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

own fault that you were so freaked out by everything he’d done that you lost it.’

‘No,’ said Bram, trying to think, trying to get his head round this nightmare that had descended on them.

‘Bram, no one knows it was Finn doing any of it.’

‘They might. He might have had – accomplices. His friends–’

‘Okay, even if that’s the case, his friends aren’t going to go to the police and confess to that, are they? If Finn disappears, the police will have nothing to connect him to us. Finn is – was a binge drinker who got into trouble a lot. No one will be too surprised if he vanishes. It happens all the time, young men getting drunk and disappearing, lying dead in a ditch somewhere or falling into – into a river…’ She stopped.

‘We can’t – try to cover this up! I have to tell the police what happened.’

‘And go to prison.’

Bram lifted his shoulders helplessly.

‘God, Bram!’ Kirsty was sobbing now. ‘You wouldn’t last five minutes in prison!’ She clutched him, clutched his shoulders, and then she was hugging him close. ‘It would break you, and I’m not going to let that happen!’

‘I would cope,’ he managed to say.

‘Of course you wouldn’t! You can’t go to prison. We need you. The kids and I need you.’ She pulled away from him but kept a grip of his shoulders. ‘We have to get him out of sight. Into the shed. We can deal with him – with it later, when Dad and Fraser have gone and Max is in bed… Bram. Bram!’ She shook him. ‘We have to do this. Okay? Okay?’

‘Okay.’

Neither of them wanted to touch him. Neither of them wanted to go near his head. In the end, they took a boot each and dragged him to the door of the shed.

‘It’s locked,’ said Kirsty, shining the flashlight from her phone on the padlock securing the door. ‘Where’s the key? Bram? Where’s the key to the padlock?’

He’d got a padlock to secure the door, he remembered now, after the incident with the weedkiller. He’d put the little padlock key…

‘Under that flat stone.’

He watched Kirsty stoop, the light from her phone illuminating her in fits and starts, turning her into a series of freeze-frame shots, into a strange, menacing figure that seemed to move in jerks, like something in a horror film.

She lifted the stone. ‘Got it.’

They pulled him – it – inside the shed, into the incongruously everyday smells of creosote and oil and new, resiny wood. The floor of the shed was finished with smooth, pale-grey, heavy-duty ceramic tiles that David had recommended for ease of cleaning, and Bram could see that Finn’s head had left a trail of blood, like a snail’s trail, across them.

He stopped, one large, booted foot in his hand.

He could feel the indentations of the sole, the roughness of the leather, the criss-crossing laces, and imagined Finn sitting on a chair in the boot room at Benlervie to tie these laces for the last time. He cupped the boot in his hand, the words going round his head:

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

‘Let’s get him back against the workbench, so if anyone looks in the windows they won’t see him,’ said Kirsty, her voice wavering on the last word.

They pulled Finn across the remaining few feet, turning as they approached the bench to bring him around so he was lying parallel to and slightly under it. Bram set the boot he was holding down carefully. Kirsty grabbed a blue tarpaulin and tucked it around Finn as if tucking one of the kids into bed, her hands gentle as she pressed it down over his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bram said. ‘Kirsty. I’m sorry.’

She nodded. Stood.

He followed her out of the shed.

He shut the door. Hooked the padlock into position. ‘Where’s the key?’

‘I thought you had it?’

They checked their pockets.

No key.

‘We must have dropped it.’ Bram took Kirsty’s phone from her and shone it on the grass.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Kirsty. ‘We need to find Dad and Fraser and Max, and stop the patrol. Get Dad and Fraser to leave. Then when Max is asleep, we can bury… bury Finn in the wood.’

‘Our wood?’

‘Yes. We can control what happens there. We can make sure no one… I don’t know, excavates there for drains or…’ She was already walking away. ‘Come on, Bram. We need to find them.’

As he walked after her, hardly able to take in what she had just said, he saw, briefly illuminated by the light from Kirsty’s phone, Henrietta, the wooden goose, standing there amidst the wildflowers staring at him, or so it seemed to Bram for one mad moment. He choked back a sob and looked away.

Bertie ran towards them, tongue lolling, across the grass of the paddock. Kirsty shone her phone behind him and Bram made out three indistinct figures.

As Bertie nuzzled him, Bram swallowed another huge sob. This innocent animal. Little did he know…

‘What the hell are you doing out here?’ was David’s greeting as he shone a powerful torch in their faces.

‘I’m not happy about this – it’s asking for trouble,’ Kirsty said. ‘Patrol’s over. Please, Dad, go home. Max, I want you back in the house and in bed, okay?’

The torchlight lingered on Bram. ‘God almighty, what’s up with you?’

‘Hay fever,’ said Kirsty.

Max was plodding along after Fraser, arms hanging by his sides as if he’d forgotten how to walk properly.

‘Boy’s done in,’ said David. ‘Fraser and me, we’ll just do a last circuit of the house and–’

‘No!’ said Bram and Kirsty together.

What if they decided to check the shed?

‘No, Dad,’ added Kirsty. ‘I think you’ve done your bit. Thanks so much. But it’ll be light soon.’

‘Not for another couple of hours.’

‘If anyone was going to mess with us tonight, they’d have done it by now. Even yobs need their shut-eye.’ How was she able to smile? How was Kirsty even functioning, given her complete abhorrence of violence of all kinds?

She was so much stronger than Bram. But