by Will Carver
He turned the key and heard the television blaring in the living room.
‘Mum? I’m back. Dinner smells good.’ He lied. He was so sick of the ready meals.
Oz put the gun back up to shoulder height so that he had a more accurate shot should he need to take it. With the other hand he put a finger to his lips and mouthed shh.
It was time.
AGAIN
They looked so alike. Oz was a little slimmer than Harvey, but Harvey lived off salt-filled ready meals and Oz had only eaten forty-eight biscuits that week.
The elder brother was stunned into silence. Not by the gun – though that certainly played a part – but by the vision of the man stood opposite him.
‘Mum?’ Harvey asked, not taking his eyes away from Oz’s face.
‘I’m fine. It’s okay.’
‘I wasn’t asking if you were okay. What the hell is this?’
Oz pointed the gun at his brother and shook it to the left. Harvey understood the gesture and moved away from the doorway and into the lounge next to his mother. She was seated. He remained standing.
‘Who is that?’ Harvey spoke almost without moving his lips, directing the question to his mother through the side of his mouth.
‘Stop talking about me as though I’m not here.’ Oz was calm. Too calm. It made Laney and Harvey feel even more on edge.
‘He’s your brother, Harvey.’
‘My what?’
‘Stop talking to each other?’ Oz was more angry. He raised his voice. The venom was frightening. ‘I am not your brother. I do not know you. I do not want to know you. I am simply here to speak with Miss Laney Isaacs. I have one thing to tell you and one thing to ask you. Then I will be on my way. Do you understand?’
They nodded in unison. Laney tried to hold Harvey’s hand but her youngest son gave her a look that said it just would not do.
Oz looked at the woman who had given birth to him then given him away.
‘You do not have to die today, Miss Isaacs. You are being given a second chance. But you do have a choice to make. Who is your favourite? Which son do you choose to stay alive? I should probably remind you at this point that my name is Oz, in case you had forgotten.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Harvey interjected. Oz looked at him, a stare that burned through to his heart.
‘This is not your question. You should trust your mother to make the correct decision.’ This was harder than Oz had anticipated. The real Oscar Tambor was hurting inside at the sight of the brother he only learned he had been involuntarily wrenched from on day one. But he was not strong enough to fight his darker self.
‘Say the name of the son you wish to live. I do not need a reason. Just a name.’ He had modified his speech with each mother he had spoken to. ‘Or you can say nothing. Then you will die. You will sacrifice yourself for your children. I know this can be done. I have seen it now.’
Oz never moved the sight of the gun away from the centre of Laney’s forehead.
He waited.
Harvey held his breath. There was nothing he could do. He couldn’t think about how much he loved his mother, all he could think about was how he would not even be there if she had just tried to pull her fucking stupid life together.
And then she said, ‘Harvey.’
She wanted to save Harvey.
She wanted to keep Harvey and let Oz go.
Again.
Oz looked at them both. The family he never knew, never needed, never needed to know about. And he placed the muzzle of his pistol underneath his chin. His finger trembled on the trigger.
‘Wrong answer,’ he said and whipped the gun to point at Harvey’s face.
Oz took a quick step forward and blew a hole in his brother’s head that killed him instantly.
‘Noooooo. You bastard. You fucking lunatic.’ Laney tried to stand but thought better and dropped back to the couch.
‘If there has been one thing I have learned this week, it is what a breaking heart looks like. It happens to every parent, good or bad. Selfish or benevolent. Yours is truly beautiful, Mother.’ He spat the last word out. ‘Really, it is an image not easily erased. Heartache. This is you at your most pure.’
Then he unloaded his last bullet into her chest.
He shot her through the heart because she had broken his.
He could not stand to see his brother’s face because it was a reflection of the man Oz could have become.
How could he possibly have explained that to Liv over the phone?
HIS OWN TOAST
Then he’d have to explain how he didn’t just leave after killing his biological family.
He’d have to explain how he tucked the gun back into his belt and walked towards the scent from the kitchen. To Harvey, it had smelled like unreal, pre-made food. To the man who had been living on cookies, the meatball-and-cheese pasta bake represented a fine-dining experience he could not pass up.
There were two meals in there. And some garlic bread, which had burnt. Oz Tambor ate it all. He sat on the sofa next to a woman with a hole in her chest and he forked over two thousand calories into his mouth while watching a news item that detailed his exploits in Hinton Hollow, followed by a soap opera he never watched and didn’t really enjoy about families more dysfunctional than his own.
He ate too quickly but he enjoyed it and was full. Bloated, even.
He was also fatigued. Murder is hard work. Running away is even tougher. And his body was now working overtime to digest the food he had just shovelled into his stomach.
Oz left the television on but turned the sound down to a more sociable level. The house would have been too eerie if it had been silent. Particularly with the two dead people in the lounge.
He dimmed the lights and went upstairs, where he found two bedrooms. He spent the night in his dead brother’s double bed. It was a comfort he had really missed that week while being cramped in the boot of his own car.
He slept straight through until morning. Not too late. He still had some things to take care of. He ate a large breakfast. First a bowl of cereal and then toast. Every piece of his own toast. No half went the way of anyone else’s mouth. It had been something he’d missed while in the woods, but it was a detail he revelled in at the Isaacs’ house.
The bodies in the lounge were exactly as he’d left them, of course. Harvey looked just like him. Sufficient to fool the police for long enough, maybe even fool Liv if she was asked to identify him. Oz found Harvey’s passport in the drawer of the desk in his room. Along with a little pocket money. He memorised the details.
Oz turned the television up and made sure he removed any photographs of Laney and Harvey together. He left the front door wide open and got back into his car.
It was over. He had everything he needed apart from Liv.
Once he had Liv, it would end.
TOGETHER
Sure, Oz could have mentioned something. Perhaps that May had lied to him his entire life. There may have been others in the town that knew the truth. People of May’s generation. Mrs Beaufort must have known, Oz told himself. And RD, probably. But adding them to his list was not an option. It was not a part of his mission.
Instead of mentioning any of his story, Oz lied to Liv. He told her he’d been taken but had escaped. He said he was scared but he just had to get some things together and he would meet her on Saturday morning. They could be together. He wanted them to be together.
Oz still wanted to marry Liv Dunham that weekend.
But he wanted out of Hinton Hollow.
The place was toxic.
A VERSION/AVERSION
Does that version of events work? It gives Oz his motive. It shows the ordinary man on the brink of happiness being consumed by rage that his life has been a lie. That the one person he always trusted was the one person who betrayed him. That this lack of understanding and empathy led to inhuman atrocities and evil.
The problem is, while a bow can be placed around his motivation for killing t
he mothers, there is no real justice. His brother was not at fault for any of this, yet took a bullet to the face. And what about the families of the victims? How were they to ever receive closure?
And he probably should not have told Liv he had been taken. Perhaps that he just went away to get himself a passport.
It is a little messy and somewhat problematic.
But life is that way.
People lie and get away with it. People kill and are never discovered. The best writers don’t sell the most books. And a concert pianist will perform to hundreds or thousands while a tone-deaf teenager, who plays no instruments, will be auto-tuned and sold to millions because their greatest skill was having genetically full hair.
Sometimes, after the chaos, order is not regained.
SOMETHING ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
This was a version of how things ended.
How they could have ended. In an alternate reality, perhaps.
But, while it is all true, none of it happened.
This was the only part of proceedings that Oz had planned. And this is how he ran through it in his mind every day while lying in the back of his car. It is what kept him going. More than the biscuits.
Just because it was planned does not mean it came to pass.
Remember when I said that sometimes evil presents itself as truth?
Little Henry Wallace was coming home. Back to Hinton Hollow. I couldn’t let him come back to this. I couldn’t have that ending. I couldn’t have Oz loose for another school run.
Oscar Tambor was in the woods, in his car. He was not at his birth mother’s home. He was not putting a bullet into the face of his estranged brother, and Liv was not misidentifying his body. He was still in the car and still in his own mind.
His storm was fading fast.
He was waiting for the whispers.
A BIG HOUSE WHERE EVERYONE COULD SEE
This is also true.
The part with the mothers was a necessity. To demonstrate the level of evil required to make a point. To show these people how far they have regressed.
But this was about Detective Sergeant Pace.
It was his story.
Lights flicked on around the close that Charles Ablett lived on. He had enough money to move to a substantial property a little further into the countryside – he had the connections, too, thanks to his position at Ablett and Ablett – but that was not Charles’ style. He wanted a big house where everyone could see that he had a big house.
The police were outside. Pace arrived in his unmarked car and Anderson in the vehicle that had let him down so badly the day before. He’d had it fixed that same day. Suddenly, everything was being done by Pace’s book. He was trying to make up for it. Being professional. Being efficient. He still couldn’t lose his inappropriateness but that would mean Anderson wasn’t really Anderson.
A shutter moved on the equally luxurious property opposite. Within seconds, Roger Ablett knew the police were going to storm through his brother’s front door. They had their warrant, their suspicion and their motive. What they didn’t have was their man.
Roger called his brother to warn him but got his voicemail message.
They pushed through the door with relative ease, Pace leading the way.
It was huge and open-plan. The living room looked as though it had never been sat in. The cream carpet was spotless. There was not a single smear on the television screen, which looked too large and heavy to be hanging from a wall. There were no books or films or photos. A few ornaments dotted the floating shelves and windowsills, plastic-looking things that clearly cost a lot of money and were considered art by some idiot in a toupee, but nothing that really showed Charles Ablett’s personality. And that in itself said so much about Charles.
The kitchen was off to the right. Modern white slabs everywhere. Clean. Uncooked in. Around the size of Pace’s entire apartment in London. But there were bottles everywhere. He’d been drinking and he’d been drinking heavily. And probably not alone.
Pace made a gesture with his hand that Anderson determined as a signal to follow him upstairs. Even in these soulless palaces, one could not get to the top of the steps without one of them creaking. As soon as it made a noise, Pace leapt two at a time and aimed himself at the one room with a lamp on. Anderson followed but checked the darkened room to its left in case it was a trick. He did not like Pace’s impetuousness. It was the type of behaviour that could get someone killed.
The dark room was clear. Anderson exited to find Pace stood in the doorway of the lit room. He wasn’t moving.
On the bed, a man was lying naked. He was in decent shape for a corpse. Pace couldn’t make out his identity because there was a pillow over his face that had been ripped open by the bullet he expected to find lodged in the man’s head. He also expected that man to be Charles Ablett.
There was a bottle of Johnnie Walker Gold resting in his left hand. It had hardly spilled. Pace could smell it over the death and cleaning products that had been used all over the house – either to conceal evidence or Charles had had a fastidious cleaner.
‘Matches May,’ Anderson said behind Pace’s head.
‘What?’
‘May Tambor. She had been shot in the face. And I don’t think we need to pull the pillow away to know that’s the case here.’ The inspector seemed almost proud of his deduction.
‘It looks the same. It could have a link. But I think this is someone cashing in on the mayhem.’
Before Pace could continue his diatribe, the boom of Roger Ablett interrupted. He was downstairs, calling Pace. Calling Charles.
‘Bang on time. I thought this might happen.’ Pace smiled. He knew how Hinton Hollow worked. He’d been away for a few years but he’d already been back long enough to have some insight into its darker underbelly.
That was his speciality.
That’s where he lived.
Pace hung himself over the bannister and looked down the stairs. The considerable frame of Roger Ablett almost blocked out the light from the kitchen. He was the one thing that could make the inside of that house suddenly appear small and quaint.
‘Don’t come up here, Mr Ablett.’ That was an order. A polite order.
‘What do you mean? I’ll go wherever I damn well…’
Pace and Anderson moved quickly to block him off before he could take in the crime scene.
‘I’d like you to accompany us to the station.’ Pace took the lead and Anderson allowed it. He had no idea what was going through his detective’s mind but he knew it was best to leave him to work his magic.
Ablett threw his weight around a little and backed it up with some bravado about not going anywhere unless he was being arrested. Pace didn’t budge. He told the overweight estate agent that he would arrest him but it was in Ablett’s best interests if he didn’t walk out of his brother’s house, in front of the neighbours and, no doubt, news cameras that had been tipped off by now, in a pair of handcuffs. Reputations don’t recover from that shit.
Roger Ablett’s face flushed. He coughed violently three times then hit his chest with his fist and agreed to go quietly.
Pace suggested that Ablett return to the station with Inspector Anderson.
‘Are you following?’ the chief questioned.
Pace looked only at Roger Ablett when he spoke. ‘I’ll be along shortly. I’m going to pick up Nathan Hadley.’
It was going to be another long Hinton Hollow evening.
To everyone else, the walls were clean and the house was sterile. To Pace, the surfaces were covered from skirting board to ceiling in black flames.
He had other things to take care of.
Once more, he wondered whether he could run away.
A REMINDER
You want to know who killed Ablett? Definitively. That’s what happens with this ending.
I’D LIKE TO TELL YOU ONE THING
It doesn’t matter.
Okay, it was a jilted lover. One of the married women in town
who risked everything for one night of passion with the local lothario. She put her marriage on the line and her children. Because she was too comfortable. Too content with her lifestyle. She needed something else. She needed something more. Something different. Charles Ablett’s promises did not live up to the billing.
No. It was his brother. He was sick of carrying that layabout around his whole life. Supporting him. Giving him a job. Letting him off with behaviour he would not tolerate from anyone else.
Roger Ablett knew what Charles was like. Everyone thought he doted on his younger brother. Nobody would suspect him over a jilted lover or a cuckolded partner. They knew that Roger was ruthless and determined but not in a way that would harm his own family. They would suspect Ellie Frith of being a climber before they pinned it on that walking heart disease.
Maybe it was obvious all along that it was Nathan Hadley. He ticked all the boxes. Disturbed and depressed at the sight of his entire family murdered on the street. Drunk. Hungover. Suspicious, and rightly so, that his dick was the second one that had been in his wife’s mouth that final morning.
There was no forced entry. Rachel had left the door open the morning she left Charles Ablett. Who knows how long he had been there. He may already have been dead when Pace came to call. Both Ellie Frith and Roger Ablett had keys to his home.
What is important is that a man died. A human being. Not a good one but a human nonetheless. And the important thing to think about is the reaction of others. This determines the state of the collective consciousness.
Are you desensitised to the violence?
Are you secretly rejoicing because something evil has been taken down?
Do you feel it is justice?
Are you more concerned with who did it rather than why it would ever happen in the first place?
Charles Ablett was at an age where he was at the greatest risk. While every dalliance around town seemed like a successful conquest, while he appeared to pride himself in such misogyny, while he was a picture of confidence and swagger, the slick estate agent was dreadfully unfulfilled. He was dying in small-town life. He was stuck. In the considerable shadow of his brother, drowning in a sea of futile fornication. In simplest terms, he seemed to be bursting with evil but really, he was filled with sadness.