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‘Wait,’ Joseph says. ‘You’ve been back here once already? Why didn’t you wake me?Talkto me?’
The boy meets his eyes. It’s a while before he speaks. Eventually, he says, ‘Because you’ve already been through so much. Because, on top of everything else, you really didn’t deserve this.’
‘Max,’ Joseph says, and doesn’t know how to continue.
‘I grabbed a spade from the shed, some other gear. And then I went back. I know how it sounds, how it makes me look, but I didn’t know what else to do. If I go to the police, say anything, then the one thing I could do to make up for this, even slightly – med school, the foundation programme, trauma and orthopaedics – will be toast. Plus, I knew what seeing me go to jail might do to you.’
Tears are running freely from his eyes again. ‘I wasgoing to bury him in the woods. Then I realized it’s the first place the police might look. They might get sniffer dogs out there. Cadaver dogs. So I wrapped him in that tarpaulin we sometimes take camping and loaded him into the boot. On the way home I realized that … I guess I needed more time to think it through.’ He runs his hands through his hair. ‘I don’t know, Dad. Maybe I deserve everything that’s coming.’
‘Don’t say that. Where’s the car, now?’
‘Berrylands Road.’
Close to here but not too close, Joseph thinks.A quiet road with few streetlights. The kind of place I might park a car containing a dead body while figuring out what to do.
‘Is there much damage?’ he asks. ‘To the car, I mean.’
Max shakes his head. ‘The guy saw me, fell backwards just before it happened. The car … it kind of went over him rather than through him.’ He pauses. Then he says, ‘Did you mean what you said earlier? That you’d keep this between you and me? No matter what?’
Joseph fills his lungs. He knows Max’s question is the right one. At present, it’s the only question that matters. He studies his son, seeing the boy he was and the man he might one day become. He sees the tiny white scar on his lip from nursery, when another child swung a tennis racquet without looking behind him. He sees the sprig of hair that insists on standing proud however often it’s wetted, the downy facial hair beginning to track across each cheek. He sees the features inherited from Claire: the oval jaw, the high forehead, the aquiline nose. In contemplating them Joseph braces himself against all the pain bound up with her memory.
‘You’re my son,’ he says simply, because to add anything more would bring tears, hard sobs. And because, really, there’s nothing more to add.
Max nods, his own throat bobbing.
‘I’ll grab us some clothes,’ Joseph tells him. ‘And then we’ll get the car.’
Five minutes later, they’re fully dressed. Before they leave the house, Joseph collects up everything they used to clean the kitchen: the blood-soaked and bagged-up sheets of kitchen roll; the mop he used for the floor; Max’s bloodied clothing; the washing-up bowl and the dish scrubber.
‘Where’s your phone?’ he asks.
Max produces it. Joseph turns it off, hands it back, checks his watch. It’ll be dark for a while yet. Leading his son through the back door, they creep down the path beside the house, carrying the binbags between them.
The Carvers live in a cul-de-sac of identical four-bedroom homes, each with a double driveway and front lawn sloping down to a shared turning circle. The boundaries of each property are marked not by walls or fences but borders of low shrubs. Next door, a monkey puzzle tree grows in the Robinsons’ front garden. Other than that, there’s little cover from prying eyes.
Joseph steps on to the pavement, into the orange glow of the cul-de-sac’s three streetlamps. Immediately, his neck prickles, as if unseen eyes are watching him. Except for Ralph Erikson’s place, the neighbouring houses are all dark. There, the curtains are undrawn, the ground-floor lights all on. Joseph doesn’t see the widower inside, but that doesn’t mean the man isn’t watching from somewhere upstairs.
His prickle of awareness doesn’t leave him until the circle of houses is out of sight. At the end of the street, he turns left on to Hiltingbury Lane, then right on to Berrylands Road. They pass the driveways of three homes hidden by giant leylandii before they come to the car, a twenty-year-old sky-blue Honda Jazz.
Officially, the vehicle still isn’t Max’s. Until she died last Christmas, it belonged to Joseph’s mother. It’s been sittingon the Carvers’ driveway since probate, waiting for replacement parts.
And now there’s a dead man in the boot, Joseph thinks.Wrapped in the tarpaulin we take on family camping trips.
The horror of it, mixed with the everyday mundanity, feels unreal.
After checking the street for activity, he moves to the rear of the car and puts down his load. ‘You’d better unlock it.’
Max squeezes the key fob and the vehicle’s hazards flash. Joseph glances at his son, tries to read his face in the shadows of the street. A wild hope takes him that this is all some monstrous hoax; a hideous gotcha filmed for TikTok. Max will open the boot and balloons will burst out, rising into the night. The boy’s friends will emerge from hiding, filming Joseph on their smartphones and collapsing into hysterics. Erin will appear. Tilly, too.
But Max has never been one for cruel jokes. And now, silent, he swings up the boot lid.
It’s too dark to see inside. Dialling his torch to the lowest setting, Joseph turns it on. He sees a green polythene-wrapped bundle, bent in the middle and secured with three yellow bungees.
His torch beam trembles. Joseph extinguishes it. Then he reaches into the boot and gently squeezes the tarp.
If he harboured any doubts, he doesn’t now. There’s no mistaking the contours of a human body. To think that not long ago this was a living, breathing individual sickens his soul, suffocates him with sadness.
During the walk from home, perhaps to protect himself, he’d been thinking about this purely in terms of a corpse he intended to hide. But of course it’s not that at all. This is a man just like him – maybe a little younger, maybe a little older, but with hopes and fears just as real, with real family and friends expecting to see him again soon. He has a bankaccount, a list of favourite foods, a particular way he takes his tea or coffee, a favourite book. He probably has a private space, filled with objects meaningful to him.