Chapter 24
He’s right beside the dresser, about two feet from where I’m crouched, trying not to breathe.
“Nah,” he says to whoever’s on the phone. “I told you. I’m standing in the dead room right now and there’s nae sign of her.”
Oh, Chloe, I think. And, Why didn’t I ever ask myself why that bothered you so much?
“I told you,” John says. “The whole of the front is covered and we’ve been watching.
She couldn’t have got here.” He listens.
“There’s no way in the back.” So he thinks.
“Robert, Eric, and me have been right round,” he says next.
“Calm down. She’ll be hiding somewhere out on the road waiting for the gate to open and nip in. ”
Then a silence. Who is he talking to?
“I’ve got her phone.”
He waits.
“Nah, she took the car key with her. But—”
He’s interrupted.
“Yeah, but you don’t know her like me,” he says when he gets the chance to talk again.
“She’ll not be able to stand being shut out like this.
My old dear used to kick us out when we’d been wee shits—I did it too, till Shelley put her foot down!
Thing is, it never did me any harm but it wrecked her head.
She’ll be scratching at the gate like a lost pup, I tell you. ”
Never did him any harm. He did it to Zak and Nicky until Shelley put her foot down. I can’t—But he’s talking again.
“Well, if she does,” John says next, “which she won’t, I’m telling you, but if she does, Robert’s watching the front and we’ll hear the car start. Pick her up back at Saint Helen’s and take it from there.”
Another silence.
“It won’t,” he says. “Sort of thing happens every day.” What the hell is he talking about now? “Grieving and lonely, eh no? Getting to lodge in a pal’s big posh house isn’t enough to lift her spirits and all that. Take it from me.”
Yesterday, I would have tried to believe his meaning wasn’t clear, but I’m done with that. Look where refusing to meet the worst head-on has got me.
“Aye, but you’re forgetting that her brother and her best friend’ll confirm the state she was in. Aye, aye—‘reluctantly.’ Good call. But who else has she seen since she got back? Shelley and me, Chloe and you.”
So he’s talking to David. Together they are all calmly planning to kill me and make it look like suicide.
“No, stay at home,” he’s saying now. “We’re covered.
Eric’s in the office watching the screens, Sarah’s in the house with Shelley.
But she’ll not get in the gate. And, if she thinks she can hide all night in this, she’ll get hypothermia and do the job for us.
” He cuts this off quickly as if he’s been interrupted.
“You’re too soft,” he says. “Get a grip, man.”
Then his footsteps move away and, unbelievably, he’s whistling.
For some reason, I feel perfectly calm. Maybe it’s because at last I understand.
I have no idea—and I don’t care either—what happened to the other three to get them here.
But I know what happened to John. He didn’t recover from our childhood.
And he didn’t do what I did either. He didn’t bury it too deep to find until reading a self-help book out loud unearthed it.
And he didn’t stay broken and hurting either.
Now I understand why he couldn’t talk about “Dad.” Why he pretended I’d made a silly mistake, saying that when I meant “Mum.” It’s because he moved into the space our dad left.
You hurt old people with big houses different from how you hurt little kids who trust you, but it takes the same kind of man to do both.
Our dad did what he did to John and to me. I ran away from him. John became him.
The journey back under the dresser base, along the edge of the field and out onto the road is a hell that feels a week long although it can’t even be fifteen minutes.
I fall twice, now that my feet are so cold I can’t tell where I’m putting them.
The second time, I graze my cheekbone on a rock and twist my ankle trying to get back up again.
But eventually, in the failing light and sheets of rain, I’m standing on the verge, a good bit along from the yard gates, waiting for a car to come so I can flag it down.
When I do see lights at last, I don’t just stick out my thumb; I step right out into the path of a lorry, waving my arms and saying “Please, please, please,” hoping the driver can see me, then hoping the driver can stop in time.
I want to jump out of the way but I want even more to show him how desperate I am, so I stand there wailing, mouth wide open like a baby.
He stops, air brakes hissing and engine shifting down and down until it’s just a grumble under the sound of the lashing rain. I get myself moving somehow, and totter forward to thank him.
Thank her. She waits for me up in the cab and gives me a long look up and down as I scramble in and sit back with my head resting on a fluffy cushion Velcroed to the passenger seat.
She twists the control on her heater until hot air blasts out. Immediately, I start steaming up the side window and my bit of the windscreen.
“Who did that, then?” she says, gesturing to her own cheekbone, as she starts up again.
I pull down the sun visor, taking two goes to make my arm swing that high and my fingers grasp the edge of it. “I fell,” I say. Then as she makes a scoffing noise halfway to a spit I add, “You can check if you like. There’s grit in it.”
Then we’re passing Lord’s Yard and I bend over in my seat out of view until I judge we’re beyond it.
“Is that where you live?” she says.
“I used to,” I tell her. “But—”
“Fucking bastard,” the lorry driver says. I don’t care that she’s got the wrong end of a very long stick. She has no idea how right she is, essentially.
“So where are we going?” she says, another few miles along. “Police?”
“Police,” I agree.
“Good girl,” she says, still not understanding. “I was headed to Stirling. Do you know where the Stirling police station is or will I get it on the satnav?”
I don’t answer her. I’m thinking. But my thoughts aren’t swirling the way they’ve been.
These thoughts are orderly and they’re taking me somewhere.
If I heard Peggy at the junkyard that night, the day she was taken from her house, then when did she scratch that message into the paint?
And if I heard Peggy at the junkyard that night, if those screams were because they were killing her, then what’s the nursing home for?
I get that far then let my head fall back. The police will sort it out for me.
Except . . . John told David to stay at home. And he said Eric was watching the screens and Sarah was in the house with Shelley. Chloe is at Saint Helen’s. So maybe, just maybe, no one is at the Elms.
I wish I hadn’t stopped counting the graves, because a notion is taking shape in me, and I can’t stop it growing.
I close my eyes and try to bring the sight of the Barrens—John’s dead room—back into my mind.
One grave was slightly rounded and one was dark and steep.
Were there four flat places where older bones had settled?
There were more than three. But were there really as many as five?
“Actually,” I say, “if it’s not too much bother, could you do a drive-by of a house in Kincardine? I need to check something.”
“Always a treat to take my rig over that bridge,” the driver says, but she’s smirking and I can tell she’s going to do it for me.
“Thanks.”
“But then you’ll go to the police.” It’s not a question.
“Oh, I’ll go to the police,” I assure her. “Keep your eye on the news. You’ll see.”
“Good girl,” she says again.
“I’ll go to the police,” I repeat, half to her and half to myself.
I’ll go to the police. I won’t excuse, or explain, or try to find a workaround.
I won’t be Shelley. I won’t be my mum. Because the thing is I know she put us out on the road so he wouldn’t find us, when he was looking.
I know she did it to protect us, time after time.
I know she meant something with those fierce hugs she gave us afterwards.
But the first time we got away from him all by ourselves?
When we made ourselves a hidey-hole in the caravan?
She was angry. She was livid when she found out how come we’d managed it.
And it was her who told us it wasn’t safe to run away, that we’d get put in a home.
I try to think about what he might have put her through when he was looking for us and couldn’t find us.
I try to care what punishment she had to bear when he wanted his children and they weren’t there for him.
I fail. She could have broken her life into bits, lost her home and her husband and her pride. She could have saved her kids.
“It’s not right that women get blamed for not stopping men from doing what they do,” I say to the lorry driver.
“Depends what they’re doing,” she says grimly. “Usually there’s enough blame to go round, if you ask me.”
Twenty minutes later, the lorry lumbers along the quiet street towards the Elms like a monster come to ravage the city. I see curtains move and lamps snap on. But not at the nursing home; it’s in darkness.
“This the spot?” she says, braking and then idling.
“I’ll take it from here,” I tell her, opening the door and slithering down.
I wait until her compression brakes have disengaged, like the breath of a snorting dragon, and her “rig” has rumbled away, leaving utter silence and total blackness in its enormous wake. I slip inside the gates, still shivering and squelching, and walk up the drive.
It was six graves, I tell myself. And Chloe said Peggy’s was their seventh house. And this nursing home must be part of the plan for something.