The Sick Rose (39 page)

The bus driver had been right; the car was crumpled like paper, its entire front section compressed or sliced off, it was impossible to tell. The snow was washed with engine oil swirled around with something else so that there were streaks of burgundy in the black.

At the bottom of a garden path, a man’s plain black lace-up had been thrown from the car, sock still stiff inside it. Louisa winced to consider the kind of impact that could tear the shoes and socks from a man’s feet, and watched as a grey cat sauntered over and began to sniff it, at which point Louisa became suddenly, horribly aware that this was because it contained a foot and an ankle. The cat nosed it onto its side, and a single splash of blood made a livid red poppy on the white snow. She fought to keep her breakfast down. Beside her, Paul sucked in his breath and grabbed her arm at the elbow, but when she turned her face to his he was staring not at the severed foot or the stained snow or even at the car but at something else, something with the power to drain the colour from his cheeks and the speech from his lips. He was fixed on two halves of something, black lettering on yellow plastic or vinyl that, on first glance, Louisa identified as one of those Baby on Board signs that Miranda had in the back of her people-carrier. How awful, how horrific.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Oh,
please
no.’

‘I know that number plate,’ said Paul, his voice thick. ‘I’ve driven that car.’

She reassessed the scene in the light of his words and this time recognised the broken plastic as the remnants of a car registration plate. Even then, it took her a few seconds to understand the weight of what he was saying.

‘Stupid prick always drove like a maniac,’ he said in a monotone. He cracked his knuckles. ‘Let’s get out of here, let’s go to the Lodge.’ He scrambled back down towards the car without a backward glance, but her eyes were drawn back to the foot once more. ‘Louisa, come
on
.’

Not until they had driven the half-mile drive back to Kelstice Lodge, and up the ride, and seen the tools of death laid out at the top of the car park ridge did they break their shocked silence. Paul let out a long, loud noise that was half-cheer, half-sob. She could not bring herself to join him. Her relief was tempered by the sickening knowledge of what they had been about to do.

Chapter 51

August 2009

Paul had chosen to run in the right direction (did that mean Daniel’s path was the wrong one?). The stubbled field he crossed led him directly to another, larger road that he instantly recognised as the one they should have been driving along to make their escape. He remembered that pair of houses – oddly semi-detached although they had no other neighbours – set a little way back from the road. The right-hand house had a child’s bicycle lolling on its side in the front garden. Paul hopped over the low fence and stole the bike, feeling what was left of his innocence desert him. Fairly sure now that he was pointing in the right direction, he began to pedal in the dark. The bicycle’s saddle was too low and the wheels were tiny; after a couple of miles he felt his knees begin to ache and was grateful for the little pain. It stopped him thinking about what they had just done. Whenever he heard a vehicle coming he dismounted and hid, at one point throwing himself into a stinking ditch and pulling the bike down on top of him. As the car roared past, he found himself wondering if the bike was postcoded. His dad had always written their postcode on new bikes before they even left the shop so that they would be traceable if stolen – and he wondered if there was any way this one could connect him to what had happened at the school.

The A13 took him by surprise when an unprepossessing road dipped below a whooshing viaduct. Overhead, the lamplit arterial road was almost empty of traffic. Soon he was approaching the local but unfamiliar environs of Benfleet town centre and decided that it was time to dismount. He looked too conspicuous, a man-sized body on a child-sized bicycle, although he didn’t feel like a man. He had never felt less like a man. He sent it sailing down the side alley of a mean little house; a family home judging by the
High School Musical
curtains but, from the jumble of white goods dumped in the front garden, not the kind of family that took lost property in to the police.

Walking through the town, he put his hood back up and tried not to look guilty. The station was well signposted and, when he arrived, well furnished with benches. He lay down on the cold metallic surface and hoped he looked like a pisshead who’d missed the last train. Incredibly, he caught himself dozing. He double-knotted his hood under his chin in case it fell off while he was asleep. It deadened some of the sound from the street, making him feel vulnerable, a state which bought him another hour’s nervous wakefulness. Every time he came out of the light microsleeps that broke his night he looked around for Daniel on the offchance that his escape had taken a similar route. Even as he craned his neck to take in the whole platform, he knew that Daniel was not free, might never be again. Daniel had said he wouldn’t tell them about Paul and he believed him, but that did not mean they would never catch up with him. When all they were doing was stealing copper Paul had been entirely confident that he had dodged the sight lines of the camera. Now that violent death had raised the stakes, the security of that knowledge fell away and he even thought he remembered the soft whirr and click of the camera as it detected the movement of his shadow. Even if Daniel was the only one who had been filmed, they would know the theft was not a one-man job and it would not take much to work out who the second man was. They lived together, after all. Any Grays Reach resident would tell the police that whenever you saw one of them, the other was never far away. Shit. He knuckled sleep out of his eyes.

The first train to London came at 6 a.m. He boarded it before he had even woken up properly and cowered in the corner of the carriage for the two stops it took to get to Tilbury. To his great relief, the barriers at the station were unmanned. Any kind of confrontation with authority was unthinkable in this state; if he had been nicked for fare evasion he would probably have sung his song of guilt to the ticket inspector.

He could tell by the way the dog greeted him, with a thumping tail and accusing eyes, that no one was in and had not been since the day before. Still he called Daniel’s name.

It was only the second or third time he had been alone in the Scatlocks’ house. Although he had been living there for months he got the uneasy feeling he had when they were trespassing. Diesel, clearly starving, gave him his usual warm welcome, a headbutt to the groin. Paul got a pouch of wet food out of the cupboard. The gelatinous slab of meat slid out of its packet; the smell turned his stomach. While Diesel slobbered and swallowed, Paul put a wash on, throwing everything he was wearing, excluding his underpants but including his trainers, into the machine. Out of habit, he turned out the pockets and found the CCTV instruction leaflet that Daniel had caught him reading. The blind eye of the device seemed to stare an accusation from the page. It marked Paul out as present at the crime scene as surely as if he’d danced in front of the camera. He turned on the gas hob and got ready to burn the thing. As the flames started to blacken the edges, he saw a scribbled note on the back. He read it in one blink without taking in its meaning and then, as the first orange flame stretched towards the ceiling, he waved the flaming paper around but, instead of extinguishing it, this only encouraged it to burn. He stuck it under the kitchen tap. There was a sizzle as the water doused the fire. Paul spread what was left of the manual before him. It looked like a sheet of old parchment. Bits of it came off in his hands, staining them with soot. All that remained of the note Paul had read was
FAO Nick
at the top of the page and then
New CCTV system to go live 1st September
.

Paul did not need to look at his phone to know that it wasn’t 1st September yet. The date was etched in his memory as that of his escape, although now it would be remembered for very different reasons. He was surprised to find that even after the events of the last twelve hours there was room for more sickness and guilt. Daniel might have been the one who killed the caretaker but Paul had encouraged him to stay on the roof, and he had failed to point out the camera.

But the camera had not been turned on. Paul’s cowardly scheme to get his own back on Daniel had all come to nothing. No, worse than nothing. Nothing implied that you were back where you started, that you had broken even, that you were no better or worse off than before. A man was dead. This was something. He tried to call Carl but he wasn’t picking up his phone. Carl would have known what to do. His mum would not have known what to do but that didn’t mean Paul didn’t want her. He thought about calling her, but what could he say?

He sprinted up the stairs as though in an attempt to escape himself, and went into the bedroom. His black jeans and a red top were on the back of the chair. When he had placed them there, the previous afternoon, he had still had a future and no one had killed anyone and life had been, in retrospect, gloriously carefree and uncomplicated. He grabbed his bag from the top of his wardrobe and got as far as the bottom of the stairs before realising how hopeless it all was. There was no longer any question of him taking up his place at Brighton. He was inculpated, deeply, undeniably. His prints were on the car, he lived with Daniel; there was no way he would escape from this with his name untarnished. Daniel knew where he was going. If he somehow got away with it, Daniel would follow him. The perfect bubble of his new life had burst like, like . . . like an eyeball, he thought, sickened.

Diesel had finished his breakfast and was pawing at the front door the way he did when he was desperate for his walk. He began to make a pathetic whimpering sound that was more feline than canine. Paul knew that the animal would not leave him alone until he had had some exercise. What harm will taking him for a run along the river wall do? he thought. The river air might help him see things more clearly. Sometimes, standing on the edge of the estuary made everything seem better, the size of the bridge and the cranes and the ships made your own problems seem insignificant.

Even as Paul told himself this he knew there wasn’t a structure in the world that could diminish the magnitude of his current problems. The thought came to him that he would rather endure his father’s death again than feel the way he did at the moment. He passed the mirror and couldn’t look at his own face. He grabbed the lead from its hook on the wall and clicked it onto the dog’s collar. He opened the door and walked straight into the man he would very soon come to know as Detective Sergeant Woburn of the Essex Police.

Chapter 52

January 2010

The thaw had begun on the morning of Carl Scatlock’s death. Now, almost a week on, the air was still cold enough to turn dark shallow puddles to slates that cracked underneath Louisa’s boots, but the sky looked different, clearer and less portentous, as though the heavens had shifted from threat to promise.

Louisa felt clean for the first time since Adam. Carl had died without intervention from either of them and in doing so had removed the one threat to their liberty, happiness and futures. It had all been done without Paul having to turn that dark corner; she felt sick to think that she had once intended to drag him into her own particular hell. If anything, the opposite had happened. Paul’s innocence – of which she remained convinced despite his constant gnawing guilt – was almost contagious. If blamelessness could be restored to a person then that was what he had done for her.

Things were already changing, suggesting that their luck was beginning to turn. The first thing was that they had been outed, something that had not come as the expected blow but rather as a relief; the logistics of concealment were beginning to bore and exhaust them both. Ingram had seen them together in the wine aisle of Tesco in Leamington, of all places. After some initial acerbic comments (‘You’re supposed to hug the hoodies, dear, not debauch them’) he had been persuaded that to broadcast the relationship would tilt the fragile equilibrium of the Kelstice staff into anarchy, and agreed to remain silent. Doubtless he had told Demetra, but since Louisa had not received an official summons she could only presume that their relationship was to go unpunished.

The second, and more marvellous, thing was that the problem of the meeting with the Heritage Gardens Trust had resolved itself. Joanna Bower had called to express her deep regret that things with the young film-maker had not worked out and that the Kelstice Lodge pitch would no longer be filmed. Joanna had said that they were still keen that the Trustees come to Warwickshire to see at first hand the work they were doing, the plants they had rescued from obscurity, the young people whose work was making it all possible. Louisa had swallowed a cheer, set a date and booked the private room in the Kelstice Arms for their meeting which she could now claim, almost without lying, that the Heritage Gardens Trust had requested themselves. She was almost looking forward to it. Paul was starting to put together a presentation on the computer using something called Powerpoint which, when she had mastered it, would allow her to flash up images of her designs, graphs projecting visitor numbers and even a reproduction of the tapestry itself. She could not wait to see the look on Ingram’s face when she unveiled her new technological proficiency, and proficient she must become: Paul could not be there to operate it for her on the day. He would be two hundred miles away, wearing a suit and taking the witness stand at Essex County Court.