Chapter 40
EVAN
My lips peeled apart as though they’d been glued. I rasped the words. ‘Chris didn’t … He didn’t …’
‘Of course he didn’t,’ Dad rolled his eyes. ‘He didn’t know anything about it.’
I gripped the arm of the couch I was sitting in.
‘The kid nearly dropped dead from terror when I killed a couple of chickens in front of him.’ Dad shook his head. ‘I bet you have to get him six weeks of therapy just to have a nugget in that house.’
‘What did you do, Dad?’
‘Well, first off I got Steve Venables over to show him that car I told you about,’ he said.
‘So I’d have an alibi. Venables lives up the road here.
By mid-afternoon every day he’s staggeringly drunk, so I called him, told him to come round.
He won’t remember what time he came or how long he stayed for, so he’ll go along with what I tell him about the timing.
Then I asked Chris down to the pub for a birthday drink,’ Arthur said.
‘We stood out the front, near the river. He went in both times. He had a fake ID in case they carded him. You know he had that? He showed me. Pretty convincing.’
My throat was burning. The coffee was gone, through my stomach and back out again, into the toilet. I could feel it at the back of my nose, stinging. ‘When did you …’
‘After he left,’ Dad said. ‘I hung around out there and watched her go up. Made sure I had the room right. You can see the lights from the front. The skylights. I was hoping to get it done some time close to Chris having been there, because I didn’t know where he was going afterwards.
I didn’t want him popping up somewhere else and giving himself an alibi.
There was one guest up there. A guy. He left, and Chloe went up, and then Chris left, and I just watched and waited for the right time. ’
He puffed on his cigarette. Trails of smoke eased from his nostrils.
‘That’s half of it,’ he said. ‘The waiting.’
‘Half of what?’
Dad shrugged. I felt more ill than I ever had in my life. Because I knew. I could see it on his face. The waiting was half the pleasure.
‘What did you tell her at the door?’
‘Oh, I just played the confused old man.’ Dad stubbed his cigarette out on the arm of the couch, brushed the embers away.
There was a great hole where he’d been doing that for years, blackened foam.
‘Deary, I’m looking for my room. Is this number three or number four?
Oh, fiddlesticks, I’ve dropped my card.’
‘That’s what you did with Linda and Marian.’ I shivered. ‘You gave them a story at the door.’
‘That was part of it, too,’ he said. ‘Whether I could get them to let me in or not. Linda recognised me from the week before. I said there’d been an accident down the road a bit, and I needed to call my station.
I remember running up to the house so I’d look breathless when I got there.
She got me water. Marian … Oh, I don’t remember.
It was years ago. I told her something. Probably the same thing.
There was a problem and I needed to use the phone. ’
I held my face. Shook my head, made myself dizzy. ‘I can’t clean this up. You’re asking me to … to … I mean, you murdered them, Dad. If what you’re saying is true, you …’
He was silent. I was suddenly so afraid to look at him. I stared at my hands.
‘You were so sure,’ I said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Of the game. You were so sure of how you’d do it. How it would work. What you wanted.’
‘Don’t get into that. Don’t make—’
‘Were there others?’
‘—your own life harder than it needs to be right now, Evan.’
‘But this wasn’t the first time, was it? With Linda. The killing you’ve described. It was so … escalated. So advanced. People like you, they don’t go from zero to ten like this. There must be—’
‘The coppers,’ Dad cut over me. His eyes, when I braved to look at them, were full of warning.
‘They’ll have Chris coming into town, Evan.
They’ll have him on the CCTV at the pub.
And they’ll have the text message, on my phone and his, telling him to come down and meet me.
You need to make sure this doesn’t become a problem for me, my son.
Because if this becomes a problem for me, I’ll tell them that I did indeed meet my grandson at the pub at Redbelly that night.
That he was talking aggressively about a girl who was inside.
That he’s a fucked-up little weirdo who has threatened violence before, and that I left because I was starting to feel uncomfortable.
I’ll say that the last time I saw him, he was heading towards the stairwell. ’
‘Your DNA is on her!’ I had to growl the words through the rage that was suddenly so hot and all-consuming it made my teeth lock together. ‘They have your DNA!’
‘Do they?’ he asked brightly. Gave an amused snort. ‘You know, I asked you to come onto this because I wanted it bungled. But you and your brother have really cut to the chase with the whole thing. I’m actually impressed.’
‘I thought the sample was Chrissy’s,’ I managed. ‘It’s a familial match to me and Rus. They’ll test it further. It’ll come back as you. What the hell am I supposed to do about that?’
‘I can explain away my DNA transferring from me to Chris, and from Chris onto the dead girl.’ Dad waved a dismissive hand.
‘I’ll have a hell of a lot of an easier time making a jury believe that story than you will making them believe an old, chronically injured hero cop killed that feisty young woman in that room. ’
‘You’re not chronically injured,’ I said. ‘You can’t be. The strength it would have taken—’
‘I’ve been playing up the injury since it happened.’ He rotated his shoulder. ‘I’m fine.’
I thought about that case. The wife who went missing.
The back door of the house open, and the potatoes cooking on the stove.
The husband accused. My father shooting him before he could ever be officially pinned down for the crime.
I wanted to ask if it had been him. Dad.
If he’d killed that woman, too. My thoughts turned to my mother.
Dead, slumped, in the back shed, waiting for my brother to come home and find her.
I got up and went to the windows. Gripped my hair in two handfuls, tried to make the pain take me away from this moment.
It didn’t work. The whole world was closing in around me.
‘You’re talking about my son, Dad! You’re talking about my baby! ’
‘Evan—’
‘I can’t clean this all up. I’m … I’m behind. I’ll never catch up. I’m not smart enough.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Evan.’
‘Don’t do this.’ I hid my face and cried into my hands. ‘Please, please, please. Dad, please. Don’t take my baby.’
‘I warned you,’ came his voice from behind me. ‘Didn’t I? I warned you, a long time ago. Never love anything. That’s the safest way to be in life. You never love anything, and you’ve got nothing to lose.’
He got up and went into the kitchen. I stood at the windows and looked out into the yard, at the rusting car bodies and the broken-down coop and the distant bush.
It was as still as death out there. No sound beyond the drumming and thundering and splintering and crashing between my ears, the orchestra of panic and rage that had been silenced far too long.
I almost felt my body giving into it. Letting that inky black thing inside billow out and take over, stretch into my fingertips and the soles of my feet.
The thrumming in my skull softened, and what took its place was the noise of the screaming of the kettle in the kitchen.
The kettle noise masked the sound of me walking over and picking up the rifle by the armchair.
Dad was at the sink. He turned around, going for the coffee canister, and noticed me standing there. He looked at the rifle in my hands, then at my eyes. A disbelieving smile fluttered at the corners of his mouth. It dropped off his face as I ratcheted a bullet into the chamber.
‘Evan?’ he said.
I shot him in the chest. The rifle kicked hard into the hollow of my shoulder, hit the bone, which sang with pleasure and rightness.
My father gripped at the hole in his sternum, went down onto the linoleum.
I came into the kitchen, sliding the bolt forward and back again, the shell casing singing as it flew and hit the top of the fridge.
Dad tried to slide away from me, his back on the floor, leaving a trail of blood, his legs working. One hand up. Reaching for his child.
‘Oh god! Oh god! Oh god!’ he cried.
‘There’s no god where you’re going,’ I told him.
Then I shot him in the face.