Page 55 of The Bodies

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.’

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 done things 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. In this 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 inside with 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.