Captured

by Neil Cross

‘You’re having an episode.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake. I’m a bit irritated, yeah. I’m a bit wound up. I got burgled, I’ve got a marching band yomping round my attic. But I’m not having an episode. This is me, not having an episode. Look. No episode.’

  The stairs creaked again as she softened.

  She joined him on the landing, gave him a cuddle, told him: ‘You need to move.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So why don’t you?’

  ‘Dunno. Back then – when it all happened – I couldn’t. It would’ve looked bad. So I had to stay put.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now I can’t afford it.’

  ‘Come here.’ She kissed him. ‘Poor baby.’

  ‘Don’t laugh.’

  ‘I’m not laughing.’

  She sat down, her back to the bannister. He sat down next to her. They held hands.

  She said, ‘My place is nice. Smaller, but nice.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then move in.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just can’t.’

  She let go his hand. She stood, went downstairs. Jonathan lingered on the landing as if trapped there, but eventually he followed.

  When Jonathan and Becks came to bed, Jonathan pushed the ladder inside the attic as if it were a prolapse.

  They murmured in bed for another half an hour, intimate but tired, in no mood for sex.

  Soon enough, Jonathan was asleep. Kenny could hear him softly snoring.

  But he couldn’t believe that Becks was asleep.

  He imagined that she lay there with her eyes pinned to the ceiling - looking through it, seeing Kenny all shrouded in cobwebs, an abandoned fairground for mice and spiders.

  Just after 2 a.m., he heard her get out of bed and creep out of the bedroom.

  He sensed she was beneath the hatch. Just stood there, staring up at it. Then he heard her creep back to bed.

  19

  In the morning, Jonathan and Becks were subdued, taking it in turns to shower, Becks first.

  She made coffee and toast while Jonathan showered. She kissed him goodbye while he was still wrapped in his towel.

  Ten minutes later Jonathan left the house, too. He checked all the windows and double-locked the doors.

  For an hour, Kenny stayed hidden behind the boxes in the corner. Being up there was like being a spider.

  Eventually, he straightened. His back and his legs sent out bright bolts of pain. Stiff, he clambered over the boxes and stood in the half-light, wiping the worst of the cobwebs from his hair and clothes.

  He opened the hatch and climbed down into the house which – glimpsed only briefly the day before – now seemed familiar and homey.

  Kenny went to the bathroom. He gargled with mouthwash, then finger-cleaned his teeth with a dab of toothpaste. He poked his head into the shower and ran the water over his head to get rid of the cobwebs.

  He put his T-shirt back on, hung up the towel and went down to the kitchen.

  He rinsed out a coffee cup that sat upended on the drainer, filling it with cold water. Before he could drink, his phone rang. It was Mary.

  He said, ‘Hey, Mary.’

  ‘Hey, you. Where are you?’

  ‘Bath.’

  ‘Bath? You hate Bath.’

  ‘Not Bath, really. I’m at a campsite. They’ve got these amazing toilet facilities.’

  ‘You’ve come up in the world. Last time I went camping with you, I had to poo in a bush.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘I do. So – you coming home?’

  He was looking out of the kitchen window, down the long garden.

  Mary said: ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m here.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Something’s wrong. Pat thinks so, too.’

  ‘Have you been talking to Pat?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You can’t stand her.’

  ‘She’s an old cow, but she’s your friend.’

  ‘Am I not allowed to go away for a couple of days?’

  ‘Not when you’ve been acting so weird.’

  ‘Have I been acting weird?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, I’m coming home today. I’ll pop in and see you.’

  ‘Good. When?’

  ‘This afternoon?’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  He hung up and put the phone away, then went upstairs to Jonathan’s office.

  He sat in the office chair and hit a key. Jonathan’s screensaver dissolved – revealing a Text Entry field which required a password.

  Kenny ran his hands underneath the desk and found nothing.

  He went through the drawers; they were tidy and organized and contained nothing he was looking for.

  He went through the books on the shelf, flicking through them one by one, page by page. He’d gone through perhaps twenty-five before he opened the RHS A–Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants. Inside the dust-jacket he found a folded, printed sheet of A4.

  Listed on it were a number of Jonathan’s usernames and passwords. The uppermost password was Jonathan’s administrator log-in. Kenny entered it, then flicked through Jonathan’s emails. Most of them were work-related and quickly became tedious.

  Much of Jonathan’s communication with Becks, Kenny supposed, would be via text message - that was the modern lovers’ preferred means of correspondence.

  He ran a quick search on Callie’s name, but found nothing. And anyway, he knew what he’d come to find.

  Jonathan had hidden the home movies inside private folders, but anyone who knew what he was looking for wouldn’t be long in finding them – and Kenny spent a lot of time alone, with a computer, manipulating scanned images and managing complex file structures. He found the videos after only a cursory search, looking not by file name but file type, searching for all files ending .WMV.

  Here were the videos of Callie Barton. Callie Reese. Eight of them in all, each backed up with a duplicate marked *safe_copy*.

  In the first of them, Callie was masturbating in the bath. It was a different bath in a different house. Two hands moving between her legs; her breasts glistening with water.

  Jonathan was filming her from the doorway; all Kenny could hear was the hiss of the camcorder and Jonathan’s breathing, the occasional word he muttered to her.

  Kenny skipped to the third film. Here she was in a hotel room, lying on the bed wearing nothing but a pair of shoes, one of the pairs Kenny had found in the box upstairs. She lifted her legs and locked her ankles behind Jonathan’s back, grabbing the bedstead with both hands and arching her spine. Her muscles grew taut, her hair was sweated flat to her brow.

  Kenny looked at five of the eight films. Callie’s hair got longer, got shorter. He never heard her voice, just her shy giggles and sometimes a little profane muttering.

  She was on her knees in an evening dress that had been yanked down to expose her breasts and she was moaning, moving towards orgasm.

  Jonathan was saying there you are, there you are. Urging her on.

  There you are. There you are.

  She was face down on the bed in another hotel room – a foreign hotel. When Jonathan lifted the camcorder and walked away, she looked at the lens, frozen for an instant.

  Kenny’s penis shrivelled; it seemed to burrow up and into him, as it did sometimes when he was very, very cold.

  He sat with his head in his hands and tried to conjure up that elasticsplaying little girl in her white knee socks, the girl missing her front teeth, the girl who’d secretly hooked her ankle round his under the desk. Instead, he saw a woman’s ankles locking round a man’s spine, the mechanical undulation of her hips. Not bruised knees but the badger-stripe of pubic hair.

  He put the computer to sleep and replaced the pass
words in the dust-jacket of the gardening book.

  He went downstairs and let himself out the back door. He walked down that mature garden.

  Trapped in the attic, he’d missed the fresh air. But the air out here didn’t taste fresh; it tasted of mulch and rot, the sour reek of ivy and crumbling fence-wood. Along the towpath, there was only scum and stagnant water.

  He walked until he found the trout stream and followed it to the campsite.

  It was a warm day, threatening rain. The campsite was almost empty, but dotted with red tents and blue tents and white Oldsmobiles.

  In the far corner, under a hazel tree, was Kenny’s VW Combi – bright orange, rusty round the rims, faithful.

  He opened the door, got in, closed the Paisley curtains and lay on the foam mattress in the baked-in-heat of the summer: the good, familiar smells of a life to which he could never return.

  He curled up, trying to make the knowledge of what he had to do next go away. But it wouldn’t go away, and it was still there when he woke, waiting for him.

  20

  Kenny left the campsite again at teatime, just as it was reaching its most relaxed and convivial.

  He drove the Combi to the suburbs, pulling over once or twice to access Google Maps. He drove round until he found what he believed to be the optimum street, given what he had to work with.

  After parking there was a lot of time to kill so he went for an exploratory wander, during which he came across a yellow skip. Inside the skip, along with a great deal of builder’s waste, was half a brick. He picked it up, examined it, and walked on, clutching the brick loosely in his hand.

  He kept walking. Loitering might draw attention to him - to this youngish man with hair so white it seemed to glow in the twilight.

  Kenny took a circular route past the chip shops and the curry houses and the corner shops and the shut-down newsagents. His eyesight was bright and true; the darkness was not really darkness, just a deep summer purple.

  After midnight, he walked to Number 25 Coney Lane.

  He stopped across the road, facing it, bouncing the half-brick in his hand like a cricket ball. Then he pitched it through Jonathan Reese’s living-room window.

  The noise was brilliant and urgent, shattered glass cascading like a waterfall; Kenny imagined it echoing over the city, waking everyone in their safe beds.

  He wanted to call something, to scream an obscenity. But the words jammed in his throat as Jonathan pulled back the curtain and stood at the living-room window.

  He saw Kenny.

  There was a shock of connection.

  Then Jonathan moved. Kenny watched the weird, angular shadows he cast as he hurried into his shoes.

  He heard Jonathan thundering down the hallway, fumbling the chain from the latch, opening the front door.

  He waited until Jonathan came outside and shouted: ‘Oi!’

  Then Kenny ran – not too fast at first. Not until he knew for sure that Jonathan was following.

  Jonathan’s footfalls echoed from the pavements and the low garden walls as he chased Kenny to the dark end of the street.

  Kenny rounded the corner and stopped.

  This road was straight and long, edged on both sides with parked cars. At the far end it crossed a main road, brightly lit, still busy enough with traffic.

  There were gardens to hide in and passages between houses, shadowy back gardens. Behind him, a left turn would lead him to the local train station - it was closed; chained and bolted for the night. There were many places to hide.

  But Kenny didn’t hide. He pushed on, nursing a stitch, until he reached the Combi.

  He stepped between the front grille of the Combi and the boot of the Vauxhall Astra parked in front of it. He rummaged until he found the crowbar where he’d left it, tucked behind the front wheel.

  Then he flattened his spine to the cold metal and waited. His breathing was too loud, rasping and painful.

  He made a promise to himself: if Jonathan had given up and gone home, then Kenny would give up, too.

  But then Jonathan passed by, having slowed his sprint to a laboured jog.

  Kenny stepped out from his hiding place, lifting the crowbar high, bringing it down.

  Jonathan dropped like a slaughtered cow.

  The impact jarred Kenny’s wrist. Carried by his own momentum, he stumbled over Jonathan and fell.

  As Jonathan tried to climb to his knees, Kenny scrabbled round for the crowbar, found it, took it in two hands, got to his feet and hit Jonathan with it.

  Jonathan fell down again, tried to raise himself, crawl away.

  Kenny stamped on his kidneys, kicked him in the guts, the ribs. He stamped and kicked until Jonathan stopped moving. Then, gulping for air, he said: ‘Get in the van.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Kenny raised the crowbar, breathing through his teeth.

  ‘Please,’ said Jonathan.

  Kenny kicked him in the head.

  Jonathan raised a hand in submission and, mumbling please, dragged himself towards the Combi – Kenny prodding and goading him with the crowbar.

  When Jonathan had reached the Combi, Kenny shoved him into the front passenger footwell. ‘Curl up and shut up.’

  He lay down where Kenny told him. Kenny had to push the passenger seat back to its fullest extent. Then Kenny got behind the wheel, tossed a blanket over Jonathan and drove away, the crowbar on the seat next to him.

  He drove under the limit until he reached the darkness on the edge of town, parking in a gravel lay-by on the perimeter of a cow field. The Combi was sheltered by an immense overhanging oak.

  Kenny darted round to the front passenger seat and dragged Jonathan out by the hair, making him walk with comically bent knees, like a trained chimpanzee. He opened the Combi’s sliding side door and shoved Jonathan inside.

  He wrapped duct tape round Jonathan’s ankles, then his wrists, then his mouth.

  This was done in night-silence, with heavy, laboured breathing. The unspooling of the duct tape was cinematically loud.

  Then, hurrying, Kenny lay Jonathan on the floor of the rear compartment and threw the blanket over him again.

  He drove Jonathan to the cottage.

  21

  Kenny drove down the dark, rutted lane and parked outside the cottage. He wrenched the hand-brake; a lonely sound out here, late at night.

  Kenny looked at the black windows of his home. The Combi’s engine ticked and cooled.

  He stepped out and walked for a bit in the darkness, stretching his legs.

  There was a silky rustle in one of the hazel trees bordering the driveway. Perhaps it was one of the saucer-eyed owls that nested here.

  Kenny knew that, if he stood still for long enough, the night would come alive all around him. In the darkness were bats and moths and badgers. There were worms and mice and rats and foxes. Moles burrowed beneath his feet.

  He dug out his keys and let himself in. He’d been gone long enough, and far enough, that he could smell the cottage, slightly musty, like the bottom of an empty biscuit tin; the smell of home.

  Without turning on the lights, he went to the kitchen. He took a serrated steak knife from the drawer, then took the blue plastic bucket from the cupboard under the sink and filled it with cold water.

  He carried the bucket to the Combi, water sloshing his toes. He slid open the side door and tugged the blanket from the shape in there.

  Beneath the blanket, Jonathan was conscious – wide-eyed as an owl. So Kenny didn’t need the cold water to wake him, but he tossed it over Jonathan anyway.

  Jonathan howled, stifled by the duct tape. He lay there, drenched and shivering as Kenny showed him the knife.

  When it had registered in Jonathan’s eyes, Kenny slit the tape that bound Jonathan’s feet and said, ‘Walk to the house.’

  Jonathan struggled to a woozy sitting position. He perched on the edge of the rear compartment, shaking his wet head to clear it.

  He glanced at Kenny. Then
he ran away, weaving, poorly balanced because his hands were taped before him like a penitent’s.

  Kenny cursed and followed. In one hand, he held the steak knife. As he ran, its blade flashed alternately silver and black in the moonlight.

  Jonathan was following the rutted drive, aiming for the road that led to the village. Kenny ran fast and came close; he could hear Jonathan’s exerted breathing.

  Kenny kicked out like a soccer player and tripped him.

  Jonathan slammed into the ground and lay belly-up, eyeing the knife in Kenny’s hand. He was panting, prepared.

  Kenny grabbed a fistful of Jonathan’s hair and yanked him to his knees. He dragged him to the cottage and shoved him through the door.

  Worn out, Kenny shut the door and sat with his back to it.

  Jonathan lay in the hallway, breathing in a shallow whine, watching the knife that dangled from Kenny’s hand.

  His helplessness made Kenny detest him. He wanted to kick him and beat him and scream obscenities, for being so impotent.

  Instead he sat with his back to the door, saying: ‘There you are, Jonathan. There you are. There you are.’

  Kenny let Jonathan wriggle along the floor a little then stood and followed, nudging him towards the last of the empty bedrooms.

  It was a cold room. Kenny rarely went in there. The only window, fitted with a crooked, salmon pink Venetian blind, overlooked a grassy incline to higher ground. It made the room damp in winter. The cold radiator was a white, cast-iron beast, ten fins marked with ancient paint splatters.

  Kenny ordered Jonathan to sit in the middle of the bare floor and looked round for a few moments. His first thought was to shut the decrepit blind but then he thought again and used the steak knife to slice away its cord.

  He made a loop of this strong, narrow rope and slipped it around Jonathan’s throat. Jonathan struggled, gently enough at first, then harder. He stopped when Kenny held the knife to his eye.

  Kenny tightened the loop around Jonathan’s neck, just enough. He tied the other end to the radiator.

  This arrangement made Jonathan sit with spine erect and head held high, like a proud dog.

  If he moved, he’d choke.

  Kenny left Jonathan leashed in the empty bedroom and walked around the outside of the house, through the long grass, past the rusting Morris Minors to the ramshackle outbuildings.