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

David chuckled. ‘Okay, princess. We’ll get out of your hair. We could probably do with some beauty sleep ourselves before we have to be back on site bright and early in the morning.’

‘Aye, not so bright and not so early,’ Fraser muttered, stooping to pat Bertie.

When David, Fraser and Bertie had left and Max had stumbled up the stairs to bed – he’d probably be asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, thank God – Bram and Kirsty looked at each other.

‘We have to do it now,’ Kirsty said, as if reading his mind. ‘We can’t just leave him in there.’

Bram nodded.

‘There’s a spade and a fork in the shed. We might need a pick axe, for stones. Do we have a pick axe?’

‘No.’ His legs were shaking. He had to sit down. He stumbled to the armchair by the cold stove. ‘Why was he doing it, Kirst? Finn? What had we ever done to him? It was obviously nothing to do with Owen, Finn wasn’t even born when–’

‘Of course it’s nothing to do with Owen! He’s – he was just a little yob, Bram, doing it for kicks. A nasty little yob.’

Yes. A fortifying flare of anger shot through Bram. He’d been terrorising them. Finn had been terrorising them for no reason.

But he couldn’t stop his legs from shaking as they left the house and walked back over the grass to the shed. Bram averted his eyes from Henrietta this time. Neither he nor Kirsty spoke a word.

What more was there to say?

At the door of the shed, they both stopped, as if waiting for the other to open it. But when Bram tugged at the padlock to remove it from the loop, it wouldn’t budge.

‘Oh God,’ he whimpered. ‘It must have locked automatically, when I hooked it over the loop. But I’m sure I didn’t click the arm thing into place, I just left it loose!’

‘You can’t have.’

He shook his head. It was like some outside force had taken him over, like he really was possessed, his actions not under his control any more, not even registering in his brain. ‘I don’t remember. And I didn’t realise it did that! I didn’t realise, Kirsty, that it would lock itself automatically! And we don’t have the key!’

‘Okay, Bram, calm down! Let me try.’

But the padlock wouldn’t budge.

They spent a tense ten minutes sweeping the ground with the flashlights on both their phones, Kirsty snapping at Bram to stop whining about the key probably having been dropped inside the shed.

Bram bent to lift the stone the key had been under originally, although he knew it wouldn’t be there –

And there it was.

‘For God’s sake!’ Kirsty swooped on it.

‘I don’t remember…’

‘Right. Let’s do this. Bram, you’re going to have to hold it together. You’re going to have to help me because I can’t do this on my own. Bram?’

He nodded.

Kirsty fitted the key into the padlock, pulled it free and opened the door. Bram choked as he stepped inside after her – this wasn’t a garden shed any more, redolent of freshly cut timber and linseed oil and paint. It was a butcher’s shop, the air cloying with the animal smells of death. There was blood – so much blood on the floor, the stench of urine and shit –

The tarpaulin loomed up at the back of the shed, over the workbench, as if animated, puffed up, as if Finn’s life force had transferred to it and oh God, how did it get there? Someone had moved the tarpaulin! It always puffed up like that unless you stamped down on it as you folded it to get the air out.

Finn wasn’t there.

Kirsty was wailing, a keening sound coming out of her mouth, and Bram slowly turned his head to watch her, to watch her step across the shed to the stack of boxes under the window across which Finn was slumped, face down, the back of his head a mess of blood and bone and hair and – was that brain?

‘Oh God oh God oh God!’ Kirsty screamed.

Bram, as if in a dream, a nightmare, went past her to Finn. He put a hand on the boy’s back. Wet. He was wet.

He said, his voice seeming to come from far away, ‘Finn?’

The boy didn’t move.

‘He must have been trying to get out of the window!’ Kirsty screamed. ‘He isn’t dead!’

Bram pushed his hand between Finn’s chest and the boxes he was lying on, and put his other arm across his back, and heaved him up and backwards off the boxes. ‘Help me,’ he said to Kirsty. ‘Kirsty! Help me!’

They lowered him gently onto his back on the hard ceramic tiles.

Finn’s chest was wet too. In the shuddering light from Kirsty’s phone, he could see that it was blood. All over Finn’s black top. All over Bram’s hands. He made himself not flinch away. He pressed his hand on the boy’s chest.

It wasn’t moving.

‘I think he is dead.’

‘He can’t be,’ groaned Kirsty. ‘How can he be? He’s moved!’

Bram put a finger to Finn’s neck. ‘But he’s dead now. I think.’

‘I did that before and there wasn’t a pulse!’ Kirsty’s own fingers were next to Bram’s, moving through the blood on the boy’s neck. ‘But I mustn’t have done it right!’

‘Google it,’ said Bram. ‘On your phone. Google How to tell if someone’s dead.’

But Kirsty’s fingers were still moving on Finn, under his chin, down his neck, under his jawline.

Bram wiped his hands on his jeans and got out his own phone.

Google.

How did you get Google on a phone? It was as if all the ordinary everyday things he used to be able to do without thinking weren’t available to him any more. He was outside it all now. He was outside normal life.

‘Google,’ he said aloud.

His finger, his bloody finger, swiped the screen as if of its own accord, and there was the little Google icon. He stabbed at it.

How to tell if the bloody finger