Captured

by Neil Cross

  He and Jonathan slept curled up on the hardened, oil-poisoned soil. They woke every half hour and carried more wood to the bonfire, stoking it, keeping it hot. Then they lay down and curled back up and went to sleep.

  At dawn it began to drizzle and the remains of the fire, still cracking and popping, began to hiss. They woke to see its charcoal and ashes, the dead branches and blackened earth. In its centre, the darkened skull of Paul had burst. Fragments of jaw and teeth, a shattered grin. Ulna, shoulder blade. Feet on incomplete legs.

  Kenny doused the bonfire with water from the blue bucket. It hissed and steamed in the morning drizzle. Bone fragments cracked.

  Not far from the cooling bonfire, Kenny lay out a blue tarpaulin, weighing down the edges with carburettors and hand-sized rocks. Then he used the new garden fork and the gardening gloves to drag the burned bones from the bonfire on to the tarpaulin.

  He gathered the fragments of skull and jawbone. With needle-tip pliers, he separated the teeth from the skull. It took surprising physical force. The bone fragments radiated their baked-in heat through the gardening gloves. Kenny had to keep putting them down. But eventually he stood, rattling the teeth in his gloved hand like dice, and walked to the edge of his land.

  He scattered the teeth over the brook. They plopped one by one like heavy rain into the cold clear water.

  He returned to the remains, putting on the plastic goggles he hadn’t worn for five years, since the last time he used spray paint. Kneeling, he used the short-handled sledge-hammer to shatter the oddments of skull. Then he pulverized the remaining fragments into smaller splinters of bone and blackened meat and tendon. The spine and the hips were hard work. He didn’t know that he sniffed and wept as he worked, on his knees, bringing the hammer down. Bone chips cut his brow and his cheek. He was lucky to be wearing the goggles.

  He gathered the pieces into a heavy-duty garden sack. When that was done, he used a broom to sweep bone debris to the centre of the tarpaulin, then a dustpan and brush to get the debris into the sack.

  While he remembered, he washed the dustpan and brush in the stand pipe outside.

  He returned to the tarpaulin and sealed the garden sack. Then he mummified it with duct tape. When that was done, he slipped the refuse sack inside a second refuse sack, sealed it, then slipped it into a third, a fourth.

  He was left with a bulky, airtight bundle. He tucked it under his arm and took it into the cottage and down the hall, to the last bedroom.

  Jonathan had used the crowbar to lever up some of the bare floorboards, exposing the grave-smelling crawl-space beneath. When Kenny entered with the bundle Jonathan stood at its edge, waiting.

  Without saying a word, Kenny clambered down into the crawlspace and crouched in its chill. Down here, the soil was alive with worms and pale grubs.

  Jonathan passed him a trowel and Kenny lowered himself into the darkness.

  He waited, crouching under the low floor, until Jonathan had squeezed the package between the gap in the floorboards. Then Kenny slithered to the dark centre of the crawl-space, dragging the package behind him. It wasn’t far, but it was awkward and cold and damp, and it took a long time.

  He was out of breath when he reached the centre of the darkness beneath his house. The air smelled rich with soil.

  On his hands and knees, the damp floorboards an inch or two above his head, Kenny worked with the trowel. He scooped out a shallow grave, one cupful at a time. His back hurt and his arms hurt - his neck hurt worst of all because he was digging on his knees, hunched over himself.

  He didn’t speak. If he’d heard his voice echoing down here, he’d have had to leave this awful place, squirming faster and faster towards the pale oblong of sunlight. He’d never have gathered the courage to come back down.

  Kenny rolled the bundle of bones into the hole.

  It was too shallow.

  His heart was light and fast with exertion and anxiety. He ignored the dirt and the cobwebs in his hair and the pain in his lower back and his cramping thighs, the horrible dank blackness. He dug deeper. His hands sweated in the gardening gloves.

  At length, he dragged the package into the hole. Then he used his hands to heap earth upon it, and the flat side of the trowel to compact the earth as well he could.

  Then Kenny dragged himself back to the light.

  Jonathan squatted, offering a hand to help Kenny out of the hole.

  Kenny stood in the last bedroom, bathed in rainy sunlight with cobwebs and grave dirt in his hair, gasping like a fish.

  Jonathan told him to go and sit down. Kenny sat in the doorway as Jonathan replaced the floorboards, nailing them in place. He used a rag to massage shoe polish into the new, ashen splits in the dark aged wood.

  And then it was done. Kenny had made someone disappear; created an absence from a presence.

  He had made the opposite of a portrait.

  He was spent. He showered, massaging his scalp with trembling hands.

  They sat on the sofa and tried to eat. Neither of them could manage it.

  On the news, Kenny saw Pat’s caravan.

  Jonathan said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Kenny. He saw the fire engines and the police cars and the onlookers and the skeleton of the burned caravan and he remembered how Pat had held his hand as they stood watching the pier burn.

  He thought of the spray of blood on Paul Sugar’s monolithic brow.

  He put down his knife and fork. They made a bright domestic sound in the blue darkness.

  He went to the kitchen and washed the plate and the knife and fork under cold running water. Then he dried the plate and put it down on the drainer. Then he wept.

  52

  Kenny woke Jonathan at 4 a.m.

  They walked outside amid the sounds of the placid night; the cool before the warm morning.

  Jonathan wore Kenny’s baseball cap. He sat in the passenger seat of the Combi.

  Kenny drove.

  They stopped five miles outside Bath, at the south-eastern edge of an arable field called Round Hill Tyning. The field’s centre, dark against the field of stars, rose in a gentle swell.

  Kenny sat there with his arms crossed over the steering wheel, looking at it.

  Jonathan said, ‘Is this it?’

  ‘This is it.’

  Kenny and Jonathan stepped out of the Combi and closed the doors, too loud in the silent morning. They climbed the low fence into the dew-wet field.

  They walked for a long time in silence, climbing the hill spur as the sun began to rise.

  At the top was the Long Barrow, a Neolithic tomb: a hundred feet long and ten feet high, made of blue flint and local granite. The entrance to the underworld was marked with a fossilized ammonite.

  They looked down on the village, half a mile away. They were breathing hard with the short exertion.

  Kenny said, ‘What will you do?’

  Jonathan huddled in the borrowed clothes, too small for him, and said: ‘Tell them I don’t remember.’

  ‘They won’t believe you.’

  ‘They’ll have to.’

  ‘Your confession. On tape

  ‘You beat it out of me. Whoever you were.’

  Kenny nodded. ‘It won’t be easy. Keeping up a lie that big.’

  Jonathan said nothing. He just turned, facing Kenny.

  Here, on the high hill, looking down at that little village, Kenny felt close to him – as if they were brothers returned from a distant war. They had lost the same thing.

  Jonathan said, ‘What will you do?’

  Kenny shrugged.

  And that was it – there was nothing to say. Jonathan began to trudge down the other side of that limestone mound, heading for the village. He looked like the ghost of a tinker.

  Kenny watched him until he was halfway down the hill. Then Jonathan turned, looking up at him. He had to call out to be heard, even in the quiet of the morning. He said, ‘Did you have a nickname? When you were a kid?’

  �
��Yes,’ said Kenny.

  ‘Was it “Happy”?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kenny. The strength had gone from his legs.

  ‘She said you helped her,’ said Jonathan. ‘She said you were very little. You were shorter than her, and you smelled funny. She said you were a little gentleman. Those were her words.’

  Kenny blinked.

  He said, ‘Thank you.’

  The sun was rising now, over the barrow which was an ancient burial chamber and a kind of womb, too: a womb for the dead. Jonathan walked towards the little village, and Kenny knew he would never see his face again.

  Jonathan came to the wet edge of the field and climbed the wire fence. Through the low morning mist, he limped down a country road, heading for the village of Wellow.

  He’d passed the church and the war memorial when he heard an approaching car. Soon, a spectral form came at him like a muscular fish through murky water.

  There was a snarl as the unseen driver nudged the accelerator. A silver-grey Audi parted the mist.

  The driver, a curly-haired young man in a suit and Windsor knot, saw Jonathan – this raggedy man, wild-eyed, bruised black and shambling.

  Jonathan hobbled to the centre of the road, waving his arms above his head and shouting.

  The driver hit the brakes. The road was wet. He lost control. The Audi coasted laterally towards Jonathan, whose arms stopped waving when he saw what was happening.

  A car skidding. A crazy man with his arms raised, alone on a country road. Behind him the milk white sky and the brown field, some crows, the sunrise.

  53

  Kenny packed a bag with some trousers, T-shirts, underwear, books, his medication. Then he walked round the cottage one more time. The air was heavy with Paul Sugar’s presence and Jonathan Reese’s absence.

  He locked the windows and the door and slipped the key under the boulder by the wheelie bin. Mary would know it was there.

  He tossed his rucksack and one large box into the back of the Combi, then got behind the wheel. He dug in his pocket and pulled out the list. It was balled up and tatty so he flattened it on his lap.

  He found a biro in the glovebox and drew a line through Callie Barton’s name. So the list read:

  Mary

  Mr Jeganathan

  Thomas Kintry

  Callie Barton

  Now he saw that the only name remaining uncrossed was the only name that really mattered.

  He scrunched up the list and shoved it back into his pocket. It was meaningless, just a piece of paper – but he wanted to dispose of it far from the ground upon which Paul Sugar had trod before vanishing from the world.

  He started the engine and drove away.

  Desmond Cale agreed to meet him for coffee at 6.30 a.m., so it was still early when he got to Mary’s place.

  Kenny waited until she opened the curtains and saw the Combi parked outside.

  She came to the door, still in her pyjamas.

  Kenny got out of the Combi, carrying a taped-up cardboard box. He limped to the open door of the pastel-coloured house on the steep hill.

  ‘Is it too early?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

  The kids were eating breakfast. They screamed and set aside their plates when they saw Kenny. Kenny knelt and put down the box, accepting their hugs, the fine smell of them.

  When Kenny stood, there was Stever in a pair of stripy pyjama trousers and a washed-out Futurama T-shirt.

  Kenny and Stever hugged, slapped each other’s backs. Stever’s beard tickled Kenny’s face as he whispered in Kenny’s ear, private but unembarrassed: ‘We love you, mate.’

  When Kenny looked at Mary, she had tears in her eyes. Then she hugged him.

  Stever mumbled something about cleaning teeth and getting dressed and ushered the kids from the room.

  Mary said, ‘You look so tired.’

  ‘I’m okay. I’m fine.’

  ‘Thanks for coming round.’

  ‘I can’t stay long.’

  ‘Yes you can. What’s this?’ She tapped the box with her toe.

  ‘In a minute.’ He touched her face, her skin smooth and alive. He said, ‘I wanted you to know, I’m leaving the cottage to you and Stever.’

  She shook her head, once. ‘I don’t want to have this conversation.’

  ‘You need to listen to what I’m saying, okay? It’s not a holiday cottage. It’s in a mess. As soon as it’s yours, I want you to take out a little mortgage on it. Not much. Just temporary.’

  ‘Stop saying this. I don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘Spend what you borrow from the bank by renovating the place. Get the cars removed from the back yard, get the outbuildings torn down. That’ll cost a few thousand. Get the back yard turfed over. Tidy up the hedges at the bottom by the brook and put up a new fence. Inside, it’s all right, structurally. You’ll need to re-sand the floors, get the place repainted, refit the bathroom a bit, do something to the kitchen. And then you sell it, okay?’

  ‘I really don’t want to have this conversation. There’s no need for it. Not yet.’

  ‘Yes, there is. I need you to understand. I don’t care if you get less than you might have, two years ago. I want it sold and gone. It’s not a happy place. It’s not a good place.’

  ‘Kenny . . .’ She held his face in both hands and kissed his lips. ‘Shhh. Please. Shhhh.’

  He disengaged. They looked at each other. He gave her the box.

  It was light.

  She sniffed and peeled back the tape. Inside the box were the portraits Aled had made of Kenny as a child.

  He said, ‘I didn’t know what else to do with them.’

  Mary flicked through pictures of Happy Drummond, this little boy he’d been. Her tears spotted on to the paper, soaked in. They brought the pictures back to life, gave them value.

  She sucked a breath through her teeth, wiped at her tears with the heel of a hand, then put down the box and kissed his cheek. ‘I love you.’

  He smiled and didn’t say it. He just felt it, and feeling it made him stronger.

  They crowded in the door to say goodbye – Mary and Stever and Daisy and Otis. They waved and smiled, pretending this parting was not what they all knew it to be, and Kenny drove away.

  54

  The impact of the car shattered Jonathan’s hip and leg and wrist. The paramedics raced him under blues and twos to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, where he lay sedated but conscious, saline and morphine drips feeding into his arm.

  The police came to see him, but he couldn’t talk. His family came to see him, too. He was aware of them crowding the side of the bed – his mum and dad, Ollie and Becks.

  He kept his eyes closed, because he didn’t want to talk yet. But even pretending to be unconscious, he could detect a certain stiffness between Becks and Ollie, and he supposed he knew what lay at its core.

  He didn’t mind. Given the circumstances, it had probably been inevitable.

  He wasn’t a jealous man, not any more. Once upon a time he had been: he’d paid the price for it.

  Jealousy had led him to suffocate Caroline Reese in bed with her pillow, then drag her out of the house in a composting sack and into the back of his van.

  The week before, Ollie had given a quote on landscaping the grounds of a mansion refurb just outside Yate. Thinking about this saved Jonathan. He knew that no chain of evidence connected him to that unfinished place; just a couple of calls to Ollie’s mobile from the client’s mobile, two calls out of hundreds, maybe thousands.

  He drove her out there under cover of darkness and buried her in the muddy hollow that soon would become a swimming pool. She was there now, staring up through the soil.

  Two years ago, the owner of the mansion had gone bankrupt. Since then, the property had changed hands a couple of times. It always made him feel strange, to think of families swimming in the pool, the shadows of their scissoring legs passing over Caroline’s empty eyes.

  He’d seen thos
e eyes behind Kenny’s, sometimes. She seemed most present in those moments when Kenny went blank – a separate intelligence, staring out through a borrowed face like living eyes in an old portrait. But she was gone now.

  Becks took Jonathan’s blistered and bandaged hand, kissed his bruised knuckles, brushed her lips along his hairline, whispered in his ear: ‘I love you.’

  Jonathan heard but didn’t speak. He just floated there, halfawake – scared to sleep in case he should dream and mutter aloud the things he knew.

  This horror would follow him through the years, a chill undercurrent in the warm new marriage he was about to make with Becks, a woman who loved him, and whom he forgave. But the dread would fade, then it would pass.

  Everything does, eventually.

  55

  Kenny crossed a long bridge and drove all day and much of the night. He parked the Combi in the grassy dunes at the edge of a far beach.

  He woke with the sun, chilly and stiff in his bones. He felt clean and good.

  He opened the Combi door and stepped into a brisk morning. The sand was rough on the tender soles of his feet.

  He cast off his T-shirt and felt the air on him. Then he bolted for the sea. He skipped over green-black tresses of kelp. Here the sand was darker and harder: he left shallow footprints in his wake. They filled with cloudy water and faded away – the marks of his passage on the face of the earth rescinded behind him.

  He sprinted into the ocean and cried out at its shocking cold, the brilliant life of it. He raced forward until the foaming water was chest high and seaweed tugged at his ankles like siren hands, caressing and withdrawing.

  He ducked his head into the spume and came up soaked and laughing; his white hair in spikes, the salt stinging his eyes.

  He took a moment to turn in the water and look back at the Combi – waiting at the edge of the beach with great forbearance, keys dangling in the ignition, a note on the driver’s seat.

  Then Kenny turned. He aimed west of the sun and east of the moon, and began to swim.

  Read on for an exclusive peek of THE CALLING, the brand new novel from Neil Cross introducing Detective John Luther, coming in March 2012.