Random Acts of Unkindness

by Jacqueline Ward

  It’s sunny now, and crisp and when I zoom past the crossroads I see the road’s been cordoned off with yellow tape and two uniformed officers are standing drinking brews. I barely register with them. Why would I? They’ve got bigger fish to fry now.

  I want to know if Connelly is in custody, if Mike and Jim found anything else. I picture the mothers of the boys, each one collapsing with grief. Pat. Her face crumbling as she realizes it’s all been a setup, she’s lost her son and her life and all the time people nearby knew. Mothers and fathers of boys missing years ago, nodding sadly, as if they knew all along, but dying inside as they hear the details. I want to go in and help with the operation debrief, do my job.

  I desperately want to stand there while they are told that their children are dead, and tell them that I know what they are going through, this time I do. Not the empty words I’ve used before, the platitudes my job requires of me. I know how they feel. But instead I drive home.

  I know something’s wrong even before I park up. The garage door is slightly open. There’s faint glow from under it that means the kitchen light is on, and the side door is open. I turn to check that the police car is still there, and it is. I park up the bike and pull off my crash helmet.

  A sliver of orange light tells me that the front door is slightly open and I push it a little. Is it Aiden? Has he come home and not found me here, so looked in the garage for me? My heart jumps a little at the thought of going inside and up to his room.

  Is he there, lying on his bed with is headphones on, tapping his foot, smiling at me? Do I flick on the kettle and make him a hot chocolate, just the way he likes it? I blink into reality and the image disappears. It’s replaced by what appears to be a dark stain on my carpet. Hot chocolate? No too red. Blood. But how can it be?

  My line of vision widens to the sofa. The coffee table is knocked over. The TV is on and it’s the end of a drama. The Notebook. The bit at the end where Noah and Allie are by the piano. The bit that always makes me cry.

  I can feel the tears in my throat now and this time there’s no holding them back. I walk around the sofa and see the pink bunny rabbit slipper, one of the ears is twisted underneath in an awkward position, just above a snapped ankle. Her foot caught underneath the television stand as she fell backward. Fell. Fell. Did she? Would a fall be enough to crack open her skull?

  Sheila’s eyes are closed and her mouth is twisted in pain. She’s bunched up, her foot straining enough for the bone to rip the skin, and I want to release it but I can’t. Did she fall? If she has, why would the coffee table be over? Why would the drawers be open in the sideboard?

  I go through to the kitchen and see Sharon sprawled out on the tiles. She’s facedown, but from the side of her cheek, I can see, she has heavy bruising. She’s clutching a small butter knife and there’s an unbuttered piece of toast on the kitchen side. I feel her neck for a pulse, but there is none.

  Looking closer, I can see a blade sticking through the blue winceyette of her dressing gown, making a small puncture. No blood. As I turn to check the garage, I remember that you should never try to remove a knife from a body, never open a wound.

  Another body lies in the kitchen doorway. A young woman I don’t know, someone in their early twenties, in a police uniform. I can hear the credits roll on the film now, as I step over her and go upstairs.

  It’s completely ransacked. The bathroom is smashed, all the bath panels have been removed and the shower screens ripped apart. I go to my room and it’s a mountain of jumbled clothes and MDF. Everything has been piled high on my bed, and I automatically look upward, then feel guilty.

  Three dead bodies and I’m worried about the money. Who the fuck have I become?

  The ceiling tiles are intact and I stand on my dressing table, which has been pulled out, to see if it’s still there. It is. Exactly where I left it. Of course it fucking is. No one else knows about it. Only Bessy.

  I panic. I haven’t got to the end of her story yet. For all I know, the next bit of her notes could say that she informed the police or told a relative or even a friend, or Mothers for the fucking Missing. Jesus. Come on, Jan. Come on. I’ve got so used to looking up, reading the skies, that my heads in the clouds.

  Still standing on the table, I assess the room. It’s hard to tell how it used to be, but I crouch down and think about what whoever did this could be after. What did I have that someone would need? I don’t have any money of my own.

  I don’t have any police business kept here. Nothing at all. Obviously someone thinks I am hiding something. Is it Connelly, a payback for finding him out? What am I hiding? The money, but it’s not that. Unless they’ve killed three people and left empty-handed. What else? What else have I got here that someone else would want?

  My eyes scan the room and finally rest on the remains of the small fitted cupboard in the corner of my bedroom. I jump down and pull away the debris, waiting for Aiden’s passport and bank card to drop out from behind the hardboard. But it’s gone. It was that.

  Oh my God. Maybe I was wrong? Maybe Connelly does have Aiden, as special case, holding him to get at me. Somewhere, else, away from the Gables. Keeping him prisoner, a bargaining tip for when it all comes on top.

  Now he’s going to take him away for good. But why would he do that? Why would he do any of this, now it’s over? Revenge? Or just because he can.

  Just because he can, because it makes him powerful. Like the terrible signs in the sky, holding everyone’s fear high above them, reminding them that all he has to do is drop it and . . .

  I rush downstairs. The money can wait. What Stewart doesn’t know will keep for the time being. This is more important. I pick up the house phone and dial the ops room. It’s engaged, and I phone Mike. He’s engaged too. Of course he will be. They’ll all be at the Gables, sorting their way through the carnage.

  I dial the ops room again, pressing redial every time I hear the engaged tone. Come on, come on. I notice that there’s a terrible smell for the first time, shit and blood, not unlike the rooms where the boys were kept. Death. That horrible sense that someone has suffered. Someone’s life has ebbed away.

  My mind races away from death and onto the passport. What would they want with Aiden’s passport if they didn’t have him? Aiden must be leaving the country. There’s no other reason for it. But why would Connelly take Aiden abroad? To sell him?

  The thought repulses me, and I force back vomit. It wouldn’t be outside what Connelly was capable of, after all. And he did seem to have singled me out for some reason. Come on. Come on.

  Then I see it. In the middle of all the fucked-up murder and the topsy-turvy furniture, I see it. Beside the torn ligaments and the bunny rabbit. I see it. Or, rather, I don’t see it.

  I replace the receiver and scan the floor. I pull the coffee table away and reach around the floor for any sign of it. The small bronze statue of an eagle I bought in a junk shop in Italy in what seems like a lifetime ago. I researched it and found out it was a maquette. A scale model of the real thing, which, by some serendipitous occurrence, stood in a museum in Sal’s Italian hometown. It turned out that the area Sal’s family came from, Catania in Sicily, was very close to a raptor sanctuary. Famous for birds and famous for mafia connections.

  We’d joked about it, but now it seemed eerily real. Sal denied it, dismissed it as conspiracy theory and ridiculous, but now I wonder if cruelty and violence is somehow genetic.

  He’d coveted the eagle, his eyes glazing over and a vein in his forehead thumping every time I picked it up. I say maquette, he says plastico. We couldn’t even agree on that. I had it valued and it turned out to be worth in excess of ten thousand pounds, so I kept it locked in a reinforced glass-fronted cupboard in the lounge where I could both see it and keep it safe.

  Sal loved it as soon as he set eyes on it. It was as if he already knew what it was, a little piece of his hometown, a little piece of him. When we divorced, he listed it as his, but I produced a receipt to say I had paid
for it and I kept it. Because I knew how much it would get to him.

  I bend down and see that the glass is not broken. It has been carefully opened with a key that only Sal and I know the whereabouts of, and locked again after the tiny bird has been taken out. I reach up above the curtain rail and the key is gone.

  I perch on the edge of the sofa, not really wanting to believe what seems to be happening. Sal? Sal? Why would he do this? What would he want with Aiden’s passport? I suddenly remember the packed bag with the bank card and passport in the side of it. I run upstairs, through the debris and the bodies, and I stand on my dressing table again to reach the money.

  No one will know I’ve been here. I rush back downstairs and try to leave the house, but I can’t. I can’t just leave them here like this. But I have to go right now. I try the ops room one more time, but it’s still engaged.

  So I jump on my bike and speed down the road helmet-less, the money dangling from my arm in a carrier bag. Stopping at the place where I dropped my phone last night, I retrieve it and drop the money there instead. This is a black spot, no surveillance, no phone signal. So it should be safe from prying eyes. Prying eyes.

  How could I have missed it? My head is filled with Sal’s stock sayings, one of the things that had endeared him to me. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ Sal in the station, wandering around the ops room, preparing for our appeal. So angry when I took him to the interview room. Sal in Jim Stewart’s office. Sal, when we were still together, going for a pint with Mike. Sal. Waiting for me in the cloakrooms after work like a dutiful husband. Sal with my phone. Sal with my work notes. Why had I never seen it before? Why?

  Had I been too caught up in my domestics with him to realise that he hated me so much that he would use me to get information?

  Then it hits me. He must be working for Connelly. He must be. Otherwise, why would he need to run now? I backtrack, Sal in the background of everything. My phone call to him yesterday, he asked where I was. Was I outside?

  Sal’s face when I’d found the passport, his anger. Sal, earlier on, in Jim Stewart’s office, probably while he took the call from Mike. Sal could have alerted Connelly. He was the one who cleared the Gables, fed Connelly the false information I had given Mike. Further back, to Operation Hurricane.

  Sal offering to keep Aiden for weekends while I worked long hours, then bringing him back just before I arrived home and making me coffee. Talking to me. Asking me about what had gone on. I hadn’t told him any of the details, but I probably had said enough to hint at what the operation was about. He’d always shown an interest, even when it became clear that he resented my job.

  I’m outside his flat now. I remember the security camera. I pull around in the background and go behind the post that holds it and throw and old rag I find on the steps over the lens. First time. I must be getting better, in my desperation.

  Then I park under the balcony, just to be sure. Two steps at a time I reach the front door, pressing all the buzzers over and over until someone buzzed me in. I push my ear against the moulded plastic and hear nothing. So I feel for the key and it’s still there.

  I turn it and push open the door quietly, but I already know it’s too late. Sal’s coats no longer hang by the front door. The hallway is empty, and as I walk through to the lounge, it’s like the first time I visited the flat with him before he moved in, to make sure Aiden would be OK here.

  Empty. Except for a note on the kitchen side, alongside a stack of blank notepaper. I pick up the paper and feel it. It’s the same paper as all the other notes were written on. All the notes I thought were from Connelly.

  The note tells me to check my phone. I turn on my mobile, fumbling with the buttons and will it to operate after a night outside in the damp. It does, and immediately beeps loudly into the echoing emptiness.

  Lots of texts and messages from Mike, but only one from Sal. It’s a picture message. It’s him holding the eagle and two plane tickets, with his thumb over the destination. He’s too far away for me to see the time of the flight, but the backdrop is a thick plastic barrier and the flash from the phone has reflected in it.

  I peer at the picture, looking hard, and I can make out the outline of someone in the reflected light, the shape of a body I gave birth to, that I am so familiar with. The way he stands, slightly to one side, a piece of hair that tufts out in every photograph he has ever had taken. It’s so obviously Aiden.

  There’s some text underneath the photograph. It says ‘I Win.’ And he’s right, he does win. I sob at this now, because it’s true. In between all the chaos and death, all the mothers who have lost sons, all the frightened little boys who have been murdered, through all Bessy’s suffering, Sal’s right, he does win.

  He’s taken my son away from me. Aiden’s not dead. No. He’s gone with his father, probably to a new life, without me. He was alive all this time, God only knows where, him and Sal planning this whole thing.

  Sal and I were drifting apart, and Sal needed information. A way to get close to me. A way to get close to ops, to find out what was going on. It crosses my mind that he might have kept Aiden prisoner, but this falls away quickly when I look at the photograph.

  They were standing in Manchester Airport, for God’s sake. He’s smiling, and Aiden’s taking a photo. Sal. The man I lived with for all those years, is standing in Manchester Airport, smiling, just after murdering three policewomen. He knew about Connelly and what was going on at the Gables. Why else would he run now? The man I had lived with. Slept with.

  I feel the vomit rising and rush out of the flat. I can’t risk being sick in here, having my DNA all over the place. So I shut the door, wipe it and replace the key. Then I rush down the stairs and vomit in a litter bin around the side.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In ten more minutes I’m back at my house and calling Mike. It’s engaged twice, then it rings.

  ‘Jan. Thank God. We thought something had happened to you. Are you OK?’

  I feel a lump in my throat and tear run down my cheeks as I look at Sheila, blue around the mouth now.

  ‘No. No. Get round here quick. I’ve been trying to call for over an hour.’

  ‘Yeah. All the lines have been busy. What is it? Where are you?’

  I look around. I’m at home. Except it isn’t home anymore. And it never will be again. Not without Aiden.

  ‘My house. Get here quick, Mike. Something terrible’s happened. Bring backup. And some ambulances.’

  Mike’s silent for a while.

  ‘Is it Aiden?’

  ‘No. It’s the policewomen who’ve been here. They’ve been . . .’

  ‘On my way. I’ll get everyone who isn’t up at the Gables up there. We’ll be there in a minute.’

  The line goes dead and I find myself walking upstairs and going into Aiden’s bedroom. None of this seems real, and I check my phone again, just to make sure I’m not mistaken. I’m not. The picture is still the same.

  I look out of the window and over Northlands. In the distance I can see that the nearest main telegraph wires have been cut. The black dots that punctuated the sky were gone now, probably bits of tat lying in the street, all their meaning diffused as soon as they hit the ground.

  The messages are gone, and nowhere to hang any more black flags. Further up, I see a plane jetting through the midday sky. It could be any flight, but it could be the one carrying Sal and Aiden to who knows where. I can’t believe it. And that’s why I’m here.

  When it first dawned on me that Aiden had disappeared, had gone missing, and everyone suggested that he might have ‘gone off’ to ‘be with his friends,’ I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t. And part of the reason for this is that he hadn’t taken anything.

  Of course, the obvious items he would have taken were his bank card, passport, any kind of ID. But it wasn’t even this that convinced me. I knew that if Aiden had planned to leave there was one thing that he would never leave behind.

  He was a sma
ll child when Ruby came to stay. She was a Jack Russell, with a lively personality to match. She was adorable. When we bought Ruby and brought her home. She had a double link chain around her neck that hung like a necklace, weighed down by a tiny piece of jet that Sal had found on the beach at Whitby and made into a pendant. Ruby was Aiden’s best friend from the age of four until he was eleven.

  When she passed away he didn’t speak for a week, then after returned to normal. Until one day, two years later, when I was cleaning his room. I opened his drawer and came across Ruby’s collar and the pendant, hidden away in one of my jewellery boxes. I hadn’t noticed Aiden standing behind me.

  ‘Put it down.’

  His face had been approaching evil, the same look as Sal had when he was angry and ready to flip.

  ‘Aiden, don’t speak to me like that. And who said you could have this box? It’s mine.’

  His face relaxed.

  ‘Is it? Is it yours? Dad says that all this will be mine when you die, so why not cut out the middle man?’ He snatched the box away from me and grabbed the chain and pendant, holding it up in front of me. ‘Have your box. Have it. But don’t ever touch this again. OK?’

  The moment broke and I threw down my duster.

  ‘You cheeky little sod, Aiden. After I die? Is that what you want?’

  It was back to Mother and son after a moment when I wasn’t really sure who Aiden was.

  ‘No. I didn’t say it. It was Dad who said it.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I bet he did. Well, you’ll have to wait a long time because I’m not going anywhere yet.’

  He’d laughed and swung the chain around in his hand.

  ‘But that’s not true is it? You’re going to work. You’re always going to work or coming home. So you’re always going somewhere.’

  Although we’d never talked about Sal’s hate of my job in front of Aiden, those words could have been straight out of Sal’s mouth. And wishing me dead. Just the sort of thing he would say. Cut out the middle man. It was the first, but not the last time that I had wondered exactly what he had been filling Aiden’s head with. But we were close, weren’t we? Nothing Sal said could ever come between me and Aiden, could it?