Page 41 of The Bodies

THIRTY-SIX

In the half-second before Joseph throws open his door and follows, a hundred thoughts rush through his head; a thousand.

Last night, lying awake, he’d been ready to tell Erin everything.

Not just what Max had done, first to the dead man and then to Drew, but how Joseph had concealed the truth.

He’d intended to tell her because he hadn’t thought it conscionable to let her find out any other way.

Now, just like previous decisions since this nightmare began four days ago, the calculus has fundamentally changed.

Because as much as he might still love his wife, as much as he might understand the reasons for her infidelity, he’s just glimpsed a side to her he hadn’t known existed.

Outside the police station, Erin had begun their conversation by spinning him back to his first meeting with Tilly, a memory she’d known would invoke all the emotions that had filled him that day, all his protective instincts.

She’d gone on to share intimate details of her life with Robson, and then Mark, that he’d never heard before.

Only once she’d pacified him with the opiate memory of first encounters and neutered him with the horrors of past relationships had she admitted the truth about Angus Roth.

He can’t fault her. She has, at least, been honest. But Erin’s manipulation of him, however trivial, does highlight something important – his ability to predict her behaviour isn’t as accurate as he’d once thought. Right now, right here, that could be his undoing.

Joseph gets out of the car, ignoring his body’s various shrieks of protest, unable to ignore the chill of fear his mother’s bungalow instils in him.

The building seems different, in ways he can’t explain.

It exudes a tangible menace. Breathing hard, he hobbles after his wife, his fingers hooked like talons, like claws.

Erin slides her key into the lock and opens the door.

She sniffs the air, steps through. Joseph pauses on the step, casting a look back at Dell Stephano and the sprinkler flinging its jewels into the morning sky.

He wonders if the stench of death rolling out of the bungalow is real or entirely illusory.

Sweat bursts from his pores. It rolls wet from his armpits.

Flexing his fingers, he limps across the threshold behind Erin.

He elbows the door shut, hears the snick of its latch.

Immediately, he finds himself in an entirely different world to the one populated by Dell.

It’s silent in here, but there’s an awareness to the silence.

The bungalow feels sentient; as if it’s poised, alert.

The stench Joseph thought he’d breathed into his lungs is already fading.

His imagination must have been playing tricks.

The air feels ancient, even so, hot and dead: like the inside of a crypt unsealed after a couple of millennia lying beneath desert sands.

Again, he’s struck by how alien everything looks.

He feels less like he’s standing in his late mother’s hallway and more like he’s entered a—

—lair , some part of his mind volunteers.

Erin glances over her shoulder at him, her eyes hidden by her sunglasses. Then she turns away and lifts her chin. ‘Hello?’

Joseph baulks at that, stares at his wife in confusion. She knows the place is unoccupied. Who does she think might answer?

‘Drew?’ she calls. ‘Are you here?’

Joseph watches Erin move along the hall, his stomach twisting like an Archimedes screw. She stops at the door leading to his mother’s bedroom, ducks in her head.

‘What’re you doing?’ he hisses. ‘You really think she might be here?’

Erin ignores his question, disappearing inside.

Joseph, his heart kicking like a newborn foal, is forced to follow.

What he sensed as he crossed the drive he senses even more strongly inside the bungalow.

Something is badly amiss with the heavy, bookish quiet.

Even the peculiar fall of the light through the slatted blinds feels wrong.

His mother’s room is a desolate space, familiar yet fundamentally changed. The fitted wardrobes – white with decorative gold inlays – look just as they did when she was alive. Her bed, now stripped to the mattress, is crowned by the same rose-velvet headboard.

But just like the rest of the bungalow, the vital touches that made this her sanctuary have disappeared.

Her empty dressing table is layered with dust. Joseph remembers it cluttered with make-up and perfume bottles, along with keepsakes and gifts made by Max: the boy’s first finger painting; his first handwritten letter; Christmas cards he’d drawn; crude clay figures he’d pushed together; a bookmark cut from felt and badly sewn; a trinket box covered with carefully stuck-on shells; photos of him feeding ducks, or wearing a doctor’s dressing-up kit, or standing on a box and turning sausages on a barbecue.

Where did it all go? Joseph remembers clearing the bungalow with Erin, a few months after his mother’s death. But now, standing here, he doesn’t recall what happened to her most sentimental belongings. He knows he didn’t throw them away.

Erin glances at the bed, leans over it. Whatever she’s looking for, she doesn’t find it. Going to the fitted wardrobes, she opens the doors two at a time, revealing the empty spaces beneath the rails.

Erin closes the last set. Then she returns to the hall. Joseph follows, watching as she performs the same routine in the guest bedroom.

In the living room, he spots the first change since his last visit. Someone has returned his mother’s chair and side table to their original positions. Their legs have been slotted, like eight keys into eight locks, back into the same depressions in the carpet.

Did Miah do this yesterday, following the viewing? Perhaps it was the older woman with the Japanese knotweed fixation.

Erin looks around the room. There’s nowhere in here to hide a body – not unless you chopped it into pieces and put separate chunks in the sideboard and dresser; likewise, in the kitchen beyond the arch.

Perhaps Erin’s not looking for a body at all but signs of occupation.

Perhaps she suspects Max and Drew have been using the bungalow as a hideaway, that Drew has been camped out here for reasons unknown.

With a lurch, Joseph recalls the way Enoch had rubbed Erin’s side last night, his fingers not-so-subtly seeking her breast. He recalls Erin’s story about her first husband and how Robson had abused her, and had abused Tilly even worse.

Perhaps that’s why Erin thinks Drew might be here. If so, she won’t be looking for bloodstains or pieces of hacked scalp but crumbs of food, toiletries, a sleeping bag crushed inside a drawer.

In the kitchen, she opens each cupboard individually. She checks the fridge, the washing machine, the dishwasher. When she turns to him, he still can’t see her expression. The sunglasses have given her ant eyes: black, shiny, enormous.

Joseph forces himself not to look at the connecting door to the garage. Erin hasn’t checked it. Can it possibly have escaped her notice?

‘Well?’ he asks, wiping sweat from his forehead. ‘Are you going to talk to me?’

‘I think Max found out about Angus. I think that’s why he’s been acting so strangely. And I think that maybe he decided to do something about it. Scare Angus off, or teach him a lesson. Maybe snatch him off the street and hold him prisoner for a while.

‘Angus hasn’t been seen since Thursday, and it’d take a lot of work to keep him here so long.

Max has been seeing Drew. You told me that yourself.

I’d wondered if she might be helping him – if that might explain where she’d gone.

But she’s not here, Joe. No one is. So maybe that’s not what happened at all. ’

Erin pauses. Then she says. ‘Maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe Drew found out that Max had done something and threatened to go to the police.’

Joseph laughs, shakes his head – because mockery of her argument feels like his only possible strategy. ‘Jesus, Erin. Do you know how you sound? Your evidence for any of this is what, exactly?’

Her chest rises and falls. She folds her arms, then unfolds them.

‘All the connections I just laid out. Angus hasn’t been seen since Thursday.

Friday night Max decides, seemingly randomly, and for the first time ever, to take a drive in an untaxed and uninsured car.

When he gets home, he doesn’t park outside.

Instead, he sneaks into the house, keeping all the lights off.

In the morning, the washing-up bowl and the dish scrubber have disappeared.

Also – and I didn’t mention this before, thought I’d hold it back – someone decided to mop the kitchen floor in the early hours of Saturday, because when I went downstairs first thing it looked spotless and smelled strongly of bleach.

And when I asked you, that morning, about what happened when you confronted Max, you told me you—’

Erin stiffens, raises her head. She turns away from him, stares at the connecting door to the garage. ‘You told me you drove the car over here with him, in the middle of the night, to stop him from using it again.’

Erin takes off her sunglasses and slides them in her hip pocket. She’s breathing even faster, now. For the first time, Joseph thinks he sees something new in her expression – the smallest flicker of apprehension. Perhaps even fear.

She moves towards the connecting door. And Joseph, out of desperation, blocks her path.

‘Move,’ she says.

‘Erin—’

‘What’ve you got to hide?’

‘Erin, listen.’

‘I said move .’

They’re inches away from each other. Joseph can smell her perfume, the lingering traces of coffee on her breath. He can see the striations of caramel in her blue eyes, the inky pools at their centres. The tick of her pulse in her neck.

She is, he thinks, quite beautiful. Even now. Especially now.

All he wants is to protect his son. To keep Max out of jail, to give him another chance of life.

He wonders if Erin can read any of that in his face.

He wonders if she understands the lengths he’ll go to achieve it.

Because he’s in this for the finish, now, has resigned himself fully to the task.

He loves his wife but he can’t lose his boy.

Joseph thinks of what’s waiting on the other side of that door: the car, Drew, the garden implements piled in one corner, the workbench against the near wall and the work tools stacked upon it – the screwdrivers, the hammers, the mallets; the saws, the wrenches, the planting spikes; the hand axes, the lengths of hose and rope.

With a huge gulp of air, Joseph stands aside. Erin reaches for the door handle and opens it, revealing a wedge of perfect dark. She hesitates on the threshold, throws him a distrustful look.

It feels like someone has forced a paddle down Joseph’s throat and is violently stirring his guts. A muscle twitches in his bicep. His knee sends out a warning shriek.

Forty-eight hours after Drew’s passing, twenty-four hours after he wrapped her in plastic and dumped her inside the Honda, Joseph fears the stench inside the garage will be thick enough to coat his tongue.

But the air rolling out of it smells toasted, not rotten – an inoffensive combination of warm engine oil and baked dust.

Erin steps forward. Joseph follows. He feels like a cow being led into an abattoir. And then, as if a slaughterman just pressed a bolt gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger, white light flares.

In front of him, his mother’s garage resolves, shadows flitting like bats to the furthest corners of the space. Overhead, the fluorescent strip stutters twice and stabilizes.

Joseph staggers past his wife, somehow keeps his balance. He blinks, stares, reels. But there’s no denying reality. His mother’s car has gone.