by Sam King
“Oh, you don’t want to hear about it.”
“No. Really. Tell me.”
“Well, Wayne — he’s my boyfriend — we had a fight, and I, well, I got angry at him …”
“He hit you?”
She nodded.
“You ought to go to the police.”
“No. It isn’t like that. We’ll get back together again. He’ll give me a call in a few days.”
This sounded like insanity. If Michael hit her, they definitely wouldn’t be getting back together in a few days time, probably not ever. Then again, she couldn’t imagine Michael hitting her.
“Samantha,” she began, “I can’t really give you a place to stay. Not now. But I can pay for a motel for you.”
“Oh, no. Not a motel. I hate motels. If I’d thought I was going to a motel I wouldn’t have come.”
Susan remained silent.
“Can’t I stay, even for one night?”
“Well, perhaps for one night. But that will have to be it.”
“That’d be great.”
Susan nodded.
They walked upstairs together. She collected some sheets from the linen press, an old floral set that had been her mother’s, and began making the bed.
“This looks lovely,” Samantha said, turning to the window and placing her hands on the sill. “You sure are lucky to have a husband and everything.”
Perhaps, but then she wasn’t prostituting herself either.
“Take a bath if you want to, and maybe then you’d like to lie down.”
“I sure would.”
Chapter 42
Susan walked into the sewing room and called the locksmith. He said he could come within the hour and she nodded, feeling a frisson of tension, but mainly relief. If only he actually did come and did manage to get the drawer open.
She turned to the window and looked down at the boys in the pool. Luke was floating lazily on a recliner and Tom was about to execute a dive. It was a clear blue day without a cloud, the water sparkling, and for a moment she considered going out to the pool herself. Then it struck her that it was almost Christmas, that it would be Christmas a week from today. She needed to get moving with preparations and so on. There was shopping to do, shopping for food and for gifts. And then there were the decorations. She could do something about that now.
She walked downstairs and through to the sunroom, a large room at the back of the house with enormous glass windows. It overlooked the pool and had a door that opened into the pool area. She spied Tom stalking along the edge of the pool. He looked as though he was about to jump Luke on the recliner. She watched on as he dove beneath it and then came up, upsetting Luke.
She shook her head.
The Christmas decorations were stored in a large cupboard by the laundry door. She opened this and then found the stepladder in the laundry. She got onto it and pulled the Christmas tree down — a fake one, though it was realistic enough and stood a full two metres. She hefted it over to the windows looking out onto the pool and then left it, figuring she could interest the boys in erecting it when they came in.
She went back to the cupboard and pulled out the boxes with the tinsel and Christmas lights and tree decorations in them, and hefted these too over to the windows looking out onto the pool. In a further box she found decorations for around the house, some snow-covered miniature houses, holly and ivy, and a wreath for the front door. She walked through the house, opened the front door, hung the wreath on the hook, and then stood back to admire it.
A van pulled into the driveway — the locksmith — and she turned to greet him.
He was a large man with a beard and a protruding belly. His head was bald, but for some very untidy grey fluff at the sides and the rear.
“How’re you doing, Missus?” he said, an unexpected greeting.
“Fine,” she said.
“So where’s this filing cabinet?”
“Upstairs.”
He opened the van door, pulled out a toolbox, and followed her into the house.
Upstairs, he inserted some sort of gadget into the lock, twisted it back and forth a few times, and then opened the drawer.
“Oh — right,” she said.
“It’s that easy.”
Apparently it was. Apparently, with one of those gadgets, anyone could open any lock.
“Do you want a new lock on it?” he said.
She said that she did, and he disappeared downstairs again. Tentatively, she stepped forward and peered into the drawer. The iPad was in there. She took it out and placed it on the desk. The locksmith returned a moment later. He fitted a new lock and charged her more than a hundred dollars.
After saying goodbye to him she made her way upstairs again. The iPad was sitting near the sewing machine. She took a seat and tapped in Tom’s code, but it failed to open. Then she remembered that it was Luke’s iPad. She tried his code, but again, it failed to open. Hell, she thought. She got up and locked the iPad back into the filing cabinet again, and then took both the new keys (held together on a ring) through to her bedroom. She placed them at the back of the top drawer in her night table.
She walked downstairs and out to the pool area.
“Tom!”
He was breast-stroking lazily. Luke was sunning himself on the recliner again.
“What is it, Mum?”
“I need to talk to you. Come inside.” She paused for a moment. “You may as well come in as well, Luke. I want the two of you to put the Christmas tree up.”
“The Christmas tree!” He tipped sideways off the recliner and into the pool with a splash.
She watched Tom get out of the pool and find his towel, and then held the door to the sunroom open for him. She sheparded him through and then closed the door.
“You need to give me the code for the iPad,” she said.
He was drying his hair, and didn’t immediately answer.
“I need to know what it is.”
“What are you going to do, Mum?”
“I’m going to delete the film and destroy the pad.”
“Burn it again?”
She nodded.
“I can do it for you, Mum.”
“I’ll do it. But I need the code.”
“Could I watch it again?”
“No, Tom.” She waited a moment before prompting him. “What’s the code?”
“One four seven nine five three.”
“One four seven nine five three?”
He nodded.
Luke opened the door and walked into the room. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Mum’s going to torch your iPad.”
“Oh, Mum. Not really.”
She bit her lips.
“You really are.”
“I have to, Luke.”
“It was on my phone as well.”
“What?”
“On your phone?”
“It got there automatically. With iCloud.”
“You didn’t tell me,” Tom said.
“I didn’t want to.”
Susan took a breath. “You mean it was on your phone? The phone that you lost when we were in Katoomba.”
He nodded, but looked a little shaken.
She felt like lashing out at him.
“Oh, Luke,” she said.
“Sorry, Mum.”
“And you didn’t delete it?”
“I was going to.”
She thought back to the day they’d walked along a trail into the Jamison Valley. Luke’s phone had slipped out of his pocket sometime during the day, when they’d stopped for lunch — at least they supposed so. He was meant to be getting a new phone and a new iPad for Christmas, but that sounded like a joke now. What sort of parents were they? How indulgent could they be?
“You won’t be getting a new phone, Luke. And you won’t be getting a new iPad, either. Neither of you will be.”
“That sucks, Mum,” Tom said dryly, as though he didn’t care.
“Sucks, yes.”
She turned away, her immediate thought being that Luke would need a new phone for emergencies. She could hardly deny him that. But an iPad? No way. Neither of them were getting a new iPad.
She stormed upstairs and slammed the sewing room door. She locked it and then remembered the keys, which were in her night table. She opened the door again. Both boys were standing at the top of the stairs.
She yelled at them. “I told you to put the Christmas tree up.”
“We’re going, Mum,” Luke said. “We’re just getting changed.”
Hell, she was really losing it.
She marched into her room, retrieved the keys, and then marched back out again. Samantha appeared on the landing, looking a little lost and as though she’d been woken.
“Is everything okay?” she said.
“It’s fine, Sam. Everything’s fine.”
She turned away and locked herself in the sewing room. Then, as she was pulling the iPad out, she heard Tom, in conversation with Samantha. She hadn’t even told the boys Samantha was in the house. She opened the door again. Tom turned to her, looking bewildered. Samantha wasn’t even decently dressed. She had her breasts partly bared.
“Tom, this is Samantha, a friend of mine from school.”
Tom was wearing Speedos, and he obviously felt uncomfortable. He disappeared into his room.
“Sorry, Sam,” she said.
“The shouting woke me.”
“We should be quieter now.”
Samantha nodded and turned away.
Susan locked herself into the sewing room and turned on the iPad. She clicked on the camera and was bewildered for a moment by the number of still frames she had to chose from. She searched for Tom’s face, but then saw a frame that looked like the photo of a naked boy. She tapped on it and was confronted by Martin Lockheed in his underwear.
Chapter 43
“What the fuck?” she muttered to herself.
There were seven photos of Martin altogether, all of them provocative, two of him bending forward and one with his hands on his hips. He was smiling, as though it was a great joke, but this was obviously child pornography.
She frowned.
Tom had had photos of Martin as well, but those were snapshots of him out and about around the school — photos that looked as though they’d been taken without his knowledge. These were different.
She shook her head over it and then tapped on the film.
Tom’s face again.
“You want to see the perfect murder? Just watch this.”
She hadn’t meant to watch the film again, but as it jumped, something caught her attention. There was something here that she’d missed. She watched Tom pull away from the camera, but her first thought as he did it was that it was Luke and not Tom at all.
She frowned, and then watched him carefully, convinced as the film wore on that she was in fact watching Luke pretending to be Tom. She had seen it before, but never quite this convincingly. The main problem was the school uniform and the hair, the way he had it flopping over his forehead. But this was obviously a trick, she eventually realised. In the film, she lifted her head from Jude’s side and told Tom to call an ambulance. At this point the boys performed a kind of shuffle. Tom loosened his tie and Luke scooped his hair back over his head. Then, while she was distracted, Tom shook his hair forward. They had changed roles again.
“You bastards,” she muttered.
She flopped backwards in her chair and began to think out the ramifications of this as the film wore on. Luke had pretended to be Tom, which meant that it was Luke and not Tom who had implored Jude to swallow the Wongdongler. And both of them had lied all the way through it, to the police and to her. If anyone was going to jail, then, it would be Luke rather than Tom. Or more likely both of them, as it now seemed to be some sort of conspiracy.
She felt suddenly alone, as though she didn’t know a soul in the world. Luke had betrayed her. Her boy! She began to cry.
The film finished and half an hour or so passed as she thought over the times the boys had fooled her in the past. It was the school uniform more than anything else and this thing with the hair. Luke was always so neat and tidy while Tom was such a mess. She often didn’t look up to check. Yet it had taken her a third viewing of this film to sort one son from the other. No wonder other people got confused.
She thought back to the day Jude died. Luke had come into the kitchen that afternoon, straight from the bus with his shirt tucked in and his tie knotted, his hair scooped neatly over his head, and she’d talked to him, all the while unaware that she was talking to Tom. And then later, at the police station, something had been off there. The boys had performed the same trick again, she now realised, so that when Tom was being interviewed he could in fact give the real version of events as he’d witnessed them — from her perspective, as he’d been with her and not in the play room. Luke, meanwhile, must have endured the interview as Tom, the boy who’d been in the play room that afternoon.
It was confusing, but she had it straight in her mind within a couple of minutes. Which made sense of Tom’s ongoing certainty that nothing could touch him, as all he’d done was record an introduction to the murder, a murder that his brother had carried out. And it was this, obviously, that Tom now held over Luke, the means to put him in prison, or at least threaten him with the same — to the point where Luke had been frightened, she imagined, into admitting to the incident with Martin Lockheed, if that even made sense. If it didn’t, then the two of them had made some sort of pact about it.
Hell, she thought.
What sort of children was she raising? Where had she gone wrong?
After sitting for a few minutes more, she became aware of a growing sense of anger. She got up and unlocked the door, forgetting the iPad altogether. She made her way downstairs and out to the sunroom. The boys had the tree up and were putting the finishing touches to it. She watched on in silence. A few minutes passed without them noticing her. Then Luke turned. Then Tom. They stared at her impassively, without comprehension, and then went back to work stringing baubles. A few moments later they stood back and hit the fairy lights interlaced into the braches of the tree. The lights flashed on for a few seconds and then began to blink rhythmically.
“There!” Tom said.
“What do you think, Mum?”
They’d done an excellent job. She couldn’t deny that. When they were younger, she’d told them Santa wouldn’t leave presents beneath a sadly decorated tree. Somehow this had stuck, and they’d done as good a job as ever.
“I need to speak to both of you,” she said. But she didn’t want to speak to them together. She wanted to speak to each of them alone. She asked Luke to come upstairs with her, and as they were making their way up the stairs, she remembered the iPad. She ushered Luke into the sewing room and locked the door.
“What is it, Mum?”
She showed him enough of the film to give him a chance to admit it. Then she confronted him with the idea that it had in fact been him with Jude that afternoon. He admitted it tearfully and began to cry.
“You don’t think I’ll go to prison, do you, Mum?”
She shook her head. “Not if I can help it.” She paused for a moment. “But why did you do it, Luke?”
“It was Tom’s idea.”
“Tom’s idea?” She could easily believe that.
But when she called Tom in he told a different story. He said that Luke hated Jude and had wanted to do it as much as he did. Now she didn’t know what to believe.
Chapter 44
She deleted the film and the photos of Martin Lockheed and locked the iPad back into the filing cabinet. She would have to put it in the wood stove, but she couldn’t do it now. The time had worn on and it was past two p.m. Samantha was here, and she needed time to air the house out before Michael got home. She would do it tomorrow.
She wandered downstairs and made some lunch, not only for herself and the boys, but for Samantha also. Then she traipsed
upstairs again and knocked on Samantha’s door. She wasn’t sleeping and did want some lunch, but she came down in the same singlet she’d had on beneath her jacket, the one that revealed her breasts so boldly.
Susan introduced Samantha to Luke, but both boys ate quickly and left the room. Then she was alone with Samantha. She happened to glance at her arms and saw track marks, the tell-tale signs of heroin addiction. Samantha lit a cigarette and then asked if she had an ash tray. She didn’t. No one had smoked in her house for years. But Samantha failed to take the point. She ashed onto her plate, where the crusts of her sandwiches sat uneaten.
“So where did you think you were—” Susan began, but she was cut short by the doorbell. She excused herself and got up to open it, wondering, for some reason, if it would be Jean again. It was the police. She drew her head back. Grainger and Adamson were grim-faced and serious.
“May we come in, Mrs Hope?” Grainger said.
