A big fist gripped his foot in mid air, interrupting his arc. He tipped and covered his face and fell awkwardly, skimming the tree and hitting the fence.
He bounced into the dirt, stunned and staring up at the cloudless blue sky.
And then Adam While came over the fence like an angry bear, and Jack rolled to his feet and ran again, through the neighbours’ garden, down the side of that house, across the little patch of front lawn where a woman pruned a rose –
‘Oh!’
– and out into the street, legs blurring and lungs sucking in air, and arms pumping so hard that he thought he might take off and fly the rest of the way home.
Or die.
‘You little shit! I’ll fucking kill you!’
Jack risked a glance over his shoulder. While was still coming. Bigger and older, but fury kept him in the race.
Jack kept running.
Kept sucking.
Kept looking behind him.
Until – finally – nobody was there.
Only then did he slow. Only then did he stop to take stock of the grazes and scratches and soon-to-be-bruises on his arms and chest and back, and the blood that ran from his ringing ear.
He went the long way home, along the canal, where he washed the blood from his face and chest. He winced at the pain in his ear. His knee hurt from the patio. He felt a little sick, and the back of his head throbbed.
But Adam While had killed his mother.
Now Jack knew it was true. He’d seen it in the man’s eyes, felt it in his fists. The same brutal hands that had murdered his mother and his unborn sister had punched him, grabbed him, ripped the shirt off his back.
I’ll kill him, he thought, and was shocked by the surge of hot pleasure that came with the words.
Jack was used to anger, but he had never before felt murderous.
He did now.
His blood fizzed, and his fingers twitched in anticipation. Adam While on his knees. He’d beat him to death as he pleaded for mercy. Bring his hammer down, claw first, lever slabs of skull from the top of his head, spatter his brain, break his teeth, puncture his eyes, wrench off his balls in bloody handfuls. Leave him in the road for the crows to pick over, the way Adam While had left his mother for nine days.
Nine long hot summer days …
In the scrub in a lay-by. Like waste. Like rubbish.
He sprinted through the town, pale blood still running in wet rivulets down his chest and ribs, his ear shouting in pain with every step.
The homeless man looked up as he passed.
‘You’re bleeding!’ he said, and started to rise, but Jack left him behind and kept running all the way home.
The sun was leaving the sky, but he could hear the lawnmower out back, and was grateful that Merry wasn’t there to ask questions.
He ran upstairs and took his other hoodie off the hook on the back of the door where he kept his clothes so the mice couldn’t piss on them.
He grabbed his backpack. His hammer. He’d go in through the bathroom window. They wouldn’t be expecting it. Not tonight. He’d kill Adam While while his stupid wife screamed and screamed and wished she’d called the fucking police!
All his weariness was forgotten; his fear was forgotten.
Only anger remained.
He slung the backpack over his shoulders and turned to go.
‘I’m hungry.’
Shit!
The sudden silence was the absence of the lawnmower.
‘There’s no cereal,’ said Merry. She held Donald to her chest like a shield, his scaly toes resting on her collarbones, his face looking trustingly up into hers.
‘Then eat something else.’
‘There is nothing else. And I’m hungry. We all are.’
‘What the shit, Merry,’ he snapped. ‘You never fucking stop!’
She flinched. He didn’t care. She stared up at him with big scared eyes to make him feel guilty.
‘It’s not my fault,’ he snapped. ‘For fuck’s sake, stop nagging!’
‘I only—’
‘I’ll bring you something for breakfast, OK?’
Her lower lip wobbled. ‘But I’m hungry now.’
‘There’ll be food in the morning, Merry! Jesus!’
‘OK.’ Merry nodded miserably. She hitched Donald up, and turned her head and wiped her nose on her own skinny shoulder.
She could wait for breakfast.
‘And a book?’ she hoped.
‘Don’t push it,’ he said, and stormed down the stairs.
CATHERINE WHILE WAITED for Adam to come home – scared in a way she’d never been before.
Not scared that she might fail an exam or crash the car or get mugged on the way home from the shops – but scared for her entire future, and that of her child.
She waited, her ears alert to every sound, her eyes searching the garden, then the road, then the garden, then the road, for any sign of Adam or the boy. She called Adam’s phone. It rang in the van that was parked haphazardly in the driveway.
The events kept replaying themselves in her head like a horrible movie she couldn’t un-see. She’d never seen Adam so angry. Never seen anyone so angry. What if Adam had caught the boy? What if he’d beaten him to a pulp? Or had chased him on to the railway line where he’d been chopped into pieces, or knocked him into the canal where he’d sunk like a stone? What if bystanders had made a citizen’s arrest? What if the handcuffs were being snapped around Adam’s wrists, even while she sat here and dithered?
Even worse, what if Jack had killed Adam? Turned on him with a knife or a stick or a chunk of concrete? What if Adam were only so long coming home because he was dead?
Tears boiled over in Catherine’s eyes as her panicky mind darted from one dreadful conclusion to the other.
If Adam were dead, what would become of her?
Or arrested for murder, what would become of her?
Either way. What would become of her?
She almost laughed – it sounded so melodramatic. And yet it was all she could think of, as the minutes ticked slowly away until they became parts of an hour – and then an hour itself, and then two hours – and still Adam did not come back.
She nearly called the police.
She really nearly did.
But if the worst had happened, she wasn’t in a hurry to hear it. And if it hadn’t, she didn’t want to alert the police to the fact that her muscular six-foot-two-inch husband had assaulted, and was now hunting down, a skinny boy.
A police siren whooped and she froze, but it passed.
Not for her.
And please, not for her Adam.
Her Adam, who’d vowed to love and honour her, who had bought their microscopic dot of a baby banana pudding and a train that blew bubbles. Her Adam, who worked so hard to pay the bills and who had given up his sporty car for a Side Impact Protection System, and who sent her postcards from Derby and Warwick and Falmouth with wry notes and funny doodles that made her giggle and feel safe and adored.
Her Adam – who’d ignored her cries and pleas to stop, while he’d punched a boy bloody, then torn the shirt clean off his back and chased him over the fence and down the road …
Like a madman.
It got dark, and Catherine prayed. She felt stupid but she did it anyway, for the first time since childhood. Begging a snubbed deity to do her this one favour: to let Adam come home safe, and without having done anything – ever – that they’d all live to regret.
WHEN HE LEFT home, Jack was angry with Merry. But by the time he broke into the house on Brooksia Close, he was only angry with himself.
It was his fault that she was hungry. He’d been distracted. Since finding the knife, he’d been distracted. Hadn’t worked so much. Hadn’t brought food. Hadn’t brought books. He’d taken his eye off the ball.
He gritted his teeth. Being in charge was relentless.
No wonder his father had given up.
There were slim pickings in the kitchen of the Wil
liams family, who had gone to Disneyland Paris and whose cupboards were filled with junk food.
Finally Jack chucked a net of oranges and a pint of milk into his backpack. He emptied the rest of the rubbish out of their fridge and into the washing machine and considered it a personal favour.
There was a bookshelf at the top of the stairs and Jack went through it, sweeping out rejected titles in angry armfuls and tumbling them to the floor, then trampling them while he looked at others, careless of torn covers and ripped pages.
There were only two vampire books and Merry had read them both, but he found Stephen King’s It. It was good and thick, and Merry might as well get started on clowns …
He had never read the book himself, but when he was about eight he’d watched the TV film with his father and it had scared the shit out of both of them. The horror that lurked around every normal corner … Afterwards his mother had yelled that he was too young to watch it, but afterwards was too late, and Jack was glad. The film had become something they’d shared – he and his dad.
He’d thought that had meant something, but he’d left them anyway.
Suddenly the fact hit Jack like a physical blow. He stumbled sideways on the slippery book covers and clutched the bannister for balance, bent over and breathless with loss.
He missed his father.
He missed the kind and the funny and the strong parts of him that he’d almost forgotten existed before the weakness and the fear and the crying. He missed how, when they were little, he and Joy would climb him like monkeys up a tree; the way he’d wrapped Loopy the gerbil very gently in tissue paper, and put a little scatter of sunflower seeds in the shoebox they’d buried him in; the time Jack had burned a hole in the living-room carpet with a magnifying glass, and his father had covered it up with the couch so Mum wouldn’t see … And the day Jack had learned to ride a bike in the park – his father’s hand there and then not there, but still close enough in case he needed catching …
Jack panicked.
One minute he was standing on a stranger’s landing, feeling as dizzy as a small boy on a runaway bicycle, and the next he was skidding off the books and half falling down the stairs in his haste to get out of the house.
It was past midnight and the only sound in the whole of Tiverton was his own rubber footsteps echoing through the Pannier Market, and past the crescent of the Half Moon pub and down Gold Street, where a barn owl swooped over him, so low that he could have reached up and brushed its pale feathers with his fingers, before tipping a wing in salute to the statue of Edward VII and disappearing over the canal.
He ran on, still not knowing why, except that Merry was hungry now, wasn’t she? She was hungry now! And it was his job to take care of her. His job to catch her so she wouldn’t wobble and fall …
He cut across the supermarket car park, where a single escaped trolley under a security light was the star of the show. Past the garage that sold cars nobody could afford, and finally – panting – on to his street.
At the freshly painted front door, Jack stopped. He dropped the book and the backpack. Couldn’t feel his legs.
The little glass porthole was broken.
And through it he could see that the house was on fire.
IT WAS NEARLY one in the morning before Adam finally came through the front door, and when he did, Catherine attacked him.
‘Don’t you EVER!’ she shouted, flailing at him. ‘Don’t you EVER do that again! I’ve been frantic. What would have happened if you hadn’t come back? If he’d stabbed you? Or you’d killed him? What would have happened to me and the baby? What would have – happened – to – us?’ She slapped him on every word, on the arms and the shoulders, furious with relief, until she finally ran out of energy and fell into his arms and cried and cried and cried.
‘You scared the shit out of me!’ she sobbed. ‘You macho dickhead!’
‘I’m so sorry, Cath,’ he said, gently stroking her hair, her back, her tummy. ‘I just snapped. I was a macho dickhead. I’m so, so sorry I scared you.’
He soothed her and murmured to her until she finally stopped crying, then he made them both tea, which they drank at the kitchen table, perched awkwardly on wooden chairs instead of relaxing in the living room, because that would have seemed too forgiving.
‘Where have you been?’
‘I couldn’t catch the little bastard—’
‘Thank God!’
‘So I went to the pub.’
She was surprised. Adam wasn’t a big drinker, and she couldn’t smell it on his breath. But then, her nose had been filled with tears all evening.
‘Which pub?’
‘The Half Moon.’
He’d run all the way into the centre of town, then. He must have tried very hard to catch the boy. Been very angry …
Catherine shivered at what might have been.
‘Why are you even here?’ she said, only just thinking about it. ‘And not in Ludlow?’
Adam sighed and rubbed his face wearily with his hands. ‘I knew something was up, Cath. I was watching the house.’
Her eyes widened. ‘You were spying on me?’
‘Of course not,’ he said, surprised. ‘You’re my wife! I wanted to be sure you were OK. I was worried about you – and obviously for good reason. This kid threatened to kill you, Catherine! And he was in our house! What would have happened if I hadn’t been here?’
Catherine bit her lip. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I wasn’t going to sit around and find out.’
‘But what about work?’ she said.
‘Let me worry about work,’ he said. ‘I’ve done so much overtime they owe me a month.’
Catherine hesitated. Adam was only a salesman. Not irreplaceable …
Then she let it go and nodded dully. She would let him worry about work. She had to; she had no spare capacity to worry about anything new.
Adam covered her hand with his, and she didn’t move it.
He gave a huge, cleansing sigh. ‘Anyway, he’s had a good smack on the head and a big fright. I don’t think he’ll be back again. And if he ever does come back, we’ll call the police and have the little sod arrested. Deal?’
He smiled reassuringly and Catherine looked into his eyes. They were so kind that it was hard to reconcile them with the way he’d attacked Jack …
‘Deal,’ she whispered.
‘Good,’ he said, and they went upstairs together.
While Adam showered, Catherine got ready for bed. She took out her nightdress – so big it was like a sheet – and laid it on the bed and stood over it – unseeing.
Then she picked up the phone and called Jan. She apologized for the hour. It was fine; Jan was up.
‘Oh good,’ said Catherine, and stopped and didn’t know what to say next.
‘Is everything OK, Cath?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I just … How’s Rhod?’
‘Great!’ said Jan enthusiastically. ‘I really think he might be the one, you know.’
‘I’m so happy for you,’ Catherine heard herself saying. ‘That’s super news.’
‘Thanks!’ said Jan, and wittered on for a little bit about how well Rhod treated her, and how much he earned doing whatever it was that he did, because she still wasn’t sure, hahaha …
‘What happened with his tyre?’
There was a confused pause where Jan stopped talking about her golden future with Rhod and readjusted to Catherine asking about a flat tyre.
‘Oh,’ she said, sounding a little put out. ‘It wasn’t faulty at all. It had been slashed.’
Catherine turned slowly and stared into the mirror on the wall next to the bed. ‘Really?’
‘Yes! Can you believe it? In that quiet little road, right outside your house! They said something very sharp had gone right through the wall in two places! So of course he didn’t get a refund.’
‘Of course,’ said Catherine.
Another silence.
She wasn’t sure
how the conversation with Jan ended, but she knew she’d hung up.
Slowly, she removed her clothes.
In the bathroom, the shower was switched off and she could hear the small sounds of Adam drying himself, humming snatches of song – something by The Beatles – and then doing his teeth.
By the half-light of the hallway Catherine stood, naked, and stared down at her huge tummy – shiny and stretched to accommodate the baby they were looking forward to with such pleasure. It was a view she’d enjoyed many, many times over the past months – marvelling at her tightening swell and disappearing feet.
She always felt joy and wonder.
But tonight the joy didn’t come. And neither did the wonder.
Instead Jack Bright’s words spiralled and twisted inside her head. The words that had made her invite him into their house like a vampire …
If he found it, then he must have been looking for it.
Adam said the knife had been lost. But he knew it was gone. And had searched for it hard enough to find it in her underwear drawer.
And then he’d lied to her about it.
So tonight Catherine looked down at her tight tummy not with joy, but with a strange queasiness.
Because for the first time, alongside their precious child grew a tiny seed of doubt.
And she hated Jack Bright for planting it there.
JACK YANKED HIS key over his head – sucking in a sharp breath as the string snagged on his sore ear, and then coughing out smoke.
He shoved open the door, and flames bounded at him like happy dogs, before the door hit something solid and bounced back at him, engulfing him in a single genie-like puff of grey smoke.
Joy and her fucking papers!
‘Joy!’ he shouted. ‘Merry!’
He covered his face with his crooked arm, ran through the fire and dropped to all fours and, on the floor, found air and eyesight again.
The fire was only behind the door – the flames licking the walls almost to the ceiling, and crawling along the carpet – but the smoke was thick and choking, and heading for the stairs …
Snap_‘The best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time’ Val McDermid Page 14