by Neil Cross
Dennis couldn’t show his face at the golf club any more, and was ashamed by how much that bothered him.
Becks could almost hear him saying it: ‘Let’s not go dragging all that up again.’
But he surprised her. He said: ‘You go to the papers, love. Make them coppers look like the shitters they are.’
Later that afternoon, Becks met Chris Bollinger in the park.
He didn’t look or act like her idea of a journalist: he was a large, diffident young man in jeans and T-shirt, soft-spoken. He bowed his head as she told him everything – quietly at first, then quicker and quicker and with growing zeal until her nails dug into her palms and her voice grew strangled with outrage.
Chris Bollinger made occasional compassionate noises. He interrupted only now and again, to check a quote or seek clarification on a point of fact. But mostly, he just let her talk.
33
Feeling that time was growing very short, Kenny went to the drawer which contained Aled’s portraits of him.
He owned fewer than ten photographs of himself as a child – some baby photos, a couple of faded, scallop-edged colour snapshots of a grinning toddler in socks and sandals. All had been taken by his mother.
But his father had left him dozens of portraits: on canvas, on paper, on napkins, in the margin of pages torn from foxed, Morocco-bound copies of La Morte d’Arthur.
Aled’s sketches were frantic with love and the terror of loss, as if he feared the passage of each radiant moment. He sketched Kenny while he ate, painted him while he slept, drew his profile while he read the Dandy or watched Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
When Kenny was gone, these pictures would become no more than items of passing curiosity. A stranger in a junk shop might flick through them and idly wonder what had became of this unknown, beloved child.
Perhaps Kenny was wrong about Callie Barton. Perhaps love just faded from the world like baked-in heat from a stone.
He couldn’t look at the pictures any more. He packed them into a cardboard box and sealed it with Sellotape.
There were no paintings of Aled to pack away.
Kenny had painted him – his mad father, babbling like there were cities inside him, great metropolises, libraries, hospitals, barracks, vast cathedrals.
When Aled grew depressed, the talking stopped and he became sullen, heavy-limbed, beetle-browed. He’d painted Aled like this, too – but not until much later, when Kenny was nearly a man and becoming confident in his technical skills.
The first of these paintings, in burnt umber and swirls of inky black, Kenny called ‘Still, Life’. Aled had wept when he saw it – his blue-black eyes with coal-red centres, his swirling orange hair, his grey beard.
That night, for the first time in many years, Kenny dreamed of Aled’s wild, bearded face with its burning eyes and its great blade of nose.
And he dreamed of that lost painting – taken to the woods the day of Aled’s funeral. Doused with petrol, burned, stamped on, wept over. Left to the earth.
Kenny woke twitchy, anxious and nauseated, a dry metallic taste at the back of his throat. The fragile scent of distant burning tyres.
Outside, the birds sang.
He took the list from the back pocket of his jeans and read it over. It seemed to belong to another time, like an artefact in a folk museum:
Mary
Mr Jeganathan
Thomas Kintry
Callie Barton
He could find no meaning in it; he’d forgotten Thomas Kintry and Mr Jeganathan. He’d forgotten Mary. There was only Jonathan Reese’s defiance – and Callie Barton, whom he remembered with intense and growing clarity, as if he were moving towards her in time, not further away.
He replaced the list in his pocket and dressed, his father’s face hovering on the edge of his consciousness like an after-image of the sun.
In the last bedroom, Jonathan awaited the ritual of the morning -the gentle intonation of her name, the appeal for confession, the promise of deliverance.
It was still early. Outside, the air was crisp but in here it was twilight and suffocating, like a birdcage under a cover.
Kenny was wearied of the ritual. ‘I don’t want to hurt you any more. Please don’t make me. Let me put an end to this.’
‘I already told you a thousand times. I can’t tell you what I don’t know.’
Kenny crouched down in the corner. ‘How did you meet?’
‘Me and Caroline?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it really matter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if someone remembers something, it’s not really over.’
Jonathan considered him for a long moment. ‘We just met, like people do.’
‘At a pub? A club?’
‘At a dinner party.’
‘Where?’
‘In Bath. We were at one end of the table. We got on. She was funny.’
‘Funny how?’
‘I don’t know. Just funny. She made me laugh.’
‘What did she say, to make you laugh?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, what sort of thing did you talk about?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Politics? Music? TV?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘How can you not remember?’
‘We were flirting; it didn’t matter what we talked about.’
‘I remember every word she ever spoke to me.’
‘When? Every word she spoke to you when?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Kenny thought of his class photograph: Callie Barton in the front row, bottom right. He said: ‘What did it feel like?’
‘What?’
‘Killing her.’
‘Oh,’ said Jonathan. ‘Right.’
Kenny didn’t like his tone. He turned to stare.
Jonathan said, ‘I used to get mail from people like you. Always asking the same question: what was it like? What exactly did I do, in what order? What did she look like, sound like, smell like? Was she naked? Did she piss herself? Did she gurgle? Did I fuck the body?’
‘Shut up.’
‘I thought you wanted to know everything.’
‘Not that. Shut up.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Nobody.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Are you going to kill me?’
‘Not if I don’t have to.’
‘But I can’t say what you want to hear.’
‘Then whatever happens is your fault. It’s out of my hands. It’s up to you.’
Struggling with anger and disgust, Kenny drove to the village shop to buy the things he needed: bread and semi-skimmed milk and microwave porridge. At the counter, he queued behind a young man in a suit who was buying cigarettes and breath mints.
Kenny handed his wire basket to the shop assistant, who passed the bread over the barcode scanner and bagged it in a Spar carrier.
Near the till were folded copies of the Evening Post. Kenny glanced at them. His heart stopped.
He reached out, picking up a newspaper and paying for it with change.
He walked to the Combi with the Spar carrier in one hand and the newspaper tucked under his arm. Behind the wheel, he unfolded the newspaper.
On the front page was a photograph of Jonathan Reese. He looked drawn, but younger.
The large headline read: ‘MURDER QUIZ MAN DISAPPEARS’.
34
Paul Sugar plonked himself down into a creaking seat in the far corner of the empty café. He opened the morning edition of the Bristol Evening Post.
Above the fold, he saw the headline: ‘MURDER QUIZ MAN DISAPPEARS’ and scanned the story with practised disinterest:
MISSING WOMAN’S DEPRESSED HUSBAND VANISHES
POLICE DENY BEING SLOW TO SEARCH
The husband of missing Bath woman Caroline Reese – whose disappearance remains unso
lved – has also vanished.
Jonathan Reese, a landscape gardener, has not been seen since 27 July when a family friend found the front door of his home open and his evening meal half-eaten.
Mr Reese was questioned at length by Avon and Somerset police after his wife disappeared from their family home in June 2004, but was later released without charge.
Mr Reese’s current partner Rebecca Devlin, 33, a travel consultant from Yate, said Mr Reese has been depressed since his landscape gardening business ran into financial trouble late last year, and she fears for his safety.
Ms Devlin told the Post that ‘the police don’t seem to care’ about searching for him, a charge Bath police deny.
A police spokeswoman said that Mr Reese’s case had been treated in the same way as every other missing person case.
‘We have not been slow to react. But we do need to wait a reasonable period before committing police time and resources to mounting a search,’ she said.
Paul got the point, moved on.
His fleet blue eyes darted beneath the fold: ‘Four Injured in Bedminster Bus Crash. Bristol Man’s Extra Pint Leads to Court Fine.’
Over the page was a competition to win tickets to see We Will Rock You, which was coming to the Bristol Hippodrome. Then Paul got the feeling.
He couldn’t describe it, other than to say it was a change in texture near the back of his head. It was the mild agitation he felt just before getting an idea.
He reread the rules of the We Will Rock You competition, wondering what he might have seen and not seen.
A picture of Ben Elton was saying: ‘We Will Rock You isn’t just a title, it’s a promise!’
Paul looked at that for a long time. Then he flicked to the front page and worked backwards.
‘Four Injured in Bedminster Bus Crash. Bristol Man’s Extra Pint Leads to Court Fine.’
‘MURDER QUIZ MAN DISAPPEARS’.
*
Paul recalled sitting in this very café with Pat Maxwell, who’d begun to smell cabbagy and old. She’d been offering to pay him a pittance to find some woman.
And this man, this disappeared Murder Quiz Man, was the husband of the woman Pat Maxwell had asked him to find.
Paul stared at the story until his soy latte was cold.
He had a feeling.
Then he drank the latte with a scowl of disgust – waste not, want not. He folded the paper, popped it under his beefy arm, and went to work.
35
Kenny stood in the last bedroom with the newspaper in his hand.
‘You’re ill,’ Jonathan said. ‘You don’t know it, but you are. You go into a trance. You’ve been stood there for ten minutes.’
Kenny looked down at the newspaper. He knew that Jonathan could see the headline: ‘MURDER QUIZ MAN DISAPPEARS’.
Jonathan said, ‘They’re looking for me. I told you they would.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course it matters. The best thing you can do now is let me go.’
‘I’ll let you go when you admit what you did. Just tell me where she is. Where did you bury her?’
But Jonathan brushed the question aside. ‘Look, I don’t know where I am. I don’t even know your name. So you could drive me somewhere. Put me in the boot so I can’t see anything, no landmarks or whatever. Drop me off somewhere. I’ll give you fifteen minutes to get away, then go somewhere and call the police. I’ll tell them I’ve lost my memory. They can’t make me tell them where I’ve been. Not if I say I can’t remember. They can’t make me.’
Kenny looked at him, tilting his head.
Jonathan began to shout. ‘Come on! Jesus, this has gone much too far. And here’s a way out of it! I’ll never say a word. Not a word. I swear to God. Do you think I’m keen to talk about this, after what I’ve already been through?’
‘What you’ve been through?’
‘They ruined my life – the newspapers, the TV, the police. You’ve got no idea what these people do to you. And after that, the crank phone calls, the death-threats . . .’
Kenny waited until he was sure Jonathan was finished. Then he said: ‘They’re not going to find you.’
Jonathan nodded eagerly, as if agreeing. But he said: ‘In ordinary circumstances, okay – maybe you’d have a point. But it’s all over the newspapers now. They’ve got to look for me; it’s a PR thing. Bad headlines. So they’ll do a bit of house-to-house. Someone must’ve heard the window breaking, looked out, seen me chasing you. Maybe someone saw a camper van, a fight in the street. They might not have put two and two together yet. But a copper hears ‘the night Jonathan disappeared, there was a fight in the street between two men, outside a VW Combi, not far from Jonathan’s house’ – all they do, they go to CCTV. CCTV’s everywhere. You can’t move for it. How many Combis were in Bath that night? Half a dozen, tops? How many came within half a mile of my house? Not many. They’ll have your number plate in half an hour.’
Kenny stood in the doorway, thinking about this.
Jonathan watched him. Then he said, ‘They might have the number already. So the best thing you can do is let me go. Just let me go, and let this all be over.’
Kenny left the room, twisting the newspaper in his hand. He stood in the kitchen, looking through the window.
Then he put the twisted-up paper down on the work surface. Its edges darkened and softened as it soaked up some residual water.
Kenny went to his studio and found some writing paper and a biro. He supposed it would be possible for the police to get his fingerprints off the paper, but it didn’t matter. His prints weren’t on file, and time was short.
He walked to the last bedroom and dropped the notepad on to Jonathan’s lap. Then he cut Jonathan’s right hand free.
Jonathan said, ‘What’s this?’
Kenny stuck the scissors in his back pocket. ‘I need you to write a suicide note.’
‘Not on your life.’
Kenny put the pen in Jonathan’s lap. ‘Just write the note.’
‘No.’
‘Write the note.’
‘No.’
‘Write the fucking note!’
‘No.’
Kenny took the scissors from his back pocket and stabbed Jonathan in the arm with them.
Jonathan screamed.
Kenny yelled: ‘Shut up.’
But Jonathan kept screaming, bound to the kitchen chair by both feet and one wrist, bleeding from his upper arm.
Kenny held the scissors to Jonathan’s eye and hissed through his teeth. ‘Shut up.’
Jonathan shut up. He was breathing through his nose, sharp shallow breaths.
Then he began to struggle. Kenny moved the scissors so their point indented the delicate skin at the base of Jonathan’s eye socket.
Kenny knelt, took a cable tie from his pocket and rebound Jonathan’s wrist to the chair.
In the kitchen, he washed his bloody hands. When he was done he stood at the sink, letting them drip dry. He stood there until the pandemonium in the last bedroom grew louder, then louder still, and finally fell quiet.
Kenny took Jonathan’s wallet and mobile phone from the kitchen drawer, put on some yellow kitchen gloves and cleaned them with kitchen surface wipes. He gathered up Jonathan’s shoes, socks and shirt and put everything into a carrier bag.
He stuffed the carrier into his rucksack. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do. Then he returned to the last bedroom.
Jonathan began to tremble.
Kenny strapped him to the chair with duct tape, reserving four inches for a gag. When Jonathan was mummified to the chair, Kenny slipped a white cotton pillowcase over his head.
Kenny watched him squirm like a worm on a pin, panting with fear and claustrophobia. He wished this wasn’t happening. Then he looked at his watch. He had the sense that time had passed.
He closed and locked the last bedroom door.
Kenny stopped off in Bristol to withdraw two hundred pounds from an ATM. It put him into overdraf
t.
Then he visited a Carphone Warehouse, buying the cheapest pay-as-you-go mobile they had, cash. He knew the phone could be traced to this shop – and that he would appear on CCTV buying it. But it wouldn’t matter.
In the glass arcade outside St Nicholas’s Market he set up the phone, programming a single number into its memory.
Then he stuffed the packaging into the carrier bag it had come in, dumped the carrier bag in a bin on the way back to the Combi, and drove to Bath.
He felt that he was returning after a long absence. Smiling at the wheel in this fragile sunshine, he felt wistful for the person he’d been, the last time he was here – a man with no knife wound to his ribs, no hooded captive in his house.
He remembered parking the Combi at the campsite with the clean toilet block, having a lager and lime at the bench by the trout stream. In the sunset, the tourists had murmured and the midges had swirled like distant birds, and it seemed to Kenny that he’d been happy then.
But he hadn’t been happy. He’d just had a sense of purpose, which wasn’t the same thing. Now that sense of purpose had become something else; he didn’t know what to call it.
He drove in circles until he found a decent parking spot about half a mile west of Jonathan Reese’s house.
Slinging the rucksack over his shoulder, he walked until he identified a path that would lead him once again to the Kennet and Avon Canal.
He tramped along the lonely towpath, watching iridescent dragonflies hover-skip across the surface of the water.
Once, because his nerves were strained, he almost cried out in shock as a kingfisher swooped low and fast on the edge of his vision.
Just past the lock, the canal took a long curve. It was sheltered by an ancient hawthorn hedge. This was the right spot.
Kenny stopped and took several long breaths.
He waited.
Satisfied no one was coming, he slipped off the rucksack, moving quickly now. From the front pocket he removed the yellow kitchen gloves and put them on. Then he unzipped the main compartment.
From it, he removed Jonathan’s shirt. It was filthy with blood and mud and God knew what else, but it would do. He folded the shirt like they did on display tables in shops. Then he lay it flat near the roots of the hawthorn.
