The Sick Rose (36 page)

‘People always go for the wrist,’ said Carl musingly. ‘What you want is the brachial artery here, it’s much larger. You’ll bleed to death in half the time if you slash the brachial.’ He pressed down and the dark little river of blood showed purple. ‘I’m going to ask you again. What were you saying?’

Paul knew for a fact that the sight of Louisa’s blood would kill him. What he said next was as much an act of self-preservation as jumping from a burning building into the unknown dark potential below.

‘His name’s Alan Murray. He was hurt in an accident in 1989 in Kensington, and we don’t know where he is now.’

‘I’ve got a little theory about accidents,’ said Carl. ‘I don’t think there’s any such thing. I should know, I’ve arranged enough in my time. What’s the real story?’

‘I pushed him in front of a car,’ said Louisa in her flat voice. She pinched the bridge of her nose and lowered her eyes.

‘You wouldn’t want that getting out, would you?’ A smile began to crawl across Carl’s face. If it had reached his eyes it would have made him look just like Daniel. Did you mention savings? How much?’

‘Forty,’ she said, although Paul knew it was much more. Carl turned towards Paul without releasing Louisa’s arm.

‘
You
,’ he said, ‘will get in touch with the police, make an affidavit on your statement, and my boy will go free and we’ll say no more about it.
You
. . .’ He pressed the knife flat against Louisa’s skin; she winced as though he had nicked her, and Paul felt the swish of excess saliva that usually precedes vomit. ‘
You
will get me
all
your savings out, not just the forty grand you’re admitting to now, with a full statement, so I can see that you’ve cleaned the account out, and I won’t tell anyone about your part in Alan Murray’s accident.’

Paul held his breath while he waited for Louisa to agree.

‘Anything,’ she whispered.

‘You can blame
him
for it,’ said Carl, nodding at Paul. ‘It’s his fault I need the money. Have you got any idea how much a decent brief costs? I’m twenty grand down before the trial even starts.’

‘I need to give them three days’ notice,’ said Louisa. ‘I won’t be able to get you anything until this Saturday.’

‘Then that’s when I’ll come back,’ said Carl, ‘8 a.m., next Saturday. And when I do, I want you to have changed your statement. Are we clear?’ Paul noticed that both he and Louisa were nodding the same way, too fast and for too long.

Apparently as an afterthought, Carl waved the knife and cut off a switch of Louisa’s hair, so near to her ear that it was skill, not chance, that stopped him slicing the flesh. He tossed it into the brazier. A few odd strands caught sparks and glowed like filaments, a brief moment of bright shrivelling wire in the dark. The rest of the hair did not seem to burn so much as melt, and the bitter smell of charred human was momentarily on the air.

Neither of them moved until the noise of Carl’s engine was an echo in the memory. Louisa was a statue, posing with her hand up to the side of her hair. Paul started throwing half-eaten potatoes and litter into the brazier like someone packing a bag in an emergency. ‘We’ll take the van and go tonight,’ he said.

She shook her head; a little tuft of hair stood out at an angle to her scalp. ‘Do you know how long it took me to get that van in there? Do you know how long it’s been since it was driven? I don’t even know if there’s any fuel in it, the tyres are flat. We’d have to drive it right across the fields, we’d churn up his ground, that’s if we could even get it out of the snow, you’ll probably have to push it, all in the dark . . .’

‘Then that’s what we’ll do! The van can cope, I can push. I’ll do it. I’ll walk to the petrol station while you get it ready. We can put air in the tyres in the big petrol station on the Kelstice road. He might come back tomorrow, there’s no knowing what he’ll do.’

‘Paul—’

‘We can dump the van tomorrow and get something else to tide us over for the next few days. We’ve both got savings, haven’t we?’ Almost without knowing he was doing it he dragged his feet along the ground and started rubbing out Carl’s footprints. ‘Give me your car keys. I’ll go back to Leamington for my bags now. It’ll take me ten seconds to pack, I can be there and back in an hour.’

‘Paul—’

‘No, you’re right. The van’s too noticeable. We’ll just take what you need from here and go in the car. We’ll go to Leamington on the way. I’m not leaving you here on your own.’

‘
Paul
.’ She was almost shouting at him now. ‘We can’t leave.’

He thought he understood and berated himself for his insensitivity.

‘Oh, Louisa, I know, but there’ll be other gardens, there must be. I know how much it means to you here but this is your
life
we’re talking about.
You saw what he was like. He put a knife to your skin. He wouldn’t mind that you’re a woman. He’ll come back and do it for real next time.’

‘I’m not just talking about Kelstice. You can’t just
disappear
. You’re due in court in two months. They know where you’re supposed to be. If you run away they’ll look for you. You’re not just a normal person any more, are you? You’re a witness in a murder trial. You go missing, they’ll come after you, God knows what they’ll unearth about me. You can’t go drawing that kind of attention to yourself. If we go tonight, we’ll be on the run forever.’

Paul sank down onto the cold earth, heavy with the knowledge that she was absolutely right. Their lives were an impossible maze, each of their problems a twisting, doubling path with Carl Scatlock’s grinning face at the dead end. He looked at her through his fingers and saw his own panic reflected. She gave tremulous voice to his own thoughts.

‘I just don’t believe this,’ she said. She was rubbing frantically at the skin on her arm, as though trying to scrape Carl’s skin cells off her. His knife had not left an impression on her skin but she was marking herself, fingertips making red comet trails. ‘I didn’t see this coming. We were so . . . that man, he’s . . . everything we’ve . . . I mean, what’s to stop him coming back again and again, Paul?’

He could not answer her. He retrieved her coat from the floor; it was only muddy on the outside, the lining was clean and dry and still retained some of her body heat. He guided her arms back into the sleeves; all the while she was frantic with uncontrolled gesticulations, and he imagined this was how it felt to dress a baby. She broke away and began to pace.

‘What’s to stop him coming back here, taking all my money, all I’ve got, and then telling the police anyway?’

‘I dunno about
that
, not the police, not him.’

‘I think he’s capable of anything after the way he just threatened me. You trust him, do you, you take a man like that at his word?’

Once Carl’s loyalty would have been one of the few certainties in Paul’s life, but not any more. He shook his head.

‘What’s to stop him taking my money then
killing
us? Jesus, Paul, I can’t handle this, I can’t believe I’m back here again—’

She broke off and walked away from him, her lips moving rapidly in silent conversation with herself. What had she meant by that, ‘back here again’? He had hated her ranting but silence was worse. All of the bad things that had ever happened to him had occurred in some kind of silence, as if evil rushed in to fill the void left by noise.

She stopped pacing as abruptly as she’d started. Her expression had changed again and now she looked almost serene, as though that internal struggle had been stilled. Her features were utterly still and her eyes two points of light. She wasn’t smiling, but she had never looked more beautiful.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Have you thought of something?’

She nodded, pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and took a deep breath.

‘What, Louisa? What are we going to do?’

She took her hands away and slowly met his gaze. ‘The only thing we can do. We’re going to keep our appointment with Carl and, when he comes back, we’re going to have to kill him.’ She let out a gasp as though she couldn’t believe the words had escaped her, and one hand fluttered back up to her mouth.

‘You’re not serious.’

‘I think I am. No, I know I am. Look, I can’t see another way out of it. Who knows where it would end? He’s not an honourable person like us.’ Paul waited for the ironic giggle, but it didn’t come. God, she meant it. ‘We know when he’s coming. We know we’ll be the only ones here, look, we’ve got a shed full of murder weapons and a twenty-acre grave. I’ll do the . . . deed,’ she said, softly. ‘But I’ll need your help.’

Fear leaked its way down his spine like a cold trickle of sweat. Escape didn’t always mean running away from something. Sometimes, it meant putting your head down and charging at the thing you were trying to outrun.

‘OK,’ he said. He felt his belly lurch, as though he had lost his footing and was falling. The fire in the brazier let out its death rattle. A single resistant ember sent a line of smoke curling towards the sky, like a soul on its last journey.

Chapter 49

August 2009

Something was up with Daniel. He kept taking audible breaths, as though about to speak, then closing his mouth again with a little click. If this behaviour was designed to make Paul nervous, it was working. He was forty-eight hours away from his new life in Brighton. He had tolerated Daniel for five years; why, then, did he feel that tonight was going to be so hard to get through?

Hash hadn’t nicked them any old sat nav. They had tried to look it up in the Argos catalogue; it was so expensive that Argos didn’t even sell it. It could remember not just their recent destinations but the routes they had taken and the times and dates at which they had driven there. It was simply a matter of asking the device to retrace the previous route. The snaking lane that led them from the A13 to their destination had, thanks to them, only one sign left on it, that white moon with its black sash signalling that the road was governed by the national speed limit. Paul chanced a glance at the little screen on his lap and wished he hadn’t; it told him that Daniel was driving at eighty miles an hour. He held on to the dashboard, feeling that he had been stuck for years on a lurching fairground ride he hadn’t wanted to board in the first place.

‘Should be a good haul tonight,’ Daniel said and then, without taking his eyes off the road, ‘I suppose you’ll be needing money in Brighton.’ His voice was devoid of emotion but he pressed hard on the accelerator pedal and took a complicated crossroads without stopping to look or give way. ‘Michaela was round the other night, she read your letter. It was fucking embarrassing. I had to pretend I already knew. When were you going to tell me?’

‘Tonight,’ Paul lied. ‘I was going to tell you tonight, just after we did this job. I only found out a week ago. It’s all been a bit last minute.’ He double-checked the connection of his seatbelt, suddenly convinced that Daniel was about to brake and throw him through the windscreen, but instead he brought the car back down to an appropriate forty miles an hour, smooth as a chauffeur. This self-control was more terrifying than any outbreak of temper.

‘I’ll drive you down. I might stay for a bit. You’ve got your own place, haven’t you?’

‘I’m in halls. Daniel, I’m not sure.’

‘It’ll be good for us,’ said Daniel decisively. ‘We could do with a change of scenery. We’ve outgrown Essex, we need somewhere new.’

‘But you hate college, school, everything like that . . .’

‘You won’t be there twenty-four hours a day, will you? We’ll still have our evenings.’

There was nothing he could say. Paul felt a wretched, withering sensation and supposed that it was the death of his dreams. An internal voice told him that that was it, Daniel would follow him around forever, there would be no student parties, no girlfriends, no normal life, just Daniel and petty crime and sharing a room and a friendship that was like a plastic bag over his head for the rest of their lives. Stupid of him really to expect, to dream of, more.

On the outside, he went through the motions of the job, pulling up his hood, slipping on the disposable gloves, guiding Daniel as he parked on the edge of the field next to the school with the copper roof and the aluminium weathervane. Together they surveyed the site for security devices. Daniel might not be able to read but he could recognise the little icon of a CCTV camera when he saw one, and he had even learned to identify the acronym. He established one boxy white camera trained on the main gate and another above the door itself. He too was acting like nothing had happened, as though Paul wasn’t leaving him. Paul started to doubt whether they had even had the conversation in the car.

‘What they’ve done is they’ve covered the legit way in and out but ignored all the back ways. They’re so busy thinking about protecting the kids from paedos and that,’ – he turned and spat over his shoulder – ‘that they overlook the security of the
building
. Not that there’s probably any film in them anyway. They’re well out of date, them cameras.’

Paul sat on the bonnet while Daniel calculated the blind spots and then, with the snips he carried in his belt, made a hole in the ten-foot-high, diamond-grid fence. From here you could see CDs hanging from the trees as decorations; the children had drawn patterns on them in magic marker. His whispering conscience started to hiss and spit. How the fuck did my life end up here, he thought, tying his hood tight under his chin. At this rate I’ll be teaching in schools by day and vandalising them by night.