Bred in the Bone (32 page)

The Last Kindness (ii)

The car had surely never been driven so carefully or politely, as Catherine took every precaution to avoid doing anything that might attract the attention of the police. She did entertain a lingering worry that this in itself might inadvertently draw suspicion through the sheer incongruity of a typically ostentatious BMW doing things such as indicating, observing lane discipline and maintaining a distance of more than eighteen inches from the car in front, but it was a smaller risk. Besides, nothing was surer to bring the police into the equation than getting into a prang, so she was proceeding with all caution, and unavoidably extending an unintended and undeserved courtesy to the two passengers locked in the vehicle’s boot.

It certainly hadn’t looked a comfortable way to travel so much as around the block, never mind a couple of hours down bumpy and winding South Ayrshire back roads, so they ought to be grateful that the car wasn’t being driven in the manner it normally was.

She was sweating profusely by the time she had managed to heave them both inside, trussed at the wrists and ankles, and having feared that they wouldn’t fit she felt she could give the manufacturer a glowing testimonial regarding the car’s boot capacity. Its occupants might not be quite so glowing in their testimonials, not that either of them had voiced an objection at the journey’s outset.

The worst moment had been when she first tried to move Cadaver. Rolling him on to his back, she had felt a shock at the dead weight as she tugged at his arm to turn his face sideways out of the puddle of drool that was pooling beneath it on the cold stone floor. She had a moment of panic as she feared the whole plan would fall apart through her inability to move him a few feet, never mind all the way through the house, out the front door and into his car. Then she recalled moving some heavy sacks of winter feed on
Wednesday evening, and deduced that the wheelbarrow would do just as well for a heavy sack of something else.

She had used a wooden board as a ramp at the back steps, then again at the rear of the car. What with the ravages of the board and the metal front edge of the barrow as she tipped its awkward load, she made a right mess of the BMW’s paintwork. Shame. What was it Cadaver had said?
Aye, boo-hoo
.

As she drove she heard a bump from behind her, then another, then a flurry of them. The sounds shook her as surely as had they been beating against the back of her seat, but she knew they would cease once their futility had been established. It took a while though, possibly because it would take longer for two people to give up trying to escape than just one alone. What she didn’t want to admit to herself was that she was hoping it
was
two people trying to escape.

She was close to her destination. The thumping did indeed tail off after a short while and she resumed rehearsing in her head, as she had been for most of the journey: going over and over what she was going to do, what she was going to say. She’d open the boot and let them struggle their way out, all the time keeping her dad’s rifle trained on them.

‘You’re getting nothing more from this family. Tell your boss and whoever else is in on this racket: you ever come back to our farm, it’s this rifle you’ll be getting shot with, not a tranquiliser. We’ll bury you in the fields and you’ll never be found.’

Over and over in her head. She knew where she’d stand, knew what she’d say, and had worked out her exit strategy this time. She was better prepared than back in the kitchen, yet there was one discordant note telling her that none of what she had pictured would happen. It was a thought she was trying to shout down, drown out with her prepared speech: ‘You’re getting nothing more from this family . . .’

The puddle of drool on the kitchen floor. Cadaver’s eyes rolled back, not fully closed.

No. It was just the effects of the drug: tranquilisers hit different subjects in different ways.

‘We’ll bury you in the fields and you’ll never be found.’

Then she was going to drive away, leaving them on the edge of a cliff on the South Ayrshire coast.

Have fun walking back from there, boys.

They’d have no money for a bus or even to a call from a payphone, as she had cleaned out their pockets. Their names were Walter Russell and Paul Sweeney, according to, respectively, a bank card on Cadaver and a video club membership on Squirrelly. She’d leave the car on the double yellows at Calderburn Station, where it would get a pricey ticket, maybe even towed away by British Rail.

These people were bullies. That wasn’t to say they weren’t strong, weren’t dangerous, but their modus operandi was to prey on the cowed and vulnerable. She was letting them know they’d find easier pickings elsewhere.

She turned the car off the narrow B road on to a sliver of a single track, the turn-off for which was all but camouflaged by a bend in the road and a copse of trees. Ayrshire was full of such isolated arbours, like huddled clumps of daisies that had been missed by some giant lawnmower. The track was paved by crumbling concrete for the first thirty or forty yards, then gave way to compacted earth rutted by tractor wheels. She could see gulls ahead, soaring on the updraught where the sea met the cliffs. Ailsa Craig was a grey blur, shrouded in the clouds that had swept in from the west. There was no sign of human life in any direction.

They used to come to this place for picnics when she was wee: days out beneath blue sky, her and Lisa drinking Creamola Foam from plastic cups, nothing more sinister to worry about than wasps. It felt like the four of them were the only people in the world. Nobody else ever came here. Her mum knew about it because she had grown up only a few miles from the spot, a farmer’s daughter also, who spent her childhood days walking and cycling every track and path just to see where they led.

She stopped the car and killed the engine, pocketing the keys. The thumping resumed a few moments later, in response to the vehicle being silently stationary and therefore not merely stopped at lights or a junction.

Catherine reached into the rear footwell and lifted the canvas bag, from which she removed the rifle. She fed four rounds into the breech and slid the bolt: up, forward, down, back. A shot over their heads or into the vehicle would drive the point home. The noise alone would have them jumping out of their skins: people who had only seen guns on the TV were always literally shaken by the real report of a live round.

She opened the door and walked around slowly, the rifle’s strap slung around her shoulder and the barrel steadied by her left hand. There was a bracing wind whipping in from the water, a smell of sea and a tang of salt borne upon it. She checked the ground underfoot at the rear of the vehicle, then popped the boot and took a couple of swift but measured steps backward, taking hold of the stock in her right hand and levelling the rifle.

There was a grunt and a scuffing sound, then the lid of the boot flew upwards with a speed that almost caused it to rebound all the way shut again, that absurd spoiler threatening to crack the rear window. The squirrelly one, Sweeney, clawed his torso over the mouth of the boot and flopped awkwardly to the ground. He had worked loose the bonds around his wrists, but not quite disentangled the rope from his ankles.

When he raised his head and looked up, his eyes were wild, terrified, his pallid face drained of its cheeky assuredness and his body shaking as he hyperventilated in spluttering panic.

‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’ His eyes darted around as he spoke, focusing on random areas of his field of vision. ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’ He looked at Catherine a couple of times, but in those first disoriented moments she seemed to be of no greater significance than anything else his restless eyes alighted upon.

Catherine wasn’t focusing entirely on him either, her gaze constantly drawn to the still-gaping mouth of the boot, from which nothing else had yet emerged.

‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’

His eyes fixed on her again and this time he finally seemed to see her.

She was trembling herself now, her mind going blank, the
beginnings of a descent into panic. Grasping for a hold on something stable, she remembered what she had rehearsed.

‘You’re getting nothing more from this family,’ she tried to say, but her mouth was dry and quivering and her ill-formed words seemed swallowed up by the wind.

Still she gazed past him into that blank, gaping mouth. Still nothing issued from it but a silent accusation.

‘You’re getting nothing . . .’ she tried again, but her throat seemed to swell from within and choke her words. If she could say it, say her piece, she’d be back in the plan, it would all be the way she pictured it.

‘You’ve kill’t him,’ Sweeney screamed, as though he sensed her denial like a sheet of glass in front of her and was trying to shatter it with his voice. ‘Ya fuckin’ cow, you’ve fuckin’ kill’t him.’

The glass disintegrated into a million fragments that could never be put back together. She knew he was dead as she tipped his body into the boot. Knew he was dead as she tied his ankles and wrists. Knew he was dead as she hauled him off the kitchen floor. She had shot him in the heart with a horse tranquiliser. She did know the strength and dosage because she knew where Harriet Chambers was supposed to be going before Dad’s collapse changed her plans: to Garrowfoot Stables, where a yearling colt had gashed the cannonbone of its right foreleg and wouldn’t let anyone near itself.

She had killed him, and locked his colleague in a car boot with his corpse.

‘You’re getting . . . you’re getting . . .’

She saw again the future they had all seen for her father on that awful first day, when he came storming down the hall with the rifle; except this time it had happened, this time there had been no one to grab the gun and stop it. The process was in motion, one that would end with her in jail and her family torn apart, her parents crushed more devastatingly than by anything these crooks had wrought.

Sweeney meanwhile began climbing to his feet, coils of rope falling away as he raised one leg and let them drop. Then she saw the flick knife.

‘Put the gun doon or I’ll fuckin’ cut ye,’ he vowed, his disorientation replaced by trembling anger.

She tightened her grip on the gun, though she couldn’t have said whether this was to steady her aim or because one part of her was trying to wrestle it away from the other, like she and Lisa and Mum had done to Dad in the hall.

She backed away a step, two steps, but as she retreated Sweeney began advancing, the knife gripped in front of his face.

‘I mean it. I’m gaunny fuckin’ slice you, hen.’

She witnessed the fury in his eyes, heedless of the weapon. The fear was gone. He saw no threat in front of him, only vengeance.

Catherine didn’t remember making a decision to pull the trigger: only an impulse, a signal from her brain to her finger and the bang, muted in the wind, blown away like the smoke from the muzzle.

Sweeney flew backwards as though jerked on elastic, landing in a crumpled sitting position with his shoulders against the back of the BMW’s left rear wheel arch. He appeared dazed and startled for a moment, even as his hands reflexively pressed against the wound below his ribcage, then he looked up incredulously at her, his breathing a series of laboured, agonised moans.

‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ she said.

She dropped to her knees on the dirt, the rifle falling into her lap, still hung around her shoulder by the strap. Her vision clouded as her eyes filled up.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

The blood spread across the front of his tracksuit, spilling through the gaps between his fingers; that awful laboured moaning beginning to take on a despairing, panicked quality. From inside she suddenly felt bile rise like something within her was being purged by a greater force than her body could muster. She vomited harder than she could ever remember, but at the end there was no sense of catharsis.

The rifle suddenly felt heavy and shameful, diseased. She had to get it off, get away from it. She staggered to her feet and unslung it, letting it drop to the earth next to the puddle of sick, then she turned and began to walk away. She didn’t know where, didn’t think
beyond each step, knew only that she had to put distance between herself and what lay behind her.

That was when Sweeney managed to speak.

‘Don’t go,’ he said, a groaning, heartfelt plea. ‘Please stay with me. Please stay.’

The words halted her like a brick wall across her path. She still wanted to flee, perhaps even more so, but she could not. She did not want to turn back, to confront what she had wrought, but she knew she would, knew she had to. Not for absolution, for she knew he could not give her that even if he wanted to: this was hers to carry always. She turned back to Sweeney, who had stolen from her family, tormented her, humiliated her, because it was how her father had raised her. This was the last kindness she could give him.

She knelt down next to him, her back also against the rear of the car, and gently pulled his shoulders towards her until his head was resting on her chest. His breathing was irregular, sometimes jolting, sometimes long and slow.

‘I’m scared,’ he said. ‘I want my mammy.’

Catherine cried silently. He couldn’t see her face and once again she didn’t want him to know she was in tears, but this time because it felt like something she wished to spare him, rather than deny.

His eyes looked to be losing focus, gazing blankly into space as his lids fell halfway to closing. The moaning had all but fallen away, his breathing shallow now, shallower with every breath.

She placed a hand on his head and stroked his lank, greasy hair.

‘Is that you, Mammy?’ he asked, his voice a broken whisper.

Catherine swallowed to prevent a sob, replying in a whisper of her own as her voice would have broken had she spoken properly.

‘I’m here,’ she replied, feeling the warm waters run down both her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ he breathed. ‘I’m sorry, Mammy.’

‘It’s all right,’ she whispered.

She shuddered as his right hand suddenly moved, reaching just a few inches to grip one of hers.