by Jane Renshaw
She pushed herself up, got herself to her feet, shakily, a hand on Caroline’s shoulder, and straightened. She stood straight and said, ‘Yes. Yes. To incriminate me – That’s why they – they strangled him. If they’d used a knife or a gun the pattern... the forensics would clear me, because there’d be no blood on me, but... Using a chain to strangle him with, there’ll be nothing to clear me, and I touched it –’
‘Whoa. Let’s just call the police and ambulance, first off, and then –’
‘We can’t call the police,’ she said, quite calmly, ‘because they’d arrest me. And how would Beckie even begin to cope with that? Her mum arrested, and taken away from her, for killing her dad?’
‘God’s sakes! Of course they won’t arrest you. Their number one suspects are going to be the Johnsons, obviously –’
‘Not if they’ve set up alibis again. And they will have. They’re going to arrest me because I spent two years in a Young Offenders’ Institution – when I was twelve I killed this girl, and they’re going to go into all that and they’re going to find out I’m Rachel Clark and I was there right after Saskia was murdered.’
Caroline was gaping at her.
‘We can’t call the police because I will be their number one suspect.’
For a long moment Caroline didn’t speak. Then:
‘Okay. Okay.’ She was frowning off. ‘Right. We have to think. We have to not panic. We have to... If we’re not going to call the police, what are we going to do?’
Flora stared at her. ‘I don’t know.’
Caroline’s eyes widened. ‘Wait a minute though! The CCTV! The CCTV will show the Johnsons getting into the house, won’t it?’
‘Yes! Yes, it’ll show the Johnsons –’
Leaving Beckie in the kitchen, where she was happily arranging the contents of Caroline’s kitchen on the table into their food groups, Flora and Caroline left the flat and walked – Caroline made them walk rather than run – down the street to Number 17.
With her hand on the front door, Caroline stopped. ‘What if they’re still here? Did you check the house?’
Flora shook her head. There had been no space in her brain for anything other than the huge, impossible fact:
Alec’s dead.
Caroline grimaced. ‘But I guess they’re not going to be hanging about, are they? We’re probably safe enough.’ She pushed open the door and headed through the vestibule and up the stairs. ‘Get the CCTV footage up. I’m going upstairs to – look at him, okay? To check...’
Flora just stood in the hall as the waves pounded her, the waves, the tsunami of Alec’s dead, Alec’s dead, Alec’s dead.
‘Flora? Get into the study and get up the footage for today. Fast-forward through it and check the Johnsons are on it, right, then we’ll call the police. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter what the police find out about you. If the Johnsons are on camera breaking in to the house today, that’s them banged to rights.’
In the study she breathed him in. The pine shower gel he used and that faint outdoorsy botanist’s aroma that he must pick up from spending hours in the lab around plants and soil. On the desk were a glass of water, the glass filmy from not being washed between refills; a mug, a plate, his untidy piles of paper.
How was it possible? This morning she’d been asking him to get fruit and double cream for dessert, and now she was standing here having to look at CCTV to try to get evidence against his murderers?
How could that be?
She didn’t sit down in his swivel chair, she stood with her palms flat on the desk as the computer booted up.
When Caroline appeared she was staring at the screens, at the beautiful summer’s day flashing past her eyes, like a time-lapse sequence in a nature programme on BBC 2. Trees shivering in the breeze. Birds shooting like bullets across the endless blue of the sky. Shadows moving, on the different screens, across the sandstone of the house, across rippled panes of Victorian glass, across the expanse of the glass doors.
Was he alive then – or then? Did he look out of the window and see those birds flying past? Was that when they were putting the chain round his neck, when he was fighting to stay a part of the life he could maybe see through the bedroom window, going on, just as normal, rushing on past as his time stopped, all at once and forever? There it was in front of her, his time flying past and then at one moment – maybe then, as a cloud crossed the sun, or maybe then, as a leaf flipped up in the breeze – coming to a stop. Reaching its limit. And then that and that, all the moments afterwards happening without him, without his ever knowing about any of it, second after minute after hour after day after year.
‘Got them?’ said Caroline.
‘What?’
‘Are the Johnsons on there?’
She shook her head.
‘Fuck.’
The camera angled towards the street had captured a stream of humanity, vehicles, cats and dogs and birds, but from Flora and Beckie and Caroline leaving in the morning until their return, no one had approached the house, at either the front door or up the drive to the side.
As she shut down the screens, Flora was conscious, in a distant part of her brain, of Caroline looking at her.
‘I didn’t do it,’ Flora said flatly.
‘God’s sakes, I know that! It’s just weird that the cameras didn’t pick them up. They must have come in a window that wasn’t covered, I guess.’
There wasn’t any such window. Alec had made sure, in his thorough, nerdy way, that every single window was covered. But:
‘I suppose so,’ she said.
‘You’re right – we can’t call the police. We have to get him out of the house. If he’s found here, the police are going to want to see this footage, and it’s kept on the server on a cloud thing, yeah, at the security company, so we can’t wipe it?’
Flora nodded.
‘First thing we need to do is turn off the cameras. Just for as long as it takes... Can you do that?’
‘Yes, you can turn them off from here –’
‘Okay. It’ll maybe look a bit suss if the police ever check, but these things do have unexplained outages. Then we have to get him into your car, right, and take him somewhere and dump him. Best to take him out the back, through the doors at the back, less chance of someone seeing... Get your car round to the garden door and then we just need to open that door and get him in the boot... Come on. Come on, Flora. Let’s do this.’
‘Dump him.’
Caroline blinked.
‘Dump him?’ she yelled into her face.
Caroline took hold of her arms. ‘Okay. I know this is a fucking nightmare and you’re barely functioning – but you have to get a grip and do this, for Beckie’s sake if for no other reason, right? That wee lassie – she needs you. She’s going to fucking need you like never before, and what’s going to happen to her if you’re in the jail?’
Flora took in a huge gulp of air and nodded.
‘You can do this. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
But in the bedroom, she couldn’t look at him.
She couldn’t.
‘Flora. Flora!’ Caroline was bending over the bed. ‘Take his legs and I’ll take his shoulders. Thank God he’s just a skinny wee guy, eh?’
Flora made herself walk to the bed and look down at Neil’s shoes. Shoes on the bed. She’d go mad at him for that normally.
But seeing as I’ve been murdered, you’ll let me off?
Hysterics threatened.
He was wearing one green sock and one red one.
‘Your fucking DNA’s going to be on him anyway, you’re his wife, that’s not a problem forensically... Suppose I should wear gloves though. Flora? You got some gloves?’
Flora went to the wardrobe and opened one of the little drawers inside where she kept scarves and gloves, and picked out a pair at random.
‘Thanks.’
Flora grasped the thin ankles and lifted when Caroline told her to; walked bac
kwards to Caroline’s directions, the weight of him pulling between them; struggled down the stairs like something out of Laurel and Hardy. He swung between them, slipping, bumping his bottom on the stairs, threatening to pull his legs through her grasp as if he was still Alec, still here, having a huge joke at her expense. As if in a minute he was going to rip off the man-strangled-by-chain mask and laugh his barking seal laugh.
The breath was puffing in her lungs, and she was making odd little sounds, little grunts that were half way to laughter.
Down the stairs, through the hall, into the family room.
They laid him down, gently, by the glass doors.
Flora didn’t look past his ankles.
‘Right,’ said Caroline, hauling open the doors. ‘Oh God, Beckie though... I’d better go back to her.’
‘The Johnsons!’ Flora gasped. How could she have –
‘The Johnsons won’t be anywhere near. But yeah, I’d better get back to her. You’re okay to get him out to your car, and take him off somewhere? Can you manage him? See if you can drag him...’
She grasped the green ankle and the red ankle and heaved. ‘Yes I can manage. You go. Go to Beckie.’
‘When you’ve done it, come to mine and we’ll take Beckie back here and you can start calling round ostensibly trying to find out where he’s got to... Call his work... Then when you realise he’s missing you call the police. It’s a myth that they can’t do anything for twenty-four hours, it’s case by case basis, they might ask you to come to the station to make out a report or they might send the plods round... I’ll give you an alibi, but don’t worry, they’re not going to look at you as a suspect when the body’s found dumped, not with the Johnsons ready-made psychos in the frame. Their DNA will hopefully be on him somewhere. Don’t volunteer any info about your past though – I’m guessing you changed your name before electronic recording started, yeah?’
Flora nodded numbly. ‘Mum just went to a local solicitor who drew up the deed poll documents – they’re not on a centralised database anywhere – I checked. And the solicitor is dead now. Unless the police ask to see a copy of my birth certificate they might never find out...’
‘Good, great.’ Briskly, Caroline pulled off the gloves and tossed them onto the table by the doors.
‘Go!’ Flora gulped. ‘Go to Beckie. I can do this.’
‘Where are you going to take him? Somewhere isolated. A forestry track or something, where you can park up out of sight.’
‘I could take him to Cairn Hill.’
‘Great!’
‘Great?’
Caroline took a long breath. ‘Sorry.’ She reached out and took Flora into a hug. ‘Oh God, Flora, I’m so sorry... We both have to hold it together for the next few hours, then we can have a complete fucking breakdown. Right? But you have to get moving. If this was the Johnsons, if they’re trying to put you in the frame for this, we have to think their next move might be to call the police anonymously to report shouting or something coming from the house...’
Flora pulled away. Made herself look down.
‘You have to get moving, yeah? And as soon as you’ve done it, start calling his mobile and leaving messages asking where he’s got to. Might be easier to get him on a tarp and slide him out to the car on that... Have you got a tarp? Flora? A tarpaulin?’
‘In the shed. Caroline. Beckie!’
‘Okay, I’m going... We can check the house later for anything else the Johnsons might have done to incriminate you.’
Flora nodded.
‘You gonna be okay?’
She looked down.
His face was turned towards her, grossly inflated, purple and red, and the ludicrous thought was going through her head: We need to get him to a doctor to see to that.
‘Flora?’
‘Yes.’
Chapter 30
Both the police officers were female. For some reason she had expected men. They were both fortyish; both wearing wedding rings; both, outwardly at least, all tea and sympathy. They’d said ‘Yes please’ to the offer of tea, and the four of them were sitting round the table now in the pools of light cast by the Jim Lawrence lamps.
The blonde one was asking the questions while the brunette took notes.
‘And he didn’t say anything about where he’d be going today?’
Flora gripped her mug. ‘No. I just assumed he’d be going in to work as usual. Oh, actually – I asked him if he could get some ingredients – for a trifle I was planning to make – and he said he would.’
‘Do you know which shop he was going to for that?’
‘Probably the Sainsbury’s at Cameron Toll.’
‘Okay. And did you pick up on anything unusual about him this morning?’
Oh God.
Flora just stared at the woman. She had one of those faces that was almost pretty but not quite – it was a delicate, fine-boned face, but chin and nose were pointed, giving her expression a sharpness that wasn’t attractive.
‘No,’ she managed to say. ‘I can’t think. I can’t think of anything unusual.’
Caroline reached out a hand and closed it round Flora’s arm in a gesture that would probably look comforting, but the pressure as she squeezed was painful.
‘And you can’t think of anywhere he might be?’
She shook her head. ‘If he’s not at work... No.’
‘He would have driven to work in his car?’
Alec was dead.
He was actually dead. Gone.
Forever.
All he would be from now on was a list of nevers. The papers he’d never write, the students he’d never inspire. The wife and daughter he’d never see, never speak to, never hold in his arms again.
Never never never never.
Alec.
She nodded. ‘Yes, he’s taken his car.’
‘How were things at home, between you?’
‘Oh, fine!’
That had sounded so forced. So unconvincing.
‘You can’t think of any reason why he’d not come back?’
‘No.’
The brunette cleared her throat. ‘Mrs Parry, we do have a record of your husband being charged with assault two months ago, although the charge was later dropped. And cautions have been issued to Jed, Ryan and Travis Johnson concerning breach of a court order in respect of the closed adoption of your daughter? And in fact you changed your names two years ago and moved here after a mistake by Social Services led to the Johnson family learning your names and address? That’s what’s come up on the databases, anyway, when we did a check. Can you tell us about that?’
Flora stared at Caroline, who patted her arm and sat back and said, ‘That was a nightmare right enough, but it’s all blown over now.’
‘There was – We had some trouble with Beckie’s biological family breaching the court order not to contact us. Neil – it was all quite heated at one stage... The family – the Johnsons – they’d found out where we were again and made contact. But they’ve seen sense and not been near us for... Oh, ages. A month at least. As Caroline says, it’s all blown over.’
‘Okay.’ The brunette was scribbling furiously.
‘The alleged assault was against a Carly Johnson,’ said the blonde. ‘Who is presumably one of this family?’
‘Yes. The sister of Beckie’s biological mother. Neil... He’d just gone round there to their house to talk to them, and this girl stood at the gate blocking his way, and he just sort of tried to push past... It wasn’t an assault. The girl herself and her mother – they actually came round to apologise. It all ended quite amicably.’
‘They came round here?’
Flora nodded.
‘Was your husband here at the time?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how did he react to that?’
‘Well, at first he wasn’t happy about it, but when it transpired that they’d come to apologise... Neil was... Neil’s always inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt.’
<
br /> Neil was?
But she could have been about to say Neil was fine with it or something.
‘He’s a lovely guy,’ added Caroline.
‘It sounds like maybe the two of you have been under some stress, though?’ said the blonde.
Flora sighed. Nodded. ‘But not lately...’
‘Sometimes these things just hit you. Is it possible he’s gone off to clear his head? Has he done that before at all?’
‘Well... no.’
‘There was the time he went round to the Johnsons’ house, though,’ Caroline interjected. ‘He’d gone off to clear his head then, hadn’t he, after he thought he saw one of them in the garden? And he ended up going round there, and that’s when the assault happened? The so-called assault, I mean.’
Flora shrugged. ‘I suppose.’
The blonde said, ‘Do you think it’s possible he might have gone to see the Johnsons again?’
Flora shook her head. ‘Why would he? They’ve stopped bothering us.’ She took a deep, shivering breath. ‘I think it’s more likely he’s had an accident... He’s not a great driver, he’s...’
Caroline leant over to put an arm round her. ‘If he’d had an accident you’d have been notified by now, eh?’
The policewomen stood. ‘We’ll check all the hospitals anyway. And someone will go round to the Johnsons and check out that possibility. But at this stage, I wouldn’t worry too much. In these situations, the person concerned often turns up the next day. We can all have a wee wobble every now and then, can we not, and take ourselves off? That’s probably all this is. But we’ll update you on the hospital checks and any information we obtain from the visit to the Johnsons.’
‘Thank you.’ Flora stood.
Caroline stood with her, arm still round her shoulders. ‘Thanks very much, then.’
When they’d gone, when Flora had at last shut the front door behind them, Caroline puffed out a long breath. ‘See, told you it’d be fine. You were fine.’
‘Was I, though?’ Flora sat down on the pew; immediately stood up again, locking her shaking knees. ‘I have to check on Beckie.’
‘Okay – I’ll leave you to it. Call me though, yeah, if you need me? For anything at all. And I mean anything, Flora.’