The Quiet People, page 23
I come to a stop and walk carefully towards it, pointing my flashlight at the ground, not wanting to fall into the open grave that must be nearby. I find it a few metres ahead, a rectangle freshly carved from the earth waiting to be filled. It’s deep. They’re always deeper than you think they’re going to be.
I put the flashlight on the ground next to it, then go back to the car. I get the trunk open, and wrench Lockwood out. I carry him over and drop him next to the grave. I ought to feel guilty but I don’t. Either murder is easier than I thought it’d be, or it hasn’t sunk in yet.
I grab the shovel. I put it across the width of the grave and swing from it to lower myself in. Then I dig. The ground is hard, and I have to stomp on the shovel and stab it down, but the earth comes away. I dig at one end and pile dirt at the other. When I’m down half a metre, I hook the shovel back over the top of the grave and pull myself up and scramble out.
I roll Lockwood into the grave. He thuds heavily into the bottom. I grab his camera. It’s still recording. I hit stop, then scroll through the footage. Like I thought, he started following me from my neighbour’s house. He’s filmed everything, including his murder. I erase the footage and take out the memory card. I lower myself back down. I fold Lockwood in half, getting his face close to his feet, then getting him into the hole I’ve carved out. I scoop the dirt back and level everything off. The ground is higher than what it was, but shouldn’t be noticeable.
I drive back out the way I came in, tossing the prybar and the now broken-in-half memory card and camera into the small lake along the way, along with the blanket. I drive past the church, thinking I’ll be coming back here next week for Zach’s funeral. It’s four in the morning when I get back to the motel. I take a long shower. The bandage is covered in dirt. I take it off and dump it into a bin. I turn on my phone and see I’ve missed a bunch of phone calls from Kent, the first one coming in at 1 a.m., the last one coming in twenty minutes ago. No doubt she’s calling about the fires. She hasn’t left any messages.
I don’t call her back.
I turn my phone back off and I go to bed.
I think about Dallas Lockwood, the look on his face when he tore Willy in half, the look on his face when he realised it was more than my fist swinging at him, the look on his face when I rolled him into the ground.
There’s something else too. Even though I got the prybar, and the camera, I know somewhere over the last few hours, where the rubber was meeting the road, there’s been a slip. Those two things briefly separated, and in that moment I’ve overlooked something. If Lisa were here, she’d spot it. It’s what makes us a great team.
Only Lisa isn’t here.
And nor is Zach.
Sixty-eight
Cameron Murdoch is having an out-of-body experience. When he wakes up to daylight—he’s surprised he even slept—he takes another shower. This is the first morning in the rest of his life where his son is no longer in it, but it’s also the first morning in the rest of his life where he’s a killer. He’s numb. He feels old now, older than he’s ever been, older than he ever thought he would feel.
I watch Cameron Murdoch dry himself, then get dressed in the same dirty clothes from last night. His knuckles have torn skin and spots of blood. It’s not a traditional out-of-body experience, because I’m not watching myself from outside, but rather from within. I’m a passenger, going along for the ride.
Cameron checks out of the motel.
“How was your stay?” the motel clerk, a woman who is as tall as she is wide, asks him.
I don’t say anything, but I hear Cameron say, “Good, thank you.”
“You look familiar,” the woman says. “You on TV or something?”
“I have that kind of face.”
Cameron gets into his neighbour’s car.
Cameron drives away.
Cameron makes lefts and rights, and he indicates, and by the time he gets to his neighbourhood he has no memory of even driving there, and he thinks, Cameron thinks, did he drive? Or did the Hand of God pick him up from Point A, and drop him at Point B? He can hear a storm on the horizon. Can’t see it, but can hear it.
Cameron parks the car up Mr Crawford’s driveway. He gets out, and Mr Crawford comes out of the house, and Mr Crawford says, “Are you okay, Cameron? You don’t look right.”
“I’m good, thank you,” he hears himself saying, and he looks up for the storm. It’s getting louder. He can hear the wind. Can’t feel it, but can hear it.
Cameron takes the bag out of the car, and the two halves of Willy.
Mr Crawford looks him up and down. He takes in the dirty clothes, and the soot, and he nods slowly, and he says, “Gonna be a hot one today. I think I might give the car a good clean. Get it looking like new. You think that’s something I ought to get about doing?”
“Yes,” Cameron says.
“I might detail it on the inside too.”
“That’s a good idea,” Cameron says, having to talk louder. The storm is here. Can’t see it, but he can feel the pressure building in his head.
Cameron climbs the fence.
Cameron drops down into his yard.
The storm catches up. It’s loud, a loud rushing sound like he’s in a wind tunnel. Cameron collapses onto his knees, and we hold our hands up to our head, and I close my eyes and wait it out. The storm passes, and I am no longer a passenger. But, when I end up in court for killing Lockwood, I’ll say that I was.
I get to my feet. I can hear Mr Crawford spraying the hose over his car.
I go inside. The window has been replaced and the broken glass cleaned up. The crowd outside is a fraction of what it was yesterday, but the front lawn has been covered in flower bouquets and teddy bears and cards. I change into fresh clothes, and toss the dirty clothes into the washing machine and turn it on.
I go into the lounge and put a rubber band around Willy to hold him together, then turn on the TV so we can watch the news. There is a woman being interviewed. Her hair is red, and her eyes are red, and her face is red too. She’s crying, and mad, and like many of us, broken.
“. . . fault,” she says. “Of course it is. Cameron Murdoch killed my boy, the same as if he had taken out a gun and shot him.”
I have no idea what she is talking about.
“Only he didn’t shoot him,” the journalist says.
“No, but he may as well have. And before you say my boy shouldn’t have been there with all those other people, let me remind you it was his God-given right to go to their house and be angry about it, the same way as all those other folks.”
“The Murdochs had nothing to do with what happened to their son,” the reporter says, and it could be Rolled Sleeves, I don’t know, it doesn’t cut to him. The camera stays on the face of the woman in pain.
“I don’t know how Cameron Murdoch did it, but he did it. We all know he did it. You ever read his books? A man like that, a man who can write twisted things like he writes, well, he has to be wrong in the head, doesn’t he? And it’s like that man said on the news a few nights ago, if anybody can get away with a crime like that, it’s a crime writer. I know what people are going to say. I know they think my son got drunk with his friends, and they were acting the fool dressed up like nuns and priests, and that it was an accident he fell from the top of that pyramid, and they’d be right to say that. But the bottom line is if Cameron Murdoch weren’t a killer, then my boy would still be alive.”
Sixty-nine
We all know he did it.
The woman’s words hang in the air long after I’ve turned off the TV. I stare at them, I watch them hang, I watch them shift on the breeze, these words, these six words that will always be with me. It doesn’t matter what I say, or what the police say, we all know I did it.
What if there’s some way of proving . . .
“Yes?”
Well, what if . . .
“Yes?”
I’m sorry. I got nothing.
I remember the young men dressed as nuns and priests. I remember somebody screaming for help during the arrest. I feel bad for the woman who has lost her son, I truly do, and for the boy too, but I refuse to let myself feel any sense of guilt. I don’t have any left to spare.
I carry Willy down to Zach’s bedroom and rest him on the bed. Soon I will tidy the bedroom up, and it will stay tidy until the day I die. There is a commotion outside. I get to the door before the bell rings. It’s Kent. She’s always here. I ought to turn my office into a guest room for her.
She squeezes past me without an invite. “How’s Lisa doing?”
“I haven’t called the hospital yet. Why are you here?”
“I wanted to come by and check in on you, and give you some updates.”
It’s bullshit. She wanted to come by and see if I smell like smoke. Or maybe they’ve found Lockwood already. “I don’t want you here without my lawyer.”
She sighs, and she slumps, and she relaxes, and she asks, “Do you have coffee?”
“What?”
“Do you have coffee?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because you look like you could do with it, and I sure as hell could. Please, Cameron, I’m not here as a police officer.”
“What are you here as? My friend?”
“Why don’t you freshen up and I’ll make us some coffee, and then we can talk.”
I thought I was fresh. But then I realise my hair is sticking up, and I haven’t shaved in days, and even though I showered at the motel, there wasn’t any soap. I go into the bathroom and spray around some deodorant, and I wash my face and I do my hair and I look at the man in the mirror and I don’t recognise him, but he looks better than the one who walked in here. I put fresh bandaging around my hand. I call the hospital.
Back in the kitchen Kent has made two cups of coffee. She’s started on her one. She’s made mine strong. Kent was right—I did need it. It’s the only thing she’s been right about all week.
“I rang the hospital.”
“And?”
“And there’s no change. The doctors say there’s no chance Lisa can go to Zach’s funeral, but every chance she will be in hospital for some time, potentially months.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Yeah, there seems to be a lot of that going around. Look, I have things to do. So . . . again, why are you here?”
She seems to be struggling with whatever it is she wants to say, and in the end she says, “Let’s go for a drive.”
“To the station?”
“No. Please, I know you hate me, and you hate all of us, and I don’t blame you for that. I really don’t. And I have no right to ask you for anything right now, but I would like you to come with me. Like I said, I’m not here as a police officer.”
“Fine. But let’s make this quick.”
Seventy
Neither of them finish their coffee. They go outside. The media is back in force, but the good folks of Christchurch who came for the show over the last few days have stayed away. When questions are asked, Kent takes a moment to tell them the Murdoch family has suffered a great loss, and that the police are looking to learn more about Lucas Pittman. She thanks them for their time, ignores their questions, and promises to give them more information at a twelve o’clock press conference, which she has every intention of handing off to somebody else so she can go home and sleep. She’s beat. She didn’t get home till four in the morning, after spending almost two hours sitting in a quiet street watching a quiet house not being set on fire. She’d be at home right now if it weren’t for the fact officers saw Cameron Murdoch arriving at his house earlier and called her. Given it seemed Murdoch climbed over his fence last night to leave, it made sense he’d come back the same way.
“The story will fade,” Kent says, when they get into her car. “They always do, and you’ll get your privacy back.”
“Do you think that woman in the news was speaking for everybody when she said we all know he did it?” Cameron asks.
“What woman?”
“The one whose son died outside our house.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” she says. “And no, she’s not speaking for everybody at all. There was a vigil outside your house last night, did you know that?”
“No.”
“There were hundreds of people here. They lit candles, and they held hands, and they cried, and they prayed for you.”
“They’re just trying to make themselves feel better for what they did.”
They drive in silence for a while. From the direction they’re going, she’s sure Murdoch has figured out where she’s taking him.
“Where’s Thompson?” he asks.
“He’s been put on leave.”
“Will he lose his job?”
“There’ll be a review into what happened. He made a bad call.”
“That’s how the police sum up what happened to Lisa? As a bad call?”
“No,” she says. “Of course not.”
“He’s a bad cop,” he says. “He let his anger cloud his judgement. From day one he thought we were guilty.”
“We were all wrong,” she says. “Not just Thompson.”
“Yeah, but Lisa was the one who got hurt, not you, and not Thompson.”
They pull up at an intersection next to a car with a stereo so loud Kent’s car vibrates from the bass.
“I’ve been thinking about something since yesterday,” he says. “As soon as you knew Zach hadn’t run away, you must have looked for people in the area with a record for sexual offences involving children. How come Pittman wasn’t interviewed?”
Kent was hoping he wasn’t going to ask her this. She looks ahead, and she flexes her grip on the wheel. She exhales loudly, then she says, “He was.”
“What?”
“Detectives spoke to him at his house.”
The car with the loud music pulls away. She stays sitting at the intersection even though it’s clear. She keeps staring straight ahead. She can feel Cameron’s eyes burning into the side of her face.
“They went there, and they went inside, and they looked around. Pittman didn’t raise any red flags.”
“Which detectives?”
“I can’t tell you that right now,” she says, but it was Vega and Travers, two good detectives, and she likes to think if there had been anything there to see they would have seen it—only they must have missed something.
“You are kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding me.”
“I’m sorry, Cameron. We—”
“It’s Mr Murdoch from now on.”
“I’m sorry. But they spoke to Pittman, and—”
“And you people went there with your minds made up. You went there thinking I was guilty, and couldn’t see anything else.”
A car pulls up behind them and toots. She carries on driving.
“You could have saved Zach.”
She says nothing.
“When were you going to tell me this?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“You should have told me yesterday. You . . . you could have prevented this.”
“I know how this must sound to you, but—”
“I don’t think you do know,” he says, “because if you did, I don’t think you’d be in this car with me alone right now.”
She ignores the threat. “I spoke with the detectives who interviewed him. They questioned him and searched his house. They said he said nothing and they saw nothing to indicate he knew anything about Zach. Obviously they were wrong, and obviously there will be some type of review.”
“You said Zach’s bag was found under the bed. How did they miss that?”
“One of the detectives looked. She said it wasn’t there.”
“Bullshit. She didn’t look. If she had, she would have found it. Zach was probably in the house somewhere and—”
“He wasn’t there,” she says. “If he had been they would have found him. They checked under beds, and in wardrobes, and his car, and the garage—they checked everywhere.”
“And they didn’t find anything in the house disturbing enough to warrant further investigation?”
She knows what he really wants to ask, only he can’t ask it. He wants to ask about the room set up as a child’s bedroom, and the doll. Asking would be admitting he was there.
“There were things that were disturbing, but nothing illegal, and like I said, nothing to suggest Zach had ever been there.”
“They probably barely looked. Why would they? You already had your suspects, didn’t you?”
“That’s not how it works, Mr Murdoch. The parents are always considered suspects, yes, but that doesn’t mean we stop looking elsewhere. The thing with Lockwood, all the things he said on TV, we already knew that. Of course we did. We started putting that together from the moment we knew your son was missing, so of course we were—”
“Oh, so it’s our fault for saying those things onstage and in inter-views.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“It sounds like you are.”
“You can’t blame us, Mr Murdoch, for thinking the very things you’ve said for years you were capable of doing.”
He doesn’t have an answer for that, and she hates herself for having said it.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I wish things had gone different.”
“I honestly don’t know what to say. All of this could have been avoided. Zach would still be alive. Even if Zach wasn’t being kept there, Pittman was keeping him somewhere. If your guys had figured that out, he would still be alive.”
