by Jane Renshaw
Paint.
He could pretend he’d been in here painting something, and spilt paint over the boxes. There was plenty of paint in the cupboard, left over from decorating the house. He got a screwdriver and eased open the lid of a tin of the dark green eggshell they’d used for the woodwork in Kirsty’s study.
He splashed it over the boxes, over the bloodstains. The stains from where Finn – where Finn had tried to get to the window –
He needed to go to the police and tell them what happened. He needed to tell the Taylors. He needed to confess and take whatever punishment was coming to him.
We need you. The kids need you.
How long would he go to prison for?
A long time. Ten years? More? Because Kirsty was right: he couldn’t argue self-defence. He’d bashed Finn’s head on that hose bracket how many times? And then they’d locked him in here while he was still alive. That was unforgivable. He’d get more than ten years for that, surely?
And Kirsty would go to prison too.
And then what would happen to the kids? Ma and Pap were too elderly to cope with Phoebe. David and Linda would have to take them in. Kirsty was adamant that that mustn’t happen – she’d gone on and on about it all night, sobbing that ‘the kids can’t go to Mum and Dad’ – presumably she didn’t trust David to look after them, after what had happened with Max and the fight in the Inverluie Hotel bar. And Phoebe – their vulnerable, fragile little Phoebe… How would she cope? How would she begin to get her head round Bram and Kirsty going to prison for…
Oh God oh God oh God!
Kirsty was right, as she always was. That couldn’t happen.
The hose bracket. He needed to clean it.
He used one of the now pale-pink clothes to wipe it down, shrinkingly, his gaze averted, and then he shoved all the cloths into one of the pails and put it under the workbench.
That would have to do until he had time to clean up properly.
Now for the holes in the ground in the wood. He shut the shed door and padlocked it and pocketed the key. First line of defence would be that he couldn’t find the key – but take a look in at the window – you can see there’s no one in there.
He ran to the wood. It looked different by daylight, but he knew that the biggest hole, their third attempt, was in the beechwood. That was the one it was vital to fill in. The others might be dismissed as the work of animals, but he’d used the spade in the third one to try to get through those roots.
‘Finn!’ he began to shout as he ran along the path. ‘Finn?’
He could hear voices, away off through the wood.
He needed to find that hole. They’d come along here with the barrow, after attempting to dig amongst the undergrowth under the birches. They’d passed this big tree with the twisted trunk…
There it was – the dip in the ground. With a mound of soil next to it!
Bram ran to it, trying to look around him to see if there was anyone about, but with all the trees it was hard to see. He had to just do it. He kicked at the pile of earth, swiping it into the hole with the side of his shoe. He hadn’t realised how much soil they’d managed to dig out.
When most of the soil was back in the hole, he stamped it down and kicked beech leaves over it.
Thank God.
It was done.
Now what? Should he go over to Benlervie and offer his assistance? But wasn’t that what murderers did? They ‘inserted themselves into the investigation’? Got a sick kick out of it?
Instead, after finding and filling in the other two holes, he sent Sylvia a text:
Any sign of him? Searching our wood now.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there, staring at his phone, when Andrew and another portly man appeared, coming along the path towards him. His phone still had blood on it! He shoved it into his pocket and walked down the path to meet them, assuming an expression that he hoped conveyed worry rather than guilt.
‘No sign of him?’ he called when he was near enough.
Andrew shook his head. ‘You’re sure you haven’t seen him?’ He was looking narrowly at Bram. Damn. Bram had never been a good liar. Ma always said his conscience gave him away in his body language before he’d even opened his mouth.
‘No, and Max hasn’t either. I’ve had a look around the house, in the shed… Well, I was working in the shed earlier this morning, so unless he was hiding in the cupboard in there or under the workbench –’ A high, awful sound halfway between a giggle and a yelp came out of his mouth. ‘– I already knew he wasn’t there.’
‘Okay,’ said Andrew, frowning at him.
‘Could he be with some of his mates? Was he out drinking?’
‘No,’ said Andrew shortly. ‘We think he went out for one of his night-time walks. He comes here sometimes. Through the woods. The police are going to do a proper search when they get here.’
‘Good, good!’
What had he just said?
Of course it wasn’t good!
He frowned. ‘I’m sure he’ll turn up safe and sound. Uh, I might just go back and speak to Max again. See if he has any ideas as to what might have happened – I mean, where he might be.’
What might have happened?
Shut up, Bram, just shut up!
He practically fled away from them down the path.
19
Kirsty had done her best with foundation and blusher and eye make-up, but she still looked terrible: her skin pasty and slack and dry, her eyes sunken into dark pits in her face so you could imagine what the skull underneath would look like.
God, where had that thought come from?
The four of them, Bram, Kirsty and the kids, were sitting at the kitchen table. Through the side window, Bram saw the two uniformed police officers walking off towards the paddock. They had come to the door ten minutes ago to say they were going to conduct a search of their grounds, and Bram had nodded and smiled and said to let them know if they needed anything. ‘Sylvia’s overreacting a bit, isn’t she?’ he’d added. ‘Finn’s a very, uh, sociable boy. He’s probably crashed at a friend’s place.’
The female officer had smiled back and made a non-committal ‘Mm’ sound.
‘Unless they’re thinking… We’ve had some trouble with, uh, youths recently. They shot my mother-in-law’s guide dog. Broke into the house… I hope Finn didn’t encounter them and…’ He swallowed.
‘Yes, I’ve seen the crime reports. We’ll be looking into that possibility, of course, but as you say, hopefully this is just a case of a young man who’s maybe had a bit too much to drink and not made it home.’
Bram had nodded. ‘Yes, well, I hope you find him soon.’
‘Mum, are you okay?’ Phoebe said now in a small voice.
‘I’m fine, darling.’ Kirsty smiled at her. ‘Just didn’t get much sleep last night.’
‘Are you okay, Max?’ Phoebe persisted. ‘Are you worried about Finn?’
‘Yeah,’ was all Max said in response. He was still in the boxers and T-shirt he wore in bed. He was staring off, a punch-drunk expression on his face.
When they’d all eaten and Bram was clearing up the breakfast things, there was another ring at the door.
It was the male PC. ‘Wondering about your shed. You looked in there?’
‘Yes, he’s definitely not in the shed,’ said Bram. ‘I was working in there this morning, before I heard from Sylvia that he was missing. But come and take a look if you want.’
As Bram strode across the grass towards the shed, the two cops at his side, he felt weirdly unconcerned, weirdly calm. It was almost as if he wanted them to find the blood. To discover what had happened. To take it all out of his hands.
He didn’t even pretend to have mislaid the key. He took it from his pocket and inserted it into the padlock. Pushed open the door.
Paint fumes assaulted them.
‘Phew.’ The female cop smiled at him. ‘Looks like there’s been a riot in a paint factory in here!’
‘Aye, paint’s a bugger,’ said her colleague. ‘At least it was in the shed and not all over the new carpets, eh? Been there, done that.’
‘Feel free to look around.’
‘Nah, you’re all right.’ And as Bram closed and locked the door: ‘Thanks very much, Mr Hendriksen. We’d better get off to the next place on the list.’
Bram could hardly look at David. He’d thought he didn’t have any energy left for any more emotion, but the hatred that surged to the surface whenever he looked at the man threatened to overwhelm him afresh. If David hadn’t put such pressure on Bram to step up, would this ever have happened?
And David, he was sure, suspected something. He’d seemed on edge ever since he’d got here, alerted by Max to Finn’s disappearance. They’d all been out there helping to search the woods, apart from Kirsty who’d stayed in the house with Phoebe. After they’d had something to eat they would have to go back out again, Bram supposed. But at least he hadn’t had to speak to Andrew again. A police constable had issued them with hi-vis tabards and told them which part of the wood to search. And then everyone had spread out, so Bram didn’t have to interact with anyone.
Nothing had been found, of course. Apart from a couple of dead badgers.
Now David was prowling around the kitchen, then sitting down with the rest of them, then getting up to resume his prowling. Fraser was slumped at the table nursing a cup of coffee. Could Kirsty and Bram’s drawn faces, their traumatised expressions be explained by the late night, from David’s point of view? And the worry, maybe, about the intruder? And now Finn’s disappearance? Or had David worked out that there was something else going on?
‘There was talk amongst some of the searchers,’ said David finally. ‘Speculation that the lad might have encountered the joker who’s been messing with you. PC said they were following that up as a line of enquiry.’
Phoebe, thank goodness, was up in her room, but Max was sitting next to Fraser, poking at the salad on his plate. His head snapped up.
‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ said Kirsty numbly.
Max looked like he was going to cry.
‘I’m sure he’ll be found safe and sound,’ Bram said briskly.
‘We should get back out there,’ said Fraser, but with no enthusiasm.
Kirsty got up abruptly from the table, widening her eyes at Bram to telegraph that she needed to talk to him. Up in their bedroom, she went to the wall of glass in the gable and stood looking out at the wood, where someone in a yellow tabard was walking slowly along the edge of the trees. ‘I’m going to get some bits of shopping. I’ll dispose of the cameras in a bin at the supermarket.’ She turned away from the view. ‘Does Scott know about the cameras? Does anyone else, apart from us, and Mum and Dad and Fraser?’
‘Well, we had notices up saying we had CCTV, but that could have been a bluff. No. I don’t think anyone else knows we actually put cameras up – not unless David or Fraser or Linda mentioned them to Scott or something.’
‘What if Mum or Dad or Fraser asks about them?’ She rubbed her face. Picked at the dry skin at the side of her mouth.
‘We can say they were stolen,’ Bram suggested. ‘We didn’t let on because we didn’t want Phoebe to worry that we didn’t have cameras covering the house.’
A door banged downstairs, and a woman shouted: ‘Where are they?’
And then a man: ‘Sylvia!’ That was Andrew Taylor.
Footsteps pounded on the stairs and then the bedroom door was flung open and a mad woman was launching herself at them, grabbing Bram, shaking him, her eyes wild. He barely recognised Sylvia Taylor.
‘Where is he? What have you done to him?’
She knew? But how?
‘Sylvia!’ Andrew came into the room and took hold of his wife from behind, trying to pull her off Bram, who stood, passive in her grip, gaping at her. She had tied her hair back in a scrunchie but half of it had straggled free, and her face was bloated and puffy from crying. ‘Sorry, she’s – not exactly thinking – rationally.’ The last word was gasped out as Sylvia rounded on him. And now she was hitting Andrew, pounding at his chest as he held on to her shoulders. ‘This isn’t helping!’ he half-shouted over the noise she was making, a wailing sound that went straight through Bram, jangling all his nerve endings. Andrew pulled her against his chest and she collapsed against him, the wail now a thin, hopeless sound that Bram just couldn’t listen to any longer.
He pushed past them and fled the room, fled to the bathroom, rushed inside and locked the door behind him.
He couldn’t do this.
He couldn’t do this any more.
Whack whack whack! on the door.
‘Bram!’ Kirsty. ‘Bram, please, come out of there! They’ve gone. The Taylors have gone.’
Bram opened the door. ‘I need to tell the police what I did. We can’t put them through this. Sylvia and Andrew. Sylvia knows, somehow. Or suspects. I don’t know how, but–’
Kirsty put her fingers to his lips. ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘You’re not going to the police. You’re not going to ruin your life, all of our lives, the kids’ lives, just because you can’t take the guilt. Sylvia–’ She dropped her voice again. ‘Sylvia can’t possibly know anything.’
‘But you heard her! “What have you done to him?”’
Kirsty shook her head. ‘Maybe she suspects that it was Finn who was responsible for terrorising us. If it was Max, if he’d been doing something like that, he’d have a hard time pulling the wool over our eyes, wouldn’t he? But she can’t possibly know that we – that we have anything to do with his disappearance.’ She kissed Bram on the mouth, tenderly, gently. ‘We have to hold it together. No one knows a thing. And that’s how it’s going to stay. Okay? Bram?’
In the end, Bram nodded.
‘Right. I’m going to the shops, and I’ll get rid of the cameras. Then I’ll be straight back. Get back out there with Dad and Fraser and make out you’re as keen as mustard to participate in the search. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Bram, if we don’t do this, if the police find out what we did, we’re both going to prison – and that can’t happen. It can’t. Right?’
He nodded. ‘Right.’
Bram told David and Fraser that he was going to do a blog post about Finn to ‘spread the word’ and retreated to his and Kirsty’s bedroom. He couldn’t face going back out there. He couldn’t face Andrew and Sylvia and Cara.
He watched David striding across the paddock to the woods, Fraser following, both in their hi-vis tabards. He didn’t go out onto the balcony. He opened the sliding door an inch so he could hear what was going on but stayed inside, hopeful that the sun glancing off the glass would stop anyone down there spotting him. The police were always on the alert, weren’t they, for anyone acting strangely in these circumstances? The missing teen’s neighbour skulking in his house watching the search would presumably ring all kinds of alarm bells.
He could see occasional glimpses of fluorescent yellow tabards moving amongst the trees. Maybe it was the presence of the searchers, but what he was looking at now, the paddock, the woods, the hills beyond – it all seemed different. Like it was an entirely different place. It was as if everything had shifted onto a new plane and was no longer quite as it had been, but the changes were so subtle that he couldn’t have named them. Would everywhere be like this, now? When he went back to Islington, or to visit his parents in Primrose Hill, would he find that everywhere had slid sideways, become a different version of itself?
Of course it would.
The whole world had changed. He’d be seeing everything, now, from the perspective of the man who had killed a nineteen-year-old boy. All his life, whatever else he did, if he found a cure for cancer or stopped global warming or reversed habitat destruction, he would still be first an
d foremost Finn Taylor’s killer. Finn Taylor would still have ended his life in unimaginable pain and terror, stumbling around that shed, falling and falling again –
How could he ever come to terms with that?
He couldn’t.
There was no way to make Bram Hendriksen back into a worthwhile human being.
All he could be now, he supposed, was someone who helped Kirsty and Max and Phoebe make good lives for themselves.
Yes.
They were all that mattered.
Kirsty and Max and Phoebe.
But he was a murderer! How could it be a good thing that he was in their lives?
Was he really a murderer, though? Finn Taylor had been terrorising them. He’d been wearing a mask! For all Bram knew, he’d been heading for the house to break in and – what?
What had Finn been intending to do?
Was it possible that Phoebe had been right all along and Finn Taylor was a psychopath? It wasn’t as if he had the excuse of a horrendous childhood that had turned him feral. He was a privileged young man with perfectly nice and very wealthy parents. He had to have been a pretty disturbed individual to have taken all that trouble to victimise the Hendriksens, for no good reason that Bram could think of.
Was it possible that Bram’s actions had actually averted an even worse tragedy?
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there when his phone buzzed. Mechanically, he took it from his pocket. The dried blood was still on there, streaked over the screen. A forensic specialist’s dream.
He supposed he needed to clean that off.
It was Kirsty.
‘Mission accomplished,’ was all she said. ‘See you soon.’
‘Okay.’
After he’d ended the call, he stood staring down at the vegetable patch. Little did they all know, little did Finn Taylor’s father and mother and sister know that their beloved boy was dead, battered to death by Bram, his body shoved unceremoniously into a hole in the ground like a dead cat or dog.
People were coming towards the house from the wood.
Scott. And David and Fraser.