by Anna Wharton
‘Is this the way to the fish and chip shop?’ she asks.
The sports results are on the radio and Patrick turns up the volume before answering.
‘I need petrol,’ he says after a moment. ‘There’s a place just up here.’
‘Oh right.’ Chloe tries to allow her body to sink into the leather of the upholstery.
Ahead, at the next roundabout, is a large village, and just before it, the petrol station Patrick had mentioned. He pulls onto the forecourt, and gets out of the car. Chloe sits, frozen, the sweet smell of benzene floating into the car when he opens the door to get his wallet. She watches him cross the forecourt. Just an ordinary man to everybody else. There is a long queue to pay inside, and Chloe makes the most of a few moments alone in the car. Her eyes flicker around, and she checks the back again, behind Patrick’s seat, just in case the gun is propped up there. But she finds the footwell empty. Her imagination is getting carried away. She looks up at Patrick again behind four or five other people. Just an ordinary man.
She sighs inside the car. The windows are still steamy. She watches him, though she knows he’d struggle to see her. And that’s when she notices the glove compartment in front of her. It has a tiny lock on it, one that fits a tiny key. She looks up at Patrick, still stuck in the queue, tapping the side of his leg with his keys. Chloe leans forward, restricted a little by her seat belt, but enough to try the tiny door – it opens. Inside, there is the usual paraphernalia you find in cars. She takes each item out in turn: screen wipes, a log book, a small first aid kit. And then, pressed tight against the bottom, something that seems unusual. Her fingers feel for it, fishing it out, and then there it is, exposed in her hand – a newspaper cutting she recognizes from her own collection at Low Drove:
ANGIE’S FATHER IN SHOCK ARREST
Her heart stops still in her chest. Her hands start to shake as she reads the words she knows so well, the ones she’s already committed to memory, the quotes from Patrick that had once put her mind at rest. She looks from the cutting to Patrick in the queue. He took this from her archive. She knows this because she recognizes the same biro writing down the side of it: Patrick angry. Maureen frightened into silence. And the date, just a few weeks before.
The cutting flutters in her hands. She looks up. Patrick is paying at the till. He turns around, heading out of the petrol station, back across the forecourt. She takes the cutting, pushing it into her coat pocket, feeling it tear as she does so. Quickly, she shoves everything else back into the glove compartment, closing the door tight just as Patrick gets back in the car beside her. He stops for a moment and looks at her, as if sensing a shift in atmosphere. He looks down at her hands in her lap. She places one over the other, so he doesn’t see how they’re shaking.
‘Bloody queues,’ he says, heaving the car door shut behind him. Then he pulls on his seat belt and puts his key in the ignition. And as he does, Chloe closes her eyes and longs for the safety of home. Nan’s home.
They continue on the road towards the Fens. Inside, the car is filled with the white noise of tyres on the dual carriageway. Chloe’s head is spinning beside Patrick. He taps the steering wheel, humming along to the radio. She watches his hands as he changes gear; the rest of the time, she focuses on the dull grey of the road in front of them, pictures swimming in front of her eyes. She is still in her seat, but her heart thumps behind her ribs and hot blood spins in her ears.
Then Patrick turns off the dual carriageway onto a single track they haven’t taken before. Chloe grips the sides of her seat as he pushes his foot down on the accelerator. In the wing mirror she sees dust kicked up by the tyres. Her feet press into the footwell.
It is early evening out in the Fens and the big sky is turning pink, dyeing silhouettes of the trees an inky blue. She would usually see beauty here, but not tonight. She doesn’t recognize this road. She has never been here before. She pictures the boot of the car. Patrick’s gun. Maureen at home waiting for fish and chips.
‘Would you look at that?’ Patrick says.
Suddenly he lunges towards her. She flinches, squeezing her eyes shut. But when she opens them, out of the window, at exactly the same level and even speed, a barn owl flies alongside them. Its beautiful white plumage streaks across the dark green of the fields, its black eyes fixed straight ahead. It moves as if it flies in slow motion.
‘Ent that a sight, eh?’ Patrick says.
For a moment the pair of them are mesmerized by the sight: the bird’s round moon face, its dangling feathered legs, within them a mouse, or perhaps a vole.
A bump underneath the wheels jolts them out of the moment. For a second, black tyres tear across the road. Patrick clutches hold of the wheel, which spins under his grip, and he slams on the brakes. Chloe grips the upholstery harder as she jolts in her seat. A moment later and the car is still, the only thing moving a cloud of dust chewed up from the road behind them.
Patrick checks the rear-view mirror. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he says, quickly undoing his seat belt. Then again: ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’
He’s out of the car before Chloe has time to turn around. He leaves the driver’s door open. Chloe thinks of the cutting crumpled in her pocket and looks quickly at the keys hanging in the ignition. She glances through the back windscreen, and sees Patrick striding swiftly back the way they came. She turns further in her seat to see why. Not too far in front of him, there is something unidentifiable writhing in the road.
Chloe unfastens her seat belt and opens her own car door. Out on the open road, Patrick marches closer to the figure on the tarmac. Chloe follows him. He looks up.
‘Stay back,’ he says, holding his hand up to stop her.
She jumps slightly, but obeys him.
He turns back to the creature, and she hears him say again, ‘Oh Jesus.’
A hare lies on the road, its deep brown eyes bulging in pain. Even from this distance, Chloe can see the whites of its eyes. The terror in them as Patrick approaches. She can feel it. The hare makes a pathetic attempt to run, but its hind leg is stuck fast to the road, a mass of pink and red seeping into the tarmac.
Patrick kneels down beside the hare. The animal jerks away, a bloody part of its leg tearing from the tarmac, but not enough. Flesh and fur enmeshed on the road.
Patrick reaches for its long angular head with both hands. The animal struggles, but his strength is too much. She sees the hare’s black-tipped ears poke out of the top of Patrick’s palms. There is no time for Chloe to look away. The wind carries the sound towards her: the snap of the hare’s neck breaking in two. It is the swiftest of movements that does it, and in the same second the animal stops struggling. Patrick returns its limp body to the road. Its wide eyes reflecting the last of the amber sun.
Chloe stands as still as the hare on the tarmac. In this barren landscape, the only witness to this death.
Patrick makes to stand, then bends back down. He pulls what’s left of the hare from the road and tosses it onto the grassy verge. A pinky stain remains where it lay. He turns back towards the car and that’s when he looks up and sees Chloe’s face. He stops still. The pair of them twenty paces apart. His own face drained of blood.
‘Chloe, it was the . . .’
She stares at the blood on his hands. Those big hands.
‘There was nothing more . . .’ He takes a step towards her.
Chloe instantly jumps back. She feels the boot of the car against her back. She whips round, searches the landscape for another car, another witness. There is nothing, nobody.
Patrick holds his hands out as if surrendering. But he knows she’s seen it, the ease with which he stubbed out that animal’s life. There is no going back and she cannot hide the horror on her face. He knew how to break that hare’s neck. He did it as though he had done it a thousand times before. But there is only one occasion now that runs like a reel through Chloe’s head. He sees it too. He must do.
‘Don’t come near me,’ she says, her hands feeling behind her for the side
of the car.
‘Chloe, what—’
‘Don’t move another step.’
‘Ah, come on, Chloe, you saw the poor fecking creature, it was the kindest—’
What will she do out here on this lonely road? She reaches into her pocket for her phone, then remembers it is off. And who would she call, anyway? What would she say? What is there to tell? That’s when she hears herself say it.
‘You did it, didn’t you?’
‘Did what?’ Patrick asks.
‘You killed Angie.’
FORTY-SEVEN
There is silence between the pair, just the whistle of the wind as it finds the only two things around which to coil.
She stares at Patrick. His face is blank. Her own hot blood pounds in her ears.
Patrick staggers backwards and forwards in the road, his hands reaching for his temples. For a long while, he can’t speak. When he does, all he says is, ‘What?’
His tone is incredulous, frayed at the edges.
Patrick takes one step towards Chloe. She inches back. Two fields away, she hears the hum of traffic from the dual carriageway. Too far to run. Closer, she hears the rustle of the sugar beet leaves in the fields that surround them, and then her voice as she calls across the asphalt to him: ‘I’ve known for a long time that you did it. I just didn’t know how I knew for sure . . . but seeing that just then, how easily you—’
‘Chloe, it’s a fucking hare.’
Chloe is silent. It’s not just the hare.
On the road, Patrick clasps his hands together. He shakes his head as if he cannot believe what she is saying. Then he rests his forehead in his hands.
He tries again, stepping forward, but Chloe moves back.
‘It’s a fucking animal, Chloe. There’s a big fucking difference between an animal and . . . and . . .’
‘It’s not just that, though, is it?’ she says. ‘It’s everything. You told me yourself you weren’t at the swings the day Angie disappeared. So why would you have people looking there? The whole investigation was based on that play park . . .’ As she says this she spreads her arms wide, as if the police had been combing this very field.
Patrick stops, as if the thought has suddenly hit him. He looks up to the sky and then puts his head into his hands.
‘Chloe, I . . . look.’ He pauses, staggering around. ‘Would you get a hold of yourself.’
But she won’t give up. She’s come this far.
‘All these years you’ve let Maureen think that Angie was taken from that park. All these years. And yet you were hiding the biggest secret of all, from everyone.’
‘Chloe, it’s not what you thi—’
‘Why else would you let Maureen think that I was Angie unless you didn’t want her to know what had happened to her? What you had done to her?’
He takes another step forward. ‘I think you’ve got your wires cr—’
‘Don’t move,’ she shouts. He stops suddenly, and he must see it then, the terror in her eyes. Her absolute fear of him.
‘Don’t take another step closer,’ Chloe says. ‘You killed your daughter and now what? You’re going to kill me?’
With that thought, she looks around, across the fields that surround them. She hasn’t thought this through. Just what is she going to do now? There is a house, across two fields, where smoke files from its short chimney stack, a warm glow from one downstairs window. Could she make it there? Could she get there before him? She turns back to Patrick. He’s standing, wide-legged, wide-eyed on the tarmac. She weighs up whether she could run, but she has no chance. She knows that. If he has that gun in the boot of the car, her chances of making it even fifty yards are slim. She hadn’t expected it to happen like this. It wasn’t meant to. But there was the car journey, the hare, his hands. His hands.
Patrick is cradling his head in them now. Pacing up and down, talking to himself – not that Chloe can hear what he’s saying.
He goes to speak, but he can’t find the words. Instead he sinks down onto his haunches in the middle of the road. He wipes his hands across his face, and sighs, defeated. Chloe is surprised to feel her back relaxing into the boot of the car. By instinct she knows she’s got him, that a confession will follow. He is so obviously undone by her accusation that this is surely over. She’s won. And now what? What does she do with him out here? In that moment she isn’t sure. All she does know is that the mystery is over. It has ended. She pictures Maureen at home, waiting innocently for fish and chips, naive to the fact that what will return home to her will blow her world apart. But what choice has Chloe had? She is not Angie. She never was, and once she knew Patrick only allowed Maureen to believe she was to hide his own crimes, how could she keep up the facade? There was no more fantasy, only the truth.
She stares at Patrick, almost as broken on the road as the hare he discarded. She has done this – Chloe has done this. It had taken her appearance in their home to show Patrick Kyle for who he was. Hadn’t she always vowed to find out the truth about Angie? Perhaps now, she was one step closer to that.
It seems to be a long time before either of them move. When Chloe looks up again, the sky has darkened and the pair of them are little more than shadows. Finally, Patrick gets up from the road. He holds up his arms as if in surrender.
‘I’m going to walk back to the car, Chloe,’ he says slowly, a resigned tone to his voice that she’s never heard before. ‘I don’t want you to be frightened. I’ve got my hands up, I’m not going to come anywhere near you. I’m just going to walk back towards the car, OK?’
Chloe nods, then realizes he can’t see her in the darkness. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘OK.’
He’s moving already, walking towards her. She sees the way he moves, his head bent, his shoulders slumped. Something in his stance tells her he’s not a danger now, he can’t hurt anyone ever again. Somehow, instinctively, she is no longer afraid.
Slowly, Patrick walks back to the driver’s door. They face each other, the car between them.
‘Get in,’ he says. Then more gently, ‘Get in and I’ll explain everything.’
She hesitates. Does she want to get into a car with a murderer? But she looks around her, at the deserted road, the two of them in utter blackness, too early for the moon to shine its torch. If he was going to kill her, wouldn’t he have done it by now? She looks across the fields for the house she saw, but it’s now lost in the blindness of dusk; there is no light to run towards.
Patrick indicates again for her to get in. Then, without waiting for her, he slips into the driver’s seat, leaving his door wide open. Slowly she moves back towards her side of the car. She glances in; he is staring at the steering wheel. She takes her place alongside him, but like him, keeps her door open. They sit like that for a while, both doors open, the air whistling through the open car. Finally, Patrick speaks.
‘I am guilty,’ he says, his voice shaken and small. ‘I am. But not in the way that you think I am.’
Chloe swallows beside him. She knows she needs to let him speak.
‘I couldn’t have killed Angie, she was the most’ – his voice breaks – ‘she was the most precious . . . she was . . .’ He clutches the steering wheel with both hands and leans his head in the middle of them.
Chloe looks over at him, the light in the car highlighting his hair.
‘She was everything.’ He starts to cry.
Chloe sits still beside him. She has never seen a man cry like this, she’s mesmerized – mesmerized and horrified. She watches him without making a sound. It’s a while before he recomposes himself. He wipes his face on the sleeve of his jumper and rubs his eyes. It’s a few more minutes before he can speak.
‘It is true that we weren’t at the swings the day that she disappeared and you . . . you were the first person I ever told in all those years. Can you believe that?’
Chloe shakes her head under the glow of the car’s interior light.
‘I don’t know why, why I chose to confess that to you, a pe
rfect stranger, when I had carried that secret all that time.’
He stops talking to shake his head in disbelief.
‘Perhaps I felt so out of control,’ he says. ‘Maureen, she’s so convinced you . . . well, you know. And I’ve tried, all these years I’ve tried to make her . . .’
He drops his head down again and sobs.
Chloe waits. Her mind is ablaze with questions. But she has to let him tell her himself. She has, after all, waited this long.
‘OK . . . all right.’ He turns to her in his seat. ‘The truth is, I was having an affair. Can you believe it? I was the man who had everything. I had Maureen, I had my little girl, but like a lot of young men, it just wasn’t enough.’
Chloe tips her head back against the headrest. An affair? She hadn’t seen this coming. What? What is he saying?
He runs his hands through his hair, and bangs the steering wheel with both hands. Chloe jumps in her seat, and Patrick turns to her quickly, his hands out to calm her.
‘But it doesn’t make me a killer, Chloe. A fecking eejit, yes, but not a killer.’ He shakes his head. ‘Not a killer.’
Chloe moves a little towards the door, still nervous of being so close to him. Her mind was racing to join the dots, to understand what he was trying to tell her. What exactly had Patrick Kyle done if he had not murdered his daughter?
‘But I knew, though, I knew I was risking everything,’ he says. ‘That’s why I took Angie with me on that day. I took her with me to break it off, to end it. She was the best reminder of all I had to lose – I knew if I took Angie I would go through with it. We met not far from the park, but not in the park itself – a copse nearby. I couldn’t risk . . . I couldn’t risk anyone seeing . . . ah, it was a stupid thing, a stupid secret, and it cost me my daughter. It cost me everything.’
Chloe’s brain scrambles. An affair. With who? What is he saying, that he lost Angie? But why not just confess? And why would he have taken Angie? Wouldn’t she have told Maureen when they got back? So much isn’t making sense.
Patrick continues: ‘Angie, she played just beside us . . . unaware of anything her stupid eejit father was doing. And perhaps I thought if Angie said anything, I could just tell her we bumped into someone at the park, that kind of thing. Jesus, I don’t know.’ He turns to Chloe quickly. ‘I swear I only took my eyes off her for a minute but . . . that was all it took. It’s all it ever takes.’