Page 93

‘What about the one I bought you to WhatsApp him?’
‘That’s at home, too,’ Drew says, feeling it press against her spine.
‘Why would you leave it?’
She opens her arms. ‘Look at me, Tilz. This dress doesn’t exactly have pockets.’
‘You didn’t bring a bag?’
‘Do you see one?’
Tilly studies her closely. She waits a beat, then tosses Drew the car keys. ‘When you get home, you smash that phone to bits and get rid of it. Understand?’
‘Sure.’
‘You’d better get moving.’
FIFTY
The clip ends. Joseph rocks back in his seat. For a while he sits motionless, unable to order his thoughts.
Since the early hours of Saturday, a nightmare has enveloped him of Kafkaesque proportions. He’s reacted with a ruthlessness and a single-mindedness he hadn’t realized he possessed. All to protect his son. And now it turns out he wasn’t protecting Max at all.
From the start, everything about this catastrophe has felt off. He’d never really accepted that Max could be responsible for the violence he’s just witnessed on that phone. Now, faced with the truth, he can’t process the implications fast enough.
Once he takes away the possibility that Max killed Angus, it leaves no possibility in his mind that Max killed Drew. How Tilly managed to get into the boy’s head so effectively that he not only agreed to bury Angus Roth, but concocted a story to fool his father, is difficult to fathom. Part of the answer, no doubt, lies in Tilly’s extraordinary gift for manipulation. But another part, Joseph thinks, might lie in something his son said at this table, Friday night:Because you’ve already been through so much. Because, on top of everything else, you really didn’t deserve this.Max, quite clearly, has been trying to protect his father all along.
It’s a discovery all the more devastating for its timing. Joseph just took Enoch’s life in a desperate attempt to prevent the phone evidence incriminating Max of murder. And now it turns out it exonerates him.
Lifting his head, he forces himself to confront Enoch’s slumped form. A father, just like him, intent on protecting his child. Except Enoch, albeit it unwittingly, had lost that battle even before it started.
Erin, sitting opposite, looks as bloodless as a corpse. Joseph can’t imagine the carnage wreaked inside her head. She’s just plunged into the very nightmare he’s been living these past four days. For him, at least, it had built in stages: a car accident; a body hidden in a boot, an act of misplaced mercy; and then, two days later, Drew.
For Erin it’s arrived all at once. Compounding the shock, she’s just witnessed something Joseph had been spared: the horrifying visual brutality of her daughter’s actions. Finally, and possibly worst of all: as Erin’s affair seems to have been the catalyst, she’ll believe herself directly responsible.
If he could take some of his wife’s pain on to himself he would. One thing he’s learned, these last four days, is his seemingly endless capacity for it.
‘What do we do, Joe?’ Erin whispers. ‘I can’t think straight.’ She looks up at him. ‘You said you knew where Max was going.’
‘I said it so you wouldn’t call the police. After what we just saw, I’ve no idea. The blood upstairs might not even be Tilly’s. More chance, now, that it’s his.’
A multitude of emotions twist across Erin’s face when she hears that. It’s like watching wind change direction over a lake, the surface flayed first one way and then another.
Joseph hauls himself to his feet. ‘I need you to stay here,’ he says. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘Where’re you going?’
‘Ralph’s. There might be something on his doorbell cam that’ll help us.’
‘I’ll come.’
‘No. If we both go, it might ring alarm bells. We want to keep this low-key. I’ll be five minutes, no longer.’
‘Joe?’
‘What?’
‘You better put on a shirt first. Clean yourself up.’