The Radleys (18 page)

“That’s the one,” he says. “That’s where she lives.”

And the police leave, glancing over at the camper van before heading next door. Toby disappears back inside number nineteen. Eve stands dead stil . She is far enough up the lane for birds to be singing happily in the trees. She watches the police knock on Clara’s door and sees Clara’s mother answer with a look of deep concern. Eventual y, the officers are invited inside.

Eve carries on walking and decides on a quick visit to see Toby and ask him what’s going on.

She wants to talk to him anyway, before school, to apologize about Friday night and her dad dragging her away.

Fortunately, Toby’s friendly stepmother answers the door, so she avoids having to talk about the rent with Mr. Felt. Mrs. Felt pul s back on the col ar of her red setter, who pants happily up at Eve.

“Hel o. Is Toby in?”

“Yes,” the woman says, in a way which seems quite breezy given that the police have just been here. “He is. He’s gone upstairs. It’s the first room on the right.”

Eve finds him sitting there with his back to her, grunting, and with his arms jerking violently away at something. An Xbox game, she realizes with some relief. He hardly acknowledges her presence as she goes over to sit on his bed. She sits there a while, staring at the gal ery of posters on his wal —Lil Wayne, Megan Fox, tennis players, Christian Bale.

“Flamethrower! Flamethrower! Die . . .
yes
.”

“Look,” says Eve, when she sees he’s between levels, “I’m real y sorry about Friday night. My dad’s just got a few issues with me being out late.”

Toby gives a kind of affirming grunt from the back of his throat and continues to set walking lizards on fire.

“Why were the police here?”

“Harper’s missing.”

It takes a moment or two for Eve to compute this properly. But then she remembers the two men talking outside the newsagent.

“Missing? What do you mean,
missing
?” She knows the horror of this word only too wel .

“He didn’t come back home on Friday. You know, after the party.”

Harper is a lumbering brute, but he is Toby’s friend and could be in serious trouble. “Oh God,”

Eve says. “That’s terrible. My mum went missing two years ago. We stil haven’t—”

“Clara knows something,” Toby says, aggressively cutting Eve off. “Stupid bitch. I know she knows something.”

“Clara is not a bitch.”

Toby frowns. “Wel , what is she then?”

“She’s my friend.”

The door is pushed open and the energetic red setter charges into the room, wagging its tail.

Eve strokes it and lets it lick her salty hand as Toby keeps talking.

“No. She’s someone you hung around with because you were new here. That’s how it works.

You move to a new school and you have to hang around the freaky geek girl with glasses. But you’ve been here months now. You should get someone, I don’t know, like you. Not some bitch with a freak of a brother.”

The red setter moves on to Toby, nuzzling its nose into his leg, which he jerks hard to push the animal away. “Nutsack.”

Eve looks at the screen he’s just been playing on. GAME OVER.

Maybe it is.

She sighs. “I think I should go,” she says, standing up.

“You haven’t got long, you know.”

“What?”

“My dad wants that money. The rent.”

Eve stares at him. Another selfish pig to add to her selfish pig back catalogue.

“Thanks,” she says, determined to show no emotion at al . “I’l pass the message on.”

Police

It would normaly be rather scary for Clara Radley to be sitting on the sofa in her living room, between her parents, being interviewed by two police officers about a boy she is responsible for kil ing. Especial y when her next-door neighbor seems to have done everything in his power to incriminate her. But rather than being a stressful experience, it is strangely like nothing at al . It is about as nerve-racking as a trip to the post office.

She knows she should be worried, and she’s even making an effort to share some of her mother’s anxiety, but she just can’t do it. Or not to the degree required, anyway. In a way it feels rather fun.

“So, why did Stuart come after you, if you don’t mind me asking?” one of the police officers asks. The male one, PC Hen-something. He is smiling politely, as does the woman next to him. It is al very friendly.

“I don’t know,” says Clara. “I suppose Toby might have put him up to it. He’s got a cruel sense of humor.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, he’s just not a very nice person.”

“Clara,” says Helen, in a mildly reprimanding way.

“It’s okay, Helen,” says Peter. “Let her speak.”

“Right,” the police officer says. He stares intently at the oatmeal carpet as he takes another sip of coffee. “It’s a lovely house, by the way. Bit like my mum’s house actual y.”

“Thanks,” says Helen, with a nervous chirpiness. “We had this room spruced up last summer. It was looking a little tired.”

“It’s lovely,” adds the female officer.

Hardly a compliment from you
, thinks Clara, noting the woman’s terrible frizzy hair is scraped back into a bun, leaving a rectangular fringe jutting out from her forehead like a mud flap.

Where are these bitchy thoughts coming from?
Now everything and everyone seems worthy of ridicule, if only in her head. The falseness of everything: even this room with its pointless empty vases and tasteful y smal TV seems to be about as artificial as an advertisement.

“So,” says the male officer, getting things back on track, “he went after you. And what did you say? Did
he
say anything?”

“Wel , yeah.”

“What? What did he say?”

She decides to have fun. “He said, ‘Clara, wait.’ ”

There’s a pause. The officers share a glance. “And?”

“And then he said that he fancied me. Which was weird, because I don’t normal y get boys coming up and saying that stuff. Anyway, he was drunk and getting a bit ful -on, so I tried to let him down gently, but then he started . . . I feel bad about this . . . but then he started to
cry
.”

“Cry?”

“Yes. He was drunk. He
stank
of alcohol. But it was stil weird to see him cry because he’s not real y like that. I wouldn’t have real y had him down as a sensitive type, but then, you never know, do you?”

“No. So, what happened next?”

“Nothing. I mean, he cried. And I suppose I should have consoled him or something but I didn’t.

And then that was it.”

The female officer looks up from under her mud-flap bangs. She seems somehow sharper al of a sudden.
“It?”

“Yeah, he just went off.”

“Off where?”

“I don’t know. Back to the party.”

“No one saw him at the party after you left.”

“Wel , he must have gone somewhere else then.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. He was in a state. I told you.”

“He was in a state and he just left you. Just like that?”

Helen stiffens. “Listen, she’s quite upset about poor Stuart going missing and—”

“No!” says Clara, causing the officers to stop scribbling in their notebooks for a stunned moment. “No, I’m not upset about him going missing. I don’t know why people always do that, every time someone dies. You know, how we al have to make out they were this great saintly person when real y we hated them when they were alive.”

The policewoman looks like she’s just tripped over something. “You just said ‘dies.’ ”

Clara doesn’t quite get the significance of this at first. “What?”

“You just said ‘every time someone dies.’ As far as we know, Stuart has gone missing. That’s al . Unless you know something different?”

“It was just a figure of speech.”

Peter makes a throat-clearing sound and reaches his arm around Clara to sneakily tap Helen’s shoulder.

The officers’ eyes are scrutinizing Clara. A slight discomfort sets in. “Look, I was just making a general point.” She is surprised to find her mother suddenly stand up. “Mum?”

Helen smiles grimly. “I’ve just got to go and sort the tumble dryer out. It’s beeping. Sorry.”

The officers are as bemused as Clara. As far as anyone is aware, nothing is beeping.

Wil is not asleep when Helen knocks on the van window. He is staring at the dried, old blood drops on his ceiling. A kind of star map charting his debauched history. A history that he is also lying on, detailed in the seven leather-bound journals under his mattress. Al those nights of wild rampageous feeding.

Someone is knocking on his van. He pul s back the curtain to see an exasperated Helen.

“Fancy a trip to Paris tonight?” he asks her. “A Sunday night strol by the Seine. Just you, me, and the stars.”

“Wil , it’s the police. They’re interviewing Clara. It’s going wrong. You’ve got to go in there and talk to them.”

He steps out of the van, sees the police car. Even in exposed daylight this feels good. Helen asking him to do something.
Needing
him to do something.

He decides to milk the moment for every drop of sweetness. It’s in his blood.

“I thought you didn’t want me to come here.”

“Wil , I know. I thought we could handle al this but I’m not sure we can. Peter was right.”

“So you want me to go in there and do what exactly?” He knows, of course. He just wants her to say it first.

“Talk to them?”

He inhales deeply, catching the scent of her blood on the country air. “Talk to them? Don’t you mean
blood-mind
them?”

Helen nods.

He can’t resist. “Isn’t that a little bit unethical? Blood-minding police officers?”

Helen closes her eyes. A little vertical crease appears between her eyebrows.

I want her back
, he realizes.
I want to have the woman I made.

“Please, Wil ,” she begs him.

“Okay, let’s leave our ethics behind. Let’s do this. But you owe me, Hel. You owe me.”

The police officers look surprised when Wil arrives. Peter nods though, even smiles at Helen, pleased she understood the shoulder tap.

“This is my uncle,” Clara explains.

Helen stands by Wil ’s side, waiting for things to begin.

“We’re actual y in the middle of asking Clara some questions,” the male officer says, his eyebrows rising to reenact an expression of authority he’s noted from police dramas on TV.

Wil smiles. He’l be able to blood-mind both of them quite easily, even at this time of day. Two young, obedient, little unbloods police-tutored in submission. It wil take him a sentence, maybe two, and his words wil begin erasing and rewriting their weak, servile minds.

He gives it a go, just to show Helen he’s stil got the magic. A subtle slowing and deepening of his voice, the careful spacing between each word, and that simple trick of ignoring faces and talking directly to blood. And as he is close enough to smel the contents of their veins, he starts straightaway.

“Oh wel , don’t mind me,” he says. “Keep asking your questions. Keep asking and you wil find the truth—that this girl before you has a mind as pure and unknowing as a field of untouched snow and she knows nothing whatsoever about what happened to that boy on Friday night. Which is why there is no point writing anything down in those little notebooks.”

He walks over to the policewoman and holds out his hand. Almost apologetical y, blank-faced, she hands him her pad. Wil tears out the pieces of paper she has written on, before handing it back.

“And everything else you have heard has been lies. Clara knows nothing. Look at her, real y look at her . . .”

They look.

“Have you ever seen anyone quite so pure and innocent? Don’t you feel ashamed that for a moment you doubted that innocence?”

They nod their heads, like little children in front of a strict teacher. They are deeply ashamed.

Wil notices Clara’s eyes are wide with wonder.

“You wil leave now. You wil leave and you wil realize that you have nothing to go on here. The boy is missing. It is another unsolved mystery in a world ful of unsolved mysteries. Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you wil realize that that is what makes the world so beautiful. Al those unsolved mysteries. And you won’t ever want to interfere with beauty again.”

Even Peter and Helen are impressed, Wil notes, as the officers stand up and walk themselves out of the room.

“Bye now. And thank you for your visit.”

Deli Ham

Clara is sitting eating her brother’s deli ham in her room when Eve arrives. Clara starts to offer an explanation about yesterday’s incident in Topshop. She tel s her she had a panic attack and needed to get outside. A half-truth. Or a quarter-truth. But not an outright lie.

Eve, though, is hardly listening. “Did the police come and see you?” she asks. “About Harper?”

“Yeah,” says Clara.

“So what did they want to know?”

“Oh, this and that. Was Harper suicidal? Stuff like that.”

“Clara, what
did
happen the other night?”

Clara makes eye contact with her friend and tries to be convincing. “I don’t know. I was sick on his shoes and then he just left.”

Eve nods. She has no reason to believe her friend is lying. She scans the room and notices the absence of posters.

“What happened to the sad monkeys in cages?” she asks.

Clara shrugs. “I realized the animals are stil going to die whatever I put on my wal .”

“Right. And whose is that camper van outside?”

“It’s my uncle’s. Uncle Wil . He’s pretty cool.”

“So, where’s he now?”

Clara is getting frustrated with al the questions. “Oh, sleeping probably. He sleeps al day.”

Eve wonders about this for a moment. “Oh that’s—”

But then they hear something.

Someone shouting downstairs.