Page 27

‘Me too.’
‘Tilly took the bus into town so you’ve got the place to yourself for a while. Garden looks like a war zone if you’re feeling up to it, but I’ll tackle it when I’m back if you’re not.’
Once she’s gone, Joseph brews coffee and loads the toaster with bread. He still isn’t hungry, but he hasn’t eaten since Friday night and he’s starting to feel faint. He manages one slice before the ghost scent of the dead man wrecks his appetite again.
Upstairs, he showers and brushes his teeth. Then he douses himself in cologne and dresses in clean clothes. On the landing he pauses outside Max’s bedroom. He doesn’t want to do this, but he can’t see any alternative.
Gingerly, he pushes open the door. The room is characteristically tidy: the bed made, the floor clear. On the desk stands a collection of football trophies, along with a human heart of dense foam, which opens to reveal a detailed interior. Claire had bought the heart, along with the foam brain beside it, when Max first took an interest in biology. Tacked to the wall above the desk is a human anatomy poster, one side illustrating the skeletal structure, the other side illustrating the musculature. Peering from the skull’s red half is a single bulging eye. It looks, to Joseph, uncannily like the dead man’s stare from Friday night.
Grimacing, he opens Max’s desk drawer. ‘Sorry, buddy,’ he mutters. ‘But you’ve given me no choice.’ Inside the drawer he finds ID cards, loose change, pens, bookmarks, a couple of ancient fidget spinners, a birthday card from six years ago with a handwritten message from Claire, an orienteering compass, an old GPS watch, a pocket knife Joseph once bought him for camping trips, spare boot studs, a brick charger, old phone leads, old batteries.
The birthday card slows Joseph down but doesn’t stop him. When he finds nothing of interest in the drawer, he turns his attention to Max’s bookcase. He slides his hand along the narrow gap above each row. Then he opens theboy’s wardrobe and searches the two wicker baskets on the bottom shelf. He finds clothes, shin pads, odds and ends; everything he might expect.
The space beneath Max’s bed houses several nine-litre storage boxes. Joseph pulls them out one by one, prising off their lids and searching through them. He unearths certificates, old school exercise books, Lego instruction manuals, chemistry sets, comics – and toys that haven’t seen daylight in years.
Right at the back, near the wall, he discovers something that makes him feel ugly for invading his son’s privacy, because he has one just like it – equally priceless – in his own room.
Max might not call this a bereavement box but that’s exactly what it is: a shoebox filled with memories of Claire. There are letters, cards, photographs; even a pair of old football socks into which she’d stitched Max’s name label.
While Joseph has kept one of his late wife’s scarves, Max has kept her favourite woollen cardigan. Wrapped inside it is the Cabbage Patch Kids doll from her childhood, along with her wooden recorder. There’s a gift aid card for a local charity shop with Claire’s signature, and a mug Max once chose for her birthday with the legend,MAMA BEAR.
Joseph repacks the box as carefully as he can and puts it back where he found it. Then he replaces the storage boxes in their original positions.
Feeling dirty, but doing it anyway, he searches Max’s bedside table and checks down the back. He’s about to leave the room when his gaze falls on his son’s wooden footstool, a christening present from Claire’s parents. The front is inscribed with Max’s name and date of birth. Inside the seat is a secret compartment accessed on the underside by a sliding panel.
Joseph turns it upside down – and hears something floparound inside it. He slides open the panel, revealing a dark interior. Then, holding the stool above the bed, he flips it back over. On to the duvet falls a black leather wallet.
Oh, Jesus Christ, Joseph thinks.Oh, you foolish, foolish boy.
Because he knows whose wallet this must be. He’s working out what to do next when, downstairs, the doorbell rings.
FOURTEEN
Standing in Max’s room, staring at the wallet on his son’s bed, Joseph hears the doorbell chime a second time. So many thoughts erupt inside his head that he finds himself paralysed. He doesn’t want to touch the wallet and yet he must. He doesn’t want to answer the door and yet he has to know who’s calling. Worst of all is the discovery that his son has not only killed a man but has lied to Joseph about key details – details which could see them both jailed.
Wrenching himself around, he steps into the hall and leans over the bannisters. Through the privacy glass in the front door he sees a pair of dark shapes.
Police, a part of him insists.
Paranoia, insists another.
Joseph dips back inside Max’s room and scoops the wallet off the bed. The leather feels warm, alive. Grimacing, he slides it into his back pocket. As he hurries down the stairs, he recalls the coin-eyed doorstep seller from last winter, who’d forced one foot into the hall and wouldn’t leave without payment.
A lot has changed since then. Joseph has filled the house with weapons he dare not use, and a nightmare far worse than any he’d envisaged has crept up on him unawares.
When he swings open the front door, he finds Tilly and Drew on the step, in novelty sunglasses and summer dresses. The sight is such a relief that he blows out his breath like a punctured football.
‘It was a flight of stairs, Joe, not the Matterhorn,’ Tilly says, as she comes inside. ‘Maybe it’s time to invest in a gym membership. Work on that cardio.’
Joseph flashes a sickly smile. Closing the door, he follows the girls into the kitchen. The wallet sliding against his buttock feels like a just-cooked steak. ‘I thought you went into town.’
‘Only for suntan lotion. Today’s all about lazing in the back garden like a couple of hungover hogs.’
‘You’re suffering?’
‘Not overly.’ Tilly dumps a carton of coconut water on the worktop, goes to the bifold doors and opens them. Her sunglasses are shaped like pineapples, with yellow lenses and green plastic crowns. Lowering them to the tip of her nose, she says, ‘I’m going to root out our sun loungers from the shed. Do we have blueberries?’
‘Some.’