Larry’s apparent affection for her made her grow confident and assertive. Whatever she wanted she got. Whatever he said, she would do because she believed she wanted to do it. Then when she was six she disagreed with him. He looked at her as he looked at my son and raised his hand and slapped her hard on the face. Her adoring face. She looked stunned and then furious. She wasn’t upset but appalled. It was as if every slap and punch she’d seen her brother receive were suddenly revealed to her in that single action. She looked at him, as if daring him to do it again and then turned away.
Looking back, I should have seen the signs in the world around us. I hadn’t started to notice patterns at that point, not like I do now. Now I know that at this point there were three serial killers active in America. Three murders in less than three weeks by three serial killers, as January turned to February. I could feel the gap where real time was suspended and evil could dominate but I wouldn’t have been able to explain it then. Sometimes there are moments where evil bursts through the seams of normality, and now I can see how my decision to act took place in this gap between worlds.
In the lonely empty years after Meghan, I drew up timelines and saw the links emerge. We are all bound by synchronicity. I became obsessed with ley lines and the way Coggeshall sat in the middle of so many. Where too many meet it’s the sure sign of a devil’s path. I know that now. I know the track my great-grandparents followed was one of those paths. I know wherever I travel I won’t be able to avoid one. There was no path I could take back then and I could see no other way out. Yet I had to act.
Every Friday night Larry asked me to drive the van into the garage he’d rented near our house. It was one of a long line of brand new, wooden gated buildings behind the back of our garden, a two-minute walk. That was the only way that the Isinglass Factory would allow him to keep it over the weekends. He would stand at the end of the garage and solemnly guide me forward, there being a matter of two legs’ give on either side of the length of the garage. The van had to be slightly more to the left in order to allow someone in and out of the door as well. That Friday after he’d hit my daughter I kept my eyes down as I carefully put the puttering van in gear.
When I first thought about doing it, I didn’t think about it as attempted murder. I thought of it as killing the beast. I sat at the wheel and he stood at the back of the garage. He waved me forward. I placed my feet on the accelerator and the clutch, found the biting point, released the handbrake and shot forward.
I heard the crunch against his legs and felt sick when I saw the shock on his face. I left it a couple of minutes before I put the car into reverse and inched out of the garage. I parked up carefully in front of the neighbouring garage. No-one came.
I turned the engine off, locked it and walked up to him. He was lying on the oil-stained concrete, his hands bent up to his chest. My heart was beating so loudly that I couldn’t hear his moans until I was right on top of him.
‘If you ever raise your hand to either of my children again, I will kill you, no question about it. You’re not as quick or as clever as you believe. I will be there before you even realise it. I’ll leave you to have a think.’
I stood by the open door, next to his body and listened to his stuttering breaths, waiting for them to fail him. He kept breathing.
I walked back to face him. One of his hands shot out and grabbed my left ankle. I dropped the keys in fright, then I raised my right foot and stamped on his wrist until he let go. I stepped out of reach and crouched down.
‘Can you walk?’ I said. ‘Only it would be easy enough for me to close the garage door and leave you here all night. There won’t be anyone around until the morning and it’s going to be very, very cold tonight. So what do you think?’
I folded my coat around me and tried to make out his expression in the dark.
‘I’m quite cold,’ I said. ‘You have thirty seconds to apologise and promise to keep your hands to yourself.’
I started counting to myself; I got to thirty and stood up.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I agree.’
‘To what?’
‘To being sorry and never doing it again.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Put your hand out.’
He did and I dragged him from the garage to the side of the house and realised I’d left the keys on the garage floor.
I could have run back to the garage and grabbed the keys but the thought of someone seeing and calling an ambulance stopped me. I had to call Sean. I knocked, quietly at first, but he didn’t respond so I shouted through the letter box and finally saw his feet on the stairs.
He opened the door and saw his father lying on the ground. The relief on his face nearly made me cry. Then Larry moaned. I could tell from Sean’s face that he was upset he wasn’t dead. He helped me drag Larry to the front room and we left him to die on the floor.
I should have left him in the garage. It was difficult for the post-mortem to explain his injuries, but they concluded he’d dragged himself home after being hit by a car. I cleaned the blood from his work van before it was collected and ran it into the back of the garage to disguise the dent. No-one wanted to blame the dead man or his widow.
I still thought things would improve from that point, but they didn’t. I’d left it too late for Sean to believe that my actions had anything to do with him. I’d hidden it from Shona so well that she somehow gave herself the credit for the monstrous silence that dominated our relief. She built in weeks of fatherly penitence and appeared to believe that he’d died of shame. It’s strange what makes us happy. She was right that she did change people, although she changed me, not Larry. But what had I become?
I would lie awake remembering him in the garage. He didn’t look like a demon or a devil. He was just a man with crushed legs fighting for each breath. No spirits came up from the earth to drag me to hell, or fix him. He would never walk again but no demons revenged him. We were all glad he was dead, but what if he wasn’t the devil at all? I couldn’t kill the devil. No-one could. If I had killed Larry, then that only proved that he was a man and nothing else.
All three of us crept about as if he was still alive, hunched in his chair, waiting for him to erupt into violence again. Even dead he occupied the same space, haunting the house between his chair and the downstairs bathroom and the bedroom, back and forth over the ever-thinning lino, an angry, quiet spectre.
After the post-mortem, after the funeral, after we believed we’d packed him away, I realised that he hadn’t gone anywhere. He was there in an even more determined way than before, when his arms swung and his voice belted us. We tried to ignore him, but we could think of nothing but him. Even Shona, who had never been afraid of him and claimed his defeat as her victory, would sit and anxiously observe his chair. She may, like me, have been wishing him to say something, anything, to show he was still there somehow. I hadn’t killed the devil. I’d just made him harder to see.
10
Finally paid up at the library, Shona felt as if she was on the right path again. She popped in to the museum see Kallu, her shopping bags full and her purse nearly empty. The money she’d saved up from essay writing was running out but they still needed to eat.
She could hear the persistent beep before she pushed the door open. Kallu was having problems working the till again. He looked round at Shona. The woman waiting sighed.
‘Let me help you,’ Shona said.
Shona reached across him and pressed void. He kissed her on the cheek as she passed back behind him. She could smell the sea in his hair, darkly curled like seaweed.
‘Where have you been?’ Kallu started to type in the codes again. ‘I’ve been waiting. I thought you’d know.’
‘I was busy. I’ll make you some tea.’ She went into the tiny office behind the till and hid until the woman had left.
Kallu came to find her.
‘You know to press void. You were just being awkward.’
Kallu smiled. ‘That woman needed time to think
. It was for her. And I knew you needed to remember there’s always a void button.’ His deep blue eyes looked black today. That meant he was feeling separated from himself. He would talk and talk and all of a sudden . . .
‘And I thought you needed me.’ Shona smiled awkwardly. He looked away and rubbed both upper arms, absently. She could see a single small piece of driftwood tied onto each bicep.
‘Yeah, I know.’ Kallu was slipping away, she could see his eyes becoming unfocused. She had to be quick.
‘Is there anything, any message for me?’
He’d gone. It often happened when she arrived. He said it meant he could relax, knowing Shona would protect him, cover for him. And she always would.
She watched him leave the office, walk slowly around the stuffed animals. He found the fox, curled up in its pretend hole. He sat down by the glass case, cross-legged and eyes closed. Shona could see the fox and his reflection merge. She sighed. Ever since she’d come back to the house he’d seemed to do this more and more often. She wanted it to mean that the message was on its way but suspected that the phone call to some authoritative body was becoming inevitable.
No messages. She knew it sounded ridiculous, would never dream of telling or trying to explain it to anyone else, especially not after Mariana’s reaction. Shona didn’t even believe in spirits. But something deep within her stomach did and stopped her picking up the phone.
She put the lunch sign on the door and locked it, posting the keys back through the letter box. There were other people who worked there and it surprised her that he never seemed to get in trouble. The place was never packed or anything, but people must have noticed these absences. That’s why, when large groups were booked in, Shona had offered to be on-site, just in case.
‘Shall I make some tea?’
Shona had tried to tidy before she arrived, but hadn’t got very far. Now that Thea was here, the papers she thought were fairly hidden under the sofa looked an obvious last-minute shove. The plates and mugs she had piled up ready to take to the kitchen were still on the table next to a bowl containing a couple of wrinkled apples. She hadn’t even thought of sweeping the floor.
Thea picked Cerys’ photo off the windowsill and sat down.
‘Is this her?’
‘This is Cerys,’ Shona said. ‘She’s fourteen. Long, brown hair, blue eyes, five foot one. She’s blonde now, actually. Slim build, a scar on her left shoulder from a dog bite when she was four. She works hard at school and wants to be an art teacher. She likes music and films and lying-in at the weekend.’
‘You sound like a newspaper report.’
‘You can’t try to sum anyone up without sounding like one.’
‘So, let’s get the food on table and talk,’ said Thea. She moved to the table and emptied the shopping as Shona took the dirty plates to the kitchen and came back with clean ones. Thea pulled from her bag tortillas, breadsticks, humus and guacamole.
‘This was supposed to be a thank-you for looking after Jude so much. There’s loads here.’
‘But a thank-you is not necessary and it doubles as dinner for Jude too.’ Thea sat down. ‘You need to spill, so just spill. Katya always said I was the best listener, right up until she dumped me.’ Thea faked a sad face and smiled. ‘And I have wine, unless you want tea.’
‘You’re a bad influence.’
‘Yes, Katya mentioned that too.’
Shona went back for glasses. Thea poured and they both drank a good mouthful.
‘Have you had a bit of a day too?’ asked Shona.
‘Too right.’ Thea prised open the hummus. ‘Had to do a birthday party for a dozen toddlers.’
‘That’s your job? I thought you said you weren’t completely mad.’
Thea ran her hands through her hair, making it stand up. ‘Only for money. There’s very little that is too mad if you get paid for it. Haven’t you seen my van? Seven Stars Parties.’
‘Seven Stars?’
‘I used to live at Seven Stars Green, just past Eight Ash Green.’
‘Are you making this up?’
Thea looked confused. ‘No.’
Shona thought back to Kallu and his necklaces. The goddess of the seven stars.
‘So?’ asked Thea. ‘Spill.’
‘I have no idea where to start.’
‘Start with Cerys, of course.’
‘Cerys is somewhere. She says she doesn’t want me to know where. Not to me, she’s said it to other people. Maynard apparently knows, but he won’t tell me either.’
Thea cut the cheese to place on her bread. ‘So, there’s no other way you can find out?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘Oh, and what’s Maynard’s problem?’
‘I blame him for our other daughter dying. He says it wasn’t him. The court says it was cot death. Cots. That’s all he talked about after we buried her, wanting to know where I’d put the crib.’
‘Why was he so interested in that?’
‘It was an antique. He loves antiques and paintings more than people. To me it wasn’t worth anything because of that. It was Cerys’ and I knew he’d sell it or something, so I packed up all of her stuff and hid it from him. I told him I’d taken it to the tip. He never believed that, but he never forgave me for taking it from him.’
‘And you’ve been living together with all that hatred hanging over you?’
Shona nodded. ‘For Cerys.’
‘I’m sorry, Shona, but I’m amazed she stayed as long as she did.’
Shona froze.
‘I’m not blaming you, but that’s bloody horrible.’
It was true. What a waste.
‘All so you could stay in this house?’ Thea asked.
Shona nodded. ‘Sounds stupid, I know. And now I have to accept that Cerys might have chosen her father over me. That she wants me to lie awake and wonder where she is and what she’s doing. That she hates me enough to just leave without saying a thing.’ Shona drank the rest of her wine. ‘It’s barely bearable. If it wasn’t for Jude, I don’t know.’ She looked at Thea.
‘Go on.’
‘When Meghan died, I wanted to die too. I had Cerys but I saw how much she adored Maynard. I thought, I hoped, that Meghan would be my child, would love me instead. But she died. She was killed. And nothing was enough to mark her going, nothing was big enough to hold the thought of her. I wanted to build something. Have you seen those roadside shrines in Europe, in France and Belgium?’
Thea nodded. ‘For the farmworkers.’
‘Yes. I ordered the bricks, even, but Maynard took one look and persuaded the building yard to collect them. I could have beaten him to death with just one of them. I dreamed I did, one night. I woke up in the morning and felt so happy, so relieved and there he was, sleeping next to me.’ Shona shuddered. ‘But there was always Cerys to think about. She never even remembered Meghan. She doesn’t talk about her at all, probably because she doesn’t want to upset Maynard. But this house is where I had them both, for a little while. I can’t leave it because that is leaving Meghan behind. And Cerys needs a safe place too. If she ever comes back, that is.’
‘So it doesn’t feel ended? You feel that no-one was punished for Meghan’s death.’
‘No. Maynard killed her and now it looks like he’s taken Cerys.’ Shona felt the wine and carried on. ‘If I couldn’t mark her with a shrine, then I had to keep the house. And then Jude came along, and that complicated it.’
‘Who’s his father?’
‘Some guy. No-one.’ Shona shook her head. ‘And now Kallu is here.’
‘What’s the deal with him?’
‘My friend, Mariana, thinks he’s scamming me, pretending to have access to messages from Meghan. I don’t know what I think any more.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Cerys found out I was having an affair with her teacher. That didn’t help.’
‘OK. That’s enough to start with. Who do you know who knows Maynard?’
; ‘I don’t know any of his friends. There’s his mother, but she doesn’t like me.’
‘That doesn’t matter, it’s still worth a go. Phone her.’
‘Maybe.’
‘No, now. Phone her now.’
Shona fetched the phone and dialled Maynard’s mother.
‘Sylvie, I need Maynard’s address in London.’
‘You don’t have it? You’re his wife, in name at least.’
‘Can I have his address, please?’
‘Have you once phoned me to talk? Have you kept me informed about your daughter, my granddaughter? There could be a perfectly good reason why Maynard has not given you his address and I, at least, am loyal to him.’
‘Please. I think he may have Cerys.’
Sylvie barked a short laugh. ‘I will be so pleased when he divorces you. I have no idea why he has supported you and your bastard for so long. Ask Maynard for his own address.’
The line was dead.
‘Did you hear any of that?’
‘I saw your face.’ Thea grimaced. ‘It needed to be done, just to cross it off.’ Thea ate a couple of olives. ‘Can you remember any clue about where he is, what area?’
Shona fetched the photos which had been posted and went back to the table.
‘These are the only clue I have.’
‘Who sent them?’
‘Maynard, I suppose.’
‘That’s pretty vindictive.’
She had the photograph of Cerys which could have been taken in London. She had Maynard’s lack of concern and the fact that the police hadn’t done more that issue a short statement after the first report. No press interviews, no posters other than Shona’s own. She had never been to Maynard’s flat and only knew that it was in Edgware, maybe, or somewhere like that. She tried to remember him talking to other people about places he’d been or had visited, but she had clearly paid no attention at all.
‘So, where in the house did Maynard keep his stuff?’
‘In the front room.’
‘So what’s in there?’
‘Furniture, stuff. The address is bound to be in there, on some bill or scrap of paper.’
The Devil in the Snow Page 13
