Page 68 of The Bodies

SIXTY-THREE

Joseph drops Erin and Max at the house, then drives to his mother’s bungalow in Saddle Bank. He parks in the garage, locks the car and cycles home through sleeping streets. During his absence, his wife and son have showered, and filled a binbag with the clothes they’d worn at Thornecroft.

‘You’d better do the same,’ Erin tells him.

He stands under the hot water for as long as he can bear, blasting the blood and grime from his skin.

Afterwards, Erin puts fresh dressings on his injuries and helps him into a loose-fitting shirt.

Max shoves the binbag of soiled clothes into a rucksack.

He’s gone twenty minutes and returns empty-handed.

They do a final check around the house. Erin collects the pieces of broken door handle from the back step. Joseph stuffs the crossbow box into their wood burner and tosses in a match.

At midnight, they report Tilly missing. Because of the link to Drew’s disappearance, two police officers arrive straight away.

Erin does most of the talking. She tells them her daughter had spent the morning publicizing Drew’s disappearance on social media, and that afterwards she’d left the house to put up posters around town. Her phone, when called, diverts straight to voicemail.

The officers ask to see Tilly’s room and Erin shows them. They don’t seem to notice the dink to the plaster in the upstairs hall. They do spot the stack of MISSING flyers on Tilly’s desk, and take one with them when they leave.

Joseph drinks a beer, opens another. Despite his exhaustion, he can’t slow his brain, can’t stop hunting for things he might have missed. He thinks of the woman he saw at Thornecroft on Monday. Wonders where she is now.

At three a.m. the police return, this time in far greater numbers.

Before he answers the door, Joseph embraces Max and sends him upstairs.

A while later he finds himself in the back of a patrol car with Erin, on the way to the hospital where, an officer tells him, his stepdaughter is recovering from an abduction almost too savage to contemplate.