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Joseph tightens his grip. He tells Max it’s OK, even though he knows it isn’t. And he wonders – if this is how life now feels to his son – whether it might explain Max’s actions in Jack-O’-Lantern Woods. Because if life is pain, one might be forgiven for thinking that those who cut it short aren’t demons, after all, but angels.
‘And now I’m losing you, too,’ the boy whispers.
‘No, you’re not. Of course you’re not.’
‘Yes, I am. After what happened to Mum, I swore to myself I’d look after you, and now I’ve dragged you into a nightmare.’
‘It’s not your job to look after me, Max,’ Joseph says.‘It’s my job to look after you. I might not have done it very well in the past, but I’m going to do it now.’ He kisses his son’s ear, then turns him by the shoulders and ushers him into the hall. ‘Go,’ he urges. ‘Straight up. We’ll talk more tomorrow.’
Thankfully, Max complies without further protest.
Joseph watches him climb the stairs. Then he gets to work.
TWELVE
Outside, he grabs his bike from the shed and lowers it over the brick wall that divides their property from the Calthorpes, who live behind them. He isn’t going to let Ralph Erikson or anyone else on the cul-de-sac know that he’s embarking on another three-a.m. bike ride. At the party, the Calthorpes were drinking heavily. Doubtless, by now, they’ll be comatose. Their lean-to carport offers easy and inconspicuous access to the neighbouring street.
Ten minutes later, Joseph arrives at his mother’s. He leaves his bike in the hall and edges through darkness to the kitchen. In here, it feels safe enough to use his torch. He switches it on, angling its beam around the room. He sees empty worktops, a stack of post, the Honda’s spare key hanging from its hook. When he grips the handle of the garage’s connecting door, he thinks he hears movement on the other side: the scrape of a foot, perhaps; or maybe the drag of an axe head across the concrete floor.
Joseph freezes, heart thudding in his chest. He knows his fear is irrational, but he can’t rid himself of the notion that the dead man has somehow escaped the car boot and is waiting for him in the darkness, his face a bloodied crater.
It takes all Joseph’s willpower to push the door open and aim his torch beam inside.
Workbench. Old paint tins. Blue Honda.
And, even from here on the threshold, an unmistakeable odour. It isn’t strong but it’s there, and it’s the worst thing Joseph’s ever experienced – the smell of Dead Guy Rotting In Hot Weather.
He pauses in the doorway, staring at the car. Something about it feels wrong. He doesn’t want to get closer until he figures out what. For a minute or more he stands there, his torch beam aimed at the bonnet.
This is the first time he’s seen the front of the vehicle since he found out about the dead man. On Berrylands Road, where Max had parked after returning from Jack-O’-Lantern Woods, they’d approached from the rear. After driving it here last night, Joseph had gone around to the boot so he could search the dead man’s pockets. Immediately afterwards, he’d left via the same garage door through which he’d entered.
Now, Joseph passes his torch over the car’s headlights, its bumper, its grille. He recalls Max’s words while they’d been sitting in the front seats:I know what you’re thinking. But I’m not a killer, Dad. I’m not. It was a kindness, what I did. Just like you and that deer.
The doe Joseph clubbed to death had weighed maybe a hundred kilos. He’d been doing just under forty when he hit it. The impact had shattered his driver’s side headlight and ripped off his wing mirror. The damage had cost him over a thousand in parts alone.
The Honda, by contrast, looks largely intact. Admittedly, the grille has a few dinks and the bumper looks scratched, but Joseph isn’t sure those marks weren’t there before. Of course, he doesn’t know how fast the car had been travelling, but Max already admitted that the dead man was stillalive when he pulled over, so it couldn’t have beenthatfast. And there aren’t many places inside Jack-O’-Lantern Woods where you can really floor it.
Standing there in semi-darkness, he’s struck by a possibility almost too dark to contemplate: what if Max was lying? What if the collision was a fabrication? What if events unfolded some other way?
Shaking himself free of that thought, he steps inside the garage and edges along the car to the driver’s door, breathing through his mouth. A fat bluebottle buzzes past his head. It performs long and lazy loops, its shadow distorted grotesquely by the torchlight.
Joseph climbs into the driver’s seat and presses the button for the motorized garage door. While it’s lifting, he clips Claire’s iPhone into the holder fixed to the dash. He selects the Maps app and loads his destination. Then, starting the car, he reverses on to the drive, reactivates the garage door and pulls on to the road.
He won’t entertain such traitorous thoughts about his son. Max might be troubled but he’s not psychotic. Plenty of animals killed by cars never even scratch the paintwork. That must be true of humans, too.
It was a kindness, what I did.
Joseph drives with the windows down and the cold air vents on full – and still can’t eliminate the stink of the dead man. It coats his tongue, clings to his throat. He feels like he’stastingthe putrefaction. Even though he left the bluebottle pulling barrel rolls around the garage, he still hears its buzzing in his head. He imagines opening the boot and releasing a black cloud of flies – and then he’s not just tasting putrefaction but stomach acid.
Even worse than all that is his creeping sense that he’s left this too late – that he simply doesn’t have enough time to complete tonight’s task. It’s already quarter to three. Hehas an hour’s drive ahead of him. The sun will rise at six, but he’ll need to have finished the job long before then – not just for fear of being seen, but because he needs to be back in Crompton before the rest of the family wakes. That gives him, at best, ninety minutes at Black Down to dig a grave and fill it in.
Not long enough, he tells himself.Not even close.
The journey, at least, is uneventful. He sees few other vehicles – and mercifully no police. Soon, he’s climbing a gently winding road towards Black Down’s summit, his headlights illuminating the heath. He spots a dusty, unpaved track and turns on to it. Half a mile later he pulls over.
When he gets out of the car, the wind singing through heather and gorse is the only sound. It’s cooler up here, fresher. Joseph holds his breath and opens the boot. Thankfully, the cloud of bluebottles doesn’t materialize. He grabs his spade and walks one hundred paces into the scrub. There, he picks out a gorse bush larger than the rest, with a trunk so twisted he’ll remember it. Then he switches off his torch.
The stars, as they reveal themselves, are of a purity unsurpassed.Look at us!they appear to demand of him.Will you desecrate our beauty by digging an illegal grave while we watch? By tipping a dead man into a hole and covering him up?