by Will Carver
‘Michael,’ his mother called out in a shriller-than-usual voice.
Mum, you’ve ruined it now, Michael huffed.
He turned around to see what she wanted. Jacob turned around a fraction after his older brother.
There was a loud noise and Michael heard a thump before his brother’s legs seem to lose all strength and give way beneath him. A man in a long dark coat was running towards the woods. His mother was screaming, the most deathly, terrifying howl he had ever heard. She was running towards her youngest son, then dropping to her knees and scooping him into her arms.
The man with the gun reached the line of trees in the distance and looked back over his shoulder. Michael’s mother did not notice; she was too busy rocking Jacob and holding her hand to his chest.
Michael saw. In shock, he sat down calmly on the grass a few metres from his wailing mother and bleeding brother. He didn’t say anything. His eyes were open but he wasn’t really looking at anything. Not in the real world.
He was in shock. Yes. But he had deliberately withdrawn inside himself. There was only one thing in his mind to focus on now. And that was the face of the man who had killed his little brother and would rip his family in half.
SURFACE TOWNS
I’ve witnessed many deaths.
Have you ever noticed that it always seems to be the funerals that bring people together? Feuds can be put on hold for the duration of a ceremony, grudges can be forgotten while a body is lowered into the ground. It’s the weddings that cause all the trouble. The pressure of perfection. That burden just isn’t present at an occasion where the guest of honour is decomposing in a box.
It is death that unifies people.
Almost everybody in Hinton Hollow thought it started in the park with the Brady kid, that he was the first victim of that dark week in their town’s history. Initial insights suggested an outsider, a freak occurrence, some maniac passing through their sheltered idyll. Perhaps a tearaway from a neighbouring village. There always seemed to be a little more noise coming from Roylake. Perhaps a disgruntled resident of Twaincroft Hill, a marginally more affluent village to the east that boasts luxury riverside homes but a high street in decline, overrun with estate agents. Isn’t it always one of those surface towns where nobody is a suspect and everyone should be?
They were wrong.
This didn’t begin with the death of young Jacob Brady. And Detective Sergeant Pace was not an outsider; he was born here. His GP was Dr Green, like so many of the folk that still live in Hinton Hollow, the ones that stayed while that young overachiever was tempted by the pulsating thrum of city life. Pace was a stranger, sure, but he belonged.
It didn’t begin with him, either. It opened, as is so often the case, with love and that most formal and public declaration of commitment. The entire village was invited and all were involved with the proceedings in some manner. From the florist arranging gerberas, to the bakery stacking tiers of sponge, to the mediocre local cover band who refused to improve with rehearsal.
But Oscar Tambor went missing, and for two days, nobody took his fiancé seriously. Because a five-year-old boy was killed that day and that case dominated. That is what clawed at the members of the Hinton Hollow community. That is what dampened spirits and wrung hearts. It wasn’t Liv Dunham pestering the police about her absent husband-to-be. They didn’t believe that Oz Tambor would simply walk out on Liv this close to the big day. But it seemed even less likely that he would have been taken.
It’s the weddings that tear people apart.
NOT THAT KIND OF PLACE
He romanticised London inordinately, despite the necessity to escape. That is one of the reasons he sat facing backwards on the train. He wanted one last look, to hold it in his view for as long he could, drinking in the place he had loved before everything turned to shit.
Detective Sergeant Pace was apprehensive about returning to Hinton Hollow. It had been years and, though he knew the village and its people would not have changed significantly since the date of his departure – it’s not that kind of place – he understood that he was never getting back to being the person he had once been; the person they all thought they knew.
The train journey seemed to end too near the point at which it had begun. They were less than an hour from London, and Hinton Hollow was the next stop. It wasn’t even necessary to change lines at any point. Hinton Hollow has a quaint but historic station on a route between two major cities. Pace wondered whether it would have made a difference to his life if he’d simply commuted. He could have worked in the city that had attracted him in the first instance but had an escape at the end of the day. The security of his hometown.
He still would have seen those people jump from Tower Bridge, though. And no amount of freshly baked bread or civic conviviality would have been able to make him forget.
The woman opposite him had distractingly smooth legs. City legs, he thought to himself. Nobody in Hinton Hollow could possibly have legs like that. Her hair was straight, mousy, stroking lovingly at her thin shoulders. Her gaze was fixed on the pages of her book as Pace’s was on her calves. It was a novel he’d never read but instantly dismissed as some unrealistic crime story. He breathed in that reality and it was nothing like the books or movies portrayed.
Pace flicked his eyes up but the woman was still engrossed in her fiction. She was either reading slowly or pretending to read because she hadn’t turned the page in the last ninety seconds. He noted that.
I was next to her. Gently caressing her interest so that she would play with him, tease him.
Pace looked out of the window to his left; the buildings had been getting smaller the further he journeyed from London. Even the large telecom company buildings surrounding the last train stop seemed humble in comparison to the adopted home he was running from. He had reached the part of the journey where the concrete gave way to the crops and waterways that led to Hinton Hollow.
He imagined the playful fake reader opposite him was commuting to the city at the other end of the line, and for a moment he thought that she was lucky.
Facing the capital also served the advantage that he could watch where he was coming from. He’d notice if someone or something was following him. He could keep an eye on his own shadow; looking out for the darkness. He had no idea I was right there with him.
The carriage gently urged his travel companion’s chest forward as the train began to slow for his stop, Pace took the opportunity for one final innocent dalliance with the sultry pretend bookworm. He wasn’t going to see legs like that for a long time. And he wouldn’t get a smile like that from a stranger in Hinton Hollow. Because nobody was a stranger.
I put a hand on her back and she produced a coquettish little smile, a knowing look. And Pace put his hand on his right trouser pocket to check for his phone. He’d have to speak to Maeve at some point and some point soon. She’d be wondering where he was. He knew how she would react to him leaving so suddenly. They’d woken up together the previous morning.
Detective Sergeant Pace could have his back turned to his hometown all he wanted. And he could tell himself that it was for his own protection – that he was preserving the people he had known and edged uncomfortably away from. But all it meant was that he couldn’t see what was coming.
HEADING OUT
I was all over town. Everywhere. If you are still here, listening to my story, you will also be everywhere.
Try to keep up.
Liv had been talking to Oz Tambor about Maggie when Detective Sergeant Pace’s train pulled in to platform two: there are only two platforms at Hinton Hollow train station, one heading to London, the other to Oxford. Maggie was the daughter of the flower arranger who had prepared the wreath for Oz’s father’s grave four years previous and had woken up that morning to a broken shop window.
‘She’s certainly got her mother’s eye,’ Oz had proclaimed, feigning enthusiasm for the subject once again.
He wanted to marry Liv Dunham. He loved h
er. He had loved her for years. They’d become a couple in secondary school and neither had strayed in that time. Neither had lived. It was an inevitability that this day would come. They knew it. The whole town knew it.
OTHER THINGS THE WHOLE TOWN KNEW
Oz and Liv were perfect for each other.
Their love was so true it was almost enviable.
They were stable.
They were predictable.
Oz was posturing, rattling out some line he’d picked up from Liv and her friends about the autumnal colours being reflected in the flowers and how it would be a continuation of the forest. Bringing the outside to the inside.
He said these kinds of things because he knew it made Liv happy to think that he wanted to be involved in the planning. She had her notebook and her stickers and her colour-coding; he had his nodding agreement.
What a team.
SOMETHING THE WHOLE TOWN DIDN’T KNOW
Stability can leave a person yearning.
I can work with yearning.
Oz was aware that the series of planned moments were important to her, that the spectacle of that one day had become her drive. It was now a project. Though Oz was not hugely interested in what the ceremony looked like, it was important to him because it was important to Liv. All he wanted to do was marry the woman he had always loved.
They had agreed to take the week off work so neither would be stressed with the balance they’d have to perform in the run-up to their vows.
It hadn’t worked like that for Oz.
Everything had become about the wedding. It’s all they talked about. It was only day one and he had already started to miss the office.
‘I don’t think it’s worth worrying about now, Liv. Everything is in hand. We should just enjoy this week together.’ He bit into his toast, the crunch punctuating his sentence.
‘I know. I know. You’re right. But I’m only planning on doing this once, I don’t want to drop the ball now.’ Liv was standing waiting for the kettle to boil while Oz sat at the kitchen table. She took half a slice of his toast and started to eat it. She’d always done this, claiming she wasn’t a breakfast person; a morning coffee would suffice. It didn’t annoy Oz that she did this. It was another of her quirks that made him smile and give that every single morning shake of the head.
‘I get it.’ He swallowed his food before continuing. ‘The whole town is in on this; they won’t let anything go wrong. Nothing will go wrong.’
A conscience would have made me move on to one of the other 5,019 people left in Hinton Hollow. If, in any way, I had found them interesting, I would have danced my way around somebody else’s kitchen that morning. But this was too perfect to pass up.
The kettle clicked as though it had an idea at that moment. Liv poured the boiling water onto her two spoons of instant coffee, stirred and took it over to the table, where she sat with her relaxed husband-to-be and the gnawed triangle of toast she, apparently, didn’t even need.
‘Surely it’s not against the rules to talk about our preward?’ She smiled. She even winked. She always winked when she said preward. Another of her quirks. Making up words. She was an English teacher at the same school she had attended as a teenager, the same school where she had first got together with Oz.
The school that Jacob Brady would never be old enough to attend.
The honeymoon was to be their reward for the hard work of organising a wedding. Their combined wage wasn’t high so they had chosen Paris and Provence. A simple trip. Liv wanted Paris due to its literary and romantic connections, then a move on to Provence would provide the quiet relaxation and seclusion expected of such an excursion.
Both places began with P. It was their reward. Hence, preward. The word usually made them both grin like idiots – small town, small things – but not on that day. Oz’s eyes simply widened and they both stopped chewing.
I found this irritating. It made Liv come across as sickly. And false.
So I danced. I danced around that kitchen and covered it in worry.
Looking back, it’s easy to say that the quarrel that followed was, perhaps, where this all began. Oz had never been abroad; he’d hardly been out of Hinton Hollow, so he’d never thought about filling in a form and sending off his birth certificate. Liv was annoyed because it was the only part of the organising that he was solely responsible for: ensuring he could leave this country and enter another.
‘I’m heading out for a bit.’
That was the last thing he said to Liv before he was taken.
Before that, he’d told her to calm down. That these things can always be resolved. He’d told her there was an office you could go to in Wales that would sort it for you on the same day. She argued that he was confused and was thinking about the process for obtaining a driving licence.
It all went nowhere and became too much.
My real work had begun.
But it hadn’t all started with this confrontation about a passport, as you know. Nor did it begin when he walked out of their front door.
And it would not end on day five when that sixth bullet was due to hit Oscar Tambor in the face.
THAT DAY IN THE PARK: JACOB BRADY
You can’t blame Michael. He’s just a kid. And he’ll be blaming himself forever. Sure, if he hadn’t misplaced his shoe then they all would have left school at the correct time, the Bradys would have been a part of the crowd.
So, blame the man with the gun.
Blame the mother.
Blame me.
It wasn’t Michael’s fault.
And that is not how Jacob saw it at all.
On his hands and knees, five-year-old Jacob Brady scampered around the dusty floor of the changing area, checking beneath every bench, hoping that he would be the one to save the day and find his big brother’s missing trainers. Yes, they argued sometimes and they fought about the most insignificant things and they could’ve shared a little better at times, but Jacob thought that Michael was the coolest guy in the whole world.
He never got a chance to tell him that.
They shared a bedroom. Even though there was another room upstairs in their house. Their mother thought it would be a good idea to keep that other space as a playroom. Somewhere that didn’t necessarily have to get tidied at the end of the day. Full of toys and paints and superhero costumes.
Their bedroom was smaller than the playroom. They had bunk beds. Michael got to sleep on the top bunk because he was older, but Jacob didn’t mind. His brother always hung over the edge at night to talk to him when they were supposed to be sleeping or being quiet. Jacob loved that about him.
‘Here’s one,’ Jacob shouted, proud of himself. ‘I don’t know where the other one is yet.’
‘It’s okay. I’ve only lost one. The other one is in my bag. Well done. You saved me. I thought Mum was going to kill me.’ And he did that thing where he ruffled Jacob’s hair in a playfully patronising way to disguise his affection.
Jacob didn’t mind. He kind of liked it. He knew what it meant. That’s why he never flattened it back down.
‘Look, Mum,’ Michael said, ‘Jacob found it. Under the bench.’
Jacob was still smiling.
‘Well done, Jacob. Shall we get going now, we’ll be the very last ones out today, I think.’ His mother started towards the door and the boys followed.
Outside, they ran through a well-rehearsed skit that they used to get their mother to do what they wanted. Michael told his brother once that she couldn’t refuse politeness. Especially from Jacob.
She was a sucker for her hazel-eyed angel.
It worked. Jacob’s mother agreed that they could cut through the park and play for a bit before returning home for dinner.
‘You will eat everything on that dinner plate.’
The boys didn’t really pay attention to that last remark as they ran off down the path.
Then Michael was saying, ‘Go on. Touch it.’
And Jacob knew his brother was t
rying to scare him.
Go slowly.
Jacob Brady didn’t even have time to be frightened. He turned around to see why his mother was calling Michael and was assaulted by the sound of the gun firing. Before he even reached the top of his flinch, his heart had been ruined.
There was no time to spot the horror on his mother’s face and no time to turn to his big brother for help. He didn’t even get to touch the beetle.
No time for goodbyes.
No more bad dreams to wake Michael up with in the middle of the night or ideas for new games they could play in the day.
And no opportunity to tell his big brother that he was right about the monster in the woods.
INVISIBLE SHADOW
Pace wanted so much for it to feel like home. To make his time pass more simply. He had missed Hinton Hollow in some ways and hoped he’d somehow find a place to slot back in.
He recognised all the town landmarks immediately. It’s possible to see right down into the heart of the village from the station platform. A straight line that leads to the crossroads, where life glides along, holding hands with decency. Unlike the city, where existence seems to thump around corners, scratching at weakness and temptation.
His shoulders slumped slightly but noticeably as the train pulled off, taking the attractive book woman away to Oxford. Pace thought about turning back for one last shared glance. I held her interest in that flirtation until she was out of sight before switching my focus back to the detective. I let go of her and she went back to reading.
The mobile phone vibrated in his pocket.
Maeve.
They needed to talk. He wanted to. So that he could explain his departure, so that he could explain what had happened on that last case. But not at that moment. Not right then. He’d just got back. He was Hinton Hollow. Maeve went back into his pocket and through to voicemail.