Pact of Silence, page 19
Dad was waiting in the car outside the station at Glenfield. ‘All aboard! You’re looking better, lad! And wait until you see your room!’
Mum plonked down in the passenger seat and gave Dad the same sniffy look the A&E doctor had given her. ‘We paid a visit to the hospital to make sure his nose isn’t broken.’
Dad raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Did you now? And what did they say, Luke?’
‘Not broken. It’ll be fine in a few weeks. They gave me better painkillers.’
‘Painkillers and anti-inflammatories, Euan.’
‘All right, all right. As long as he’s okay.’
‘They said we should have had it checked immediately.’
Luke almost laughed. Mum was milking this; it was like watching tennis. Better change the subject. He leaned forward in the back seat. ‘We saw the school, Dad. Looks great.’
Dad gave him a big grin. ‘We’ll practise for that interview later on, huh? Don’t worry, I know the music teacher there and a couple of the others too. I’m sure we’ll get you a place. They’re sending the prospectus.’
The rest of the drive home was taken up with Mum telling Dad about the vacuum cleaner museum. Luke went straight in and up to his room and – wow! The hated yellow walls were gone. At least, the walls were still there but they were white now, and the ancient old fireplace on the back wall had been closed off. The paint smelled awful but the effect was actually pretty cool.
Dad had followed him upstairs. ‘The white’s the base coat. We’ll go to the DIY place tomorrow and you can choose your colours, two different ones if you want, and you and I can roller it on. You can sleep in the spare room in the meantime. How’s that?’
‘Brilliant.’ It was, too, so why did he feel like crying?
Luke wandered across the room to the window. You could see for miles and miles across the valley, fields and trees everywhere. It all looked so normal, as if nothing ever happened here. He started to move away, but oh, no. Luke clapped both hands to his mouth, and pain seared through his nose. He stared at the garden below. Part of the vegetable patch was newly dug up, a dark square of fresh earth that contrasted horribly with the winter-neglected look of the rest of the plot. Dad had been digging again, why? As if he didn’t know…
Dad cleared his throat and hugged Luke to his chest, jerking him away from the window.
‘Come on. Dinner time. Nothing to see down there, is there?’
They started painting Luke’s walls the following afternoon. He’d decided on orange for two walls, but he was still thinking about the other two so they didn’t buy paint for them yet. Luke rollered the top coat onto the walls. It was called ‘Caribbean Sunset’, but it really just looked orange. Dad did the tricky bits, and it was more fun than Luke had expected. They covered the floor near the wall with a big dust sheet so drips didn’t matter, and Dad put on the radio on the chest of drawers. Luke got to choose what station they listened to, and Dad didn’t complain once about loud music. He even allowed Luke up on the ladder to do the bit near the ceiling.
‘Looking good, son.’
Dad stepped back to see it better, and Luke pulled the ladder a couple of feet to the left. The two walls were almost done, all except a thin strip beside the door.
‘You finish there, then we’ll let it dry before doing another coat. I’ll see what your mum’s up to.’
Dad’s feet clattered downstairs. Luke swapped the big roller for the small one to do the bit between the door and the wall, and set to work, rollering from ceiling to floor to avoid having drips running down already-rollered bits. There! Now to–
A muffled exclamation from his mother in the living room had Luke pricking his ears up. He waited until she and Dad were talking again, then crept down half the stairs and sat listening.
‘–simply carry on as if everything's normal!’
That was Mum’s worst voice, the high shaky one. Luke could picture her wringing her hands as she spoke. Dad was his usual unflappable old-fashioned self.
‘It’ll pass, Marie. Sensations always do.’
‘This isn’t a sensation, Euan. A man is dead!’
Luke’s breath caught in his throat. Was this the first she’d heard of that part?
‘And we have to deal with the consequences. That means carrying on. And keeping our heads down.’
Mum was in floods, and Luke’s heart thundered in his chest. Consequences? Heads down?
‘It’s not the fact that he was killed that terrifies me, Euan. It’s why.’
Huh? It was obvious why Ryan was killed, and at least he wouldn’t be doing the same things to other kids now. Why was it so terrifying now he was dead? Muffled sobs were coming from the living room, and Luke’s throat closed. He had done this.
‘Marie. It’s not the same thing at all. All we have to do is keep a low profile, and believe me, the past won’t catch up with us. It doesn’t matter.’
Huh? Luke gripped the wooden banister. What past? And what wasn’t the same thing?
‘It does matter, and a lot of people will think it was exactly the same. It was illegal, Euan. They’d come after us.’
‘Which is why we need to keep a low profile and carry on. Come on, love. Luke will be down in a few minutes, and you don’t want him to see you so upset. Let’s get his lunch on, shall we?’
Luke crept back upstairs and closed the bathroom door loudly. What did all that mean? Had Mum or Dad done something wrong, way back whenever? That was what it sounded like, but they so weren’t the kind of people who went around breaking the law. What could possibly have happened that was making Mum so scared now? He would have to find out, somehow. And what did it have to do with Ryan’s death?
He thundered downstairs and called from the hallway. ‘What’s for lunch?’
‘Vegetable quiche. Is that okay?’
Mum didn’t sound as if anything was different – except she didn’t often ask him if the lunch menu was okay.
‘Yum.’ Now he was the one acting weird, because you didn’t get much yukkier than bloody vegetable quiche. Luke went into the kitchen, where Dad was washing lettuce and Mum was laying the table.
And all through lunch it was as if they were actors in a film of their lives, Dad trying to be jokey and jolly and Mum trying to get Luke to eat more salad, and Luke trying to look as if everything was all right. Nothing was said about doing something illegal, and nothing was said about Ryan, either. It was like a – a parody, that was the word. A parody of their normal life.
Chapter 28
Friday, 21st May
Fear snaked through Emma as she grabbed her mobile from the bedside table. Late home was one thing, not home at all was quite another. Luke wouldn’t scare her like this, so something must have happened. Her fingers were shaking so much she could barely flip the phone case open. No missed calls, no new messages. Shit, shit, shit.
She tapped, and listened as the call rang through to voicemail. ‘Luke, I’m worried. Call me as soon as you get this. Please.’ She sent a message too, then sat clutching her phone. What did people do when their partner didn’t come home? Should she worry Marie and Euan already? The police? Were you supposed to call 999, or go to your local police station? Where was her local police station, actually? And the loneliest feeling in the world: there was no one, no one at all in this awful village that she could turn to for help and advice.
Downstairs, with peppermint tea churning around inside her, realisation dawned. The stretch of road from York to Glenfield was busy; the road from Glenfield to Ralton Bridge was well travelled. If Luke had been involved in an accident on his way home, she’d have been informed by now. So that meant he was staying away deliberately, unless someone had kidnapped him, which was just so melodramatic she wasn’t even going to consider it. Emma sagged over the kitchen table. Someone shoving dog poo through the letter box and trying to knock her off her bike was pretty melodramatic too, wasn’t it? But Luke’s behaviour over the past week gave her enough reason to think he could be avoiding confrontation and avoiding having to tell her the truth about what had happened to Ryan James, too. The story about those parcels wasn’t ringing true, somehow. Who would make a man into parcels? Doug the butcher’s face swam in front of her eyes. No, no… Get a grip, Emma – find out how to report someone missing.
The internet provided her with terse details. You didn’t have to wait twenty-four hours before going to the police, and you could phone or go to a police station. However, you were supposed to ask people who might know the missing person’s whereabouts first, and in Luke’s case, that meant scaring Marie and Euan into the middle of next week all over again.
Emma drummed her fingers on the table. She could go into Luke’s email account; she knew his password. But that was such a breach of trust… On the other hand, what he was doing to her with this entire ‘let’s move to Ralton Bridge’ project wasn’t great either. She made fresh tea while she was thinking about it, and yes, she was hoping he’d rush in with an out-of-battery phone, saying, ‘Sorry, sorry, I crashed on Mike’s sofa and…’
She’d do it. Emma sat down again and negotiated her way into Luke’s email account. Work emails, emails from two or three friends but nothing that helped now; a couple of removal-related ones that Euan had sent on for Luke to deal with. There was nothing you’d call personal here, but that could be a guy thing.
Or maybe Luke kept his personal stuff in a different account. After the disclosures of the past few weeks, anything was possible.
Outside, it was a beautiful sunny day complete with blue skies and the odd powder puff cloud, and Emma swallowed. She wouldn’t panic yet. She would walk into the village, go to the library where there were advice leaflets on everything, find out where the nearest police station was, and yes, she could do that online, but… Waiting here at home was doing her head in.
Ralton Bridge was waking up as she walked up the hill. The barman at the Black Bull was outside wiping the tables and chairs there, and he nodded as she passed. Further on, kids were milling around in the two school playgrounds, waiting for the bell to ring, and the shriek of young voices filled the air. Friday, yay. The last school day before the weekend. Tears filled Emma’s eyes, and she laid a hand on her tiny bump as she hurried on.
Carol the butcher’s wife was in front of the shop, pulling a squeegee on a long pole down the window. She stopped as Emma drew level. ‘Morning, love! Oh my – are you–?’
Her eyes widened as she stared at Emma’s middle, and Emma snatched her hand away from her bump. What an idiot she was, calling attention to her pregnancy like that.
She nodded. ‘Early days.’
A little smile flashed over Carol’s face. ‘It’s a special time, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I won’t spread it around.’ Her face returned to her usual sombre folds. ‘Terrible about Alan Johnson, wasn’t it? That poor girl… Mark was – we were all–’ She glanced into the shop, where Mark, behind the counter, was staring out at them.
Emma struggled to find something to say. ‘It’s dreadful. I’m glad Kate’s gone back to Manchester with her mother.’ What had Mark thought, when he heard about Alan? But it was definitely time to change the subject, and there was something Carol could help her with.
Emma waved a hand at the shop window. ‘Do you still chop up cows and pigs on the premises, like in the old days?’
The older woman smiled grimly. ‘No, not any more. My father-in-law used to, but that all stopped in the early nineties. It isn’t worthwhile for small businesses like ours. The meat comes ready-butchered from Glenfield.’
‘So it’s still local meat?’ Best if Carol thought that was the point behind her question.
‘Absolutely. Everything we sell here would have grazed on the fields we see every day. It’s a high-quality product. What we need is more customers to appreciate it.’
Carol was still gazing at her, and Emma tried to look businesslike and busy. ‘I’m off to the library to gather info about services in the region, you know, Citizens Advice and police and so on. Everything seems so scattered, online.’
‘The library’s your best bet, love. Or the Post Office in Glenfield.’
Emma thanked her and hurried on without looking to see if Mark was still staring. She checked her phone outside the library in case she’d missed something from Luke, but there was nothing, and the signal here was shaky too. Oh, glory.
A strange woman was at the desk in the library, dealing with an elderly man, and Emma swung the circular stand of leaflets round. The nearest police station was in Glenfield, who’d have guessed, and it was time to do something more concrete. Emma stuffed a couple of leaflets into her bag and hurried back up the hill, glad that Carol was nowhere to be seen. She would call Luke’s friends and see if they knew more than she did about his disappearance, and if she had no joy with that, she’d be on the first bus to Glenfield. Reporting her husband missing was definitely something she’d rather do in person.
‘And he’s never done anything like this before? Any reason he might go off now?’ The young police officer at Glenfield Police Station was reassuringly calm, and the tension in Emma’s middle eased slightly. She was doing something official now. She’d called eight of Luke’s friends before leaving home, saying she needed to get hold of him but he wasn’t answering his phone and did they know… No one did, so she called Marie, told her a lie about Luke’s phone, and listened to a story about Euan’s first mobile that he was never fully in control of. Unless Marie was made of Oscar material, Luke wasn’t there either.
Now, with the police officer waiting, she cleared her throat. She couldn’t explain Luke’s possible reasons for not coming home without revealing what was going on, and she didn’t want to do that. Yet.
‘Never. We’ve – he’s had some problems recently, family stuff, and a friend died last week. He hasn’t been himself, and I’m worried.’ Heck, that sounded as if she thought he might be a danger to himself.
‘And he’s been missing since yesterday, you said. Did he go to work?’
Emma stared. That was a very good question, and one she should have thought of too. ‘He left home at the usual time, but – I’ll check.’ A quick call revealed that Luke had left work at four-thirty yesterday afternoon but hadn’t appeared that morning.
Emma relayed this to the officer at the desk, and he nodded, his eyes creasing sympathetically.
‘Right, love. Tell you what. I’ll take his details, but he hasn’t been gone long and from what you say, he could just be wanting some quiet time? Most people aren’t really missing, but of course it’s worrying for the families no matter what. If he hasn’t appeared by, say, six tonight, give me a call and we’ll start searching. Now, I’ll need a photo, and…’
Emma supplied the necessary details and a photo from her phone, and took the card he slid across the desk. PC Jon Baker, and a mobile number. Good. But how horrible – she’d come to the end of what she could do.
She was in the bus rattling back to Ralton Bridge when an idea sprang into Emma’s mind. She could do something – she could open that fireplace.
It was one thing saying she would open the fireplace. Doing it was going to be quite another. Emma stood in the second bedroom, tapping the wall opposite the bed. They hadn’t decorated in here yet, so she could crack the fireplace open without having to worry about the wallpaper. But how to go about it? She opened her laptop and tapped ‘how to open a fireplace’ into the search engine.
Golly, you could learn about everything on the web. Do your research, said the first website she went into. Box ticked and thank you, Mrs Alderson. Break through the plaster. Right. Tools. That was the first thing. There was a toolbox in the hall cupboard, and the things in the shed. And she’d need dust sheets, too. Emma searched around, then gathered her finds in the second bedroom: an axe and a mallet from the shed, the toolbox, plus a shovel and Euan’s old gardening gloves, which were thicker than her own. She fetched the dustsheets they’d inherited from Marie and Euan, and arranged them on the floor in the spare room, then bundled the bed things into the smallest bedroom and shoved the bed as far as possible from the chimney wall. There weren’t enough dust sheets to cover the furniture as well as the floor, so she fetched a few sheets from the airing cupboard too.
She was ready. Go, Emma, and fingers crossed Mrs Alderson was right about no asbestos. Hm – the chimney might be dusty and sooty inside, though, so maybe a face mask would be a good idea. They had some with the painting stuff under the stairs.
Preparations complete, Emma tapped around with the mallet, then hefted it and struck the wall, which splintered. Plywood, excellent. An old, dusty smell wafted into the room. Another couple of blows shifted some more wood, and Emma stared at the gaping hole that had appeared in the wall. Wow. Demolition work wasn’t as hard as you’d think. She stepped back until the dust settled, then chopped about with the axe before pulling a large section of plywood free. More dust billowed from the chimney, dropping onto the dustsheets as grey and black specks. Emma crept forward to see into the hole.
First of all, there was an Edwardian fireplace there. Not as ornate as Mrs A’s, but still a handsome piece, if marked and shabby. And in the bottom lay a mess of dirt and debris and – what was that?
Emma leaned into the hole, her heart thudding. As well as soot and dust, a depressing little collection of bird skeletons and a couple of stray half bricks that might have come from the walls of the chimney were all lying in the fireplace. And right at the back lay a ball of dirty, yellowed newspaper, about the size of a football. Emma’s breath caught in her throat. Was this the parcel of Ryan? There was one way to find out, but was she ready to do it?
