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

someone likes you the autofill suggested.

someone dead the finger continued.

‘Kick him,’ said Bram, reading the results. ‘Or poke him. But I think we’ve already checked the responsiveness thing by – by hauling him about. He’s not responsive.’

‘Of course he’s not responsive!’ Kirsty yelled.

‘Try poking him, though,’ Bram said dully.

Kirsty jabbed a finger at Finn’s arm.

‘And shouting his name,’ he added.

Kirsty just sat there, squatting on the floor next to Finn, holding the flashlight from her phone so it shone on the boy’s face – there was blood all over his face apart from his eyes, his staring eyes –

‘Finn!’ Bram shouted.

Nothing. Of course, nothing.

‘We have to check whether he’s breathing,’ said Kirsty.

‘Uh, yeah, that’s the next thing.’ Suddenly Bram was calm. He read quickly. ‘Okay, we need a mirror. Or a piece of glass…’ He took Kirsty’s phone from her and shone it around the shed. That would do – a glass jar on the workbench in which Phoebe had been collecting rose petals. He tipped them out and brought it back to Finn. ‘Okay. Shine the light on the jar…’

Bram held the side of the jar over Finn’s mouth and nose. His mouth was slack, slightly open.

He held the jar closer. There was a solitary rose petal still inside, browning around the edges, stuck to the glass.

‘See any condensation on it?’

Kirsty just shook her head.

‘Okay.’ Bram set down the jar and returned to the Google results. ‘Next thing is eyes. Shining a light in his eyes and seeing if the pupils contract.’

He held the flashlight from the phone over Finn’s left eye. The pupil wasn’t black, it was red, like people in photographs got red-eye from the flash bouncing off their retinas.

‘It hasn’t changed, has it? The pupil? Kirsty?’

‘No. He’s dead, Bram. He’s dead now, but he wasn’t then! He can’t have been. I thought he was dead! But he was still alive and we left him in here to die!’

‘We should have called an ambulance,’ Bram said dully, sitting back on his heels, angling the phone so the light fell not on the boy’s face but on the floor by Kirsty’s feet.

He had still been alive.

When they’d dragged him in here like a piece of meat.

He had still been alive.

When they’d dumped him down by the workbench and put a tarpaulin over him, when they’d left him there, when they’d shut and locked the door.

He had still been alive.

And he’d come back to consciousness, and managed to crawl to the window.

A dying boy. A desperate, dying boy, in who knew what pain, what agony?

Left here to die.

There were too many tree roots.

Even when, on their third attempt to find a suitable spot, they chose a dip in the ground with no trees in it, they found roots, pale, thick snakes hidden in the earth that frustrated their attempts to dig. Bram had to hack at them with the spade, but he couldn’t get a good swing because the sharp part was along the end, not the sides. He had to stand over them and almost throw the spade downwards at the solid, woody structures that seemed almost to be there to protect the soil from what Bram was trying to do.

It was hopeless. The dark was already melting away, and soon they wouldn’t need a torch or the phone’s flashlight any more to see what they were doing. In summer, in Scotland, the dawn came very early. Not quite the land of the midnight sun, but close to it.

‘We need a saw,’ said Bram. ‘But it would take too long.’

‘We can’t put him back in the shed!’ Kirsty raked her earthy hands through her hair, looking down, shrinkingly, at the wheelbarrow into which they’d put Finn, well wrapped up in the tarpaulin, which they’d tied round him with string like a mummy. The mask was in there too. Bram had put it back over Finn’s face before wrapping him in the tarp, as if he really were an Egyptian being prepared for the afterlife. It had been easier, though, as soon as the mask was in place; as soon as Finn’s face had been covered and he didn’t have to look at it any more.

‘We need somewhere that’s easier to dig,’ he said. ‘The paddock, maybe. But we’ll have to work fast. It’ll be light in half an hour.’

‘The veg patch!’ Kirsty said, turning back to the barrow. ‘We can put him in the veg patch for now, while we think where we can put him permanently. Maybe we could dig a hole here over the next few nights, if we brought a saw… Fill it in with loose soil between times…’ She hefted the wheelbarrow. His long legs were flopping over the front, as if he was a kid and Kirsty was giving him a ride in the barrow.

Even inside the tarp, he stank of shit.

The veg patch was much easier to dig in. They took it in turns with the spade to make a long trench down the length of it, deep enough to contain Finn’s body with a couple of feet to spare.

‘We should go deeper, maybe,’ said Bram.

But it was already so light that he could see the pale lines across his knuckles against the earthy grime on the backs of his hands.

‘No time,’ said Kirsty shortly. ‘Let’s get him in there.’

Bram brought the barrow to the trench and tipped it sideways, and Finn flopped into the hole. They shovelled soil in over him. It took surprisingly little time to fill the hole, and then there was the problem of the mound of earth displaced by the body. Bram used the spade to distribute it over the veg patch as best he could, Kirsty helping by kicking it with her trainers.

When they’d finished, they took the wheelbarrow back to the shed.

There was blood all over the floor. A huge pool of it where they’d left Finn by the workbench at the far end, and streaks leading to and from it, where they’d dragged him