No Place Like Home

by Jane Renshaw

  Andrew stooped over his wife, putting a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. Behind him, Bram could see two policemen, running up the track towards them.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ was all he could find to say.

  And by that time the two PCs were on the verandah.

  ‘Okay, folks,’ said the older one firmly. ‘What’s going on here, then?’

  ‘He killed him,’ Sylvia mouthed, all the fight seeming to have gone out of her.

  ‘You need to arrest him,’ Andrew said. ‘This man has killed our son.’

  ‘But you can’t think…’ Kirsty blustered. ‘You can’t think Bram has anything to do with whatever’s happened to Finn?’

  ‘Let’s just calm this down,’ said the cop. ‘Mr and Mrs Taylor, can you come with us back to your property and we’ll–’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Sylvia. ‘Andrew? Tell them what you did. Tell them!’

  Andrew closed his eyes for a second, then nodded. ‘You might want to write this down.’

  The cops looked at each other, and then the older one took out a notebook.

  ‘We – I hatched a plan to…’ Andrew flicked a look at Bram. ‘To drive these people out of Woodside and buy the place back at a bargain price. Hence all the sinister happenings – it was Finn who shot the guide dog, shot at us with the BB gun, dumped the heart in the pan, all that. And I’m responsible for the water supply “failing”, and the bridge collapsing. The idea was that, given all this, they’d feel it would be an uphill struggle to sell the place on the open market, so when I approached them with a low – very low – offer, they’d bite my hand off.’

  ‘The bridge…’ Kirsty had gone pale.

  ‘Okay, let’s get this straight,’ said the older cop. ‘You’re saying you were responsible for everything that went on here? The shooting at animals, the home invasion, the tampering with the bridge…?’

  Andrew nodded. ‘We’re in pretty dire financial straits. Overextended ourselves to buy Benlervie, and the restaurant is going down the tubes. We’re having trouble making the mortgage and business loan repayments.’

  ‘So he had this ridiculous idea!’ Sylvia wailed.

  ‘To drive the Hendriksens out?’ The cop made a note.

  ‘Yes,’ said Andrew. ‘And buy back Woodside at well below market value. Resell quickly at a healthy profit.’

  Bram shook his head. ‘But who would want to buy the place, given all the trouble there’s been here?’

  ‘We were intending to make out to potential buyers that you were a couple of nutters seeing threats that weren’t there. We’d point them in the direction of your blog, which, given the trolls’ input, does seem pretty paranoid.’

  ‘You’re the trolls,’ said Bram.

  ‘We started it off, yes, but it soon snowballed – randoms piling in with the mob mentality you get online.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Kirsty.

  The younger cop was looking shell-shocked, but the older guy just shook his head in a seen it all before way as he continued to make notes.

  ‘So Finn…’ Bram was shaking. Could the cops see that he was shaking?

  ‘Finn was the foot soldier, so to speak,’ said Andrew dully. ‘But it was down to me. I was directing the campaign. I palmed a front door key when I called over, weeks ago, while the place was still a building site… Got a copy made and returned it a couple of hours later, so no one was any the wiser.’

  ‘So you planned this… Right from the start?’ Kirsty shook her head. ‘From before you even sold us the plot?’

  Bram wanted to throw back his head and howl. While he’d been able to tell himself that Finn was just a little yob who had, to an extent, brought what happened on himself, it had been possible to attempt to rationalise what he’d done. But now it turned out that Finn was only doing what Andrew had told him to?

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Andrew with a sort of grim satisfaction. ‘Had it planned down to the last detail. And then when I found out that Kirsty’s boyfriend had been Owen Napier, I used that to subtly suggest that maybe whoever had killed him was after Bram. Got Finn to write “Your next” in blood on the worktop. Hoping that would really freak you out.’

  ‘Christ,’ was all Bram could say.

  ‘But you know it was us. Don’t make out like this is all a big shock. You caught Finn, didn’t you, prowling round the house? He’d got a couple of roadkill badgers and was intending to pose them in the wood, hang them from the trees, and then run round the house shouting, taking potshots at your security lights. Wearing the monster mask, so you wouldn’t be able to identify him. But you caught him? What happened? There was an altercation?’

  ‘No,’ said Bram.

  ‘We had no idea,’ added Kirsty.

  ‘I – Obviously we didn’t want to have to admit any of this, but weighed against Finn’s life… Please.’ Andrew’s voice suddenly broke. ‘Please just tell us what happened. Where is he? Is he dead or… Are you keeping him somewhere?’ The hope in his eyes was a dagger in Bram’s heart. ‘Locked up somewhere – to teach him a lesson, maybe?’

  ‘No,’ Bram repeated weakly.

  ‘This is ludicrous!’ Kirsty protested. ‘Where the hell would we be keeping him?’ And as she met Bram’s gaze, it struck them both at the same time: the car. What if they looked in the car?

  ‘Feel free to search the house,’ Bram said hurriedly. ‘If you think we’re keeping him prisoner here, for some bizarre reason, please – search the place.’ And as the younger cop started to speak: ‘No, it’s fine. The sooner you can establish he’s not here the better, presumably. Please. Go ahead.’

  ‘We’ll do that, if you don’t mind, Mr Hendriksen,’ said the older cop.

  ‘Just let us get the kids out of here,’ Kirsty put in. ‘Actually…’ She went inside and returned with a front door key. ‘We’ll take them to my parents and leave you to poke about as much as you like.’ She took a breath and looked down at Sylvia, who was still slumped on the floor. ‘I’m so sorry, Sylvia, Andrew… I know you must be going through hell. But really, we have no idea what’s happened to Finn.’

  The older cop took the door key from her. ‘Thank you. And we’ll need you to give us written permission to search your property.’

  When they’d done that, Kirsty fetched a wide-eyed Phoebe and Max from upstairs and they left the house. It was all Bram could do not to sweep Phoebe up in his arms and run down the track to the bridge, to the car on the other side.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Hendriksen!’ came a shout from behind them.

  Bram stopped, his heart thumping.

  He turned.

  The younger cop was running after them, flat out, arms pumping. Bram’s body wanted to break into a run itself, to take off, to flee. It took a conscious effort of will to stay where he was, feet planted on the dusty surface of the track.

  He flashed a panicked look at Kirsty.

  Did they want to search the car? Of course they did!

  The policeman skidded to a halt in front of Bram. ‘Can you leave us a phone number? So we can contact you when we’ve finished?’

  In the kitchen at David and Linda’s, Linda pulled Kirsty into a hug. ‘Are you okay? How are you holding up?’

  They had called before they left Woodside to let them know what was happening.

  Kirsty clung to her, tears starting. Phoebe looked on, frowning in concern. And Kirsty straightened, smiled, nodded. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Come here, princess,’ said David, hugging Kirsty tight in his turn. ‘Those bastard Taylors!’

  ‘David,’ remonstrated Linda.

  ‘Sorry, love, but my God! First they scare the – bejesus out of us all with their antics, and then they try to set the cops on Bram because their wee yob of a son has done a disappearing act! The bugger could be anywhere. Who knows what else that lad’s been up to? Probably on drugs. Probably lying somewhere in his own piss, a needle sticking out his arm.’

  Bram stared at his father-in-law. He re
ally was a deeply unpleasant person.

  ‘David!’ Linda put a hand on his back. ‘Phoebe doesn’t need to hear this.’

  ‘I don’t mind, Grannie,’ said Phoebe. ‘Finn is a bad person.’

  ‘He’s still a human being,’ said Linda.

  ‘He’s a bad human being,’ Phoebe amended, and that made everyone smile.

  ‘Are you staying the night?’ Linda asked.

  ‘No – thanks, Mum, but we want to get back to Woodside once the police have finished there.’

  ‘Why should they be hounded out of their own home?’ David put in.

  It wouldn’t, of course, have been possible to bring overnight bags even if they had intended staying with David and Linda – how could they have explained to the kids why they had to hold their bags on their knees instead of putting them in the boot? It had been hard enough trying to account for the smell in the car on the way over. ‘They must be spraying pig manure on the fields’ was all Kirsty could come up with.

  David was running water into the kettle. ‘Scott just called,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Apparently the police want to search here too. Can you credit it? I suppose they’ve got to tick all the boxes, cover their backs in case the Taylors decide to sue or something…’

  What?

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Bram managed, exchanging a frantic look with Kirsty.

  If the cops came here, would they search the vehicles?

  Possibly.

  ‘I’m going to phone Scott,’ said Kirsty, taking out her phone. ‘Bram, can you come with me?’ And the two of them practically ran outside.

  Kirsty quickly called Scott to ask what was happening. From her side of the conversation, Bram gathered that the police were intending coming here after they’d searched Woodside, maybe in a couple of hours’ time. When she’d finished the call, they stared at each other.

  ‘We have to get rid of him now,’ Bram said at last. ‘But where can we…’ He dropped his voice. ‘How are we going to get rid of a dead body in broad daylight?’

  Kirsty squeezed his hand. ‘It’s okay. I know a place. An old flooded quarry in a forest. We used to swim there as kids in the summer, but I don’t think kids these days use it. There’s a track right up to it. We could get rocks, put them in the tarp with the body, back the car up to the quarry and throw him in.’

  ‘But what if someone saw us?’

  ‘It’s surrounded by forest. We have to risk it, Bram. What choice do we have?’

  ‘Sorry, boy,’ said Bram, hooking a hand under Bertie’s collar to pull him away from the car. ‘Not this time.’

  Bertie strained to get back to the car.

  ‘He really wants to go with you!’ smiled Phoebe. ‘No, Bertie, the sniffer dogs aren’t trying to find biscuits!’

  They had told Linda, David and the kids that they were heading back to Woodside to help with the search. David thought this was madness.

  ‘The Taylors are only going to have a go at you again,’ he objected now. ‘Why should you help the buggers?’

  Bertie pulled free of Bram’s restraining hand and launched himself at the boot of the car, jumping up at it and scratching with his paws, scrabbling sideways until his nose was level with the edge of the boot door. He snorted into it, sniffed, snorted. Scrabbled again.

  Bram went after him and hauled him away, a smile plastered to his face. ‘Sorry, Bertie. Not this time.’

  ‘There’s an odd smell,’ said Linda, lifting her face into the breeze.

  ‘I think he’s rolled in something,’ Bram improvised.

  ‘Oh, bloody Nora,’ said Linda.

  ‘Over to you, Mum!’ Kirsty smiled, and beeped the car open. ‘Come on, Bram, we’d better get going.’

  As they made off down the street, Bram let out a long breath. ‘Okay, if it comes out that we told your parents we were joining the search but never actually turned up… What do we say?’

  ‘We chickened out. Too scared of the Taylors.’

  ‘That would make sense. We went for a drive and fell asleep in the car…’

  ‘But were too embarrassed to admit it.’

  Bram nodded. Was that reasonable? He couldn’t think straight. He was so tired he felt nauseous. Light-headed and dizzy. As Kirsty turned out of the street he had to close his eyes to stop his head spinning.

  ‘No,’ said Kirsty. ‘Oh, no.’

  There was a high mesh fence all the way round the quarry, no doubt for safety reasons. They got out of the car and stood looking through it to the deep, turquoise water beyond.

  ‘We could cut the fence?’ Bram suggested half-heartedly.

  ‘With what? And if they found the fence cut, they’d wonder why. With the search for Finn getting more publicity, some bright spark would be bound to put two and two together and get divers into the quarry.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We’ll just have to dump him. Deeper into the forest.’

  ‘But someone’s bound to find him!’

  ‘Eventually, yes. But what else can we do? We can’t bury him. We’ve no spade, and it would take too long anyway, with all the roots. We’ll just have to dump him in the forest and hope it looks like – I don’t know, a drunken fight gone wrong. Finn was a nasty piece of work – he probably got into lots of fights. One of the other yobs killed him by accident, drove him up here, dumped his body…’

  ‘But they know he went out that night to terrorise us!’

  ‘Obviously it’s suspicious, and we’ll probably be prime suspects, but they can’t know what happened. They can’t know some of his yobbish pals weren’t helping him – they could have fallen out, gone for each other… They can’t know who killed him.’ She turned away from him to walk back to the car. ‘We have to just dump him and hope for the best. What other choice do we have, Bram?’

  They drove on up the track into the forest, and at a fork selected the weedier of the two alternatives, which looked as if it didn’t get much traffic. They carried on for about quarter of a mile and then stopped the car.

  ‘Here’s probably as good a place as any,’ Kirsty said dully.

  But neither of them made a move. Bram closed his eyes.

  And he must have slept – how could he have slept? – because the next thing he knew, Kirsty was shaking him awake.

  ‘We have to,’ she said, her eyes puffy and red from the silent tears she must have been crying.

  They opened the boot and removed the bin bags. The body in the tarpaulin, which they’d managed to squeeze into the small space last night, was more problematic to get out again. Bram grabbed it by the shoulders and pulled it round, but the tarpaulin snagged on the catch for the boot lock. He heaved, and the tarp ripped a little.

  Kirsty grabbed the legs and helped Bram lift the body out and lower it onto the track. ‘We should take the tarp off him. All the soil on it – they might be able to match it to Woodside’s soil.’

  ‘Something else for the wheelie bins?’

  ‘We should maybe just burn it all. We can go to a shop and buy matches and firelighters.’ Kirsty glanced off back down the track. ‘Let’s get him out of sight before we start messing with the tarpaulin. Into the trees.’

  The conifers in the plantation were planted close together and had spiky, brown, twiggy branches sticking out at head height and below which jabbed and snagged them as they heaved Finn’s body through the trees. They had to bend double in places to avoid the branches, and one or other of them kept dropping their end of their burden. At least no one was likely to come walking through here. A few metres in it was a twilit, claustrophobic world, the light so dim that nothing was growing on the forest floor. It was just a carpet of dead, brown needles.

  ‘We can’t just… leave him here,’ said Kirsty, when they finally laid him down.

  He knew exactly what she meant. Abandoning him here, in this dark, dead place where nothing grew… Somehow it seemed so much worse than putting him into the soil, where bodies were supposed to go. This just seemed
wrong.

  ‘We have to,’ choked Bram. ‘We have to. We need to get the tarp off him. Do we have scissors? The string… We need something to cut it with.’

  They stared at each other in the gloom. ‘We don’t have scissors.’

  ‘Or a knife?’

  Kirsty shook her head. ‘There might be something in the car we could use.’

  In the end they had to unpick the knots, and it seemed to take forever, crouched there breathing in the odours from the body. Finally they got the tarp off him, and bundled the string and the mask inside it. Bram averted his eyes from the body as they stumbled their way back through the trees to the car.

  Bram drove this time, back onto the main track, but as they turned onto the straight section that led past the quarry he saw people up ahead. An elderly couple in light-coloured jackets, maybe a hundred yards away, out for a nice morning walk. They were heading away down the track, but turned to stare at the car.

  ‘Go back!’ Kirsty hissed. ‘If we carry on up the main track, I think it comes out eventually on the back road.’

  Bram reversed back round the bend to the junction, where he turned and headed off up the track through the forest. In places the surface was rutted and difficult to negotiate, especially where the track headed uphill, where rainwater flowing down it had gouged out channels and trenches. What if they got stuck and had to call a garage? How would they explain… And then when Finn’s body was found, which was bound to happen eventually, the garage would have a record of recovering their car from the same forest –

  But they got over the brow of the hill and down the other side, and then they were onto a much better track, and out of the trees into a clear-felled area, and then, oh thank God, onto a tarmacked public road.

  They had done it.

  22

  One, two, three days and nothing. It was like waiting for a storm to break, and the kids were picking up on the tension. Max was spending almost all day in his room, and when Bram or Kirsty went in to check on him, he was usually in bed, either asleep or staring at the ceiling. Phoebe, in contrast, was hyper, bouncing around the house giggling manically one minute and in floods of tears the next over something as minor as creases in her skirt. She seemed to have got it into her head that the Taylors were going to come over and start shouting again about Bram killing Finn, and maybe try to hurt the Hendriksens.