Chapter 21

21

Kath's bookshop on Brick Lane is easy enough to spot with its bright green paintwork and white mullioned windows.

Books—the original handheld device! is chalked in jaunty pink-and-yellow bubble writing on the blackboard outside. Priya had forbidden me to make contact but it was too late now; I needed to talk to her. It was surprisingly easy. I emailed her via the shop website on the pretext of asking her to verify certain dates from Nate's memoir, and she replied almost immediately.

Anna, at last someone has got in touch with me. I've read bits and pieces and I'm extremely concerned, so much so I'm consulting my lawyers. I tried to contact Nate and Priya, but no response. Really useful if we could meet at the shop later today. Kath

If Nate and Priya weren't in contact, how had she managed to see some of the material in the book? I think of Nate's study, his printer, various edited chapters lying around on his desk—

Jade.

Of course, who else would have such easy access? She's been a source of intelligence for her mother all this time. I hesitate for a moment, distracted by the pretty window display of recent baking books, carefully arranged around a vintage cake stand scattered with silver almonds. The work of a frustrated set designer, perhaps.

I remember Nate telling me that Kath had shared the same creative flair as her younger sister, but she liked to claim there was room for only one artistic ego in the family. Eva made up for the two of them, she said. At university she studied classics rather than fine art, spending a year in Greece where she met Jade's father, Michel, a lawyer from Athens. After Kath's and Eva's mother died, Kath used her share of the inheritance to buy an old betting shop, transforming it into Emerald Books, the name above the paneled door in swirling gold italics.

I finally step inside, wandering from one table to another until I spot her, perched on a small book ladder. Kath reaches to the top shelf in a balletic posture. I can see the shadow of Eva in her profile; the delicate curve of her cheekbones, the straight-edged nose and heart-shaped chin. There the similarity ends. Images from my lost hours in Eva's wardrobe flash back to me, the giddy extravagance of all those outfits. Where Eva was exceptional, Kath is more conventional in her Breton top, ballet flats and white jeans.

I head for Biography while she finishes chatting to a customer, study the rows of bestselling memoirs from Michelle Obama to Elton John, Tara Westover to Deborah Orr. As I take down Henry Marsh's Do No Harm , a voice behind me breaks the silence. A voice that sounds eerily familiar to her younger sister's.

"Aiming high. I'm not sure Henry Marsh needed a ghostwriter either. He could manage pretty well on his own."

I twist around and meet Kath's stare, clear and shrewd and searching. Before I can think of a suitable reply she extends her hand, as cool and dry as parchment.

"Anna? I recognize you from your byline pic," she says, half smiling. I follow her to the back of the shop where there is a cluster of tables, the smell of roasting coffee and fresh pastries. She brings over two mugs and sits down opposite me.

"Thank you for coming this morning. I appreciate you seeing me at such short notice. None of this is easy, especially since Nate and Priya seem so unwilling to talk to me."

"I understand you hadn't been offered a chance to read it, but I'm sure once the draft is finished you can—"

Her sleek eyebrows ruffle, her eyes a hard arctic blue. "I'm her sister, and no one has even asked my opinion about it or offered to involve me at any level."

I hold her gaze for a moment as we assess one another. I guess she is closer to fifty than forty. Her complexion is line-free, her skin glowing from a recent trip that Jade told me about, visiting relatives outside Athens. I imagine a strict regime of Pilates and raw vegetables, elemental coastal walks and restorative spa breaks on Aegean Islands.

It dawns on me that perhaps Eva's death is the first time wealth and privilege has failed to protect Kath. I had read in the news about her quiet, articulate anger when she told reporters the police had been neglectful in their duty, that she wouldn't rest until a second inquest was opened.

"I'm sorry to hear that. But you say you have read bits of it?"

"It became obvious to me I wasn't going to get a chance to see the book until it was too late, so I asked Jade to intervene. What?" she asks, catching my anxious expression.

"Nothing. It's just, well, maybe there was an easier way for you to read it. I'm sure Nate would have let you—"

"Really? I very much doubt it. You two have been locked away, according to Jade, in your bunker creating this thing that has no bearing on Eva's life. None of what I've read is true to who she really was or, I believe, to what really happened between them. You made her up. There's nothing of the sister I knew in there at all."

"My job was to write down Nate's memories of her and that's all I've done. I haven't made anything up," I say steadily, catching her eye, hoping I'm not betraying the guilt I feel inside. Although maybe it's a case of touché—Eva recorded, unwittingly, a version of my life in her journal, now I'm fashioning a version of hers. "Believe me," I add, "I want to get to the truth of Eva too."

"I can see you're in a difficult situation and none of this is really your fault. I understand that. You've been drawn in by Nate, manipulated even."

"I don't think that's—"

"You really don't know who you're dealing with, Anna. You have no idea what he's capable of, how persuasive he can be." She shakes her head. "But I need him and Priya to know that I will take legal advice over this. I don't want it going ahead, if what I've read already is anything like the rest of the book."

I inhale sharply. "Look, I'm sorry you're so upset by it but maybe you've taken it out of context. Reading the odd chapter here and there can be misleading."

She gives a small dismissive laugh, makes a vague gesture with her hand. "I doubt that. I got a pretty good impression of how you're painting her. As some fucked-up hedonist, a beautiful victim defined by a powerful man. I mean, couldn't you or he be a little more original at least? If you are going to do a memoir, surely it should have some integrity? You can tell Nate from me, Eva would have been furious."

She steeples her hands on the table in an effort to regain her composure, a large opal stone glitters on her wedding finger.

"Look, I know how crucial it is to get this right for Eva," I say. "If I talk to Priya, there may be stuff I can add in. I'd need to run it by Nate obviously."

"Obviously," she says and I ignore her pointed look.

"What sort of stuff would you want included?"

"I have plenty of anecdotes, if anyone had bothered to ask. I know my sister wouldn't have wanted a sanitized version of herself in print. Anna, I can help you make it truer to Eva, give you a bit more background, convince you that what I'm saying is true. Especially if your subject seems so...hard to fathom?"

"Why do you say that?"

She sighs. "Obviously, Nate has a lot to hide. He has kept secrets and built a wall around them. I can see it on your face, you know this too, deep down. But you're trying to convince yourself otherwise, that he's a good guy worth believing in."

She looks at me kindly and I can't help recoiling. In her eyes I am a naive fool to be pitied, another female acolyte.

"You know, when I first met Nate, I was so hopeful," she says. "So relieved for Eva's sake. At last, someone who truly understood her! He genuinely wanted to help her and his diagnosis was huge for us. Looking back, it was obvious something was seriously wrong but we didn't know what help or resources to seek. Nate helped us understand why Eva was different, how to support her. At first all he cared about was her, until his career really took off. Somehow everything changed, something was lost."

"In what way?"

"The whole race to find a cure for pain, he got swallowed up by it, obsessed with his ambitions."

"Wanting to help rid the world of pain is hardly such a selfish ambition, is it?"

"Without Eva there would have been no more research. No profile. No recognition. She gave all that to him. But he took so much from her. She felt used, at times." She shakes her head quickly, her eyes shining. "I can't help thinking he's created a lot more pain than he claimed to cure. Now he's taking from her again, profiting with this memoir."

I shift uneasily. "That's not the whole story. It can't be. He genuinely wants everyone to benefit from his work, it's his vocation."

"Come on, Anna. What was the real reason you came to see me?" Her gaze is expectant, unblinking.

"I wanted more background, I guess..."

"Sure you did."

"Nate told me Eva was having an affair," I blurted, waiting to see how it lands. She doesn't seem to register any surprise. Did Eva confide in her? "Obviously we're not putting any of it in the book but...did you know?"

She presses her lips closed in a slim firm line, as if she's torn between speaking or keeping her counsel. She finally lets out a small sigh. "Yes, that's what she had alluded to with me too."

I can hear the relief of disclosure. She wants to let me know. She wants to tell someone. I can see it in her eyes, hooking into mine, direct and clear.

"Did Eva say any more about it?"

"A few months before she died, she told me she'd met someone. Nothing had happened but...the word she used was unprofessional . I assume it was via her or Nate's work. I mean, the way she got together with Nate himself wasn't exactly professional, given that she was the focus of his research paper. She said they waited until his PhD was finished but I'm not convinced. Waiting wasn't exactly her strong point."

More or less professional, I wonder, than his advances toward me? Nate and Eva shared that in common, I realize, happily crashing their way through professional boundaries. Maybe both Eva and I are Nate's victims; he's toyed with both of us in different ways, manipulating the power imbalance to please himself. What a rich seam of discussion that could have been between the two of us, I can't help musing.

"What did she actually tell you?"

"She wouldn't go into detail, but I could see that it troubled her. She knew that it was wrong. Something about it worried her deeply..."

"And you believed her?"

"Yes, I really did. Eva could never really see the point of lying, partly because she never felt guilty enough to cover anything up." She allows herself a brief smile. "She lived by different rules to most of us. But she could be pragmatic too. Eva knew transgressions could be hugely destructive. Anyway, she only ever talked about it once and it was never clear to me how far it had really progressed. I think, if anything, she tiptoed to the edge with him."

"With him ? Are you sure it wasn't her ?"

"Her?"

"Priya."

"Whatever makes you say that?"

"Something Nate told me, that Eva and Priya were a thing?"

She looks at me blankly, shakes her head.

"Absolutely not. She would have told me."

"But their trip across Morocco, their...friendship...?" I trail off, knowing how I must sound.

"And that constitutes an affair?" She gives me a withering look. "Really, Nate is spinning you another line, surely you can see that?"

I feel myself redden, stare down at the crumbs on my plate, press the pad of my index finger to each one and watch as the tip slowly turns white under pressure.

"Either way, Eva's infidelity would have made him furious. She told me that his anger could be scary, unpredictable. As I've said, none of this is for publication, but I've had a private forensic toxicologist reevaluate the findings, and there is some speculation that the cocaine wasn't lethal because of its purity. It was cut with something else."

My skin prickles , something bitter rises in my throat, déjà vu. I already know exactly what she's about to tell me. I look down so my hair falls across my face, hoping to conceal the heat rising in my face.

"Fentanyl."

"Fentanyl," I echo, weakly.

"That's what the lab came back with, the results are with the coroner ahead of the second inquest."

"I'm not sure I understand the implication," I stammer. Nate had told me when we visited the coast that day about his slipped disc, the acute pain he suffered. Later, he admitted how easy it was to get hold of it in his Pain Laboratory. The date on it was May 2019, prescribed the month before she died.

Kath watches doubt creep across my face.

"Oh, Anna," she says, again as if chiding a small child. "I'm sure you can make the connection. Fentanyl is often used as an adulterant in street cocaine because of its high potency, a little goes a long way. Florida has been awash with coke contaminated with opioids. They call it blue cocaine, apparently. Even just a trace of it can prove fatal. And that's what showed up. Who else has that guaranteed access except for our King of Pain? Nate has a temper. If he found out about the affair, all he needed was a quick, traceless way to retaliate. You'd have to agree it makes Nate a number one suspect in all this?"

"But you've said yourself, it's a thing. That doesn't point to Nate. There's even a street name for it."

She shrugs. "Well, the police are due to search Algos House again by the end of the month and hopefully we can find answers to a few more questions. I think the clues were there all along. In fact, Eva had mentioned she kept a journal, so I had asked Jade to look for it in case it divulged any details about Nate's behavior around her death. She never could locate it, but the authorities certainly will."

My stomach drops at the mention of the journal. Trying to keep my composure, I say, "If you're that sure about his involvement, how can you carry on letting Jade stay there in the house with him?"

"I've never been happy about her being there. But she loved her aunt, wanted to be closer to her."

So close, she liked to nose around her bedroom and take her things . Maybe we shared more in common than we thought.

"Anyway," continues Kath. "She managed to persuade me it made sense to stay, that it was advantageous to us. Which it was. But she's been there too long, and I don't want her anywhere near him. She packed up and left yesterday morning, told him there was an illness in the family and she needed to be with me. I'm relieved to get her home."

I think about those small blue pills, casually left in his bathroom cabinet. If he'd really cut the cocaine with fentanyl, wouldn't he have covered his tracks and disposed of the evidence? Even if it wasn't those pills, the name itself in his home would surely be damning?

Kath's eyes are on me, scrutinizing: "Does Nate appear to be worried about any of this? I mean, don't you ever wonder about the timings? Why he was so keen to do his memoir now?"

I think back to that first interview with him and Priya and how I had posed the same question.

"He told me before we started that he wanted the book to help others out there in a similar situation. People like him, devastated by sudden loss. And he wanted to do Eva's legacy justice. I believed him."

"You believed. Is that past tense?" Her expression hardens.

"No, I believe him now," I insist, and my jaw tightens. "I mean, if anyone is manipulative here, isn't it Priya? Why is she so keen to get him to America?"

"Ah, yes, Columbia University. Jade told me last week. She wasn't very happy about that either." She shakes her head lightly, regretfully. "You see he's just doing what he always does. Seducing people, ruining their lives, and leaving other people to pick up the pieces." She smiles teasingly except her eyes are hard and sharp, needled by pain.

"I'm sorry. I mean about Eva," I say, pointlessly.

"I'm sorry too. For you as well, that no one is immune to him. You shouldn't be caught up in it all, not like this," she says, with a piercing look, as if she can see straight into me, a ringside seat to the dark dilemma blazing inside.