Believe No One (24 page)

He hears voices, a burst of laughter. The trunk opens. He sees a flash of angry eyes – a man, the driver. The man recoils, lifts his arm over his face, cussing at the smell of vomit.

The boy takes his chance – slashing with the knife, he's up, out, running for his life. Behind him a hullabaloo of dogs yapping, howling, straining at their chains, men yelling.

Someone shouts, ‘Stop right there, you little fucker!'

The boy risks one terrified glance over his shoulder. The man raises a rifle, and Red's heart stops. He cannot move. A fat woman bumps the shooter's arm, knocks him off target. The shot goes wide and the woman slaps the man round the head.

‘Damnit, that's a kid you're taking potshots at, not a goddamn squirrel!' she yells.

For a second nobody does anything.

She looks straight at Red, says, ‘C'm 'ere, son.'

Red looks right and left. He's in a wide clearing. Ahead of him, a big house. Another woman stands in the shadow of the front door. Either side of the car, two men: the driver, and someone looks enough alike to be his brother. Two more by a pickup – he recognizes one of them. All of the men are armed.

The woman says, ‘There's no place for you to go, son. These entire woods is booby-trapped.' She looks at him like she's waiting for the information to sink in. ‘Now c'mon.'

The woman is wearing brown cotton pants and a dazzling white shirt. She stands like a man with her feet turned outwards and her hands making fists. Red watches her, but still does not move. She sighs and takes the rifle away from the man who tried to shoot him. ‘Go get him,' she says, her voice tired.

The man takes a step and it breaks the spell. Red spins on his heel. He tears through the woods, running, the hounds after him. But he's on unfamiliar ground and dizzy with the fever – he stumbles and falls. The knife flies off into the underbrush; they are close – real close – he can't go looking for it. He boosts himself up with his hands, staggers a few more steps, hears a crack and the ground gives way under him. He tries to leap out of trouble, but his legs are weak. He falls, spinning, grasping at air, and pictures flash through his mind of bear traps and pitfall traps and the tripwire with the spiked weight at the pot grow in the woods. He blacks out.

Aberdeen, Scotland
2 p.m. BST

Josh Brown had found a new toy. He'd read an article on language use in psychopaths and discovered that the university had a word-pattern analysis program called Wmatrix. He thought that he might use it to assess the narrative responses of people who had claimed a miscarriage of justice – a key area of interest to him. Psychopaths' speech is emotionally flat, he'd learned, and displays a high level of instrumentality: ‘I wanted this, so I did that.' ‘I had to kill her because …' They focus on self-preservation and primitive physiological needs – higher-level needs like intellectual and emotional fulfilment do not loom large in a psychopath's narrative. Fennimore had been interviewed three times in the five months between his wife and daughter's disappearance and the discovery of his wife's body, and Josh had been given access to them along with the rest of the Task Force. To amuse himself, he ran the transcribed interviews through Wmatrix. Fennimore, it turned out, was not a psychopath.

Fennimore's case was a cause célèbre on campus – even nationally – and since moving to Scotland to study with Fennimore, it had become a kind of hobby for Josh. He had lurked on forums, occasionally striking up conversations. No leads, so far, but he'd been covering Fennimore's summer-school classes at the university, as well as working with the Joint Task Force, so he only had time for an hour or two a day.

He saved the Wmatrix assessment and opened his photo gallery, finding the image of a man and a girl walking side by side in the sunshine. The man was aged thirty, or thereabouts. He carried a bit too much weight, but wasn't bad-looking. He wore a good suit and had the meaty look of a successful business type. The girl was maybe sixteen; she wore a knee-length dress and held a clutch bag on a thin strap. She was slim, and strode confidently in high heels. This was the girl who might or might not be Professor Fennimore's daughter. Josh had stolen the image from a pen drive that Fennimore had left out on his desk. It wasn't encrypted, which, to Josh's mind, made it fair game.

Fennimore will focus on the girl. Understandable, but it's the wrong approach. Children are anonymous, easily explained, or explained away. They can be moved around, renamed reconstructed so easily. An adult, on the other hand, has a past – a personal history, friends, an education, a career, a reputation, maybe. This is where Josh will start.

He cropped the image and produced a new JPEG of the man's face. He saved it and uploaded it to a free online sketch tool, and with the click of a button he had the image as a sketch. Of all the forums he'd lurked on, he thought that ‘Save Suzie!' would yield the best results. But the appearance of an actual photograph online would raise too many questions – it might even get back to Professor Fennimore, and he did not want that. So he saved the sketch and uploaded that to the forum, and waited for the comments to start rolling in.

The backwoods, Williams County, Oklahoma
Morning

When Red comes round, he is lying on the earth at the bottom of a pit. Five faces are staring down at him: four men and a woman – not the fat one, a younger one. He doesn't have any holes in him: there are no spikes in this pit. Two dogs are snuffing around the top, sending crumbs of earth and small stones onto him. He flinches, raising an arm to protect his eyes. One of the dogs starts bouncing on its front paws, yowling.

The car driver, the man who tried to shoot him, bats the dog away and leans into the pit, offering his hand. Red sinks his teeth into the fleshy part of the man's thumb. He yells, cussing and swearing, tries to pull back, but the boy hangs on. The others are yelling and laughing but the shooter is roaring like a bull, till someone pokes Red with a stick and he falls on his butt. When he looks up, it's the fat woman.

The men go on laughing, but she looks mad. ‘You want to get out of there, boy, you're gonna have to behave like a Christian child.'

Red scowls back at her, digging his fingers into the dirt where he landed.

‘Suit yourself.' The woman waves her hand in front of her face like she's chasing flies. ‘We can just as easy shoot you.'

Red knows who this woman is. She is Marsha Tulk. The kids in school say she is boss of the Tulk family. And if she says she will shoot you, she is not fooling.

She disappears from the edge of the pit and Red jumps up. ‘Wait!' he yells. ‘I'll come out!'

She appears again, her face fat and round, her eyes dark and small and hard, but there is a crinkle of fun around the eyes. ‘Oh, you will … we just got to decide how.'

‘I'll be good,' Red says.

She narrows her eyes. ‘I want to hear you say it.'

‘I'll behave like a Christian child,' he says, his eyes fixed on the damp earth at his feet.

Next second, he's hauled up by two strong arms. The men do not let go, but look towards the big woman with the small, hard eyes.

She stares at him like he's a sorry excuse for a human child, shakes her head and says, ‘Bring him up to the house.'

Mrs Tulk sits in a rocker out on the porch. The two men march Red up after her and make him sit on a wood chair.

He wriggles and she says, ‘Do I have to tie you down?'

He shakes his head. It's buzzing, or else the cicadas are singing in two-part harmony.

‘I can't hear you,' she says.

‘No, ma'am, you do not have to tie me down.'

She nods, satisfied, and the men let go of him.

The woman looks at his dirty face, his cut hands and stained clothes. ‘Well, little boy, you are a mess.'

The way she says it makes him want to cry, so he frowns hard at the woman's strong right hand, curved loose over the edge of the rocker arm. Her nails are sharp-pointed and the knuckles are big and calloused, yellow, like a bird's claw.

‘What were you doing in the trunk of my son's car?' she says.

The four men have gathered round, the man he had bit being tended to by a young woman – the one he saw at the front door of the house – the other three sitting or leaning on the porch rail. The one he recognized is the chunky guy he saw tending the pot grow – the one he hitched a ride off of the first time. None of them is laughing now, nor smiling, neither; they don't look so much mad as mean, and he knows that he needs to be careful what he says next.

‘I was escaping.'

‘From what?'

‘Foster home,' he says.

‘Why're you in foster care?'

‘My momma died.' He chokes up and cannot speak for a bit, and Mrs Tulk hands him a Kleenex from the pocket of her pants.

‘Can I have a glass of water?' He's hot and dizzy, his face all swole up from the heat and the crying. ‘Uh, please, ma'am?'

‘Let's get this over with first,' the woman says. ‘How come you're not living with your daddy?'

He shrugs. ‘I don't know who he is.'

The woman shifts her bulk in the chair and makes a
tsk
sound through her back teeth.

‘I'm going to ask you a question again, and I want you to answer me truthfully, this time,' she says. ‘What are you running from?'

The boy bows his head, his two arms hanging loose between his knees. He can't go home, because he knows his momma isn't ever coming back, and, if he tells her, the police will come and put him in foster care for real.

‘I'm running,' he says, taking his time so he can decide on a story she will believe. ‘From my foster father.'

‘Why?'

‘'Cos,' the boy says, ‘he's a pervert. Wanted me to come see his garter snakes. Said I could “handle the male”, like it was something dirty. He made me drink beer—' He widens his eyes and turns them on her, knowing they are blue and innocent as a May morning. ‘I didn't want to …'

‘How old're you?' she says, her face hard.

‘Nine years.' Thinking,
She doesn't believe me. I told a lie and she doesn't believe me and now I'm going to die.

But the woman gazes in wonder at her own boys. ‘He's no more'n a baby.'

‘Am not.'

Her attention snaps back to him and he quails, but her face softens. ‘'Course you're not. But you're not big enough to deal with that kind of sinfulness on your own, neither. Don't you have
any
family? An aunt, a gramma?'

He shakes his head.

‘Where you from, boy?'

‘I can't tell you.'

‘You will,' she says, leaning forward in her chair, ‘or we're going to have a fallin' out.'

He tries to look her in the eye, but can't. ‘Ma'am, I swear I don't mean to make you mad, truly I don't, but I can't go back there.'

The terror of what happened to him must show in his face, 'cos she says, ‘I'm not going to make you go back, son. I just need to know where you come
from.
'

Now
she's
lying, but he knows better than to say that to a woman like Mrs Tulk. ‘But if
you
know, other people will know and
they
might send me back.'

She snuffs a bit and he sees the crinkle of humour around her eyes again. ‘Well, you are a smart boy. But that's assuming I would tell anyone, which I won't.'

He looks at the four men around her.

She sees him look and gets mad. ‘Gosh almighty, don't you
want
to see that man punished?'

He closes his mouth tight, hearing Rodney Atkins singing ‘If You're Going Through Hell' in his head.

Mrs Tulk settles back in her rocker and contemplates him for a while. ‘Harlan, where'd this boy get into the trunk of your car?'

The man who tried to shoot him says, ‘I don't know, Momma.' He is tall and bearded, dark-haired like the others. He looks strong and powerful, but he seems nervous when he tells her.

‘Well,
think,
‘ she says.

Harlan shakes off the young woman who is fixing up his hand, and she falls to staring at Red instead.

Harlan says, ‘I might of left the trunk unlocked over to the …' His eyes slide over to the boy then back to the woman. ‘The tomato field in the woods.'

‘Is that right, boy?' she asks.

Red gives her a someway truthful answer. ‘I do recall a powerful smell of tomatoes in the clearing where I climbed in the trunk.' He thinks it would be unwise to mention that the smell of marijuana was just as strong.

She eyes the boy, curious. ‘Just how long were you in the trunk of that car?'

‘I climbed in just after dark. Mr Harlan drove for a while, then he stopped and drove off with someone else. It was getting light when they got back and we started moving again.'

Her eyes flicker to her son and the boy sees a slight nod. ‘How'd you know it was light if you were in the trunk?'

‘Ma'am, that old tin can is nothing but rust and air.'

The others laugh and Harlan starts to grumble, but she says, ‘You know it's true, son.' Then to Red: ‘What's your name, boy?'

‘Caleb.' He can see that she knows it's a lie. ‘But everyone calls me Red.' Another lie – the kids in school call him all kinds of names, but they do not call him Red.

‘I'm trying to help you, son, and you are defying me.'

Red thinks that not many people have ever defied Mrs Tulk.

‘I'm sorry, ma'am. But I will not go back.'

‘We already had that conversation,' she says, a threat in her tone.

‘I'll leave,' he said. ‘I want to. Just let me go.' There is a pleading in his voice which makes him feel ashamed, but Mrs Tulk looks like she's giving serious thought to the idea.