by A J Waines
‘How you did it.’ I lean casually against the fridge, trying to look more confident than I feel. He might be stupid but he’s bigger than me. ‘You took a hell of a risk trying to sell Max’s watch.’
‘Yeah, well. Didn’t get caught though, did I?’
‘Come on, then. Tell me everything.’
‘You want to know what happened?’ His eyelid twitches.
‘That would be nice.’
‘Are you for real?’ he says. He’s chewing gum, trying to look mean and hard. ‘You got a wire on you or somefin’?’ He’s inches from my face.
‘What? No…’
He makes me put out my arms and pats me down like we’re in airport security. He tips my bag up on the table and tosses through my belongings.
‘Can’t be too careful,’ he says, as I stuff everything back in. ‘Okay, what do you wanna know?’ He pushes his sleeves up.
‘From the beginning.’
He shrugs. ‘Well…we all knew dear old Rickie was in need of a buck or two…you knew that right?’
It’s my turn to shrug. ‘If you say so.’
‘When the second gig came up, he let it slip about Max Raeger’s expensive piece of kit and I suggested we go fifty-fifty.’ He scratched his stubble. ‘But Rickie wasn’t having that. Told me to fuck off. So I followed him up to the Lakes on my bike. Once I got there I knew my way around. I’d been there that first time, hadn’t I?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I remember you driving us up there in 2001, before Richard had passed his test.’
Greg is leaning against the sink, playing with a piece of foil from a bottle top. ‘You know all this.’ He looks at me quizzically.
‘Just carry on, will you?’
A frown burrows into his forehead, then he shrugs. ‘While you lot were scraping away, I messed with the brakes, loosened a bolt here and there and started a slow puncture in the front tyre – nothing so radical that the police could say for certain it was deliberate.’
My knee twitches, but I force myself to stay still, refusing to react.
‘Rickie’s original plan was to “skid” off the road and sink into the mud on the bank of the lake. In the kafuffle, he was going to take the violin from the back, hide it in the bushes and chuck the case in the water. He wanted to make it look like the instrument had got lost in the lake. At that stage, he knew everyone’s main concern would be getting out. But someone had a better idea.’ He screws his eyes up, giving me a look that implies I ought to be familiar with all this.
‘Go on,’ I say coolly.
‘If you insist,’ he half laughs and carries on. ‘Rickie was soft. He only meant for you all to get your feet wet. He hadn’t worked out that everyone’d be straight out of the van as soon as it touched the water: Max desperate to save his violin, not letting it out of his sight. I knew it’d work far better if the van went high speed straight into the lake and down to the bottom.’
I gulp down the knot of outrage in my throat.
‘I stuffed a mix of cardboard and glue in the seatbelt clips so they’d jam. It meant the three in the front seats would waste precious time and effort trying to get out, so I had time to get my hands on the violin.’ He wraps one fist around the other and crunches his knuckles loudly.
My heartbeat shoots off the scale and every muscle in my body is telling me to run. He’s talking about it like he sabotaged a cricket match, yet he wanted us all to drown. He didn’t give a toss. He’s a total psycho; he didn’t even care if he killed his own brother.
‘So it was you behind us. You weren’t “just passing”, you ran us off the road. It was you Richard saw?’
He yawns, but he’s faking it. ‘The van needed to go in the water at just the right spot where it was deep close to the edge, it wasn’t going to work otherwise.’ He’s revelling in this; it makes me sick. ‘You got out pretty sharpish as it happened. Bit of a Houdini, aren’t you?’ He rubs his hands together. ‘You heard enough yet?’
Greg is prowling around the kitchen. He’s picked up an empty bottle from somewhere and is slapping it rhythmically into his palm.
Richard said they’d never got on as siblings. He’d described Greg as a waster, involved in petty crime and drug peddling. Lucy said he’d sponged off Richard, even stolen from him. Once he’s told his story, he isn’t going to wave me a cute goodbye and let me wander back onto the street to tell everyone what he’s done. I make a quick calculation. The front door is further away, but the kitchen window involves a climb. It will have to be the front.
‘I need the toilet,’ I say, turning towards the doorway.
‘Oh, no you don’t,’ he says, manhandling me into a wooden chair. He kicks the door to the hall shut. ‘Sit and listen. I thought that’s what you wanted. You’re the one person I can share the whole story with.’ I squeeze my knees together. I’m going to have to be really careful not to end up trapped with him in here. ‘At least take your gloves off,’ he adds.
‘No, it’s all right, thanks. I’m cold,’ I reply.
He shrugs and stays standing. ‘Once the van had been under for a few minutes, stuff started floating to the surface. I took various wallets and the little coin pouch holding Max’s watch, of course,’ he says. ‘It was too late for him. I let his body float away.’
I snatch a breath. ‘You saw him? You never said that at the auction house. You could have saved him…you just let him drown?’
‘He was already a gonner by then and I had a job to do. I let you scramble out with a case, because I thought you’d got the violin, then I realised Max’s case was the big rectangular one. I watched you get to the bank and then pass out. It was too deep to dive down, but there was no one else around, so I hung around and before long the violin case came up.’
‘Yeah - it was super special,’ I tell him, ‘designed to float and keep the violin dry.’
‘That was lucky, wasn’t it? I grabbed your case too, and hid them both behind a pile of rocks, further along in the undergrowth.’
‘You took my viola? You’ve got it?!’ Instinctively, my hand springs to my chest. He’d saved it!
‘I reckoned if you’d bothered to risk your neck getting it out, it must be worth somefin’, too.’ He tosses back his greasy fringe. ‘I strapped one case to my front, one to my back and drove back to my B&B. I mean, everyone assumed it was a terrible accident, no one was lookin’ for stolen instruments. Max’s case was locked, so I had to bust it open, then I went back to the lake the next day and chucked it into the water at the far end, to make the police think the violin itself was down in the depths somewhere. Smart move, huh?’
As Greg is talking, I’m back there revisiting the scene from his perspective and a new memory pops up from nowhere, loud and clear. Sam was right, when you try to recall a situation from someone else’s point of view, fresh memories come out of the woodwork.
There’s a man on the phone in the hallway…It’s worth a fortune and it’s under the bridge, he’s saying. And suddenly I know that it’s Karl Hinds’ voice.
That’s when I realise Greg doesn’t know the half of it.
Chapter 41
Rosie
Greg walks over to the bin and spits out his gum.
‘Where are they?’ I say. ‘Where’s my viola? Max’s violin?’
I get up from the kitchen table, but Greg shoves me back down again. He gives me a calculating grin.
‘Did you know someone else was after the violin –right behind us, that day?’
I shrug.
‘When I got back up to the road who did I see, but Karl Hinds, driving off in a fast car. Richard was convinced Karl was a sly devil. He didn’t know what the deal was, but he thought he was connected to the guy who fell off the drainpipe at that first party. You know who I mean?’
‘Mick Blain.’
The one who’d got his hands on my viola and had very nearly broken it.
‘Yeah, him.’
It’s worth a fortune and it’s under the bridge…
A new piece of the puzzle snaps into place. Greg’s got the wrong end of the stick with this part. Karl wasn’t after the violin – he wasn’t stupid enough to go for something he didn’t know how to sell. He was after the same thing Mick Blain had been interested in at that first party. Something under a bridge. Whatever it was.
‘Where’s my viola?’ I snapped.
‘Just hold your horses,’ he says. ‘The violin’s the real deal here and I want the hard cash. I mean, I’m not in the know about a blinkin’ Gru…Gran—’
‘Guarneri,’ I correct him.
‘Yeah, whatever. I knew it was bloody rare – but that’s where you come in.’ He puts his hands on the table in front of me, stares into my face, expecting, waiting for something. ‘You don’t remember, do you?’
‘Remember what?’
‘Any of it. I’ve been watching you as I’ve been going through it all, point by point, and you don’t remember a frickin’ thing.’ He folds his arms, a secretive expression on his face. ‘You haven’t got a clue about the chat we had in the pub – the pact we made in my room at the B&B…’ Again, he scrutinises my face for signs.
I don’t know what he’s talking about.
‘You were IN on it, darlin’…every step of the way.’
‘What?’ I let out an incredulous huff, trying to look disdainful, but I’m actually totally thrown by what he’s suggesting. I make myself think. The night we arrived in the Lakes I’d spoken to Richard in the pub. I try to flag up that memory – the one with him teasing me about stealing the violin, but I can’t find it any more. I can’t see Richard’s face. And now Greg is saying I had that conversation with him.
‘We planned it together,’ he persists.
He’s lying.
‘When?’
‘The night you turned up from London. We were all in the pub: Rickie, you, that Steph bird. Max wasn’t there – he was doin’ yoga or some bollocks…’
I’m trying to go back there. ‘In the pub…’ I’m unable to reach it. It’s like I’m clawing at layers of curtains, but as I peel each one away another drops in its place. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘The others had gone and it was just you and me. I asked you if you were interested in the idea. It was all a bit of a laugh at first, I wanted to know what your reaction would be.’
I’m grasping to reach into the past, but there’s nothing there. ‘I thought that was Richard…’
‘I don’t know what you talked about with him, but this was with me.’ He winks. ‘Let me show you.’ He reaches into a tall food cupboard beside the freezer and fishes about in a carrier bag.
‘Here…’
It’s a sketch on lined paper of the road from the Hinds’ place to the lakeside, with all the road names labelled. There’s a red cross at the exact spot where the van left the road. It’s in my handwriting. My eyes follow the line of the pen; I can tell it belongs to me and yet it feels alien. I can’t recall putting the pen on the paper.
‘You were meant to grab the violin,’ he says.
He scratches his head. I’m barely hearing him. Questions are firing off like canons inside my head: Could I have been involved? Is he messing with my mind?
‘I would never have agreed to kill anyone,’ I say with conviction.
He picks up a peanut from a torn bag on the table and flips it into his mouth. ‘That’s not what you said at the time.’
I shake my head. ‘No, I would never do that.’
I’d remember – wouldn’t I?
‘For someone who’s so innocent, you were pretty damn quick to volunteer to sit in the back.’
I force myself to look at him. ‘The seatbelts – you’re saying I knew?’
He snorts. ‘Are you kiddin’ me? Hell, you suggested it!’
‘No. You’re making this shit up…’
He throws his hand in the air. ‘Bugger it, believe what you like. I don’t care. Either way, it was the only way it was going to work. You had to be in the back, so you could stay with the violin. Then you were meant to grab it and hide it on the bank. Only you botched it up big time, when you grabbed the wrong bloody case. Talk about dead wood.’
‘Why would I risk my own life?’ I demand. ‘Why would I have put myself through that?’
‘You said you were a hotshot at getting out of small spaces. And a good swimmer. You said it would be a doddle.’
He tosses another nut in the air and catches it nonchalantly in his mouth. ‘So, anyway, because you cocked it up, your cut’s gone down by half.’ With his sing-song voice he sounds like he’s taunting little kids in the playground. ‘But, you’re still gonna help me sell it.’
He jabs his hands into his hips.
‘Hell…you’ve made me wait long enough. You were meant to get in contact ages ago.’
He waves a hand up and down in front of my face.
‘You really don’t remember any of this, do you?’ His jaw thrusts towards me, snarling, nasty. Why is he doing this? Trying to make it seem like I knew everything? ‘You banged on about how we could fence it; how we could get the violin out of the country and make a deal overseas.’
He sees my blank expression and bursts into raucous laughter. He bends down right in my face as if he’s talking to someone simple. ‘Shit man, you’re a weird bitch!’ He’s so close, his spit lands on my cheek.
His snide attitude reminds me of someone else, another bully, but I can’t quite work out from where. All I know is something inside me begins to smoulder.
He moves back to the cupboard in the corner and pulls out the plastic bag he opened earlier. Then the memory shuffles into place. It’s Ralph he reminds me of, when I was ten, that time at Picket’s Wood. The ringleader. His bony face; scathing, vindictive, pretending to include me and then casting me aside like I was a bit of dirt stuck to the bottom of his shoe. I see my chance. I tip my chair back quickly, scoop up the small chef’s knife from the draining board and slip it up my sleeve, out of sight.
As Greg is fiddling with the bag, my ordeal in Picket’s Wood comes tumbling back with the force of Niagara. The little gang of five. My desperation to be part of it. The trust I put in their grubby little hands. The hurt, the humiliation. Then, the way it ended. The real ending.
It was the week after I’d been abandoned in the dark. I’d gone back to school as if nothing had happened, wearing thick tights to cover the bruises and cuts on my legs. The group who’d staged the little charade spent playtimes and lunch breaks sniggering and whispering behind my back.
Then the tables started to turn. It began when Mrs Tanner came in to see my school teacher. Neil’s Nintendo had gone missing. As a result, all our bags and desks were checked. It never turned up. Shortly afterwards, Ralph left his brand new bike outside the Post Office and it must have rolled down the bank and got run over by a truck. He’d only had it three weeks. His dad went mad.
A day or so later, Kelly came to school in tears. Her pet frog, the one she kept in a jar on the window ledge in her bedroom, had escaped. Taken the lid off its own jar and hopped out, it seemed. Then, that weekend, the day after bonfire night, Miles’ treehouse burnt down. One of the other kids claimed they’d seen him playing with matches. He said he was nowhere near when it went up in flames, but his parents stopped his karate lessons anyway. A few days after that, I overheard Julie’s mother saying that she’d found Julie’s bridesmaid’s dress at the bottom of the garden. It was in the wheelbarrow, covered in mud with a huge rip down the front, like it had been caught in a car door.
All those mishaps, so unfortunate, one after the other. Funny how the sniggering and whispering stopped after that.
Greg’s footsteps bring me back to the present. He is standing in front of me looking pleased with himself.
‘Here’s the first piece of sunken treasure…’ He delves into the plastic bag, showing me just a few inches. I recognise the scroll at the top straight away.
‘My viola!’ I’m on my feet.
He sniggers. ‘Exce
pt – you’re not gonna be playin’ it anytime soon!’
He slides it out, holding up a jumble of loose strings and flaps of wood. It looks like a headless puppet with all its limbs dislocated.
‘What have you done?!’ I cry, trying to take hold of it. ‘You’ve smashed it to bits…’
Greg smirks. He backs away, taunting me, swinging the remains of my beautiful instrument. ‘Soddin’ worthless load of shite,’ he snarls. ‘I stamped on it once I realised just how crap it actually was. Guy at the music shop took one look at it and said it would cost more to get it valued than it was worth!’
He makes it do a grotesque dance in front of me and breaks into hysterical laughter. The parts clatter together, like a tuneless wind chime.
Greg drops it back into the bag unceremoniously, lets it fall to the floor and kicks it into the corner. Then he reaches beside the fridge and holds up a bottle of whisky.
‘Fancy a slug?’ he says, ‘to show there’s no hard feelings. Then we can talk about the big one – the violin. Want to see it?’
I shrug and he turns towards the draining board. He has his back to me for only five seconds, but it’s enough. My hand is up my sleeve and around the handle before my brain tells me to do it. Years of hurt, rejection, loss and anger, mostly anger, are seething inside me. He’s taken this precious part of me, my lifelong companion and crushed it to pieces, smiling all the while. It’s deliberate. Malicious.
As he leans over to pick up two filthy glasses, I spot a thin stretch of white flesh under his T-shirt. I lunge forward and sink the knife into it. It slides in more easily than I expect. A wail leaves his lips and Greg turns, falls against the chair, his abdomen exposed. I sink the blade in, again and again, drawing strength from a place of dormant rage inside me I barely know exists.
I know then what Dad must have felt. Why he pulled the trigger so many times. It was hurt that got the better of him and he couldn’t stop. Outrage, anger and fury all bubbled up into one big bang inside his head. Just like I’m feeling in Greg’s kitchen, with my viola in splinters on the floor and the knife in my gloved hand. I didn’t plan this. I didn’t come here to do this. It just happened.