by Mosby, Steve
‘Okay. The question is: can we prove any of it anyway?’
She was right. If the man turned up, the only evidence we had for his involvement in the killings was Miller’s word. The online messages inciting the crimes had been deleted, and the letters we’d received had been impossible to trace. If we caught the General right here and now, then unless we found further evidence—at his home, say—it would ultimately come down to his word against Miller’s. And unlike Miller, the General was smart enough to have thought ahead. He could come up with a million explanations for having the key in his possession.
‘You remember what Miller’s father said, though?’ I sipped my drink; Laura was right about the coffee too. ‘It’s not our job to prove any of it. It’s just our job to catch him and gather whatever evidence we can.’
‘Yeah, like that’s ever been enough for you.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I guess not.’
‘At least we can be sure of one thing—regardless of whether Miller turns out to be a lone gunman on this, we’ve got him. He’s our murderer. If the General really exists, then we need to catch him, sure, but at least we’ve got Miller.’
I nodded. Even if the General existed and was guilty of instigating the crimes, Miller was the one who’d carried them out—and he was behind bars now, going nowhere. Which meant that nobody else was going to die. And that was something.
At the same time, it wasn’t enough: not for me, anyway. Miller was responsible for his own actions, of course, but the General had helped to cause them.
And aside from catching the bastard, I wanted to know why. What was the code? Why the letters? Why do such a monstrous thing in the first place? With Miller, it felt like I could understand a little. He was a young man who’d grown up twisted and bullied, learning the lesson well that inflicting fear and violence on the world was a way to make yourself bigger. His motivations—money and self-empowerment—were twisted but logical.
For the General, I couldn’t even attempt an answer.
Without catching him—without knowing for sure—the case would remain open in more ways than one.
‘I’m tired,’ Laura said. Tired of all this.’
‘Me too.’
‘I want to go home.’
‘Me too.’
She put her cup down.
‘How are things?’ she said. ‘At home, I mean. Better or worse?’
I thought about it, remembering the way it had felt to embrace Rachel the other night: the sense that the distance between us had closed slightly. And in the woods today, when I’d been sure I was about to die, it had been her I’d thought about. Her and our child.
‘Better, I think.’
‘Really? That’s good.’
‘We’ve still got a long way to go.’
But for the first time in months, it did feel like we might be able to get there. And for once, I had an idea of how to help that happen. Talking, yes, but before I could do that, there was something else I needed to do. Something I should probably have done a long time ago.
Laura said, ‘What do you think—’
My radio squawked. I grabbed it up off the counter almost before the sound registered. One of the officers stationed outside.
‘Here,’ I said.
‘Hicks.’
My heart sank. It was Young, back at the department.
‘Sir?’
‘We’ve got a problem.’
I listened as he explained, slowly and quietly, what had happened. And although he kept his voice even and his tone calm, I could sense the anger. If he’d been talking to me in person, I imagined he wouldn’t have blinked the whole time. Someone was about to get obliterated over there, and I took no pleasure right now from knowing who.
I put the radio down and turned to Laura.
‘It’s over.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘Charles fucking Miller has happened. He’s given a statement to the press, right outside the department. In full military regalia, too. Can you believe that? He told them he’s convinced his son is innocent and that we’re fitting him up to save our skins.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yep.’
Shit didn’t even cover it. If the General was anywhere near a television set, he would now know that Miller had been arrested and the storage unit was compromised. Which meant that our only way of catching him had just disappeared.
We gave it another hour, just on the off chance. The unit received three customers in that time, two women and one man; they were all obviously homeless, but we had them detained anyway. Aside from that, the radio remained silent.
‘All right,’ I said eventually. ‘Let’s do it.’
We walked across to the lockers and located the number Miller had given us. I used the key from his room to unlock it. The door screeched slightly as it opened.
Laura peered in at the contents.
‘Where does that leave us?’
It’s over.
I stared at the neat pile of CD cases, secured with a red rubber band. Sixteen in all.
‘Nowhere,’ I said. ‘Nowhere at all.’
Part Four
FRANKLIN LEANS FORWARDS.
‘The key to your father’s gun cabinet?’
The boy—Andrew—nods.
‘And then what happened?’
Andrew looks like he’s about to cry. Once again, Franklin tries to summon up some sympathy from inside him. He has been through a lot, after all, this boy. Whatever happened in the house, he must remember that. Andrew is eight years old but looks younger. Whatever happened, it must have been awful and traumatic. It is understandable. There is nothing to gain from pressing him, not really.
‘Andrew? Can you tell me what happened?’
The boy shakes his head, unable to meet his eye. But again, he thinks, that doesn’t mean anything. He is only eight years old.
‘You can’t?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know what happened next?’
‘I stayed in the bedroom, like John told me.’
Despite himself, as Franklin looks at the boy, he absently touches the cross he wears around his neck.
You’re lying, he thinks. Andrew, you are lying to me.
Fifty-One
THE MORNING AFTER THE failed stake-out, I drove out to Buxton. There was something I needed to do.
The road was wide and flat. On my way, I passed a few cars, but mostly just speed-limit signs and the lines of indistinguishable houses: dull wooden faces with shadowed windows, set back behind their fences. When the breeze picked up, dust billowed across the tarmac. The sky ahead was featureless: a single, implacable shade of grey.
When I reached the house—one I hadn’t returned to for over twenty years, or at least not physically—it was obvious. Not only from the indistinct but shivery familiarity I felt at the sight of it, but because it stood out from all the others I’d passed. As ramshackle as its neighbours might have been, at least those buildings were habitable, even if only barely, but this house was clearly derelict.
I parked up outside. When I killed the engine, there was no sound at all, not even birdsong.
I stared at the worn façade of the house. The red paint had long since flecked away. The windows had no glass, giving oblique views of the peeling wallpaper in the dank rooms within.
A family had lived here once.
There was a man and his wife and their two sons. By all accounts, they were innocuous. Nobody who knew them had anything bad to say about them; nobody would have marked this particular family down as having something wrong with it. They wouldn’t have suspected there was a seed of violence nestled at its heart, waiting for the right time to bloom.
The man was former military, retired through injury, and clearly a little rough and bitter. He drank. The woman was cowed and nervous in a fidgety kind of way. None of that was enough to differentiate them from other families in these parts.
The two boys, though …
With hindsight, some people did say they’d appeared haunted: too quiet, both of them. It was as though they were making an effort to keep silent about something. As though there was something they wanted to say but wouldn’t, or couldn’t. When they looked at people, they didn’t seem to see them.
And with hindsight, those same people probably wondered if they should have recognised that something was wrong with that family. If they might have done a little more, even though doing something is not what people do, and especially not back then.
But that was all a long time ago.
As far as I knew, nobody had lived here since what happened. Not in the ordinary sense, anyway.
Finally, I got out of the car.
My brother was two years older than me, but he was always smaller and weaker. It really was as though we had different fathers, although I don’t believe for one second that’s true. It was just that John took after him, while I carried more of my mother’s genes. Although perhaps that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
Regardless, my brother always felt the need to protect me, because he was older. Even though he wasn’t physically capable of doing so, somewhere deep inside him he felt like he should, and his failure to do so ate at him. The more he hated our father, the more he also hated himself for being unable to stand up to him. When our father mocked him for being weak and ineffectual, it stung, because he believed it was true.
And yet, despite his hatred, John had still taken on board our father’s ideas about what it meant to be a man. He’d absorbed the idea that one way to deal with the frustrations of your life is by using violence against others to make yourself feel bigger. That wasn’t the whole story of why he did what he did that night, but it was a part of it.
On the night my father died, I told the policeman who interviewed me—Franklin—that I’d stayed in our bedroom: that John had gone downstairs and unlocked the gun cabinet by himself, dragged the shotgun upstairs alone, and that I hadn’t seen what happened in my parents’ bedroom shortly afterwards.
Of course, that was a lie.
The gun cabinet was gone now—everything was. The downstairs room, like the rest of the house, had been stripped bare. The floorboards were exposed, broken in one corner, and the walls were pale, with permanent shadows of mould cast on the plaster. The remains of the fireplace formed a broken black mouth in the pale wall, the floor in front speckled with flecks of wallpaper and wood, as though the house had begun eating and spitting itself out.
But standing in the doorway and looking through the lounge doorway, I could still remember where everything had been. Memory added fixtures and fittings to this empty space; it superimposed furniture, and leached colours on to the grey shell. A ghost of an old life, flitting—briefly—across the world. A room seen through a window, passed by at speed.
I shook my head and moved back into the hall. It smelled of mildew and earth. Bubbles of moisture had formed on the walls and hardened like pearls. An empty doorway revealed the corpse of a kitchen, recognisable as such only from the square stains where cupboards had once clung to the walls. Behind me, daylight leaned in through the open front door, but didn’t reach the staircase I was looking up. The landing above was dark, and somehow both empty and full; the wooden stairs themselves looked precarious and soft.
I tested each step, all the way to the first floor.
With the far window exposed, the corridor up here was like a dark, weathered tunnel. Doorways led off at various points down the hallway, the first to what had once been a bathroom, the second to the bedroom I had shared with John, the third to what had been my parents’ bedroom.
There was no heartbeat here, not like in my dream, but the air had a pressure that might have been mainly inside my head. I hesitated. Then I walked all the way along to the last doorway.
Just as I had that night, all those years ago.
I’d gone downstairs with my brother.
I’d been there with him when he lifted the shotgun from the rack. He’d carried it himself—that much was true—because he didn’t want my fingerprints on it. He kept telling me to go back into our dark bedroom, but I wouldn’t, and it annoyed him. Perhaps he thought I was undermining him—that this was his action, one he should be doing alone, and there was me, trailing him like an equal partner. Saying nothing, because I hated our father and I wanted him to do it.
And yes, I followed him into our parents’ bedroom.
The door creaked slightly, but neither of them woke. Our father was snoring softly, lying on his back with one beefy arm thrown above his head. Even in the gloom, I could tell his mouth was wide open, slack. Our mother was curled up on her side of the bed, her back to him and her legs drawn up, as though she was trying to get as far away from him as possible.
It happened quickly. I think John was scared that he wouldn’t be able to go through with it if he faltered, or perhaps that our father might sense us there and wake up. If he had, I doubt John would have done it. Our father would have taken the gun off him, and God only knew what would have happened next.
John lofted the shotgun awkwardly, and somehow got it pointing at an angle down into our father’s face. He paused, suddenly unsure of himself.
Do it, I whispered.
Do it, John.
And then he pulled the trigger. The room immediately transformed into a judder of noise and smoke and vibration. The impact lifted the barrel vertical and knocked my brother backwards with the force. Below us, my father’s face and head had been replaced with nothing. The rest of him didn’t even move; he died instantly where he lay, his arm remaining where it was. Our mother jerked awake with a screech and nearly fell out of bed, blood spattered all over her bare back.
That’s all I really remember. I was back in my bedroom, sitting alone, when the police arrived.
Looking back, I suspect Franklin had known I was present at the murder, but both John and I stuck to our stories closely enough for him never to be able to prove it. Why did I lie? I’ll never be sure, but I think I did it for him—for John—because he so desperately wanted to have done it by himself, without my help. He had wanted to protect me, and I, in turn, had played the role required of me. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I was below the age of criminal responsibility. So John was charged and sent to a remand centre for eight years; I was fostered. Due to press interest at the time, both of us received new and separate identities.
Regardless, I’ve never forgotten that look on Franklin’s face. An expression that said that when he looked at me, he saw it in me—something evil, malformed and wrong. Not just an abused, scared little boy, but something worse. Something of my father in me. And although I got away without any official sanction, I’ve lived with the implications of that look ever since.
I’ve lived with telling myself, over and over, that it couldn’t be true. That I wasn’t like my father. That everything has a human explanation. That there is no evil.
Standing in the doorway to my parents’ bedroom now, I looked at the dim wine stain of blood that remained soaked into the back wall. And then I moved back down the hallway towards the second doorway along: to my old bedroom. I hesitated at the frame, a part of me not wanting to peer in, but then I did.
The first thing that struck me was how small it was.
Could two boys have ever slept comfortably in here? It seemed impossible to imagine now. Even without the furniture, it was little bigger than a cupboard: a dark, windowless cell. But we had slept in here, and it was in here that we had woken up that night, and the rest of my life had begun to unfold.
Despite my best efforts, a part of me had remained here ever since, and in that interview room with Franklin. I’d never quite believed the things I’d told myself; I’d protested too much. But now … that could change, couldn’t it? Franklin hadn’t recognised me as an adult. And this room, in reality, was empty. There were no ghosts here. No pale children huddled, shivering, where a bed used to stand. No sobbing black-and-white woma
n to come screeching at me for failing to save her.
It was a space to be filled, as and how I saw fit.
So I thought: I’m not evil.
I won’t necessarily be a bad father.
I won’t necessarily have a bad son.
I stood there for a few more moments, filling that nothing, and then I left.
As I walked the rest of the way back along the hall, carefully down the stairs and out into the dull grey daylight, I thought about Rachel—about the list of characteristics on her dating profile that had first attracted me, which I’d talked about in the therapy session. There had been something else on that list that I had not mentioned. Two details she’d given that at the time had been the most important ones of all.
Children, she’d written: no.
Want children: never.
I’d always had that safeguard in place. Until she changed her mind so vehemently last year, that is, and I’d been forced to make a choice: confronting my fears of becoming a father and what that might mean, or losing the woman I loved and needed more than I could ever explain. I hadn’t been able to bear the thought of either thing, and balancing them had been pulling me apart ever since. Pulling us apart.
It’s like there’s something he wants to say and won’t.
Yes. It had been like that.
But maybe, soon, that could change.
Fifty-Two
IT HAPPENED IN THE middle of the night.
I don’t know for sure what I was dreaming, only that it was something about James Miller. In part of it, he was coming slowly and steadily towards me at the side of the Hawthorne Road. Holding that hammer, with that look on his face. There was nobody else around, and this time, I couldn’t find my gun.
‘Andy, Andy, Andy.’
I woke up suddenly in the dark bedroom, struggling to make sense of what was happening. It was Rachel tapping me on the shoulder, frantically.
‘What?’
‘It’s happening. Oh God.’
‘I’m awake.’
I was—instantly. I sat bolt upright in bed. Rachel was sitting on the edge, her eyes wide and bright even in the darkness.