Mice (12 page)

 

There was just enough room to fit the corpse in the rose bed without having to uproot any of the rose bushes. The top layer of soil was wet after the night’s rain and our sharp spades cut through it easily. It was sticky and clung to the blades and we had to use our boots time and again to scrape them clean. The deeper we dug, however, the more difficult it became. Two feet down, the soil seemed unaffected by the rain and as hard as rock.

I started to sweat profusely. I felt dizzy and lightheaded and had to take off my heavy dressing gown before I could carry on. We were both too weak, too exhausted from lack of sleep, to make much of an impression against this stubborn stratum, and as we hacked away fruitlessly at the soil, the day was growing lighter every second. I began to feel horribly exposed and visible, even though there was no one around to see us – the farmer had long gone, the lane was deserted, and the surrounding fields were as still and silent as a photograph. I found myself remembering one of my religious education teacher’s favourite sayings:
The eye of God sees all.

At three feet deep, Mum stopped, red-faced and breathing heavily from the exertion.

‘It’s not deep enough, Mum,’ I said. ‘Animals might be able to dig him up.’

‘It’ll have to do, Shelley. We’ve just got to
hide
him. We’ve got the house to clean up yet.’

We dragged the body to the very lip of the narrow trench, and then pushed him in using our feet and our spades, not wanting to touch something so disgusting with our hands. To my horror, he came to rest on his back, and I found myself staring at that weaselly face yet again. The same face, yet different, subtly changed by death.

The eyes were half-open, but they were glassy, unfocused. His eyebrows, completely relaxed now, had dropped low on his forehead, forming a dark Neanderthal ridge. His jaw must have been dislocated by Mum’s blow, because the bottom half of his face was twisted sharply away from the rest. The fracture had forced his mouth open and his lower teeth now protruded slightly above his top lip, giving him a fierce, animal look like a boxer dog. His left arm lay straight by his side, the hand on his thigh as if strumming a guitar, while his right arm, stiffened into the position in which he’d died, was extended high above his head like a keen student who knows the answer to a difficult question.

And maybe he does know the answer to a difficult question
, I thought,
the most difficult question of all – what happens to us when we die?

The shallow pit we’d dug wasn’t long enough to fit the burglar’s straightened right arm. The forearm and hand remained protruding out of the mud, a grotesque new five-petalled flower in the garden. Rather than dig any more, Mum stepped gingerly down into the hole and seized the corpse’s arm and tried to bend it down towards the top of his head. Rigor mortis had already started to set in, and the arm kept slipping from her grip and straightening itself as though the burglar was deliberately resisting her – even in death.

Mum was horribly pale when she stepped up out of the hole.

We shovelled the soil back on top of him. I buried his feet (one foot in its trainer, the other in a ragged green sock), his legs, his left hand, his waist, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw any dirt over his head. When I saw Mum dump a shovelful of soil onto his face, I winced (
mud was going in his eyes – mud was going in his mouth!
) and then kicked myself for being such a baby.

When we’d finished, the youth had completely disappeared from the face of the earth. There was Honeysuckle Cottage, there was the neat front garden, there was the oval rose bed, there were the rose bushes already showing here and there a precocious pink bud. But the corpse had vanished without trace.

We leaned on our spades, drunk with fatigue, taking a moment before we started on the next horrendous task – cleaning up the blood in the kitchen.

It was then that I heard the noise. Soft, muffled, a series of musical notes like a bird or maybe even an insect. It stopped and then a few seconds later it started again, the same set of musical notes. Mum and I looked at each other, confused. The noise stopped. It started again. I looked around at the bushes and flowerbeds to see what it could be, and then it dawned on me. I knew that tune. I’d heard it many times before, in the street, in cafes, in restaurants, on trains . . .

It was the ringing of a mobile phone. And it was coming from the oval rose bed.

The burglar’s mobile must have rung more than twenty times before it finally rang off. I realized I’d been clenching my fists and gritting my teeth the whole time, as though enduring an agonizing physical pain.

Mum rarely swore but she swore now. A staccato outburst of ugly expletives.

‘Oh my God!’ I whined. ‘
Omigod!
’

We both stared in horror at the rose bed as if we’d seen the soil form itself into a mouth and start to speak.

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

Mum was silent for a long time before she answered. ‘We’ve got to dig him up. We’ve got to get that phone. We can’t risk it ringing again and someone hearing it . . . and the police will be able to trace it, they’ll be able to pinpoint its exact location. We’ve got to get it out of there.’

She raked her hand through her hair, her brow knotted with anxiety. ‘
Dammit!
I should have gone through his pockets! Whatever was I thinking?’

The thought of digging up the corpse and searching through its pockets was simply too much for me. I slumped down on the grass.

Mum glanced at me over her shoulder. I was struggling to bite back the tears. I felt unnaturally hot, feverish. I was short of breath, but even taking great lungfuls of air didn’t seem to help. I didn’t want to see that face again. I didn’t want to see that face with mud in its eyes and mud in its mouth. I didn’t think I could bear that . . .

‘I’ll do it, Shelley,’ she said as if reading my mind. ‘But we haven’t got a lot of time. Go back inside, get the mop from the kitchen cupboard and start cleaning up the floor. Don’t walk anywhere else –
stay in the kitchen
– we mustn’t tread blood all over the house.’

‘OK, Mum,’ I said in little more than a whisper. But I didn’t move. I felt weighed down by the futility, the stupidity, the wrong-headedness of what we were doing.

‘Someone’s looking for him already, Mum. Someone’s already trying to find him. We’re never going to get away with this. We’re bound to get caught!’

She turned towards me a face made strange and sinister by the livid purple bruising.

‘It’s too late to worry about that now,’ she said, her voice oddly hollow, as if her mind was elsewhere, perhaps already steeling herself to the grisly task she was about to perform.

Just then the burglar’s phone rang again, and I jumped as if I’d had an electric shock. I got quickly to my feet and hurried across the lawn back to the house. I couldn’t bear that sound!
I had to get away from that sound!

That cheery eight-note sequence repeating itself over and over again sounded to my ears like the burglar’s laughter – taunting us, mocking us from the darkness of his shallow grave.

 

When Mum came into the kitchen thirty-five minutes later, her face was more drawn, more haggard than I’d ever seen it before.

She emptied one of her dressing-gown pockets onto the breakfast bench. There was a flattened packet of cigarettes, a Zippo lighter, a worn leather wallet, sweet wrappers, a bunch of car keys with a football keyring and the mobile phone.

‘I’ve turned it off,’ she said.

She delved into the other pocket and waved a wad of crumpled notes at me. ‘And look at this! He had all the money from under my mattress in his back pocket – nearly two hundred pounds! I can’t believe I didn’t look in his pockets before we . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

‘We’ve had hardly any sleep, Mum. We’re not thinking clearly.’

‘Well, we’ve got to start thinking clearly from now on – or we
will
get caught.’ She put her hands on her hips and chewed her bottom lip as she always did when she was agitated. ‘We’ve got to think. We’ve got to
think
.’

She was trying to suppress her panic, her horror and revulsion; she was trying to deal with this bloodbath as she would a problem tossed onto her desk at work – as a mental puzzle, an intellectual challenge. All she had to do was bring the full force of her brilliant mind to bear on it, her common sense, her methodical attention to detail, and she would solve it like she solved all the other problems.

It was only then that Mum looked around the kitchen and noticed the work I’d done. I’d picked up all the pieces of broken crockery and put them in a cardboard box by the back door. I’d set about cleaning up the worst of the blood with the mop, filling and emptying bucket after bucket of water at the sink, watching the water I poured away gradually change from dark crimson to the faintest of pinks. I’d dried the floor off as best I could with the tea towels that were to hand and was just about to start on the bloodstains on the walls and benchtops when Mum had come back.

‘Well done, Shelley,’ she smiled. ‘You’ve got rid of the worst of it.’ She glanced at the clock on the cooker. ‘Seven twenty-three. That’s good. We’re doing well for time.’

Then her face became concentrated again.
The problem. She had to address the problem.

She took a thick roll of black bin bags out of the drawer under the sink and snapped one off.

‘Listen to me carefully, Shelley,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to get rid of everything that’s bloodstained and everything that can prove the burglar was ever in this house. We’ll put it all in bin bags and we’ll hide them upstairs in the spare room until we can get rid of them safely.’

She swept the burglar’s little pile of personal possessions into the bin bag, then picked up the box of bloodstained crockery and tried to fit that in. I held the neck of the bag open for her to make it easier, then brought over the tea towels I’d used to dry the floor and dropped them into the bin bag too.

‘Where’s the knife?’ she asked.

I took it from the draining board where I’d left it and gave it to her, trying not to look at the gore dried thick and dark like treacle on the blade. She wedged it deep inside the cardboard box.

She looked around her for other bloodstained objects, and noticed the doormat. She knelt down and folded this too into the bin bag. I mopped up the pink rectangular stain it had left behind.

Mum tore off another bin bag. She took off her blood-flecked dressing gown and stuffed it inside.

‘Where’s your dressing gown, Shelley?’

I had to think for a minute and then I remembered. I’d left it by the rose bed.

‘Can you run and get it, please, darling, and it can go in here with mine. It’ll have to be destroyed, I’m afraid – we can’t risk washing it.’

I didn’t want to go anywhere near the burglar’s grave, but I couldn’t say no – not after what Mum had just forced herself to do. I raced across the lawn, trying not to look at the oval rose bed, trying not to think about a voice coming from under the soil (
Fancy a snog?
) or a cold hand seizing my ankle. I grabbed the towelling bundle and sprinted back to the house as fast as I could.

Mum put my dressing gown in the bin bag with hers.

‘Now give me your wellies,’ she said, and that word, with its aura of childhood innocence, sounded weirdly out of place in that kitchen, at that moment.

I sat on a chair and tugged them off. Mum took hers off too, and flung both pairs into yet another bin bag.

‘OK,’ she said wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘I’m going to really scrub everything in here – cupboards, walls,
everything
.’

She disappeared into the louvred kitchen cupboard where we kept all the household cleaning stuff, and emerged a few moments later with a plastic bowl, scrubbing brushes, a pile of clean tea towels and an enormous bottle of disinfectant. I looked at her in her nightie and bright yellow rubber gloves, her hair a ragged bird’s nest, and felt the urge to burst out laughing again as I had when the burglar’s trainer had come off in her hand and she’d been catapulted backwards.

‘People in the audience sometimes laugh out loud during the grisliest scenes in
Macbeth
,’ Roger had said to me once.

I managed to beat down the urge to laugh – which was probably a good thing in light of the desperate resolve on Mum’s face.

‘What do you want me to do, Mum?’

She didn’t answer me. She was filling the bowl with hot water, absorbed in the details of the problem – how to rewind time, how to make the house look just as it had before the burglar broke in, how to clean the kitchen so that the police wouldn’t find a single spot of blood. I had to ask again.

‘I think you’d best go upstairs and shower and get all that blood off you,’ she said, as she yanked off another bin bag. ‘Put your nightie in here when you take it off and any towels that you use. Even if they don’t
look
bloodstained, they will be . . . and we can’t afford to take any chances.’

For the second time in my life I looked at my reflection and was unable to recognize myself. The face of a savage stared out at me from the bathroom mirror – not a sixteen-year-old middle-class English girl, but a primitive savage with a face daubed in the blood of the kill, eyes wide with the excitement of battle, hair stiff with dried blood and sticking up in jagged stipples. It was a shocking sight and it took several seconds before I could accept that the savage in the mirror
was me
.

I rubbed my cheek with my index finger and the dried blood flaked off like rust, leaving a trail of russet powder on the white ceramic of the sink. I examined the grey smudges on my throat, two dark half-moons on either side of my windpipe, where the burglar had tried to strangle me. My throat still stung and I could feel something odd, something lumpy, every time I swallowed. My eyes were completely bloodshot save for a few microscopic blobs of white floating here and there. I remembered reading that the police could tell if a person had been strangled by the burst blood vessels in their eyes. Something to do with lack of oxygen in the blood.
How close had I come to death?
My head throbbed, and I felt so tired I could have curled up on the bathroom floor and gone to sleep right then and there.