Hinton Hollow Death Trip

by Will Carver

  Catherine Raymond acted with the appropriate decorum for a mother being called in to her son’s school again as a result of his fighting. She was older than Rachel and she felt it. Ben was nine and his younger brother was one. Obviously not a part of Catherine’s life plan, but it had happened and she was dealing with her situation in the best way that she could. Ben may have been feeling neglected but she was feeling tired. So fucking tired, of everything and everyone.

  It wasn’t until they were outside the front gates that Catherine laid into the young boy. She was pushing a buggy with her left hand and clipping the back of Ben’s head with her right. She was shouting at him, telling him to grow up. Then, when he cried, she shouted some more, telling him to stop crying. When he didn’t stop straight away, she raised her hand again.

  Aaron and Jess giggled at the bully getting a taste of his own medicine. Rachel felt for him. The rebellious spark she’d been feeling that day as a result of the cloud moving through The Hollow made her want to clip Catherine on the back of the head and shout at her. But the woman had a small baby and it was probably already hearing too many raised voices.

  ‘Stoppit, you two. You’re still in trouble for retaliating.’

  ‘But, Mum, I was protecting Jess,’ Aaron protested.

  ‘I know. But there are ways to deal with bullies, and bullies only act that way for a reason they are too scared to mention.’

  Neither of them really understood what she was talking about or why she would defend Ben bloody Raymond but they stayed quiet.

  ‘Let’s get home, shall we?’ Her tone wasn’t mad, nor was it accusatory. She was pleased to be going home, finally. And she wouldn’t be alone because she had Jess and Aaron. And Nate would be back in a couple of hours.

  The Raymonds were almost out of sight, powering off into the distance, the sound of the wind muffling Ben the Bully’s castigation.

  Stanhope Road was empty. The Hadleys were the last family to leave the school. The packs had run off earlier and eventually dispersed. They had been left behind. At the back. Slow and exposed.

  WHO’S THERE?

  Pace left a gap hardly long enough to scratch the back of his head before he rapped on the Brady door three more times.

  Andrea and Owen were stunned into inaction. Michael was looking up from his book, waiting for somebody to move. He wanted to speak but he was still afraid of what he might say.

  ‘Mr Brady,’ Pace called, his words seemingly unfreezing the statues inside. ‘Can you open the door, please? It’s Detective Pace.’

  Owen Brady opened the door himself this time, and Andrea went to the dining area to sit with Michael. She smiled as she entered. Michael did not reciprocate.

  ‘Detective, I’ve already told you everything I know. I just want to be with my son. What else could you possibly want to know?’ Owen spoke like a man broken and tired by his ill fortune. Wearied by the cruelty of fate.

  ‘Oh, I have many questions that I require answers to in this town.’

  Where is Julee? What happened to her? Why is Mrs Beaufort here so soon after her collapse? Is this all my fault? Did it follow me here? Where is home?

  Owen said nothing.

  ‘There’s only one person in the world, as far as I know, who saw the man that shot a gun near Hinton Hollow Primary School on Monday.’ He let the sentence float in the air, unaffected by the wind. He’d thought about how he would word it on the way over – he was sensitive to the situation and wanted to avoid mentioning young Jacob Brady so explicitly.

  ‘Detective. This really isn’t the time. He’s been through enough,’ Owen pleaded but not with any force.

  ‘The man with the gun is still out there, Mr Brady. We have no idea if he wants to strike again or whether he has something against your family name. What we do know is that Michael saw him and, if I’m going to catch this guy, I’ll need more than the fact that he looked like an ordinary man.’

  Pace had already taken one step up to the threshold before Owen Brady had resigned to inevitability.

  No more of this small-town solidarity.

  It was time for the boy to start talking.

  NOT AN OPTION

  Remember in the beginning, when I told you that you should just leave, because you’ll be annoyed? Well, this is that part.

  I know what you’re going to think. Because I’ve been watching all of you. Forever.

  You’ll want the mother to say ‘no’. You’ll want her to say that she cannot choose between her children and that the bullet should go through her skull. You’ll think that she should lay down her life so that her children may live. You’ll want her to do what you feel Faith Brady should have done.

  And this is the problem. This is the reason I am here, doing this.

  It’s because of you, and the things that you think.

  You think the best course of action would have been for Faith Brady to have taken the bullet herself. You think her two sons should have turned around from their playful beetle prank in the park and seen their mother lying dead on the stone path as an ordinary man ran into the woods.

  You think the next mother should do the same.

  Because you are caught in the morality of it all. You think that you would choose your children’s lives over your own. And what you are not seeing is that there is another option. The option not to accept evil. The option to be good, to do good.

  There is the option not to be desensitised to the wrongdoings of the world.

  There is an option to care.

  For more than the immediate.

  There is the option where neither the children nor the mother have to die.

  Because of you, on day three, this was not an option.

  THE BOY WHO KNEW SOMETHING

  JESS HADLEY

  When it happened, it happened fast.

  A little faster than before.

  The Raymonds were a dot in the distance. Agitation and impatience proving to be the key to their survival.

  Jess was staring at the back of Ben the Bully until he disappeared. She was wishing he’d vanish. She kept saying it over and over in her head until she couldn’t see him any more.

  I made that happen, she told herself.

  Take that, Ben.

  After her mother had told her and her brother to be quiet, both children had been in their own worlds. They listened to her. They obeyed her instructions. But Jess, who was older, saw something different in her mother that day. She had been quicker to short her fuse. She had even stuck up for that slime ball Ben. She was being weird.

  Jess brushed her long, scraggly, mousey hair away from her face with her right hand. She wasn’t particularly girly. She didn’t care about keeping her hair in the ponytail her mum tied every morning and she didn’t mind getting dirty or falling over. That’s how she’d got into the scrape with Ben the Bully. She was getting herself involved in boy stuff.

  She thought about that no-brain idiot with his hand around her throat. He was strong, that was for sure. And her little brother having to save her. She’d wanted to kick that bully in the shins but she’d frozen. Aaron hadn’t even paused. He was younger than her and he was protecting her. She hated that he had to do that but she loved him for doing it.

  She looked over at Aaron but he was staring in the other direction. God knows what he was thinking about. Jess turned her gaze back to the front. Nobody was there. They were almost at the corner of their road. She wondered what might be for dinner.

  There was the sound of her mother’s voice, then Jess Hadley took a bullet to the face in the same way that May Tambor had.

  There was no pattern.

  He was killing little girls now.

  AARON HADLEY

  Aaron had been expecting a hero’s welcome. He’d looked after Jess. His dad would probably pat him on the back for what he had done when he got home, when he found out that Aaron had saved his sister from that thug.

  Dad will be proud, he mused, looking through the high bushes of the lar
ge, gated homes just past his school. The houses were two or three times the size of his. He was wondering what they looked like inside, how big their televisions were, how much room they had in their gardens to kick a football.

  His knee was cold. Another pair of trousers that he’d ripped. Usually it had something to do with football, falling in the playground. He ran a lot. And he was fast. Fast for his age and even for the year above him. That’s how he’d knocked Ben over, it was nothing to do with his strength, it was momentum and a lack of fear. It had helped that the tormentor’s posse had moved aside so he hadn’t slowed down at all.

  It had hurt his shoulder when they collided, he hadn’t looked at the bruise yet but he was sure there was one. His right knee had scraped the concrete of the playground. He didn’t feel the pain at that point, even though he was bleeding, because the adrenaline had kicked in. It had taken over a part of his brain that caused him to reason with himself. He just lashed out. He’d got a few good hits in, too, before Ben managed to retaliate.

  Before he remembered he could be hurt.

  Aaron was smiling into the wind as he walked along Stanhope Road. He was pleased with himself even if his mother disapproved of the way he had handled the situation. He didn’t think what he’d done was wrong. And he couldn’t wait to tell his dad about it.

  Then his mother’s voice.

  And the bang that floored his big sister.

  One more for himself. Through the heart.

  He was joining Jacob Brady.

  An ordinary man ran away.

  His mother wasn’t crying.

  MY THIRD WISH.

  I wish I’d let go.

  RACHEL HADLEY

  Rachel wanted her children to be quiet. She had to think. The only choice she was considering was whether or not to tell Nate what had happened. She was scared of Charles Ablett – and he was the nicer of the two Ablett brothers. She’d been so stupid.

  So fucking stupid. So selfish.

  She had no idea what had come over her but she still felt it, like a foreign presence that made her feel more adventurous. More sexual. More aggressive.

  The last thing she needed at that moment was another decision to make.

  So, when the gun was pushed into that dent in the back of her neck, just as it had been for Faith Brady, when those words were spoken softly, asking which of her children she would choose to die, Rachel Hadley was not herself and, therefore, did not act in the way that could have saved Aaron and Jess’s lives.

  She killed them.

  She killed them all.

  ORDINARY MAN

  He left the car in the woods. It would be safe there. Nobody was looking in the woods. There was no missing body. Nobody that anyone realised was actually missing. Not yet.

  Nobody was looking for Oz Tambor in the boot of a car. Like nobody had bothered to look for Julee.

  They were yet to find that May Tambor was gone, too.

  So he walked. Everybody in Hinton Hollow walked.

  He blended in. He was one of them, whatever they called themselves.

  Hollowers.

  Hintonions.

  The sound of the fast train rumbling straight through from London to Oxford was the only noise cutting through that rushing air around him. There were no cars on the road, no people walking around in this weather. But there would be soon enough. The kids couldn’t just stay in school. They had to get home somehow. They had to leave at some point.

  One of the mothers had to be asked.

  He headed down the hill towards the crossroads, his long coat protecting him from a wind that seemed too scared to touch him. His stubble made his skin look as grey as the Hinton Hollow cloud cover. His steps were steady, unrushed, like he had nowhere important to be.

  Walking to the crossroads was a risky move. If there were going to be any people – any witnesses – it would be there. Parents of younger children would be hoicking pushchairs into Rock-a-Buy, the florist was busier than ever with the latest run of untimely deaths, not to mention the wedding that was still booked in for the weekend. And there was always somebody at RD’s Diner, no matter the time of day.

  He’d be spotted if he risked that route. And be remembered. Locals would remember a local and they sure would not forget an outsider slinking through their beloved crossroads with nothing on his mind.

  The ordinary man turned right onto Oakmead, a useful cut-through to avoid the traffic lights if you were driving through Hinton Hollow. The houses were arranged in a horseshoe around an area of greenery and trees that could be used as goalposts but were too thick to find a decent foothold to try and climb. He lit a cigarette and walked on.

  Oakmead cut a corner that avoided being noticed at the crossroads and he emerged quietly on Stanhope Road around fifty feet from the school.

  A bell rang and he could feel the stampede of children’s feet, eager to get home to their games consoles and books and sweet treats and pets. Any that turned right out of the gates – his left – would be heading along the main high street. They’d be safe for another day.

  He rested against a lamppost, finishing the dregs of his cigarette, watching as kids flew out of the door excitedly, as though they were staging a mass prison break. He could see the Had on the Hadley’s Hair sign and rubbed at the unkempt nest on his own head.

  Initially, a large peloton of people evacuated in both directions. He wasn’t interested in either group.

  There was only one question but there weren’t enough bullets.

  He was waiting for the stragglers. The kids who had lost a shoe after gym practice or those who were detained for bad behaviour, whose parents had been called in to resolve a disciplinary issue. He flicked the butt of the cigarette onto the floor and stamped on it, leaving enough evidence for the police to start mounting a more useful line of enquiry. The wind blew the burnt stub towards town, where it would never be found.

  It was difficult to hear what the children were talking about with their parents that day because the air was either taking sound off into the distance or blowing too hard around the ears to make out the specifics of the conversations. They were clucking chickens and squawking seagulls. A rabble of nobody he wanted to talk to.

  Then the Raymonds emerged from the gate. The mother was pushing a buggy with one hand and pulling an older boy along like a cartoon.

  The ordinary man’s back straightened against the post, pushing him forward slightly.

  They could work.

  Two children. One mother. The perfect combination.

  She didn’t pay any attention to the man on the other side of the road. She was too busy shouting at the boy and yanking him to keep up with her pace though her legs were much longer than his.

  Ask her.

  Ask her the question.

  The gun was tucked into the back of his trousers, the handle hanging over his belt. He reached around carefully inside his long coat and gripped it in his hand. Then he slid it slowly around his body as the mother and her two children pushed on ahead. He put the gun into his pocket and took a step forward. His eyes were fixed on the nape of Catherine Raymond’s neck.

  Then he stopped.

  Another mother appeared from the blue school door. The teachers that had been monitoring the playground had either dispersed or headed back into the building.

  It was her.

  It should be her. The runt of the litter.

  Perfect.

  She was attractive. More so than Faith Brady, though their thighs were a hair’s width apart in terms of quality. He was thinking about her sexually though that was not what it was about. He shook that off instantly; there was work to be done.

  He fell back against the post and allowed the family to exit the school grounds. They turned left – his right – and followed the-ones-who-got-away up Stanhope Road towards Roylake. The Raymond family moved much faster than the Hadleys.

  Watching for a minute, he could see that their relationship was close. The children walked alongside th
eir mother – the girl on her right, the smaller, younger boy on her left – unlike the Brady woman, who had let her kids run out ahead of her. They were not holding hands, they were too old for that, but they were as close to touching as could be without actual physical contact. They were a unit. That was clear, even to a murderer looking at them from behind.

  They are a family, he told himself. Her decision will be harder to make than the last one.

  He still didn’t understand what he was doing.

  He was pissing into the wind. The gale-force wind.

  He saw Rachel Hadley talking to both of them. She was direct. She gave them equal attention, looking right at her daughter then left at her son. He couldn’t work out which of them had been naughty. Who was at fault for keeping them all behind after school. Marking their cards for death.

  When the mother had finished talking to her children, she rubbed the top of their backs with one hand, both of them receiving her loving touch at the same time. It appeared to mellow both children. The tension dropped in their shoulders and they both peered off into the distance, thinking about the things that a ten- and seven-year-old think about.

  That’s when he made his move.

  There was no reason to look both ways before crossing the road, there was no traffic, but he did it out of habit and that inbuilt mechanism for self-preservation. Before stepping off the kerb he took one final look over his shoulder.

  He moved quickly. Once the decision had been made there was no room for hesitation. He was gliding along the pathway of Stanhope Road as though dancing with the wind. He pulled the gun out of his pocket and pointed it forward, if she heard him coming he would have to end it there.

  But Rachel Hadley could not hear him coming, not in that weather. He knew he would have to be close if he was to deliver his message.