by Neil Cross
‘I suppose.’
‘Why have you been avoiding me?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘You want me to ask again? I’ll stand here and I’ll keep asking. I don’t get bored.’
‘I’ve been busy.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Stuff.’
‘So much stuff you can’t pick up the phone?’
He flexed his jaw, moved his tongue round his mouth, couldn’t find any words.
She said, ‘Are you eating?’
‘Yes.’
‘You look rough. What was all the shouting?’
‘What shouting?’
‘I heard shouting.’
‘When?’
‘When I rang the doorbell.’
‘I hurt my finger. I might’ve shouted. Did I shout?’
‘Someone did.’
‘There you go then.’
‘What’s happening over there?’ She nodded towards the last bedroom.
‘Nothing. Why?’
‘You keep looking.’
‘Do I?’
‘You got guests I don’t know about? Having a Nazi-themed orgy?’
‘Ha! No, no. I’ve got a rat though. I think it’s a rat.’
‘You should get a cat.’
‘It hardly seems worth it, really.’
‘So how did you kill him?’
There was a noise in Kenny’s head like a train rushing past. He listened to it, blinking.
Pat said, ‘I’m not so old I’m completely doolally. How did you do it?’
Part of him – the old part – wanted to tell her the truth, that Jonathan Reese was alive in the last bedroom.
But what good would that do? Pat would call the police. They’d cut Jonathan loose, give him food and water, set him free.
Nobody would ever know what happened to Callie Barton: and Pat would learn what kind of creature Kenny had become, in the name of pure love and dead days. So he said, ‘Does it matter?’
She was looking past him now, at their reflection in the studio windows. She laughed. ‘You selfish little fucker.’
‘Pardon?’
‘That girl Mary, she loves you. Stever loves you. Even their fucking kids love you. And all you can do is wrap yourself up in something that happened thirty years ago, that means fuck all to anybody.’
‘It’s not like that.’
‘Then what’s it like?’
For a moment, Kenny thought Pat was going to hit him. But she just said: ‘Me – I can hardly remember being a kid. Not really. I look at a photo of this little girl I used to be. There’s no connection.’ She was still looking out of the window. ‘Time passes. It just does.’ Then she turned from the window and said: ‘What if Jonathan Reese didn’t do what you think he did?’
‘He did.’
‘But what if?’
He kept his silence.
Pat said: ‘If Mary and Stever ever find out what you did, it will kill them.’
‘Will they find out?’
‘Don’t put this on my shoulders. This isn’t my doing. Do you want to protect Mary from this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Me, too. That’s why I’m here. To protect her. Have you made a will?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who gets the house?’
‘Mary. Are you going to tell her?’
‘Are you listening to a single sodding word I’m saying? What kind of twisted bitch do you take me for? The reason I came here tonight, I didn’t come here for you. I don’t care about you, not any more. I care about Mary. Because she doesn’t deserve all this. The weight of what you did. She doesn’t deserve it.’
‘I know.’
‘She can never know.’
‘So don’t tell her.’
‘I never would. But I’m not the only one you have to worry about.’
For a moment, Kenny thought he might faint. ‘What?’
‘There’s someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘A man called Paul Sugar.’
‘Who the hell’s that?’
‘The man I paid to find Callie Barton.’
‘The man you what? Why?’
‘I wanted to help, Kenny. But I’m tired.’
Kenny was shamed by his burst of anger, and too worn out to maintain it. He sagged and said: ‘What does he know?’
‘I can’t say for sure – not yet. I do know he’ll have read the papers and made the same connection I did.’
‘Will he go to the police?’
‘Have you ever met a really greedy man, Kenny?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, double him and add one more for luck. That’s Paul Sugar. Do you own this house outright?’
‘No. But my life insurance will cover the rest of the mortgage.’
‘And the house is worth a bit?’
‘Not as much as it was last year. Where are you going with this?’
‘You need to make out a new will. Leave everything to Paul Sugar.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘Yes, you can. Right now, Paul doesn’t know the full story. Odds are, he won’t even care about the full story. What he cares about is money. Promise him enough, he’ll stop being interested.’
‘The house goes to Mary.’
‘The house is the price Mary has to pay for your secrets. You need to see your solicitor.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Don’t throw that name around too lightly. Not in your position.’
He saw that she was not joking. He said, ‘And what about me and you?’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘That you forgive me?’
‘For making me an accessory to murder? I don’t think so.’
‘Will you?’
‘If I forgave a bit better, I’d have retired Chief Inspector. And I wouldn’t be living in a fucking caravan.’
‘Please, Pat.’
But she just made a face, a disgusted face, and made for the door.
Before getting there, she turned. She said, ‘You hung me out to dry, you self-centred little twat.’
Kenny waited for the sound of her engine, the wheels growing more distant on the gravel drive. He was trapped behind an alien face.
When Pat had gone, he went to the outbuildings. They were mostly in darkness, now the sun was setting.
He probed round with a wan torch until its beam alighted on an eight-gallon container, far in the dark corner. He brushed cobwebs from the container, smelled it, then hoisted it and returned to the house.
He grabbed a Bic lighter from the kitchen drawer and took a page from the free-sheet that lay unread on the kitchen table. He twisted it up, then stuffed it into his back pocket.
He went through to the last bedroom.
Jonathan was still lying flat on his back, tied to the chair.
Kenny unscrewed the lid of the container and splashed petrol over Jonathan’s face, head and upper body.
Then he produced the Bic lighter. His hand was not shaking.
38
Jonathan roared, stifled by the duct tape. He shook his head as though denying a terrible accusation.
Kenny crouched down to rip the tape from Jonathan’s mouth. Soaked in petrol, it came free easily.
‘Okay,’ said Kenny, ‘you’re not scared to die. But you don’t want to burn. Nobody wants to burn. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Did you hear the conversation I just had?’
‘Some of it.’
‘Then you know time’s run out.’
‘I can’t tell you a story just to make you feel better.’
‘Then I’m sorry. We’re done.’
Kenny limped from the room.
In the doorway, he lit the end of the twist of newspaper.
Jonathan followed him with his eyes. He was breathing fast, like he’d been running.
Kenny stepped forward, ready to toss the taper into the room.
Jonathan shouted: ‘All right.’
Kenny lowered the taper. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means, all right. I’ll tell you what you want to hear.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘I’ll tell you what happened. But put out that fire. Please put it out. Put it out and I’ll tell you.’
Kenny took the taper to the kitchen, far from the petrol fumes, and ran it under the tap.
Then he returned to Jonathan and crouched down like an archaeologist, his elbows resting on his knees.
He was looking down into Jonathan’s eyes.
He said, ‘All right. Tell me.’
39
Kenny sat against the wall. Jonathan lay on his back, tied to the chair. It was as if the fabric of reality had been twisted between them.
Jonathan said, ‘Are you sure?’
Kenny said, ‘Yes.’
Jonathan shifted, as far as he was able. ‘There’s not much to it, really. I was ill. Depressed. About a year before, we’d had this really bad argument, the one where I hit her. She took me back, but she wasn’t happy. Neither of us was happy. She wanted things to be different. She was bored with where we lived, bored with our friends, bored with her job. Bored with me.
‘She’d started taking these night classes, talking about doing another degree, something to do with English. She wanted to change her life, become a teacher, whatever. I don’t know; nor did she, really. She was having an affair with this bloke. Callum, his name was. He was, like, her first love – from school. They got talking on the internet. Met up somewhere, some bar in Bristol. Started sleeping together pretty much straight away, as far as I could work it out – probably in the back of his car, that night. That used to kill me, for some reason: thinking about them in the back of his shitty little car. That was worse than anything.’
‘So you knew about it?’
‘From the beginning, pretty much.’
‘How?’
‘You can just tell. I used to read her emails to him, their texts. All this sickly talk: “I’d love you to be the last thing I see every night and the first thing I see every morning.”’
He made a sour face, rehearsing his own disgust.
‘Did you talk to her about it?’
‘No. I thought it was one of those things she had to do, just her way of getting back at me. I’d decided to let it burn itself out. But the jealousy, mate. Jesus. It’s like having a monster living inside you, like you become an ogre. I started drinking again, getting ugly drunk. Falling over drunk.’
His face was far away now. Kenny let him have the moment he needed.
‘So one night, she comes home really late. Tarted up to the nines. She’s a bit drunk. I’m drunk, too. I tell her she’s making a fool of herself, mutton dressed as lamb, showing herself off like that.’
He glanced at Kenny, but Kenny was staring at the wall as if at a screen. So Jonathan went on.
‘So I’m shouting at her. She’s fucking this, she’s fucking that. And halfway through – I’m still shouting – she gets a text message. A little beep. She reads it. And she laughs. I think the text is from him, from Callum fucking Murray, Mr Fuck You Till You Scream in the Back of My Mondeo. She’s so besotted with him, I’m so meaningless. I’m ranting and raving. And she’s smiling at his text message. So I punch her.’ ‘And?’
‘She fell down. I pinned her arms with my knees, pressed a cushion to her face. She’s screaming into it, screaming and screaming, trying to claw me, but I’ve got her held down. She’s thrashing her legs around; she pisses herself, all down her tights. And then she’s dead. Just like that. I’m alive, with this cushion pressed over her face – I remember the day we bought it, we’d gone to John Lewis to buy a chef’s knife, but we came out with these cushions instead. She loved them. And one of them turns out to be a murder weapon. You could see it in her face. It wasn’t like dead people on TV. She was just dead. Her expression was weird. I can’t describe it. Her eyes were all funny.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Panicked. Put her in a composting bag and dragged her out to the van. Picked up her handbag, her mobile phone. The lot. Took her out near Bath Valley Woods. There’s an old farm down there – derelict. I used to go birding there when I was a kid.’
‘Birding?’
‘Bird watching. I knew the land – I knew there was an old cesspit. Not used for years, covered up with corrugated iron. I drove as close to it as I could. Took her the rest of the way in the wheelbarrow. Still in the bag. Her foot was hanging out. I thought someone was going to see me. Then I got to the cesspit. Cut the lock, chucked her in.’
‘You threw her in a cesspit?’
‘It’s not the kind of place where people look, is it? And any – y’know. Any weird smells, people aren’t going to think too much about it. Worst comes to worst, they’re going to think it’s a dead fox. A dog, a badger. Whatever.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘What did you want to hear?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No. Well – now you know.’
‘I do. Yeah.’
‘For weeks and weeks it was like I was outside my body. I wanted to kill myself. I couldn’t think about anything else – just how to do it, when to do it. For months, this was. Years, really.’
‘Why didn’t you do it?’
‘Thinking about my mum and dad, how they’d feel if I did it. And then, bit by bit, it all just started to fade away – the police, the newspapers, the death threats. It began to seem like it never happened. It still does, to be honest. It seems like none of it ever happened.’
Kenny sat there, staring at the wall. ‘Things just pass,’ he said.
Jonathan turned his head, facing him. ‘So does it feel better? Knowing?’
Kenny didn’t know. He didn’t have a name for what he felt. He’d only felt it once before, when the doctor told him he was dying.
He stood up and said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
He walked away, feeling Jonathan’s eyes on his back.
When he came back, two hours later, he was carrying an old analogue tape recorder.
40
Pat left Kenny’s cottage, drove two or three miles through country roads, then pulled over. She took in a big breath, held it for a moment, released it with a shudder.
For several minutes she had to fight the urge to vomit, breathing quickly and flexing her fists so hard her fingernails bit deep into the heart of her palms.
When it had passed, she dug out her cigarettes and cranked open the window, letting in the cool night and the rain.
She sparked up a John Player Special and smoked it to the filter. Now and again she was lit yellow by the sweeping eyes of a passing car. Once, she shone cold blue and ghostly in the xenon glare of a Mercedes.
She got out to stretch her legs. In the long wet grass at the edge of a cow pasture she dug out her mobile phone and called Paul Sugar.
‘Pat!’ he said. ‘I had a feeling you might call. Where shall we meet?’
She felt a rush of affection for him, for his cheery dishonesty, for his self-knowledge and unabashed self-interest.
She said, ‘My knees hurt too much to drive all the way to Bristol.’ It was a lie, but she didn’t feel too bad about it.
Next morning, they were strolling along the sea front in Westonsuper-Mare.
It was public, but not as public as Pat would have liked. It had been a poor summer, and now the pier was gone, leaving just this blackened stump jutting out from the beach like a burned bone. There was hardly any reason for anyone to come here, especially this early on a weekday. The donkeys stood forlorn and unridden on the brown beach.
Paul was eating a hot dog. ‘So what’s all this in aid of?’
‘I think you probably know.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
Pat halted so abruptly that Paul nearly collided with her. He said: ‘What?’
‘You’re not recording this conversation are you? No clever gear? No recording pens, whate
ver?’
‘What good would that do me?’
But he lifted his big arms obligingly, thrust forth his dirigible belly, his prodigious hams, inviting her to pat him down.
Instead, she said: ‘If you record this conversation and try to use it against me – I swear on the name of the sweet Baby Jesus I’ll come down on you like ten tons of fucking bricks. I’ll come down on you so fucking hard and so fucking fast you’ll leave a skid mark.’
‘Jesus, Pat. Get a grip. I’m eating, here.’
‘Good.’
They walked on. Paul said, ‘So. You’re in a shitty position.’
‘You think?’
He had finished the hot dog and was dabbing ketchup from his pink lips. ‘You come to me on behalf of someone you won’t name, looking for this girl. Callie Barton. Turns out, she hasn’t gone by that name since she was practically a baby. So I’m thinking, your client – who can he be? An old love? It can’t be that – because the last he knows about her she was eleven, for Christ’s sake. A pervert teacher? A paedo uncle? But I can’t see you going for that. I remember how you had that nonce Harris by the balls once. You twisted his knob like a bit of liquorice.’
‘I remember that. I nearly broke off his winkie-woo.’
Paul barked at that, appreciating it. And Pat grinned as she lit a cigarette.
Paul said: ‘So anyway. You pay me to find out where she is, because you can’t be arsed. About five minutes after that, the husband disappears.’
‘That was suicide, from what I read in the papers.’
He barked again, affably enough.
‘The folded clothes,’ said Pat. ‘The watch. The phone.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘You’re a dick, Paul,’ she said, ‘but you’re not a grass.’
‘No. What I am, is in debt. At the very least, you know who did this. Which means, you’re withholding evidence of a serious crime.’
‘I’m a sweet little old lady. Who’d put me in the dock?’
‘The CPS goes out of its way to prove how clean it is. It takes a look at you: ex-copper, into something a bit mucky. It comes at you with the full majesty of the law.’
‘I’d do a month, tops.’
‘You reckon? Well, that’s your call. All I have to do is pick up the phone. We’ll see.’
Pat said: ‘There’s a cottage.’