No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (the best electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

Amy was saying to Max, examining the bruise across his chest. ‘So how come you hit your face off the dashboard?’

Damn.

Max grinned. ‘Well…’ And he exchanged a look with Bram, who grimaced and nodded to signal he should come clean. ‘That’s not exactly what happened.’

Kirsty whipped round.

At breakfast the next morning, Phoebe, sitting wide-eyed across the table from her brother, was more interested in the fight than the collapsed bridge, and Max was certainly not averse to telling and retelling the story. Phoebe offered him first jam and then marmalade and then lemon curd to go on his toast, as if setting out a feast for the conquering hero, while Max drank coffee and embroidered the tale.

‘Finn was trying to provoke me from the moment he arrived. I tried the strategy of treating him with lofty disdain, but he kept on, laughing about Bertie being shot and stuff.’

‘He thought you wouldn’t fight back!’ Phoebe crowed.

‘Indeed.’ Max gave her an indulgent half-smile.

There was an indefinable change in Max since last night, Bram was concerned to note. He had – not a swagger, exactly, but a consciousness, a new confidence.

Kirsty sat down next to Phoebe so she could look Max in the eye. ‘No matter the provocation, it’s always wrong to hit someone.’ The last two words wobbled a bit, and she took a breath. ‘I don’t know what else I can say to make you see that.’

Max grimaced. ‘It’s okay, Mum, I’m fine. It looks worse than it is.’

‘That’s not the point, Max, and you know it!’ Kirsty’s chair legs scraped the floor as she got to her feet.

Bram put his hands on her shoulders and gave Phoebe a reassuring smile. ‘I think we all know that what Max did was wrong. It’s not something to be proud of, punching someone and making their nose bleed.’

‘Hello?’ said Max, indicating his own face. ‘What was I supposed to do, stand there and take it like a human punchbag?’

‘You needed to walk away, Max.’

‘Pfff.’

‘Finn’s a bully,’ Phoebe said firmly. ‘He had it coming.’

Kirsty’s phone buzzed, and she turned away to answer. After a brief conversation which consisted mostly of ‘Oh no!’ and ‘Okay,’ she ended the call and turned to Bram. ‘Scott. He needs us down at the bridge. He thinks it has been tampered with after all.’

Max wanted to come too, but Bram and Kirsty insisted he stay inside with Phoebe. As he followed Kirsty outside, Bram realised that he wasn’t actually too surprised that the bridge collapse hadn’t been an accident. Maybe now the police would start taking the whole situation seriously.

‘Why?’ Kirsty said as they walked down the track. ‘Why is someone doing this to us?’ She grabbed Bram’s arm. ‘The bridge collapsing could have been really serious.’

Bram grimaced. ‘It’s just a small bridge over a stream. We were never going to be seriously hurt, even if it had collapsed completely.’

Kirsty stopped walking. ‘How can you be so calm about it?’

‘I’m not calm! I’m just–’

‘The glass is always half full with you, isn’t it?’ She gave a shaky laugh. ‘I never thought I’d be saying that as a criticism. But your determination to always look on the bright side – sometimes it flies in the face of reason.’

This echoed his own thoughts over the last few days. Bram took a breath, watching the morning light on the stretch of ground towards the wood, the shadows chasing across the grass as little white clouds moved over the sun and away. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I do need to be less… less naïve, I guess.’

She turned to face him. ‘Tell me the truth. Was it Dad’s doing?’

‘Uh – what?’

‘Max getting into that fight!’

‘No, no. It was as Max says – Finn was out to provoke him.’ There was no point upsetting Kirsty further by telling her the whole truth.

At the bridge, the Discovery was still in situ in the ruins of the structure, its rear wheels in the stream, bonnet pointing skywards. Beyond it were several police cars, and a guy in forensic gear was taking photographs. There were dressed stones all tumbled about in the water, under and to either side of what remained of the bridge.

Scott splashed into the stream and pointed at a large wedge-shaped stone lying in the water. ‘That’s one of the keystones – the stones that sit at the top of each course of stones in the arch, across its width, and keep everything in place. See the white marks all over it? Those are chisel marks – recent ones. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to chisel the keystones out.’ He indicated another stone – this one looked as if it had been newly split, with a sharp, light-coloured edge to it. ‘Looks like they must have removed maybe five or six of them last night. Hence the collapse when the Discovery came onto the bridge.’

‘Oh my God,’ breathed Kirsty.

‘Quite an undertaking. They probably muffled the chisel with cloth, but the sound of it hitting the mortar and the stone would probably have carried to the house. You didn’t hear anything?’

Kirsty shook her head. ‘The double glazing would have cut out that kind of noise, presumably. At this distance, anyway.’ She was staring at the Discovery, and Bram knew she was thinking of Max, already battered and bruised from the fight, sitting in that passenger seat as the bridge collapsed.

He touched her arm. ‘At the risk of coming across as a glass-half-full idiot, I have to reiterate that it was never going to cause a serious accident. Was it?’ he appealed to Scott.

Scott shook his head. ‘Not unless something freakish happened – like the windscreen being broken and a stone hitting someone on the head or something. No. Whoever’s doing this, I would say they probably don’t want to actually hurt anyone, just put the fear of God into you.’

‘But who would want to do that?’ Kirsty was trembling.

‘That’s what we have to find out. At least this is the nail in the coffin