‘Open up, John! You know why we’re here!’ the man called.
Of course there was no answer. Daddy, as we knew, was not there.
‘Open up, John!’ called another from behind the bulldog man, encouraged by his companion’s engagement. His accent was from north of here: still England but near the Scottish border.
Taking courage, the other men came closer to the house and some started beating on the walls and windows. A pane of glass smashed as one man tapped it too hard with his bat. He jumped back from the scene, shocked. Everybody was on edge. I could feel it.
A man in a grey tracksuit with soft blonde hair and a mawkish face, who could not have been much older than Cathy, went over to the man with bulldog shoulders, who appeared to be in charge. ‘I don’t think he’s in, Doug,’ said the mawkish man.
‘Not answering his door more like. Holed up inside there with the kids, he is.’
‘None of us can see owt through the windows. There’s no sign of them.’
‘So you want us to just leave it, do you?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘You want us to go back to Price empty-handed. Do you think that’ll go well for us?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying. If they’re not there, there’s nowt we can do, is what I’m saying.’
‘We better check,’ another man called from around the other side of the house. I could not see him, only hear his voice.
‘That’s right,’ said the man with bulldog shoulders. ‘We’d better check.’
He went back to the front door and started beating at the lock with his crowbar. Others went to the windows and smashed the glass, deliberately this time. I became aware of Cathy at my side. She was flexing the muscles in her arms and thighs as if ready to leap but her fists were clenched tight around the uncovered roots of a large ash, holding her to the ground. Impetuous as she was, at least she had the sense not to run at them. I considered doing something small to reassure her – to remind her that I was still there. My right hand hovered for a moment at the crook of her elbow but I thought better of it. Her whole body was held taut like a hunting trap, and any touch, no matter how slight, might set her off. We had to wait it out.
Our front door was made of oak and it held fast even when attacked at its weakest point. He tried the corners, but still it held. Had Cathy and I been inside we could have locked the extra bolts that Daddy had fitted – for situations like this, no doubt – but as it was, the single lock, fixed from the outside, was enough.
Until they brought out the battering ram, that was. Police issue, by the look of it. Wielded by four men, the door frame came away from the wall and fell to the floor with a single, ponderous thud. The wood was too heavy to bounce. And then they were inside, and we could no longer see them apart from the two stationed at the door, keeping watch.
We heard them well enough. They set about tearing up our things and smashing furniture, some of which I had made with my own two hands.
Cathy remained as she was, poised. But I turned away, confident that they would not hear the undergrowth rustle as I turned my back on them and sat in the moss looking instead into the depths of the copse.
I do not know how long the men stayed inside destroying our things and ripping at the guts of our house but they were quiet when they had finished. A job well done. They came outside and lingered only to catch their breaths before filtering back into the two vans. One started up and accelerated immediately but paused when the driver saw he was not being followed by the other vehicle. A head was poked out the window to check on the situation but he must have been waved on by the driver of the second van because he soon tucked himself back into his cabin and started up again. As the first van sped out of sight, the driver of the second got out, walked around to the front and opened up the bonnet. There was a problem with the engine. I could smell it now: a faint dark smoke had drifted towards us in the trees and had just now reached my nostrils. Burnt oil. As he worked at the engine Cathy kept her eyes fixed upon him like a lion in the scrub watching gazelle.
I was looking out towards the house when I heard the strike at Cathy’s head. It was an unfamiliar sound and so close, simultaneously soft and chafing like a football bouncing on gravel. Then Cathy’s head was in the dirt. I looked down and saw her: I did not look up to see the man who had struck her. She coughed into the loose soil and it kicked back a cloud of umber. She was not unconscious but, a moment later, I was.
Chapter Twenty
I woke in her arms. Cathy had placed my head on her lap and she was cradling it. I felt something cold and wet on my forehead. She mopped my brow with a towel then my cheeks and lips. She had lifted a bottle of water and, seeing that my eyes had opened, she raised my head, put the bottle to my mouth and urged me to drink. The shock of the cold water made my head feel worse but I soon discovered how thirsty I had been. Feeling well enough to raise my arm, I took the bottle myself and finished it then considered that I should have perhaps left some for her.
‘I’ve already drunk,’ she said, reading my thoughts. ‘You’re fine.’
My head was far from fine. I did not need to touch it to check for blood. I could smell it on my face.
‘They got us, then,’ I said.
‘Looks like it.’
‘Where are we?’
‘They put us in a van and brought us out to a farm. Mr Price’s, I think. They locked us in a shed round the back of the house, near a big barn. I was awake the whole time. You were out cold.’
I shuffled my body into a more comfortable position.
‘There’s a load of them,’ she said. ‘Too many for Daddy. Perhaps.’
‘Is Daddy here?’ I asked.
‘Not yet.’ Cathy was still holding her hope out in front of her for all the world to see. I had swallowed mine.
I looked around. The shed would have been completely dark but for a thin row of windows just beneath the corrugated iron roof. There were shelves containing stacks of cardboard boxes, canisters and plastic bottles. Garden twine, sheets of bubble wrap, pull-ties, paraffin. That sort of thing. The floor was mucky and covered with pelts of green AstroTurf, which were mucky too. In one corner there was a table laden with nursery plants, little shoots of something or other poking out of their individual black pots.
‘Did you kill that boy, Cathy?’
She had been busy rearranging the folds and creases in her jeans and did not look across. We were sat right next to each other on the mucky floor and I could hear her halt her breath but she did not look across.
‘I don’t mind if you did,’ I continued. ‘It’s nowt to me. You’re my sister and I love you. I have believed everything you’ve ever said and I will believe everything you ever will say. And if you did it there was reason, even if that reason was just that you wanted to. It’s nowt to me. You’re my sister.’
She still did not look across. Nor did she speak. I put my hand around her shoulder.
‘There was nowt else I could do,’ said Cathy. ‘I wandt strong enough to just push him off. If I’d fought him just to put him down on the ground long enough that I could get away, he would have just got straight back up and caught me again. He was so much bigger than me. So much stronger. If I had fought by any kind of rules I would’ve lost. It’s just like Daddy’s always said. If I’d slapped him round the face or punched him he would have slapped and punched me harder. If I’d grappled with him, he would have had me. Of course he would have. That’s the way it goes. He’s a boy, growing into a man, and I’m a girl, growing into a woman. The only thing I could do was to pretend – for just a moment – that that’s not how the game is played. You woundt understand.’
‘I would. I do. Please tell me.’
‘I just. I just knew that the only way I could regain any kind of control over it all – over myself, my body, the situation – was if that control was complete. My action had to outweigh anything he might do by such a long way that he woundt even have the chance to act. Bec
ause, with the way things were set up between us, he had many chances; I had one. So I took it. It was like everything inside me came together in one moment to a single point and that point was my clasped grip around his throat. I held him like that, tightly, for minutes and minutes. Long after he was dead. I had to make sure. Like I said, I had one chance.’
‘I didn’t even know he was there at the racecourse,’ I said. ‘Either of Mr Price’s sons. I handt thought on him much since all this, not since they came to see us that time, and I took them around the copse.’
‘I suppose you woundt. I dindt say anything about it and there’s been other things to think about. He’d been having a go for a while though. You know I dindt like staying at Vivien’s for her lessons so I used to go outside and go round about. I’d go for walks and sometimes just sit beneath a tree or whatever or I’d go and see if I could spot some birds. Just to occupy myself, you know. I were never much into what you and Vivien like. Reading and that. So that’s what I did. Although I’d find myself interrupted by those lads, Tom and Charlie. It happened once that they were out with their dogs and guns and the dogs found me lying on my stomach by a fox den, waiting to see the kits. I’d been going to that spot for a few days, after I’d seen where the den was and that the fox – the dog fox – was going back and forth with food, like it would if it was bringing it home for a suckling vixen. I’d been waiting there for the last few days for the chance of seeing something. And then I heard the hounds howling, coming towards me. I thought they’d got the scent of the foxes, maybe they had, they would have flushed it for the lads to shoot. But then they got my scent and came at me and I jumped up from the grass and Tom had his gun pointed in my direction. I thought he were going to shoot. Maybe that’s what he wanted me to think. And the dogs were all yapping and sniffing round me like it was my scent they’d been given all along. Tom lowered his gun and they came forward. They wanted a chat, they said. I gave them what they wanted, answered their stupid questions, laughed at their stupid jokes. Then I told them after a while that I had to get home and they seemed okay with that. Only they found me again a few days later. And then again.’
Cathy was hunched over her knees. She rested her chin on one and put her hands on her shoes to play with the laces. ‘And well,’ she said, ‘that’s how it went.’
‘Why dindt you say owt to Daddy?’
‘Because it were my thing. It were my problem to deal with. I can’t always go to Daddy whenever anything happens. I have to be able to deal with things by myself.’
‘But not this.’
‘Yes this. Yes this. This were my part of it. Daddy had other stuff to deal with. Daddy and Ewart and the others had to do what they were doing. The Prices were coming at us from all sides and this was my part. And Daddy won’t always be around. And even if he is, it is my life and my body and I can’t stand the thought of going out into the world and being terrified by it all, all o’ the time. Because I am, Danny, I am. And I don’t want to be. I don’t want to feel afraid. All I kept thinking about was Jessica Harman, thrown into that canal, and all those other women on the TV, in newspapers, found naked, covered in mud, covered in blood, blue, twisted, found in the woods, found in ditches, never found. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about them. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about how I’m turning into one of them. I’m older now and soon my body will be like theirs. I dindt want to end up in a ditch. I dindt want that any more than you want to be a fighting man like Daddy, or a labouring man, out sorting potatoes on a farm all day until your limbs get caught and broken and chopped in the dirty machinery, dirty iron and dirty steel. We all grow into our coffins, Danny. And I saw myself growing into mine.’
I took hold of my sister’s hand. The light seeping into our jail from the high windows darkened as she spoke, filtered by a sombre parade of ashen clouds. It had been hot for days. Hot and humid and dense and now the engulfing heavens were trapping the heat within like the stone lid over a sarcophagus.
Chapter Twenty-One
We remained in the shed for at least a day, a night, and another day, but we slept for much of it, curled together like caterpillar and leaf. Food was brought. Bread and jam at breakfast, a couple of microwave pizzas in the evening. We had not eaten anything like it for months, not since school dinners. I was not used to so much white bread. My insides ached. And they were tight with nerves.
Neither of us recognised the men who brought the food. They were different each time. They shuffled in, placed the tray down, then they left. I looked behind them through the opened door to the outside on each occasion but noted nothing. Each vista was a quiet simulacrum of the last: duller, hazier, but no significant alterations. From these brief glimpses of outside I could gauge no movement, no changes to provoke either concern nor hope.
In the evening of the second day, three men came to the shed. The bolts were shunted open and the key turned in the lock. They waited outside.
‘You’re to come,’ said one. He stood in the middle, slightly forward of the other two.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Cathy.
‘You’re to come, that’s all. You’ll find out soon enough, young lady.’
Neither Cathy nor I moved.
‘You’ll be coming either way,’ said the man. He was trying to menace but it was clear he had no real power. Such things can easily be discerned from very little contact. The merest waver in a man’s voice, the smallest declination of the eyes to the floor, a look of minute sympathy. He said, ‘You’ll be coming the easy way or the hard way.’
‘Right. Yeah. Well. You could just tell us where we’re going then we’d probably come, woundt we?’
The man in the middle looked to either side for support. One of them shrugged. The other just stared at Cathy.
‘We’re taking you up to see Mr Price.’
‘Right then,’ said Cathy. ‘In that case, we’re definitely coming.’ She got up and I followed. ‘Was that the easy way?’ she asked as we stepped across the threshold.
He might have given her a clip round the ear but I could tell he was afraid. She was nothing to him in size, of course, but my sister always had a certain manner. There’s power in the truth. In saying what you really mean. In being direct.
We walked with the three men through the back garden. There were further outhouses, a network, for tools, for boots, for guns. We weaved through vegetable patches and greenhouses, other potting sheds. The men did not lead us into the house but around it, on a thin gravel path that skirted the outer wall. We came to the front of the house and to an oval forecourt that stood before the steps up to the grand double front doors. Seven or eight vehicles, of different sorts, were parked around. I recognised Mr Price’s Land Rover, and his Jaguar. There were the Transit vans, and also a pick-up truck with a dirty tarpaulin flung over something bulky in the back.
Another group of men, possibly fifteen, were huddled. Hands in the pockets of dark jackets, all. Mr Price was among them, centred, gazing out towards the perimeter of his property, where an emerald hedge stood high.
The doors of the van we had come down in were open. Its engine was choking. The air around was black with exhaust. The stench hit my nostrils.
Mr Price glanced over at us and quickly away. His face looked hard worn, steadfast.
We were led to the van and bundled in the back.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘Where’re you taking us?’
‘Up back to yours, via a stop on the way,’ said the man.
‘Back to ours?’
‘We’ve found your Daddy.’ He winked and grinned with teeth then slammed the van door tight shut, soaking us in a stiff darkness.
Cathy, with a sudden panic, ran to the door and rattled the steel with her fists. ‘Let us out!’ She hammered. ‘Let us out!’
I remained where I was, and held firm to the side of the van. The choking engine spluttered and caught and the van rolled then jolted then accelerated sharp. Cathy fell back and winded herself. I held
on but grazed my elbow on something sharp. I felt a moisture in the crook of my right arm. It could have been blood or it could have been sweat. It was too dark to see.
Cathy coughed and caught her breath as the van hurtled forwards. I shuffled my feet apart to balance as the floor rattled beneath us. The roads and lanes round here were rutted after years of frosts and thaws and disrepair. I thought I heard dogs howling in the distance. They could have been ours. I had not seen Jess and Becky since they had run out of the house and down the hill. They often went roaming round about, but usually they found their way home.
We had not gone all that far when the van shuddered to a halt. Men leapt out. Shouting. Doors slammed. The sound of men running on grass and tarmac and gravel.
Cathy crawled to the door of the van where there was a slight crack in the rubber seal. She angled her nose against the metal in such a way that her eye was more or less aligned with the crack.
‘Can you see much?’ I whispered.
She rearranged her body, tilted her head, and looked out again.
‘I don’t recognise the place.’
There was more shouting. No words clear enough to make out. But there was much in the tone. An anger. A brutal excitement.
Cathy shuffled away from the door and sat. I could see her outline, dimly. It was too dark to see features or expression but I knew her well enough to recognise when she was afraid. Her ribs shuddered as she breathed. She was still such a little thing.
‘I don’t feel good about this, Daniel. If you get the chance to get out of this, take it. Go, run, and don’t look back.’
‘I woundt leave you.’
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