by T. J. Lebbon
‘We were on the way to the White Hart,’ Andy continued. ‘Through the lanes out past the old iron bridge, you know? I was larking around. I was in a good mood.’
‘Because you’d seen Claudette the night before,’ Dom said, smiling at Emma. She wasn’t even looking at him. All her focus was on Andy.
‘Yeah. So when the other car came around the corner, Dom didn’t see it. Caught it a glancing blow. We stopped, so did they. There wasn’t too much damage, at least I didn’t think so. But it was … they weren’t nice people.’
‘What do you mean?’ Emma asked.
‘They’re the ones who killed Jazz?’ Daisy asked. ‘Because Dad bumped their car?’
‘It was a bit more than a bump,’ Dom said. ‘They came off worse, my car was just a bit scraped and—’
‘You heard of the Hucknalls?’ Andy pressed gently on Dom’s foot under the bench, a silent Shut the hell up.
‘Should I have?’ Emma asked.
‘Local rough family,’ Andy said. ‘They’re quite spread out, live in Newport, Cardiff, Swansea.’
‘Rough as in crime?’ Emma asked.
‘Well, yeah. Not nice people. There’re parents, siblings, cousins. Couple of them have been inside for nasty stuff. Drugs, fraud, extortion, GBH.’ He glanced at Daisy, shrugged at Emma, as if to say, You don’t want to hear any more.
‘One of them was in the car,’ Emma said.
‘We didn’t know it at the time,’ Andy said. ‘Guy jumped out, a skinny runt but obviously a bruiser. Dom offered his insurance details, said he’d be in touch. The guy started getting feisty. I calmed him down.’
To Dom, it sounded ridiculous. It sounded like a scene from a Carry On film. Carry On Robbing Post Offices.
‘Then what happened, Dom?’ Emma asked.
He looked right at her. Looked into his wife’s eyes and lied, and somehow, from somewhere, calmness settled over him. He didn’t think about the money bag buried in the pill box outside of town. No images of the Looney Tunes gang flashed by. He didn’t even consider the dead woman and child at the post office.
‘Andy managed to sweet-talk him down, calm him a bit, and I apologised and we—’
‘You apologised for crashing into him?’ Emma asked.
‘Well, yeah.’
‘You should never do that!’ she said, and that was when he believed she was going for the story. ‘Apologise and you’re as good as saying it’s your fault.’
‘It was.’
‘Doesn’t matter! That’s for the insurance companies to decide.’
‘There won’t be insurance companies,’ Andy said. ‘And that’s my fault too. The guy wanted money there and then. We didn’t have any, so I said we’d deliver cash to him later that day, meet at a coffee shop in Newport.’
‘And you didn’t,’ Emma said.
‘I don’t have five grand lying around,’ Andy said. ‘And Dom told me he didn’t either.’
‘Five thousand pounds?’ Emma gasped.
‘So they killed Jazz,’ Daisy said. ‘Because Dad bumped their car, they killed Jazz, cut her up and stabbed her.’
Dom could not answer. Somehow the lie made the bloody truth even more awful. This wasn’t about a dented car and five grand. The reality was much, much grimmer. He wished he could believe his own lies and go on living that way.
‘It was a Ferrari,’ he said.
Emma rolled her eyes.
‘We didn’t show, so they got our attention,’ Andy said. ‘Now they’ll ask for more money.’
‘Police. Now.’ Emma went to stand, and Andy held her arm. She glared at his hand and he let go.
‘Em,’ Dom said.
‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Just stupid!’
‘You’ve seen what they’re capable of,’ Andy said. ‘Really, Emma, you don’t want to involve the police now.’
‘You can’t be afraid of people like this,’ she said.
‘You can, and I am,’ Andy said. ‘Look, go to the police and, at the very least, Dom might go to prison. He left the scene of a crime.’
‘What crime?’
‘The guy’s girlfriend was in the car. She was hurt. I got Claudette to ask around at A&E at the hospital for me, and a women came in that morning after a car crash. Whiplash, cuts from broken glass, broken nose. You’ve got to consider how the Hucknalls might react.’
‘They’ve already reacted!’ Emma said. She was raising her voice, Daisy was huddling into her, eyes watering. Dom wanted to end the conversation and take them home. Hide his head in the sand. If Andy wasn’t here, he’d have told them everything.
‘I’ll sort this out,’ Andy said. ‘Really. I promise. I’ve still got this guy’s number, I’ll call him and sort it out.’
‘You?’ Emma asked. That one word carried a weight of inquiry. How would he sort it out? Where would the money come from? And how did he know how to deal with something like this?
‘Just … trust me. I have some money saved, and you can pay me back.’
‘We don’t want to owe you, Andy,’ Emma said. She turned away from them both and looked across the park. Dom glanced at Andy. His friend tapped his foot again.
Daisy sat staring at her hands. She’d lost her pet, Dom could see Jazz’s blood on her fingernails. He felt a sudden, dizzying rush of terror the likes of which he’d never felt before, a fear of ultimate loss that made him want to hug his daughter to him, hold her so tightly that no one would ever be able to prise them apart.
‘I want it all to go away,’ he muttered.
Emma turned back to him, hearing his wretchedness. She held his hands across the table again. Stern, but loving, she gave him a cool smile.
‘Dom should come with me,’ Andy said. ‘We’ll call them and try to come to an agreement. It’ll all be over by this time tomorrow.’
‘This just all feels so unbelievable,’ Emma said. ‘This happens to other people. We’re just normal!’
‘They didn’t have to kill Jazz,’ Daisy said. Her voice was flat, furious. ‘They didn’t have to do that.’
‘They know what they’re doing,’ Andy said. ‘They know decent people like us fear them, and what they can get from us. It’s the kind of people they are.’ Dom remembered him saying, I know their sort. As soon as he and Andy were alone, he’d ask him how.
‘So where do we go in the meantime?’ Emma asked. ‘I’m not staying home tonight. No way.’
‘Mandy’s?’ Dom suggested.
Emma sighed heavily. ‘I’ll give her a call. Tell her we’re … fumigating the house, or something.’
‘This isn’t fair,’ Daisy said. ‘It’s just not fair! We should be able to go to the police without being scared. That’s what the police are for.’
‘Sometimes fair doesn’t come into it,’ Andy said. It sounded like he knew what he meant. Something else for me to ask him, Dom thought.
He felt sick at the lies they’d spun, wretched at the danger he had exposed his family to. Most of all, he felt a burning need to get Andy on his own and ask just what the fuck was going on.
‘I’ll come by Mandy’s in an hour,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring a Chinese.’
‘Right,’ Emma said. ‘Because that’ll make everything better.’ She stood, waited for Daisy to join her, then the two of them walked back towards the car park.
Dom watched them go. They were the two people he loved most in this world. They’d been threatened, and he would do everything in his power to make that threat go away. He watched until they were in Emma’s Corsa, and as it swung from the car park he waved. Sunlight glared from windows, and he wasn’t sure if either of them waved back.
‘We get the money,’ Dom said, still staring after the car. ‘We give it to them. And that’s it.’
‘It’s not as simple as that.’
Dom sprang up from his seat and lunged for Andy. He grabbed his friend’s shirt collar, his foot caught in between the bench’s seat and table upright, and he went sprawling, pushing Andy down bene
ath him. They both hit hard. Andy gasped as he was winded, and Dom rolled aside. He sat up quickly, looking around. No one seemed to have seen.
He was breathing hard. So much was spinning in his head, so many possibilities and regrets. Were Emma and Daisy even safe? The very idea of not going to the police made him feel sick, but the prospect of prison made him cold. He couldn’t do that. Not him.
‘They’re fucking murderers!’ he said. He wanted to shout. Instead, he held out his hand and helped Andy up.
Andy sat on the table’s edge and rubbed his back.
‘Okay,’ he said. He was looking at the ground at his feet, still rubbing. He seemed to be having some internal discussion. Dom had rarely seen him looking so vulnerable. ‘Okay.’
‘Okay what?’ Dom asked. ‘Andy, I’m going to sort this out. Get the money, wait for them to contact us, give it to them. Then they’ll piss off, won’t they? Leave us alone?’
Andy didn’t seem to hear. He was still nodding slowly, then he looked up at Dom, and something about him had changed. It was as if a veil had lowered from his eyes, exposing something darker and grimmer beneath.
Chapter Twelve
Nothing Would Happen
Passing through the centre of town, Emma swung a left into the car park. It was hidden away behind the main street.
‘Mum? Aren’t we going to Mandy’s?’
‘Hang on,’ Emma said. She parked in the far corner in the shade of some trees, reversing into a space so that she could see the rest of the car park. She was holding the steering wheel hard, knuckles white, fingers cramped.
‘Mum,’ Daisy said softly. She touched Emma’s shoulder, and that simple contact broke a dam of emotion. Emma sobbed loudly, once and tearless, pressing her hands to her face.
‘I’m okay,’ she said quickly. She rubbed at her eyes, ran her hands through her hair and checked herself in the mirror. Every few seconds she scanned the car park. No white Jeeps. Plenty of people on their way home from work, picking up a bottle of wine for an evening in the garden or a bag of groceries. A flock of old women walked across the expanse of tarmac, all white hair and backpacks, finishing an afternoon hike with a coffee and cake in the museum cafe. No wild-haired men. No dog killers.
Emma had to be strong, for herself and for Daisy. Jazz had been part of the family, but her immediate fear was for themselves. Daisy’s grief was plain and direct. Emma’s was contoured with complexities. The family should be together now, not pulled apart by Andy and whatever he thought he could do to help them. And why would he? Was he really so guilty that he’d expose himself to such danger? She liked to think so but … she didn’t really know Andy that well at all.
What she did know indicated that he was probably a bastard.
Dom had been terrified. She’d seen truth behind his eyes that craved release, but Andy had guided their conversation. She’d seen fear, too. He’d loved Jazz as much as the rest of them, but the terror she’d witnessed in him had transcended what had occurred, and she hated seeing such fear in the man she loved.
Dom might have been quiet, content without adventure in his life, but she had never considered him a coward. In business he stood up for himself, and he was not afraid to fight for what was right. Sometimes he even surprised her. Two years ago his company van had been stolen from outside a house he was working on. By lucky coincidence, their friend Mostyn had seen it parked outside a country pub a couple of miles outside Usk, and he’d driven Dom out there to confront the two young thieves. She still remembered Mostyn’s delighted expression as he’d told her about Dom approaching the beer garden table were they sat, crowbar swinging casually from his hand.
Today, a different Dom had faced her across that park bench.
‘We should bury Jazz,’ Daisy said. ‘She’s just lying there and … there are flies. It’s hot. What if the neighbours see her? What if they see the blood and that message?’
Then that makes what I need to do moot, Emma thought. If someone else called the police, the decision was taken from her.
‘I just need to think,’ she said. ‘I just want to … hang on.’ She opened her phone.
‘Are you calling Mandy?’
‘Not yet.’ She opened her browser and entered Hucknall family South Wales. The search took a while, her connection poor, and its only results were to do with the band Simply Red. She tried something else, accessing the local newspaper’s website and doing a targeted search. If any of the Hucknalls had made the news for any of the crimes Andy had listed, there’d be a report.
Again, nothing.
She closed her eyes and tried to take a step back, disassociate herself from what had happened. It was difficult, but it allowed a certain clarity of thought. A man had stalked her that morning. Someone had approached Daisy, threateningly. Their dog had been slashed to pieces.
‘Fucking hell,’ she muttered.
Daisy glanced at her, surprised by the foul language.
‘This is just stupid. I’m calling the police.’
‘Really?’ Daisy sounded shocked.
‘Yes. Really. It’s what normal people would do, and we’re normal people. Whatever happened with your dad and that car, it should be sorted out the right way.’
‘Did you really believe Andy’s story?’ Daisy’s surprise was obvious, her voice high. ‘About Dad bumping a local bad family’s Ferrari?’
Emma blinked at her daughter, and, of course, no, she didn’t believe it. She hadn’t believed it from the moment Andy started constructing the tale, butting in so that Dom couldn’t talk. Lying to her face, and demanding that her husband go along with the lie.
‘They’ve done something worse than bump a car,’ Daisy said. She clenched her hands in her lap, staring from her side window into the hedge close by, seeing nothing. ‘I’ve never liked Andy.’
It seemed like a random adult comment for a ten year old, Emma thought, but its simplicity illuminated the whole situation.
Emma started the car and pulled away.
She hadn’t been sure about Andy since the moment they’d met two years before. He’d been biking with Dom. He’d nodded hello to Emma, smiling and comfortable in the same sort of kit that made Dom self-conscious and edgy. He’d seemed over-confident, even brash. She’d caught him eyeing her down and up again, annoying her and making her fold her arms across her chest. He’d seen that, and hadn’t even looked away.
But Emma was the last to judge by first impressions, and over time Andy had become a fixture. He’d socialised with them, driving down to ride with Dom from Usk so that he could join them for a drink afterwards, and sometimes a meal. Dom liked him, though in private he was open about his new friend’s perceived faults. It’s like he doesn’t have a care in the world, Dom would say. Andy was confident, but not quite pompous. Extremely clever, though not arrogant. Happy to take advantage of his good looks, physique, and charisma to charm his way in and out of a selection of beds. He kept his girlfriends at a distance, although Dom admitted to knowing that a couple had been married. Andy didn’t seem to have any moral concerns about that.
Dom also seemed to know very little about him. There’d been some vague talk about him living in London before moving to South Wales, but he rarely talked about background or family, and would avoid the subject when it was brought up. Emma wondered if he hid some family tragedy or rift, or whether he was simply someone who truly lived for the moment. Whatever it was, it gave him a shallowness that often made her suspicious.
Perhaps emphasising his faults, to Dom in her own mind, was a way of distracting herself about how she felt. Because she’d become drawn to him, and not in a way she was used to. She loved Dom for his mind, his humour, his love and sincerity. The physical side was strong too, and always had been. But she’d not experienced the base, animal attraction she felt for Andy since Max Mort.
He made her feel like a teenager again, and she’d enjoyed such naive sensations because she’d felt safe doing so. Nothing would happen. He was a casual frien
d, and even Dom had said that in reality he was more of an acquaintance. He never opens himself up, he’d once said. I don’t actually know him at all.
Nothing would happen.
Until that one time.
Recalling that moment still inspired guilt and excitement, a flash of rainbow colours against a sepia background. A lazy Sunday afternoon, Daisy out with friends, Emma reading in the garden with hands still dirtied from planting some pots and hanging baskets. She found gardening therapeutic, whereas Dom just thought it boring. It was the perfect pastime for when he was out.
Around three o’clock, Dom and Andy rolled in from a forty-mile ride. Andy had driven down to their house to start the ride, so that he could eat with them afterwards. He always brought a kit bag with spare clothes. They were going to have a barbecue. Emma had prepared some kebabs, and Daisy was coming home in time to make her secret couscous recipe which Andy professed to love.
While the men disappeared upstairs to shower, Emma lit the barbecue. Jazz fussed around her, and she petted the dog before realising she had soot and soil still on her hands and clothes. Ensuring the barbecue was safe, she trotted upstairs to their bedroom. Andy was showering in the family bathroom, Dom in their en-suite shower room, as usual. Making sure the bedroom door was closed, she quickly stripped off her dirty shorts and underwear, and her vest top.
For a second as she opened the door to the en suite to take a wash, she thought everything was as it should be. Steam filled the room, and she wondered why Dom hadn’t turned on the combined light and extractor fan. She enjoyed the waft of warm, damp air across her skin, the smell of Dom’s minty shower gel. She was surprised that the shower was already turned off.
It wasn’t Dom.
Andy stood on the bathmat beside the open shower cubicle, towel around his head and over his face as he dried his hair vigorously. His body glistened with water droplets. They speckled the hairs across his broad chest, dripped down his flat stomach, nestled on his closely trimmed crotch.
Emma held her breath in shock.
