The Scribbler by Iain Maitland (a court of thorns and roses ebook free TXT) 📗

shoulders close to making his legs give way. He stumbled to the van, the bagged body sliding off his back to the ground as he fell forward onto his knees. Opened the doors, half dragging, half lifting the body up and onto the floor, rolling it in.

He stood up, pushing the doors closed, snatching at breath.

Looked back towards the woods.

A young fair-haired boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, was standing there, holding a lead attached to a Jack Russell dog.

The dog started barking.

PART THREETHE HOUSE

13. WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER, 6.27PM

The man with the latex gloves drove his van slowly along the main road into the forest. He kept his speed at a steady twenty-seven or twenty-eight miles per hour, had done since he had slammed the van doors shut back in the woods and set off for home.

Knew this drive would seem to take forever.

Breath held. Eyes on the rear-view mirror. Heart thumping.

Some thirty to thirty-five minutes stretching out endlessly.

This was a quiet road that twisted and turned its way through the forest. Cars were few and far between, racing up behind him as often as not, slowing to his pace and then accelerating fast as they turned a bend and saw a long, straight stretch ahead. He watched as the last one disappeared and the next one appeared in the rear-view mirror a few seconds later, still some way off. He checked the speedometer and slowed the van a touch back to twenty-seven miles per hour.

The boy and the dog had troubled him. He had jumped when he saw them, never imagining for a moment that anyone would be there. Looking. Watching him. Seeing everything. It had never happened before. He knew he had always been lucky. Realised his luck could not last forever. But he did not expect it to end like this. The boy with his big saucer eyes. The dog yapping and yelping. He did not know what to do, how to respond.

The car behind was close now, tucked in at the same speed, twenty-seven, twenty-eight miles an hour.

It annoyed him, the car, up so close against his van. He wished it would pass him by.

Leave him alone with his thoughts on his journey home.

His instinct, with the boy and the dog, was to ignore them, to carry on as if what he was doing were perfectly normal. The bagged body, if the boy had seen it, no more than a shot deer. A dead Bambi. As he had stood there thinking, looking at the boy, he finally moved, breaking the moment, towards his van door.

As he got to the door and looked back at the boy, still watching him, and the dog, now quieter but pawing at the ground, he thought he might say something, perhaps making a jokey reference to a dead deer. “Oh dear, a doe, a female deer.”

But he hesitated, not exactly sure if that were the best thing to do. Then he thought he might shoo the boy away, gesturing with his arms as if to say, ‘Go on, clear off, you bloody nuisance, you shouldn’t be here. Be off with you.’ But he hesitated again, struggling to form the right words, the correct tone.

The car was still behind him as he turned a bend and looked towards a straightish stretch of road.

So close that he could barely see its lights.

He slowed a little, down to twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four, to encourage the car behind to overtake and pull away.

When he had got into the van and sat down, he looked once more at the boy. He could not, in the fading light, quite make out the expression on the boy’s face, but he was still there, looking back, taking it all in. He sat there for a moment longer, looking out through the windscreen, staring the boy down so that he would turn away, tugging at the dog’s lead, to disappear back into the woods, forgetting about the man and the van and what was in the black bin bags.

But the boy did not move, and the dog settled down, sitting there, waiting for the boy’s instructions. The man moved his left hand and turned on the van’s lights, adjusting the dipped beams to headlights shining in the boy’s face. The boy looked startled, scared even, raising his hands to his face to shield his eyes. The dog moved back, at first frightened and then growling again. Still the boy stood there, as if defiant, refusing to move.

The car was behind him, so precise, adjusting its speed as he moved faster and then slower to shake it off.

He knew that whoever was in the car was playing with him, trying to scare him. Teenage boys going on a night out. Having fun at his expense.

He pushed the car up to thirty, thirty-two and then thirty-five. The car behind came with him, almost nudging his bumper now.

It was at this point, with the boy standing there and the dog growling and pulling at its lead, that he had decided what to do. He would grab the boy and the dog, put them in the van and take them away. He thought about this and decided it was the best course of action. He would not harm the boy or the dog. He would lock them up for the night. That would teach the boy a lesson. A short, sharp shock. To teach him to behave himself. To keep quiet.

But the more he had thought about this, the more it bothered him. The boy’s family might call the police when he didn’t return home from walking the dog. The idea of bringing the boy back to the place in the woods a day or two later and then leaving him here troubled him more. The boy would be questioned, for sure, and he might well remember all sorts of incriminating things.

So, although it sickened him and broke every principle he had ever held dear, he decided he would have