by Peter Laws
‘You said Clarke was an artist?’
Miller turned a little more, ‘Correct.’
‘Well … haven’t you noticed something?’
Miller stepped back inside while Taylor let out an exasperated breath. ‘Gentleman … I’ll be in the car.’
‘We’ve looked in every room in this house,’ Matt said. ‘And I’ve seen a lot of paintbrushes and a couple of easels.’
‘So?’
‘Well, where are the paintings?’
Miller followed Matt’s gaze to the bare walls of the corridor. A few picture hooks stood proudly from the peeling wallpaper. Nothing was hanging from them. Nothing except a subtle line of dust marking the dim outline of a frame.
‘Were they worth much?’ Matt asked.
‘Hardly. The shop sells them for like twenty quid a pop. I hardly think this is an art heist.’
‘So where are they?’
Still wearing the latex gloves, Miller laid a fingertip on the wall. ‘And where’s she?’ He said it quietly, almost a whisper, and Matt noticed an unexpected sound in it. A tremor of stress. Then he snatched his hands back and pulled off his gloves with a rubber snap.
‘Better hurry up you two,’ Taylor called from the car. ‘The heavens are opening.’
As soon as Taylor said it, Matt heard a low rumble of drops hitting the corrugated roof of Tabitha Clarke’s creaking, lonely house, and the rectangle of sun he’d been standing in was gone. In its place, he saw a family of woodlice scuttling toward his foot. It felt like as good a cue as any to leave.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Wren, Lucy and Amelia did that giggle/squeal/giggle sound as they rushed down the path from the cottage. Jackets were pulled over their heads as the rain pounded into them. Matt flung the car doors open and they all bundled inside, gasping and laughing.
‘Oh my word.’ Wren dragged her fingers through her wet hair. The bright red was now a dark, copper brown. She held up her soaked hand. ‘Look at that. That’s ten seconds’ worth.’
He turned the ignition and the wipers squeaked into life, clearing the windscreen. They watched the cottage for a moment. It pulsed in and out of focus as the heavy drops filled the screen, quicker than the wipers could manage. Around the cottage, around the car, everywhere in fact, the shaggy clumps of tree branches were swaying and quaking madly to a long, low hiss of water, like they’d all been flung to the base of that waterfall.
He flicked the lights on, reversed and swung the car round. Then he headed off down the long dirt track, their heads bobbing on the uneven road. The trees on each side grew dense and far-reaching. The rain on the roof made it sound like they were in a helicopter, not a car.
They were halfway down the track when Amelia jerked upright in her seat. ‘Whoah.’
‘What?’ he said.
‘That. What’s that?’
‘What’s what?’
‘Over there. Running in the woods.’
All four of them swung their heads to the left.
‘What are we looking for, exactly?’ Lucy groaned.
The rain on the windows was making it hard to figure out, but then Wren tapped her finger on the glass. ‘Oh. I see it. Over there.’
‘Congratulations,’ Lucy said. ‘You just found a tree in a forest.’
‘No there … the foxes.’
He looked over and saw them straight away. They were running at full pelt to keep up with the car. Two of them. Weaving in and out of the tree trunks, hopping over fallen logs, springing through the forest.
‘Daddy?’ Amelia tugged at Matt’s shoulder. ‘Why do they keep looking over at us?’
She was right, they were. Running and flicking their heads toward them. ‘I guess they’re partial to a decent Mondeo—’
Thud.
A huge, loud and sudden bump pounded through the car.
Amelia screamed and Matt automatically slammed his foot onto the brake. The car skidded on the dirt track, back wheels locked into a drift a couple of feet to the right. Ah crud … there was a ditch on the side of the road, racing toward them.
‘Brake! Brake!’ Wren shouted, like it was a helpful suggestion he may not have considered yet.
‘I am!’ he shouted back, annoyed, as the wheels slowly crunched to a stop and the grinding ended. The car was still upright, just short of the ditch. Two seconds’ worth of trauma, at the most, but enough to plunge them all into a gaunt, sudden silence.
The entire car was still, but the rain rumbled on. The wipers scraped and squeaked, over and over and over again.
‘Crap,’ Matt whispered. ‘We hit something.’
All eyes flitted to the windscreen and out across the bonnet. Every couple of seconds the wipers cleared a view but all they could see was rain bouncing off the car in hundreds of tiny fountains.
‘What’d you hit?’ Lucy slipped her seat belt off so she could lean through the two front seats.
‘Is everyone alright?’
‘I said, what did you hit?’
‘Look,’ Amelia said. ‘The foxes have stopped running too.’
He looked over at them, now distorted brown smudges. They were panting and milling around a tree stump, looking over.
‘Pass me my jacket,’ Matt unbuckled himself.
Lucy grabbed it from the back seat and bundled it through. He swung it around his shoulders, clicked the door open a crack. The once muffled rain sounded suddenly sharp and crisp.
Wren was popping her belt to join him but he put up a hand. ‘You might as well stay in the car and keep dry.’ Then he gave a silent nod toward Amelia. She looked pale.
‘You okay?’ Wren nodded and reached over, grabbing her hand. ‘Be careful, Matt.’
The tremble in her voice made him look back at her.
‘Probably just a log in the road,’ he said, as much for his own benefit as theirs.
He winced as the rain hit his face then he glanced over at the foxes. They were suddenly much nearer to the car. Maybe it was due to the rain but all of their ears seemed to be down, flat and folded back. He didn’t like that look at all.
Fat drops seeped into the back of his collar and ran down between his shoulder blades, making him shiver. So he swung the jacket over the top of his head like a makeshift tent and moved round to the front of the car.
They hadn’t hit a log, because logs don’t bleed.
A bright red splash covered the first three letters of his registration plate and spattered up into the radiator grille. His first thought: after all that searching he’d finally found Nicola Knox wandering in the woods, only now she was dead and buckled under their car.
He looked up to see all three girls staring out of the windscreen from behind the frantic wipers.
He went round the back of the car to check and found a dark furry lump. He let out a sigh, which was part sadness and part relief. Running a kid over would have been a definite holiday downer.
He knocked on the boot and Wren wound her window down a touch, squinting as the rain came in, ‘What is it?’
‘It’s just another fox. Keep the girls in the car for a bit.’
The little mound of coppery fur had tried to curl itself up into a ball. It was so still he thought it was dead but as Matt leant down it suddenly jerked in a freaky little spasm. Enough to make Matt jump. It flipped itself onto its other side, and for a moment looked like a furry little fish flopping on the bottom of a boat, gasping for air.
‘Aw shit, little man. I’m sorry.’ Matt cringed at the long, gaping slit in the fur, running in a jagged line from its chest down to its groin. Wet leaves were stuck to its bloodied belly and the smell reminded him of uncooked steak.
As the fox flopped slowly back and forth, darker blood quickly pulsed out onto the dirt. The dying fox’s ears were folded back exactly like the others at the tree stump. The fox would be dead pretty soon. A few minutes maybe. Ten?
He was suddenly startled by a knock on the rear window. He looked up to see the two girls trying to pull on
their jackets while Wren was obviously telling them to stay still.
Oh great. They were coming to see it.
You can’t let it die like this.
For a second he considered just kicking the fox to the side of the road so it might drop into a ditch, out of sight. Flashing his hands and saying nothing to see here, kids! But the thought of the poor little guy twisting in pain down there caused Matt to move his foot towards its throat. He put one hand on the car’s boot to steady himself and pushed the toe of his shoe forward. Keeping it poised, he looked away.
Is this really necessary, Professor?
The girls’ doors clicked open.
‘Stay in the car.’ He pretty much barked the words. Then holding his breath he pushed the toe of his shoe in, the other foxes observing his every move.
He pushed harder.
Harder still. Quickly, so nobody else would see.
Matt’s eyes closed when he heard a tiny snap, muffled like a twig in jelly. Part of him didn’t want to open them again, because he had no wish to see what he’d just done.
But he did open them. And when he did, Lucy was standing there, one hand over her mouth. She’d moved quicker than he expected. The hood of her jacket was sparkling with little stars of rain, her other wet hand touching the edge of the boot. Her face was a paper-white mask of shock and disgust.
He quickly moved his foot back, away from the fox.
‘Lucy,’ he whispered. ‘It was in agony …’
‘Oh, my God.’ Her eyebrows had drawn together as they so often did with him. But this time they were drawing up in the middle, a sort of organic expression of a brain unable to compute. And when she spoke it was in tiny, frightened gasps. ‘You killed him.’
‘Lucy.’ He reached out towards his stepdaughter, which was a bad idea. She stumbled back.
‘Don’t you even touch me.’
The heels of her white Stussy trainers sank into a ridge of mud.
‘Oh, just calm down. It was dying—’
She spun on her feet and threw herself back into the car.
Oh, great. Just bloody perfect.
He checked to see if any of the blood was on the tip of his shoe. There wasn’t any, just a few wisps of fur. So he shook his foot, wiping the tip in the dirt. The animal was dead, one eye open, one eye closed in a sort of unamusing death wink that said, Thanks … but I’d rather you had posted me to Dignitas, you brutalist!
‘Urgh.’ Now it was Wren, standing there with her hood up.
Lucy wound her window down and shouted, ‘You better be going to bury it. You can’t just lob it in the woods.’
Matt looked over at Wren, who shrugged.
To be honest he had no clue what to do with it. Tossing it into the woods sounded like a pretty good plan. Wouldn’t that be the most natural thing to do? File it somewhere in the food chain. But then, maybe burying it would be a good thing for the kids. They’d never had any pets. Too many allergies. Maybe doing this would teach them about death or something.
Hey, Matt. What’s next on this holiday adventure? Take them to the airport to teach them about plane crashes?
‘Let’s bag it up,’ he said.
Wren quickly grabbed a plastic bin bag that they had in a cubbyhole of the boot and held it open. With a curved thick branch he managed to peel the animal from the track and flip him into the bag. It was like the most bizarre game of golf he’d ever played, and it took him four attempts to eventually flick him inside. All the while, rain pounded onto them both.
He gazed a little too long at the pool of dirty blood on the track, but at least the rain was diluting it. Wren grabbed a handful of leaves and started to rub the blood from the registration plate.
The toes on his euthanasia foot felt suddenly warm and tingly.
‘So, are we cooking this bad boy or not?’ she said, catching his eye. ‘Road kill’s got a lot of nutrients.’
He smiled softly at her and wiped some rain from his brow. Then he tied up the end of the bag and lifted it, sickened by the weight, picturing the blood and dirt pooling in the bottom of the black plastic. After a quick, whispered discussion with Wren he set the bag neatly at the side of the road and climbed back into the car, shivering as the seat pushed the cold wet shirt into his back. He braced himself for Lucy’s town crier announcement that good old Matthew here had just broken a fox’s neck.
‘That’s it, then?’ Lucy said. ‘You’re just going to leave him there?’
‘We need to get to the church,’ Matt said.
Lucy screwed up her face. ‘For videogames? Don’t you think that can wait.’
He checked his watch. ‘I promise we’ll come back and bury the fox later.’
‘No way, we’re doing it now,’ Lucy said.
‘Er … no we’re not. It’s pouring down, and I’m not bringing him in the car.’
‘He’ll have diseases,’ Wren added.
‘So we bury him now, then.’
‘With what? Your phone?’ Matt said, getting annoyed. ‘We haven’t got a shovel.’
‘Then we’ll use our hands. We’re not leaving him.’ She went to open her door again.
‘Lucy,’ he caught her eyes in the rear-view mirror, ‘do not open that door.’
‘Why? Is this how you used to bury people when you were a vicar? Leave them on the side of the motorway to rot in a bag?’ He heard her door click open, the sudden hiss of the rain filling the car.
Wren shot her a glare, mouthed the word’s, Don’t.
‘Do not go back out there,’ he said.
‘Oh, get lost, Matthew—’
‘Dammit Lucy, get in the fucking car!’ The words came out of him with such a hard deliberate snap that both Amelia and Wren jumped. ‘For once will you do as you’re told?’
He turned the ignition and the engine came to life.
Wren stared at him, jaw open a little. ‘Close it, Lucy.’
A few seconds passed. It clicked shut.
The hiss of the rain may have vanished but the car was now filled with the low buzz of stress and tension. He straightened and glanced out of his window as rain pelted the bin bag, holding the first non-insect he’d ever killed.
It was Amelia who broke the silence. ‘You think that fox was the daddy?’ She was staring out at the other two foxes who were still looking over at the car, blinking slowly and watching. ‘I think it was the mum.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Matt suddenly said. ‘I shouldn’t have sworn at you but—’
‘Oh, don’t bother,’ Lucy said.
He glanced down at his right foot, pressing the accelerator, feeling pretty miserable. Wisps of fur, invisible against the dirt track, now clearly stood out against the black carpet of the footwell.
They drove the rest of the way in silence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
They left the kids in the Sunday school hall. It was a 60s holiday-camp building that had been bolted onto the seventeenth-century church with plenty of thought to practicality, though zero to aesthetics. A common crime amongst Protestant types.
The youth leaders had filled the room (pig-pink walls with orange carpet) with a circle of LCD screens, all facing in. A bunch of teenagers sat gazing at them, their pupils flashing with white squares as they jabbed at controller buttons. A stiff-looking woman with her shoulders back marched from one child to the other, recording their scores silently on a clipboard. It was all quiet and serious and positively Orwellian. Matt was tempted to join them for a quick game but he was a few decades short of the entry requirements. Shame.
Lucy and Amelia settled themselves in front of a PS4. But just as Lucy picked up a controller she gave him a look. A sort of eyebrows-up flash of defiance, which said loud and clear: I know what you did to that little mummy fox.
He was amazed she hadn’t told his crime to Wren or Amelia yet. But that look told him she felt like keeping this knowledge in for a while. It was probably more strategic that way. Gave her a power chip. She was mistaken. He’d beat her to it
and tell all when he got the chance. There was no shame in what he’d done, was there? He’d have to convince his feelings of that too.
The harsh woman with the clipboard stepped into his view, snapping him out of his fox thoughts. ‘We don’t bite,’ she said. Then flashed a smile ironically lined with sharp, jagged teeth. ‘Your children are safe with us, so please stop leering.’
‘I’m not leering,’ Matt said, looking for the bald guy with the goatee that they met the other night at the Purging. ‘Where’s Billy, the youth worker? Isn’t this video game thing his idea?’
‘It is. I’m not sure where he is, but he might be upstairs, praying with the others.’ She nodded to a tiny window to some upper room. ‘They’re asking for the kids to sense God here today. That he’ll speak to them.’
‘What … through Angry Birds?’ Matt glanced over at a kid, feverishly sweeping an iPad.
‘God’ll speak through everything … anything. You just have to listen.’ She smiled again. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me.’ She strode off, plunging the point of her high heels onto the thick carpet.
He wandered over to Wren. She had one hand on her hip, staring up at an arch in the ceiling. He took her elbow. ‘Come on. I think we’re cramping the kids’ style.’
They headed back out of the Sunday school hall and back up into the church foyer. Carpeted floor turned back to stone.
She had a stack of yellow notepads under her arm and a pencil shoved behind her ear; she’d dried most of her hair with the toilet hand-blower moments earlier, so it looked like it was moving toward 80s power rock video. She didn’t seem to mind. Today’s task was sketching out the new lobby. Lots of glass, Chris had insisted. We want to be transparent!
‘Well, I’d better leave you to it.’ Matt went to kiss her but her lips felt stiff and cold against his. He pulled his face back, waited for the appropriate seconds to pass. ‘Look. I’m sorry for swearing back then.’