Six Days, Six Hours, Six Minutes

by Alex Smith

Six days, six hours and six minutes, you or them, tell nobody.

  There was a photo of Luis, alone, in the middle of the article. He was a little older than Blake, forties maybe, a streak of grey running through his hair. He was dressed in a shirt and jeans and was smiling at the camera, at somebody he obviously liked. He looked like a nice guy. The caption underneath read: Luis Allen Nevill, wanted by police for questioning.

  Maybe that’s all this was. Maybe Luis had lost his nut, had grabbed a kitchen knife and killed his kids and wife before going on the run. You heard stories like that all the time in the tabloids, a guy thinks his wife has been cheating, or finds out she’s leaving him, and goes on a rampage. Blake continued reading.

  There is no evidence of a break-in. Detectives are currently questioning all known acquaintances as well as previous owners of the house and any staff who may have worked there. Luis Nevill has no criminal record, although police are making enquiries with police departments in Norfolk and across the country. In the meantime, residents of Thetford and the surrounding towns have been advised to keep their doors and windows locked, and to be on the lookout for suspicious activity. Any sightings of Nevill must be reported, although police say that he should not be approached.

  Next of kin has been notified.

  It was here that the appendix of photographs started, seven of them. The topmost three were in colour and depicted glimpses of an idyllic family life. The first showed a pristine garden, a picnic table and a plastic slide, a cluster of plant pots on the grass, some filled and others waiting. Two sets of gardening gloves were draped over one, a small pair with slender fingers, and an even smaller pair covered in pictures of mud-spattered elephants. The next shot was a wide-angle photograph of the front of their home, a large farmhouse with a lopsided wooden veranda and a double garage. There was a barn on one side, woodland on the other. The front garden was immaculate, a BMW parked on the large drive, bikes locked up next to the front door. It would have been perfect if not for the ambulance just in shot on the right-hand side of the image. That and the mark, Blake realised as he peered into the grainy image. The big yellow door was ajar, but he could just about make it out as a smudge beside the letterbox.

  The next image down was a family photo, the five Nevills grinning insanely next to a lake. Luis and the oldest boy were wearing wetsuits and lifejackets, the boy—Michael—holding a huge pair of flippers across his chest. Elizabeth was holding the youngest kid, Alice, while Vincent peeked up from the bottom corner of the shot, cheeks flushed, both front teeth missing. It hurt Blake’s heart to look at it, and he wondered what photo they would use of him, if he died at the end of the week. Which version of him would be the last one the world saw?

  He wondered, too, which photo they would use if Julia and Connor died instead.

  He pushed the image out of sight and looked at the next one, the photo of the mark on the door. It was definitely the same symbol, no doubt about it. 666. The caption here read: No damage was done to the property, although detectives found a symbol engraved into the door, and a similar symbol painted in blood on an upstairs wall.

  “Shit,” said Blake. He scanned the last two images—one of the bedroom where two of the kids had died, the bodies removed but ink-black traces of them left on the floor and bedposts. The last was of the wardrobe in which Alice had met her untimely end. The doors had been closed again, and there was no blood here. All the same, Blake couldn’t help but imagine it—the girl hunkered down in the dust and the dark, hearing the screams of her brothers, then the thud of footsteps as they entered her room, those hoarse, gulping, greedy breaths.

  He threw the phone onto the seat next to him, the gorge boiling up his throat. He snapped on the radio, drowning himself in something loud until the images had been blasted from his head.

  It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t be real. Things like this just didn’t happen, not to anyone, certainly not to him. He was Blake Barton, a therapist; wife and kid and house in one of the quietest cities in the country—it was Norwich, for fuck’s sake. He was a nobody, the kind of guy who would be forgotten almost as soon as he died, eradicated from history after a generation. He hadn’t done a single thing in his life to deserve this.

  He wiped a hand over his eyes, feeling moisture there and hating himself for crying. He returned to the article and scrolled to the bottom, to the related stories section. There was a link to a follow-up piece, Father of murdered family arrested, charged. Blake tapped his foot as he waited for it to load, reading it so fast that he couldn’t take it all in. He had to return to the start and force himself to slow down.

  Luis Nevill, husband and father to the family slaughtered in Thetford Forest in May, has been apprehended in Birmingham. Nevill was found walking through the city in bloodstained clothes and bare feet. He was in a state of confusion, without identification, and refused to disclose his name. It was only later that police recognised him as a suspect in the multiple murder that rocked the country.

  Nevill’s trial began on Tuesday, with a not-guilty plea. Nevill claims that he was framed and that he was kept prisoner after the deaths of his wife and children. However, the blood on his clothes was found to match blood taken from the crime scene, and no evidence can be found to back his assertion that somebody else was responsible for the deaths.

  Superintendent Colin Clare, of the Norfolk Constabulary, claims that the case is watertight.

  There was more, but Blake skipped it, loading up another article. The headline read: Nevill found guilty of murdering wife, children, sentenced to life.

  It went on. The jury took only forty-three minutes to find Nevill guilty of the murder of his wife, Elizabeth, and their three children, Michael, Vincent and Alice. The evidence against him was overwhelming—including bloodstains on his clothing, his bloody footprints at the scene, fingerprints on the murder weapon and the fact that he attempted to flee. Nevill continued to assert his innocence until the last minute of the trial, and broke down when the verdict was announced. Judge Gladstone, presiding, asked for the sentence to be carried out in a secure hospital until Nevill’s mental state could be determined.

  There were testimonies from the family, from the neighbours, but Blake ignored them, scrolling to the bottom of the page again and looking for more articles. There were none related to the case, so he typed Luis Nevill, murder into Google and searched the results. Each was more of the same, just snippets of information. No mention of the man who called himself the devil, no mention of the threats, no mention of anything other than a husband who murdered his wife and kids.

  Google offered him a brief piece about Luis Nevill being sent to Rampton, a high-security psychiatric hospital somewhere near Nottingham. It came with a grainy photo of Luis being pulled out of a prison bus, cuffs around his wrists. He was gaunt, a shadow of a man, huge dark circles around his eyes. And those eyes, they were a madman’s eyes. Even here, years later, looking at an image on his phone, Blake could see the blind, crushing fury that swirled there. He looked like a man possessed, and it was a look Blake knew all too well, a look he was wearing himself.

  It was the look of a man whose life has been ripped apart, a man who knew he could have done something about it.

  Blake put down the phone and sat back, his pulse drumming in his temples. Luis Nevill was innocent. There wasn’t a single shred of doubt in Blake’s mind. One day his bell had rung, he had opened the door, and something evil had walked into his house.

  Tell anyone, and your wife and child will die. Call the police, and your wife and child will die. Try to run, hide, seek help, or deceive me in any way, and your wife and child will die. And they will not die quickly, Luis. Theirs will not be a nice death. It will be slow, and it will be bloody, and they will know the full horror of hell before I end them.

  Luis had broken the rules.

  But maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he could find him, talk to him, together they might be able to find the man who’d done this. Blake might be able to save Lu
is as well as himself and his family.

  And he’d almost started to feel hopeful when he picked up the phone and clicked the next link.

  Mass murderer found hanged at Rampton Secure Hospital.

  Luis Nevill was found hanged early yesterday morning. Sources say no suicide note was discovered, but foul play isn’t suspected.

  “Shit,” Blake said for a third time, feeling his gut drop into a cold, dark nothing. But he snatched at a glimmer of hope before it could vanish completely. He’d found something, he had some kind of ammunition. All he needed to do was work out what kind of weapon he needed in order to fire it.

  He looked at his phone again, searching through the information on Google. It was only on the sixth or seventh page that he discovered what he was looking for.

  An address.

  Thirty-Five

  He stopped at a petrol station as he drove south out of Norwich, buying a Ploughman’s sandwich and some Red Bull. Only when he hit the A11 did he remember to call Julia, knowing that she’d be on rounds and leaving a message.

  “Hi, look, something has come up, something important. I won’t be able to get Conn. Can you ask your parents? Or ask nursery to keep him for the afternoon too? He won’t mind, he loves it there.”

  He paused, staring at the grey world outside, plumes of rainwater thrown back towards the heavens by the traffic that steamed ahead.

  “It’s important,” he said again. “I need to do this. I’ll be back soon. Tonight. I love you.”

  He ended the call, wondering if he should have told her to grab Connor and run, get the hell out of the city. But he couldn’t risk it. Not now that he had something to go on. He might find something at the Nevill place, something he could use.

  Yeah, said his head. Because the police won’t have gone through the house, they won’t have stripped the place bare looking for evidence.

  But they wouldn’t have been looking for him.

  Blake was clutching at straws, he knew that, but it had to be better than sitting at home twiddling his thumbs waiting for the devil to show up on Thursday morning, right?

  His mind started arguing and he switched it off, turning the radio on, keeping his eyes glazed to the road ahead. He knew from experience it would only take forty minutes to get there, and it felt good to be out, good to be moving. Maybe he should just keep going, put the pedal to the metal and never stop, never look back.

  Yeah, right.

  The man would kill Julia and Connor. Blake would hear about it on the news one day. Mother, infant son, murdered. Father on the run. And he wondered if that’s what Luis had done, if he’d got in the car one day and bolted, thinking that if he was out of the picture then the devil would leave his family alone.

  “Bad move, Luis,” Blake whispered.

  No, he was done running, done sitting on his backside too. Whatever was out there, in the murder house in the forest, he’d find something.

  His life, all their lives, depended on it.

  It took nearly an hour in the end, because his satnav was old and hadn’t been updated for over a year. The road that was supposed to lead to the forest had been buried beneath a new stretch of dual carriageway, and he had to double back and enter Thetford from the south in order to find his way. He drove right through the town and popped free on the other side, entering even deeper country. The rain was harder now than ever, his wipers doing their wild dance at top speed and still barely able to clear the water away. He only spotted the right road because he was driving so slowly.

  He turned onto it just as his phone began to buzz. He ignored the call, focussing on the road, keeping to the middle to avoid the lakes that had sprung up on the camber. It would be Julia again. She’d left two messages already, the first saying she’d contacted nursery and sorted out an afternoon session—for fuck’s sake, Blake, you could have done that yourself, I’ve got surgery this afternoon and this is the last thing I need to be doing. The second came an hour later and had considerably more expletives. Harold, the quaking old prick, had called her to let her know Blake was no longer employed by the hospital.

  Maybe you should ask the devil for a trade, his head suggested. Ask him to take Harold instead. And he almost smiled at the thought until he saw Harold pleading with the devil man, standing over the body of his wife or his kids, his grandkids. Despite everything, a thumping fist of sympathy hit him in the solar plexus. Harold was an arse, but he didn’t deserve this. Nobody did.

  He passed a tractor, its headlights blazing even though it was only just after two. There wasn’t much up this way, a few signposts for sugar beet farms and a petrol station that looked like it had been boarded up. Then the road began to descend and houses sprang up along the side of it, big ones with tall hedges and gates and long driveways. The satnav told him to take the next left and he followed its instructions, steering the Volvo onto a dirt track. After another minute or so it announced that Blake had reached his destination.

  It didn’t look like it, though. The track wound its way through a stretch of forest, pine trees craning up on either side, leaning in like they were trying to peer inside Blake’s car. They made the dark day even darker and Blake flicked his lights onto full beam, trying to make out anything up ahead. He drove past a stack of felled, pollarded trees, following the track as it curved sharply to the right until, suddenly, there was a house in front of him.

  Blake slammed on the brakes, the car rocking. It was the property from the newspaper article, the farmhouse with its ancient veranda and double garage. It was impossible to tell whether it had a yellow door or not because there was a rectangle of plywood nailed across it, and one covering every window. The house stood blind, deaf, and mute.

  He eased the car forwards, the wipers still pounding. There was a sign by the side of the road, knocked flat, and he read Conifer Farm. Somebody had nailed a For Sale board to the top of it, everything half-covered by creepers and moss. The Volvo lurched slowly over the potholed road, shying like a nervous horse. The closer he got to the house, the more he saw how decrepit it had become. The paintwork had peeled away like leprous skin, tiles missing from the roof and the veranda listing to one side, ready to drop. It looked like a mourner at a funeral that had never ended.

  The huge and once beautiful front garden had overgrown, the grass knee-high and dotted with saplings that had taken root. To the left of the house was the barn, almost as big as the house itself. It, too, was in a state of decay, part of the roof already caved in, defeated by the rain. A single window, glassless but unboarded, stared down at Blake. He moved to switch off the engine then decided against it, turning the Volvo around and driving back the way he’d come. He parked it behind the stack of wood, hidden from the track, then cut the engine.

  It was like he’d been thrown into a pool of dark water, it was so quiet out here that he had to flex his jaw to try to pop his ears. Only the rain dared speak, roaring down on his windscreen, onto the garden, onto the trees and the forgotten house. For a moment he sat there, unsure what to do next. What the hell was he supposed to find here? From the look of it, the place had been abandoned since its last occupants had died.

  Sighing, he climbed out into the rain. He ran up the track and across the garden, practically diving under the lopsided veranda. The wooden deck creaked beneath him, half-rotted away, and he trod carefully as he made his way to the boarded door. He tugged on the plyboard but it had been fixed firmly in place, the unflinching barricade holding the rest of the house together. He walked along the porch to the closest window, grabbing the board there and pulling. It didn’t budge.

  Putting a hand to his face to shield himself from the rain, he jumped into the jungle of the front garden and made for the corner of the house. His foot thudded into something hidden by the grass and he looked down to see a heavy ceramic plant pot, probably the same one that had been in the photo. Moss clogged it like an artery, nothing else growing.

  He reached the corner and peered around into the gap between the
house and the barn, maybe twelve foot wide. There were some bins here, and a hose that had been unwound and left like a dead python. Halfway down, a six-foot-high wooden fence blocked the path to the back garden. Wedged in the corner between the fence and the house was a bin shelter the size of a car, a dozen or so black binbags piled against it. Most had been split open, rubbish spilling out onto the dirt like ruptured intestines. Foxes, probably.

  The window closest to him had been boarded up, so Blake walked to the fence. There was a gate, but it was locked with a padlock. Everything was sealed tight. He rubbed the rainwater from his eyes, blinking, then looked up to see that there was a window on the second floor, right above the fence. It had been boarded like the others, but the plywood had been pulled loose and hung like a false eyelash. Past it, the glass was broken.

  He looked around for a ladder, realising it wasn’t going to be that easy. Bracing his hands on the top of the bin shelter, he hoisted himself up. It took several attempts, his body unused to any kind of workout and his muscles still aching from the night before. Eventually he managed to clamber onto the rough bitumen roof, bracing his hands on the side of the house. The window was still out of reach, so he put a foot on the slippery wood of the fence and pushed up. He almost missed the window, wobbled, felt like he was going to fall. Then he managed to grab the sill, anchoring himself.

  What the hell are you doing, Blake?

  He got a grip with his other hand, digging his feet into the wall and scrabbling up. He slipped, fought, grunted, ignoring the pain in his palms, in his fingers. Then his chest was over the edge and he wormed through into the darkness.

  He dropped to the floor and struggled back to his feet, rubbing at his stomach where he’d gouged it on the sill. Grey, heavy light oozed in from the day outside, but it didn’t go far, like it had no intention of spending time inside the house. He made out a small room, empty other than a couple of cardboard boxes in the corner, rotted to pulp. The floor was bare, untreated wood and it had begun to fester, patches of mould spreading from the shattered window like a disease.