She’ll be grateful, he thinks.
No, no, no.
He pays for them anyway and trudges back along the hard shoulder, round the final bend, to find the car with Emily still inside it. She has a newspaper spread over the wheel. He opens the passenger door, fuel can in hand, and says, ‘Success.’
She smiles gratefully, and he knows she was worried he might not come back.
‘What’s a breed of large penguin?’ she asks.
‘Sorry?’
She taps the newspaper. ‘I’m struggling. Seven letters.’
‘Emperor,’ he says.
The word, right there: how heartening!
It’s an old car. She has to climb out and unlock the petrol cap with a key. Joseph would have done it for her, but now she’s beside him, solemnly listening to the glugging as he tips the fuel into the hole.
‘You’re in some sort of trouble, aren’t you.’
The last drops drain from the spout.
He screws down the lid.
‘Trouble or not,’ he says, ‘you needn’t worry. You should have enough petrol now to get you home, and I can make my own way from—’
‘No,’ she says, cutting him off. ‘I was going to say the opposite. You’re welcome to come with me, to my house. Rest, have something to eat, see if you can’t find a way to solve your … problem. That is, if you don’t have to go to Southampton straight away. You’ve done me a favour.’ She nods at the fuel can. ‘I’d like to do the same.’
47
They found out later that the woman with the blood-matted hair, the children’s mother, was called Katja, and that her friend with the singed shawl was in fact her sister, the children’s auntie, Anis. When Katja walked towards the house Anis followed. That didn’t surprise Joseph as much as the fact that Lancaster went with them, but he did, leaving Joseph no choice but to tell Reid, who already had his rifle trained on the house with his good arm, to cover him while he went too.
Those yards between the gate and the front step: bloody hell!
Each step was an invitation.
You got Reid in the arm and me in the neck.
Why not finish the job!
But it didn’t happen. They made it to the front door un-shot-at.
Once through it, the first thing Joseph saw – because how could he miss it? – was a decorative swipe of blood stretching along the parquet floor of the hall.
Though Lancaster told her to wait, Katja followed it straight into the back yard, leaving footprints as she went. Joseph and Lancaster held back to clear the house, room by room. It was empty. Making it likely Lancaster had hit the gunman, who’d dragged himself bleeding outside. If there’d been others, they’d fled too.
The bedroom with the blown-out window smelled all wrong. It took Joseph a moment to work out why: as well as hitting the gunman one of Lancaster’s bullets had struck a can of hairspray on the dressing table by the back wall. Joseph was about to pick it up when a terrible wailing started behind the house.
He followed Lancaster downstairs and outside to find Anis holding Katja in the doorway of a brick outbuilding, both women wailing because of what they could see inside. Some twenty yards beyond them lay the gunman, still alive, propped against a bale of chicken wire. He had dropped his pistol. Joseph picked up the gun and shoved it into his webbing and stood over the man for a moment. He wasn’t going anywhere. Given that, Joseph had no choice but to join Lancaster and the women by the brick shed.
Dead children: he knew that’s what he would see, but he hadn’t expected it would be like this.
The outbuilding contained some sort of bakery. There was a calendar on the wall turned to February, the wrong month, depicting an Alpine-looking chalet in thick snow, and there were sacks of flour on the floor, and a rack of metal cooling trays stood next to one wall, opposite a row of kitchen units topped with a long stainless-steel work surface. Squat in the middle of the room, planted on the brick floor, stood a huge oven. A homely light shone from inside, illuminating four small feet, blackened and split and pressed up against the door glass.
Before he knew what was happening, Katja had broken free of her sister, who had in fact been holding her back, and she made it to the oven. Heat billowed from within as she opened the door. Joseph took a step away and Lancaster told her to stop but of course she didn’t. She burned herself pulling the first child out, shrieked, couldn’t hold onto the corpse, dropped it hard on the brick floor. The head was canted back, mouth prised open, stopped with something round. Katja took whatever it was out and threw it to one side. The object rolled towards Joseph. It was an apple.
‘Damn,’ said Lancaster. ‘Unbelievable.’
Despite the burning heat Katja hauled the other body out of the oven as well.
Joseph, soldier in charge, just stood there.
Look!
An apple in this one’s mouth, too.
What’s happened here?
The answer’s pretty obvious!
Go on, then, spit it out.
Somebody had killed these children and cooked them, or worse, put them in the oven alive.
Now here was Katja, with her bloodied head and burnt hands in her lap, her two dead children curled black on the floor in the doorway of the hut.
Joseph could feel his back teeth flexing in his jaw; the torn skin on the side of his neck was smarting now, a richly deserved sharpness!
One of the children was twisted backwards, a balletic little shape, while the other’s fists were tight black balls.
Joseph, man of action, shut the oven door.
Well done, very good.
Next, he picked up two empty hessian bags from a storage bin under the window and laid them over the children’s bodies, careful, though he didn’t know why, to arrange them writing-side down.
‘Unbelievable,’ Lancaster said again.
‘Can you stop saying that.’
‘But, Jesus. What do you think makes a person decide this is the thing to do?’
Later, they found out: Katja and Anis’s younger brother had killed the Bosnian baker’s wife and three children eighteen months beforehand. He shot out the windscreen of the wife’s car as she was approaching a pontoon bridge. All four of them drowned upside down in the frozen river, and though Katja’s brother had since died himself, his roasted nephew and niece were somebody’s idea of revenge.
48
He accepts Emily’s offer of help, since … he just does.
She drives them to her house, a square-set child’s drawing with roses wired to the brickwork, a spider plant on a window sill in the kitchen, and photographs – of Geoffrey and his children, presumably – all over the walls.
There’s a collection of wind-up toys in the fireplace next door, some of the toys without keys, and a pleasant smell of cedar logs when he bends to look more closely at: what’s this?
A tin monkey frozen mid-drumbeat.
The manic expression on its face!
Emily explains her husband made these toys in his retirement, and because he seems interested, she shows Joseph his workroom with all the tools still laid out, screwdrivers and Allen keys and miniature spanners, pliers, a tiny hammer, all as he left them.
They return to the kitchen to sit at the dark wood table, on which Emily places a cold ham with a rind of yellow breadcrumbs, Stilton, pickles, and … a pair of Pot Noodles, at odds in their midst.
They eat in silence, Joseph seriously considering explaining his missing status, what he’s done to the bank, Lara, Zac, the goddamn unopened letter in his satchel, all of it, and so on. But he can’t quite begin, and opts for: ‘This is very kind of you,’ instead.
‘There was a time, after the divorce, when I thought Geoffrey might do something stupid. He was that low.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s a mother’s worst nightmare.’
Joseph thinks of his own mother. The Green Party flyers on her sideboard, ready for her to push through letterboxes, whatever the weather; her booksh
elves piled higgledy-piggledy with gardening manuals, self-help books and detective fiction. That murdering idiot, Tristan.
‘What turned him around?’
‘A British Gas engineer. I know, it sounds stupid, but his boiler broke down and the engineer who came to mend it fixed him, too. The gas man was retraining to be a counsellor, saw something strange in Geoffrey’s demeanour, asked him if he wanted to talk about it. And he did. And it worked.’
‘I see.’
‘I couldn’t help him myself. I was part of the problem just because I was me. He couldn’t admit how low he was to his own mother. It’s just the worst, that your child might do that to themselves, isn’t it?’
Joseph nods.
‘Anyway.’ She pauses, clears the plates, says finally: ‘He’s all right now.’
‘Good.’
She’s sweet: she’s trying to tell him that it will all be all right in the end. Geoffrey the dentist pulled through. He will, too. Possibly Geoffrey’s low point didn’t involve a $1.34 billion crime, a hammerhead called Lancaster, and a memory that just won’t go away.
49
Somebody’s idea of revenge.
Wasn’t it obvious whose?
Joseph walked away from the two women, the two corpses, Lancaster, and the pervasive horrible burning smell, knelt down and dry-retched over a flowerbed with no flowers in it. He shut his eyes and tried to imagine he was somewhere else but that was never going to work; the next time he opened them a string of saliva connected him to the turned earth. He stood up.
‘It is, though, isn’t it,’ said Lancaster behind him. ‘Unbelievable.’
Over Lancaster’s shoulder the man he had shot sat slumped against the chicken wire, going nowhere slowly.
‘I’ll sort this,’ Joseph said.
‘What?’
Joseph, moral crusader, could hear himself breathing fast. He looked out across the scrubby hedge at the unplanted field and trees beyond it. There were knots of birds in the upper branches. Roosting crows perhaps. No, they weren’t big enough. Starlings.
‘Save the children,’ Joseph said. ‘Peacekeeping.’
‘Sit down, Joe. Put your head between your knees. You look like crap.’
‘Somebody did this.’
‘No shit.’
‘Him.’ Joseph pointed to the man sitting by the chicken wire.
‘Possibly.’
‘It was him.’
‘Maybe. Come on, Joe.’
Joseph pointed to the women. ‘Best get them inside.’
‘Take it easy,’ said Lancaster. ‘I’ll radio this in.’
‘No.’
Lancaster took off his helmet and passed his hand over his head, his cheek, his chin. His face was pink. Never mind the dusting of stubble, he suddenly looked young for his age, which was pleasing. All that competence was just an act: he was as clueless as the next man when push came to shove. Joseph was the next man. No, no, no. He pointed at the women again. ‘Just get them out of here,’ he said.
‘Calm down.’
‘I am calm,’ said Joseph evenly, walking towards the man.
‘Okay, but slow down. Wait.’
Joseph paused and pointed at the women again. ‘I am waiting.’
‘Okay. Good.’
Lancaster squatted next to Katja and Anis and took his time encouraging them inside. He pointed at the sacks on the floor and said, ‘We’ll bring these to you.’ The word ‘these’ was obscenely unspecific. By the time Lancaster had ushered the women inside, Joseph’s breathing was steady again.
50
Joseph excuses himself to use the bathroom; when he returns to the kitchen Emily is nowhere to be seen.
He waits.
Where the hell is she?
He should leave.
But he doesn’t want to, and doesn’t quite know why.
He pulls on his boots, opens the back door, and finds Emily at the bottom of the garden. She’s wearing a headscarf, an old Barbour, and she has tucked her slacks into wellies. She’s also holding a crowbar in one hand. If the clothes fitted her once, she’s shrunk within them over time.
‘Something’s up with the drain,’ she explains. ‘We’re not on the mains. The septic tank is ancient but I had it emptied not long ago. Sometimes the sump bit leading to it gets blocked.’
Joseph looks around and sees a row of neatly pruned fruit trees, a compost heap, a squirrel running along a distant fence top.
‘The sink wouldn’t empty,’ Emily goes on. ‘My husband was a practical man. He used to sort of jab at the hole under here to get it going again.’
Joseph holds out his hand for the crowbar.
‘First the petrol, now this: I couldn’t possibly let you,’ she says, but allows him to take it from her anyway.
‘This thing?’ He sticks the point of the iron into the soddenness surrounding the slab and works it upwards, not particularly wanting to see what’s beneath it. Scummy liquid full of peelings and worse swimming in a hole which, when he prods it, has some sort of fibrous mass stuck deep inside. He jabs harder at the obstruction. Here’s a good deed. Costs nothing! If he can just gouge and thump and break apart the crap in the bottom of the hole all will be well. Sure, some of it is spattering back up at him, and Emily is telling him to stop, but he’s started and he’s bloody well going to finish.
Thump, spatter, thrust, fleck, twist.
He’s not done anything like this for years!
A good old physical problem.
Solved!
With a sucking sound the watery sludge in the drain suddenly drops away.
‘There!’ he says.
‘Your clothes.’
He looks down at the mess.
‘You’ll have to let me wash them.’
‘I’ve really got to get going.’
‘But look at you! You have to clean yourself up.’
She’s almost scolding him.
It’s sweet.
She’s also right: his clothes are properly filthy now, and he stinks.
So he complies. He allows her to lead him indoors, loan him her dead husband’s dressing gown, and use the plastic, avocado-coloured bathtub, while she runs his clothes through the washing machine.
He lowers himself into the foam, slides beneath it and resurfaces, thinking: baptised. After he’s scrubbed himself, the bubbles are grey and there’s a scum line round the sides of the bath. He lies there thinking would he, Joseph Ashcroft, ever let a stranger use his bathroom, or feed them a Pot Noodle, or indeed offer them a lift?
No. He would not.
But an elderly woman has done all this for him, partly, at least, because she wants to help him sort himself out again.
In fact, she’s prepared to do more.
She’s made him a cup of tea to drink, in her husband’s dressing gown, at the kitchen table, and says, ‘Your clothes will take time drying. I made the bed up in the spare room. You’re exhausted. I’ll show you where it is. Have a lie-down. If Southampton can wait, that is.’
Joseph lets her lead the way, thinking: it’s a funny old ___.
No, no, no.
Funny old ___.
World.
The bed is cool, its sheets thin. He slides in delicately: a misplaced heel might tear this old clean sheet. She’s put a glass of water on the bedside table. That’s what he’s talking about: kindness.
He holds the glass up, watches bubbles rise within. Then he puts it down again, leans back, shuts his eyes, and sleeps soundly.
51
More or less.
There’s just the memory of the dying seagull to deal with first. He found it in the back garden when he was nine, hanging at head height in a bush. His football had rolled into the flowerbed and he didn’t notice the bird as he stretched beneath the bush to retrieve it, but as he stood up it was just there, its blank eye an inch from his face. He jumped back. Yuck! The seagull didn’t flap or screech. So was it dead? No. He stared at its downy blue-white breast feathers, slate stri
pe along one wing, the edge almost green, and saw the beak open and close slowly. Then the wing scissored forward. The bird looked mechanical almost, but wasn’t. It was alive, dying. How long would that take? And how had it got there in the first place? Couldn’t just have fallen out of the sky, could it? Impossible to say. Joseph wanted to take the bird out of the bush and end its misery but he didn’t know how. He was frightened. He took his football inside and spent the afternoon trying not to think about the seagull, and the next time he went into the garden, it was gone.
But the injured man slumped against the bale of chicken wire, well, he was still there when Lancaster returned, and Joseph was still staring down at him, remembering that seagull for no good reason at all, except the obvious one.
‘What were you thinking?’ Joseph asked.
The man took a breath but didn’t answer. Probably couldn’t. The entire left side of his body – coat, jeans, even his one muddy trainer (how had the other one come off?) – was stained with blood so dark it looked black, yet both the hand pressed against his chest and the exposed side of his neck below his beard were bright red with it. Now the man twisted his head up a little, trying to see Joseph perhaps, but he couldn’t turn his neck far enough to pull the manoeuvre off.
Poor guy: very shot!
Joseph crouched over the man. ‘Can’t answer?’ he said.
A bluebottle landed on the shot man’s collar. Joseph waved it away for him, stood up, had a little walk around, stopped to look at him again. He was a chunky man, barrel-chested, broader across the shoulders than Joseph, powerfully built. But who was he? A baker. With an oven. Perhaps he’d grown so strong lifting bags of flour? Or maybe he wrestled, wearing tights? Or lifted weights. Or swam a lot. Yes, he was on the local water polo team. Not just on it, he coached it, and coached young children to swim as well, taught them how to swivel their hands when doing backstroke, dip their little fingers into the water first, keep their hips up, their arms straight. A community-minded sportsman. What’s more, the curve of that nose looked intelligent, which meant he had also been to university, to study economics perhaps, or political theory. No, that didn’t fit with the being a baker bit. Or did it? Probably he was offered a place but couldn’t go, what with the war and so forth.
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