No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (top 10 non fiction books of all time .TXT) 📕

The boxes under the window were covered in it too.

Was that where he’d – bled out, was that the term?

Or had it been the concussion that had killed him? Surely it had to be. A head wound so severe that bits of brain were –

No.

No.

He couldn’t think about that now.

‘We need to just lock the shed for now and deal with this later. Tomorrow night. We’ll need to get water up from the stream to clean the floor with. And we can burn the boxes.’ Kirsty slumped against him. ‘Oh, Bram. How can this be happening?’

He held her. He just held her. He couldn’t do anything to shield her from this, and that was one of the worst things of all.

For a long moment, they just stood there, looking at the blood all over their garden shed, where they’d left a nineteen-year-old boy to die. It was so horrific it was almost impossible to comprehend.

Kirsty pulled away from him. ‘We need to check and see if there’s blood on the ground outside.’

There was some on the grass. Bram took a bucket to the stream and poured water over the area, mashing the grass with his feet to make sure any trace was obliterated, and then pouring more water over his shoes.

‘The cameras!’ said Kirsty. ‘The cameras you moved from the wood to the house! We’ll have been caught on those cameras!’

‘Okay.’ He took a long breath. ‘That’s okay.’ The ladder was kept on hooks on the wall of the shed. He went in there and reached up to it. ‘I’ll get them down.’

‘We need to destroy them. Smash them up.’ Kirsty took the other end of the ladder. ‘Put them in bin bags. Then into the car. We can take them to the dump, or put them in a random bin – Bram? Bram, we have to just do this one last thing and then–’

‘And then what, Kirsty? And then what?’

18

The whole of the gable wall of the bedroom was glass, and in the middle was a door that opened onto a tiny balcony. As Kirsty, exhausted from crying, slept in their disordered bed, Bram slid the door open quietly and stepped outside into the early morning air. From here he had a bird’s-eye view of the vegetable patch and the newly turned soil.

And it was possible to see over the treetops to Benlervie, to a triangular section of the lawn in front of the house and part of the driveway. The cooing of a collar dove was the only sound. So peaceful. So idyllic.

Had Finn been missed yet?

It was so hard to think of him as it, a dead body, a thing that was lying under the soil of the vegetable patch because Bram had battered the life force out of it and it was just a collection of chemicals now, carbon and nitrogen and… whatever. It wasn’t Finn any more. A nineteen-year-old boy with his whole life ahead of him. All he would ever be now was a nineteen-year-old corpse. Slowly decomposing into its elements.

‘Muum? Daaaad?’ came Phoebe’s call.

Bram crossed the room to the door; slipped outside into the corridor. Phoebe was standing there in her jim-jams, hair straggling to her shoulders.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Okay, kleintje, let’s go and get some breakfast.’ The thought of food made his gorge rise. He couldn’t get the image out of his head of Finn’s face, Finn’s bloody face with those staring eyes; the terrible head wound with the pieces of bone and brain in it –

‘Are you okay, Dad?’

‘Ah, yes, I’m fine. Just didn’t get much sleep last night, what with the patrols and everything.’

As he was standing at the worktop staring at the pan in which two eggs bobbed about – Phoebe loved boiled eggs and soldiers – his phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out. The screen felt strange, rough, and as he stared at it he realised that it was smeared with dried blood.

Finn’s blood.

And the name illuminated under it was Sylvia Taylor.

Time seemed to slow down. Here he was, standing in their new kitchen, Phoebe sitting at the table in her pink pyjamas with Dalmatians all over them. Here he was, holding a phone smeared with the blood of the dead son of the woman who was calling him –

‘Are you going to answer that, Dad?’

No! He couldn’t talk to Sylvia Taylor! He couldn’t talk to her and sound normal.

But he had to.

He put the heat off under the eggs. ‘Back in a sec,’ he told Phoebe, and took the phone through to the Room with a View.

‘Bram!’ exclaimed Sylvia in his ear. ‘Have you seen Finn?’

He swallowed. Plastered a smile to his face. He’d read somewhere that if you smiled as you spoke on the phone, you sounded more friendly. ‘Hi, Sylvia. No, not this morning.’ Which was true enough.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Uh, yes. He’s gone AWOL, has he?’

‘His bed hasn’t been slept in. Are you sure you haven’t seen him?’ Why was she being so insistent? Why would she think Bram would have seen him? ‘Max hasn’t seen him?’ she added.

‘Uh… I’ll check with him and call you back.’ He ended the call and stood staring out at the distant hills. He should have expressed more concern. Asked more questions. But maybe she would think he didn’t want to waste any time.

He walked back through the kitchen, heading for the stairs.

‘My eggs, Dad.’

‘For God’s sake, Phoebe! I’ll be two minutes, okay? I have to speak to your brother, then I’ll get your eggs!’

Phoebe’s lip trembled.

He didn’t have time for Phoebe’s histrionics. He ran up the stairs and pushed open Max’s bedroom door. He could have just pretended to Sylvia that he’d asked him, but then Max might give the game away later.

‘Max? Max?’ He went to the bed, clicked on the bedside light.

‘Hmmph?’ Max was just a shapeless mound under the covers.

‘You haven’t heard from Finn, have you?’

‘Nuh.’

‘Okay. Go back to sleep. It’s okay.’

He called Sylvia straight