Page 58 of You Can't Hurt Me

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.

22

All About You

In the past, individuals with CIP (congenital insensitivity to pain) were treated no better than people at circus freak shows. One of the best-documented cases was Czech immigrant Edward H. Gibson, a vaudeville performer known as the Human Pincushion. In 1932, theJournal of Nervous and Mental Diseaserecorded his pain-defying stunts where he would invite audience members on stage to skewer him with fifty to sixty pins “anywhere but the abdomen and groin.”

Sometimes Eva could relate to poor old Edward H. Gibson, a mutant on show. Soon after her diagnosis, she was a global news story too. TheNew Yorkerprofiled her, speculating that cases similar to hers had died in terrible circumstances, of frostbite and heat stroke, hemorrhages and heart attacks without feeling a single thing. One TV channel asked if Eva would like to appear on their show so the audience could watch as she placed her hand in a flame or, failing that, consume a bowl of Scottish bonnet chilis live. This was a different sort of freak show, but it was made clear to her that, for the sake of her art career, she’d be foolish to refuse.

The night before I see Nate again, I sleep fitfully, my dreams spiked with nameless demons. I walk on eggshells at home, the atmosphere curdled because Amira and Tony are getting on badly, shouting at one another or grimly silent. Reluctant to take sides, I stay out of it, inwardly tormented about where my loyalty should lie. I wake too early, brittle and frayed. As I walk along the avenue to his house, the river glistens in the spring sunlight. There’s a charge in the air, the energy of one season erasing another.

“Hey,” says Nate, answering the door. He is unshaven, relaxed, in a T-shirt and jogging pants. His tone is neutral, neither warm nor distant, impossible to read. It’s as if the other evening has never happened. He’s clearly unphased by it. Was he ever going to mention Columbia?

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