The Killing Woods

by Lucy Christopher

  ‘Em,’ Joe says. ‘I know Damon seems like a decent guy, but . . .’ His trainers tap on the carpet. ‘. . . he’s not going to be on your side, is he? He probably doesn’t even like you.’

  ‘Pretty much like how everyone else in this town doesn’t like me then.’

  ‘More than that.’ I can feel Joe’s eyes lingering on me. ‘All I’m saying is, I wouldn’t mess with him, Emily. He’s probably really screwed up about all this.’

  Like I am, then – that’s what I almost add.

  We’re silent for ages. I’ve wondered before if Joe’s height and recent quietness go together: the taller Joe gets, the more room his voice has to bounce around inside him. Once you couldn’t shut the both of us up.

  ‘Peas in a pod,’ Dad called us.

  ‘Birds of a feather,’ Mum said.

  Joe glances over to the photographs I’ve got tacked beside my bed. I see him staring at a photo of Dad and me mushrooming in the woods. Could Joe be jealous of me going into Darkwood with Damon? That thought makes my cheeks go hot, makes me feel guilty all over and I don’t even know why.

  ‘You still think your dad is innocent, right?’ Joe says eventually. ‘I mean, after the hearing yesterday . . . what he pleaded . . .?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  Joe’s the only one left – the last one to go with me on my theory of it being someone else who killed Ashlee.

  He nods. ‘He’s innocent. That’s why I’m surprised you went into Darkwood with Damon. I mean, just because Damon was Ashlee’s boyfriend, we don’t actually know . . .’

  Joe’s voice trails off. I see a similarity then, between Damon and me: how people might look at him and wonder if he’s got secrets too, if he’s not who he seems. I almost feel guilty about the stuff I said to him earlier.

  ‘The police would have arrested Damon,’ I say. ‘If he was involved. And it’s not like he’s gone on the run or anything.’

  Joe is frowning. He goes back to the photos on the wall, this time looking at one from when he’d tagged along with Kirsty and me at the fun fair last year. There’s no sound from Mum downstairs. She’s either burnt the pizza, or she’s forgotten about it. Maybe she’s passed out on the couch and done both. Suddenly I want everyone to go away. I want to lie on my bed in the dark and think about everything that’s just happened, make sense of it if I can. I want to work out why I feel so unsteady when I think about Damon.

  ‘He could have really hurt you, Em,’ Joe says quietly.

  I remember Damon’s red angry cheeks when I’d pinned him to the forest floor, how close my head had been to his. If anyone had done the hurting today it had been me. Just like I’d done at school with Kirsty. Just like I’d wanted to hurt Mum earlier too.

  In the photo Joe’s staring at, he’s got one arm around me and the other stretched out long as it can go, holding the camera. I look so much younger, but the shot was only taken last summer, not long before Dad was discharged and came home. I’m grinning like a loon. This person is a parallel version of me, someone slipped through one of Joe’s cracks into a happier, easier place.

  Joe hesitates before hugging me goodbye. ‘Don’t go there again with Damon,’ he says, his voice loud near my ear. ‘I mean it, he’s . . . he’s different to what you think.’

  This makes me bristle, how he sounds just like Mum, how Joe thinks it’s OK for him to follow me into the woods but not OK for me to meet Damon there. His arms grip me tighter than usual.

  ‘You’ll break my spine, Joe!’

  ‘Eat something, then!’

  He hesitates at the top of the stairs like he’s going to say some great speech, but all he says is, ‘My mum cooked you guys a shepherd’s pie. It’s in your kitchen.’

  He lopes down the stairs, goes out the front door before I can even say thank you. In the kitchen I unpack the pizzas and put them into the freezer, chuck the shepherd’s pie in the oven. I feed Florence, bending down to stroke her behind the ears in the spot she likes. I don’t look at the kitchen table. If I did, I would still see how Ashlee’s arm trailed down from it that night.

  When I take the heated-up shepherd’s pie in, I expect Mum to maybe apologise for earlier. I expect a smile: we always used to joke that this meal was named after us. But I don’t think she even notices it’s not the pizza; she doesn’t apologise for anything. She just takes the meal on her lap and continues to yell answers to another of her quiz shows.

  Madagascar!

  The Prince of Wales!

  But she does eat. Maybe to her, each bite doesn’t taste like charity.

  When she falls asleep, I take the plate from her chest and watch her breathing. The skin around her eyes looks wafer thin; I can see veins under the surface. Perhaps she’ll sleep talk; perhaps, like that, we can finally have a proper conversation about Dad. I turn off the telly as it switches to a wildlife documentary, the kind of thing Dad used to watch, and I wonder whether he can watch television where he is . . . whether he’s watching this. I get the blanket that now lives permanently on the arm of the couch and place it over Mum, switch off the lamp next to her and find my own bed.

  I don’t read the psychiatrist’s notes again, or even look at Dad’s uniform. I don’t look at the photos on my wall. Tonight, none of those smiling faces will make me feel any better. Dad’s smile is a ghost’s smile, and Joe’s face is too close to the camera. The face I want to – need to – think about isn’t there anyway.

  Damon.

  16

  Damon

  Lying in bed’s the worst, these hours I don’t sleep. This is when I remember Ashlee: how she’d kiss me, bite my neck, press her teeth to my shoulder blades . . . how she’d tease to go further. This is when I touch myself and pretend it’s her doing it, then feel sick about it straight after. Because what kind of loser imagines his dead girlfriend’s fingers on him? I remember how, one night, we’d been pressed against each other on the forest floor, listening to the Game go on around us; she’d loved that Charlie was on the bike trail nearby and couldn’t see us in the dark, she’d started kissing me pretty hard, her fingers moving over my hips.

  ‘Where’s the fun if you don’t take risks?’ she’d whispered.

  She would’ve done it with me right then if I hadn’t stopped her. ‘Charlie might see!’

  ‘That’s the risk!’

  I shouldn’t have stopped her.

  It was that night she’d told me about the bunker. ‘That creepy war vet hides out there,’ she’d said. ‘You know, that one who was in the papers for killing someone?’

  And now he’s in the papers again, I want to tell her. For killing you.

  ‘We should try to find that place,’ she’d said. ‘We should do it inside . . . right in the middle of the Game when everyone’s looking for us!’

  It’s like being in a maze once I start thinking these thoughts. The only way out is to think about hurting Jon Shepherd. I’d do it slowly, painfully, making him suffer. I’d strangle him over hours and days and dig my fingers into his veins. Tonight this thought doesn’t help, though; my brain’s too full of all the stuff his daughter yelled at me earlier. I almost feel guilty about the way I’d been. Emily Shepherd is not her father. That angry tough boy isn’t who I am either, not always anyway. I listen to the cars drone by below my window. How would it feel to have one smash into me? Would pain like that be anything like what Dad felt? What Ashlee felt?

  The streetlights’ glow through my curtains doesn’t make it any easier to sleep. Neither does the fact that the flat’s so quiet. Mum’s sleeping pills put her out solid these days and maybe I even miss my old man’s snores, the muffled sounds of TV from my brothers’ rooms. How heavy does Emily Shepherd sleep? Can she?

  One of the first things I did after it all happened was go to her house. It was night, I had a lighter in my pocket. I’d sat in the gutter opposite and could imagine it all: the frames of the house cracking from the heat, the smoke, the screaming as the fire ate everything. I’d flicked the ligh
ter on and off, stared at that flash of fire. I’d imagined living there, being able to look out of a window and see nothing but trees. I’d even felt jealous. Mum and I could easily move to someplace like that, she got a big enough pay-out from my old man’s death. She won’t, though, not when she can torture herself by staying here.

  I turn over, thump my fist into the mattress. When I shut my eyes it’s Emily Shepherd’s face, not Ashlee’s, I see. This time it’s Emily bending over me in the woods, it’s her who’s laughing and teasing. I feel like a sick bastard all over again.

  ‘Just fucking sleep!’ I actually say it out loud, try to make the words sink in that way.

  I make my body go still. I can’t remember the last time I dreamt. I’m not sure I can even remember what it feels like to be properly awake. I’ve been in some sort of Neverland for a while now. If I dreamt, could I remember what happened – what exactly happened? Would the images come? Or perhaps this is part of the reason I can’t sleep – I don’t want them to. I whack the light on and start tearing up my room. It’s better than just lying here. I crawl under my bed, run my hands over the carpet.

  Nothing!

  I’ve looked here before, though. Looked everywhere!

  I tumble shoes about as I search in my wardrobe, rip open the shoebox where I keep the important stuff from my old man. Ashlee’s dog collar isn’t in any of the drawers in my desk. Or in my coat pockets. I even go through all my old sports bags again.

  So where is it?

  I must’ve dropped it on my way home that night, been too drunk to realise.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say out loud, as if Ashlee is listening. I sit in the middle of my bedroom and stare at the ceiling. ‘Do you know where it is, Ash? Where I left it?’

  I’m trying to remember – the feel of her dog tag, clasping it tight in my hands. But there are other things in my head now too, getting in the way. Those words Emily’d shouted: What kind of boyfriend leaves his drunk girlfriend?

  17

  Emily

  Ilie with my heart pounding as early sunlight soaks through my curtains and over my sheets. I’d been dreaming of Damon, he’d been yelling: Killer’s blood. Murderer. Admit it! I’d been running to get away.

  I turn over and stare at one of the photos of Dad beside my bed, see his relaxed, lazy half-smile. Shut my eyes again. But I can’t sleep, not now. So I throw back the covers and sit on the edge of my mattress. What if I get to school and Damon has told everyone what I did? What if Kirsty goes for me again?

  I walk over to my desk, flick through Dad’s psych notes, all those bold, typed letters: Sixteen years old . . . running to Shepherd . . . he could relive his flashbacks . . .

  It’s too much.

  So I pick up Dad’s shirt, bury my face in it. When Dad used to come off tour he’d smell like sweat and rum and another place’s washing powder. Before we sent him off again he’d smell like us and Darkwood. But this shirt just smells of dust; of cold; of something forgotten. I glance towards my window – curtains open on the woods as always. It’s time to go back, and not just to the Leap like yesterday.

  I get dressed in jeans and a jumper. In the kitchen I write a note for Mum: Going to school early for a project, back normal time. I even ring the school and tell them I’m unwell. They buy it, course they do. It’s misty and crisp-cold outside our house, winter creeping nearer. I like the bite of it, the way it feels as if my body could snap as I walk the garden path. In the lane I look towards Joe’s house, but no one else, anywhere, is awake, not even him. At the wooden gate, I breathe out and see my breath hesitate too.

  ‘It could be anyone,’ I remind myself. ‘Someone else who killed her.’

  Damon had been so certain yesterday that it wasn’t: everyone thinks your dad’s guilty . . . it’s obvious . . . he’s a monster . . .

  I try to focus on the dull thud of my trainers on the path, and on the beech leaves that look like gold sovereigns or foil chocolate coins: try to see their beauty. But like yesterday, I’m still checking for shadows too. I take the pathway that only Dad and I would know as one; it’s more overgrown than I ever remember. Once I would’ve run down it, coat flapping as I leapt tree roots and branches, calling to Dad. Today I’m quiet. It’s not long until I reach the thicket of hawthorn, sculpted like a perfect natural hedge. Beyond it, in that small clearing, I see the slightly raised bit of ground with the leaves and brambles covering it: Dad’s bunker. The only way anyone would know it was here is if they were really, truly looking and if they knew what to look for, but we’d happened upon it by fluke. I get a memory of Dad crouched and whispering: this is our place – a secret just for us. Surely, he would never have brought Ashlee Parker here. It’s another reason why the murder charge doesn’t make sense.

  I follow the hawthorn around until I find the small opening. The day we’d found this bunker was the day after Dad had signed up for another deployment out of Darkwood Barracks. Three years ago, four? We’d been walking in the woods to celebrate not having to move house and town, and everything, again. Dad’s eyes had gone wide when he’d seen the edge of the rusted metal lid and realised what was underneath.

  ‘A bunker?’ He’d moved quickly towards it.

  I’d started to ask what a bunker was, then realised it myself from the things Dad had told me from being in the army: a shelter, somewhere to hide from enemies, a place to fight from. ‘Like they have in a war?’ I’d asked.

  ‘I reckon this one’s just from the threat of war.’

  Today I’m expecting the hawthorn hedge to be torn open with police tape flapping across, but it all looks the same as always. I guess the police approached the bunker from the direction that Ashlee came from that night, on that small animal track the other side. Twigs claw at me as I push through the hawthorn and into the clearing. There is still blue and white police tape half buried in the mud, one end flicking like a snake’s tail. It feels colder and quieter here now, full of ghosts: one ghost. I walk across the clearing very slowly, kick at some of the ashes still in the fire pit. Once, Dad would have crouched here with the copper kettle he used to boil water.

  ‘Tea?’ he’d have said.

  But that was in the early days of finding this bunker, back when things were still OK. I get the hugest pang to see this Dad again – to feel honey dribbling down my chin from the crumpets he’d cooked, to taste that smoke and sweetness. But this Dad is even further away than the one in prison. This Dad might never return, and the Dad who got discharged from combat with post-traumatic stress disorder? That Dad hardly ever got the fire going, never made crumpets. He just sat in one corner of the bunker in the dark. I dig my shoe angrily into the ancient ashes. I didn’t come here to remember this stuff. I came to imagine what might have happened that night – how my father ended up carrying Ashlee Parker to our house, how she ended up dead.

  Dad’s defence lawyers say the thunderstorm sent Dad into a flashback, that when he’d heard Ashlee Parker in the trees he must have thought she was an enemy soldier creeping up on him, that he was out of the bunker and strangling her in an instant. Dad’s lawyers say this is consistent with his psychological profiling, and that his flashback could have been building for weeks. But Dad was charged with murder, and there are others, like Damon, who say Dad stalked Ashlee and that he wanted to kill her, that it wasn’t an accident at all. Either way, the forensics show that Ashlee was too drunk to struggle.

  But Joe and me? We’ve always said it was someone else. Someone the police haven’t found yet. Someone who could still be hiding in these woods: hiding right now. Time’s running out to find them, though. I shiver suddenly as I look out at the trees.

  I’d thought Ashlee Parker was a good girl. It’s hard to imagine her stumbling through these woods, even if she had been out celebrating her exam results with the boys earlier – it’s hard to imagine her being so drunk that she’d stumble this far from her shortcut home. To get here from her shortcut, Ashlee would have had to turn right on to a small animal path. She
would have had to follow it all the way here. Would she have kept walking that far?

  My feet move slower as I get closer to the bunker. I’m thinking about Dad in flashbacks, how sometimes he’d go motionless and stare deep into nothing. How I’d see him patrolling the garden at midnight with a hunting knife, Mum trying to talk him calm again. How, one time, when I’d surprised Dad in the bunker, he’d had me in a headlock before I could even shout. There’d been more than a couple of nights when Mum had slept in with me, when Dad had started smashing things. Once we’d even called the police. Maybe there are cracks in Dad’s brain now, different cracks to the ones Joe and I used to talk about in his game. Dad’s cracks lead to scarier worlds than we could imagine.

  With tingles on my spine, I bend to the bunker. Dad’s lawyers said that killing was second nature to Dad, what his mind and muscles were trained for.

  ‘It’s like instinct to him,’ they’d said.

  But Dad could do other things by instinct; he could save things too. And there’s a difference between having a flashback about killing and actually killing, there has to be. None of the papers have reported anything about the Dad who saved things, who freed caught animals from snares and nursed them afterwards, or the Dad who once told the world’s best bedtime stories.

  The lid is down over the bunker’s entrance, the camouflage netting still fastened over it. Like this, I could almost believe Dad is waiting inside. I look across to where they say Ashlee died – a few metres away, between here and that small animal path. My skin goes shivery. It was raining on and off that night: hot, summer rain that could hide footprints and evidence, there was the thunderstorm. Someone could have dumped Ashlee here after she had already died, maybe all trace of that could have been washed away. I’d tried to tell the police.

  ‘What about all the other ex-soldiers?’ I’d said. ‘It’s not only Dad who’s suffered, who has flashbacks, who has PTSD. This is an army town, it’s full of people like this!’