Page 22 of The Bodies

TWENTY

Joseph’s first task, Monday morning, is to call his boss at the architectural firm in Shipley and tell her he’ll be working from home. Then he cancels all his meetings for the day.

Immediately afterwards he goes into Max’s room. The boy is lying beneath his duvet, his breathing slow and rhythmic. Asleep, he looks far younger than his eighteen years. Seeing him like this, it’s difficult to imagine him capable of a bad thought, let alone a bad deed.

Clutched in Max’s hand is a purple scrunchie that once belonged to Claire. It wasn’t in the bereavement box Joseph found yesterday. Somewhere, the boy must have a second stash of his mother’s things.

Five years since her passing, it’s obvious how intensely he still misses her. Does that change anything, Joseph wonders? Even slightly? Is Max’s ongoing heartache in some ways a spark of hope? Does the humanity it represents offer proof, however slight, that not everything is lost?

Tentatively, he touches his son’s shoulder – needing, suddenly, to feel the life flowing through him, the swell of his lungs as he breathes.

Joseph remains that way for some time, connected to Max physically if not by other means. Inevitably, his thoughts return to Drew, lying dead in his mother’s living room, and the unconscionable theft of her life.

Could he ever contemplate these lungs falling still? This heart failing to beat? To lose a wife, he’s learned, is to experience agony so devastating it cleaves a person in two. But to lose a son, or a daughter: how could anyone possibly survive that?

Downstairs, the house is silent. Joseph makes coffee and carries it to the breakfast bar. There he sits and drinks. He doesn’t have long to decide his course. He’s conscious that these quiet minutes of contemplation might also be his last moments of liberty.

The options he considered last night are the only ones left on the table: either he hands in his son or himself. Each prospect is uniquely terrifying.

He can’t break his promise to Claire – that he’ll protect Max from harm and ensure he reaches his potential, because that vow is sacrosanct.

But if he does persuade everyone that he committed these acts he’ll be in prison, unable to monitor Max’s behaviour, unable to mentor him, unable to intervene should something like this threaten to happen again.

Compounding his indecision is his inability, even now, to accept that his son is capable of such barbarity.

Joseph looks around the kitchen. This house, in truth, has never felt like the home he once built with Claire – perhaps because back then home had been a place of safety, inviolable – but he’d hoped, for Max’s sake, that he’d created something close.

Now, examining his surroundings more critically, he realizes that virtually nothing from his old kitchen has made it into this one.

The stools at the breakfast bar are new, as is the sofa near the bifold doors, the coffee table in front of it, the table and chairs beneath the pendant lights.

There’s different crockery in the cupboards, different cutlery in the drawers.

Different art hangs on the walls, and different vases and pots crowd the sills.

Even the smaller, everyday items are different: the coasters, the placemats, the chopping boards, the kettle, the toaster, the loaded fruit bowl.

Wandering through the house, Joseph sees that it’s the same in the living room, the dining room and the hall: everything is new – a celebration of the now; a denial of the past. The framed photographs on the mantelpiece and side tables, and the collection of monochrome images that marches up the stairs, are all of him and Erin, him and Max, Erin and Tilly, Max and Tilly – or all four of them together.

Why are there no pictures of Claire? Did he put them away because looking at them was too hard? He doesn’t even know where they are.

Overwhelmed by an urge to escape, he grabs his keys and locks the front door behind him. Across the street he sees Ralph Erikson’s house – and the doorbell cam pointed this way.

Joseph climbs into his car and drives without a destination in mind.

Twenty minutes later he finds himself on Hocombe Hill for the second time in twenty-four hours.

When he rolls past Thornecroft, Angus Roth’s mock Tudor mansion, he sees a police patrol car in the driveway.

Two police officers are talking to a scared-looking woman on the covered porch.

They’re coming for you. They know something’s happened.

With the aircon on full-blast, Joseph accelerates away. He knows where he’s going, now. Ten minutes later, he pulls up a short distance from Crompton’s police station.