Remains

by Cull, Andrew;

  Once he’d been given the all clear by the CSU unit, Detective Bob Taylor had gone from room to room drawing all the curtains, closing off the house from the outside world. What had happened here was unthinkable. It wasn’t for reporters and freaks to ogle and rubberneck. He’d never tell Matt and Lucy everything he’d witnessed that night. He’d never be able to forget it either. He was trying to contain the horror. To deny and lock away that terrible blood-soaked room. He couldn’t be responsible for it escaping into the world. No one else should ever have to experience what he’d seen.

  Before Alex’s murder, 1428 Montgomery had been a family home. Ted Lowe, his wife Ann, and their two kids, Todd and Anna, had been on holiday when Alex was snatched. There seemed to be no connection between Alex’s kidnapper and the Lowes’ house. In the end, the police concluded it was likely sick chance. As simple as Alex’s kidnapper seeing the Lowes leaving for their trip alerting him to the house being empty. It was possible he’d passed the house a day later to check there was no one home, but that sighting had been unreliable at best. When he’d returned next, it had been with Alex.

  They knew the kidnapper wrapped Alex in a blanket, possibly from the trunk of his car. They’d found fibres caught in what remained of Alex’s throat when they’d carried out the autopsy.

  Lucy hurried across the lounge, heading for the large bay window. A lone chair, with its high back to her, stood on the far side of the room. Lucy tore the curtains wide. Shadows scattered like startled birds, chased back to the edges of the room by the evening sun.

  The fading light wouldn’t keep them at bay for long.

  Lucy leaned against the window, her breath blasting on the glass, as she fumbled to open the catch. Finally, she threw the window open and stood sucking in the cold evening air, trying to clear her lungs of the dust and the sickening smell, trying to stem the rising panic that was close to overcoming her. No matter what she’d told herself, she wasn’t ready for this place.

  The Lowes hadn’t spent another night in the house after Alex’s murder. It had been cleared by a removal firm, each room hastily packed into crates except—if you believed the stories—the room where Alex was murdered.

  After what had happened, it would have been understandable if the Lowes had simply abandoned everything in that room, but rumours had spread that Ted Lowe planned to move the contents of what had been his son Todd’s room, until Detective Taylor met with him and advised him not to. While Bob Taylor cited extensive damage as the reason for not claiming Todd’s belongings, various websites had quoted a leak from the department with a different story: there was just too much blood. The injuries to the bodies from the shotgun blasts had been so severe that bodily matter had been cast over everything the Lowes might have wanted to claim. The leak further claimed that, even before he’d spoken to Ted Lowe, Bob Taylor had arranged with the CTS Decon team to have everything in the room removed and destroyed. Just like drawing the curtains, it was another attempt to protect the world from what he’d seen that night. He couldn’t stop the websites from publishing their stories though. And they’d printed far worse in the months leading up to Lucy’s collapse.

  Lucy stood in the window until she felt strong enough to carry on. Her grip on the frame eased as her nausea passed, and the fresh evening air helped wash the taste of dust and panic from her mouth. Outside the day was dying.

  A table had been flipped on its side in the middle of the room and a large ornate mirror hung, dull with dust, reflecting Lucy from the far wall. The shadows had returned, crawling inch by inch across the floorboards, edging closer with each minute the day turned to night.

  Lucy left the window and crossed the living room to the door that she knew led into the dining room. Slightly open, it rocked gently on its hinges, back and forth on the breeze from the window she’d opened. As she left the living room a thought, quiet, like a barely audible voice, entered her mind: she would never leave this place again.

  2

  Each room was the same, half packed as if the removal company had abandoned their work without warning. The chair that faced the wall in the living room, the overturned table, a stack of books in the corner of the dining room, all left behind to rot in the dark. Lucy stepped over an ivy, its pot on its side, a trail of brittle vines reaching out toward the curtained window. Withered limbs trying to make it to the light before they died.

  The track caught Lucy’s eye because it was darker than the rest of the kitchen floor. Cutting through the dust, a thin path weaved across the boards and wound into the wall where it stopped. Lucy traced the trail back from the wall, past her and into the dining room she’d just left. A rat maybe? Had Lawry, not Larry, moved something ahead of her arrival? There weren’t any footprints in the dust. If there were rats, it might go some way to explaining the smell.

  The boy’s face stopped Lucy in her tracks. Smiling from behind the shattered glass, she felt his gaze as sure as if he were in the study with her. The photograph must have fallen from Ted Lowe’s desk when the house was being cleared. It had lodged behind the pipes that fed the radiator. The Lowes must have noticed that the photograph was missing. That hadn’t been enough to draw them back to this place to look for it.

  Lucy knelt down and eased the frame out from behind the pipes. The broken pieces of glass shifted and ground against one another as she lifted the photograph. Gently, she placed it face down on the floor of the study. She couldn’t bear to look at Todd Lowe’s smiling face. His happiness made the insatiable emptiness of her grief claw inside her. There was nothing of her left, but still it hungered for more.

  Room by room, Lucy moved through the ground floor. In truth, she was delaying the inevitable. Too soon she found herself back in the entrance hall with the staircase stretching ahead of her. She wasn’t ready for this. She couldn’t face this.

  “Alex?” she called up the stairs. Please answer me. Don’t make me do this.

  Silence. Lucy wrapped a hand around the bannister and dragged herself onto the bottom stair. Her nausea had returned, her throat was clogged with dust. She couldn’t breathe. Everything had been leading her to this point. She’d seen the figure in the upstairs window, grey against the glass. Upstairs where the monster had dragged her son. Upstairs to the second room along the corridor...

  “Alex!” Please answer me! Please!

  Lucy climbed onto the second stair.

  The phone call had come from a concerned neighbor. Elsa Tan had been woken by what she thought was a gunshot from Ted Lowe’s place. It could have just been a car backfiring but she thought it best to ring it in, “what with the Lowes being away and all”.

  Initially, a patrol car had been despatched to check the house. When they found the front door ajar, Officer Hernandez and his partner had made their way inside.

  Two days after Alex had been found, Bob Taylor sat down with Officer Hernandez and his partner, Officer Abigail Redmond. Neither looked like they’d slept since that night. Redmond cried quietly through the fifteen-minute conversation; and Hernandez was distant, unable to make eye contact. Hernandez and Redmond had given their statements in the hours after they’d discovered Alex. Bob Taylor had tried to make sure they were processed and allowed off duty as quickly as possible. He spoke to their sergeant and they were both placed on leave, pending interviews with a department counsellor. When Bob Taylor had last seen Redmond, she’d been covered in Alex’s blood.

  Before driving to the meeting, Bob Taylor moved from room to room drawing the curtains across all of 1428 Montgomery’s windows. In meeting with Hernandez and Redmond, he was attempting to do the same thing. He asked them, as a favour to him, to never speak of what they’d seen in that room. They couldn’t save Alex, he couldn’t protect them from what they had been through—but they could protect a mother and father who had lost their son. If they ever found out what had really happened … How could any parent survive that?

 
Step by step, Lucy pulled herself up the staircase, up to the second floor and the nightmares that waited for her.

  3

  For almost two months Bob Taylor managed to keep the full details of Alex’s death from the public.

  Officer Hernandez quit the force three weeks after the murders. He confessed to the department counsellor that he’d thought about killing himself. He couldn’t stop reliving what he’d seen. Every night, the faceless boy was waiting for him in the dark.

  “If there was a God he’d have killed that kid straight away! How could he have kept him alive...like that?”

  A month after that meeting, Karen Guzman had followed Lucas Hernan­dez to the bar where he now spent most of his days. She’d kept the drinks flowing until he could barely lift his head. Then she’d convinced him that the only way to stop the broken boy from visiting him each night was to tell her his story. Share his burden. He’d told her everything. He had no idea that she worked for The Post. The next morning the whole world knew all the terrible details that Bob Taylor had fought to keep from them.

  Hernandez and Redmond had found the front door to 1428 Mont­gomery half open. Broken glass had been cast across the hallway floor. A trail of stars, flickering in the beam of Redmond’s torch as she traced it back to one of the stained-glass panes that framed the door. Alex’s kidnapper had smashed it, reached in through the jagged opening and unlocked the door from the inside. The Officers were at the foot of the stairs when Hernandez signalled for Redmond to stop.

  “Can you hear that?” The sound of their movement settled. Redmond had only been on the job for eight months. She leaned into the darkness, eager, alert, trying to pull any sound out of the black. The breathing made her start.

  Wet, gurgling, it came fast and desperate. It filled her with such immed­iate horror that she flung out a hand and grabbed Hernandez’s arm. The sound came again. Wheezing, choking.

  “Oh my God, what is that?”

  Hernandez couldn’t answer her. He’d frozen, his radio inches from his mouth. Any chance he might call for backup stolen by the fear that had seized him. The third time the sound burst from the night, it was a scream.

  Mewling and terrible, like a dying animal, the broken boy cried out—a long, pitiful wail full of pain and fear. Gripping Hernandez’s arm tighter than ever, Redmond began to climb the stairs. Alex screamed again. She pulled herself forward, her mind squirming with awful flashes of what might lay writhing in the darkness ahead.

  “Oh Christ! What is that? Red, what—”

  Another scream cut Hernandez’s rambling short. They had reached the top of the stairs.

  Deeper, darker, further away from the outside world, Lucy reached the second floor. A heavy oak wardrobe stood abandoned at the top of the stairs. Its large door rested ajar, the outline of the mirror it once held burnt into its varnish by years of sunlight. Lucy’s eyes were drawn to the wardrobe’s black innards as she passed it.

  Lucy wrapped her hands together, trying to keep her trembling under control. She might only be a few feet from the answers she sought but she wasn’t sure her body could carry her that far.

  “Alex?” Her voice was rough, small, calling down the corridor, one ghost searching for another.

  In the article Karen Guzman had written after she’d tricked Hernandez, she’d described this corridor with as much lurid detail as she’d afforded every terrible moment of Alex’s death. Guzman had taken her time, describing Hernandez and Redmond’s fearful approach, their twenty steps to the slaughterhouse, relishing building the atmosphere before the main event. Matt blamed that article for pushing Lucy over the edge.

  Because of Guzman, Lucy knew that through the ivory painted door to her left was Ted and Ann Lowe’s bedroom. A large bed still stood in the middle of the room. A white dust sheet thrown over it, it looked more like a tomb in a crypt than a bed in a family home.

  Lucy felt a tear streak her cheek. She’d tried so hard to be strong, dragged herself to this point, but she had nothing left. Please don’t make me do this! The corridor wrapped tightly around her. With every step it seemed to grow smaller.

  Ahead on the right was the second bedroom. Because of Guzman, Lucy knew that Ted and Ann Lowe had recorded Todd’s height on the wall next to the door. The lines were where she expected them to be. A new one for each birthday... 4, 5, 6... Ted had written LITTLE MAN! BIG MAN! GIANT! next to his son’s annual measurements. Lucy gritted her teeth, grinding them, trying to hold herself together. Because of Guzman, she knew that beyond that door was the room where her life had ended.

  4

  She couldn’t do it. After everything, she couldn’t open the door. Even though she knew now, was sure now, that it was in the window of this room she’d seen the grey figure. Pale skin glimpsed just for a moment. Could he really be here?

  “Alex?” Lucy called weakly at the door.

  Don’t make me do this.

  “Alex?” She closed her eyes. Hernandez’s words were waiting for her in the black. If there was a God he’d have killed that kid straight away! How could he have kept him alive...like that?

  Lucy’s fingers closed around the handle and she turned it.

  For nine months the house had whispered; now it screamed. Lucy opened her eyes. She’d read all the articles, hoarded all the words, she knew every detail that Bob Taylor had tried so hard to protect her from, but finally stepping into the room where Alex died crushed her.

  On the far wall, someone had attempted to repair the damage from the gun shot that killed Alex. A large patch of plaster, at what would have been the height of Alex’s head, had been roughly smeared onto the wall. A sob, pure grief torn from her heart, burst from Lucy’s lips.

  She knew the shot had thrown Alex backwards, his tiny body slammed into the wall. Gloss paint had been rolled across the raw plaster, a high shine on an otherwise matte wall. The colours didn’t even match. Lucy staggered across the room, her legs close to giving out beneath her. She stopped in front of the botched repair. Now she was standing over the place where Alex had died. She reached out and touched the rough plaster. Mould had spread through the gloss paint, the truth refusing to be silenced. It had taken forty-five minutes for Alex to die. Redmond had sat with him for over thirty of those minutes. She’d cradled what was left of his skull in her lap, trying desperately to find a way to stem his suffering. Lucy fell to her knees in front of the wall and sobbed.

  Alex had screamed, that awful broken scream, until the paramedics had arrived. They knew they couldn’t move him but they couldn’t treat him either. His wounds were so severe he should have been dead already. Redmond had begged the paramedics to do something. All they could do was inject him with morphine for the pain. He screamed for another fifteen minutes until he finally fell silent. Bob Taylor had arrived at the same time as the paramedics. Once he realized there was nothing that could be done, he’d ordered the room be cleared and had sat with Redmond, Hernandez and Alex. He’d held Alex’s hand and prayed for the end to come quickly.

  How could she not have been there? What sort of mother lets her son die terrified and in agony, surrounded by strangers? Where were you when he needed you? When he screamed for you? Lucy gritted her teeth. Stop crying! She wouldn’t let the pain out. She didn’t deserve to let the pain out. She had to keep her grief inside, inside where it dug and scraped, where it tore and gouged her, every day until her dead heart finally stopped beating. She’d failed him completely and this was her sentence. In her eyes, no amount of pain or suffering could ever make amends for what she’d done.

  Alex wasn’t the only person to die in Todd Lowe’s room that night. Behind Lucy, on the wall by the door, a second patch of raw plaster indicated all too clearly where Alex’s murderer had ended his life. Whoever had carried out the repairs to this room hadn’t even bothered to paint over the second patch.

  In Guzman’s article, she’d d
escribed in vivid detail how Alex’s screams had driven his murderer to put the shotgun in his own mouth. How looking down through the mist of blood that hung in the air, seeing that ripped-apart face looking up at him, possessed him with such guilt that he put the burning hot barrel between his teeth. His hand—slippery with Alex’s blood—found the trigger. The blast emptied his skull, his face collapsing, flames and blood where his eyes should have been. His suffering had ended in an instant.

  Lucy wished he’d hesitated, that he hadn’t been able to go through with it. He should have been made to witness every single moment Alex suffered, to listen to every terrible scream. He should have survived that night so that she could see him, confront him. Every fibre of her wanted to rip and tear at his flesh, to pummel and break him. To crush him. She wanted to hear him scream, to cry out, to beg for his worthless life. Then she wanted to beat him to death with the hands he’d left empty—

  Lucy couldn’t breathe. She could see it all. The air was thick with blood, she could taste the metal in her mouth. There was so much blood! She stumbled for the window.

  She grabbed at the catch and twisted it open. The window wouldn’t budge! It had been painted shut. She tried the smaller one above it, and the one next to it. They’d all been painted shut. Lucy collapsed against the pane. She pressed her face against the cold glass and wept. What had she expected? What had she imagined would happen?

  “Oh, Alex! Where are you?”

  Then Lucy noticed the curtains.

  Bob Taylor had gone from room to room drawing closed all the curtains—she knew that from Guzman’s article. There was no way he would have forgotten the most important room in the house. Lucy stood up. Someone had opened the curtains. Maybe just enough that they would be seen. The grey figure she’d glimpsed two nights ago? She realized she was standing where that figure had stood. Alex? Please let it be true.