No Place Like Home

by Jane Renshaw

  ‘Max!’ Bram rapped out. ‘That’s not funny!’

  ‘Yeah, tell me about it!’

  Phoebe’s lips trembled.

  Bram put his hand on Phoebe’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, kleintje,’ he said for the umpteenth time. ‘The Taylors know Grandad didn’t kill Finn.’

  Phoebe looked up at him with her big blue eyes. No matter how often they told her that the Taylors had moved out of Benlervie and would never be coming back, Phoebe was convinced that they were going to come for revenge.

  ‘Yeah, everyone knows that except the stupid police and, it seems, his own stupid granddaughter,’ Max spat, and Phoebe lifted up her head and howled.

  After Bram had read Max the riot act, he sulked in his room, refusing to come out for lunch with Linda. When it was time for Linda to leave – Kirsty was running her back into Grantown – Bram knocked on Max’s door and, when there was no response, opened it and went in.

  Max was sitting on his bed hunched over his laptop. He didn’t look up.

  ‘Grannie’s leaving now, Max. Can you come down to say goodbye, please?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Max?’

  ‘Piss off, Dad.’

  Bram blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  Who are you and what have you done with my son? Bram had no idea how to communicate with this new Max. ‘Uh.’ What on earth should he say? ‘Well, Max, I don’t imagine Grannie wants to see you if you’re going to behave like this.’

  Max finally looked up at him, and Bram’s blood ran cold. Max was staring at him as if… yes, as if he hated him. The silence stretched on.

  ‘Right. Come down when you’ve cooled off,’ Bram ended up saying, pulling the door shut behind him.

  Bram made Max’s favourite dinner of tacos with refried beans and a big salad. He set it out on the table and took off his apron. Phoebe plomped herself down on her chair and put a tomato into her mouth. Kirsty started filling glasses with water.

  ‘No, I’ll get him,’ she said when Bram made for the stairs.

  They tended to use a tag-team approach when it came to disciplining the kids. Not exactly good cop/bad cop – more a case of moving up the reserves to give the battle-weary front-line troops a break.

  She was back down in thirty seconds. ‘He’s not in his room.’

  A search of the house established that Max wasn’t there. Bram had a quick look around outside – the rain had finally stopped, so it was likely Max had gone for a walk.

  ‘Let’s just start without him,’ Kirsty said. ‘He’ll be back when he’s hungry, which won’t be long, knowing him.’

  About an hour after they’d finished eating, when they were gathered round the TV, Kirsty’s phone buzzed.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’ Her eyes widened as she listened. ‘Right. Okay. Well, tell him we’re not happy that he didn’t tell us where he was going.’

  She mouthed, ‘Max is with them’ at Bram.

  ‘How… Oh, no, you mean he hitch-hiked? Can I speak to him?’ A long pause. Phoebe was gazing at Kirsty with that virtuous look she assumed whenever Max was in trouble. ‘Max. Are you okay?… What?… What? Don’t you dare speak to me like – Max. Max!’ She shook her head grimly at Bram.

  Bram held out his hand for the phone. But when he put it to his ear and said, ‘Max?’, it was David’s voice that replied.

  ‘Bram. Listen, he’s fine. He just wants to stay with us for a while.’

  ‘To stay with you?’

  Kirsty telegraphed to him frantically.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, David. Can you put Max on?’

  ‘He’s not wanting to talk to you, Bram.’ A sigh. ‘Hold on.’ Sounds of footsteps and a door opening and closing. ‘Right. Truth is, Bram, we’ve got a problem. We need to talk. Man to man.’

  ‘What sort of problem?’

  ‘I’ll come over – or no. Let’s meet up somewhere. I would suggest the Inverluie Hotel bar, but I know it’s not your favourite place in the world. How about Anagach? You know Anagach Wood, just outside the town?’

  ‘Uh, yes, where you take Bertie?’

  ‘That’s the place. See you in the car park at the end of Forest Road in half an hour? At the start of the woodland walks? We can go for a ramble, have a bit of a chat.’

  ‘Yes, okay then.’

  He ended the call and told Kirsty what David had said.

  ‘What does he mean by “a problem”?’ Kirsty frowned.

  ‘No idea.’

  Phoebe sighed. ‘Max is really going off the rails. Is he on drugs?’

  Kirsty and Bram gaped at each other.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ said Kirsty weakly.

  Phoebe shrugged. ‘When teenagers go all weird, they’re usually on drugs.’

  What on earth had she been watching? As she skipped off to the kitchen, Kirsty urged, ‘Go, Bram. Find out what’s going on with Max and make him come back with you. Don’t leave him with Dad. What if he decides he wants to stay with Mum and Dad permanently?’

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’ Bram put a confidence into his voice he didn’t feel.

  Just what was going on with Max?

  27

  David appeared from the trees as Bram parked the Discovery in the tiny car park at the end of the tarmacked road, where the Speyside Way footpath met the woodland walks through Anagach Wood. Good – he hadn’t brought Bertie. This was going to be traumatic enough without having to keep track of the dog. There was only one other vehicle, but it wasn’t David’s Subaru – presumably he had come on foot.

  ‘Where’s Max?’ Bram asked as he pulled on his walking boots.

  ‘Back at the house.’ David was jigging from one foot to the other impatiently. ‘Let’s go, Bram.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Bram quickly tied his laces and they set off along the wide, well-maintained path into the wood. Despite all the rain, it wasn’t too muddy, at this point anyway. ‘Which walk shall we do?’

  ‘The one that goes to Mid Anagach.’ It wasn’t a suggestion.

  Bram wasn’t sure where that was, but he nodded. ‘David, do we have to do this? Can’t we just go back to the house and talk with Max?’

  David didn’t respond, just marched off under the overhanging boughs of the trees.

  Bram trotted after him.

  For a while they walked in silence. It was a beautiful, wild place, the air heavy with pine resin. The sky had cleared and the sun was low in the sky, casting a warm evening glow over the tops of the trees. Soon they had left the deciduous trees behind and were in the pinewood proper, the path meandering through the heathery undergrowth, the massive old pine trees towering above them seeming to shelter the smaller ones, their offspring, that grew naturally, self-seeded, all around. Great for wildlife. If Max had been here he would have been on the look-out for capercaillie, the big turkey-like bird that was the largest member of the grouse family and critically endangered in the UK, although this was one of its strongholds.

  Or would he?

  He’d probably just have shambled along with his head down.

  ‘David,’ Bram said at last. ‘Are we going to talk or not?’

  ‘Oh, we’re going to talk, all right.’

  David marched on ahead, as if he was alone, never looking back to check that Bram was still following. Embarrassingly, Bram was soon puffing. David set quite a pace. Bram made an effort to catch up, and, where the path widened as it came out into a heathery clearing, he came alongside David.

  ‘What’s this “problem” with Max?’

  David shook his head, his mouth a thin line. Then he suddenly stopped, rounding on Bram and getting right in his face. ‘I hope you’re proud of yourself. You’ve really messed that boy up.’

  Bram stepped back. ‘What do you mean?’

  For a moment David just stared into Bram’s eyes, his chest visibly rising and falling. Then his face contorted in a sneer, and he marched on ahead, leaving Bram to trot after him. God almighty. What on ea
rth did he mean by that? In what way was Max ‘messed up’? Was he talking about the whole Finn trauma, the police interrogation? But how could David know that Bram had anything to do with Finn’s death? No, he must be talking about something else.

  They’d been walking in silence for about quarter of an hour when David suddenly struck off the main path onto a much smaller, muddier one – was it in fact a proper path, or just a deer track? – and Bram’s boots slipped around on the slick surface.

  ‘Uh, aren’t we supposed to stick to the paths so as not to disturb the capercaillies?’

  ‘This is a path,’ David snapped, not looking round.

  As well as the mud, there were heather roots to negotiate, black, slippery trip hazards crossing the path, but David didn’t break stride.

  ‘David,’ said Bram in the end, exasperated. ‘I thought you wanted to talk?’

  He turned. ‘Aye, but not where any bastard could hear us.’

  Bram gestured at their surroundings. There wasn’t a sound except for the wind in the tops of the tall pines. Not a soul around. ‘Isn’t this private enough for you?’

  David, hands on hips in Henry VIII pose, scanned the path behind and in front of them, and nodded. ‘Okay.’ He took his phone from his pocket. ‘Max wanted to help me out. See if he could find something that would exonerate me. You’d said the cameras were stolen a couple of days before the night Finn was killed, although, weirdly, you didn’t report this to the police. Max decided to see if they’d picked anything up. Maybe someone suspicious hanging around. Maybe one of Finn’s dodgy mates. The real killer. Something that might get DI Cromer off my back.’

  Bram had gone cold. ‘But – with the cameras gone, how could Max check any footage that might have been on them?’

  ‘The cloud.’ David’s unwavering gaze seemed to bore into Bram’s head. ‘He looked on the cloud.’

  Bram couldn’t speak.

  He and Kirsty weren’t tech-savvy. They tended to leave any IT stuff to Max who, like most of his generation, seemed to have absorbed his knowledge of it through osmosis. Bram hadn’t even thought about cloud storage. He remembered, now, Max burbling on, when Bram had moved the cameras from the wood to the house, about how this meant they were now in range of the Wi-Fi, but Bram hadn’t thought through what that meant.

  It meant that all the footage taken near the house had been stored, through the Wi-Fi, on the cloud.

  Wordlessly, David handed him his phone.

  On the screen were infrared images of two figures, one holding the other, moving in a sort of macabre dance, the shorter of the two shaking the other, whose floppy head was flung back, again and again, to bounce –

  To bounce off the wall of the shed.

  It was Bram, bashing Finn’s head against the hose bracket.

  As he watched, Finn flopped to the ground and Bram stood looking down at him, then stooped and put his hands to Finn’s head. Not to try to help him, not to try to staunch the blood, but to roughly pull off the mask. Finn’s face immediately glowed brighter as the mask was removed, and the residual heat gave the mask in Bram’s hand form, briefly, a dull orange face with dark circles for eyes and a dark leering mouth, before the heat dissipated in the night air and only a ghostly imprint of it remained.

  Bram watched as the glowing alien version of himself moved off screen, and all that was left was the glowing shape of Finn lying on the ground. Glowing as brightly as ever.

  Then Bram was back with another person.

  Kirsty.

  The two figures dragged the third into the shed.

  Bram continued to stare at the screen as the glowing white and yellow shapes of himself and Kirsty – glowing brighter now, for some reason – left the shed and disappeared.

  It was the end of the clip.

  David snatched back the phone and switched it off.

  ‘I – we–’ Bram swallowed. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him!’

  ‘Keep your bloody voice down!’

  ‘He came for me. You must have seen, on the footage just before the bit where – where I’m pushing him back against the shed – he came for me. And then… I lost it. But I didn’t mean to kill him.’

  Max had seen this. He’d gone onto the cloud hoping to see some random thug prowling about, and been confronted with this. His own father battering the boy to death, and then both his parents concealing the body in the shed… He must have found the footage today and fled the house, gone to his grandad.

  Oh, Max!

  ‘You killed him,’ spat David. ‘And then you dragged Kirsty into it, you made her an accessory, you made her help you hide that lad’s dead body in the shed and then – what? You buried him in the veg patch? Then decided to dump him further afield?’ He snorted. ‘Talk about bloody incompetence! And then you let Max be arrested! You let me be arrested! No – you engineered my arrest!’

  ‘All we did was show the police the petcam footage,’ Bram got out.

  With a look of disgust, David turned on his heel and marched off down the path.

  Bram ran after him. ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to the police? Is Max – Is he all right?’

  ‘Of course he’s not all right!’ David flung over his shoulder, not stopping, not slowing down.

  Oh God.

  Bram followed him. The path wound into a thicket of trees where it was difficult to see the path, the trees blocking out the low evening light, and Bram slipped and fell onto his side. By the time he’d picked himself up, David had disappeared.

  Oh God, oh God!

  He had to persuade David not to go to the police. And he’d have to talk to Max, explain what had happened.

  He scrambled down the path where it headed off downhill, and then he was coming out of the trees onto a narrow tarmacked road. He could see David ahead, striding off into the gloom cast by tall pines. He hurried after him, but as they came in sight of a house, David turned to snarl: ‘Keep your mouth shut!’

  So they kept walking along the road in tense silence. On one side was a band of trees beyond which Bram got glimpses of fields. Where were they? Did this road lead back to the car park? In one way he wanted this nightmare of a walk to end, but in another he wanted it to go on forever because what was waiting at the end of it? An excruciating talk with Max. With Linda, he supposed. And then the police…

  What the hell was going to happen?

  There were more houses strung along the road, and then they were at a junction with another road, where David turned left and went on a few paces before stopping and wheeling round to face him. ‘Of course I’m not going to the police,’ he hissed, his face contorted with rage. ‘How can I, when you’ve got Kirsty mixed up in it? I dob you in, that’s my wee girl going down for what she did. What you made her do!’

  Bram took a step back.

  But David just shook his head in disgust and marched off.

  Bram watched him disappearing into the dusk.

  He had to make David understand. Surely, after what had happened with Owen, David could understand what it was like to be caught up in a moment of madness? But it was hopeless trying to reason with him when he was in this mood.

  Coward.

  As if his mood was going to get any better any time soon.

  Unless Bram could explain.

  He made himself start walking again, after David. Into the gloom of the trees and then out again. The sun was setting now, all the colours of the rainbow streaking the sky, making David’s bald head glow a weird orange. He had stopped and seemed to be waiting for him. Bram could hear the roar of traffic – they must be near the A95. He passed between a pair of bollards and up an incline in the road, which had become less of a road and more of a track at this point, grass encroaching on either side. And then he realised where they were.

  That wasn’t traffic he could hear. It was water, roaring under them.

  There were on a bridge.

  Oh Christ! Was this the Old Bridge of Spey? Where David had killed Owen?

/>   David was shaking his head. ‘You say Finn came at you.’

  ‘He did!’ Bram looked around them, but there was no one else in sight. Should he make a run for it? But David, despite the age difference, was much fitter than Bram. He would catch him. And anyway, why would David intend him any harm? Okay so he was angry, but surely not homicidally so?

  ‘And so you killed him.’

  ‘I keep trying to tell you: I didn’t mean to! The same thing happened as when you encountered him, and hit him with the rifle. It wasn’t like I even meant to… to assault him. There was a fight. In the heat of the moment… I suppose I went too far. Obviously I went too far… bashing his… his head off the shed like that.’

  ‘Until he was dead.’

  It wouldn’t help matters to bring up the whole he-wasn’t-actually-dead thing. The clip had ended after Bram and Kirsty had dragged Finn’s body – what they’d thought at the time was his dead body – into the shed. Presumably Max had stopped watching at that point.

  Bram nodded.

  ‘Until he was dead?’ David repeated.

  ‘Yes.’ The word came out as a groan.

  David’s expression seemed to change.

  In the low light, Bram thought he was smiling – but surely not?

  ‘Thanks, Bram.’ He held something up in his hand. His phone. David’s voice came from it, tinny and distorted:

  ‘You say Finn came at you.’

  And then Bram’s own voice:

  ‘He did!’

  ‘And so you killed him.’

  ‘I keep trying to tell you: I didn’t mean to!’

  David stabbed a finger at the phone to cut the recording and pocketed it. ‘That should do the trick. We don’t want the police seeing that footage, after all, do we? Not with Kirsty on there. Now they won’t have to.’

  Bram felt his legs weaken, and backed up against one of the bollards. ‘Okay.’ He took a huge breath. ‘But please, David… Let me go to the police myself, and tell them what happened. I’ll leave Kirsty out of it.’

  David took three steps to close the distance between them, and Bram shrank back, but David put an arm round his shoulders, giving him a shake. ‘Good man.’