by Steve Mosby
'Sir, are you injured? Can you tell me if you've been hurt?'
It felt like a stupid question, but the man didn't appear to be wounded. He was dressed in black suit trousers and a dark blue raincoat, so it was difficult to tell for sure, but he was moving OK. Nothing looked to be broken. Carl glanced through into the front of the car. Everything seemed to be intact. What the hell was wrong with the guy?
'Sir-'
But then Carl looked down at the ground and saw the blood he was standing in. A large pool of it was expanding out from behind the back tyre of the estate.
He took an involuntary step back.
Then he crouched down. He couldn't see much detail beneath the vehicle, but the pool was black and wide. He watched as a tendril crept slowly down the slope of the road. It hit a small pebble, parted, and then overwhelmed it.
What the hell?
His mind put the screaming together with the blood and that made sense. But the man was inside the car and, apart from the noise he was making, he wasn't hurt. Carl leaned in and tried to see. The driver had gone still now; he was just keening softly to himself. But there was no blood visible on the back seat. None dripping down into the footwell.
And there was too much of it.
Everything inside him began to tingle at that.
There really is… far too much.
Carl moved round to the rear of the vehicle, where the boot lid was bent in two, pointing up in the air like a hooked metal claw.
Don't touch anything.
He didn't. He just looked. And it was enough. Not enough for him to understand immediately what he was seeing, but certainly to justify the feeling he'd had since parking up. Something was terribly wrong here; he understood that much at least.
The inside of the boot was soaked red. But it was bare metal in there, and the base was rusted through, which had allowed the blood to pour out onto the tarmac below the car. There was broken glass in there, and he recognised the handled top of what might, before the crash, have been a demijohn. And then another. At the back, a saucer-shaped slab of glass that was crusted red. Slivers glinting in the sunlight like tiny knives
The driver had been carrying bottles of blood.
The man was silent now. Even the keening had stopped. The only sound was the sirens in the distance.
Carl looked down the street, willing the back-up to arrive.
* * *
Chapter Nine
My brother's house was on the opposite side of town, at the end of a small cul-de-sac that curled down from a busy main road. The property might have belonged to him now, but it hadn't always. This was where the two of us had grown up.
When my mother died, she left the place to James. She fought a long battle against cancer, approaching it with the same quiet dignity with which she handled a number of other battles through her life. Towards the end, she sat down with me, just the two of us, and explained what she wanted to happen to her things when she was gone. I was to receive a small share of her savings, but the bulk of everything she owned, including the house, would go to James. On the surface, she was simply explaining this, but I knew she was also making sure I understood. And that if I disagreed or was hurt by her decision she might change her mind.
Perhaps I was a little of both, but I didn't show it. At that point, the actual money felt like one of the least important things in the world, and anyway, it did make sense. I didn't need those things. I was settled with Marie, and we already had a home together. I had a steady job. Whereas my brother was existing - as he always had - on a hand-to-mouth basis, finding it difficult to cope with life. He flitted from jobs and homes and partners, or else they flitted from him.
You'd think the fact he was older would have made him more capable, more mature, but it also meant he remembered our father leaving. For as long as I could recall, there had been an air of resentment to him, as though he believed he was somehow entitled to things and shouldn't have to work at or earn them. When he didn't get something, it was the something's fault. My mother indulged that attitude better than I did, perhaps because she remembered my father leaving too.
So I told her it was fine. But it annoyed me, afterwards, the speed with which James accepted everything, just as he always had, without even mentioning it afterwards.
Looking back, I know that was stupid of me. What was he going to say? And yet, in my head, it was one of the many things that added up against him over the years. Maybe the worst part was that, with a bit of distance and a bit more maturity of my own, I could see that from his perspective those same figures probably added up against me as well.
The police might not have known where Sarah's body was now, but they appeared to be satisfied about the circumstances of her actual death. She'd been killed in James's kitchen. The scene had been sealed off for the past week, but the police had released it earlier this morning, with my brother's agreement, to Mike. And at nine o'clock, he picked me up from outside the train station.
He'd seemed fairly relieved when I agreed to come with him. I could understand why: in addition to the keys, the police had given him the business card of a specialist cleaning company. When I'd seen crimes reported in the past, I'd never really considered that side of things, but I supposed it made sense. The police weren't going to tidy the place up themselves. So there was that to face and then to deal with - at some point, anyway - but I also imagined Mike didn't really know what to do with the place in general: what was expected of him and what wasn't. For my own part, I was just glad of the opportunity to do something.
I'd laid awake for a long time last night. There was no air conditioning, so I'd opened the window a couple of fingers, and listened to the constant noise of inner-city traffic far below. I'd watched the shadows on the ceiling, attempting to keep horrible pictures out of my head long enough to manage some sleep. Because why would someone steal a girl's body? My mind had come up with several different answers to that question, and it had insisted on showing them to me one by one.
I should have been here.
And now I felt an urge to help in some small way, no matter how little or how late.
As we set off, Mike said. 'I'm sorry about Julie last night.'
'It's fine.'
'I think she was just surprised.'
But I remembered what she'd told me.
'Julie was thinking of you,' I said.
He pulled a face. 'Me? I didn't even notice you were gone.'
I smiled, despite myself.
'That's all right then,' I said. 'But if you had noticed, then I'd have to say I was sorry.'
'And then I'd have to get really annoyed and irritated telling you it was OK.'
I nodded. 'It's a good job you didn't notice then.'
'Notice what?'
We drove in silence for a while, and I felt a little better. Mike had always been forgiving. He was the kind of person to whom you only ever needed to say sorry once. And that's a rare and valuable gift to have in a friend, for lots of reasons, but maybe most of all because we find it hard to grant ourselves that level of leniency. It's why people who are fundamentally good stand out from the crowd. They offer hope to us normal people who are just muddling through.
'So what happened, Mike?'
'Between J and Sarah?'
'Yeah.' I remembered my brother and the way he struck out at the world. 'I mean, he always had a temper, but I never figured he'd do anything like that.'
'I don't know.' Mike thought about it carefully, then shook his head. 'When they first got together, everything seemed fine. That wasn't long after you left.'
'And afterwards?'
'I guess it was gradual. They started to argue on nights out. We noticed that. And both of them looked really tired, you know? There was obviously some kind of tension between them, but we never realised how bad it was.'
He shrugged helplessly.
'And we lost touch a bit. They stopped coming out as much, and then they stopped coming out at all. We hardly saw them
over the last couple of months. I know Julie feels guilty, like we should have done more, or something. That's probably why she took things out on you.'
I watched him for a second, thinking about that.
And then looked away. 'None of us could have stopped it.'
'Maybe not. I don't know.'
I watched the houses flash past. We were nearly there.
'When I saw him-'
That got my attention back. 'What?'
'Yeah. He's on remand until the trial. He can have visitors.' Mike grimaced as he shifted gear. 'You need to phone in advance, but it's no hassle.'
As though I might want to.
There had never been any love lost between us at the best of times, never mind now. I was almost surprised to realise I didn't hate him for what he'd done, as though I didn't have any right to, but I certainly didn't have any inclination to see him either.
'How is he?' I said.
'He's totally shit. Broken. I mean, he looks like someone else. Bewildered by it all. You look in his eyes, and it doesn't seem like he can believe what he's done.'
No, I thought. That sounds exactly like James.
Mike pulled up outside. We got out of the car, and he gave me the keys, a little hesitantly.
'You up to this?' I said.
He glanced at the house. 'I really don't know.'
'It'll be all right.'
When I opened the front door, there was a sense of decompression: the movement whumping gently through the house, touching all the rooms one by one.
We stepped into the hallway. The lounge was immediately to the right. From memory, the hall in front led to the open-plan dining room and kitchen, where Sarah had died.
'Let's get the hard bit out of the way first.'
Mike nodded in response, but looked like he was on the verge of turning around and running back outside. I didn't blame him. It felt unpleasant. It wasn't just knowing that someone had died in here, or even that it was one of my friends; it was more what Mike had said in the car - that they hadn't seen much of Sarah and James over the last few months. I could imagine the house had been sealed up that entire time, with madness festering slowly in the air. As though good emotions had died in this place, one by one, and the atmosphere was now thick with the decay.
We walked down the hall, and then I pushed open the door and flicked on the light. Mike followed me into the dining room, then stopped.
'Oh Christ, Alex.'
'It's all right.'
I said it as calmly as I could manage.
That little thing you can do is to make this easier for him.
So I walked across to the edge of the dining area and squatted down on my haunches, keeping my feet just shy of the kitchen tiles. The floor in there was covered with blood. There was so much of it. More than I'd have imagined possible. It was dried and crusted; in some places, it was a centimetre thick.
A large pool had congealed in the middle, with a long, unnatural ridge at one side of it. It took me a second to work out that it must have been where Sarah's body was lying, the blood pooling up against her. The image made sense of several weak smears across the base of the cabinets. I pictured her fingertips tracing against them lazily, almost curiously, as her life ebbed away.
A panic of dark red footprints swirled from one end of the room to the other. My brother pacing.
I stood up.
There were spatters across the counter, and even on the cream wall behind. The latter flecks were slightly faded now: brown and old-looking, soaked into the plaster. Someone had drawn light pencil circles round them, with tiny feathered arrows pointing to each.
I kept myself still and forced myself to breathe gently and carefully. My heart was fluttering. I'd already known what had happened, and thought that I'd accepted it, but it was obvious that I hadn't. Now that it was right here in front of me, it felt like I was falling away inside.
How could you hurt her, James?
'There's so much of it.' Mike had stayed over by the door. 'I hadn't expected it to be like this.'
'No.'
I took a long, careful breath.
'Me neither.'
Then I remembered what Julie said last night: Sarah was really hurt by it. It made me think of something Mike had said in the car on the way over. The silence began ringing gently.
'Mike, I need to ask you something.'
'What?'
'Back in the car,' I said. 'You told me they got together just after I left?'
'Yeah. Not long after.'
I nodded to myself. J's really annoyed at you for running out. That was what Sarah said on the day of Marie's funeral. Six months later, I'd run out on her too.
'Do you think it was because of me?'
'No.'
Mike said it immediately. But he was a fundamentally good person, and I didn't believe him.
When I said I needed to be on my own for a while, he looked doubtful. I wasn't sure whether that was because he would feel bad leaving me alone, or if it was what Julie had said yesterday: that I'd relinquished my rights here, and that it was no longer my place to take responsibility. But I pressed it. And in the end, as he often did, he acquiesced.
He left me the keys. After he was gone, I took another brief look around the dining room, then headed through to the lounge.
I hadn't been in this house for a long time, but at first glance very little had changed. James had thrown out my mother's old furniture, painted the walls and put down new carpets, but it hadn't made much of an impact. Every fitting or piece of furniture was almost the same colour, or in the same place, as I remembered. It was as though he'd been determined to make the place his own but lacked the budget or imagination to start from scratch. So he'd simply replaced things, one by one, and the end result was all but indistinguishable from the start.
Except in a few places - the orange throw over one chair; the half-burnt candle stubs on the mantelpiece - where I could see Sarah's influence had been beginning to take hold.
I sat down on the settee and put my face in my hands.
You can go mad trying to disentangle the threads of cause and effect and work out where the blame lies. I think that's what happened to me after Marie's death: I looked at them hard, and when you do that it's never too difficult to pick out your own strands. Not just the ones that are there, but all the ones that aren't. The things you failed to do, and the ways you let someone down.
So I sat there on James's settee for a long time, looking hard at the threads. It was impossible to know anything for sure, because I hadn't been here, but that only made it worse. I thought of a hand stretching out for help, and finding nobody reaching back to touch it.
And eventually, I came to a decision. I rubbed my face, slapped my hands down onto my legs, then went out into the corridor and stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at the landing above. It was grey and dead up there.
No, I thought, I wasn't here. I didn't know what happened. So maybe the first thing I needed to do was learn.
* * *
Chapter Ten
I took it slowly. Starting at the top of the house, there were three bedrooms and a bathroom. There was nothing obvious to see in the latter, so I focused my attentions on the others.
What had once been my mother's old room had been transformed into a makeshift gym. James had stripped the carpets off the floorboards and bolted mirrors up along one wall. There was an Olympic weight bench at one side, and a punch bag at the other. The top was moulded into the rough shape of a man's torso: a head, large shoulders and then a stocky body tapering down to a spring.
When we were younger, my brother and I had both boxed a little, although we were no good at it for opposite reasons: James wanted to hit people too often and too hard, while I never had much fondness for it at all. I'd always liked plain bag-work - it blew away the cobwebs - but Marie hadn't wanted one in our old house because the walls shook and the noise frightened her.
This one here was cracked at the neck
. My brother had always swung wide and hard. I jabbed it lightly once, and it creaked back and forth while I glanced around. The room was mostly empty, but I noticed there were actually two sets of boxing gloves over by the radiator: a black pair and a smaller, pink set. So it wasn't only James. Sarah had been working out in here too.
They'd been sleeping in what had been my brother's room when we were growing up. It was much smaller than my mother's, but maybe he'd felt more at home in here. His childhood showed through on the walls. There were still pale Blu-Tack stains visible on the old paint from where he'd had posters up as a boy. Since moving in, he'd added a badly fitted wardrobe and drawer arrangement that ran the length of one wall. It left barely enough room for the double bed, with two small cabinets at either side.
All right, then.
I started searching, without any real clue what I was looking for. A diary, perhaps? Some kind of note saying 'why I did it'? I didn't know - the only thing I was sure of was that I felt driven to try, perhaps to make some kind of amends, but even just for peace of mind. If I really was responsible in some way, the least I could do now was not run away from it.
So I went through the wardrobes and slid my hand into the piles of clothes, ruffling through the socks in the drawers until my fingers scraped the wood at the bottom. No hidden papers beneath. The cabinet to the right of the bed was obviously Sarah's, but there was nothing interesting inside. Bags of cotton wool, a box of hair dye, a spare pack of contraceptive pills. Nothing else.
Finally, I walked into my old bedroom.
Because I was the youngest, it was the smallest in the house, and looking around now I found it hard to imagine I'd ever fit in here, even as a small boy. Either James or Sarah had transformed it into a makeshift office and even that was cramped. Where my single bed had once been, there was now a desk, with a sleek hard drive resting underneath, amidst a coil of black cables. The shelves above were filled with books and yellow lever-arch files.
