No Place Like Home

by Jane Renshaw

  Bram let out the breath he’d been holding.

  And then he was staggering in David’s arms, trying to break free as David hauled him across the bridge.

  ‘No! Oh, God, no! David! David?’

  David half-lifted him.

  Slammed him down on the parapet.

  His back exploded in pain.

  Bram was shrieking, he was clawing ineffectually at David’s jacket, he was shouting something, he was trying to rip his arms free of David’s grip. The sound of the water below was so loud it seemed to be inside Bram’s head, and David was yelling over it, yelling into his face:

  ‘You’d never withstand a police interrogation, would you? Once they started asking about your movements?’ He screwed up his face, putting on a high voice. ‘And didn’t your wife realise you were gone half the night, Mr Hendriksen, disposing of an inconvenient corpse? You’d land Kirsty right in it, guaranteed, whether you meant to or not. You fucking useless twat!’

  ‘No! No, I wouldn’t!’ Bram babbled desperately, twisting in David’s grip.

  ‘This way’s better. Poor Bram lost it after I’d got the confession out of him. Broke down and ran off. No idea what happened to him after that.’

  ‘But they’ll know!’ The words came out as a whimper. ‘After what happened to Owen, they’ll know!’

  ‘But they don’t know what happened to Owen, do they?’

  ‘Kirsty will tell them!’

  ‘Yeah, grief does weird things to people, eh? Poor Kirsty’s out of her mind. But she’ll get over it. She’ll soon see she’s better off without a useless wee parasite latched on her back, sucking the lifeblood out of her.’

  His mouth widened in a grin as he heaved at Bram, and Bram felt his feet leave the ground, the solid stone parapet under him slip away as the top half of his body was pushed out into space, nothing under it, and when he tried to throw himself forwards, back onto the bridge, David flung his whole bodyweight at him, and there was nothing for Bram to hold on to but David himself.

  His only hope now was David, that solid, muscled body, and he clung to it.

  He locked his fingers round the hard biceps.

  But still he was falling, still he was falling backwards.

  Out into space.

  But he didn’t let go.

  So as he fell, David fell with him.

  Then there was another explosion of pain as his body smacked down on the water, as it closed over his head, as it flooded into his nose and mouth. And now it was David who clung to Bram, the two of them tumbling over and over in the churning river, and he felt another blow, to his shoulder, and kicked desperately with his legs, desperately pushed his head above the surface as they were dragged by the current under one of the arches of the bridge and spat out at the other side.

  Cold.

  So cold.

  All the warmth had been sucked from his body and he was shaking, his teeth knocking together, his chest cramping so whenever his head broke the surface he could only manage tiny gulps of air.

  He was going to drown!

  But into Bram’s head came the words of the instructor on the wild swimming course:

  If you fall into a fast-flowing river…

  Don’t fight the current. Go with it.

  But David was pulling at him in panic, and his head went under again.

  Flip onto your back.

  Get your feet pointing downstream.

  He managed to roll, in the churning water, onto his back, but David hauled him so he kept on rolling, buffeted and sucked under by the current.

  ‘Can’t… swim!’ David’s voice rasped in his ear as they resurfaced before they both went back under, David pulling him around and down so both their bodies were tipped over and over in the dark water until Bram didn’t know which way was up, and there was freezing water in his nose and mouth, and the blackness was coming.

  With the last vestiges of his strength, he pushed David away. Kicked out at him.

  And now he was free, and as he flailed his frozen limbs, as he forced his body up to the surface, his nose and mouth up into the air, as he gasped it, air, he saw David’s head in the water in front of him, just out of reach, bobbing away from him, the smooth, pale baldness of it standing out in the dark water. He flipped onto his back and pointed his feet downstream, his head lifted by the force of the current so, finally, he could breathe.

  He tried to angle himself to follow David, to let the current sweep him in the same direction, but the pale bald head was gone. He couldn’t see it any more.

  Fill your lungs with as much air as possible for buoyancy.

  He gulped in more air, spluttering as he inhaled water with it.

  Look around you for calm water.

  There were often eddies by the banks of a river where the water turned back on itself and cancelled out the force of the current, creating little pockets of safety. He got a hand up to his face to swipe the water from his eyes, squinting through the film distorting his vision, trying to keep his head still as his body was shaken and jarred by the current swirling around him.

  There wasn’t enough light. He couldn’t see anything but the roiling water and the indistinct bank of the river, to his left, flashing past.

  He would just have to take a chance and head for the bank.

  Get onto your front and swim diagonally across the current, not at right angles to it.

  Bram hadn’t been in a pool for weeks. Months.

  But he was a strong swimmer.

  He could do this.

  The instructor on that course in Wales had said Bram had an excellent technique, one of the best he’d seen.

  He was a bloody good swimmer!

  He pushed his head up out of the water and took a long breath before flipping onto his front and starting to swim, powering himself through the water, still going downstream but easing himself across the current towards the bank. His muscles protested, his limbs weak and so cold he could hardly feel them, could hardly tell where they were in the water.

  But the muscle memory was there. His body knew what to do.

  And then, before it seemed possible, he was scrabbling with his hands at the earthy bank, at the vegetation; he was hauling himself out of the water and flopping on the ground, lungs heaving, limbs shaking, coughing water up onto the wet grass.

  28

  ‘I’m glad he’s dead!’ sobbed Kirsty again, as if trying to convince herself that this was true.

  Bram said nothing.

  He was sitting naked on the edge of the bed while Kirsty gently towelled his bruised chest and back. She hadn’t let him out of her sight since he’d got back, bathing him like a child, insisting he stay in the hot bath until he was warm.

  He barely remembered how he’d found his way back to the car in the dim light of dusk. He must somehow have managed to retrace his steps along the road and up the path into Anagach Wood. He could only remember meeting one person, a woman walking a little dog near the car park, who had looked at him curiously, but he hadn’t felt up to offering an explanation for why he was trudging along in soaking wet clothes.

  He’d been trembling so much, by the time he’d got back to the car, that he had had great difficulty extracting the car key from his pocket, and God knew how he’d managed to drive home. That was a blur too.

  When he’d got back to Woodside he’d found he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get out of the car, and eventually Kirsty had come down the verandah steps and opened the driver’s door and said something, but he hadn’t been able to speak. She’d somehow got him upstairs and into the bath without Phoebe seeing him. And when the shaking had stopped, when his brain had started to unfreeze itself, he had been able to tell her what had happened.

  And now she dressed him, like a child, talking to him firmly but gently, telling him to lift his arms, guiding them into the sleeves of his T-shirt, his warm cashmere jumper. As she tied the laces of his trainers, she asked him, ‘Did anyone see you and Dad together?’

  It
was an effort to speak. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Okay.’ Kirsty took his hands in hers. ‘Everything’s going to be okay. You went to meet Dad at Anagach, but he wasn’t there. You came home and tried calling him. We should do that now. Where’s your phone?’

  ‘In the car.’

  She came back with the phone and made Bram call David and leave a message.

  ‘And Mum called before, wondering if I’d heard from you. I said the pair of you had probably gone for a drink… I’ll have to call her back. Oh God! I’ll have to say you wandered about for ages looking for him… You forgot your phone so you couldn’t call him…’ She fell silent, staring off. Obviously thinking about Linda.

  Bram sobbed: ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘He tried to kill you! You’ve nothing to be sorry for!’

  ‘What are we going to say to Max? What are we going to do? Should we go and get him?’

  ‘Mum will need to report Dad missing. And then – Bram, I’d like her to come and live with us. Wherever we move to.’

  Linda! Oh, poor Linda!

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We’ll need to tell Max about Finn. That you didn’t mean to kill him. We can delete the footage from the cloud. Dad’s phone… The footage was on Dad’s phone, and there’s your confession on there too, but maybe his body will never be found. Or if it is, the phone will be too waterlogged to work.’ A silence. ‘If it does work…’ She caught herself up. ‘But we can only deal with the things we can control. And hope for the best.’ She nodded, and repeated quietly, as if to herself: ‘Hope for the best.’

  For two days they lived in a terrible kind of limbo while the police searched for David in Anagach Wood. The sniffer dogs seemed to pick up a trail but then lost it again. Fraser and his mates assisted with the search, as did Bram, Kirsty, Max and Linda. Linda walked the paths through the wood with Bertie and Kirsty, and Kirsty said it was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, pretending to Linda that there was still hope.

  When she wasn’t helping with the search, Linda moved about the house like a ghost, hardly speaking, her sightless eyes seeming to accuse Bram whenever she turned to him. Phoebe was unnaturally quiet too, bursting into tears at random moments.

  Max, presumably in deference to Linda, was behaving impeccably.

  It was like living with a polite stranger.

  Bram longed to be able to talk to him about that cloud footage, but if he had supposedly not met David at Anagach Wood, there was no way he could know about it. They had decided that it would be too suspicious to suddenly confess to Max about Finn’s death right after David had gone to meet Bram to show him the cloud footage, so were waiting for Max to bring it up himself. If he didn’t do so soon, though, they would have to broach the subject, regardless.

  And then Scott called round to tell them that David’s body had been found, several miles downriver from Grantown. The theory was that David had arrived early for his meeting with Bram, gone off to look at the river in spate, and somehow fallen in.

  They needed someone to look at the body and identify it.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Bram at once.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Linda dazedly.

  He had prepared himself for David’s face to be a mess after being bashed about in the water, but, apart from a pasty, doughy appearance and some bruises, it was remarkably unchanged, so much so that Bram could almost imagine his eyes opening, his mouth moving as it framed an accusation, the muscly body propelling itself off the gurney, hands reaching for Bram’s throat –

  Linda stood quietly until Bram said, ‘Yes, it’s him,’ and then she asked if she could touch his face. Bram had to turn away at that point. It took all he had to master his emotions, to put his arm around Linda, when she was ready to leave, and speak hollow words of comfort.

  That evening, after Linda, numb with shock, had gone early to bed, Max asked if he could speak to Kirsty and Bram, and they all sat down at the kitchen table. Bram’s heart was pounding, but he managed to offer coffee without his voice sounding too strange.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Max politely. ‘Dad, could you come and sit down?’

  Bram obediently subsided onto a kitchen chair.

  ‘Did you kill Grandad?’

  Time seemed to slow right down. Bram was aware of the fridge chuntering; a weird buzzing in his ears; his own breath filling his lungs.

  ‘No,’ he said at last.

  ‘But you did meet him, didn’t you?’ Max’s tone was flat. ‘You know about the cloud footage. You know – you know that I know about Finn. That you killed him.’

  Bram nodded. Expelled the air he’d been holding in his lungs.

  He tried to explain, and Max heard Bram’s halting recitation in silence, just saying, at the end, ‘I know you wouldn’t have meant to kill Finn, Dad. And I get that you only let them arrest me because you knew they could have no evidence against me. But Grandad… You were going to stitch up Grandad?’

  ‘Yes, we were,’ said Kirsty. ‘He hit Finn too, Max. It could have been those blows that killed him. And Grandad – he’d killed before and got away with it.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘He killed Owen. My boyfriend when I was at school.’

  Kirsty told Max about Owen, and suddenly it was obviously too much. Max jumped up from his chair, sending it crashing back onto the slate floor, and then he was striding across the Walton Room to the front door.

  ‘Max!’ called Bram.

  At the door, Max stopped and turned. His chest was heaving.

  Bram ran to him, but when he reached him Max stepped back. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve deleted the footage from the cloud and my phone. And Scott says Grandad’s phone is knackered – been in the water too long. So you’re good. It’s all good.’

  ‘Max–’ But what could he say?

  Max was looking at him coldly. ‘Seems the police are thinking Grandad killed Finn, and Fraser covered it up. Now Grandad’s dead, the investigation will probably fizzle out eventually. It won’t be a priority for them, with the probable culprit dead.’

  Kirsty had joined them at the door. She reached out a hand, tentatively, to touch Max’s arm, and he let her but didn’t respond in any way.

  ‘It will all be okay,’ Kirsty got out. ‘All we need to do is say nothing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Max, looking from her to Bram with an awful little smile. ‘Yeah. I get it.’

  29

  Bram didn’t want to let go of Kirsty’s hand. They were standing in the car park, the two of them, holding tight to each other’s hands like scared children. Bram had never really liked Aviemore. It was a tourist village, and the long, modern, ugly main street stretching to either side was full of outdoor clothing shops and cafés and gift shops against the incongruously spectacular backdrop of the Cairngorms. This morning, though, it was a happy confusion of tourist coaches and cars and people in brightly coloured jackets. He wished he could stay standing here forever.

  ‘But think of the kids,’ Kirsty burst out, squeezing his hand even tighter.

  ‘I am thinking of the kids.’ Bram had to go. He had to let go of her hand and turn and walk away across this car park. ‘What kind of message would I be giving Max, if I let this go on any longer? That it’s okay to – to do what I did, and let someone else take the blame? If we make him cover this up for us, he’ll come to hate us, as you hated David. And for good reason.’

  Kirsty shook her head. ‘He doesn’t want you to do this!’

  But the only thing stopping Bram from running back to the car with her and jumping in and roaring out of here was the thought of Max’s face, the way Max had looked at him, when he had explained what he was going to do now.

  ‘No, Dad!’ he had sobbed, but his face…

  There had been devastation there, desolation, but also relief, a dropping away of a burden no boy of eighteen should have to bear. It had been the way Max used to look at Bram when he was little, when something had frightened or upset him and
he’d run to his dad, his face contorted, but his eyes… his eyes so full of trust, so full of certainty that Bram would know what to say and what to do to make it right.

  He let go of Kirsty’s hand. Gently, he kissed her, he pulled her close, as on the street someone laughed, a coach full of tourists chugged by, the world kept turning.

  And then he left her there.

  He walked into the police station.

  He asked to speak to DI Scott Sinclair.

  And when Scott had shown him into a boxy little room and gestured for him to sit on the other side of the table, Bram didn’t sit, he remained standing, he looked Scott in the eye, and he spoke the words that had been fighting, every second of every day since that terrible night, to be released.

  ‘I killed him. I killed Finn Taylor.’

  Epilogue

  One Year Later

  This was Kirsty’s night-time ritual, now: going round the house pulling the curtains across the windows. They were deep-set little windows, with the original Victorian sash-and-case frames – each one a picture, showing dusk gathering in the old orchard that surrounded the house. A late dusk, of course, this far north in summer. Mum and Phoebe were already in bed and the light had only just begun to fade. The walls were thick, so the windowsills were deep, and on each one she had arranged a collection of pretty things – tiny blue and green glass bottles, an old stoneware jug, a vase with roses from the garden, a papier-mâché elephant Phoebe had made at school.

  Little Knowes Croft couldn’t have been more different from Woodside.

  Built in 1802, it was on a miniature scale, with small, cosy rooms and low ceilings. Perfect for hunkering down over the winter, when the four of them, Max, Phoebe, Mum and Kirsty, had seemed to want nothing more than to light the fire and put the TV on and sit here together, Phoebe cuddled between Kirsty and Mum on the sofa, Max in the chair or stretched on the hearth rug.

  Kirsty had sold most of their old furniture and bought new stuff, mainly antiques to suit the cottage, at auctions and on eBay. She was particularly fond of the grandfather clock which just fitted into the low-ceilinged living room, ticking away now companionably.