Better Left Buried (17 page)

“Probably in just as much shit as you.”

I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed, staring into the darkness, going over and over it all in my head. It's as if I'm actually there, at the party, seeing the girl collapse, the lights of the ambulance, the urgency of the paramedics. Max's face stricken with grief and shock.

Did he go with her, to the hospital? I wonder. I like to think he did. I like to think he stayed with her till the end.

And then I relive, again and again, those few days my brother came home, to a family oblivious to everything that had happened. And him unable to tell us any of it.

Just leave me alone, Sarah.

It must have been agony. It must have been so lonely. My heart aches just thinking about it.

Because if what I'm going through is even half what Max endured, I can't imagine how he stood it. Though a part of me – a little part – can't help feeling he deserved to suffer. That poor girl, Anna. Dead because Max – my brainy, clever, fabulous brother – decided to do something epically, monumentally stupid.

Eventually I drop off for a few hours, waking to the noise of Mum making breakfast in the kitchen. I hear the toaster pop, the sound of the kettle boiling. I drag myself out of bed and join her downstairs.

Her gaze hovers over me. I must look terrible. I feel terrible – leaden, achey.

“You okay?” she asks, sitting at the table, taking a bite of toast.

I nod. “Rough night, that's all.”

“You want to talk about it?” Mum gives me a smile.

I gaze at her. I desperately need to talk to someone – dealing with this alone is almost more than I can bear. I consider breaking down, offloading all of it. Savour the promise of relief, knowing that Mum would call Dad and he'd come straight home and sort everything out. Go to the police, get them to stop this gang. Make this nightmare end.

I nearly succumb to the temptation, but studying Mum's face I know it would kill her. It really would. However much I ache to talk, to tell her about Jack and Lizzie, to get the police involved, I can't. It'd all come out about Max and the drugs and what happened to his girlfriend, and I can't bring myself to do that to her. Or Dad.

They think it was just one of those things. Through the agony of the last three months, it's all they've had to hang on to – that Max's death was sheer bad luck. Something that couldn't be prevented.

How can I take that away from them?

“It's nothing,” I make myself say. “A bit nervous about my audition.”

“Not long to go. Next Saturday, isn't it?”

I nod, feeling sick at the thought. When I got back from meeting Jack yesterday, I was too stirred up to do my singing, and today I feel too rough to do anything.

I dig my fingers into the palms of my hands.
Don't think about that now,
I tell myself.
Concentrate on sorting this out.

“I'm going out with Aunt Helen this morning,” says Mum. “She's picking me up in an hour. We're going to that new garden centre near Milford.”

I look at her in surprise. A few weeks ago she could barely drag herself out of bed.

“Great idea,” I say, realizing I have one of my own.

Mum glances at the time. “Won't you be late for college? I can give you a lift if you like.”

I shake my head. “No lessons till lunchtime,” I lie. “You go ahead. I'll do some practice then walk in later.”

I wait until Mum is safely packed off in Aunt Helen's car, then call the college. I know no one will answer during the busy morning period, so I leave a message reporting myself as ill. I'll fake a sick note and take it in tomorrow.

Then I dial Lizzie's phone. It goes straight into voicemail. I consider leaving a message, but remember what she said about being careful. Could the gang possibly hack into her mobile?

Lizzie's right. When we talk, it has to be face-to-face. Or at least on the phone.

I make another coffee and force myself to wait ten more minutes until I'm certain Mum's not coming back for any reason. I try Lizzie's mobile again, just in case, but it still clicks straight to voicemail. I want to scream with frustration. Why hasn't she rung me like she promised?

But the answer to that is not something I want to dwell on. I know now why she's run away.

I only hope she's run far enough.

Finishing my coffee, I get the garage key out of the shed and heave open the metal door. Pull it carefully shut behind me before switching on the light. The old fluorescent tube flickers, then finally blinks on.

Everything looks normal. The stack of dining-room chairs we inherited from Gran. Dozens of cans of half-used paint lined up on shelves. A broken freezer Dad's been meaning to take to the dump for over a year now.

Clearly whoever broke into the house didn't come in here, I think, running my gaze across all the junk we've acquired over the years and imagining the mess they'd have made. I guess they didn't find the key or have time to break the door down. Or decided it was too risky – you can see the garage door from the road and there's a good chance they'd be spotted.

I pick my way past an old trestle table loaded with rolls of wallpaper to the three cardboard boxes stashed right at the back, concealed under a couple of picnic rugs. Dad hid them so Mum wouldn't notice them if she ever took it into her head to come in here.

I grab the first box and pull it out. Something grey streaks away from behind and I let out an involuntary squeal. A mouse.

Resisting the urge to bolt back into the daylight, I take a deep breath and slide my finger under the tape holding the lid in place. Inside lie several books. I glance at the titles.

Damn. The other library books – I'd forgotten all about them. I put them aside on the trestle table, peering into the box to see what's underneath. Folders stuffed with paper. Reams and reams of it.

I lift out a large ring binder and sit on one of the old dining chairs to look through it. Mostly essays and term papers, littered with diagrams and formulae. There's an occasional tick by the side of things Max wrote. The odd remark scrawled in red biro.

An interesting conclusion,
I manage to make out,
but you'll need to justify why this doesn't result in a thermal…
I can't decipher the rest.

I lift out another folder. More of the same. Flicking through, I check each page as carefully as I can. Why didn't he write this stuff on his computer? I wonder, as I examine the familiar scrawl of Max's handwriting. He was the only person I knew who still used a fountain pen.

Further in the box are more books, one of them a novel.
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson. Tucked inside the front cover is a photograph of Max and Rob and a girl I've never seen before. I stare at her wide smile, her deep brown hair, the dimples in her cheeks. She looks nice. Happy.

Is this Anna?

The thought pricks tears at my eyes. I think about the future Max and Anna could have had if this hadn't happened. They might have married. Had kids.

Or not. But even if the relationship hadn't gone anywhere, they would at least have still been alive.

I shiver, pulling my cardigan closer, then drag out the next box. Outside a siren blares past, making me jump with shock. I glance behind me, but the garage door remains firmly closed.
No one can get in,
I tell myself,
not without me hearing.

The second box doesn't take long. It's crammed with Max's clothes – jeans, T-shirts, socks, underpants – all thrown in unfolded. I wonder if they're even clean. It feels weird, handling this stuff. Intrusive, too intimate. I have to push myself to check through it.

As I open the third box and rummage inside I hear the distant ring of the phone inside the house. I ignore it, pulling out a kettle and several mugs, one of them cracked. Judging by the careless way everything's been tossed in, I'm guessing Max's housemates packed his things. Dad would have done it properly, wrapping the mugs in newspaper to stop them chipping.

I squint at what's left at the bottom. I can't see well in the dim light of the garage, so steel myself to reach in and feel inside. My hand touches something solid and I lift it out. Notebooks, small with black covers, held together with a rubber band. I go to release them, but at that instant the house phone rings again.

Perhaps it's Lizzie, it occurs to me with a rush of hope, and I grab the notebooks and leave.

When I've spoken to Dad and lied through my teeth and pretended everything's fine, I sit on my bed with Max's notebooks. I remove the rubber band and work through the first. It's full of lecture notes, from what I can tell, interspersed with hastily scribbled drawings. There's a molecule diagram with lines between various Hs and Cs and As. I turn it on its side – it looks a bit like the segments of a caterpillar.

I flick right through, trying to make some kind of sense of it all.
Substitution at Carbonyl Groups – Leaving Groups and Use of pKa as a Guide to the Breakdown of Tetrahedral Intermediates
reads one title. It might as well be written in a foreign language.

I turn the page.
CHECK OUT RATE OF POLYMERIZATION
Max has scrawled. I get up and type “polymerization” into Google and get lots of stuff about joining up molecules. Nothing looks out of the ordinary.

The second notebook contains much the same. And the third. My attention is flagging by the time I pick up the fourth and open it up to yet more diagrams, looking like pieces of broken honeycomb. A couple of pages on, Max has jotted a few words and underlined them –
recondensing
and
alternatives to the Ritter reaction?
followed by a list of chemicals with names like
3,4-
methylenedioxy
phenyl-2-propanone
and
toluene isopropyl alcohol
.

It's worth a try. I go back to my laptop, type in
ritter reaction
. All that comes up is lots of complicated stuff I can't be bothered to read. I tag
toluene isopropyl alcohol
onto the end in the search bar and press Enter.

A lump forms in my throat as I stare at the screen. Dozens of hits – most of them on manufacturing ecstasy.

Oh god…so it's true. What Jack told me is actually
true
.

Part of me was hoping he was lying. Or simply mistaken. I just hadn't wanted to believe it.

But here it is. No mistake. No mistake at all.

I flip through the remaining pages, not bothering to read more carefully. There's no way I can work out what's going on here.

As I get towards the end I see it. The ragged edge of paper where a number of pages were torn out together. And suddenly I know, with a sinking feeling of a plan in ruins, that these are the ones that matter. These are what that gang is looking for. What I was hoping might get us out of this mess.

The missing notes that are worth a fortune.

My only chance to end this once and for all.

“You're going to Sweden.”

“Yes.”

“To where Max…”

“Yes.”

Jack sucks his teeth for a minute. He's perched on the swing, his hand in his pocket, fidgeting with the cigarette box. I've just told him I'm going to our summer house. That I want to see where Max died.

I'm hoping Jack will leave it at that.

I survey the park. It's only two days since we met in the pub, but already the world around us seems to be changing. Some of the trees have begun to shed their leaves. It's properly cold too, though it's only mid-September; I had to dig out a scarf from the back of the hall cupboard.

Maybe I should have suggested meeting somewhere warmer, some place indoors, but I wasn't thinking about the weather when I sent Jack the text. I simply picked somewhere public, somewhere I knew I'd be safe.

I'm still far from sure I can trust him.

“How long are you going for?” Jack asks.

“A few days.”

His brow contracts in disapproval. “Sarah, you need to get away for more than—”

“How long are you saying I should disappear for, exactly?” I snap, my frustration spilling over. “Months? Years?”

He doesn't reply.

“I don't have months or years. I don't even have a week. I've got an audition next week – there's no way I'm going to miss that.”

Jack looks at me. “Does it matter to you that much? Singing, I mean?”

I frown. How does he know it's for singing? Have I mentioned it before? Or did Max say something?

“Yes, it matters.” I look at the ground, afraid I might cry. “It's everything, if you really want to know. If I can't do that, then…” I can't even finish the sentence.

Jack says nothing. I take a deep breath and turn to face him. “Anyway, you keep saying I should go away, but what could they actually
do
, this gang? They've already gone through our stuff. They know we've not got anything that interests them.”

“That might only suggest they need to look harder.” Jack shrugs. “Or that maybe they should take a shortcut.”

“A shortcut?”

“Pay you a visit. Pick your brains, so to speak.”

He says this in a way that makes my skin crawl. I don't even want to consider what he means.

“They might even decide they want to hang on to you. Use you to flush out Rob and your friend Lizzie.”

“Take me hostage, you mean?”

“Kind of.”

I stare at him, open-mouthed. Is he serious? I examine his face, searching for signs that he's joking.

I don't find any.

Oh god. And if they did get hold of me, would they ever let me go again? Could they risk it? I'm shivering, and it's not only the late afternoon chill. I've no idea whether this gang…this Tommy Crace…would go that far, but I'm sure I don't want to find out.