No Place Like Home

by Jane Renshaw

  It wasn’t moving.

  ‘I think he is dead.’

  ‘He can’t be,’ groaned Kirsty. ‘How can he be? He’s moved!’

  Bram put a finger to Finn’s neck. ‘But he’s dead now. I think.’

  ‘I did that before and there wasn’t a pulse!’ Kirsty’s own fingers were next to Bram’s, moving through the blood on the boy’s neck. ‘But I mustn’t have done it right!’

  ‘Google it,’ said Bram. ‘On your phone. Google How to tell if someone’s dead.’

  But Kirsty’s fingers were still moving on Finn, under his chin, down his neck, under his jawline.

  Bram wiped his hands on his jeans and got out his own phone.

  Google.

  How did you get Google on a phone? It was as if all the ordinary everyday things he used to be able to do without thinking weren’t available to him any more. He was outside it all now. He was outside normal life.

  ‘Google,’ he said aloud.

  His finger, his bloody finger, swiped the screen as if of its own accord, and there was the little Google icon. He stabbed at it.

  How to tell if the bloody finger typed.

  someone likes you the autofill suggested.

  someone dead the finger continued.

  ‘Kick him,’ said Bram, reading the results. ‘Or poke him. But I think we’ve already checked the responsiveness thing by – by hauling him about. He’s not responsive.’

  ‘Of course he’s not responsive!’ Kirsty yelled.

  ‘Try poking him, though,’ Bram said dully.

  Kirsty jabbed a finger at Finn’s arm.

  ‘And shouting his name,’ he added.

  Kirsty just sat there, squatting on the floor next to Finn, holding the flashlight from her phone so it shone on the boy’s face – there was blood all over his face apart from his eyes, his staring eyes –

  ‘Finn!’ Bram shouted.

  Nothing. Of course, nothing.

  ‘We have to check whether he’s breathing,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘Uh, yeah, that’s the next thing.’ Suddenly Bram was calm. He read quickly. ‘Okay, we need a mirror. Or a piece of glass…’ He took Kirsty’s phone from her and shone it around the shed. That would do – a glass jar on the workbench in which Phoebe had been collecting rose petals. He tipped them out and brought it back to Finn. ‘Okay. Shine the light on the jar…’

  Bram held the side of the jar over Finn’s mouth and nose. His mouth was slack, slightly open.

  He held the jar closer. There was a solitary rose petal still inside, browning around the edges, stuck to the glass.

  ‘See any condensation on it?’

  Kirsty just shook her head.

  ‘Okay.’ Bram set down the jar and returned to the Google results. ‘Next thing is eyes. Shining a light in his eyes and seeing if the pupils contract.’

  He held the flashlight from the phone over Finn’s left eye. The pupil wasn’t black, it was red, like people in photographs got red-eye from the flash bouncing off their retinas.

  ‘It hasn’t changed, has it? The pupil? Kirsty?’

  ‘No. He’s dead, Bram. He’s dead now, but he wasn’t then! He can’t have been. I thought he was dead! But he was still alive and we left him in here to die!’

  ‘We should have called an ambulance,’ Bram said dully, sitting back on his heels, angling the phone so the light fell not on the boy’s face but on the floor by Kirsty’s feet.

  He had still been alive.

  When they’d dragged him in here like a piece of meat.

  He had still been alive.

  When they’d dumped him down by the workbench and put a tarpaulin over him, when they’d left him there, when they’d shut and locked the door.

  He had still been alive.

  And he’d come back to consciousness, and managed to crawl to the window.

  A dying boy. A desperate, dying boy, in who knew what pain, what agony?

  Left here to die.

  There were too many tree roots.

  Even when, on their third attempt to find a suitable spot, they chose a dip in the ground with no trees in it, they found roots, pale, thick snakes hidden in the earth that frustrated their attempts to dig. Bram had to hack at them with the spade, but he couldn’t get a good swing because the sharp part was along the end, not the sides. He had to stand over them and almost throw the spade downwards at the solid, woody structures that seemed almost to be there to protect the soil from what Bram was trying to do.

  It was hopeless. The dark was already melting away, and soon they wouldn’t need a torch or the phone’s flashlight any more to see what they were doing. In summer, in Scotland, the dawn came very early. Not quite the land of the midnight sun, but close to it.

  ‘We need a saw,’ said Bram. ‘But it would take too long.’

  ‘We can’t put him back in the shed!’ Kirsty raked her earthy hands through her hair, looking down, shrinkingly, at the wheelbarrow into which they’d put Finn, well wrapped up in the tarpaulin, which they’d tied round him with string like a mummy. The mask was in there too. Bram had put it back over Finn’s face before wrapping him in the tarp, as if he really were an Egyptian being prepared for the afterlife. It had been easier, though, as soon as the mask was in place; as soon as Finn’s face had been covered and he didn’t have to look at it any more.

  ‘We need somewhere that’s easier to dig,’ he said. ‘The paddock, maybe. But we’ll have to work fast. It’ll be light in half an hour.’

  ‘The veg patch!’ Kirsty said, turning back to the barrow. ‘We can put him in the veg patch for now, while we think where we can put him permanently. Maybe we could dig a hole here over the next few nights, if we brought a saw… Fill it in with loose soil between times…’ She hefted the wheelbarrow. His long legs were flopping over the front, as if he was a kid and Kirsty was giving him a ride in the barrow.

  Even inside the tarp, he stank of shit.

  The veg patch was much easier to dig in. They took it in turns with the spade to make a long trench down the length of it, deep enough to contain Finn’s body with a couple of feet to spare.

  ‘We should go deeper, maybe,’ said Bram.

  But it was already so light that he could see the pale lines across his knuckles against the earthy grime on the backs of his hands.

  ‘No time,’ said Kirsty shortly. ‘Let’s get him in there.’

  Bram brought the barrow to the trench and tipped it sideways, and Finn flopped into the hole. They shovelled soil in over him. It took surprisingly little time to fill the hole, and then there was the problem of the mound of earth displaced by the body. Bram used the spade to distribute it over the veg patch as best he could, Kirsty helping by kicking it with her trainers.

  When they’d finished, they took the wheelbarrow back to the shed.

  There was blood all over the floor. A huge pool of it where they’d left Finn by the workbench at the far end, and streaks leading to and from it, where they’d dragged him there and he’d dragged himself to the window –

  The boxes under the window were covered in it too.

  Was that where he’d – bled out, was that the term?

  Or had it been the concussion that had killed him? Surely it had to be. A head wound so severe that bits of brain were –

  No.

  No.

  He couldn’t think about that now.

  ‘We need to just lock the shed for now and deal with this later. Tomorrow night. We’ll need to get water up from the stream to clean the floor with. And we can burn the boxes.’ Kirsty slumped against him. ‘Oh, Bram. How can this be happening?’

  He held her. He just held her. He couldn’t do anything to shield her from this, and that was one of the worst things of all.

  For a long moment, they just stood there, looking at the blood all over their garden shed, where they’d left a nineteen-year-old boy to die. It was so horrific it was almost impossible to comprehend.

  Kirsty pulled away from him. ‘We need
to check and see if there’s blood on the ground outside.’

  There was some on the grass. Bram took a bucket to the stream and poured water over the area, mashing the grass with his feet to make sure any trace was obliterated, and then pouring more water over his shoes.

  ‘The cameras!’ said Kirsty. ‘The cameras you moved from the wood to the house! We’ll have been caught on those cameras!’

  ‘Okay.’ He took a long breath. ‘That’s okay.’ The ladder was kept on hooks on the wall of the shed. He went in there and reached up to it. ‘I’ll get them down.’

  ‘We need to destroy them. Smash them up.’ Kirsty took the other end of the ladder. ‘Put them in bin bags. Then into the car. We can take them to the dump, or put them in a random bin – Bram? Bram, we have to just do this one last thing and then–’

  ‘And then what, Kirsty? And then what?’

  18

  The whole of the gable wall of the bedroom was glass, and in the middle was a door that opened onto a tiny balcony. As Kirsty, exhausted from crying, slept in their disordered bed, Bram slid the door open quietly and stepped outside into the early morning air. From here he had a bird’s-eye view of the vegetable patch and the newly turned soil.

  And it was possible to see over the treetops to Benlervie, to a triangular section of the lawn in front of the house and part of the driveway. The cooing of a collar dove was the only sound. So peaceful. So idyllic.

  Had Finn been missed yet?

  It was so hard to think of him as it, a dead body, a thing that was lying under the soil of the vegetable patch because Bram had battered the life force out of it and it was just a collection of chemicals now, carbon and nitrogen and… whatever. It wasn’t Finn any more. A nineteen-year-old boy with his whole life ahead of him. All he would ever be now was a nineteen-year-old corpse. Slowly decomposing into its elements.

  ‘Muum? Daaaad?’ came Phoebe’s call.

  Bram crossed the room to the door; slipped outside into the corridor. Phoebe was standing there in her jim-jams, hair straggling to her shoulders.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Okay, kleintje, let’s go and get some breakfast.’ The thought of food made his gorge rise. He couldn’t get the image out of his head of Finn’s face, Finn’s bloody face with those staring eyes; the terrible head wound with the pieces of bone and brain in it –

  ‘Are you okay, Dad?’

  ‘Ah, yes, I’m fine. Just didn’t get much sleep last night, what with the patrols and everything.’

  As he was standing at the worktop staring at the pan in which two eggs bobbed about – Phoebe loved boiled eggs and soldiers – his phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out. The screen felt strange, rough, and as he stared at it he realised that it was smeared with dried blood.

  Finn’s blood.

  And the name illuminated under it was Sylvia Taylor.

  Time seemed to slow down. Here he was, standing in their new kitchen, Phoebe sitting at the table in her pink pyjamas with Dalmatians all over them. Here he was, holding a phone smeared with the blood of the dead son of the woman who was calling him –

  ‘Are you going to answer that, Dad?’

  No! He couldn’t talk to Sylvia Taylor! He couldn’t talk to her and sound normal.

  But he had to.

  He put the heat off under the eggs. ‘Back in a sec,’ he told Phoebe, and took the phone through to the Room with a View.

  ‘Bram!’ exclaimed Sylvia in his ear. ‘Have you seen Finn?’

  He swallowed. Plastered a smile to his face. He’d read somewhere that if you smiled as you spoke on the phone, you sounded more friendly. ‘Hi, Sylvia. No, not this morning.’ Which was true enough.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Uh, yes. He’s gone AWOL, has he?’

  ‘His bed hasn’t been slept in. Are you sure you haven’t seen him?’ Why was she being so insistent? Why would she think Bram would have seen him? ‘Max hasn’t seen him?’ she added.

  ‘Uh… I’ll check with him and call you back.’ He ended the call and stood staring out at the distant hills. He should have expressed more concern. Asked more questions. But maybe she would think he didn’t want to waste any time.

  He walked back through the kitchen, heading for the stairs.

  ‘My eggs, Dad.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Phoebe! I’ll be two minutes, okay? I have to speak to your brother, then I’ll get your eggs!’

  Phoebe’s lip trembled.

  He didn’t have time for Phoebe’s histrionics. He ran up the stairs and pushed open Max’s bedroom door. He could have just pretended to Sylvia that he’d asked him, but then Max might give the game away later.

  ‘Max? Max?’ He went to the bed, clicked on the bedside light.

  ‘Hmmph?’ Max was just a shapeless mound under the covers.

  ‘You haven’t heard from Finn, have you?’

  ‘Nuh.’

  ‘Okay. Go back to sleep. It’s okay.’

  He called Sylvia straight back before he lost his nerve. ‘Hi, Sylvia. No, Max hasn’t been in contact with him. Sorry.’

  ‘Right. We’re calling the police.’ Why did she sound so aggressive?

  ‘The police?’

  ‘We need to do a proper search. We’ve been out looking, in the woods, the nearest fields. But we have to organise a proper search.’

  ‘But Sylvia – don’t you think he’s probably just been out drinking with his friends and has crashed somewhere?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t with his friends. He went out for a walk on his own last night and, as I said, his bed hasn’t been slept in. He didn’t come back. We need to search your property.’

  Oh God oh God!

  ‘He’s not here, Sylvia.’

  ‘The police need to do a proper search.’

  ‘Uh, right, yes, of course. No problem.’ Shit. Why had he said that? Why would it be a problem? ‘But we can do that. We’ll have a good look and let you know–’

  ‘We’ll send the police over when they get here.’

  ‘Right. Okay. I’m sure he’s probably–’

  But she’d cut the call.

  He stared at the screen of the phone for a moment. At the dried smears of blood on it.

  Okay. Okay.

  The shed.

  The first thing was to deal with all the blood in the shed. They’d be bound to look in there. And in the wood, there were the holes they’d started to dig – those needed to be filled in. But if the Taylors had been out searching already, maybe they’d already found them, and it would look really suspicious if they were subsequently filled in?

  Should he wake Kirsty? Get her to help?

  No.

  She’d fallen apart last night, when they finally had all the cameras down, when they’d smashed them with a mallet from the shed and bagged them up in bin bags. She’d collapsed, hands over her head, sobbing. He had had to half-carry her to bed, where she’d lain in his arms, crying away most of what remained of the night.

  He would leave her be.

  ‘Daad,’ said Phoebe.

  He marched into the kitchen, fished the eggs out of the hot water with his fingers, dumped them in egg cups. ‘Can you get your own toast? There’s a bit of a crisis – Finn Taylor’s gone missing.’

  Phoebe was at the fridge. ‘Okay. Where’s the margarine?’

  ‘Bottom shelf. Did you hear what I said, Phoebs?’

  Phoebe nodded. ‘Finn Taylor’s a bad person, Dad. Who cares if he’s missing?’

  ‘Now, Phoebe,’ he managed. ‘That’s not very nice.’

  She shrugged.

  Bram ran to the shed. It took him three attempts to unlock the padlock. How long would he have before the police got here? Or the Taylors? Or both? When he pushed open the door, the smell hit him: that stomach-churning butcher smell. And the blood – it was everywhere! On the cardboard boxes, on the floor… Spattered on the walls, on the window, on the floor next to the boxes…

  Everywhere.

  There wer
e even some splashes on the ceiling.

  How had it got right up there?

  When Finn… He must have been stumbling about, and falling, and the blood – from his head wound –

  He must have been so desperate. Bleeding everywhere, falling so hard onto the floor or onto the boxes that the blood was sent arcing – It hadn’t just been a case of him crawling, half-conscious… He must have been on his feet and then fallen, repeatedly, for this to have happened.

  And then, like the terrible, evil person it seemed he was, the thought popped into his head: Thank God David insisted on varnishing the wood. Three coats of varnish, David and Fraser had applied. Bram had objected, at the time, to this profligate waste of the planet’s resources. But if the wood had been bare, there was no way he could have got the blood off it. It would have soaked in.

  Okay. He needed to get pails from inside – some of them would already be full of water, hopefully, the ones in the downstairs loo, unless someone had used them to fill up the cistern. He ran back to the house.

  Thank God, two of the pails were full. He detoured to the kitchen for cloths and hurried back to the shed, the pails slopping water as he went. In the shed, he started with the big pool of dried blood by the workbench. The water in both pails was soon scarlet, the cloths scarlet… His hands shook as he wrung them out in the already bloody water, the water that had Finn’s lifeblood in it –

  Gagging, he only just made it outside before he was throwing up, as if his insides were rebelling against what his brain was asking his body to do.

  But falling apart was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

  He needed to get that shed cleaned up.

  He tipped the pails of bloody water out on the grass and ran to the stream for more. It took four trips before the tiles and the walls and ceiling were clean. Clean enough, anyway. He’d need to use proper cleaning fluids on them to remove any invisible traces. Bleach, although he didn’t believe in the stuff and they didn’t have any in the house. Would eco surface cleaner do the job?

  Now the boxes under the window, which also had blood all over them. He unstacked them and then restacked them with the bloody ones at the bottom and against the wall. But there was still blood visible on a couple of them.