Chapter 46
‘Taken aback?’ Laura said.
‘A little.’
It was early afternoon, and we were walking – limping in my case – up the front path of a two-storey house on a quiet suburban road.
The neighbouring houses were all the same – wide and low and white-faced – and the gardens were well-tended.
A few houses up, a sprinkler was pulsing out of sight behind a flat hedge.
Driving up the road, I’d seen an old man pushing a buzzing mower back and forth.
It was a good area, this one. Neat and upper-middle-class and expensive.
‘I don’t know what I was expecting, but not this.’
This was where twenty-two-year-old James Miller lived with his parents, and it was a world away from the home I would have pictured him growing up in.
It was difficult, looking around the sunlit street, to imagine this was a place dark enough to have produced such a monster – but of course, I was only seeing the exteriors.
And what does opulence mean, anyway? The bad things that go on behind closed doors require only closed doors.
We approached it now.
‘How’s your leg, Hicks?’
‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘Calm down then.’
‘I’m calm too.’ I reached out and knocked. ‘I’m good and I’m calm.’
But I wasn’t.
The injury to my leg wasn’t too severe. I was going to have a hell of a bruise, but the muscle had been stunned more than anything else, and I could walk okay.
But it was inside where I was most bruised.
I still remembered the panic, the fear – the feeling that I was going to die.
If anything it was stronger now, almost shameful.
And I still remembered the sight of the killing ground in the woods.
What James Miller had done to those people.
Between the two, I was angry as all fucking hell.
Not good. Not calm.
From inside his home, I heard a chain being hooked on. A moment later, the front door opened a fraction and a woman peered out. She was in her fifties, small and wary, with a sun-browned face and wiry grey hair. His mother, I guessed.
‘Janine Miller?’ I held up my ID. ‘I’m Detective Andrew Hicks. This is Detective Laura Fellowes. Unlock the chain, please.’
Her gaze darted between us, nervous.
‘What – what’s this about?’
‘We have a warrant to search the premises. In connection with the arrest of your son, James. Here.’
I passed it through the gap in the door. She made no move to take it from me.
‘James? Where is he? What’s going on?’
‘He’s at the police station.’
He had yet to be formally interviewed. Since his arrest, he had stared blankly and without emotion – the anger and hate apparently gone from him now – and spoken only to confirm his name and place of residence, and to say he understood the charges against him.
In addition to the hammer, we’d found, in the holding compartment of the stolen scooter, a balaclava, screwdriver, hunting knife, several plastic bags, his video camera and a spray bottle of cleaning product. His torture kit.
‘Open the door for us, Mrs Miller.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
And yet something told me she did. The nervousness, maybe – as though she’d been expecting a knock on the door like this for a long time. As though she knew something, but had been keeping her mind closed to it, refusing to look.
‘Open the door.’
She said, ‘But Charles isn’t here. My husband. I can’t – he should be here.’
‘He doesn’t need to be here. This isn’t about him. We have legal right of access. You need to open this door for us right now.’
I was seconds away from kicking the door off its fucking hinges. Even if she didn’t bear some responsibility for what her son had become, we couldn’t afford to wait any longer. For all we knew, her husband might be inside right now disposing of evidence.
I took a slight step back. Laura, sensing what I was about to do, moved forwards quickly.
‘You can call him,’ she said. ‘And we’ll wait for him to arrive before we do anything. Okay? But let us in. We don’t want this to be difficult.’
Janine Miller hesitated for a moment longer, then nodded. The door closed, there was a click, and this time it opened wide.
‘Thank you,’ Laura said.
We stepped inside into a plush little hallway. The carpet was beige and clean; the walls were painted bright white. There was a small, polished table by the base of the stairs with a vase of blue flowers on it. Up ahead, a gleaming, state-of-the-art kitchen. It looked like a show home.
‘Mr Miller?’ I called out.
There was no answer from the house.
‘I already told you –’
‘Where is James’s room?’ I said. ‘Is it upstairs?’
It would be. I didn’t even bother waiting for an answer; I was already starting up them. Behind me, I heard Laura reassuring Janine Miller.
‘Come into the lounge. You can call your husband.’
‘But you said –’
‘Come through here and sit down.’
Upstairs, there was a landing with four doors leading off it.
Three were open: a bathroom, a main bedroom, and a spare room that looked as though it was being used as a study.
I glanced into each, made sure they were empty, then approached the final door, which must have been James’s bedroom, and turned the handle.
Locked.
It would be, of course.
I took a step back and kicked it hard on the centre bar of the frame, close to the handle.
It jarred my bad leg, but the flaring pain felt good for some reason.
The door splintered a little but didn’t give entirely, so I kicked it again, ignoring the shouts of protest coming from the lounge downstairs.
This time it banged open.
I stepped into Jimmy Miller’s bedroom.
The carpet in here was older and more threadbare than in the rest of the house.
Sunlight leached through the closed red curtains, painting everything a dull crimson colour.
The place stank: warm and meaty. The single bed in the centre was unmade, the covers left in a tangle that lay half on the floor.
On the nearest side, there was a toilet roll and bunches of tissues, and a stained pint glass half-full of misty water.
Piles of clothes were strewn around. There was a rickety plywood bookcase filled with magazines, knick-knacks, a filthy ashtray, an empty brandy bottle.
I stepped over to the bed, looking around, and spotted the desk in the far corner, beyond the bookcase. On it, a closed laptop was humming gently. The laptop was key, obviously, but it was what I saw on the wall above that made me pause.
Holy shit.
Several A4 sheets had been tacked up. They appeared to be printouts from photographs or single frames from video footage.
Most showed dead animals, similar to what Renton had shown me in the dark room.
There was a dog hanging from a tree branch, tongue lolling, belly slit open and emptied.
In another, he’d crucified a white cat and filled its mouth and eyes with what looked like glue.
But there were others. There was a photograph of Derek Evans’s grave and the excrement that had been left on it.
A blurred image intruded from the side and it took a moment to work out what it was.
As Miller had taken the photograph, he’d used his free hand to give the dead man’s grave the middle finger.
These people who have died mean nothing to me.
I looked down to the laptop, and then around at the mess of the room. The rest of the house was so pristine. I found it hard to imagine that Miller had been allowed to keep his room like this, lock or no lock.
I realised I was heading down the stairs, my feet thumping hard on the steps, and then into the living room.
Laura looked at me. ‘Andy?’
‘Did you know?’
I shouted it in his mother’s face. She was sitting on the settee, knees pressed tightly around her hands, not looking up. At the sound of my voice, she shrank down even further.
‘Did you? Did you fucking well know?’
‘Andy –’
I grabbed hold of Janine Miller’s shoulders and started shaking her.
‘Did you fucking know what a monster you raised?’
The woman began sobbing, and I felt Laura drag me away from her. I didn’t resist, but I kept staring down at her. She was shaking her head. I had no idea what she meant by it: I didn’t know; forgive me; I can’t take this anymore.
‘Andy. Mr Miller is on his way. Let’s just keep this calm for now.’
‘You’ve not seen upstairs.’
‘Andy,’ Laura said, a little helplessly, but then I turned around and she saw the look on my face. She stared into my eyes for a moment, then sighed.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘All right.’