Chapter 10
EVAN
I stared at the image of my son on the screen, my breath caught in my throat and my brain trying to compute the information it was receiving.
The experience was the same as when I had first laid eyes on my own image in the newspaper, the first time I’d made it into the local rag for running into a burning house and coming out with the owner’s golden retriever in my arms. There was an unreality to it.
An absurdity. That was me, but it couldn’t be me.
This was my son, but it couldn’t be my son.
And yet, an all-consuming certainty and dread fell over me, made it impossible to take my eyes off the screen.
‘Okay. So, who’s the creep?’ Russell asked.
No one spoke at first. I couldn’t. Dodge and Fry were still taking a moment to examine the image of the tall, lean man behind Chloe. Fry ran the video back and we all watched it again. The turn. The stare. ‘No one in particular is leaping to mind,’ Dodge said finally.
‘It’s not Catherine’s son, is it?’ Dodge squinted at Fry.
‘Who’s Catherine?’
‘The writer’s festival lady. Runs the book club, “The Book Feast”. My wife’s in it.’
‘Oh, her. Dunno. Didn’t know she had a son.’
‘I’ll ask her.’ Dodge paused the footage, used his phone to take a photo of the image on the screen. I felt sweat beginning to bead at my temples. ‘You recognise him, Evan?’
I wanted to scream. I looked at Russell, who had cast his eyes to the floor, thinking, listening, probably trying to pick up intonations in the voices of Dodge or Fry that might reveal they’re trying to cover for one of their local mates.
Russell trusted no one. The pressure to pass his audio exam now was making my heart hammer in my chest. Because that was Chris.
I was sure of it. And there was no part of me that was brave enough to reveal to this group of men, in this moment, that it was my son who’d examined Chloe Lutz in a decidedly ‘creepy’ fashion in the hours and minutes before she was brutally stabbed to death.
Maybe soon I’d be able to get there. But not now. So I said, ‘No idea.’
Russell looked at me for the first time in a solid ten minutes.
I braced for a torching. It had been five years since my brother saw my son, and in that time Chris had shot up in height a good foot and a half, lost a considerable amount of puppy fat and grown his hair to his ears.
I was confident he was unrecognisable to Russell.
But could he see the anguish in my face?
Russell turned away, flicked his hand at the screen and said, ‘Hunt him down.’
The words sent a crackle of terror through me.
The meeting terminated, and I walked out the door of the pub and around the corner, right to the edge of the beer garden.
I dialled Chris. He declined the first call, sent me to voicemail.
Grinding my teeth, I dialled again. He picked up after an agonising eight rings. ‘Yeah?’
‘Were you in Redbelly Crossing last night?’
‘Me?’
I told myself to be calm. ‘Yes, you, Chris. Did you go to the pub here?’
‘Nooooo, Daaaaad.’ Chris drew out the words, like he was speaking to someone for whom plain English was impossibly hard. ‘What are you, high? I’m sixteen years old. I can’t go to the bloody pub.’
‘Where were you? Who were you with?’
‘Actually, yesterday, I was fifteen. It’s my birthday. I forgot.’ Inane sniggering in the background of the call.
‘Chris, where were you? You went out. Where did you go?’
‘What are you asking me all this shit for?’ the kid baulked. ‘Aren’t you there working a fucking murder right now?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘And you’re blowing up my phone asking me if I was there?’ His voice was rising steadily. He was as fast to anger as all the Powder men who had come before him. The voices in the background had fallen away. ‘Are you for real?’
‘There’s a person on the CCTV who looks just like you.’
‘Jesus, man,’ Chris sighed. ‘Whoever you’ve got on CCTV, like, murdering someone, it isn’t me. And it’s kind of wild that you would ask me that at all, you know. Especially today.’
‘Okay, look, I’ve come at this wrong,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying you did it, but maybe you’re a wit—’
My son hung up on me. I stood there staring at the peacocks on the roof of the pub, two of them, wandering along the slanted corrugated iron awning over the extension at the back.
They were hunting for frogs, I supposed, in the guttering.
As I watched, one of them plucked something out, a slithering, wriggling thing that twisted and writhed before it was swallowed whole.
Russell’s words came back to me. Hunt him down.
I told myself it was the pressure of my first real homicide since the incident.
All that was weighing on my performance.
That it couldn’t have been my son there at the pub—like he’d said, he was fifteen the night before, a hair over sixteen now.
The girl behind the counter hadn’t carded him for his drink.
Guilt swept through me at the idea that I had just called Chris and asked him what I had, in the way that I had.
My strange but harmless little boy. My misunderstood creature.
I’d bruised him on his birthday, in front of his friends.
The unsettled feeling in my chest wouldn’t go away, though.
The immediate, instinctive notion that I’d just been looking at my child, exactly where he shouldn’t have been, exactly when he shouldn’t have been there.
I’d started to tell Chris that I was enquiring about it because he might have witnessed something useful to police.
But the guilt that was roiling in me now was the knowledge that I hadn’t been assessing Chris’s usefulness as a witness in the first instance; I’d been assessing whether or not he’d done it.