Three years later, David still thought about Colin Kerr.
Not every day. Colin had gradually receded from obsession into that smaller collection of mysteries a person carried around without expecting answers: the vanished acquaintance, the unexplained noise in an empty house, the thing once seen at night which daylight had never satisfactorily accounted for. Occasionally, though, the name returned.
Colin Kerr.
The man who had given David his life back.
It was an indecent way of putting it, but David had never found a more accurate one. On 17 November, Colin had done what David intended to do, at the place David intended to do it, on the day David intended to do it. The difference was six hours. Colin had consequently spent three years in a secure psychiatric hospital while David had spent them slowly re-entering the world.
David's life was not magnificent. Magnificence had ceased to be a requirement. He had found work eighteen months earlier, after his driving ban expired, delivering specialist equipment between hospitals and clinics. The money was adequate and the hours suited him. There was a woman now, Rachel, whom he saw three or four nights a week and who had not yet expressed any desire to reorganize his personality. His children were older and saw him more often. Louise had become somebody he could speak to without afterwards requiring several hours alone.
Steady. That was the word.
David had come to value steady.
Sometimes, driving home from work, he thought of the other driver and experienced something dangerously close to gratitude.
Colin Kerr, the man I never met, is the reason I'm driving this car.
Because had Colin eaten lunch somewhere else that day, or left home ten minutes later, or simply continued along the road like every other motorist, David knew where he himself would probably be.
Not here.
After the police interview David had researched Colin with an intensity that briefly rivalled his earlier interest in Steve. The results had been unsettling chiefly because they weren't unsettling at all.
Colin Kerr had been forty-three, married, with two children. He worked in procurement for an engineering company and had recently received a modest promotion and bonus. Colleagues described him as sociable, dependable and in unusually good spirits during the weeks before Steve's death. There was no criminal record, no known psychiatric history, no financial crisis, no collapsing marriage, no grievance anybody could find against Steve Penderhurst.
He was also a serious amateur runner.
Three weeks before killing Steve, Colin had achieved a personal best in a half-marathon. David found photographs online: Colin in running gear, flushed and grinning; Colin with an arm around another competitor; Colin later holding up half a pint of Guinness in celebration. In the comments beneath another photograph, he congratulated several runners on their own times and joked about the condition of his legs the following morning. He was by all accounts a loquacious, friendly, family man.
Nothing about him looked like a man approaching catastrophe.
Nor, apparently, had anything been medically wrong with him. The early possibility of a stroke, seizure or other neurological event had gone nowhere. Toxicology found nothing explanatory. There had been psychiatric assessments, neurological examinations, scans and tests whose details were mostly kept private, but no hidden tumour or chemical revelation arrived to make Colin Kerr comprehensible.
Police even had text messages sent ten minutes before the incident in which he asked his wife what she wanted from the shops.
And yet, the CCTV remained.
Car onto pavement.
Steve runs.
Car corrects.
Acceleration.
Impact.
Then silence.
For three years Colin had not spoken.
David had followed the case closely at first, then intermittently as public interest faded. Colin had eventually been judged unfit to stand trial and transferred to a secure medical facility. Specialists disagreed over what precisely had happened to him. The newspapers used phrases such as catatonic presentation and profound psychiatric disturbance, which seemed to David elaborate ways of saying that nobody knew.
Because Colin wasn't unconscious. He ate. He slept. He walked when directed. He looked at people. He could apparently perform simple tasks and respond behaviorally to his surroundings.
He simply never spoke.
Not to police.
Not to psychiatrists.
Not to nurses.
Not to his wife.
Not to his children.
Nothing.
David sometimes wondered whether Colin remembered Steve at all.
More troublingly, he wondered whether Colin remembered 17 November.
On a Thursday afternoon in late November, almost exactly three years after the killing, David was driving north with a case of surgical equipment secured behind him when the thought returned.
Colin Kerr gave me this life.
He disliked the sentence and yet there it was.
At the next traffic light he looked at his hands on the steering wheel. Three years earlier those hands had been intended for another steering wheel, four hundred metres from a pedestrian crossing, waiting for Steve Penderhurst to appear.
Colin had appeared instead.
Not literally. David had never seen him that day.
But somehow the job had been done.
David had occasionally entertained the possibility of cosmic intervention, although never for long. The universe doing him a solid, as he'd once drunkenly described it to Rachel without supplying the details. Karma was another possibility, if karma had recently abandoned its traditional concern with moral proportionality and begun accepting private commissions.
Mostly he regarded it as coincidence.
He had become quite good at regarding it as coincidence.
There wasn't much alternative.
Two weeks later, Detective Inspector Harris was standing beside a filing cabinet when his phone rang.
The call lasted less than four minutes.
When it ended, Harris remained standing with the phone in his hand.
Detective Sergeant Mills, who had been at the original interview with David Vern, looked across from his desk.
“Everything all right?”
Harris didn't answer immediately.
“You remember Colin Kerr?”
Mills stared at him.
“Of course I remember Colin Kerr. The silent guy.”
“Penderhurst case.”
“I know which case.”
“Three years ago.”
“Yes, Harris.”
Harris sat down.
Mills watched him.
“What?”
“You remember where Kerr ended up?”
“St. Matthew's.”
“That was St. Matthew's.”
A pause.
“Colin Kerr started talking.”