by Will Carver
And it is easy to get a gun in Roylake when you know where to go. And easier when you have influence and disposable income. And it is easy to lie in bed alone and drink. But it is difficult to stare down the barrel of a gun. And it is harder still to pull that trigger as you do so.
But this is what people do.
So, I will also tell you that while a jilted lover killed Charles Ablett, and his brother killed him, too, as did his colleague, and the local scorned hairdresser, I will also inform you that Charles Ablett killed Charles Ablett.
You can take that as the truth or you can decide that it was one of the people on that list.
I WOULD JUST LIKE TO REMIND YOU
It does not matter.
THIS HAPPENED
Hinton Hollow was a small town. Just over 5,000 residents. And I touched every single one that had some form of depravity or insecurity locked away inside them.
Every single one.
But I could not fit them all into one story. They were not all interesting. They were not all affected to the extent of Oz Tambor or Mrs Beaufort. Not every person in that once quaint community found themselves involved with Detective Sergeant Pace that week.
While there were several interconnecting tales of good and evil, there were some characters who didn’t seem to fit.
If the identity of Charles Ablett’s killer really isn’t important, then why did I tell you about him? And, if Oz Tambor never made it to his birth mother’s home to execute her and the son she had chosen to keep, then what was the significance of that plan?
And why keep returning to a woman who likes to break windows and a young, angry man from the slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the Hollow?
THE REASON IS SIMPLE
Because this happened.
FRESHLY SQUEEZED
Oz pushed against the rear seat of the car from inside the boot and it fell forward. He clambered through the gap and over onto the driver’s seat. There, he took the keys from his pocket, pushed them into the ignition and turned.
On the second attempt, it jumped into life. Cold air started to blow into his face and he adjusted the dial to its warmest setting and waited. The radio was playing some freshly squeezed instrumental jazz on a station he did not recognise.
He waited for the engine to warm the air being pushed towards his face.
His hard work was done.
He had a little time.
Oz Tambor was actively seeking the sound of the whispers I had tormented him with all week. He didn’t need them now, he was too far gone. He was changed.
He reclined the driver’s seat and shut his eyes, imagining Liv’s face when she saw him again. Picturing her in that white dress. Then he wondered what his real mother might look like and how similar to his brother he would be.
And he thought about shooting his brother in the face because he knew the woman he was going to visit had no right to call herself a mother. That she would undoubtedly make the wrong decision.
He had gone over the details every day that he had been in the boot of that car. He knew how it would play out.
And the jazz music clicked and the symbol shuffled and the clarinet kicked in and I gave him some whispers and the car got warmer.
HOWL
And Annie Harding’s husband didn’t want to have sex in the kitchen when he got straight home from work. So I shouted into her mind and the rage bubbled inside.
The doubt over his fidelity resurfacing. Her inadequacies as a lover, a mother, a woman.
‘Please don’t take it as a rejection. It’s not that,’ he pleaded.
‘Yes. Dinner first. Then dessert later.’ She was calm on the outside.
But that wasn’t really her.
‘I’ve forgotten one thing so I am going to nip out and grab it.’ She took the keys from the bowl that her husband had just put in there and left. To howl at the moon.
She drove, speeding to the centre of town. She could see where the florist had boarded up her window. She turned right at the crossroads. Up the hill. Towards the school. But not that far.
Her large 4x4 turned off-road and into the woods. She screamed obscenities while hitting the steering wheel. She wanted to be nowhere. Some place nobody would go. Out in the wild. Because she was wild. She was feral. She was anger and strength and passion.
She hit the brakes, killed the engine, jumped out and started running forward. Running fast. Running hard. Until she was breathless and lost and had to stop.
Annie looked up but everything was dark. The canopy above her blocking out the light. But the whispers still made it through. She kept walking until she came to a clearing. She could hear the animals. She could see the trees and the rocks and the leaves.
Annie Harding had forgotten why she was so mad but she knew that she was, and she knew what to do. She walked over to a large, moss-covered rock at the bottom of a tree. She bent down and used the strength of her legs to pick it up. Then she used those legs again to jump it up so that she could rest it on her shoulder.
It was her biggest and heaviest rock that week.
Then she ran again.
And she threw it hard.
And she broke another window.
TWENTY SECONDS
The pig made hardly any noise as it was helped back into the boot of Darren’s car. It had squealed uncomfortably when first stolen but, after a night in the warmth of its new owner’s dining room, there was very little sound from the back of the vehicle as Darren ambled around the quieter roads that took him across to the other side of Hinton Hollow.
A sharpened kitchen knife lay on the passenger seat. Darren had spent the evening sharpening it. The butter knife was enough to puncture the organs of a cat but this was not a domesticated animal, this would require something more. And, as he peered into the rear-view mirror at the beast behind him, he knew he would need to stab the thing several times just to slow it down.
He’d killed enough trapped, defenceless animals in his time to have a realistic idea of the strength he would need to pull this off.
This was next-level stuff.
It was escalation.
It would be a battle.
Above all, it was going to be enjoyable.
Fulfilling.
The slaughterer pulled up somewhere quiet and switched off the car. It was time.
As he gazed through the back window at the animal he was hoping to hunt and kill, you could be forgiven for thinking there was a moment of fondness that passed between those two living things. As if, at that moment, they were somehow equal. They both knew what this was about.
They were both terrified.
Darren opened the boot, expecting to help the pig out and onto the ground. But, as soon as the gap was wide enough, the prey jumped out and ran for its life.
‘Oh, you playful little girl. You trickster. You really had me going there.’ Darren was talking to himself and smiling as he shut the car.
I was just watching. This was all Darren.
He walked around to the passenger door, opened it and reached in for his weapon. Then called after the swine.
‘Don’t stop now, you little grunter. I’m giving you another twenty seconds then it’s game on.’
He counted in his head.
Twenty … nineteen … eighteen…
The pig was confused and swerving up ahead.
Fourteen … thirteen … twelve…
Darren never took his eyes off the sow.
Seven … six … five…
Then it disappeared behind some trees.
Two … one … Go.
SOMETHING WAS RUMBLING
Annie Harding ran out of the woods the same way she had entered. At one point, she thought she was lost but after throwing that rock, she was on autopilot.
She hadn’t stopped to assess the damage. She was confused. She had gone out to the middle of nowhere to scream her lungs out until they filled Hollow Forest. Yet, somehow, she had broken another window.
As light st
arted to creep through openings in the canopy above she could see more. An owl, she thought. The sound of frogs or crickets. Something was rumbling. Clicking. Leaves were rustling under foot but she wasn’t sure it was her feet making the noise.
She fished around her pocket for the keys and thumbed the button that would unlock the car. The indicator lights flashed up ahead as it came into range. She pulled her seatbelt on and started driving, leaving a huge shadow behind her. Through the window to the left, she thought she saw a wild boar.
Within a couple of minutes, Annie Harding was on the road that led downhill past the station into the centre of town. She straightened her hair in the mirror, parked the car behind the main parade of shops, bought two bottles of red wine, returned home and ate dinner with her husband.
It was still day five. I had not fully released my grip on the town, so Annie drank the wine, straddled her husband on the sofa and looked him in the eyes, pretending that she was enjoying what was happening. Faking an orgasm on her perfect sofa with the tie-in, splash-of-colour cushions.
The next day, there would be so many cracks she would have to paper over.
THE PIG GOT AWAY
Oscar Tambor did not end up with a bullet in his face at the end of the fifth day.
He opened his eyes on that driver seat but did not pull out of the woods to go and confront his birth mother for abandoning him as a newborn.
His vision was temporarily blurred and there was a pain in his head above his left eye.
The air on his face was no longer warm. Cold air was rushing in through the hole in his windscreen and a giant rock lay on his lap, digging into his stomach and thighs.
When the images started to sharpen, the only thing in Oscar Tambor’s face was another face. A man he did not know.
Darren.
‘What are you doing out here, friend?’ the pig hunter asked.
‘I’m trying to get home.’ Oz grimaced, the pain in his leg was worsening. ‘Can you help get this thing off of me?’
Darren was on his heels, squatting just outside the open driver-side door. And, over his shoulder, keeping him steady, holding him on track, was me.
‘Ah, fuck. It’s really digging into my leg.’ Oz tried to move the rock aside then screamed as the pain worsened suddenly. ‘Oh, Jesus, help me. It’s like I’m being fucking stabbed.’
‘Well, I sharpened it all night.’
‘What?’
‘The knife I keep cutting you with. It’s sharp, no?’
Oz was confused and scared. Something I could have tapped into. Maybe even given him the strength to get out of the situation. But Little Henry Wallace needed to be safe. He was brave. He was good. Oz was done.
‘The damn pig got away. Outsmarted me, if you can believe that.’ Darren rolled his eyes but smiled, knowingly. ‘Looks like I’m only good enough for slaughtering the trapped animals. The ones who have no place to go. The ones who think they’re going home.’
Oz didn’t have time to scream before Darren ran the blade across his throat, just as he did a hundred times a day to the animals who had taken a bolt to the head.
It didn’t always kill them, they were just stunned. They could feel their lives dripping away. They were conscious when their skin was stripped.
Just as Oz was conscious when Darren started cutting his guts out. He knew what was happening as the human slaughterer slit lines in his face to pull out Oz’s cheeks.
He would leave the eyes in the skull.
Oscar Tambor could not make a sound as Darren moved on from pigs and cats and cows to his ultimate prize. Oz had lost enough blood to drift into a haze as the novice huntsman grabbed a clump of the child-killer’s hair, held his head up and stabbed repeatedly into the side of his neck until it came clean away in his hand.
The wedding was off.
DAY SIX
Where you will find:
Evil releases its grip
Everything goes back to normal
Normality can change
and you are wrong about needing a little time.
A MOMENT
Then it was the come-down.
I had to let them all go.
Hinton Hollow. Population 5,013.
The thing I already knew before this trip is the lesson I hope that they have learned.
Everything can change in an instant.
Life. Death. Love. Hatred. Changed in a split second. But so can people. The fact that human beings have the capacity to meet somebody they never knew before and fall straight in love with them tells you everything. If you can do that, if you can make such a drastic alteration to yourself in a moment, you can do it for anything.
You can end a relationship that is no good for you. You can quit your job that you hate. You can stop eating sugar or meat or drinking alcohol. You don’t think it is easy to do this, that you need time, it takes time, all you want is a little more time.
KNOW THIS
You are wrong.
Stop it. Stop it now. Stop comparing yourself to others, especially those who are not portraying their reality. Stop seeking out the things that make you feel bad about yourself. Stop ‘liking’ things that you don’t really like. Stop trying to please the people that do not matter.
Start trying to please yourself.
Start complimenting someone, even when you don’t think that you have to or that they won’t really appreciate it. Start saying thank you when somebody compliments you, rather than throwing it back in their face because you don’t feel you deserve it.
Start being kinder. All the time. Not just for a week or a day after some celebrity takes their own life or because there is a hashtag you feel you can get behind.
Stop saying you want equality when what you want is dominance. Start wanting equality.
Be real.
You can change.
You can fall in love overnight. You can start saving money. You can start donating money, or better yet, your time. Listen instead of talking. Know that you are not the most important thing in the world but to a handful of people, you may actually be just that.
Make a choice.
A choice to change.
To be true. To be you. To be good.
Because the more of you that take this decision, the less I have to get involved in the world. The better you are, the less evil I have to be. And I do have to be. I am necessary.
But let me be lazy.
I hoped this would sink in. I hoped there could be a change in the 5,000 people of Hinton Hollow. I hoped it would be instant. Tragedy is a phenomenally effective unifier.
I lifted myself from their lives. Their repressed emotions and insecurities dropped back down inside them. But now with the knowledge that they were there. The people of Hinton Hollow had the choice to drop seamlessly back into the everyday or to make every day.
Annie Harding woke up that morning and did not try to fuck away her husband’s hangover. She also did not fall into the mundane. Instead, she rolled over, placed her hand on his face, looked him in the eyes and told him sincerely that she loved him. Then she kissed him and said she was going to put the kettle on.
RD and his wife opened up for breakfast as usual. Darren ordered sausages and ate them. Mrs Beaufort took her pills and walked to Rock-a-Bye and Liv continued to wait for Oz. She was starting to doubt that it had been him on the other end of the line.
Owen Brady did not answer the door when Andrea Day arrived to visit. He was going to devote all of his time to Michael. She saw the blinds twitch as she left but did not fight it.
Ben Raymond spent an entire day with his father and crying baby brother, watching films in the house. He didn’t want to go to the cinema any more. He didn’t want to be naughty.
Ablett and Hadley were still being held and questioned.
And Little Henry Wallace woke up that morning in a double bed with his mother and brother. She had protected him by sending him away and his brother had protected her by telling the police that he had placed hi
s brother on the train that day.
The malaise had lifted from their town and in its place was a sense of ill ease and wonder but also the promise of something different. Of a change.
They would recover.
I did not need them any more. It was up to them to find the good and use it wisely.
All that was left for me was to take the one man I was still waiting around for.
The one I could not let go.
DAY SEVEN
Where you will note:
God did not rest
and Detective Sergeant Pace had to make a choice.
ONCE WAS ENOUGH
It seemed like everybody in Hinton Hollow attended the Church of the Good Shepherd that final day in Hinton Hollow. Even Pace was there.
Father Salis stood outside in the rain, greeting everybody that entered.
‘Welcome, Detective. Please, come in. Get out of the rain. Space is limited today but I’m sure you can squeeze on a seat somewhere.’ He smiled. Part salutation, part self-satisfied at his growing flock. ‘I wasn’t aware that I should be expecting you,’ he added, still with a supercilious grin.
‘I’m finding myself open to a lot of new things since returning home.’
Pace entered the old church and was hit by the smell of childhood duty and languor. He did not attempt to force his way onto the end of a pew, instead he slunk to the left and dropped into the shadow of a pillar.