by Rob Parker
Your Will. This one troubled Thor most, for one main reason: he had never written one. He was twenty-five years old. What twenty-five- year-old writes a will? Not this one.
So this will had to be some kind of fake. And how in God’s name had it ended up in the family safe?
The water sloshed over Thor’s belt buckle, as he took the envelope. He couldn’t work out whether to take it someplace else to open it and pore over its contents in peace, or…
With a trembling finger, he tore it open.
40
Numb, Thor emerged from the front doorway, a supermarket carrier bag under his arm.
The scenes both in front of him and lighting his imagination no longer registered. Roisin, the love of his life, elated to see him return. His siblings huddled around the open rear door of the Land Rover, paying their respects to their dead father. The Crooks, presumably brooding somewhere, waiting for the chance to finish them all off. The police, looking for him. Thor’s nieces, nephews, sister, and mother stranded in the upper floors of the farmhouse, flood water rising. And all around them, the worst flood in the history of northern England, doing its best to sink, drown, wash away all memory and remnant of what had happened here.
‘The kids and mum,’ he shouted to his siblings, who looked over with weak expressions. They had had a little time with their father, the grim reality of his passing having clearly resonated. ‘You should probably think about getting them.’
They jogged over through the bog that was the yard, Crewe arriving first. He looked relieved not to be staring at their father’s corpse anymore, and seemed to be up for the task. ‘You think it’s getting worse in there?’ he asked.
‘That well isn’t slowing down, and God knows when this water will stop. Best get them out. Between yourselves, you’ll have them out of there in no time.’
‘Where are you going?’ asked Mercy with that indignant flash that made a mockery of her own name.
‘I’ve got to get to the police. They’ll be looking for me anyway. Take this, it’s as much as I could grab from the safe.’
He handed the carrier bag to Crewe. ‘And her?’ Mercy was pointing at Roisin.
‘She needs protective custody,’ he said. Roisin looked like Thor had just spoken in backwards Latin, her eyebrows rising in confusion.
‘What about Dad?’ asked Hollis, to nobody in particular.
‘I just… don’t know. You’ll think of something,’ said Thor. ‘Crewe, can I borrow your car?’
With a vacant look, Crewe handed keys to Thor.
‘Just fucking like you, Thor, always creating the mess and leaving us to fix it,’ Mercy spat.
‘Oh, piss off. Piss right off,’ said Thor as he marched to Crewe’s Jeep. ‘Roisin, come on, let’s go.’
As she jogged over to follow him, she tried to grab his hand, and it was a gesture that hurt so much, so very much. He didn’t know what she knew, and couldn’t hurt her anymore—not after everything that had happened. He just didn’t know how to act after what his father had left for him in the safe. His hand was limp around hers.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Did you get to the safe? Did you get what your dad told you to get?’
‘Everything will be fine,’ he said, as much to himself as her. ‘I promise, it will all be OK.’
He said it, but he didn’t know why. Like one of those things you say to frightened children: ‘It’ll be fine,’ when in fact you’ve got no idea what the outcome will be. All you can do, when your own mind is asking panicky questions, is soothe those around you who need support.
The problem was, Thor knew everything was definitely not fine, definitely not OK—nor would it ever be.
41
They zipped along at a frantic rate, spraying water up the hedgerows. Roisin looked through the windshield between her fingers, unnerved at the speed.
‘Thor, please, I understand if you don’t want to talk but where are we going?’ she said. ‘I’m scared, Thor. Really scared.’
‘Protective custody is what I said, and I’m afraid it’s exactly what I meant,’ Thor replied, softly. There were so many reasons why protective custody was the right thing for Roisin now, but the biggest was clearly that there were more pressing matters—and he needed to put concerns about Roisin’s safety to bed for a while so he could go and address it.
The truth was that, thanks to his father’s little care package, Thor now had a fair idea of someone who had a very good reason for wanting him dead. Someone he hadn’t thought of, or dared imagine. And he had to get to the bottom of it.
‘But if you go anywhere near a police station, you’ll be arrested straight away,’ Roisin said.
‘That’s why I need you to go and hand yourself in. You can’t go back to Crook’s Farm, not after what they did to you, and that includes your caravan, because they’ll come looking for you there too. I’ll drop you off at the station in Windle Heath, but you’ll have to go in alone. I’m so sorry that it has to be like that.’
Roisin was hushed by his words. ‘You’re scaring me, Thor. Baby, what are you going to do?’
Thor couldn’t answer. ‘It’ll be OK,’ was all he could muster.
‘Seeing your Dad like that…’ she tried to begin, acknowledging the scale not only of what they had been through in the last few days, but the sheer blunt fact that Thor had watched his father’s murder. Thor knew the sudden death of a family member is lain thick with horror at the best of times, but actually being there for it is something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy—and it seemed that this was something that Roisin herself was beginning to grasp. It was something that would hold them together forever, witnessing that, amongst everything else.
From the high ground of the two farms, water surged downhill towards Crook’s Hollow. This was reflected in the roads, which now looked more like swift, narrow rivers heading downstream apace. Crewe’s Jeep handled the conditions well, considering the water, the mud, and the terrain.
Before long, they were on Main Street, greeted by scenes from a low-budget disaster film. It was the end of days in little England. Water flushed down the gradual incline of Main Street, flooding right up to porches and doorways, but anything close to the streets was in two to three feet of water. The retirement residences, with their tight windows to the street and front doors that once kicked you straight to the curb, looked like a shitty Venice.
In the flatter parts of the road, the water had that thickness to it, that languid laziness of movement that suggested it was going nowhere fast. This would take ages to shift. The water table in this area would be forever altered, and because of that, Clyne’s master plan might no longer be relevant. It might already be dead in the water, so to speak.
Thor hoped it wasn’t yet. He needed it. To flush out his enemies, he needed his land to still retain its value.
The water reached all the way to the high wheel arches of the Jeep, which trundled steady. Huge clumps of hay coasted lazily downstream of this new river from the small stud farm a couple of streets along. The streetlights cast the whole waterway an eerie warm lemon glow; there was still power, but that would bring its own set of problems.
Thor had expected to see residents scrambling to save their possessions before the flood consumed everything. But Crook’s Hollow was fast becoming a sub-aquatic ghost town. Roisin’s jaw was limp and hanging, but it seemed to Thor like nothing would shock him anymore. There must have been an evacuation alert earlier, and the residents had done as they were told.
He moved the Jeep through Crook’s Hollow, experience guiding the car on a road he couldn’t see, and before long they were out on the A-road connecting Crook’s Hollow to Windle Heath, two miles away. Once on the main road, the water suddenly stopped at a bend, where runoff from higher fields was sieving through a thick hedge. Thor pulled the Jeep from the water as if he was driving up a dock, past a police roadblock with his head down.
‘I’m not sure anything will ever be the same again,’
said Roisin. ‘That was hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage. The village… it’s all gone to pieces.’ She reached for him, placing her palm on the back of his hand on the gear stick. To Thor, her touch felt different. His affection for her was massive, but its fundamental pillar was altered forever.
Before long, they arrived, exhausted, in Windle Heath. Thor would have given anything for a bed—a bed and some time to get his head straight. Windle Heath was different from Crook’s Hollow in a lot of ways, but the biggest one tonight was that it was not underwater. The rain was falling, but the drainage system here seemed to be holding firm.
The police station was in the middle of the village, and it took Thor no time at all to reach it. The residents had apparently listened to the warnings of the evacuation in the next village and were staying inside, awaiting word on what was to come next. The village looked like a settlement in wartime: empty streets, with lonely lights on in windows, people using as little power as possible.
Windle Heath was laid out in a Y shape, with a main road that entered to the south which split north-east and north-west respectively, on an island over which watched the village Sainsbury’s. When the old provision store was bought by the corporate retail behemoth, many residents thought it would be the end of Windle Heath as it was. Thor remembered the time well: provision stores were the kind of places where everybody knew who you were and the butchers at the back of the shop used to keep particular cuts of meat behind for most villagers, not because they asked or ordered, but simply because they were known and remembered. Now, the idle aisles of Sainsbury’s certainly knew who you were, especially if you were that week’s gossip. Thor hated the place for what it was and its affordable convenience. He was, like everybody else, a begrudging regular.
They came down the top left fork of the Y, turned left at the roundabout, and back up the right fork. They didn’t see another car or soul the whole time. Moreover, the bars and restaurants which frosted either side of the Y joint like underarm hair were all shut, and a journey which would normally have been doused in soft neons and muffled laughter beyond the glass was absent.
At the station, Thor pulled up in one of the many empty bays. It was quiet.
‘I’ll be back soon. I promise,’ he said.
‘You’re sure this is the right thing to do?’ Roisin asked. She sat upright in her seat, looking at Thor pleadingly.
’It has to be,’ said Thor, looking at the front door of the station house. There was a reception inside behind automatic glass doors, and it looked to be unmanned. He wondered if anyone was in the station house at all. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, but I need to know you’re going to be safe, OK?’
‘I understand that. I just don’t understand why I can’t be with you.’ ‘There are things I’ve got to do. Like I said. There’s only so many
ways out of this for us all, and I need to find at least one of them.’ ‘Do you have any ideas?’
‘Yes.’
It was partly the truth. He had something in mind. Something that would bring the moth to the flame.
Roisin looked uncertain. ‘I trust you,’ she said finally. ‘But make sure you come back to me. Do you understand that?’
‘I do.’
‘Do you love me? You better had.’ She tried to smile weakly.
‘Yes, I do. I will always,’ he said. He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘You have to go, now, before someone sees me.’
Roisin blew a kiss and ran across the tarmac toward the cold glow of the station. Thor wasted no time, reversing back out into the street without paying any heed to the traffic—not that there was any. As he drove back towards the roundabout, his mind was wound tight around itself like a boa constrictor. It was rooted in what he had to do now, the trap he had to lay, and the weight of what he’d learned when he opened the envelope his father had left for him…
In his father’s office, Thor had sat on the battered desk chair, a dead dog occasionally floating against his thighs, in flood water that rose six full inches in that time. He’d felt as if his moorings had come adrift, as if he was an oil rig way out to sea, and his foundation struts had cracked irreparably under a seismic shift.
In fact, seismic wasn’t grand enough to describe how much things
had changed in light of what he had read. This was a galactic
alteration to the landscape. His landscape.
He felt such a fool, such an idiot. The air in the office was suffocating. He began to hate it all—this room, especially—and hate its connection to the man who usually used it. His father.
The bastard had betrayed him. The bastard had betrayed them all.
And now he was dead—he’d got away with it. The hurt he left behind would be huge, and he’d never have to deal with it.
Thor wondered if anyone else knew. If anyone had ever twigged, unlike thick old Thor, whose every action had only worked to unknowingly make things worse.
All the things he had done, which he wouldn’t have done if he had known.
The whole experience was hollowing out a deep and abiding cynicism inside him, one that he would likely retain the rest of his days. However, it was that cynicism that he needed to embrace to flip the situation on its head and catch the perpetrators once and for all: it was breeding in him the tools for a trap.
The envelope was secreted in his jacket pocket. The envelope contained, among other things, the deeds to the portion of land he
owned. He was prepared to bet anything on those deeds being the reason for the break-in at his flat, and that told him something important: that his adversaries had a fall back plan. They must have thought that even if Thor didn’t die, they could still get the land somehow, and the deed was somehow crucial to that.
He wished he knew more about the legal process behind it, but it didn’t matter – the deed had attracted his adversaries before, and would do again. He could use it as bait.
Thor knew the main road in to Crook’s Hollow was blocked, so he turned off a mile from the roadblock at Windle Heath Golf Club. He knew the access routes used by the landscape buggies, having used them to walk back from the Heath to Loxley Farm many times. He could use them as a cut through.
The single-track roads were in a disarray of mud and tumbling water, and it took Thor half an hour of gentle persuasion to get the Jeep into Crook’s Hollow. He arrived at the Traveller’s Rest, parked the Jeep at the back of the car park, and made it inside to hear the bell for last orders sound brightly.
When Thor burst in, Martin Campbell had rung the bell for, it seemed, precisely nobody. The lights were on, the fridges humming, but the pub’s floor was swimming in a healthy six inches of water. Thor saw Pat Hurst perched on a bar stool with two pints being placed in front of him next to the two he already had. His toes were dangling up above the water, and somehow his shoes were dry. The pub had flooded around the gnarly boozer.
‘Ye jus’ made it for ’t end u’days,’ muttered Pat.
Thor didn’t argue—even with the slurring, Pat was making good sense.
‘Martin, please, I need a favour,’ Thor shouted over the counter into the back of the pub, but when Martin came in Thor immediately regretted it. Martin looked ravaged and beaten, completely destroyed. Bags dragged his eyes into purple hollows, his arms were filthy, and his brow was caked in sweat and mud.
‘That bad, huh?’ said Thor.
‘I’ve spent the whole day bailing out a cellar that was only to
collapse a couple of hours ago. The water just won’t… I’m ruined, Thor. Ruined. The pub is gone.’
‘What do you mean gone? You’re insured, right?’
Martin laughed loudly, a humourless cackle that echoed in the empty pub.
‘I gambled. They said this was a flood plain, and that a building like this would be uninsurable. Can you believe that? So I looked at public records for floods. Nothing since 1504. Fifteen-oh-bloody-four. So I didn’t bother, thought I’d save the cash.’
Thor und
erstood. Unless he had a hundred thousand quid stashed somewhere for exactly this occurrence, he and the pub were both buggered.
‘I’m so sorry, mate,’ said Thor. ‘This is probably the worst timing ever, but are the phones still working? And if they are, can I please make a quick call?’
Martin’s mind was still elsewhere, and he simply waved Thor to the back of the bar. Thor went back, picked up the receiver and dialed Loxley Farm. It was time to chum the waters.
He knew where the phone points around the farm were, and he knew they’d put a line out into the main barn, so his father could conduct the odd bit of business on the hoof, and not have to take all his gear off to answer calls. This was before mobile phones of course, but Thor knew it was still there last time he’d checked, and now he could picture the sound of the phone ringing out across the yard. He felt sure that’s where they’d have gone when the kids had been pulled out of the house, it being the nearest point of shelter.
The line was abruptly picked up. ‘Yeah?’ said an abrupt tense voice. ‘Hollis, is that you?’
‘Yeah, Thor what do you want? We are kind of busy here, in case you forgot.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. Listen, I need to ask you something, could you just put the word across the family that I’ve forgotten something at The Traveller’s Rest. It’s my deed from the safe. I’d just stopped in to pick up a couple of bits and must have dropped the envelope. Martin’s holding it behind the bar, so, yeah, if you could just pass it on that next
time anyone’s passing, could they pick it up for me? Thanks.’
‘OK, I’ll do that, but I can’t picture anyone being able to get there for a while.’
‘That’s fine, no rush. I appreciate it.’
Thor hung up. He knew that as soon as word got around that the envelope containing the deeds was behind the bar, his adversaries wouldn’t be able to resist just strolling over and picking them up. All Thor had to do was wait to see who would walk in the door.
The more he thought about it though, the more he felt he could really upset the apple cart. He looked up into the recesses behind the bar, at the CCTV cameras. He knew they were all wired only for video and not audio, but they would serve as a decent record of who came in and roughly what went down.