Page 20 of The Bodies

EIGHTEEN

Joseph swims closer, hampered by the lack of gravity. When he calls Drew’s name, he barely hears his own voice.

She’s dressed differently than she was at the house, her floaty summer dress switched for a tartan miniskirt and a high-necked white halter cut to the midriff.

In his head, he hears his son’s words from earlier this afternoon: Drew won’t say anything, I guarantee it.

Joseph moans, sinks to his knees.

Drew looks like she died from a single stab wound to the neck. Blood has sheeted down her throat, soaking her halter top. It covers her hands, too, all the way up to her elbows, as if she tried in vain to stem the bleeding before she died.

A few days ago, save for their occasional banter, Drew Cullen had rarely featured in Joseph’s thoughts. Now, in death, he appreciates just how unutterably precious she was, and what the world has lost.

Even worse is the knowledge that he could have prevented this – that the responsibility for her death rests with him.

He cups his hands over his mouth, forces himself to look at what his choices have brought about.

So intense is his grief that it’s a while before he realizes Max has sunk to his knees beside him.

When the boy draws breath, the air sounds like it’s rushing through dusty catacombs. When he speaks, his voice is so bereft that Joseph hardly recognizes it. ‘However I try to explain this, I lose you.’

‘Try,’ Joseph croaks.

Max claws bloodied fingers through his hair.

‘I was wrong,’ he says. ‘Drew would have talked. She got scared, Dad. She was saying she had to tell someone. If she’d gone to the police, she’d have ended up implicating you.

We’d have both gone to prison. And you’d have lost Erin – Tilly, too. Our whole family broken apart.’

Joseph hears the words but he can’t really comprehend them.

The full impact of his actions, and his role in this tragedy, breaks over him.

‘What have I done?’ he whispers. ‘I could have stopped this Friday night and I didn’t, but I never for one moment thought you’d …

Oh my God, you’ve taken Drew’s life , Max. Her life .’

He wants to scream those words. Wants to grip his son’s head, pull it close and yell them so forcedly that they detonate like landmines inside the boy’s brain. He feels Max’s hand on his shoulder, wants to shrug it off, wants to beat him with his fists, wants to crush him in a hug.

He gags, gasps for air. Right now, his entire reality feels under threat, as if a single false move could rent it with holes through which nameless horrors could pour.

The warmth from Max’s fingers spreads across his back. ‘It’s not your fault,’ his son says, beginning to sob. ‘Please, Dad. Don’t blame yourself. This isn’t on you. I don’t know how else I can—’

‘I should have gone to the police. Taken responsibility. I should have told them I hit that guy driving home.’

‘No. I never would have let you. And without me, you’d never have got them to believe you. Please don’t say this is your fault, because it isn’t.’

Joseph begins to weep, too. Once he’s started, he can’t stop.

He cries for the dead man. He cries for Tilly, for Erin, for Max.

He cries for Claire, dead these last five years, who would have prevented this tragedy had she lived, because she’d have given Max the love and guidance the boy so desperately needs.

But mostly he cries for Drew.

He feels Max’s hand slide up and down his spine, and it seems to him that they’ve swapped roles, son trying to comfort father.

‘Her parents …’ Joseph begins. ‘Enoch and Paula. My God, what have we done to them? We’ve killed them, too. This isn’t just one death, it’s three.’

‘Enoch’s an alcoholic, doesn’t care about anyone except himself. Paula cares more about cocaine than she does about her daughter.’

‘Oh, Max,’ he mutters. ‘What are you saying? What difference does that make?’

‘It doesn’t make any difference. That’s not what I mean.’

‘Then don’t say it. Because it’s entirely fucking irrelevant.’

Max licks his lips. He’s silent for a while. Joseph rocks back and forth, his gaze on the precious, tragic human lying in front of him.

There’s no blood on the carpet or any of the walls. Which means Max must have rolled out the plastic before Drew arrived, killing her when she walked in here and stepped on to it.

Joseph can’t think about that for long. It’s simply too horrific.

Time passes. How much, he doesn’t know. Because time, like everything else, has temporarily lost its meaning. He breathes, he weeps. He paddles through chaos and loss, trying to stay afloat.

Beside him, Max says, ‘You left a note at home, saying you were going to see a friend. I had no idea you were coming here. It was only when I checked the garage that I realized you must have collected the car. When that door opened, I thought it was the police, here to arrest me.’ He shakes his head.

‘What were you even doing, driving around in that?’

When Max receives no answer, he takes his father’s wrist and lifts it. Joseph stares at his own fingers. He sees the dirt caked under his nails. The dust and grime on his shirtsleeve.

‘You buried him tonight,’ the boy says, his voice flat. ‘Didn’t you? Not last night, like you made out.’

‘There wasn’t enough time last night. The ground was too hard. I left it too late.’

The room feels like it’s beginning to pulse in time with Joseph’s heart. He breathes deep, tries to focus. ‘I know what I told you wasn’t true. And I know what I said this morning – about the need for us to be honest with each other.’

‘Doesn’t matter. You were trying to protect me, I get it. This,’ Max says, turning to his father with haunted eyes. ‘I guess, in a way, this is like protection, too.’

Joseph coughs, chokes. Realizing he’s about to be sick, he staggers to his feet and lurches towards the hall.

In the bathroom, he heaves into the toilet bowl until his stomach is purged.

There’s not much to bring up – a little toast from breakfast, that’s it – but the contractions continue regardless.

What is he going to do? There’s no way back, and no conceivable path forward. Drew is dead, and there’s no way back because Drew is dead.

How did his attempt to keep his boy out of jail turn into this? How did one death – which he’d believed was an accident, a tragic one-off – turn into two?

He can’t cover this up. He won’t wrap Drew in plastic and drive her out to Black Down.

Is he going to hand in his son? Could he actually bring himself to do that? If he does, he’ll be condemning Max to a fate far worse than the one he’d previously feared. But what other option does he have?

Could he give himself up instead? He’d be trading his life for the life of his boy. And while he might think that a viable exchange, could he do it in the knowledge that this might happen again? And that next time he’d be in jail, powerless to prevent it?

Like you prevented this?

He flushes the toilet, clambers up. At the sink, he rinses his mouth and confronts his reflection in the mirror. ‘Are you going to lie to Erin?’ he asks. ‘To Tilly? Are you really going to let them think you did this?’

‘Dad?’

Joseph flinches. When he glances behind him, he sees Max standing in the doorway.

‘Who were you talking to?’ the boy asks.

‘No one.’

‘You mentioned Erin. Tilly, too.’

‘I’m just …’ He wipes his mouth on his sleeve. ‘I’m just trying to process this. Just trying to get my head around it.’

‘Does Erin know something?’

When Joseph hears his son’s tone, the blood drains from his head. ‘Erin doesn’t know a damned thing. She’s in the dark about this – totally .’

Max raises his hands. ‘Oh Jesus, I didn’t mean anything by it. I know this is horrific. I can’t even begin to …’ His face creases. ‘Are you OK? I heard you throwing up.’

‘I’ll survive,’ Joseph says, grimacing at his choice of words.

‘What happens now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’re you going to do? Now you know about Drew. About all this.’

‘Max, I just can’t believe what you’ve done to her.’

‘Dad, I don’t know how to … From the start, I just wanted to protect you. I never—’

‘By taking her life ?’ he asked, dumbfounded. ‘Have you any idea how batshit crazy that sounds?’

‘That’s not what I meant. I meant I was going to deal with this myself, so you wouldn’t have to be involved.’

‘Of course I’m involved!’ Joseph shouts. ‘You thought you’d keep this one secret, is that what you’re saying? Because when Drew was reported missing, there was no danger that I’d put two and two together? I’d just think it was a fucking coincidence?’

Abruptly, as if he’s a marionette whose strings have been severed, Max sags against the doorframe, all the strength going out of him.

Joseph stares at his son. At the wreckage Max has become. And then, because he’s a father, and because he’ll never stop loving his boy, no matter what Max does, no matter how much devastation he wreaks, he limps across the bathroom and gathers him in an embrace.

He thinks of Drew’s parents, Enoch and Paula.

Drew’s wider family. He thinks of Tilly, his stepdaughter.

All those lives about to be changed. He thinks of the poor dead girl lying in the living room – of all the joys and losses and fierce and furious moments of life that were rightfully hers and are now for ever lost. He thinks of how different the world will be because of this.

How the ripples of what happened here will spread.

How they’ll echo in the smallest of ways and the largest. How he’ll only ever grasp a tiny fraction of the impact. And how Max might not even grasp that.

Except … except his boy isn’t a monster; he’s not.

He’s just lost.

‘Dad? What are we going to do?’

‘Nothing,’ Joseph says finally. ‘Not tonight. This is just … it’s too big, Max.’

‘I know.’

‘So – we’re going to go home, sleep. Or at least we’re going to lie down and get some rest. But before that, I need you to think for me.

Because the very worst outcome would be for someone else to discover what’s happened here before we figure out what comes next.

Did Drew have her phone with her? Could someone track her here because of it? ’

Max shakes his head. ‘She promised to leave it at home.’

‘And you’re absolutely sure she did?’

‘She didn’t have it with her. I checked.’

‘Did anyone else know she was meeting you?’

‘No one else even knows we were seeing each other. Only me and you. And Drew, obviously.’

And Erin.

Thanks to your loose mouth.

‘Have you texted her at all since you’ve been seeing her? Contacted her on social media? Commented on her Instagrams? Any of that stuff?’

‘Not even once. Tilly would have picked up on it, which is why I never did.’

Joseph files away Max’s answers for later, when he has the headspace to think. ‘I want you to get out of here,’ he says. ‘Right now. Straight out the front door.’

‘We’re not leaving together?’

‘We’re not. And I don’t want you going home directly, either, to get tagged by Ralph Erikson’s camera. Go to the Calthorpes, sneak into their back garden and over the wall to ours. Understand?’

‘Sure.’ Max licks his lips. ‘Do we wrap her up first? Put her in the—’

‘No,’ Joseph tells him, louder than he intended. ‘We don’t touch her. Not a hair.’

‘You’re just going to leave her out in the open like this?’

‘We don’t touch a hair.’

‘OK,’ Max says.

A minute later, he’s gone.

Joseph returns to the living room. He stands in the doorway for a while, looking at Drew. Two nights ago, staring at the dead man folded into the Honda’s boot, he’d felt a bone-deep duty to treat him not just with respect but with reverence.

But what Joseph feels now is on a scale incomparable. This is someone he knew in life. He can close his eyes and see Drew’s smile and hear her laugh.

He goes to the kitchen and roots around under the sink, finding matches, a saucer, a stub of candle. Back in the living room, he kneels on the floor and lights the candle, securing it to the saucer with a drip of wax. Then he turns off his mother’s lamp.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s never believed in a God, in a guiding spirit, in a heaven or a hell or an afterlife. But nor did he ever believe that his son could kill another human being. Certainly not two.

If a shred of Drew’s spirit remains in this room, he’ll wait here a while until it departs. He owes her that – and a lot more besides.

He doesn’t speak, because no words exist for what he wants to say.

When the candle dies an hour later, plunging the room into darkness, Joseph senses he’s required here no longer.

Climbing to his feet, he walks through his mother’s house, feeling his way by touch.

Beneath him, all around him, the earth turns towards dawn.