Page 57 of The Bodies

FIFTY-TWO

Seconds after leaving Ralph Erikson’s house, Joseph is back at home. The air inside the kitchen churns his stomach; Enoch’s blood smells like old pennies and something vaguely sweet. Erin is still sitting at the table, clasping her phone like it’s a religious icon. She looks stricken, desolate.

Joseph goes to the bifold doors. Finding no damage, he steps into the utility. The back door looks intact, too, but when he opens it, he sees pieces of handle and lock mechanism on the step.

‘Gabriel Roth,’ he says, returning to the kitchen. ‘I think he has them. I just saw him on Ralph’s camera. He drove the car over here while we were out, broke in.’

Erin’s hand moves to her chest. She looks even worse than before. ‘Did you see Tilly?’

‘Just Max, but he didn’t look injured. Scared shitless but not hurt. Gabriel turned up before he did. I think Tilly must have been here alone when he arrived.’

Thinking of the blood he found upstairs, Joseph lets that sink in. He knows Erin’s love for her daughter won’t have been extinguished because of what she watched on that phone, however diabolical it had been.

‘This is bad, Joe. Really bad.’

She stares at him, her eyes lost, and Joseph tries to ignore his growing belief that no good endings to this nightmare remain possible.

He’s endured four days and four nights of horror – all in the service, perhaps, of delaying the inevitable, of refusing to accept that life has thrown him another tragedy.

And now, at the last, the battle he thought he’d been fighting has morphed into something unrecognizable.

It feels like there’s so little of him left – but he can’t stop until he’s exhausted every possible means to save his boy. He may have damned himself by taking Enoch’s life, but he’s going to see this through.

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Right now, we’ve got one thing in our favour: we know what’s going on, and he doesn’t know we know. Tell me everything you can about Gabriel Roth.’

Erin doesn’t have much insight. Angus, she says, hadn’t talked about Gabriel often. Not because he was dismissive of his twin – the brothers’ relationship had seemed so incredibly tight that Angus refused to grant outsiders access.

She does know they were brought up in care, that they have no blood family other than each other – and that while Angus, in adulthood, pursued property and wealth, his twin chose a life of travel. Gabriel has no permanent address, moving from place to place and living largely off-the-grid.

The more Joseph hears, the more disquieted he grows. Because it sounds like they’re dealing with a man who could slip out of sight as quickly as he appeared. A man who doesn’t fear any consequences for his actions.

‘Angus’s house on Hocombe Hill,’ he says. ‘Did you ever visit?’

‘Just once,’ Erin says. ‘A few weeks ago.’

The thought of her at Thornecroft is a knife in his gut. She must see his pain because she grasps his hand, squeezes it.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he tells her. ‘That’s for later, if we ever get there.

Look, I think Gabriel is mostly likely at his brother’s.

It’s a big place, private, and he probably knows it well.

I don’t know about Angus’s girlfriend – I think I saw her there yesterday, but if Gabriel’s moved in, I doubt she’d have stuck around. ’

‘I think you’re probably right.’

‘So that’s where we go. Once we’re there, we do whatever’s necessary to bring Max and Tilly home.’

Erin glances at Enoch. Then she looks at Joseph, ashen-faced. ‘Not that. I can’t do that, Joe.’

‘If it comes to it, I think you can. Because I’ll be honest with you, Erin. That’s where I think this is going. He believes I killed his brother. And instead of calling the police, he walked into our house and snatched our kids.’

‘So what are you thinking? We can’t just turn up and ring the bell.’

‘As I said, right now he doesn’t know we know. That’s to our advantage, but it might not last long. We need to surprise him there – and soon.’

Erin looks at him in silence. Eventually, she says, ‘How did we get here, Joe? How did all this creep up on us, unawares? How could Tilly …’

Her words falter. He opens his arms and pulls her close.

‘What kind of mother am I to let this happen?’ she sobs. ‘What kind of wife?’

‘This didn’t happen because of some mistake you made. It didn’t happen because of Angus Roth. You saw the way Tilly was on that clip. That was something else.’

‘I should have seen it coming. I should have seen the signs, picked up on them.’

‘Then I should have picked up on them as well. I’ve lived with her long enough.’

‘It’s not the same, Joe. You know it isn’t.’

He releases her, steps back. ‘As I said, there’ll be a time to talk about all this, but first we’ve got to get them back.’

He looks around the kitchen – at Enoch, at the debris from their fight, at the blood streaked across the cabinets and the floor.

‘We have to move him, too. Clean up in here. If a forensics team goes over the place we’re screwed, but that’s another thing for later.

For now we just need to make this look like it never happened. ’

‘How’s your knee? Tell me the truth. Could you run?’

‘It’ll hold up,’ he says, knowing he can promise no such thing.

Erin nods. ‘I’ll get started down here.’

Joseph limps upstairs. In his bedroom he retrieves his crossbow box from the wardrobe.

Removing the user guide, he flicks through it to the English-language section.

A few minutes later he’s attached the fibreglass cross-piece to the barrel.

Next, he attaches a stringing aid and uses the cocking system to pull it into the latch.

With the limb under tension he strings the bow.

Finally, he loads five carbon-fibre arrows, each with a razored-steel broadhead point, into a speedloader and drops it into the magazine.

The weapon feels cold in his hands. Brutally capable. Catching his reflection in the mirror, he hardly recognizes the person he sees. His skin appears bloodless. His eyes look like they’ve already glimpsed his own death.

He returns the empty box to the wardrobe and retrieves his tomahawk, his torch and his police-issue cuffs. From its hiding place in the ensuite, he grabs Angus Roth’s wallet.

He carries everything downstairs and puts it on the kitchen table. In his absence, Erin has swept up the broken glass and the shards of broken ceramic. Now she’s scrubbing the cabinets with stain remover.

Joseph fetches his baseball bat from the utility. Then he helps with the rest of the clean-up.

‘What do we do with Enoch?’ Erin asks. ‘I can’t lift him on my own. I doubt you could either, with that knee. If something happens to one of us …’

‘You want to take him along?’

‘I don’t think it’s wise to leave him in the house.’

‘I guess if we can get him into the van, we can drive that to Thornecroft. At least Gabriel won’t recognize it. Afterwards …’ He shrugs, casts about. ‘Honestly, right now I’ve no idea about afterwards.’

After locating Enoch’s keys, Joseph opens the garage door and reverses the van right up to it. Even with Erin’s help, the task of lifting the man inside proves far more difficult than he’d anticipated. By the time they’ve completed the job, they’re both sweating.

In the kitchen, Erin points at the crossbow. ‘You want to show me how to use that thing?’

Picking it up, he gives her a quick tutorial, demonstrating how to cock it after each shot and how to replace the speedloader.

‘Is it traceable back to you?’ she asks.

‘I paid cash. Some prepper’s shop on the south coast that was closing down. So no. I don’t think so.’

While Erin goes upstairs to change, Joseph digs out a large sports holdall from the cupboard under the stairs.

He fills it with everything he may need – not just the crossbow and tomahawk but the baseball bat and some of the other weapons secreted around the house.

He throws in an old birdwatching scope of Claire’s, a daysack.

Then he finds the Sainsbury’s bag containing his blood-stained top and throws that in, too.

Erin comes downstairs, wearing black cargo trousers, desert boots, a black vest. She looks grimly determined, like she’s about to go to war.

‘Ready?’ he asks.

She pulls her hair into a knot. ‘Not in the slightest.’

‘Me neither. Let’s go.’