Etherton fell away quickly. It hadn’t spread much to the north where the cement works, the quarries and the industrial estate sat at the top of the town and soon he was passing fields. He’d thought about asking John along, but hadn’t seen him properly for a while, and if he did bump into him in a pub or around town, John would quickly make his excuses and leave. Keith wondered if he was being careful after the robbery, but he suspected it was because of the woman. He knew some men could be funny about that; saw it as a mortal sin, hitting a woman. Keith couldn’t see why. If you were prepared to punch a man, why wouldn’t you punch a woman? Did men’s noses not break? Did their skin not bruise? And some of the women who’d gone for him over the years, he would rather have been in a fight with a man. At least with a man there was no scratching. But Keith would apologise if necessary. He would admit it was the wrong thing to do if it would get John back onside. It would be good to have him for the job, a good man, a man who’d done it before.
It wasn’t that he was planning to do it yet, but the money would run out and he would need more, so today he was making sure he could find the house again, find a place to leave the car. It would put his mind at rest to know where it all was. And if John was right, that months of work had gone into finding this man and his house, it seemed a shame to waste all that work on one job. Once he’d found the place he would drive home slowly, stop at a couple of country pubs and be back in Etherton in time for an evening session. He was already looking forward to that. The beer would taste like he’d earnt it.
Fifteen minutes into the drive Keith was dropping down a gear and heading up Marshaw Fell. He glanced around him as he drove, at the fields on either side, the stone walls scaling impossible slopes, the desperate-looking trees shaken by hill winds. The area was popular with walkers, bird watchers, cyclists, fell runners, nature lovers. None of it made any sense to Keith; the countryside unsettled him. He was a man used to street lights, shops and signs. In winter the dark fells surrounding Etherton spooked him. He imagined being stuck on one of them at dusk in December, dark and cold coming in, mist settling, hiding the lights of any villages and farmhouses. If he had to choose countryside or London, dirty, arrogant London would win every time.
Finding the forest wasn’t difficult, but as soon as he entered the trees he was lost. He’d only been to the house when he was driven there, the night they held the family, and when they left in the morning he wasn’t driving then either, John was, and he’d paid no attention to the route taken – he was tired, and full of adrenaline from punching the woman, excited about the money he couldn’t quite believe was going to be his. He could hardly remember the journey at all. So he drove slowly through the forest, searching for the house, crawling along tiny roads with sudden steep climbs and unexpected drops. There were more houses than he expected, but most were easy to dismiss. He remembered the house he was looking for was newer than the ones he was passing; it was more modern than the farmhouses with small windows and grey stones, bigger too. The stonework wasn’t weathered and he remembered large windows going all the way to the floor. Rich people windows. He drove down every road he could find, no matter how small or unpromising, and several times he found himself turning his car around in the front yard of a house after finding himself at another dead end. He’d been driving under the trees for an hour and was about to give up when he hit the cat. It was a grey cat, young and thin, and it was out of the hedgerow and under his wheels before he could react. It was a slight thump; there was hardly any movement in his arms or his hands on the steering wheel. He stopped the car, climbed out and crouched down and saw the animal underneath – as dead as if it had never been alive. He saw a silver glint at the cat’s throat. ‘Shit,’ he said. There was a red collar and hanging off the collar was a tag.
He recoiled a couple of times, he didn’t want to touch the dead thing, but he made himself pull the cat from under the car by its belly. The left eye had popped out and was hanging by a strand of pale flesh, there was blood around the ear and the mouth and the teeth were bared as if it was about to attack. He looked at the silver tag and read, ‘Lewis. Bank Hill Cottage.’ He stood up, turned around and saw, back along the road, behind the hedge, a cottage.
Keith pushed the cat to the side of the road with his feet and walked to the driver’s door. He rested his hands on the roof of the car. ‘Shit,’ he said, again, and pulled off his jumper.
He opened the boot, knelt at the side of the road, wrapped the jumper around the cat and lifted him up. He was about to place him in the boot but it was a mess, empty cans, sweet wrappers and old newspapers spread out in there. He lowered the cat back to the road, gathered the rubbish in his arms and dropped it onto the back seat. Then he laid the cat in the boot. He turned the car in the narrow lane, drove back the way he’d come and paused at the driveway to the cottage. A small, oval wooden sign was attached to a gatepost. ‘Bank Hill,’ it said. Keith drove up the steep drive to the cottage.
He turned off the engine and sat there.
What was he going to say? People loved their animals.
Then he noticed a woman at the front door, stood with her arms folded. She was looking over at Keith. He opened his door. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, climbing out.
The woman walked forward. ‘Can I help?’ she asked.
Keith held his arms out at his side and said, ‘Your cat. I’m sorry. I killed your cat.’
The woman looked at Keith and then to the road and Keith said, ‘He’s in the boot.’
He opened the boot and the woman walked forward with her right hand on her chest and when she saw her cat, its body wrapped in a blue jumper, blood dripping from its open mouth, she said, ‘Oh.’ She rested her hands against the rim of the boot and her head dropped.
‘He was underneath me before I saw him,’ Keith said. ‘I couldn’t have missed him.’
The woman lifted the cat from the car and carried him into the house.
Keith stayed where he was, he wondered if he should leave, but that seemed the wrong thing to do. A young woman on a horse passed slowly along the road below him, smiling at him as she went, the steady noise of the hooves on the road the only sound in the air. A few minutes later the woman came out of the house, she was holding his jumper out to him, she’d been crying. ‘I rinsed it,’ she said. ‘But it will need a good wash.’
Keith shook his head. ‘Throw it away, I don’t want it.’
The woman nodded and lowered the jumper.
‘My husband is driving the children back in a few minutes,’ she said. ‘They would have found him there, so thank you, for bringing him to us.’
Keith shook his head and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Tears were in his eyes now.
‘You were kind to bring him home.’ The woman turned and went back into the house.
Keith drove back to Etherton slowly. His eyes scanned the edges of the roads for any stray animals. He thought about the cat, about how unlucky it had been. Perhaps the only time in his life he would drive down that road and the cat chose that moment to run out. Life was fragile, Keith thought. Then he decided he needed a drink.
Eleven
When Thomas came home from work he closed the front door behind him, stood still and listened. He hated to hear silence. He wanted noise from the kitchen, Harriet singing in her bedroom, even Ann shouting at Daniel, anything to suggest that all was well. When he was reassured that the men were not back he called his hellos to the children, found Ann and kissed her quickly on the cheek. Then he preferred silence. The children would be told to turn the television down, to play quietly. If the noise continued he would become short-tempered, storm about like an angry king, upset the children and infuriate Ann. Through his temper and persistence the family learnt it was easier to be quiet when Dad was home. Thomas was left bewildered by their behaviour. He couldn’t understand why they weren’t listening for the crunch of feet on gravel, the next knock at the door.
After eating Thomas would retreat to his office upstairs. Her
e he studied the security tape recorded by the camera outside the front door. He poured himself a drink from the bottle in his filing cabinet, rewound the tape, pressed fast forward and watched intently as the screen flickered away in front of him. The camera picked up the road and the edge of the forest, so nobody could use the road or approach the house without Thomas having a record of it. But the house was so remote Thomas was mostly watching a fast-forwarded picture of an empty road. Occasionally a car passed and Thomas would pause the tape and make a note of the time, the make and model of the car, the registration number where possible, the direction the car was travelling and anything about the occupants that he could see, any clues to their age or sex. He kept a magnifying glass in his drawer, which he sometimes needed for dirty number plates and blurry occupants. He looked to see if the car slowed or showed any interest in the house as it passed. When all the information was recorded he would work through his previous entries to see if the vehicle had made an appearance before and, if it had, when and how many times. This information was transferred to a large sheet he kept folded up at the back of his notebook. Occasionally he’d be able to identify the car as belonging to someone in the village, and that pleased him, it was one less entry to worry about. But every journey would still be recorded, even Mrs Silverwood’s trips to and from the village. Thomas put this down to his training in the bank – record everything accurately all the time. He found it satisfying to gather this information and put it away in columns, in order.
There was a separate section in his notebook for people passing on foot or bike. Cyclists were not uncommon at weekends, walkers less so; they tended to stick to the popular routes – picturesque paths along rivers, long climbs with rewarding views, but the odd hiker would pass, solid boots striding firmly along the road. Their age, height and sex would be recorded along with the date and time. Thomas was shocked early on in viewing the tapes when he saw a man, at one in the morning, making his way towards the house – a black thing evolving out of the darkness. He was flooded with anxiety until he noticed the man’s stiff gait, understood the size of him as he came closer and realised that it was Raymond on one of his night walks. As Raymond passed the house his hand came out of his pocket and he gave a small wave to the camera. Thomas waved back instinctively. How wonderful it would be, he thought, to have Raymond patrolling every night, up and down the road, his eyes searching for moving shadows in the trees, someone else taking the burden so Thomas could sleep the sleep he used to, when his family was safe, his home unbreached. Every time Raymond appeared on one of the recordings in the middle of the night, Thomas felt a glimmer of hope.
Ann knew what he was doing. He’d tried to do it without her realising, telling her he was catching up on work, acting on the latest diktat from head office, but she’d walked in on him and caught him red-handed. Thomas scrambled to stop the video but he was too slow. His face flushed and he sat there feeling as guilty as if he was caught watching pornography. Ann looked down at him, his notebook with its headings and columns open on his lap and said, ‘We need to talk, Thomas,’ and left the room. But they didn’t talk and Thomas carried on, notebook open, whisky at his side, staring at the screen, looking for the men.
Thomas did manage to keep his forest surveillance a secret from Ann. The men had parked up in the forest and come through the trees, it was the only thing the police were sure of. They’d told Thomas that the house would likely have been watched for a period before the men struck, so instead of walking every morning like he used to, Thomas searched the forest for clues. He looked for footprints in the mud, for freshly discarded litter (although he doubted the leader would allow any litter dropping). He dropped to his hands and knees to inspect the threads he’d tied between certain trees, to see if any had been disturbed or broken. There were never any footprints other than his own, never any litter, and the threads remained undisturbed until one heart-stopping morning, weeks into his checks. It was a morning when the mist had settled around the base of the trees and the forest looked miraculous and unearthly. The trunks of the trees were so obscured that Thomas thought he must be mistaken when he found the broken thread, but a closer inspection clearly showed the snapped end trailing on the forest floor. He tried not to panic; it could have been anything – a fox, a deer, a fallen branch. But then he saw a footprint cut into the forest floor and panic threw itself at him.
The realisation didn’t catch him until the afternoon, when he was in his office, attempting to concentrate on writing staff appraisals. It was an obvious thought but in his panic it had taken him hours to arrive there: Raymond. It had been months since they’d last seen each other and in that time Thomas’s brain had been rushed with anxiety, his muscles as hard as bone, it was all he could do to shower and get to work. Other than the occasional sighting on the security camera he hadn’t thought of Raymond at all. But after he finished work that day he drove straight to the Chapman farm and Raymond’s caravan. He approached the caravan slowly, his eyes cast to the ground, searching for footprints, but the ground was too hard to show him any evidence. He looked further ahead and saw the grass had worn away at the foot of the caravan door. It wasn’t quite mud, but there was enough yield in the land to leave a footprint from a large boot. There were five or six of them, large and clear, the exact same footprint Thomas had seen in the forest that morning, he was sure of it. Thomas felt exhausted in his relief. He straightened his back, let out a deep breath and decided to leave without knocking on Raymond’s door. But before he had time to turn and walk away the caravan door was pulled open and Raymond shoved his head out of the dark hatch. When he saw Thomas in front of him a wide smile opened his face. ‘Thomas!’ he said, looking as pleased as if Thomas was stood there holding a large present up to him. Thomas was itching to get home, this detour had already delayed him by twenty minutes and he wanted to be back, to check that everyone was well, to check that nobody was a hostage. He looked up at Raymond’s happy, expectant face and said, ‘Come to the house?’
That night, in the garden, loosened by wine and beer, Thomas told Raymond what had happened the night the men had come. He’d told the police of course, but they’d needed times and descriptions, they were after clues and the truth of it had been lost in the detail. And when he arrived home from the bank he’d told Ann about everything that had happened, and asked what had happened at the house, although the battered eye already told him. But he’d never talked freely, truthfully, about the fear, the dread he’d felt when he’d realised what was happening.
‘I didn’t understand how safe I’d felt until this happened,’ he said. ‘There have been problems along the way, it’s not like I’ve been ecstatic all my life, but I’ve never felt like this before. Now I can’t leave the house or come home without feeling terrified.’
He described the men coming into the house, taking control like a cat lifting a kitten by its scruff. ‘They walked in,’ he said, ‘without a word. And then we were just sitting there, with them in a line in front of us, all night. And then in the morning I had to go with them to the bank. I didn’t want to leave Ann and the children, but by going I was helping to bring it to an end, and there was no choice anyway. If I’d made any fuss think about what they might have done. The only thing for me to do was to help them get the money.’
‘Did they hurt you?’ Raymond asked.
‘One of them smashed Ann in the face before they left. Really punched her.’
Thomas looked at Raymond. ‘Just . . .’ His face hung loose. ‘But the men with me treated me fine. They drove me to the bank, parked at the front and walked me in. I did everything they told me to because they had guns. It was easy. And whilst there was always the threat they might shoot me after they got what they wanted, I didn’t ever really feel that they would. After I gave them the money they locked me in the cleaning cupboard.’
Thomas watched a small fly hover around the sticky brim of his glass.
‘But when they had gone, it only really started then. When
it’s happening you are just trying to get to the end of it. After it’s happened, it becomes something else. When I saw what they’d done to Ann . . .’
‘That must have been terrible,’ said Raymond.
Thomas nodded. ‘But everyone seems to be coping. The children, they were distraught when it all happened and upset for a while afterwards, but they are getting on with things now. It’s like they had a bug and they’ve shaken it off. Ann, she just won’t let it affect her. It’s like she’s made of steel. I’m the wreck.’
Thomas looked over to Raymond again.
‘Do you know what I’m doing? I’m keeping a record of every car, every person that passes the house. I’m going into the woods and searching for any clues that they’ve been back.’ He shook his head. ‘Ann thinks I’m mad,’ he said, looking into the trees. ‘She thinks I’m losing it.’
‘Well, you’re being careful,’ Raymond said. ‘It’s understandable after everything that’s happened. Have you seen anything suspicious?’
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