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‘I’m so sorry for what I did. I didn’t want to lose you, I still don’t. I thought I already had.’
‘I don’t want to lose you, either,’ Joseph mutters, keeping his eyes on the road. As he changes up a gear, he hears a tapping sound and worries for a moment that the car is playing up – or, even worse, that someone is locked in the boot. When he glances down, he realizes that his wedding ring is rattling against the gearstick, his left hand violently shaking. The more he tries to control it, the worse the shaking becomes.
If Max did take the car, where might he have driven it? Even without Drew’s body, the vehicle is a forensic examiner’s wet dream.
Turning on to their street, Joseph drives along it to the cul-de-sac. Their driveway is clear: no Honda, no police cars. He pulls up and kills the engine.
Erin stares through the windscreen at the house. ‘I don’t want to go in there,’ she whispers.
‘It’s your home,’ he tells her. ‘Our home.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it. Not right now.’ She glances at him. ‘What if I’m right, Joe? Just tell me, before we go inside.’
He looks at her, tries to think. Back at the bungalow he’d told himself that of the eight billion people on the planet, there was only one he’d do anything to save. But is that what he really believes?
‘Remember what you told Max last night?’ he asks. ‘That our house was his sanctuary? That what happens out here doesn’t affect what happens in there? That there are no recriminations, only love?’
‘You’re taking it out of context.’
‘Am I? If Max has broken a law, hurt someone, we’ll do the responsible thing. Obviously, we will. But the moment you go to the police you’ll paint a giant target on his back – and right now you don’t even have good reason. That’s why we speak to him first, give him every opportunity to explain.’ He pauses, tries to work out what she’s thinking. ‘Will you promise me?’
Erin’s chest swells. Then she opens the door and swings her legs out of the car. Joseph climbs out, too. Positioning his torso to avoid Ralph Erikson’s camera, he retrieves the hammer from the door well and slides it inside his trousers. Hooking the head over his belt and covering it with his shirt, he accompanies his wife up the drive. His heart is beating like a bird flapping broken wings. Eight billion souls. A thought with which to damn himself. Eight billion souls in exchange for one.
So many times, on TV, he’s seen someone incapacitated by blunt force trauma suffer no lasting damage. But he knows from the YouTube guy that such outcomes can’t be predicted – and certainly aren’t guaranteed.
If Erin tries to call the police, will he physically attempt to stop her? That he’s even asking the question demonstratesjust how far he’s fallen. He loves this woman. And yet he’s lied to her repeatedly, has buried her dead lover, has concealed from her the truth about Drew.
All to protect his son. Because without Max, there’s nothing left for him in this life.
Erin unlocks the front door. Joseph – his vision stuttering, his left hand twitching as if in horror of what it might soon have to do – follows her inside.
FORTY-ONE
The second time Enoch Cullen jerks back into consciousness, he can’t figure out how long he’s been out, whether it’s late afternoon or late morning, whether a few minutes have passed or several hours. He can’t decide if he was having a nightmare or has just re-entered one.
Struggling up from his chair, he goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge and grabs a beer. He chugs half the can, gasps and wipes his mouth.
The kitchen clock isn’t working, the microwave isn’t set to the right time and his phone isn’t in his pocket. Returning to the living room, he turns on the TV and checks the guide.
It’s eight minutes past five, Tuesday afternoon. Last night, the Carvers had left around one a.m. Afterwards, he’d sat up drinking until five. Which means he’s slept, give or take, for twelve hours.
He finds his phone wedged between the arm of his chair and the seat cushion, the screen dead and unresponsive. When he goes to the front door, he finds a police contact card on the mat, handwritten with an officer’s details, a reference number and a message to call in. Beside it lies a sheet of A4. The wordMISSINGis printed above his daughter’simage, along with a few lines of text. Scrawled in biro along the bottom:
Made these earlier and putting them on lampposts today. Gave you a knock but no answer.
Tilz xx
Finding his charger, Enoch plugs in his phone. As soon as he switches it on, it begins to chime and buzz with updates: texts, missed calls, voicemail alerts, social media notifications.
The first voicemail is from a wet-as-shit-sounding detective sergeant based in Crompton. The second is from Erin Carver, calling to see how he is. Enoch calls the station first, chugging the rest of his beer while he waits for what feels like a couple of weeks until somebody fetches the right guy. The detective is as useless as Enoch had expected, and he has no real news to share: they’re continuing to look for Drew, just want to keep him informed, blah-fucking-blah-blah-blah. Only when Enoch ends the call does he remember something important: a dream fragment, perhaps – but he doesn’t think so.
Back in the living room, he rips the seat cushion off his chair and daggers his hand along the cavity around its sprung base. He checks beneath the coffee table, beneath the TV cabinet and around the partially collapsed stacks of DVDs.
Enoch finally discovers the phone beside his boxed-up Christmas tree. Not a dream fragment, then. Nor a false memory created by booze.
The phone is a Samsung, just like his. Taking it to the kitchen, he unplugs his phone and connects the new one. A few seconds later, a lightning icon appears. Enoch holds down the power button until the device buzzes in his hand. Whilehe waits for the screen to load, he grabs himself another beer. While he drinks, he thinks.
The phone can’t be Paula’s; his bitch ex-wife hasn’t visited in weeks, and there’s no way the battery could have lasted that long. It had died only when he tried to answer it. That means it couldn’t have been in the kitchen cupboard where he first found it more than a few days.