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In the living room, he spots the first change since his last visit. Someone has returned his mother’s chair and side table to their original positions. Their legs have been slotted, like eight keys into eight locks, back into the same depressions in the carpet.
Did Miah do this yesterday, following the viewing? Perhaps it was the older woman with the Japanese knotweed fixation.
Erin looks around the room. There’s nowhere in here to hide a body – not unless you chopped it into pieces and put separate chunks in the sideboard and dresser; likewise, in the kitchen beyond the arch. Perhaps Erin’s not looking for a body at all but signs of occupation. Perhaps she suspects Max and Drew have been using the bungalow as a hideaway, that Drew has been camped out here for reasons unknown.
With a lurch, Joseph recalls the way Enoch had rubbed Erin’s side last night, his fingers not-so-subtly seeking her breast. He recalls Erin’s story about her first husband and how Robson had abused her, and had abused Tilly even worse.
Perhapsthat’swhy Erin thinks Drew might be here. If so, she won’t be looking for bloodstains or pieces of hacked scalp but crumbs of food, toiletries, a sleeping bag crushed inside a drawer.
In the kitchen, she opens each cupboard individually. Shechecks the fridge, the washing machine, the dishwasher. When she turns to him, he still can’t see her expression. The sunglasses have given her ant eyes: black, shiny, enormous.
Joseph forces himself not to look at the connecting door to the garage. Erin hasn’t checked it. Can it possibly have escaped her notice?
‘Well?’ he asks, wiping sweat from his forehead. ‘Are you going to talk to me?’
‘I think Max found out about Angus. I think that’s why he’s been acting so strangely. And I think that maybe he decided to do something about it. Scare Angus off, or teach him a lesson. Maybe snatch him off the street and hold him prisoner for a while.
‘Angus hasn’t been seen since Thursday, and it’d take a lot of work to keep him here so long. Max has been seeing Drew. You told me that yourself. I’d wondered if she might be helping him – if that might explain where she’d gone. But she’s not here, Joe. No one is. So maybe that’s not what happened at all.’
Erin pauses. Then she says. ‘Maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe Drew found out that Max had done something and threatened to go to the police.’
Joseph laughs, shakes his head – because mockery of her argument feels like his only possible strategy. ‘Jesus, Erin. Do you know how you sound? Your evidence for any of this is what, exactly?’
Her chest rises and falls. She folds her arms, then unfolds them. ‘All the connections I just laid out. Angus hasn’t been seen since Thursday. Friday night Max decides, seemingly randomly, and for the first time ever, to take a drive in an untaxed and uninsured car. When he gets home, he doesn’t park outside. Instead, he sneaks into the house, keeping all the lights off. In the morning, the washing-up bowl and the dish scrubber have disappeared. Also – and I didn’t mentionthis before, thought I’d hold it back – someone decided to mop the kitchen floor in the early hours of Saturday, because when I went downstairs first thing it looked spotless and smelled strongly of bleach. And when I asked you, that morning, about what happened when you confronted Max, you told me you—’
Erin stiffens, raises her head. She turns away from him, stares at the connecting door to the garage. ‘You told me you drove the car over here with him, in the middle of the night, to stop him from using it again.’
Erin takes off her sunglasses and slides them in her hip pocket. She’s breathing even faster, now. For the first time, Joseph thinks he sees something new in her expression – the smallest flicker of apprehension. Perhaps even fear.
She moves towards the connecting door. And Joseph, out of desperation, blocks her path.
‘Move,’ she says.
‘Erin—’
‘What’ve you got to hide?’
‘Erin, listen.’
‘I saidmove.’
They’re inches away from each other. Joseph can smell her perfume, the lingering traces of coffee on her breath. He can see the striations of caramel in her blue eyes, the inky pools at their centres. The tick of her pulse in her neck.
She is, he thinks, quite beautiful. Even now.Especiallynow.
All he wants is to protect his son. To keep Max out of jail, to give him another chance of life. He wonders if Erin can read any of that in his face. He wonders if she understands the lengths he’ll go to achieve it. Because he’s in this for the finish, now, has resigned himself fully to the task. He loves his wife but he can’t lose his boy.
Joseph thinks of what’s waiting on the other side of that door: the car, Drew, the garden implements piled in onecorner, the workbench against the near wall and the work tools stacked upon it – the screwdrivers, the hammers, the mallets; the saws, the wrenches, the planting spikes; the hand axes, the lengths of hose and rope.
With a huge gulp of air, Joseph stands aside. Erin reaches for the door handle and opens it, revealing a wedge of perfect dark. She hesitates on the threshold, throws him a distrustful look.
It feels like someone has forced a paddle down Joseph’s throat and is violently stirring his guts. A muscle twitches in his bicep. His knee sends out a warning shriek.
Forty-eight hours after Drew’s passing, twenty-four hours after he wrapped her in plastic and dumped her inside the Honda, Joseph fears the stench inside the garage will be thick enough to coat his tongue. But the air rolling out of it smells toasted, not rotten – an inoffensive combination of warm engine oil and baked dust.
Erin steps forward. Joseph follows. He feels like a cow being led into an abattoir. And then, as if a slaughterman just pressed a bolt gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger, white light flares.
In front of him, his mother’s garage resolves, shadows flitting like bats to the furthest corners of the space. Overhead, the fluorescent strip stutters twice and stabilizes.