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

you, Mum!’ Kirsty smiled, and beeped the car open. ‘Come on, Bram, we’d better get going.’

As they made off down the street, Bram let out a long breath. ‘Okay, if it comes out that we told your parents we were joining the search but never actually turned up… What do we say?’

‘We chickened out. Too scared of the Taylors.’

‘That would make sense. We went for a drive and fell asleep in the car…’

‘But were too embarrassed to admit it.’

Bram nodded. Was that reasonable? He couldn’t think straight. He was so tired he felt nauseous. Light-headed and dizzy. As Kirsty turned out of the street he had to close his eyes to stop his head spinning.

‘No,’ said Kirsty. ‘Oh, no.’

There was a high mesh fence all the way round the quarry, no doubt for safety reasons. They got out of the car and stood looking through it to the deep, turquoise water beyond.

‘We could cut the fence?’ Bram suggested half-heartedly.

‘With what? And if they found the fence cut, they’d wonder why. With the search for Finn getting more publicity, some bright spark would be bound to put two and two together and get divers into the quarry.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We’ll just have to dump him. Deeper into the forest.’

‘But someone’s bound to find him!’

‘Eventually, yes. But what else can we do? We can’t bury him. We’ve no spade, and it would take too long anyway, with all the roots. We’ll just have to dump him in the forest and hope it looks like – I don’t know, a drunken fight gone wrong. Finn was a nasty piece of work – he probably got into lots of fights. One of the other yobs killed him by accident, drove him up here, dumped his body…’

‘But they know he went out that night to terrorise us!’

‘Obviously it’s suspicious, and we’ll probably be prime suspects, but they can’t know what happened. They can’t know some of his yobbish pals weren’t helping him – they could have fallen out, gone for each other… They can’t know who killed him.’ She turned away from him to walk back to the car. ‘We have to just dump him and hope for the best. What other choice do we have, Bram?’

They drove on up the track into the forest, and at a fork selected the weedier of the two alternatives, which looked as if it didn’t get much traffic. They carried on for about quarter of a mile and then stopped the car.

‘Here’s probably as good a place as any,’ Kirsty said dully.

But neither of them made a move. Bram closed his eyes.

And he must have slept – how could he have slept? – because the next thing he knew, Kirsty was shaking him awake.

‘We have to,’ she said, her eyes puffy and red from the silent tears she must have been crying.

They opened the boot and removed the bin bags. The body in the tarpaulin, which they’d managed to squeeze into the small space last night, was more problematic to get out again. Bram grabbed it by the shoulders and pulled it round, but the tarpaulin snagged on the catch for the boot lock. He heaved, and the tarp ripped a little.

Kirsty grabbed the legs and helped Bram lift the body out and lower it onto the track. ‘We should take the tarp off him. All the soil on it – they might be able to match it to Woodside’s soil.’

‘Something else for the wheelie bins?’

‘We should maybe just burn it all. We can go to a shop and buy matches and firelighters.’ Kirsty glanced off back down the track. ‘Let’s get him out of sight before we start messing with the tarpaulin. Into the trees.’

The conifers in the plantation were planted close together and had spiky, brown, twiggy branches sticking out at head height and below which jabbed and snagged them as they heaved Finn’s body through the trees. They had to bend double in places to avoid the branches, and one or other of them kept dropping their end of their burden. At least no one was likely to come walking through here. A few metres in it was a twilit, claustrophobic world, the light so dim that nothing was growing on the forest floor. It was just a carpet of dead, brown needles.

‘We can’t just… leave him here,’ said Kirsty, when they finally laid him down.

He knew exactly what she meant. Abandoning him here, in this dark, dead place where nothing grew… Somehow it seemed so much worse than putting him into the soil, where bodies were supposed to go. This just seemed wrong.

‘We have to,’ choked Bram. ‘We have to. We need to get the tarp off him. Do we have scissors? The string… We need something to cut it with.’

They stared at each other in the gloom. ‘We don’t have scissors.’

‘Or a knife?’

Kirsty shook her head. ‘There might be something in the car we could use.’

In the end they had to unpick the knots, and it seemed to take forever, crouched there breathing in the odours from the body. Finally they got the tarp off him, and bundled the string and the mask inside it. Bram averted his eyes from the body as they stumbled their way back through the trees to the car.

Bram drove this time, back onto the main track, but as they turned onto the straight section that led past the quarry he saw people up ahead. An elderly couple in light-coloured jackets, maybe a hundred yards away, out for a nice morning walk. They were heading away down the track, but turned to stare at the car.

‘Go back!’ Kirsty hissed. ‘If we carry on up the main track, I think it comes out eventually on the back road.’

Bram reversed back round the bend to the junction, where he turned and headed off up the track through the forest. In places the surface was rutted and difficult to negotiate, especially where the track headed uphill, where rainwater flowing down