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He blinks, looks down at himself, dismayed at what he sees. Is he really so punch-drunk that he’d have walked over to Ralph’s stripped to the waist and spattered with blood? It’s on his hands, his trousers; he feels it clotting in his hair, drying stiff on his ears and cheeks.
Upstairs, he strips off his trousers and cleans his face and neck as best he can. His knee has split open again. He binds it with the last of the Elastoplast. Then he pulls on fresh clothes, hiding his damaged scalp under one of Max’s baseball caps.
Outside, he passes Enoch’s van and crosses the turning circle to Ralph’s front door. A minute later, he’s sitting in the widower’s kitchen, waving away the offer of an aloe yoghurt drink and explaining what he needs.
Ralph listens in silence. Then he unlocks his phone and relinquishes it. Retreating to the sink, he fills a small watering can and starts attending to his house plants. ‘If you’re in trouble, Joseph, if you need help, we’re here for you in every capacity.’
Joseph glances up. Less than ten minutes ago he ended Enoch Cullen’s life. Now, he’s with Ralph Erikson in this weirdly Zen-like space.
He knows the widower’s offer was genuine. Perhaps that’s what surprises him. His currency, this past week, has been death and dishonesty, barbarism and betrayal. He’s inured himself to the worst of human behaviour, has donethings almost too awful to comprehend. And now Ralph Erikson – a man he hardly knows and has spent little effort befriending – has just shown him something important: that there’s good in the world, even now. Sometimes in the most unexpected places.
It’s a truth Joseph realizes he’d forgotten. Or had simply stopped believing.
He thanks Ralph and opens the Nest app. The most recently captured video shows him crossing the street to the widower’s front door. The prior clip shows Enoch arriving in his van. The third clip back along the timeline shows Joseph and Erin arriving home after their visit to the bungalow. The fourth clip was recorded fifteen minutes before that. In it, the driveway is clear. The garage door rises on its winch, revealing a dark interior. And then, impossibly, the Honda rolls out, sunlight glinting off its windscreen.
Joseph stops breathing. Because what he’s seeing makes no sense. Was the car already here when he left with Erin for the bungalow? Or did it arrive while they were out? With a grunt, he remembers that he’s watching these clips in reverse, which means the vehicle’s entry into the garage should have been captured in footage he’s yet to view.
The car stops on the driveway. Then the driver’s door opens and Max gets out. He stands there for a moment, staring across the street at Ralph’s house, almost as if he knows his father is watching.
What Joseph sees next convinces him of that – because Max, looking as solemn as he’s ever been, raises a hand and waves. Immediately afterwards he returns to the garage and hits the electric release. As he re-emerges, the door begins to close. With a final glance towards Ralph’s camera, Max climbs behind the wheel. The car rolls off the drive and disappears out of shot.
Fingers shaking, Joseph scrolls to the previous video. Inthis one, the Honda is parked on the driveway. The garage door rolls up and Max emerges. He gets into car and backs it into the garage. The door rolls closed.
The next clip, shot five minutes before the one Joseph just watched, is even stranger. The Honda is on the driveway again. Max enters shot on foot, from further up the street. He stands motionless for perhaps thirty seconds. He approaches the car, peers inside. Then he moves to the front of the house. He hesitates at the door as if listening, looks behind him and surveys the street. Finally he unlocks the door and slips inside.
The next clip was recorded twenty minutes earlier than the last. It shows the Honda pulling on to the drive. The driver’s door opens and Gabriel Roth climbs out.
Joseph rears back, nearly drops Ralph’s phone. Onscreen, Gabriel opens the side gate beside the garage and disappears around the back. The video rolls for a few seconds longer. Then the image freezes.
Across the kitchen, Ralph is still busy with his houseplants – or at least he’s pretending to be. Joseph blinks, tries to think, but his mind is a vortex of awful possibilities. Sweat rolls down his sides from his armpits. His bowels feel horribly loose.
The fog inside his head is making it difficult to concentrate. Watching the captured footage in reverse order has added to his confusion, so he tries to reorder it. While he’d been at the bungalow with Erin, Gabriel had arrived in the Honda, entering the house around the back; Max had arrived home shortly afterwards. Something must have happened inside, evidenced by the blood Joseph found upstairs. But Max hadn’t looked injured when he’d shut the garage door and driven off.
The reflections on the windscreen had obscured the car’s interior as it disappeared up the street. Had Tilly been insidewith Gabriel before Max got home? If so, Joseph’s intuition that it was her blood in the upstairs hall was likely correct, albeit for the wrong reasons.
He pinches the bridge of his nose, presses his lips together. Should he delete this footage? Keep it? The implications either way could be huge – and he has little time to decide. None of it implicates Max; if anything, it shows him acting under duress.
Still, the more evidence that exists, the fewer his options to fit a story around it. Quickly, he deletes all the files and switches off recording completely. Then he closes the app and rises from the table.
Of everything he’s just seen, what scares him most was the expression on Max’s face as he waved at Ralph Erikson’s camera.
It looked like he was saying goodbye.
FIFTY-ONE
Standing in the kitchen of his brother’s place on Hocombe Hill, Gabriel Roth stares through the window at the Honda parked on the drive.
Earlier, returning to the bungalow in Saddle Bank after the estate agent had left, he’d forced the back door and found one of the vehicle’s key fobs, still hanging on its hook in the kitchen. Standing behind the car, he’d prepared himself for the unimaginable. But when he’d unlocked the boot and raised the lid, he’d discovered, wrapped in plastic, the body of a young woman.
Barbie Girl.
Real name Drew Cullen.
Angus’s latest plaything.
And Tilly Carver’s best friend.
Any remaining hope Gabriel might have had for Angus’s survival had died in that moment.