Blood Guilt (12 page)

She sighed, not angry
anymore, just sad and full of yearning. “Don’t be sorry, Harlan, just promise
me one thing. Promise me that after all this is over you’ll come back to me.”

“I promise.” Harlan’s
voice was thick with suppressed emotion. He knew he couldn’t allow himself to
feel too much, not while faced with the task before him. He had to be hard in
thought and feeling, or else the paralysis would seize him, and he’d be
powerless even to leave his flat. “I’ve got to go now, Eve. Take care.”

Before Eve could reply,
Harlan hung up. As he turned away from the window, the clouds burst and dirty
black rain pelted the glass, ushering in an even dirtier, blacker night.

Chapter
9

On his way to Jones’s
house, Harlan bought a hooded sweatshirt, a rucksack, a torch, a screwdriver, a
crowbar, leather gloves, a balaclava and a roll of duct tape. He spread his purchases
around several stores, paying with cash. He parked in an unlit side-street
half-a-mile or so from his destination, pulled on the sweatshirt, and head
bowed against the rain, continued on foot.

By the time Harlan
reached Jones’s street, the lampposts were blinking into life. Jones’s house
was in the middle of the terrace, its front door soot blackened from what
appeared to be a recent arson attack, its boarded up windows daubed with fresh
graffiti. ‘DEAD MAN WALKING’ proclaimed blood-red letters a foot high. No light
seeped out from around the edges of the rain-bowed chipboard. The house wore an
air of desertion.

Harlan slowed his pace,
scanning the vehicles parked along the kerb. None of them were occupied. His
gaze lingered on a black van across the street. Yanking his hood as far down
over his face as it would go, he walked past Jones’s house. Near the far end of
the street, he darted into a ginnel between two unlit houses. His gaze flicked
back and forth from the van to Jones’s house. Neither showed any sign of being
inhabited. Considering the amount of time that’d elapsed since Ethan’s
abduction, he doubted Garrett would be keeping Jones under surveillance –
unless it was for his own protection. Looking at the dilapidated, battered
house, he also doubted whether Jones continued to live there. More likely, he
reflected,
he’d been put up in an ex-offender’s hostel until the anger
against him died down. Guilt-tinged relief seeped through him at the thought.

When a car pulled over
outside the ginnel, Harlan moved off. Behind the row of terraces there ran a
cobbled alley flanked by high brick walls and sturdy wooden gates with their
house numbers painted on them. As he neared Jones’s gate, Harlan saw that he’d
been wrong – a faint glimmer of light was visible through an intact upstairs
window. His heart began to palpitate. A glance at the wall told him there was
no way he was going over it – at least, not without tearing his hands to
shreds. It was topped with a layer of cement in which was embedded nails and
shards of glass. He turned his attention to the gate, which had a heavy-duty
lock. After studying it a moment, he headed back to his car. He stopped at a
phone box and called Susan Reed. The instant she picked up, he said, “You
should stay in tonight.” Before she could make a reply, he hung up.

Harlan sat hunched down
in his car, watching the rain, trying to focus only on what he needed to do.
But his mind kept turning to Eve – her face, her voice, the way her body felt
when he held her in his arms. He turned on the radio to drown out his thoughts.
There was no mention of Ethan’s abduction on the news. The media were losing
interest. They’d wrung every last drop of drama out of the story as it stood.
Now they were eagerly awaiting new developments.

The hours crawled by
like they were as weighed down with anxiety as Harlan. At one AM, he packed the
gear into the rucksack, shouldered it and left the car again. Keeping to the
shadows, he made his way back along the alley to Jones’s house. There was no light
in the upstairs window now. He took out the crowbar, and after a quick glance
to check no one was around, set to work. He jammed the crowbar between the gate
and its frame and threw his weight against it, heaving it back and forth until
the muscles of his arms burned. The wood cracked and splintered and finally,
with a groan, the lock gave way. He found himself in small concrete yard strewn
with the debris of material Jones had used to repair and reinforce his house –
rotten wooden boards, bags of mouldy cement, rusty screws and nails. He
crouched in the darkness, barely breathing, listening. There were no sounds of
movement from inside the house.

Harlan pulled on the
balaclava, then picked his way across the yard to the backdoor. He briefly
aimed the torch beam at it. The door was reinforced with steel panels and
deadbolts. It would take a battering-ram to break it down. He turned his
attention to the downstairs window, which was protected by wire-mesh screwed
into the brickwork. The window had no visible lock. He took out his screwdriver
and set to work removing the screws, many of which were almost ready to drop
out of the crumbling mortar. He piled up some bags of cement and stood on them
to reach the uppermost screws. When they were all out, he peeled away the mesh,
jimmied the blade of the screwdriver under the rattling, rotten window frame
and dislodged the latch. Seconds later he was wriggling in through the open
window, pulling aside the curtains and lowering himself to the floor. There was
a hollow clink of glass bottles as his feet came into to contact with a plastic
bag. He froze, ears straining. Again, there was no sound of movement.

Nose wrinkling at a
pungent smell that was part fried food and alcohol, part stale cigarette smoke
and even staler sweat, part mildew and something else he couldn’t quite place,
Harlan reached for his torch. Its pale yellow beam revealed what the something
else was – an easel was set up in the centre of the room, holding a canvas
thickly encrusted with gaudy, glistening acrylic paint. The painting depicted a
group of children at a playground, kicking their legs high on some swings,
their heads thrown back, their mouths wide with laughter. It would’ve been a
perfectly innocent scene in any other context, but seeing it here gave Harlan a
cold feeling in his stomach. The feeling intensified as he shone the torch
around the walls, which were covered with dozens of paintings and drawings.
Some hung in cheap frames, others were simply tacked to the yellowed woodchip
wallpaper. Some portrayed scenes similar to the canvas on the easel, others
showed children at play in school-yards, children riding bicycles, children
eating, children reading, children sleeping. All the paintings’ subjects were
rendered in too-bright colours, so that they seemed to possess a heightened
reality. There was nothing overtly sinister about any of the individual
artworks, yet collectively it was one of the most sinister things he’d ever
seen. He realised now why Jones stubbornly refused to leave his house. This
collection was clearly his pride and joy – his life’s work.

The cold feeling came
up stronger and stronger. Harlan let it rise into his gullet, hard and big as a
fist, knowing he’d need it when he came face to face with Jones. A cursory
examination of the remainder of the room revealed a threadbare sofa and two
armchairs piled with boxes of paint, brushes and blank canvases; no carpet,
only bare paint-spattered floorboards; bin-liners bulging with empty cans of
super-strength cider and bottles of cheap sherry; the greasy remnants of a
meal; the ashes of a long dead fire. There were three doors. One stood open,
leading to a small, pot-cluttered kitchen. Very quietly, very slowly he opened
one of the other doors. It led to a hallway that terminated at the front door.
The third door opened onto a flight of stairs. Wincing at every creak, he
padded up them. Like the living-room, the stairwell was papered with artworks.
Halfway up, Harlan paused as one in particular caught his eye. It depicted two
figures drawn in silhouette – an adult and a child holding hands at the
entrance to a yawning black tunnel. Harlan wondered whether the drawing
represented reality, or whether it was some kind of symbolic representation of
Jones’s relationship with children. Whatever the case, the grim little drawing
was somehow truer and less distorted than its more garish neighbours.

Harlan stiffened at a
sound from upstairs – a sort of asthmatic snuffle followed by a phlegmy cough. He
waited until silence resumed, before climbing to the landing. To his right a
short hallway led to a bathroom, from which emanated a tang of stale urine. To
his left was a closed door. Pressing his ear to its chipped paintwork, he heard
a low snore. He switched off his torch, and waited a moment for his eyes to
adjust to the darkness, before easing the door open. In the faint ambient glow
of the city that filtered through the bedroom curtains, his eyes traced the
outline of Jones’s sleeping figure on a single bed. He was laid on his back
beneath a tangle of blankets, his round-bowl of a belly gently rising with each
snore. His right hand gripped what looked like an old-fashioned police
truncheon. Harlan couldn’t clearly make out Jones’s face, but he knew from the
newspapers that he was a late middle-aged man with the vein-streaked skin and
puffy eyes of a heavy drinker. The vinegary smell of cider hung in the air like
an invisible smog.

Keeping his breathing
low and shallow, Harlan approached Jones. He paused at the bedside, staring
down at the sleeping man. A tremor ran through him as the image of Robert Reed
wormed its way into his mind. With a shake of his head, he shoved it back down
through the layers of his consciousness. In its place he pictured Ethan – Ethan
stood hand-in-hand with Jones at the entrance to a tunnel. The image seared
through him like cold flames. It took hold of him and made him reach to snatch
away the truncheon.

Jones’s eyelids
flickered. “Wha…?” he slurred.

With a fluid, practised
movement, Harlan flipped Jones onto his belly and twisted his arm up behind
him. Jones struggled furiously to break free, bucking like a maddened bull as
Harlan straddled his squat, powerfully built body. Harlan twisted harder.
Something popped. Jones gave out a muffled scream and his struggles subsided.
For a moment both men were still and silent, except for the sound of their
accelerated breathing. Then, his voice ragged with pain and fear, Jones said,
“What do you want?”

Harlan pressed the
point of his screwdriver against Jones’s neck. “Move and you’re dead,” he
hissed, trying to disguise his voice by talking through his teeth.

“Please, you don’t need
to hurt me anymore, I’ll–”

“Shut the fuck up.
Don’t speak unless I ask you a direct question.”

Harlan took out the
duct tape. Jones whimpered as Harlan wrapped it tightly around his wrists and
ankles. When he was done, he rolled Jones onto his back again. The beam of his
torch explored the bedroom – more paintings; some cheap-looking furniture; a
bedside table cluttered with brown-plastic pill bottles; a stack of newspapers,
the uppermost carrying a photo of Ethan. The light lingered on some pale
rectangles on the tobacco-stained walls where pictures used to hang, before
landing on Jones’s face. Jones’s bloodshot eyes blinked in their folds of
bruised-looking flesh. Quivers ran through his sallow, stubbly cheeks. His
chest rattled as he sucked in deep panic breaths. Harlan picked up the
truncheon and balanced its skull-cracking weight on his palm. “I’m going to ask
you some questions and you’re going to tell me what I want to know,” he began
in a quiet, tightly controlled voice. “What do you know about Ethan Reed’s
abduction?”

“Only what I’ve read in
the papers.”

Harlan hefted the
truncheon menacingly. “You know a lot more than that.”

Jones flinched,
pressing back against the pillows and speaking in a trembling whimper. “I
don’t. Honestly. Why do you think the police let me go?”

“You know where Ethan
goes to school and which park he plays in, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen him around,”
admitted Jones.

“Have you painted him?”

“I dunno.”

Harlan aimed the torch
at the pale rectangles. “Where are the pictures that hung there?”

From the flash of anger
that passed over Jones’s face it was clear the question touched a sore spot.
“The police took them.”

“Why?”

“They thought one of
the children in them looked like Ethan.”

“And was it him?”

“I told you, I dunno.
Maybe. I paint so many that I forget.”

“You like painting
kids.”

It was an observation,
not a question, but Jones spoke anyway, a fiercely protective note vying with
the fear in his voice. “Yeah. So? It’s not illegal, is it?”

“No, but abducting and
molesting them is.”

“I’ve never abducted a
kid in my life.” 

“You’ve molested them,
though.”

Red splotches rose up
Jones’s throat, mottling his face. “I took some photos of a girl once, for
artistic purposes. But I never laid a hand on her.”

“That’s not what she
said.”

Jones jutted his chin
up at Harlan. “Yeah, well she was a lying little slut.”

“Forensics don’t lie,”
Harlan pointed out, his voice growing cooler as Jones’s grew more heated. The
old feeling of controlled calmness he used to get from phasing out suspects and
pushing their buttons was seeping back in. “I’ve read the newspaper reports.
Traces of your semen were found on her clothes.”