by Ryan Casey
‘Dean,’ Gran said, nudging him.
He looked up like a disoriented puppy, glancing round at us all.
Gran nudged him again and pointed over towards the telly. ‘Your phone.’
Granddad stared at her for a moment before opening his mouth in realisation. He leapt up from his chair and bombed towards the other side of the room, brushing the crumbs off his jumper. He picked up his phone and stared at the screen for a moment before flicking his eyes up in my direction.
The phone continued to ring. Gran gritted her jaw.
Granddad pressed the button. ‘Hello? Yes, yes—don’t ring here at this time. I’m not interested in your… in your double-glazing. Goodbye.’
Gran shook her head as Adam’s cheeks flushed in embarrassment.
‘Just a salesperson,’ Granddad said, looking at me in particular.
I nodded. ‘Just a salesperson?’
He stared back at me and smiled before tucking into his next biscuit.
I knew he was lying because I’d heard my dad’s voice on the other end of the line. I swallowed the lump in my throat with another biscuit and didn’t talk much for the rest of the evening.
Chapter Eleven
Although it rained the next morning, it was a rather warm and sunny afternoon. Adam and I were out in the garden. The birds sang and children played on the beach somewhere in the distance.
I could hear the faint pattering of a dog’s feet against the road, but I didn’t pay much attention to the sound. Adam was showing me how he could do ten keepy-ups with the football.
‘But it doesn’t count if you let the ball hit the floor,’ I said.
Adam went a strange shade of red. ‘Who says?’
‘Well, everyone knows…’ I stopped speaking as I noticed Adam gawking at something behind me. His jaw kept on falling towards the ground. I turned round to see what he was looking at.
Carla ran towards us, and Adam sprinted back at her. ‘Carla! Oh, Carla, I—Carla, where’ve you been, girl? Silly girl, you silly girl.’
Adam cuddled her as she licked his face and put her paws all over him. I wanted to feel joy. I wanted to be able to be excited—and I wanted to be relieved to be reunited with my dog, our dog. I wanted to be blown away that Gran’s faith was right all along, but I wasn’t sure if Adam had missed what I’d seen. Carla’s rescuer stood with his hands in his beige jacket pocket, his glasses dangling on the end of his nose, a smile of victory across his face. He stared straight into my eyes and winked.
‘Told you she’d find her way back to you, boys,’ Donald said.
Gran and Granddad joined us outside to see what the fuss was all about.
‘Oh! You came back! Oh you came back, you good girl,’ Gran said. Donald stood tall. Gran ran over to him and wrapped her arms around him.
‘Thank you so, so much,’ she said. ‘We thought she’d gone. We thought you’d gone, didn’t we, eh?’ She turned to Carla, who jumped up towards Gran and licked at her face. Donald was Gran’s hero right now. Granddad shook Donald’s hand, and he returned his greeting with a nod of the head. Adam looked at me now, his mouth wide open, and looked back at Donald. Nothing seemed real. I couldn’t get my head around anything. Maybe Donald had stolen Carla. Maybe he had found her. I couldn’t work it out. My mind spun like a malfunctioning Ferris wheel of ideas.
‘You must come in for a brew, Donald,’ Granddad said.
Donald waved his hands and laughed.
‘No, no—we insist. Come in for a brew and eat with us. It’s the least we can do.’
Donald turned towards me. ‘As long as that’s okay with you, boys?’ he asked. His smile twitched at the sides. My hands rattled and a lump grew in my throat.
Gran ushered us inside, giddy with excitement as Carla jumped around.
‘After you, boys,’ Donald said, holding his arm out and leading us into our own caravan.
I felt trapped. First he’d somehow got Granddad on his side with the embrace that day, which seemed like forever ago. They’d laughed and joked together. Was this all a part of his plan? He knew we’d seen him burying the girl. He was playing us around, pulling the strings, like that really freaky puppet show my mum once took me to see, Punch and Judy. He had to be playing us.
My gran put the kettle on and Donald took a seat in our living room. Carla hopped in front of the fire, taking to the spot like she’d never been gone. She was asleep within seconds.
‘She’s bound to be a tired girl,’ Donald said. ‘Who knows where she’s been or what she’s been up to?’ He looked at me again and smiled.
I knew. Adam knew. We didn’t know the specifics, but we didn’t need to. We knew enough.
Gran made us all hot pot. I hated hot pot anyway, but right now I couldn’t even eat all the ice-cream in the world. Swallowing those soggy carrots and potatoes was never an easy feat, but it was worse today. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever eat properly again.
The low hum of the television on mute was ghostlike as we waited for Donald to tell us how he’d come across Carla. Adam and I sat rigid on either side of the table.
‘I was up in the woods. Wandered off the path a bit, ended up at the old caves,’ he said, a speck of carrot wedged between his front teeth. ‘I hadn’t been that way for a while, but I heard a bit of rustling in the trees above. Thought it might be that stag from the other day ‘cause it sounded like it definitely had four legs. Sure enough, old girl comes running towards me.’
Adam’s eyes shot down at his hands as Donald looked in his direction. I struggled to swallow my last forkful of hot pot. I wanted to be sick.
‘I can’t thank you enough, Donald,’ Gran said. ‘With everything going on lately, we didn’t need another upset did we, boys?’ She smiled and turned to us for approval. A weight had been lifted off her shoulders with this rare bit of good news. Maybe Donald had done this and planned it all along to give us something to be happy about. It was an outlandish suspicion, but it made sense. Gran was the happiest I’d seen her in days, pottering about the kitchen, preparing to serve her homemade cheesecake.
‘I just don’t get where she’s been all this time,’ Granddad said. ‘I mean, sure, dogs find their own ways to survive out there, but she’s spoilt rotten, this dog. No way has she made it for five days on her own.’
I turned to Donald, awaiting his response. Granddad’s cheeks went pink. I knew he knew something wasn’t right. I wanted to say something. I needed Donald to slip up.
Donald was cool, tucking into his dessert with composure. ‘If you ask me, she went running off after the stag. Who knows where the stag got to? But y’know, dogs are clever. Maybe Carla waited on the path or something like that. I don’t know.’
‘She looks so healthy, though,’ Granddad said. ‘She certainly doesn’t look malnourished.’
‘Perhaps she ended up in Bareslow. You just never know. Someone could’ve been looking after her.’
I felt the weight of everything bubbling in my body. ‘You.’ I muttered. The bubble of tension burst.
Gran turned to me. I looked up. My cheeks felt warm. Donald frowned at me. Shit. I’d blown our cover.
‘You what, Liam?’ Gran asked.
I felt the lump growing in my throat again. Adam tapped his spoon against his bowl. Everybody’s eyes pierced through me.
‘Thank—thank you. For finding Carla. Thank you.’ I looked up at Donald and smiled before gazing at my hands and scratching at the back of them. Adam stopped banging his spoon, and his shoulders relaxed.
I wondered for a second whether what Donald had said about Carla being looked after was a hint or whether I was looking into it too much. But we couldn’t be complacent. This was a full blown investigation and, as things stood, Donald didn’t seem to suspect us. I started to doubt that he had seen us in the woods that day after all. But what grounds would he have for stealing Carla? It was so confusing. But we had a case, and we would solve it. We had to.
I looked over at Adam as he twirled his spoo
n in his fingers, melted cream sliding down into the bowl. He looked at Donald, but not at his eyes; he inspected his body, his hair, everywhere but his eyes. I didn’t know what Adam was thinking, but I did know it had to be to do with the case. Looking at his body language. Looking for signs.
After a cup of tea, Donald finally left. I felt a sudden lightness as he walked out of the door. He turned round when he reached the end of our drive. ‘I hope I see you boys in the den again soon. I’ve got another chair for you. Bring Emily along too. Not seen her for a while.’
I shuddered when he said Emily’s name. It wasn’t really the way he’d said it, not like some cartoon villain or anything like that. He didn’t whisper it out, while curling his eyebrow upwards, or anything silly. It was just the way her name escaped his mouth. The fact that he knew every little detail about us. He knew about our den and about who we hung around with. He’d even given us stuff: gifts, chairs, company. He’d taken us deep into the woods at night and let us talk to him about mysteries and ghost stories.
If he had killed the girl, I wondered if he’d done it before our trip to the caves. I kept thinking about us sitting around that flashlight, with the moths dancing in the beam, listening to a murderer.
Chapter Twelve
It was 10:00 pm. Adam and I lay with our faces towards the ceiling. We couldn’t bring ourselves to talk. We could only think. I looked up at the place where the spider had built its web the other day. Nothing was to be seen. It had moved on to another place, picking up the pieces of its broken home and moving forward.
Maybe it was underneath one of our beds, waiting to crawl up on our face and tickle at our lips in the night. I scratched my lip, where it had started itching a little with the mere thought, and turned over to face Adam. He stared up, hands behind his head, lying on top of the quilt. A statement of intent that he wasn’t here to sleep—he was here to think.
‘So are we gonna do this, or what?’ I asked.
He had a playful smile on his face. A hunger for mystery. A confidence neither of us had been able to display for a while. ‘You’ve come round,’ he said, keeping his eyes closed.
I bit my lip. ‘Adam, this isn’t the time for joking around, alright? It’s serious.’
Adam raised his head and looked at me. ‘Alright,’ he said, mocking me.
I felt the hairs on my arms begin to rise.
‘I’ve already started planning things while you’ve been moping around,’ he said.
‘And?’
Adam bounced upright and turned to face me. He had a little mischievous grin on his face and tapped his feet against the edge of the bed repeatedly. ‘Right, well we start a full scale investigation into Donald and his life. We ask people close to him or people around here about him, see if they know anything.’ He paused and took a breath. He spoke as if he were reading from a script.
I tried to get a word in, but he carried on. ‘We ask more distant people, too. Perhaps ask some old ladies to see if any rumours have been going around. Maybe even Gran knows something about Donald that we don’t, what with all her gossiping.’
I nodded. Adam was good. I didn’t want to show him I was too enthusiastic about his plans, though. Didn’t want him getting big headed. ‘Maybe Granddad knows something about Donald,’ I said.
Adam rummaged under his bed sheet. He curled his lip and nodded, but I could see he wasn’t really listening. He pulled aside the sheets on his bed to reveal a notepad and paper. He’d been busy writing an ‘Action Plan.’ He’d make a great detective.
I reached over for the plan of action and glanced over it. Adam had thrown several things down, in no real order. In the bottom corner, surrounded by a squiggly line, there was a list of things we knew about Donald.
Beneath the sloppy spelling and dodgy presentation what Adam was getting at was the fact that Donald had been seen burying a body. Underneath this, a proposal: Donald was a killer. Adam had drawn lines off this statement to connect the evidence. So far there was little evidence other than the fact that he was seen burying a girl in the woods. Enough reason for suspicion. Several other similar offshoots were visible, such as ‘We missaw what Donald was burying,’ but these were present just so we knew we had considered all the possible options. We knew what we saw, so the real line of progression was what we knew: Donald buried a dead girl deep in the woods. I felt a shiver crawl down my back. We were doing this, and nothing was going to get in our way. I shook my head at the thought of telling the police. Maybe we could later, but not right now.
‘We’ll spy on him for a day first. That way we can see if he acts weird or anything.’ Adam gestured to where he had written out this point on the paper, clicking his pen.
I felt a knot in my throat. ‘What do you mean, spy on him?’
Adam looked down and rubbed his hands against his arms. He spoke slowly. ‘Well, I figured if we could watch him, maybe follow him or something.’
‘No. No way. It’s too risky, Adam. We can’t go doing anything stupid.’
Adam rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘Cuz, we’ve got to try everything we can. Donald wouldn’t do anything stupid to us. He likes us.’
‘I don’t know, Adam, it’s just… maybe he liked the girl. I don’t know.’
Adam tilted his head from side to side, pondering the thought. ‘Well, how about we interview some people and see what they know about him?’
‘How do we do this without people getting suspicious?’
‘We do jobs for them. Put their rubbish out, tidy their gardens. Then they can’t ignore us, can they?’
Adam made a good point, another example of his fine investigative mind. He may have been young, but he seemed to have mastered a way of blackmailing people and squeezing out the information he wanted when he wanted it. I felt more comfortable doing small favours for information than following Donald.
‘Then, we break into his shed.’
My mouth drooped as I tried to find my voice. ‘Are you sure about that, Ad? It’s a bit risky.’
‘What’s the worst though? We get done for vandalising. We say sorry and we pay the bills. It’ll be fine if we do it sneakily.’
‘I’m more worried about what he’ll do if he catches us,’ I said. ‘Like, Gran and Granddad can pay the bills. I’m more worried that he’s a psychopathic killer who has strangled a girl. Someone who has probably seen us spying in the process of burying her. And probably stole our dog as a crazy plan to win our family over or something.’
Adam nodded again. He slumped back against his bed without saying anything and scanned his action plan, trying to connect some theories together.
I sat back and let my mind race. Adam was probably right. If we were going to investigate, we needed to do it properly, and Donald’s shed was a huge question mark. We’d never been allowed to enter it. We didn’t really think anything of it at the time. Now I wondered how we’d been quite so careless. Here was a man who we’d seen doing something beyond anything we could have possibly imagined with a shed that he kept private. I remembered sitting outside the shed a few weeks ago. Maybe she’d been in that shed all along, right behind us, with Donald waiting for the perfect moment to dispose of her.
He’d stood there smiling as we tried to conjure up mysteries, letting our imaginations run wild like escaped zoo animals. And for all that time, god knows for how long, a dead girl lay a few feet away from us.
But then again, it didn’t smell. Not like it did that day in the woods, the wind pushing the rancid breeze towards our face. I clenched my eyes together and tried not to remember that stench.
After some time, Adam looked up from his action plan. ‘Maybe we should leave looking in the shed for a while and start by asking some people.’
I nodded in affirmation. ‘I think that sounds like a very wise idea, Ad. Worst case scenario, we find proof he killed the girl. Then we can go to the police and prove we solved the mystery.’
A murder mystery, solved by a twelve-year-old and a ten-year-old. Maybe
they’d promote us or put us on some sort of list so that as soon as we were old enough, we’d have a job lined up as special detectives.
Adam slammed his notepad shut. ‘I think we need to go see Donald.’
I paused. ‘Are you mad? What if he knows?’
Adam waited for me to finish, ready to come back at me. ‘We spend a normal day with him. Drop some questions in about Carla. Try to find a link.’
It was risky, and it was dangerous. Maybe Adam was right, though. ‘We do need to tell Gran and Granddad where we’re going,’ I said. ‘We need to be sure they know who we’re with, in case…’
Adam threw his pen towards the bed. ‘Nothing’s going to happen, Liam. We’re gonna do this.’
I nodded. ‘Weird though isn’t it, about Carla? I mean she’s…’ I stopped myself because I realised I was shouting. The floor outside our room creaked. ‘…she’s healthy. She wasn’t even dirty or anything.’
Adam scratched at his cheek. ‘It is weird, yeah. But we need to find out more. We can’t let him distract us, y’know?’
I stared into the light above our heads. ‘Adam, I’m worried about Emily.’ I don’t know where the sentiment came from and, judging by the way Adam furrowed his eyebrows, neither did he.
‘What do you mean? What about her?’ he asked.
What did I mean? It was all just gut feeling. ‘I don’t like the way Donald said her name today. And I know it’s probably nothing, but the bruises she always has, too. Have you seen them?’
Adam shrugged. ‘Everyone gets bruises, don’t they?’
I sighed. ‘I guess so. I just… I don’t know.’
Adam reached his hand over and touched my arm. I looked up at him.
‘Don’t worry about Emily, cuz. She’s got two big, strong men to look after her.’
Chapter Thirteen
