No Place Like Home

by Jane Renshaw

  Was Scott coming to arrest Bram? But how could he be? He was probably just coming to update him on what was happening.

  He looked down at the phone still in his hand. He should clean the blood off it, but he was strangely reluctant to do so, as if it were some sort of penance, to carry around something with Finn’s blood on it. He shoved it back in his pocket and was descending the stairs when David called: ‘Bram? Bram? Get your arse down here.’

  David and Fraser were sitting in the Walton Room, and Scott was in his usual pontificating position by the hearth. ‘Finn Taylor’s beanie hat has been found in your wood,’ he said.

  ‘Beanie hat?’ Bram repeated.

  ‘His parents have identified it.’

  Bram walked across the room towards them. Should he sit down? Offer them something to eat and drink? He stared at David, welcoming the spurt of anger he felt, now, in his father-in-law’s presence. It was as if Bram was carrying too much guilt for one person and he had to shift some of it onto this man, this abominable man who’d got inside Bram’s head with his macho bluster and destroyed them all.

  It felt good to hate him.

  ‘They last remember seeing him wearing it a couple of days ago,’ Scott went on. ‘He generally wore it when he was out on these late-night walks of his, apparently. So – well, I’d say it’s concerning.’

  Bram supposed he was expected to make some sort of comment about the hat.

  ‘So do you think he might have had some kind of run-in with whoever’s been terrorising us? And lost his hat in the scuffle?’ But how had Finn lost his hat in the wood?

  Scott grimaced. ‘It’s possible. Anyway, we’ll be bringing in sniffer dogs. Hopefully we’ll be able to get them here early tomorrow afternoon. See if they can pick up a scent trail from where the hat was found.’

  Sniffer dogs?

  ‘Right. Won’t that be too late? Won’t any scent trail have disappeared by then?’

  Scott shook his head. ‘The Taylors are agitating for an immediate deployment – regardless of logistical practicalities – but in a wood, a scent trail will last for days. Relatively high humidity and low air movement.’ Scott, of course, would be an expert on scent trails as well as everything else.

  ‘Right. Uh, good.’ They would have to move the body. And blitz the shed. They’d have to do that tonight. But where the hell were they going to put the body?

  Scott was looking at him a bit too closely for Bram’s liking. ‘Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary last night? Anything strange?’

  Bram pretended to think. ‘No. No, I don’t think so. Well, David and Fraser–’

  ‘Anything strange?’ David interrupted him. ‘No offence, eh, Bram? Yeah, we called in. We didn’t see or hear anything either.’

  And the penny, belatedly, dropped. Of course David, with his record, wouldn’t want the police knowing that he and Fraser had been out in the woods ‘on patrol’ last night. That was why he was so on edge.

  ‘How’s Sylvia doing?’ David went on.

  Scott grimaced. ‘Not good, as you can imagine.’

  That poor woman. And things were only going to get a whole lot worse for her.

  ‘She’s pretty frantic.’ Scott looked at his watch. ‘Okay, I’d better get back to it.’

  When Kirsty got back with the shopping, Max took a couple of the bags from her, but Kirsty clung on to the third one. ‘Stuff for the utility room,’ she said, diving off down the corridor past her study. Bram hurried after her and closed the utility room door behind them.

  ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘Three big bottles.’ Kirsty opened the bag to show him the bottles of bleach and several packs of cloths. ‘That should be enough.’

  One of the Netflix serial killer episodes, Bram had remembered, had featured the perp using bleach to destroy DNA evidence. They would slosh some over Finn’s body to destroy any of their DNA that might have transferred onto him, and they also needed to clean the shed.

  ‘Should be,’ he agreed.

  He’d called her after Scott had left, and told her about the sniffer dogs. ‘They’re going to follow Finn’s trail to the shed, and then back into the woods, and then to the veg patch. Or actually, no, they’ll probably go straight to the veg patch because he’s only a couple of feet down. Dogs have an incredible sense of smell. They’ll be able to tell there’s a rotting corpse in there–’

  Kirsty had made a wordless sound.

  ‘So we’ve got to do it tonight. We have to move Finn and blitz the shed. We need proper bleach, not the eco stuff.’

  Now, as he took the bag from Kirsty and shoved it into the cupboard under the sink, Finn Taylor flashed into his mind again, Finn Taylor coming back to consciousness in the shed…

  Why hadn’t they called an ambulance? How could they have just left him there to die?

  He slumped against the cupboard. ‘We have to be sure that this is what we want to do. This is our last chance to confess. If we dig him up and re-bury him somewhere else, we’re compounding what we’ve already done, big time. We can’t say it was spur of the moment. How’ll they spin it in court? The Hendriksens brazenly assisted with the search for Finn and then that same night they dug up his body and–’

  ‘We can’t confess to it. We can’t go to prison.’

  For a long moment, they stared at each other. How on earth had they come to this?

  ‘We have to do it, then. Tonight. We have to dig him up and dispose of him properly.’

  20

  Max went to bed at 11:30, and they left it another half hour to make sure he was asleep before donning waterproof overtrousers and coats and gloves in the utility room. Then Bram retrieved the bag of bleach from the cupboard under the sink.

  Kirsty put a hand on his arm. ‘What if the Taylors hear the car on the track?’

  Those poor, poor people!

  He took a deep breath. ‘If they hear the car and ask about it later, we can say one of us couldn’t sleep and went for a drive.’

  ‘Okay.’ Kirsty nodded. ‘But if they’re still out there searching… once we start digging, if someone finds us, there’s no way we could explain it. And once we get it – him – out of there…’

  ‘Well, what’s the alternative?’ Bram snapped.

  Kirsty lifted her shoulders helplessly. ‘Maybe we should wait another hour or so? So it’s less likely anyone will be out there?’

  ‘Okay.’ Bram put down the bag and took her in his arms. ‘Thank you for doing this. Thank you for – for helping me to – Oh Christ, Kirsty! I’m a murderer!’

  ‘No, you’re not! You were terrified!’

  ‘But I wasn’t – not at that point. I was angry. I wanted to hurt him.’

  She hugged him close. ‘You were protecting us.’

  They took off the waterproofs and crept through the house to the Room with a View, where they lay without speaking on the sofas. Bram must have drifted off to sleep, because soon Kirsty was shaking his arm. ‘It’s half past one. Let’s do it.’

  They put the waterproofs back on and walked in silence to the shed, where they numbly set to work by torchlight. Kirsty sloshed diluted bleach over the floor and walls while Bram took everything out of the boxes – tins of paint, old plant pots, wood stain, ice cream tubs containing recycled bits of string and screws and nails – and stacked it on the floor and on the workbench. Then he ripped up the boxes and bagged them. They’d stop at a wheelie bin on the way back and dispose of them. Some of the cardboard was stiff with dried blood.

  All the time he was working, he kept expecting a policeman to loom up in one of the darkened windows, or Andrew Taylor to suddenly appear in the doorway.

  When he’d finished, he took the bin bags down to the stream and left them in Max’s car, which was parked on the other side of the collapsed bridge.

  Then he returned to the shed.

  ‘Okay. I think we’re done here,’ he whispered to Kirsty. ‘How much bleach is left?’

  ‘Enough.’
>
  Bram got the spade and the bleach and they walked together, again in silence, to the vegetable patch. He glanced at his phone. It was 2:40 and already the sky was lightening. Sunrise would be at about five o’clock, but it would be almost fully light long before then.

  ‘We’d better hurry,’ he hissed.

  Kirsty nodded.

  But for a long moment, they just stood there, looking at the veg patch.

  Okay. Don’t think about it. Just dig.

  He sank the spade into the soil and immediately hit something soft that gave under it. God. He wasn’t even two feet down. The sniffer dogs would have found him immediately.

  It took a surprising amount of time, though, with just one spade between them, to remove all the soil from the tarpaulined body. Whenever he was digging, Bram kept having to stop, sure he’d heard a sound, a stealthy footstep. He kept pausing, freezing, ears straining. But it was just the many normal, small sounds of the night – a branch scraping against another branch, the wind in the trees, a bird flapping.

  ‘We need the barrow,’ Kirsty whispered. ‘And scissors to cut the string round the tarp. And more string to tie it back round him again once we’ve… once we’ve…’

  Bram didn’t want to finish the thought, but, ‘Bleached him,’ he managed to get out.

  Kirsty swallowed.

  Bram nodded. ‘I’ll get all that.’

  He made his way back to the shed. He could see the fuzzy outline of Henrietta the goose in the long grass. He imagined her staring at him, and into his head came an image of himself as a child, innocently playing next to Henrietta in the garden at Primrose Hill, chatting to her as he constructed one of his elaborate villages from twigs and leaves, little thinking that one day –

  But he couldn’t go down that road or he’d lose it.

  Another dreadful thought came to him: what if the police had decided to start the search with the sniffer dogs at dawn, when humidity would be high? The optimum time to pick up a scent trail? What if they rolled up when Bram and Kirsty were manhandling Finn Taylor’s body into the boot of the Polo?

  Well, there was nothing he could do about that possibility. He concentrated on locating a pair of scissors and some string, and dropped them into the barrow, which he wheeled back to the veg patch. Between them, they hauled Finn out of the earth, another surprisingly difficult task. It seemed all wrong, that the boy had been under the ground, in the suffocating earth.

  He’s dead. He’s dead.

  There was no need now for the torch. The night was fast retreating. They needed to get this done! They unwrapped the tarpaulin and removed the mask and sloshed bleach over it and the body, turning Finn so they could do both sides of him, almost like – Bram gagged as the thought occurred to him, and he had to turn away, take a step away.

  Like he was a piece of meat.

  He swallowed bile. ‘We have to do this,’ he muttered, his hands shaking as they spread out the tarp and pulled him onto it, threw in the mask and tied the tarp back around him with the string. Finally, they hefted him into the barrow and returned the soil to the hole.

  ‘If the dogs show an interest, and the cops ask why the soil’s been all dug up,’ Bram whispered, ‘we can say the veg patch was poisoned with weedkiller and we were digging it over to disperse the poison.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make sense!’

  ‘So? We’re ignorant townies.’

  Bram hefted the barrow and they made their way to the stream, waterproofs creaking as they walked, the sound horribly loud in the still, cool, pre-dawn air. The night was melting away, the sky no longer black but an ever-lightening blue. He could see the water in the stream, the stepping stones, the trees on the other side, no longer shades of grey but green and brown.

  The barrow got away from Bram on the bank that sloped down to the water and it tipped over, catapulting the body out into the stream.

  ‘Fuck!’ Kirsty hissed.

  ‘It’s okay!’ Bram righted the barrow and manoeuvred it next to the tarpaulin-wrapped body. ‘Help me lift him!’

  Eventually they had him back in the barrow and, with Kirsty pulling and Bram pushing, got it up the other bank. They shoved the barrow right up to the boot of the car and hauled the body inside. It took a lot of pushing and pulling to fit him in there, with those long legs of his. They were lucky, he supposed, that there was no rigor mortis. It must have come and gone while he was in the ground. Eventually they managed to fold him into the space and slam the boot shut.

  ‘Now the barrow,’ Kirsty hissed. ‘We’ll have to bleach it too. Where’s the bleach?’

  ‘In the shed.’

  ‘Did we lock the shed? Maybe we should slosh some water over the floor to rinse it off a bit – the smell of bleach is overpowering. They might wonder–’

  ‘And we need to get these waterproofs off and dispose of them.’

  ‘Not until we’ve got rid of – it,’ said Kirsty. ‘We don’t want our DNA getting on it. Then we can put the waterproofs in a wheelie bin too.’

  ‘We can’t put the bags of cardboard and the waterproofs all in the same wheelie bin! The people would notice their bin suddenly being full.’

  ‘Okay, so we put it in a few different bins.’ Kirsty groaned. ‘But look how light it is already! We’re not going to have time to clean up here, find somewhere suitable, dig a hole, bury him–’

  She was right. ‘Okay. We can leave him in the car for now. Dispose of him tomorrow night. We’ve got time to clean up in the shed and bleach the barrow and stuff.’

  They rinsed out the pails in the stream and carried fresh water up to the shed, and sloshed it over the floor, and used the cloths to mop up as best they could. By the time Bram had cleaned the barrow and, while he was at it, his phone with some diluted bleach, it was properly light, although it wasn’t yet five o’clock.

  ‘We can leave the waterproofs in here,’ Kirsty said, wriggling out of hers. ‘They’ve already searched the shed, haven’t they?’

  ‘We were mad to think we could get everything done tonight. We haven’t even thought through what we’re going to do with… Where we’re going to re-bury…’ He broke off, staring out at the lovely dawn light on the tops of the trees, the mist hanging in skeins across the forest. ‘Oh Christ, Kirsty! How could we have thought we’d ever get away with this?’

  ‘We are going to get away with it.’ She caught hold of his arm, as if without its support she would keel over. ‘But the sniffer dogs! The police are probably going to park right next to the Polo! The dogs will be all over it!’

  ‘Okay. Okay…’ God! ‘We’ll have to park somewhere else.’

  ‘And how do we explain the car being gone?’

  Bram tried to think. ‘Scott said the sniffer dogs will be here early afternoon. What if we say that watching the search for Finn is too upsetting for Phoebe, and we’ve decided to take the kids to your parents’ place? We can do that first thing this morning. Stay the day in Grantown, then dispose of him tomorrow night. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Yes… I don’t know. God, Bram – I can’t tell any more what makes sense and what doesn’t!’

  ‘I know.’ He took in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I can’t either.’

  21

  It seemed to be taking forever to get the kids organised. First Max couldn’t find his phone, then Phoebe had a meltdown and refused to leave the house, obviously picking up on her parents’ tension.

  ‘It’s too early!’ she sobbed. ‘I feel sick! Why do we have to go?’

  ‘The police are going to be doing a proper search and they want us out of the way,’ Bram improvised. ‘Come on, kleintje. Don’t you want to see Bertie?’

  ‘Bertie could come here.’

  ‘Not with all the sniffer dogs around. Bertie would be a bad influence. He’d probably lead them all on a wild goose chase for biscuits.’

  A tiny smile.

  ‘Now, what are you going to take to Grannie and Grandad’s? Your paper and pens? You could do portra
its of everyone.’

  ‘Okay!’ And she ran up the stairs.

  ‘Dad, the Taylors are coming,’ said Max from the door.

  Oh Christ.

  ‘Go up to Phoebe’s room and keep her there till they’ve gone,’ Bram told him.

  ‘What are they–’

  ‘Just do it, Max!’

  Bram stood out on the verandah and watched Sylvia Taylor marching up the track towards the house, Andrew hurrying along in her wake.

  ‘What have you done to him?’ Sylvia yelled as soon as she was within shouting distance.

  Bram just shook his head.

  She stormed up the steps and pushed him with both hands so he staggered back against the wall of the house. Her hair was even wilder than last time he’d seen her, and there were streaks of mascara dried on her cheeks. ‘If you won’t tell me, you’ll tell the police!’ she yelled into his face, flecks of spittle landing on him.

  Bram looked behind her to Andrew, who was standing staring at Bram.

  ‘Did you kill him?’ Somehow it was much more shocking, the calm way Andrew spoke, almost conversationally, as if they were chatting about the weather.

  ‘Of course not,’ Bram got out.

  ‘The police will be here any minute,’ Andrew added. ‘We’ve called them. I imagine they’re going to arrest you.’

  So this was it. He was going to be arrested, and he would confess everything. It was over. He felt almost glad.

  ‘Why on earth would Bram kill Finn?’ It was Kirsty, striding towards them across the verandah. ‘I know you’re going through a terrible time, but really – If you think harm has come to him, isn’t it more likely to have been the youths who’ve been harassing us?’

  Of course. Of course that was what he and Kirsty would be thinking. Bram should have suggested that right off the bat.

  ‘No,’ said Andrew. ‘And you know it.’ He looked from Kirsty to Bram. ‘There weren’t any youths. There never have been. It was us.’

  Us?

  ‘What?’ Bram could only gasp as Sylvia collapsed to the verandah floor, her legs folding under her.