Blood Guilt

by Ben Cheetham

  “He says he was visiting a girlfriend, a married woman. He cruised the street several times to make sure her husband wasn’t home.”

  “Does his story check out?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about forensics?”

  “We’ve searched Gallagher’s car, and we’re still searching his last known address, but so far we haven’t turned up one scrap of physical evidence to connect him to Ethan.”

  Harlan rested his head against his clenched fist, disappointment coursing through him. “Where’s Gallagher been hiding out these past few weeks?”

  “He’s been sleeping in his car, moving from place to place to avoid detection.”

  “What was he doing at the church?”

  “He was going to rob the donation box.”

  It was the answer Harlan had expected. As far as he could see, there were no holes in Gallagher’s story, no unanswered questions. The lead was a dead end, which meant his life remained a dead end. He ground his knuckles into his forehead in frustration. “Thanks for letting me know, Jim.”

  “No problem. I don’t give a toss what Garrett says, you deserve it after what you did.”

  “Have you got any other leads?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that, Harlan.”

  There was a weariness in Jim’s voice that answered Harlan’s question well enough. “You haven’t, have you?”

  Jim was silent a moment, then he admitted, “We’ve got shit-all. Unless we get a lucky break, I can see this one going on and on.”

  On and on. Harlan grimaced as the words echoed like a bell inside his head. On and on, like being trapped in waking nightmare. Without knowing what happened to Ethan, there could be no funeral for him, no closure for his family, no time to grieve or heal. All there could be was uncertainty and pain. The thought of it was almost too much to bear.

  Harlan tried to say goodbye to Jim, but his throat was closed up so tight the words wouldn’t come. He hung up and lay back on the sofa, eyes closed. He wasn’t floating anymore, he was falling, plunging helplessly into darkness. He jerked upright at the sound of Eve calling to him from the bedroom. He couldn’t let her see him in this state. He had to get out of there. Pulling his clothes on as he went, he rushed out the front door.

  Chapter 7

  For days Harlan hermited himself away in his flat, ignoring phone calls and knocks at his door, venturing outside only when he ran out of food and to report to his case officer. He didn’t watch the news anymore – hearing about the police’s continued lack of progress only made him feel his helplessness with an even more oppressive weight. He spent most of his time in bed seeking the blankness of sleep, or sitting staring out the living-room window at a world he was in, but wasn’t part of. He could see no way forward, no way back. He was at a dead end, stuck in a morass of confused thoughts and emotions. What to do? What to do? Sometimes he’d jerk awake clutching his head as if to keep it from exploding.

  After maybe a week – he’d started to lose track of time – Eve came knocking. It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to contact him. His phone was full of messages from her, asking and then pleading with him to ring her back. “Harlan, are you in there?” she called.

  Harlan approached the door, but made no reply.

  “Please speak to me, Harlan. You don’t have to open the door. Just let me know you’re okay.”

  Harlan’s face creased into lines of distress. It hurt him to hear Eve sounding so worried. But still he said nothing.

  “I’m not angry with you,” she continued. “I understand why you left like that the other day. I’ve spoken to Jim. I know how much it must’ve hurt you to find out the man you caught wasn’t the one who took Ethan Reed.”

  “Please go away,” Harlan murmured, barely audible.

  “I’m not leaving until you speak to me.” Eve’s voice was as resolute as it was concerned. “Do you hear me, Harlan? I don’t care if I have to stand here all night.”

  Harlan knew she meant it. She could be as stubborn as him when she wanted to be. That was one of the reasons they’d worked so well together. “Please go away,” he repeated louder, his tone apologetic.

  He heard Eve draw a breath of relief. “If that’s what you really want, I will. But not until you tell me why.”

  “You don’t need me in your life, Eve.”

  “Why don’t you let me be the judge of what I need.”

  “I’ll just end up hurting you again.”

  “Better that than going through life feeling nothing, which is what I’ve felt this last four years.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you could feel what I feel.” Harlan’s words came in a pained, weary breath. “I’d give anything to feel nothing.”

  “But then you wouldn’t be you, and I wouldn’t love you like I do.”

  Harlan closed his eyes, pressing his forehead against the door. It made him want to weep with joy to hear Eve say she loved him, but it also made the guilt flare like a furnace in his heart. How could he let himself love and be loved when Susan Reed and her family were enduring such torment? Bile rose up his throat at the thought of him enjoying himself while Ethan, if he was still alive, was subjected to God knows what kind of horrors.

  As if reading his thoughts, Eve said, “It seems to me that you want to punish yourself because you think you’re somehow to blame for what’s happened to Ethan. But you’re not to blame.”

  “How do you know? If I hadn’t killed his father, he might not have been taken.”

  “Maybe that’s true, maybe not. But either way, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve paid for what you did.”

  “I’ve paid my debt to society, but not to them, not to Susan Reed and her kids.”

  “You’ve done everything you could possibly do to try and get that boy back.”

  “Have I? I don’t know. Maybe there’s something else I can do.”

  Eve released an exasperated sigh. “If there was, you’d be out there doing it.”

  She was right, Harlan knew. He’d racked his brain for some other line of inquiry to follow, but there wasn’t one. He ground his forehead against the door in frustration.

  “You have to forgive yourself for what happened, Harlan,” continued Eve, “because there’s no way of going back and changing it.”

  Harlan shook his head, muttering with savage self-recrimination, “I can’t forgive myself.”

  “If you don’t, you’ll throw away any chance of happiness we’ve got.”

  “You don’t need me to be happy, Eve.”

  “There you go again. Telling me what I need. Believe me, Harlan, I’ve tried to move on from you. I thought I had done, until I heard your voice. Christ knows why after everything you’ve put me through, but the fact is I need you. I need to be with you.”

  Again, Harlan’s chest ached with a contradictory mingling of joy and guilt. “You don’t seem to understand. I can’t wipe this blood off my hands. It’ll be there forever, tainting everything I touch.”

  “No, Harlan, you don’t understand. I’m not scared by that. I’m scared of being alone.”

  “I don’t want to be alone either.” Harlan’s voice grew low with longing. He’d learnt all about loneliness in jail – the kind of loneliness that was so severe you felt it like a physical pain. “I want to fall asleep with you in my arms every night and wake up with you beside–” He broke off. He could feel his resolve weakening with every word. He pushed himself away from the door. “I’m sorry, Eve, I can’t talk anymore.”

  “So that’s it.” Eve’s voice was on the edge of tears. It took hold of Harlan and stopped him from retreating any further. “You’re just going to hide in there and drive yourself crazy agonising over something you can’t do anything about.”

  “Please go. Please!”

  “Okay, but first I want you to promise me that you won’t do anything stupid like kill yourself.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that.” The thought of suicide hadn’t cr
ossed Harlan’s mind since Ethan went missing.

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow to make sure you’ve kept your promise. I’m not going to give up on us so easily.”

  As Harlan listened to Eve’s footsteps echo away, an urge came over him to tear the door open, run after her and fling his arms around her. Resisting it with a wrench of willpower, he fell back against the wall, hugging himself, sliding to the floor. “She’s coming back,” he murmured, lips twitching as if they didn’t know whether to smile or grimace.

  Harlan held onto that thought, using it to get him through the long night when he was being tortured by images of what he’d done to Robert Reed and what others might be doing to Ethan. The next morning he woke up telling himself he wasn’t going to be in when Eve came knocking. But all day he sat in the living-room, listening out for her. To kill time, he turned on the television. Susan Reed appeared on the lunchtime news wearing a t-shirt with Ethan’s face on it and the words ‘Have you seen ETHAN REED?’. She spoke to the news reader from her tiny kitchen, which was crammed with people sorting through boxes of posters and leaflets. Her expression was no longer dazed. Her frowning, bloodshot eyes somehow managed to simultaneously convey a sense of fatalistic weariness and steely determination. The Baptist preacher, Lewis Gunn, stood grave-faced at her side, resting a supportive hand on her shoulder.

  “The search for my son will continue as long as it takes,” Susan told the news reporter. “Whether that be days, months or years. We’ll never give up hope of finding him.”

  When Susan finished speaking, the preacher, in his usual vigorous manner, informed the viewers that he was organising several events to raise money for the reward fund. He appealed to people to give generously and read out a telephone number for donations. Harlan greeted the announcement with mixed feelings. The offer of a large reward often led to an influx of new information, most of which, although of little or no use, was given in good faith. But it also brought out the chancers and scammers, passing the police weak or even knowingly false information in the hope of getting their hands on the money.

  The knock eventually came late in the afternoon. Harlan sprang up and hurried to the door. “Eve?”

  “Hello, Harlan. I told you I’d be back. I’ve brought you some pasta.” Eve waited a moment to see if Harlan would open the door, before adding, “I’ll leave it out here for you.”

  Saliva filled Harlan’s mouth – he hadn’t eaten a decent meal since visiting Eve’s flat. He looked at the door handle, swallowing. Hating himself for it, he slowly reached for the Yale lock and opened the door. His gaze flicked from Eve’s face to the plastic carton of pasta she held, as if he couldn’t decide which he wanted more. In return, her eyes moved over him anxiously as if searching for signs of illness or self-abuse.

  Wordlessly, Harlan motioned for Eve to come in. She moved past him, glancing from side to side, her gaze lingering on the sheets scrunched at the bottom of his otherwise bare mattress, the bathroom with its mound of dirty clothes and towels, and the kitchen work-surfaces cluttered with unwashed pots, half-eaten cans of baked beans and spaghetti, and mould-flecked bread. “Cosy, isn’t it?” Harlan said, with a crooked smile.

  In the living-room, Eve handed him the pasta and sat on the sofa watching while he voraciously consumed it at the table. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” she asked when he’d finished.

  “You know why.”

  “Jim says the boy’s dead.”

  Eve’s words laced Harlan’s forehead with lines like cracked clay. “He can’t know that for sure.”

  “No, but that’s what him and all the other detectives on the case think. That’s what you think too, isn’t it? I can see it in your eyes.”

  Harlan broke his gaze from Eve’s, looking at the sheer cliffs of concrete, glass and steel outside his window. “We could be wrong.”

  “Even if you are, there’s still nothing you personally can do about it.”

  “There might be. I might think of something.”

  “Like what?” Eve’s voice was gentle, but her question contained a note of challenge.

  “I…I don’t know. I just know that I owe them this.”

  “No you don’t!” Eve was on her feet suddenly, moving towards Harlan. He flinched at her touch and held her at arm’s length, as if afraid she’d catch something nasty off him. “You owe yourself. You owe us.”

  Harlan shook his head fiercely, still not looking at Eve. “There can’t be any us.”

  “This is crazy.” Eve’s voice was hard, but her hands that clasped Harlan’s arms were tender. “I love you. Fuck knows why. Maybe it’s because only you really understand what I’ve been through. And you still love me. You don’t need to say it. I know you do.” She tried to pull him to her. His arms trembled, but didn’t bend. “How can that be wrong? How can love be wrong? If you can tell me, I’ll leave right now and never bother you again.”

  Harlan couldn’t tell her. Suddenly his arms gave way and he collapsed into Eve’s embrace. Uncontrollable tremors ran through him. This was what he wanted more than anything, yet part of his mind, his soul, railed against it. He tried to draw away from Eve, but she held him tight as though trying to squeeze every last drop of resistance out of him. “Don’t,” she said.

  “Look at me.” Harlan made a sweeping gesture at the room. “Look at this place. I’m no good for you.”

  “You are good for me,” Eve soothed. “I love you. I want to be with you no matter what. And as for this place, well, you don’t have to stay here. You can move in with me.”

  Harlan shook his head. “I need to be here.”

  “Why?”

  “In case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “She…Susan Reed, she knows I live here. So she knows where to find me if she needs me.”

  Eve looked at Harlan with a baffled frown. “Why would she come to you for help? She hates you.”

  Harlan’s mouth screwed into a grimace. “I know it’s absurd, I know, but I’ve got to be here for her. I’ve got to.”

  Eve stroked his face, the angular jut of his cheekbone, the roughness of his stubble-flecked jaw. “Okay, stay here, and I’ll stay here with you.”

  “But this place is a dump.”

  “It’s not so bad.” Eve smiled. “Nothing a woman’s touch can’t fix.”

  Harlan smiled faintly too, remembering how Eve had transformed the first place they’d lived in together – a dingy one bed-roomed flat above an off-licence – into a comfortable love nest.

  “So it’s settled,” continued Eve.

  “I…I’m not…” Harlan mumbled uncertainly.

  Eve tilted up his chin and looked him in the eyes. “It’s settled. I’m going to fetch some clothes from my flat. I won’t be long.” She leaned in and kissed Harlan. At the touch of her lips, the last of his resistance seeped away.

  “Okay.”

  As Harlan saw Eve to the door, guilt gnawed at him with sharp teeth. He returned to the living-room and stared out the window, half watching for Eve, half studying his own reflection, wondering how it was possible to feel so good and so bad at the same time. Perhaps there was no way to reconcile his longing for Eve with his sense of obligation to Susan Reed. Perhaps he was just going to have to accept it, let it wash over him, see where it took him. He knew one thing – if his future with Eve was uncertain, without her it was non-existent.

  An hour or so later, Eve returned with a bag of clothes and a box of cleaning products. She set to work on the flat straight away, scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen till they gleamed, hoovering and dusting the living-room and bedroom, bagging the dirty linen ready for the laundrette, changing the bedding. And when she was done with the flat, she set to work on Harlan, cutting his hair, running him a bath, climbing in it with him, soaping his back. Afterwards, they ordered takeout and ate it on the floor in front of the gas fire, talking and listening to the wind whip at the windows. The
y talked long into the night. Eve told Harlan about the new career she’d embarked on in the past year. She told him, at his insistence, about the relationship she’d had during his incarceration. He told her, equally reluctantly, what prison had been like for him. They talked with some sadness but no resentment about Tom – his seemingly boundless energy, his huge sense of fun, his cheeky laugh. When they were finally tired of talking, they undressed each other and made love and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  Chapter 8

  Over the next few days Harlan and Eve hardly spent a moment apart. They bathed together, ate together, slept together. She dragged him out to restaurants, to the cinema, even to an art gallery. It felt both unnerving and exhilarating to him, doing normal things as if he was a normal person. Sometimes in the middle of a meal or whatever, he’d find himself staring off into the distance with eyes that were adrift in a sea of guilt. At other times, he’d wake in the middle of the night, lathered in sweat, chest heaving, grinding his teeth, trying to push Eve away. But she wouldn’t let him. She’d hold him to her, stroking his hair, shushing him as if he was a child that needed calming, until his body relaxed back into the bed. Occasionally, when the guilt burned and bit so deep he felt like bashing his head against the wall, he’d shout, “This is wrong!”

  To which Eve’s reply was always the same. “Love’s not wrong.”

  Gradually, as days turned into weeks, normality started to feel less unnatural to Harlan. The attacks of guilt became more and more infrequent. He went a minute without thinking about what he’d done to Robert Reed and what was happening to the family that’d survived him, then five minutes, then fifteen, then half-an-hour. One day, as he and Eve sipped coffee in the café of a department store where they’d been shopping for cushions and curtains and other items to make the flat more homely, it suddenly struck him that he hadn’t felt even a twinge of guilt all day. He lowered his cup, his throat so tight he couldn’t swallow. “You’ve got that look on your face again,” said Eve, reaching for his hand.

  Harlan flinched from her touch, jerking to his feet so hard he nearly knocked the table over. “I’ve got to get out of here.” His voice trembled with urgency. “I’ve got to get back to the flat right now.”