Authors: Jack Jordan
The doorbell rings behind them. A figure stands behind the glass and Dominic looks up nervously.
‘Dominic, I have to go away now.’
‘Away? Where?’
Dominic’s lost, melancholy stare instantly brings tears to his father’s eyes.
Everyone Dominic loves abandons him, one by one.
‘I’ve done stupid things, so the police are going to take me to prison.’
‘No, Dad!’ he cries, digging his small fingers into the skin on his father’s arms.
‘You can’t go! Please, don’t go. I don’t have anyone else. Mummy’s gone, Brooke’s gone. You can’t go
too!’
‘I’m sorry son,’ Michael replies with a broken voice. A tear falls from each eye and he pulls his son into him, hugging him tightly, smelling his hair, kissing his forehead, feeling his body embraced in his for the last time in what could be a very long time.
‘I love you so much,’ he whispers into his son’s ear.
‘I love you more,’ he replies, muffled in his father’s pyjama top.
Michael gives his son a kiss on the lips. He turns and opens the door, his chest so tight he can hardly breathe.
Outside stand two officers in uniform: a man and a woman. A more senior officer – a detective inspector – stands beside them: an Asian woman with short black hair and a twinkle of excitement in her eyes. She’s the one who has been working on the case behind closed doors.
‘Michael Leighton?’ the DI asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Michael Leighton you are under arrest for tax evasion, insider trading and theft from your employees’ funds.’
She reels off his rights, while the male officer motions for him to step out of the door and turn around with his hands behind his back. He follows orders, feeling the cold metal of the handcuffs against the skin on his wrists. Tears fall silently from his eyes as he
stares down at his sobbing son in the doorway.
‘What will happen to my son? Where will he go? I’m the only one here with him.’
‘Social services will take care of him until proper housing can be arranged,’ the policewoman replies, as he is led down the steps towards the police car.
‘Take him to my parents. Promise me you’ll take him to my parents!’
The policewoman holds Dominic’s hand as he tries to run after his father, crying out for him.
‘
DADDY!’
‘I’m so sorry, son,’ he whimpers, tears streaming from his eyes. He is turned and placed in the back of the police car, his head pressed down by the officer’s hand. The car door is slammed shut.
Michael watches as the policewoman takes Dominic in her arms. He thrashes her back with his small fists as she shuts the front door and carries him towards the unmarked car.
Michael begins to sob, listening to the sound of his son’s cries as he is placed in the unmarked car. They are both driven away to their new fates: Michael as a prisoner before his trial, Dominic without a guardian until his grandparents arrive.
Chapter Forty-seven
That Night
Brooke shivers as she searches for the body of the boy, longing to find him alive so his death won’t haunt her forever. She needs to find him alive.
She searches for ten minutes, and when she doesn’t find him, decides to head to the top of the hill to get a better view, hoping to see an arm protruding from the surface of the snow, or evidence of clothing.
When she reaches the top of the hill, a car drives slowly round the first bend in the road, heading towards the second. She crouches down, looking over the edge of the hill from the shadows and under her mother’s car. The car drives slowly over the snow, and then stops. Her heart thumps hard. The car reverses and stops before the break in the road barrier, in line with her mother’s car.
She hears the window wind down. She ducks from sight. She hears a car door slam. Footsteps crunch against the snow. Brooke shakes, violently.
‘Are you all right?’ a male voice asks.
She opens her eyes wide, her heart pounding, and looks up at the man standing above her.
The man looks to be in his forties, although the wrinkles on his face suggest he may be older. His
forehead is creased in a perplexed frown.
She looks up at him, stupefied.
‘You’re injured,’ he says. ‘What happened? Did you have an accident?’
‘I…’ She can’t speak. She’s too terrified.
We’ve been caught. I’m going to prison
.
The man waits for her to respond. She is stunned into silence. She stares into the man’s eyes waiting for him to figure out that something is wrong. That she is a killer. That she is a monster.
‘Hi!’ Louise calls, coming up the hill behind Brooke.
The man focuses on Louise.
‘Hi.’
‘We just stopped because we saw a break in the road barrier,’ she says. ‘Then smarty pants over here slipped and tumbled all the way down to the bottom of the hill.’
The man’s confused expression eases. He believes the lie.
‘Poor thing. Is everything all right down there? No crash?’
‘Not that we can see. It must have been from a while back. Just seems the barrier hasn’t been replaced yet. Big job, I expect.’
Brooke looks between her mother and the man, longing for him to believe them and leave. She cannot understand how her mother is so composed.
‘Ah, that’s a relief,’ he replies.
‘Go up, darling. It’s all right. We’ll go home now.’
Louise taps Brooke’s thigh where she cowers before the man.
She follows her mother’s command and stands up. The man extends his hand to help her. She stares at the skin on his steady hand, terrified to take it. She looks up at his face.
Please don’t work it out
.
Brooke places her trembling hand in his. She can feel the warmth of his hand through her glove. She wonders if he can feel the shaking in hers. She snatches her hand away and stands by the car, so tense she can barely breathe.
***
Both the man and Louise stare at Brooke for a few seconds. Louise throws her daughter the keys and Brooke gets inside, slamming the door shut behind her.
‘Is she okay? Her nose looks bad. She’s really shaking.’
‘We’ll go to the hospital right now. I can’t believe she fell. She’s really embarrassed, poor thing.’
The man nods in agreement.
‘You get her off to the hospital,’ he says.
The man takes one last look down the hill. He frowns.
‘There is something down there.’
‘What?’ she asks, looking down with him as if she is totally unaware of what lurks in the darkness.
‘Is that a car against that tree?’
‘What tree?’
‘That tree,’ he says, pointing.
Shit
.
‘I didn’t see anything when I was down there, but it’s so dark.’
The man steps down to the snowy hill.
Louise turns and looks at Brooke with alarm through the window of the car. She mouths for Brooke to stay put.
Trembling, Louise follows the man down the hill. He makes his way down to the car smashed against the tree and halts.
‘I can’t believe I didn’t see it,’ Louise says, in almost a whisper.
Standing behind him, she cannot see his face. He says nothing for at least a minute. She has no idea what she should do.
If he finds out the truth, what then?
Desperate, delusional thoughts creep into the forefront of her mind again, just like they did before she killed the boy.
‘We have to call the police,’ he says, walking round the side of the car.
She wants to stop him in his tracks, but she can’t.
There would be no logical explanation for her to do so.
The man gasps when he sees the body.
Louise gasps with him.
Frantically, the man dials 999 on his phone, his hands trembling.
Louise has to smother her urge to stop him, to snatch the phone from his hand and throw it into the darkness.
‘No signal. Shit.’
Louise silently sighs with relief.
‘I’ll go for help,’ she says. ‘I’ll drive until I get signal, ring 999, and then come back.’
‘Okay, you both go and get help. I’ll stay here.’
‘Okay, I’ll see you soon.’
She turns and begins to walk up the hill, fighting the urge to run.
‘Wait,’ he says.
She turns, begrudgingly, longing to keep going until she and Brooke are away from the scene.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Jane,’ she lies.
‘Thanks, Jane. I’ll see you soon.’
‘You will,’ she replies with a false smile. ‘Everything is going to be okay.’
She turns and makes her way up the hill, clambering up with her hands and feet as she nears the top. When she reaches the road, she runs towards the car, her feet sliding on the ice. The engine is running and
Brooke is waiting. She jumps inside.
‘What happened?’ Brooke asks, red in the face from the central heating blasting out of the vents in the dashboard.
‘We’ve got to go right now,’ she replies, putting the car in gear, releasing the handbrake and speeding off from the scene.
***
The man reaches the second wrecked car and lights a cigarette, his shoulders hunched as the blizzard blows against his back. He takes in the sight of the destroyed vehicle.
This didn’t happen a while ago. This happened tonight. How had she not seen either of the cars? The body?
The moment the black car crashed, the petrol tank was pierced. Since then, petrol has been dripping silently onto the snow, forming a deep, black puddle.
The man takes long drags on his cigarette, looking up to the road from the darkness below, wondering how long it will take for the police to arrive.
I’ll need to call work – tell them I won’t be in today
.
He can’t stop seeing the dead face flash before his eyes: the blood, the lifeless stare, the seatbelt digging into her neck.
He takes one last drag on his cigarette before
dropping it to the ground. He decides to sit in his car by the roadside and keep warm. The cold is too much to bear. As he heads for the hill, the cigarette rolls along the snow with the wind, dancing here and there, sparks flying, before landing in the puddle of petrol.
As the man reaches the bottom of the hill, he hears a thunderous roar that shakes the ground beneath him and lights up the hill around his shadow. He turns around, his heart racing, to see the black car engulfed in fire; the furious flames grow higher and higher, reaching into the night sky, burning the car to a brown, smouldering shell and sending dark, billowing smoke up towards the stars.
Chapter Forty-eight
DIs Jessica Dean and Chris Jones walk down the lane towards the country house.
The last time they saw Louise was at the end of the search for her missing daughter. They had tried to convince her to stop searching. She wouldn’t. Jessica had stayed on with her for another hour, but when it was clear she didn’t plan to stop anytime soon, Jessica headed back, hoping it wouldn’t be long before Louise did the same.
They had spent the previous evening in Jessica’s hotel room working on the case and drinking their way through a twelve-can crate of beer. After much consideration and analysis, the detectives decided that, although Louise doesn’t seem to be responsible for her daughter’s disappearance, she is guilty of something – something that has prompted a third party to take Brooke.
‘It’s the birds,’ Jessica says, walking down the lane. ‘She didn’t report the birds. Why not? And the broken window; it wasn’t a tree branch that did that. It wasn’t windy enough to blow a damn tree through the house. She’s hiding something – and I don’t think it’s to protect the person who’s leaving them. I think it’s to protect herself, maybe her daughter, too.’
‘But why robins? Why dead birds?’ Chris asks. ‘What’s the significance?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think she knows?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. I have a feeling she knows a lot more than we do.’
The pair walks in silence, thinking of nothing but the case.
‘Why doesn’t she want to use the press to find her daughter?’ he asks.
‘Because she’s hiding something. If it comes out, it’ll be all over the news. She doesn’t want that.’
‘What if it’s because she’s a private person?’
‘Mothers don’t crave privacy when their children go missing – they crave answers, and they’ll do anything to get them. The press is one of the best ways of doing that. If she weren’t protecting a secret, she would jump at the opportunity. We would have got a televised press release yesterday.’
‘It may be for the best, though,’ Chris replies. ‘Some psychopaths get off on seeing the mothers of their victims cry, don’t they?’
Jessica nods her head, disappointedly.
They walk towards the house and stand before the gate. Chris looks at the For Sale sign outside.
‘Would you buy this house?’ he asks.
‘If I had the money?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Not now.’
She opens the gate and walks down the garden path with Chris close behind her. She takes off her gloves and knocks on the door with her bare knuckles.
They wait. She expects Louise’s face to appear in the window beside the door. It doesn’t.
She knocks again.
‘Do you think she’s gone out?’ he asks.
‘What, to shop for a new dress? Her daughter’s missing.’
‘She might need food or milk or something.’
‘Her daughter’s missing. She won’t be eating.’
‘Maybe she ran out of cigarettes.’
‘I saw a box of two hundred cigarettes,’ she replies. ‘Even if she was smoking fifty a day, she wouldn’t have finished them off in a weekend.’
She knocks a third time. They wait for a full minute. Chris checks the time on his watch.
‘Maybe she’s sleeping in,’ he says, looking up at the first floor windows.
‘Or maybe something’s wrong.’
She signals Chris to check round the left side of the house and meet her at the back. He nods and sets off.
Jessica walks round the right side of the house and peers through the first window. The curtains are open. There is no sign of life on the ground floor. Through the kitchen window she can see Chris searching on the other side of the house. She continues walking
round, looking up at the first floor windows as she goes. She meets Chris at the back of the property, by the boarded up window.