The Shadow Friend

by Alex North

  Carl hadn’t seen it happen, but from what he could gather afterwards, Charlie had begun screaming abuse at Eileen, and then attacked her, pushing her to the floor and starting to beat her. James had stood there for a moment, watching the boy he imagined had been his friend trying to kill his mother. Knowing that he had been betrayed. Understanding that the foundations of his existence had been undermined in a single afternoon.

  And as Charlie continued his attack on Eileen, James picked up a knife.

  When Carl had finished, I sat there in silence for a moment.

  ‘James killed Charlie?’

  Carl nodded.

  ‘You could make an argument that he was acting in self-defence – or at least, protecting his mother. But it went way beyond that. He lost control of himself. I think that everything that had happened – everything he’d learned that day – it all came pouring out in that moment. He was still stabbing Charlie when I came downstairs. I had to wrestle the knife off him.’

  He blinked the memory away.

  ‘Why didn’t you call the police?’ I said.

  ‘I thought about it. But then … well, I made a decision. Standing there, right then, I knew our lives had changed for ever, and I wanted to limit the damage.’ He looked at me suddenly. ‘I love James, you know.’

  I nodded, remembering.

  Like his own son.

  ‘And I knew that he was going to be in real trouble. I had no idea what I was doing, but someone needed to take charge. James was sobbing; Eileen was hysterical. Someone needed to look after them both. So it came down to me. Like it always did.’

  He shook his head and fell silent.

  I waited.

  After a while, he took another deep breath.

  ‘We wrapped Charlie’s body in plastic sheeting, packed up tightly, and stuck it up in the attic, surrounded by boxes and carpets. We cleaned up. And then we waited. We didn’t know what he’d done at that point, and by the time Billy was arrested that evening, it was too late to change anything. We’d hidden the body; we’d tidied the scene. We were all guilty. The police came to talk to us the next day, but they had no reason to suspect us of anything. They never searched the house, or anything like that. I kept waiting for it all to go wrong, but it didn’t. What was left of Charlie was sealed away above us, but, in the end, it was easy to pretend it had all just … gone away.’

  He spread his hands as though he couldn’t quite believe it. He was wrong, though. The three of them might have got away with the crime, but the repercussions of Charlie’s disappearance were still being felt, even now. People were dying because of this secret. What happened that day had stretched its fingers out in the twenty-five years since, and it still had a grip on the world.

  ‘James never really recovered,’ Carl said. ‘He’s had a difficult life. The drinking. Drugs. Eileen and I came into some money, and we moved to be closer to him. He’s always needed someone to look after him.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And I did my best to help. I tried to convince him that what happened had only ever been a bad dream.’ Carl laughed flatly at the irony. ‘Over time, I think he’s come to accept that’s true. He believes that Charlie really did disappear that day. He talks about it all the time. Reinforcing it to himself. He needs that to be what happened so he doesn’t have to remember.’

  I thought about what Amanda had told me.

  ‘Does he talk about it online?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Amanda had believed the user on the forum she mentioned had been encouraging the killers in her hometown. I wondered now if perhaps she’d misinterpreted the messages she’d seen. If it was possible they had been designed not to incite so much as to bolster a belief the user needed to cling to. That Charlie wasn’t dead. That what Carl had just described to me had never really happened.

  None of which answered my original question.

  ‘How was my mother involved?’

  ‘She wasn’t.’ He looked at me. ‘Paul, you have to believe me on that. She had nothing to do with what happened.’

  ‘But?’

  He looked away.

  ‘But it was hard. The guilt. The pressure. And Daphne was my best friend. We really … well. We cared about each other.’

  I thought again of the photograph of the two of them, and then also the conversation I’d overheard as a child.

  You can do so much better, you know?

  The silence that had followed before his reply.

  No. I really can’t.

  By then, of course, my mother and father had been married for years, and Carl had already taken on the responsibility of raising James. At the time, the exchange had not seemed loaded to me, but I was old enough now to imagine a weight to the words and the spaces between them. The rules that had to be followed. The chances not taken. The things left unspoken and the lives unexplored.

  ‘You told her what you’d done?’

  ‘A few years afterwards.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That I’d done the right thing. That nothing good could come from telling the truth. Because she understood I was doing the best for James, and that it was better for it all to be forgotten. And so all these years, she kept it a secret.’

  Yes. That was exactly what my mother must have done. Out of duty, and friendship, and perhaps even lost love. But it had been a burden she had found hard to shoulder. I thought about the red hands in the attic and the newspaper reports she had collected. She had understood the consequences of her silence, and it had tormented her. But she had carried it anyway.

  One generation sacrificing so much to protect the next.

  ‘But the last year or so,’ Carl said, ‘she started calling me. It was obvious from what she was saying that she was … losing her grip on everything a little. She kept talking to me about what happened. I was worried what she might say to other people, and so a couple of weeks ago, I came back to Gritten.’

  ‘You went to see her?’

  ‘I tried to talk to her, but she wasn’t herself.’

  ‘So you pushed her down the stairs?’

  ‘No!’

  The sudden shock in his voice and the expression on his face were genuine.

  ‘Tell me what happened then.’

  ‘I decided the best thing was to get the body out of our old house. That way, if Daphne did say something, there would be no evidence there for anyone to find. So that night, I took the remains out into the woods and scattered them. Covered them up a bit. I tried my best to make it look like they could have been there a long time.’

  He’s in the woods, Paul!

  Flickering in the trees.

  ‘Maybe Daphne saw the torchlight. But whatever, she knew what I was doing. The problem was Charlie’s dream diary, you see? James had taken that, and I brought it back with me. But I realized I couldn’t leave that in the woods with him. His remains were just bones, but the diary hadn’t been exposed to the elements – it might as well have been brand new. So my plan was to burn it. I left it on the kitchen counter when I went out into the woods. And when I got back … it wasn’t there any more.’

  ‘My mother came in and took it?’

  ‘She must have. But by then, it was too late for me to do anything about it. I went to your house, and the emergency services were outside.’

  They’re all the same.

  I understood what had happened now. My mother had taken the diary and hidden it among the other identical notebooks. She had got that far, but her body was no longer strong enough.

  ‘So she was coming down the stairs,’ I said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Silence settled between us.

  Then Carl sighed.

  ‘I’m tired, Paul. Now you know everything. And like I said, it’s up to you what you do with what I’ve told you.’ He gestured behind us. ‘Charlie is out there in the woods now, and sooner
or later he’ll be found. It’ll be over. In the meantime, you need to decide what to do. You can ruin what’s left of three people’s lives. You can damage your mother’s memory. Or you can –’

  ‘Forget?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  I looked away, considering everything he’d said. Thinking through the chain of events, the network of cause and effect. If what he’d told me was true, did I blame anybody for the way they’d behaved? I wasn’t sure I did. Everybody had been trying to do their best. To protect the people they loved. To shield them from harm. To carry the separate burdens that had been handed to them. Perhaps it was time for me to shoulder my share of that.

  It was my mother’s words that came back to me then.

  ‘You could have done so much better, you know,’ I said.

  There was a whole lifetime of regret etched on Carl’s face. I thought that what I’d said was probably true of everyone, and maybe it was only as you approached the end of your life that you appreciated the force of it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  Then you can carry it all too.

  And you can decide what to do about it.

  And I was about to say something else, but then I looked up and saw the police cars that were arriving.

  36

  Dwyer drove way too quickly, and the car skidded to a halt beside what had once been the playground in Gritten Wood. A second car pulled up behind, almost running into the back of them.

  Amanda looked out of the passenger window and saw two people sitting on one of the benches. She recognized Paul, and she assumed from the live trace data Theo was still feeding to her that the other man was Carl Dawson.

  Dwyer clearly had no doubts: he was already out of the car, moving much more quickly than she’d ever have pegged him for. She was still unclipping her seat belt as he was stepping over the small fence with his ID held out in front of him.

  ‘Mr Dawson?’ she heard him call. ‘Mr Carl Dawson?’

  She raced to catch up with him. Behind her, she heard doors slamming. Both cars had parked up on the same side of the area: not great procedure, but there was a dense horseshoe of bushes around the far side of the playground, and Carl Dawson looked too surprised to put up much of a chase. He had stood up, though, and moved away from the bench towards the centre of the area. Paul was still sitting down, obviously confused by what was happening, but Carl had a look of panic on his face, as though he wasn’t remotely surprised to see the police here.

  As though he would have tried to run if he could.

  But that was out of the question as Dwyer reached him. The ID went away with one hand and the other was resting against the top of Dawson’s arm before she’d even seen him move.

  ‘Carl Dawson, right? Calm down, mate. We just want to have a word, okay?’

  Dawson was frozen in place now. Amanda stepped past the pair of them and walked across to where Paul was still sitting on the bench. He stood up as she reached him.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She held out her palms, evaluating him. He looked shaken but unharmed. ‘Are you okay?’

  But he just stared past her. She could hear more officers joining them in the playground behind, along with bursts of radio static.

  ‘Calm down, Paul,’ she said.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘We just need to talk to Mr Dawson.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that right now.’

  His gaze turned to her for a moment, and she saw the look of desperation on his face. His hands were by his side, fists clenching and unclenching. She turned around. Dwyer was leading Dawson over to the car, one arm practically looped over the older man’s shoulders. From behind, it looked as if they might have been friends, one of them helping the other home after a night out.

  And then she saw Dawson slump a little, as though the air had been taken out of him, and she knew Dwyer had just told him what they were arresting him for. The suspected murder of his wife and stepson, and of Billy Roberts.

  For a brief moment, Carl Dawson glanced back to where she and Paul were standing. She had never seen such loss on a man’s face before. It seemed as though everything he’d struggled and worked for over the years had been taken away from him. As if, in that single moment, he was looking back on his whole life and realizing every second of it was pointless and wasted.

  And then Dwyer was leading him off towards the car again.

  ‘What’s he done?’ Paul said.

  Amanda turned back.

  ‘He hasn’t necessarily done anything. We just need to talk to him.’ She put a hand on his shoulder and spoke quietly. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Why were you here with him?’

  ‘We were just talking.’

  She heard a car door slam behind her.

  ‘What were you talking about?’ she said.

  Paul had been staring over her shoulder, and when he looked at her now, she found it impossible to read the expression on his face. It reminded her of when she’d asked him in the pub if there was anyone else here in Gritten she should talk to. As though he was wrestling with something inside himself, unsure of how much to tell her.

  ‘My mother,’ he said.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She died.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And Carl was her friend.’

  She looked behind her at the car, where Dwyer was waiting, Carl Dawson in the back seat. They had three brutal murders, and the man was connected to all the victims. I like him for it, Dwyer had told her back at the department, and surely he was right. That was playing the odds, after all. If not him, then who? But looking back at Paul again now, she thought there was something she was missing – that there was more going on here than they realized.

  ‘Paul?’ she said.

  God damn it. Help me out here.

  But his face had gone blank. Whatever decision he’d been agonizing over, he’d clearly made his choice. And when he spoke, it seemed more like he was talking to himself.

  ‘Carl was her friend,’ he said again.

  Then he looked down and turned away.

  ‘That’s all.’

  37

  My father used to burn things.

  It was one of the few memories I had of him from my early childhood. I seemed to have got through my entire adult life without the need to make a fire of any kind, and yet they had been regular occurrences back then. When I was still young enough for my father not to hate me, I would stand with him in the back garden and watch as he snapped kindling, leaving thin strips of wood hanging from the ends like claws, and help him sweep rustling piles of leaves into the fire pit we had there. Newspapers. rubbish, clusters of branches and sharp ropes of brambles. Everything he wanted to dispose of was burned, and then the ashes would be raked over the following day, ready for the fires to come. I supposed that was just the way my father was. When something was no longer useful to him, he took it upon himself to obliterate it from the world.

  Perhaps he’d had the right idea.

  I stood on the back step now, holding the first of the boxes.

  It was evening, and everywhere I looked, the shadows were thickening. Night fell quickly in Gritten, and it would be dark soon. Even now, the face of the woods at the end of the garden had faded into a patchwork of black and grey, occluded further by the mist rising from the tangle of undergrowth below. The air was cooling, and there was a slight breeze that brought the smell of earth and leaves to me.

  I’d been in a daze all afternoon, shocked and confused by what had happened: first by everything Carl had told me, and then by the arrival of the police. Amanda had refused to explain what they wanted to talk to Carl about, and I hadn’t heard from her since. Of course, the same held true in reverse. I hadn’t told her what Carl had said, nor had I called and volunteered the information afterwards. Back in t
he playground, it had simply been too soon. It had felt like the decision Carl left me with had been forced upon me and what I really needed was a chance to think and work out the best thing to do.

  If I told the truth, three people’s lives would be destroyed and my mother’s involvement would become common knowledge. And to what end? I had gone back and forth, the whole time attempting to distract myself with practicalities. I’d collected my mother’s things from the hospice. I’d obtained a death certificate. I’d looked into funeral arrangements.

  But a decision had to be made.

  I thought I’d made it now.

  I carried the box down the garden. The fire pit was a little overgrown, but the bricks at the edges had held, and it was more or less as I remembered: a pale ulcer on the green skin of the garden. I inverted the box and emptied the newspapers into the pit, then kicked them into a heap in the centre, each contact raising puffs of old ash and the sour, dirty aroma of fires long past.

  Then I went back inside.

  This felt like work that should be done in the dark, so I’d left the lights off in the house for now. There was still enough daylight left to make my way down to the front door where I’d gathered everything together.

  I picked up the second box and carried it out to the fire pit.

  Emptied it.

  Was I doing the right thing?

  I looked up. The sky above was dark blue and speckled with a faint prickling of stars. No answers to be found there.

  I went back inside again and collected the third box, then emptied it into the pit, the pile of newspapers there as dull grey as old bone.

  One more to go.

  The final box, then. It was already much darker inside than when I’d started, and there was a heaviness to the air, as though my actions were somehow adding to the house rather than subtracting from it. As I carried the box out to the pit, the breeze picked up and the grass around me shivered. I emptied out the contents. My old notebooks. My dream diary. The creative writing magazine. The doll Charlie had given to James. The slim hardback book with Jenny’s story about Red Hands.