn't clear. The messages, the trolling, it carried on . All through the case, after you'd got to know me, when you said you realised what you thought about me wasn't true.'

‘I know.' He swallows. ‘I kept sending them, because as long as I could hold on to the idea that it was your fault, I could keep up the pretence that it wasn't mine.'

‘ Your fault?' Elin shakes her head, uncomprehending.

Steed nods, chest heaving. ‘It was my fault Kier left the UK, Elin. Not yours. She left because of me.'