by Mark Tufo
Michelle gasped. ‘Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t say things like that in front of the kids. You shouldn’t—’
‘You’re criticising me? Don’t waste your breath,’ Scott cut across her, the contempt in his voice clear. He leant closer so that only she could hear him. ‘I saw everything. I was watching from the moment you went out there. I know what happened. I know what you did, what you wanted to do.’
‘No, Scott, I swear... I didn’t do anything to...’
He grabbed her throat, squeezing tight enough to leave red finger marks, almost choking her but not quite, knowing just the right amount of pressure to apply because he’d done this plenty of times before. ‘Save your breath. Go and see to George and get out of my fucking sight.’
She did as he said, running to the stairs, keen to shield her son from the chaos. On the other side of the kitchen, Tammy straightened herself up, ready to attack Scott again. ‘This is all your fault...’ she started to say. He lifted a hand to hit her and she cowered away, the moment seeming to last forever. He eventually lowered his fist.
‘Get upstairs and get ready for school,’ he said, the unnatural calm in his voice now somehow more frightening than the anger he’d shown seconds earlier.
‘I don’t want to go to school,’ Phoebe sobbed. ‘Not now, not after...’
‘Both of you get upstairs and get ready for school before I really lose my fucking temper. Now!’
They did as they were told, fearing for their safety. Scott could be intimidating at the best of times, right now he was downright terrifying. Neither girl had any doubt he’d hit them if it came down to it. They’d seen what he’d done Mum enough times.
And then they were gone, and he was finally alone, left to try and make some sense of the madness of this morning. He looked out of the window at the pervert lying on the gravel by the side of the family car. What the fuck is wrong with all these people? He was surrounded – both in this house and in this town – by crazy people. What had he done to deserve this? A wife who cheated on him, step-kids who couldn’t stand him... He thought about just getting in the car and going, but that wasn’t going to happen. He had nowhere to go. He checked he’d still got the door key in his pocket, then walked around downstairs and made sure all the other doors and windows were locked too. If I can’t go anywhere, neither can they. Not until I decide.
In frustration, hoping to get rid of some of the pent-up anger festering inside him, Scott picked up the sledgehammer. It was where he’d left it on Sunday evening. He shoved the kitchen table back and began to swing at the hole in the wall. Again and again he swung the hammer at the brickwork, feeling satisfied every time a piece of masonry fell, kicking rubble out of the way so he could keep swinging. He’d thought previously that he might be capable of demolishing this whole bloody house, now he thought he might actually be about to do it.
A frantic few minutes and the hole had almost doubled in size, but it still wasn’t enough. He lifted the hammer to swing it around again, then stopped, feeling like he was being watched. Phoebe was standing in the kitchen doorway, dressed in her school uniform, face white and eyes red. ‘What do you want?’ She was almost too afraid to talk. She fidgeted on the spot, eyes on the sledgehammer, not him. ‘What?’ he shouted at her again, and she jumped at the noise.
‘My dad’s gone,’ she said quietly, wincing in anticipation of his reaction.
‘So? Do you think I give a shit about your bloody father after what he’s done this morning?’
She was crying again now, sobbing hard, shoulders shaking. It was almost impossible to speak between the tears but she made herself do it. ‘Please, Scott... I know what he did but I’m worried...’
‘Then you go and sort him out.’
‘I can’t get out.’
‘I’ll let you out.’
‘I think something’s wrong with him.’
‘I know something’s wrong with him. Sick fucker.’
‘Please, Scott... Please help.’
Scott swung the sledgehammer at the wall again, grunting with effort, then he stopped. He looked over at Phoebe. Was any of this her fault? Her sister was a genuinely spiteful and vindictive bitch, but Phoebe wasn’t. She was just a scared and vulnerable kid who’d already seen things she should never have seen this morning, things which would no doubt scar her for life.
‘His trousers are still in the yard,’ she said, sniffing back more tears. ‘And his pants...’
‘Wait here,’ he told her, deciding he needed to make sure Jeremy was well away from the house. ‘I’ll go and look.’
Scott side-stepped Phoebe then let himself out and locked the door behind him. Phoebe went to the window and watched, keeping out of sight as Scott hunted around the yard, checking under the car and around the side of buildings and walls, like he was trying to find a missing cat... She didn’t know what to do for the best. She couldn’t understand what was happening. She’d seen more than she’d let on, and she didn’t know why her mum and dad had done what they’d done. He’d always been a good dad. He’d always looked out for her and Tammy and Mum, even after they’d split up. He’d always said kind things about her, and had never talked about Scott in the unkind, disrespectful way Scott usually talked about him. But she couldn’t think about Dad like she used to now, because she had an image burned into her head that she couldn’t shake: her own father, lying on his back in the middle of the yard of this horrible grey house, beaten up and bleeding, half-naked and exposed to the world.
She just wanted all of this to stop.
Scott couldn’t find him. Surely the dirty bastard couldn’t have got far? He climbed up onto the stone wall at the end of the drive to get a better view and looked out over the fields on the other side of the road. He could see for miles, but he couldn’t see Jeremy.
He had to have gone back into town. Where else would he be? Scott picked up Jeremy’s trousers so he could sort him out when he finally found him, though he didn’t know why he was bothering. Sick fucker didn’t deserve his help.
Scott walked back to the house then got in the car and drove towards Thussock. The roads were silent today, absolutely no other traffic about. He couldn’t remember having seen a single other vehicle, not that he’d been looking.
When he reached the wooden bus shelter near to the small house where those bizarre twins lived, he slowed down. He could see movement, though he couldn’t quite make out what it was at first. Wait... it looked like someone lying on the ground on the other side of the shelter, feet sticking out but the rest of their bodies obscured by the little wooden building. Hang on, there was more than one person. Had someone else found Jeremy? Were they helping him? He hoped so, because he didn’t want to have to. He decided he’d just make sure it was him, throw the sick fuck his trousers, then go back and tell Phoebe everything was okay, that her dad was fine.
He parked in the bus space in front of the shelter and walked around the Zafira. Then he just stopped, struggling to understand what he was seeing. In spite of everything he’d already witnessed today, what was unfolding in front of him now was bizarre, grotesque and just... wrong. He’d found Jeremy all right, but there was a woman with him. More than just with him, she was astride him. Fucking him. Riding him in broad daylight, neither of them appearing to give a damn about anyone or anything else.
‘What the hell is this?’ he demanded. The woman – who he didn’t recognise – slowly turned her head to face him but didn’t otherwise react, so consumed by what she was doing with Jeremy to care, overcome with pleasure and completely uninhibited. Scott followed a trail back to the bus shelter with his eyes... her shoes, her knickers, the remains of a torn pair of tights... Christ, had this woman just been waiting for a bus when Jeremy came wandering down the road, and had they just decided to fuck on the spur of the moment? It had to have been quick and spontaneous, no time for small-talk or foreplay. Scott almost laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of it all, but the serious implications of what he was see
ing were clear. There was something inherently sinister about this inexplicable public display of base emotion, something clearly unnatural about this most natural of acts. Should he stop it? Try to separate them? Or should he just get back in the car and drive home and pretend none of it was happening?
‘Jeremy, what the hell are you doing?’ he asked, hanging back a short distance, almost too embarrassed to keep watching but unable not to. ‘Do you know what—?’
A howl of pleasure from the woman interrupted him mid-sentence. He watched as she threw her head back and looked up into the swirling white clouds overhead, groaning as she started to cum. Scott stared as she began to experience an orgasm of remarkable intensity, muscles hard in spasm, gripping Jeremy’s shoulders tight. Scott could take no more and he returned to his car, head spinning. He couldn’t understand why such an uptight little idiot as Jeremy would behave this way? He’d always been so reserved, so proper, overly polite... Michelle used to joke about how awkward he’d always been about sex, how it had always been safe and functional with Jeremy. Never spontaneous. Boring, even. Text-book.
Scott was about to get in the car and drive home when he noticed the woman was up and rushing away, running almost, clutching her clothes. She kept looking back over her shoulder. Was she looking at Jeremy, or looking at him? Hurrying away with shame, perhaps? She was still half-naked. Scott almost called out to her, but stopped at the last second because he didn’t know what to say. He felt like he didn’t know anything anymore. Nothing made sense. How could she possibly be embarrassed now after such an exhibitionist performance seconds earlier?
He noticed that Jeremy hadn’t moved.
Scott could still see his feet sticking out from around the side of the bus shelter, one of them twitching. He thought about Phoebe back at the house. How the hell am I going to explain this to her? For a moment he considered taking Jeremy back with him. His mess, his fault. He can do it...
‘Oi, Jeremy,’ he shouted. ‘Get up you useless bastard.’
Nothing.
Had he fallen asleep? Again the immature side of Scott’s character took hold. Michelle was always having a go at him for falling asleep straight after sex, was this just the same thing? Was poor little Jeremy exhausted after all that uncharacteristic exertion? No way. Jeremy was a nervous little shit, scared of his own shadow, terrified of not doing everything ‘by the book’. So why was he still lying there?
He walked around to where the semi-naked man lay on the grass verge, then stopped.
Fuck.
If Jeremy wasn’t already dead, then he would be in the next few minutes... the next few seconds, even. His face was unnaturally pallid. His mouth moved slightly, as if trying to form his final words, and though his eyes looked directly at Scott, he knew they weren’t seeing anything.
There was blood all over the grass: puddles of it under his pale white buttocks, pools forming between his spindly legs, dribbles running down his thighs.
Where the hell’s it all coming from? Did that woman cut him?
Scott gagged when he saw it, almost threw up. The end of Jeremy’s penis looked like it had been torn apart, as if someone had first skewered the hole, then ripped the flesh away in sections like they were peeling a banana. Flaps of skin hung uselessly over the end of the stump from which blood continued to pump in dull spurts, slowing with the weakening pace of Jeremy’s pulse.
And, for the briefest of moments, all Scott felt was relief. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he didn’t care because he immediately knew this was what had happened to Shona McIntyre. This was what he’d seen in all those grotesque photographs that frigging detective had shoved under his nose while he was in custody. This was proof positive to the rest of them that he wasn’t the killer.
The woman.
Was it her?
He reached for his mobile, but stopped. He scanned the horizon looking for the woman and spying her almost out of view, half-running into town. He couldn’t be the one to tell the police, could he? They’d jump to all the wrong conclusions if he admitted to being here. No, Scott knew he had to get away from here fast. He’d phone them from home, let them know what Jeremy had tried to do to Michelle, tell them where he thought he’d gone then let them find him and his fuck-buddy... Better still, maybe he’d stay quiet and plead ignorance and let someone else find the corpse.
He got back into the car, turned a tight circle in the empty road, then drove away at speed.
Chapter 74
‘Well?’ Michelle said. She was in the kitchen, waiting. They all were.
‘Well what?’
‘Did you find him?’
‘No,’ he said, because lying was easier than the truth.
‘But he can’t have just disappeared.’
‘Well I couldn’t find him.’
‘You can’t have looked very hard,’ Tammy said.
‘I looked hard enough.’
‘So what do we do?’ Michelle asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What do you want me to do? I’m not exactly heart-broken, if that’s what you’re thinking. Call the police if it makes you feel better. Tell them he’s disappeared. Tell them he was acting like a fucking freak.’
‘Scott...’
‘Tell them what you like, just don’t involve me. I’m sick of getting dragged into other people’s messes.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Tammy said.
‘No, I’ll do it,’ Michelle said. ‘It’d be better coming from me.’
Tammy followed her out into the living room, leaving Scott with Phoebe. George played on the floor, oblivious to everything.
‘Thanks for looking,’ Phoebe said.
Scott looked at her, confused. ‘What?’
‘I said thanks for looking for Dad.’
He turned away. ‘It’s fine. Sorry I didn’t find him.’
‘He’ll come back later, won’t he?’
Shit. Is she testing me? Does she suspect? ‘Sure he will.’
‘He’s not well, is he? There’s something wrong with him. He must be sick.’
‘He must be.’
Scott went to the bathroom, more to avoid Phoebe than through any real physical need. He leant against the wall, shaking with nerves. What he’d just seen happen to Jeremy made no sense at all, and yet he felt in his gut that it should explain everything. Who was that woman? Was she the cause of all of this? If so, why hadn’t she been seen or caught previously? Was she the killer, or just another victim? Could it be that these weren’t murders, that they were something else entirely? Some kind of infection? A killer STD passed from person to person? He laughed at the ridiculousness of it all, then sat down on the toilet and held his head in his hands, unable to think straight.
When Scott returned to the kitchen, several minutes later, Michelle was back. ‘They won’t do anything,’ she said.
‘Who won’t?’
‘The police. They won’t do anything about Jeremy. They say someone walking off after a fight doesn’t qualify as a missing person.’
‘They’d know. Fucking top-notch police force we’ve got round here.’
Michelle stared out of the window, looking for something to help make sense of this impossible day. Maybe she should go and look for Jeremy herself? She quickly dismissed that idea, knowing full well how Scott would react. Besides, she thought that if she left this house, she might not ever come back, and she couldn’t leave the kids. She glanced up as a convoy of three khaki-coloured trucks thundered past on their way into Thussock. If they’d been going the other way, she thought, I might have thumbed a lift.
This was stupid. They were grown adults. She couldn’t explain how she’d felt around Jeremy this morning – maybe it was just a reaction to how she was beginning to feel around Scott? Anyway, as close as it had been, nothing had happened. She turned around, looking for her husband.
‘We need to talk, Scott.’
‘You need to shut the fuck up and keep out of my sight. You think I want to talk to
you after what’s happened?’
‘Phoebe, would you take George upstairs please,’ Michelle said, undeterred. Phoebe looked from face to face, unsure.
‘But I don’t want to go upstairs.’
‘I need to speak to Scott. Just do it. Please.’
She grudgingly did as she was told, scooping up her little brother and his toys and carrying him out. Scott watched Michelle intently, trying to work what she was thinking, how she thought she was going to worm her way out of this mess. If only she knew what he knew. This inexplicable urge to copulate – first between Michelle and Jeremy, then Jeremy and the woman – was it pheromones or endorphins, he wondered, something like that?
The silence between them was deafening. Michelle didn’t know where to begin. She was starting to wonder if she even wanted to, if it was worth the effort anymore.
‘I’m worried about the girls,’ she said, trying a different tack. ‘They were already struggling, and now this...’
‘Maybe you should have thought of that first,’ he said, his spite a gut reaction. Then he thought about Jeremy, lying dead on the grass less than a mile from the house. ‘Oh well, look on the bright side, eh.’
‘There’s a bright side?’
‘There is for me. For once none of you can blame everything on me. You and Jeremy can share this one.’
‘And is that all that matters to you?’
‘I’m sick of being the whipping boy. Everything’s always my fault.’
‘That’s because it usually is,’ she said without thinking. She cringed inwardly, waiting for his reaction, bracing herself in case he came at her. When he didn’t, she risked saying more. She knew she had to; the enormity of the moment slowly dawning on her. It was now or never: to put up with more of his shit and risk things getting even worse, or to finally make a stand and do something about it. Tammy had said as much the other night, and Michelle knew now that her daughter had been right. She’d known it for a long time. ‘It’s your fault we’re here and in this mess, Scott. Your fault we had to leave Redditch.’