Touch (36 page)

Layton looked over at Savage and she could see he was thinking the same as her: if only. The CSI team would be working through the night and Savage knew that she would have to return to Plymouth to file some sort of preliminary report. When she would get back home she had no idea.

Bovisand, Plymouth. Tuesday 9th November. 9.57 pm

The clock on the dash showed close to ten before she turned in off the lane and her car crunched over the gravel drive and into the garage. She sat in the dark for a few moments, enjoying the warmth of the car and the silence and thinking about the kids. She had noticed both Samantha’s and Jamie’s lights had been on so she’d need to have words with Stefan again. He was great for them, but he didn’t practise quite the same discipline a parent might.

Tomorrow she would interview Harrison’s parents and afterwards take the rest of the day off, God only knows she deserved it. She would pick the children up from school and go for a pizza and enjoy some quality time with them. It would give Stefan a rest too.

Key in lock and she opened the door to blazing lights everywhere. They must all be playing some game that took in the whole house. She sighed at the thought of the mess.

‘Kids! I’m home!’

She dropped her car keys on the table in the hall and went into the lounge where Stefan sat on a kitchen chair in the middle of the room. He must be taking part in the game, she thought, because he didn’t move, he just sat still, like a statue, staring ahead. His eyes widened, but he couldn’t say anything due to the parcel tape wrapped around the lower part of his face.

Then something hit Savage from behind, knocking her to the floor and sending the room tumbling over and over, the light in the centre spiralling round and fading to stars. A haze rose in front of her eyes with strange floaters swimming across a checkerboard of grey and white. She groaned and moved her hand to touch the back of her head. Wet. Sticky. She felt a sudden heaving in her stomach, the nausea blotting out the pain from her head, and then she vomited through her mouth and nose, coughing and spluttering sick.

Now someone had her arms and was pinning them behind her. A zipping sound came as her wrists were yanked together and some sort of binding cut her flesh and secured her hands.

Footsteps moved away, out of the room and a few moments later returned, something being dragged.

The person lifted her now, up and onto another one of the kitchen chairs. Then the sound of tape being stripped from a roll. Not across her mouth, but round and round her body, holding her against the back of the chair.

Then he moved round to her front.

Harrison.

He appeared calm, almost normal. Apart from those eyes. They didn’t look normal. They darted back and forth between Savage and Stefan, to the door, to Stefan’s baseball bat lying on the floor, to the blood on the carpet where she had fallen, back to Savage.

She spat saliva and vomit and tried to breath slowly, to stay calm. She looked at Stefan. He didn’t seem hurt, but he had certainly been immobilised. A cable tie secured his arms behind the back of the chair and his legs had been bound with parcel tape too. He rolled his eyes at Savage, glancing sideways, indicating something. She couldn’t understand what he meant, but it gave her a glimmer of hope.

Harrison dashed out of the room and the sound of him bounding up the stairs made Savage shiver to her very core.

The kids.

She heard them coming down and he marched them into the room, their faces stained with tears. Their hands had been bound in front of them with cable ties.

‘Mummy!’ They ran across to her, but before they got near Harrison was shouting.

‘Sit down on the fucking sofa!’

Jamie and Samantha cowered before him. He shoved them across the room and bundled them onto the sofa.

‘Stay there!’

‘Matthew, please. We can work this out, we–’

‘Shut the fuck up!’

He didn’t look normal now. Anything but. His hands shook and lips trembled as he muttered to himself.

‘You had to meddle, had to nose, had to interfere.’

‘That is my job,’ Savage said in a low voice, surprised at her calmness.

‘Your job. My Emma. Gone.’

Who was Emma? Savage had no idea. The name must be one of Harrison’s made up ones, like he used Trinny for Kelly.

‘Just let the children go. Please.’

‘Younger,’ he said. ‘Lucy was right.’

Stefan shifted on his seat. Savage reckoned he’d heard something. Then she heard the engine too. A motorbike. The gravel crunching, the bike stopping, the ignition off.

Harrison cocked his head on one side. He marched across to Savage, the roll of parcel tape in his hands. He pulled off a length and wrapped the tape around Savage’s mouth.

‘One word, one squeak.’ He glared at the children and drew his hand across his throat.

The doorbell rang and Harrison scuttled out of the room and into the hallway, shutting the door behind him.

Jamie jumped down off the sofa and ran across to the big old oak bureau. Savage made a noise and shook her head. Jamie glanced over but ignored her. He was struggling to open the bottom drawer with his hands tied. In the hall Savage could hear Harrison talking to a pizza delivery man. She saw Stefan nod a confirmation. He must have ordered a takeout earlier, to arrive after he had put the children to bed.

Jamie had opened the drawer now and was rummaging in an Airfix box. The box contained a kit he had been working on with Pete months ago, an air-sea rescue helicopter. Then he was putting the kit away and pushing the drawer shut. Coming over to Savage with a craft knife in his hand.

Savage nodded and Jamie rushed across. He went round behind her and placed the knife in Savage’s hands. Next he moved round to her front and laid his head on her lap. Savage heard the motorbike start up and then the living room door opened. Harrison stood with a grin on his face and a pizza box in his hands.

The grin vanished when he spotted Jamie kneeling at her feet and he dropped the box and leapt across the room in a second, lashing out at Jamie and kicking him hard in the ribs. Jamie screamed and collapsed in a ball where he lay still, a soft sobbing noise coming from him.

‘Don’t move again or I’ll kill you!’ Harrison yelled.

He moved over to Savage, ripped the parcel tape from her face and retrieved the pizza box and went and sat on the sofa next to Samantha. She cowered away. Out came a triangle of pizza and Harrison munched on the slice, chewing each mouthful over and over and staring into nothing, distracted, distant.

Savage manoeuvred the knife, adjusting her grip so the blade touched her fingers, trying to place the sharp edge against the cable tie. She moved the knife, sawing up and down, careful not to drop it.

‘My mother used to buy second-hand school clothes for me,’ Harrison said. His voice calm and passive with no trace of the anger from a moment ago. ‘She didn’t need to because we had plenty of money, but she did. They had stains on or they were faded or ripped. Preloved, she called them. The boys at school used to tease me about it. They said I wasn’t even that. They were right. I was dirty and used. My father told me so each time he fucked me.’

Savage jerked the knife now, picking at the hard plastic while trying to keep her shoulders still and her expression calm as Harrison continued his rant.

‘My good friend Lucy informed me that younger is better. All the older ones are dirty these days. That is the way of the world. Squalid. Used. We have abused the soil and abused ourselves and now there is nothing clean left. We have been stained by our very existence. Everyone is doing it, existing I mean, and no one clears up the results. Shit, spunk, spew. That is what we are walking around in. Soon it will be up around our nostrils and we will have to recycle the stuff orally. Maybe then people will understand what we have become.’

Harrison put the pizza box to one side, shook his head and smiled.

‘Listen to me. I sound like Mitchell and look what happened to him.’

‘You went to Mitchell’s parties,’ Savage said. ‘You took pictures. You enjoyed yourself. Seems to me like you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.’

‘No! I only attended to observe.’ Harrison spat the sentence out. ‘Mitchell was sick, but he made me realise that you could get away with things.’

‘But you haven’t got away with anything. We know about Kelly. We know about the other girls.’

‘Kelly was an accident. Believe me the last thing I wanted was for her to die. That was Forester’s fault for soiling her. Mitchell got to him as well. Used him to shoot the videos after I had gone. Drugs, sex, poor Kelly couldn’t resist and in the end she turned out to be dirty too, they all were. They made their choices before I ever met them.’ Harrison’s eyes rolled upwards to the ceiling and he placed his hands together as if in prayer. ‘Dear God I wished they hadn’t, but that is the way of things. Like I said, the world is decaying. My only wish is to find somebody like my girls. They were clean and I loved them and there was nothing dirty about my feelings. Lust is evil. I learnt that long ago, but it seems impossible to escape because there is so little left that is pure.’

He suddenly reached out across the sofa and grabbed a handful of Samantha’s hair, dragging her down onto the floor.

‘Mummy!’

Harrison pulled her across the room towards the door and she scampered along trying to keep up. Her eyes pleaded at Savage with desperation.

Savage made a final effort, levering the handle of the knife on one side of the tie and the blade on the other. She would either break the blade or make the cut. Harrison reached the hall now and he looked straight at Savage with a wide grin as he took her car keys from where she had dropped them. He put them in his pocket and opened the front door, dragging Samantha behind him like a sack of rubbish.

Snap!

The cable tie parted and Savage had her arms free. She flicked the knife upwards, slicing through the parcel tape, and jumped to her feet. Harrison stood at the front door and met her eyes again, but this time there was no grin. She leapt at Stefan, cutting the tie and the tape. Harrison ran out the door, Samantha screaming as he pulled her by the hair. Savage rushed after him. Through the front door and Harrison was halfway across the driveway. He saw Savage and let go of Samantha, sprinting down the drive and into the lane.

Savage reached Samantha and knelt, embracing her. At the same time she heard the sound of an engine start up and in the lane headlights beamed out into the night sky.

‘I’m OK, Mum.’

Stefan was at the door and Savage ran back to him.

‘999 and shut yourself in the house.’

She pushed past him and grabbed a single key from the bowl on the table. She rushed out of the house again, across to the garage and jumped in the little MG. Fumbling to get the key in the ignition and then the car was firing up with a roar. The car shot forward as she floored the accelerator, wheels spinning and spitting gravel.

The car skidded as she turned hard into the lane, the lights of Harrison’s car not far ahead. The heavy 4x4 struggled to get up to speed and its width meant the vehicle took up most of the road. Once it was moving it lurched along, Harrison fighting for control as he went faster; the MG was much more suited to the switchback run towards Plymouth and the main road. Harrison slammed right at a junction into a smaller lane, the Shogun crashing into the hedge, but ploughing back onto the road and hurtling onward. Savage flicked the handbrake as she took the turn, slid round and accelerated out of the corner. She was gaining by the second and Harrison increased his speed as they plunged down into a valley.

Fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour on a road no wider than the car. Then Harrison reached the bottom of the hill where the road crossed a stream and Savage remembered the humpback. The first Harrison knew of the bridge was when the Shogun left the ground. It landed on two wheels, bounced back onto four and rolled again, crashing onto its side and flipping onto its roof. Two tons of upside down car screeched along the lane spinning in a circle before colliding with the corner of an old stone barn.

Savage braked hard to stop and jumped out of her car and ran across to the upside down 4x4. The roof had crumpled and the windscreen and side windows had shattered. Inside the airbag had exploded, but the white balloon hadn’t prevented the seat from deforming, crushing Harrison and trapping him against the steering wheel. He groaned and Savage crouched down to peer into the car, her heart pounding. Little sparks began to jump from the dash as some of the wiring shorted out and the plastic started to burn with a fierce, sooty flame. She thought she had better reach in and remove the ignition key to cut the electrics. She’d also need to phone for an ambulance and the fire brigade to cut Harrison out.

Savage put her arm in the window and groped for the keys. Her hand brushed against them and they jingled,
ding-ding, ding-ding.
The noise made her pause for a moment. Then she smelt it.

Petrol.

Petrol? The car was a diesel. She had noticed the letters TDI on the back and remembered the data Riley had obtained from the DVLC. She looked in again and now she saw a green plastic container on the upside down roof, a spread of liquid seeping into the headlining. What did Harrison want with a can of petrol?

Harrison’s eyes darted back and forth, manic and then she knew. And could see that he knew she knew. She left the keys where they hung and withdrew her arm.

‘You bastard!’

‘Please, help me,’ he said. ‘I only wanted someone to love, someone to love me. None of this is my fault.’

Harrison shuddered, his body quivering, and he appeared all of a sudden fragile, human even. Savage smelt something else now too, something strong enough to overpower the petrol odour. Urine. Harrison had pissed himself.

She looked again at the keys dangling in the ignition, they danced in motion, swinging back and forth like a little pendulum on a clock counting down the passage of time. Every second marked a moment that could not be lived again. Every second offered new possibilities. That was what life came down to in the end. Choices. Harrison had made his long ago. Now it was her turn.