Crook's Hollow

by Rob Parker

  44

  Jason did a fairly admirable job of guiding the boat through the trees at the bottom of the Hollow, which had taken on the guise of a weird- looking mangrove swamp. It was only when the trees thinned out that the flow got too fast and Thor had to get out. Jason got as close to the bank as he could before Thor sat on the gunwale like a diver about to tip backwards.

  ‘Tell whoever you can to get up here,’ he said. ‘And tell DCI Okpara it was Rue, Barry, and the Crooks. He’ll know what that all means.’

  Jason looked unsure. ‘This doesn’t look like the safest thing to do, Thor. You sure about it?’

  ‘We are long past the point where I have a choice, mate.’

  Jason had to gun the throttle hard just to keep the dinghy in the same spot. ‘Well, here you go, pal. Go get ’em.’

  Jason gave the engine a bigger rev, Thor took a breath, held it, and dove into the icy, swift flow, arms over his head. He dog-paddled for a couple of yards before managing to grab the sloped bank of the Hollow, but all he could feel was mud. He used whatever purchase he could get to pull himself along to a bush that was half submerged, then gripped it and dragged himself out.

  As he started the climb up the valley wall, which was now half the height it should have been, he couldn’t get over how deep the water was now. He hadn’t been able to touch the bottom, and he was about six feet tall. All this water, all rushing downhill to the village. Was this the end of Crook’s Hollow? At this rate, by morning nothing would be left.

  The caravan loomed in the drizzle, with one light on in the living room. Would Ward really kill Roisin? Where that man was concerned, nothing was off the table. He braced himself for the worst.

  As he got closer he could see that water was trickling through the gaps of the drystone wall below the caravan, and sure enough, as he looked over the wall, yet more water had pooled in Roisin’s yard, coming from down at Crook’s Farm. The farm stood black and dead in the distance, an abandoned husk.

  Thor didn’t think that the caravan was the best place to be for any of them, in its precarious position overlooking the flooded hollow and its foundations getting steadily waterlogged. But what choice did Thor have?

  He rounded the caravan, and knocked, shouting: ‘Ward, it’s me.

  You wanted me—now I’m here.’

  There was no answer. Fearing the worst—that he’d been called here just to find Roisin’s body in a last act of revenge—he pulled the door open.

  And his world fell apart.

  45

  There, on the sofa, shrouded in soft candlelight, sat Rue and Roisin, having a cup of tea. Thor couldn’t compute what he was seeing, so frayed were his emotions, so bruised and aching was his mind.

  ‘Glad you made it,’ said Rue. ‘I bet you have some questions.’

  Thor looked at Rue, but he no longer saw his sister. He didn’t know quite what it was he saw, but it was not the woman he was devoted to. She didn’t look smug, exactly, it was more of a steady, school-teacherly calm. As if she knew that a confrontation was expected, and was ready for it.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ she said, as she patted the sofa next to her. ‘You can have some tea if you like.’

  Thor was lost for words, and even if he hadn’t been, he didn’t know if he could speak. His life had been built on his relationship with this woman, and now it was crumbling, eroding and falling away like the outside world giving way to the rain.

  He wanted to believe that she had an explanation, a rational, reasonable explanation for what had been going on, but he knew in his heart that there wasn’t one.

  And Roisin. What on earth was this?

  ‘I don’t want to believe this is happening. I’m not sure I know what’s happening,’ said Thor, as he edged inside. ‘Where’s Ward?’

  ‘They’re all gone,’ Roisin said in a low voice. She was looking at the floor, the window, anywhere but at Thor.

  ‘But you said he was here. You said he was holding you captive. You lied…’

  ‘I know,’ said Roisin. She looked sad, brittle, and young. She looked like a naughty little girl who had been caught red-handed and hadn’t thought the consequences through.

  ‘I’m going to get out of here, and the police can sort all this out. I know I can’t anymore.’ Thor started toward the door.

  ‘No, you’re not. You know we can’t finish like that,’ said Rue. She patted the sofa again.

  Thor hoped that Jase was sending for the police like he asked him to, and if that was the case, perhaps stalling now was the best chance he could get at justice.

  ‘Why, Rue—why?’ he said.

  Rue looked as if a fragment of regret might be about to show itself, but she quickly brushed it away. She smoothed her jeans and sighed.

  ‘Do you know how hard it is, Thor? I mean, do you really, honestly know?’

  ‘How hard what is? Being honest? Quite hard, it seems.’

  ‘Raising four kids. Four kids on a farm, with a husband who got sacked. No income. No future except on handouts.’

  ‘When did Barry lose his job?’

  ‘Three weeks ago. Neither of us have slept since. Then there was this amazing opportunity.’

  ‘An opportunity that wasn’t yours to take.’

  Rue’s face darkened. ’You don’t get to lecture any of us about taking opportunities. You let us all down when you left that field to fallow. Turned your back on every one of us.’

  ‘“You should have got on with it.” That message was from you, wasn’t it?’

  Rue simply raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips.

  ‘You should have,’ she said. ‘If you had, then it would never have come to this.’

  ‘The field, the car at the church, the hanging. Rue—all you and Barry?’

  Rue shook her head impatiently.

  ‘You don’t understand the stress we were under! You don’t know what it’s been like. Things were tight when Barry had his job, never mind without it. And you, you ungrateful little shit, were sitting on more than a million quid you didn’t even deserve.’

  ‘Rue. You were the one person I relied upon, and you tried to kill me.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It was Barry, of course, doing all that. But you’ll do anything when your family’s welfare is at stake. Anything. And you’d turned your back on all of us.’

  ‘You can’t lecture me on family values—you were going to sell my land under our family’s noses.’

  ‘What’s a few acres in the grand scheme of things? They would have gotten over it when we explained it to them.’

  ‘The whole point of the land gift was that we were to give it back.

  That’s why we fell out in the first place!’

  ‘Mum and Dad would have listened to me! They would have. They would have understood.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Thor said, running his hands across his scalp.

  Where were the police?

  ‘How do you know her?’ he pointed at Roisin, whose cuts still hadn’t yet been attended to. She’d clearly never even made it into the police station.

  Rue looked over at Roisin, who got up and moved to the kitchen.

  She refilled her mug at the kettle, refusing to look at either of them. ‘She came to me,’ Rue said.

  Roisin came back and took a seat next to Rue, holding her mug close to her chest, slumped forward dejectedly, stirring her tea gently with the other.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Thor said. ‘She what?’

  ‘She came to me and told me about the development—’

  Rue was silenced by Roisin thrusting a knife into her throat—a paring knife she drew straight from her teacup. It wasn’t a spoon she’d put in her tea.

  Roisin held the blade in Rue’s neck, right down to the plastic handle. Rue gargled blood, twisting to look at Roisin with unseeing, uncomprehending eyes. Thor stood paralysed with shock, unable to move.

  Roisin’s eyes were wide and wild as she held the knife firmly in Rue’s neck. Rue
flailed spastically, feebly, as blood from her severed jugular splashed in a red gush down her front and over the battered fabric of the sofa. Finally, she fell, and the blood spurted up out of her neck onto the picture window above the sofa.

  Roisin pulled the knife out, and Rue lay still. Only her chest moved a little as she struggled to breathe.

  Thor was still too shocked to move or to say anything. His beloved sister, who had spent the last few days trying to kill him, lay dying in front of him. It was all too much.

  Part of him wanted to rush to her and see if she could be saved, but deep inside something made him hesitate, something in him appreciated the karmic qualities of the moment. That and, if the amount of blood that was spilled was anything to go by, any chance of saving her was long since departed.

  ‘Just don’t move, Thor,’ said Roisin. ‘I know this is unpleasant but it’ll be over soon. I’m sorry about that. That’s not how I wanted it to go.’

  She was still brittle yet very much connected to the moment. After all the harm he had seen happen to her in the last few days, she seemed more switched on now than at any other point.

  ‘A Crook and a Loxley,’ she said, as if speaking to herself. ‘It was always going to end badly.’

  Thor said nothing.

  ‘But your bastard father started all of this. Everything that has happened, started because of him. Oh—looks like she’s gone now.’

  Rue had stopped moving, her eyes were fixed on the ceiling, their pupils dilating. Thor shuddered at the sight, but also at the cold assessment in Roisin’s voice.

  ‘Why? Why join with Rue to betray me?’ Thor said in a cracking voice.

  ‘Why? Gosh, it’s such a good question. It started out so innocently.

  Everything started with the best intentions.’ ‘Tell me why?’

  ‘I fell for you, very normally at first. I knew I shouldn’t have, because of who you were, but I did. I had grown fascinated by you over all these years, in a sort of “the grass is always greener” kind of way. You had everything I wanted, everything I felt I deserved. I suppose the real question is, how much do you really know about me? I’m guessing from the way you’ve changed over the course of tonight, the answer would be quite a lot now.’

  ‘I know. I know about it all,’ Thor said grimly.

  ‘So you know how hard it was. How bloody hard the whole thing was, all because your fucking Dad couldn’t help himself. I wonder what it was—the naughtiness of it, the power? You must have got off on that, too, the fact that you were a Loxley and I was a Crook.’

  Thor lowered his gaze, because he knew she was right: the forbidden nature of their relationship had been exciting.

  ‘Well, Mum was sixteen. She wasn’t a grown woman like me, able to make serious choices on her own. She was a kid who was sexually abused by a much older man. An older man who shouldn’t have been anywhere near her. An older man who ruined her whole life.’

  Thor knew. He had worked it out earlier, in his father’s office while waves of nausea washed in his stomach.

  ‘The families covered it up, of course. It was buried deep down as far as they could stick it. Nobody wanted to admit that had happened, least of all your father. But it all came unstuck again when I was four, and Mum killed herself. She killed herself because of the shame. The shame of what had been done to her, and the shame with which her own family treated her.’

  The unchanged bedroom. The girl in the picture Thor hadn’t seen before. Ward and Wendell’s sister—Roisin’s mother.

  ‘And then imagine the horror my mum felt when instead of your bastard dad doing the honourable thing, and helping support the baby he had dropped on them all, he had another kid. A make-up kid, six months after I was born. An eraser, to scrub out the dirty memory of what he’d done. You.’

  The reality of that set of circumstances would take years to get over. Thor could easily see how such a situation would royally and irredeemably mess a person up, and Roisin’s story was a real jaw-dropper. But in this case there was obviously a point of no return, a point where something had snapped and a new realm of abject darkness had opened.

  ‘And while things were going to utter bollocks here, you were treated to all the things I never had. The love and care that I was entitled to, because I was a Loxley, and because I had every right as much as you.’

  Thor knew that Roisin wasn’t straight on that; his memories of his upbringing were far less rosy than she’d made them out to be. But he didn’t want to interrupt now. Not while the police were so damn close. He just had to keep her talking, even if the words were painful.

  ‘And then they gave you that piece of land and you didn’t fucking want it. The piece of land that should have been given to me. You didn’t want it, you ungrateful shite.’

  And there it was. The reason for it all, the motivation for the deceptions, lies, and heinous betrayals of trust. Revenge. Roisin wanted revenge on Thor because he was an apology from a father who didn’t want her.

  ‘I didn’t know anybody knew anything about that…’ Thor muttered.

  ‘Have you forgotten where we are, Thor? Crook’s Hollow, the swirling toilet bowl of gossip and secrets. Nothing’s off the table, especially not with a sister as gobby as this one.’ Roisin nodded at Rue’s body. ‘It’s surprising what you get talking about at a rec centre yoga class.’

  Rue had deceived Thor so badly, too, and that was equally as painful as what Roisin had done.

  ‘All this time,’ he said. ‘You knew we were brother and sister?’ ‘I’ve known since Mum died. We all knew.’

  Jesus, thought Thor. They’re all fucking nuts. That look Ward and Wendell gave Thor the morning they came to see Roisin and Thor at the caravan. They were getting off on the whole perverse sickness of it all. Roisin continued.

  ‘But then, when it came down to the offer of a deal, and Mason and Tilly saw a way out from Crook’s Hollow and the shameful memories, they saw it as a way to get away from me too. The shameful half- Loxley they had living down at the bottom of the farm. When they accepted Clyne’s offer, they told me in no uncertain terms that I was to have none of it. Ward and Wendell would be fine, but me? There was too much Loxley blood in me, they said, and they’d be damned if any profit from Crook’s Farm would go to a Loxley. And then I remembered where I could get some payment of my own—where I could get what I was owed.’

  ‘But we were… intimate… long before this came along,’ he said. ‘We’d been having sex as brother and sister, oh God, for weeks before all this happened.’

  Roisin attempted a smile, and looked at him. ‘Strange things happen to you when you’ve been outcast, abused, and tormented your whole life. Your requirements are… different.’

  Thor felt a strange sympathy for her, an unwanted empathy. Despite all she had done, her story was sad. The unhappy tale of a child who needed love and care but was given neither, and became a product of her own environment, her own imaginings, and her own twisted needs.

  ‘Roisin, how did you think you were going to get away with this?’ he said.

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know. Rue and that husband of hers were doing all the leg work. I was just making sure you were in the right place at the right time, playing my role and waiting for a cheque. You just kept messing it up for them, and I’m afraid they weren’t the best accomplices.’

  Thor looked at Rue again. Her face was talcum-powder pale. Her decision to betray Thor had ultimately cost her her life.

  ‘And the more messed up it got,’ continued Roisin, ‘the more we had to create this war between the two families to keep things going, keep putting you in harm’s way and distract you from it. The bottom line was, you had to end up dead. It didn’t matter how it happened. I just had to keep getting you to the right spot for it to happen, and keeping my innocence obvious.’ ‘So your kidnap. All staged?’

  ‘When you’d fled the police and were on your way over, you’ve no idea how hard it was to run up those stairs without anybody seeing me, t
ie myself to that radiator, bash myself up and piss myself. If you’d bothered to check, you’d have noticed it was still warm.’

  ‘I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been,’ said Thor, bowing his head. ‘In truth, neither could we.’

  Headlights swung beyond the glass. No sirens, just the swish of water.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Roisin said, with abstract wistfulness, ‘I’d sort of been looking forward to the end.’

  The car stopped and the engine died. They heard footsteps slosh their way closer, and the door was booted open. A voice boomed in with the night.

  ‘Have you seen this? She’s his fucking sister!’

  Barry Turner bellowed in disgust as he entered, holding Thor’s envelope out in front of him, but he was rooted to the spot by the scene that lay before him. Thor, Roisin, his wife dead in a torrent of blood. He let out a guttural cry, long and painful, his voice shredded by the end of it.

  Roisin simply sat next to the body, curling her knees up to her chest. She still looked vulnerable, almost innocent, but Thor knew nothing could be further from the truth. Darkness lurked in the strangest places, not least in the people in this room.

  Barry went to Rue’s side and tried to mop the blood off her with abject futility, as if he could somehow funnel it back into the wound in her neck. He got frustrated as the blood kept leaking through his fingers, making more of a sticky mess. His breathing become more ragged and frantic, and he started to howl again, like a wolf.

  But he was cut short by Roisin suddenly plunging the knife into

  his neck.

  Barry threw himself at Roisin, who tumbled back into the back corner of the caravan as she struggled to keep the knife in place. For the caravan, the sudden shift in weight had a dramatic effect, and began to lean slowly towards the corner in which Barry and Roisin had fallen. They all froze, Barry hunched over Roisin somehow still with a knife in his neck.

  The caravan teetered back, not quite making it level. Thor heard a couple of loud crunches outside, which jolted the flimsy shell of the caravan.