The Burning Air (21 page)

41

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2013

B
ESIDE ME, TARA sighed and rolled over, taking half the bedclothes with her. I had not slept. Despite my exhaustion I was wired with dangerous energy.

That nobody suspected me was of course an advantage but I needed a bold statement to draw a line between the person they thought they knew and my true self, with all his terrible ambition and capability. The obvious thing was to remove the child somewhere, create an initial stir of terror before somehow producing her—I thought with a smile of a magician producing a rabbit from a hat—and making the physical threat that would loosen Rowan’s tongue. Of course, I could not do that alone, but I knew someone who could. I knew someone who would do anything for some time alone with that baby. I forced myself to slow down. I had made that mistake before, making rigid plans that ran too far ahead of circumstance. In the meantime, I would have to concentrate on getting Kerry alone with Edie.

Tara began to stir and I pretended that I was waking up too, taking the arm she threw around my shoulder and pulling her close to me. Her body felt liquid and boneless, while every muscle in mine was clenched. This was the last time I would ever wake up next to her. By the time she next went to sleep, this lazy, careless morning would have been recast as the prelude to a nightmare.

“Morning!” I said.

“Tar Barrels day!” she said. “My favorite night of the year. You’re going to love it.”

“I hope so. It’ll be nice, all the family out together.” She beamed to hear me say that. “It’s a shame Sophie isn’t coming out,” I ventured. “I was listening in on Will and you talking the other night, about babysitting and stuff. I just think it would do her good to get out of the house.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Tara. “Especially after yesterday’s meltdown. But what can you do?”

I shrugged and left the thought to fester. From then, it was a question of five minutes alone with Kerry. The offer of babysitting had to seem to come from her, even though I would be the one in ultimate control.

•   •   •

The valley was thick with a horrible, drizzly mist that frizzed up Kerry’s hair as we wandered up to the old ruined cottage. I kept trying to catch her eye, but her method acting had gone too far for that; she was avoiding me in a way that almost looked deliberate. Sophie was burdened by her smallest son, the creepy one, so Edie was passed from person to person. Only when it was my turn did Kerry approach me. She took the baby from my rigid arms and folded her deep inside her coat. Jake stuck close behind us for a while, but eventually the sight of her bottom began to bore him, and he ran to catch up with his cousins. I was frustrated that the baby had to be present—I wanted Kerry’s full attention—but this was better than nothing.

We brought up the rear of the party, abreast but separate. I had to be careful that no one could see us, two ostensible strangers, in intense conversation. Boys zipped around us, visible, invisible, in and out of pockets of mist. Every time Sophie glanced back at Kerry, as if to check she had not spirited the child away, I was reminded of the challenge at hand.

When the little boy in Sophie’s arms began to whine, I grabbed Kerry by the elbow and pulled her behind a vast oak.

“He burned them,” I said, talking quickly and clearly. “Rowan burned the diaries, and with them all my chances of ever being believed.”

“But without them . . .”

“I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, there’s a plan B. It involves your little friend here. We’re going to take her on a trip away from the barn.”

Kerry’s expression was transformed, as though someone had pressed her “on” switch.

“To
live
with us?” she said, her face glowing. My heart sank. What was worse, her insanity or her stupidity? She was a danger to society. How did she think we would possibly hide a kidnapped baby? I wondered again what I was doing trusting her with such an important plan. I used up my last reserves of fake patience.

“No, Kerry,” I said. “Not to
live
with us. That wouldn’t work. What we need to do—are you listening to me? What we need to do is get you to babysit tonight, and then while we’re all out, you take Edie away to show them we all mean business. I’ll come back and get you both and then we pretend we’re going to hurt Edie, just to give Rowan enough of a scare that he tells me what I want to hear.”

Kerry put one hand over the baby’s head and stepped back away from me.

“No, no,
pretend
. Just pretend. Like all of it’s pretend.” I checked that no one was looking; in fact they were barely visible. Still, I positioned us farther around the tree for extra cover. I put my hands on Kerry’s shoulders, chased her eyes around with mine until she was forced to lock onto my gaze. It was crucial that she understand this perfectly. “It’s going to look very real, and it’s going to be frightening, but it’s got to be that way because otherwise Rowan won’t tell me what Lydia did. I might have to pretend—
pretend—
to threaten you, too. You’ll just have to go along with that, and look scared.”

“We’re not really going to do anything bad to the baby?”

The child looked up at me, Lydia in infant form. “Absolutely not,” I said. “But it is vital that they
believe
something bad is going to happen to her if Rowan doesn’t tell them all what Lydia did. Once I’ve got that confession, once they all know what kind of person their mother really was, that’s when we get in the shot about who we really are, and then . . . and then, at last, it’s all over.”

“They’ll just stop us. There’s more of them than there are of us.”

Kerry was not usually this argumentative or paranoid. It must be the stress of the double life. I had thought about this long and hard. It was the mainstay of my plan.

“I don’t think they will.” I opened my jacket to show her the weapon I had chosen. “They won’t be able to get near us.”

“What’s to stop them just calling the police on us the second we’ve gone?”

“Edie?” called Sophie, an edge to her voice.

“All present and correct!” I shouted.

I took my hands off Kerry’s shoulders and we walked again, side by side now. I spoke to her out of the corner of my mouth.

“I’ll have Rowan’s confession then, won’t I? I’ll have my phone in my pocket, recording every word he says. I’ll tell them that if they call the police I’ll post it online. It’s always charged, I’ll start recording it the minute it all kicks off; I’m not making that mistake again. They’ll know that to call the police out for a baby that’s completely unharmed, when I’ve got that on them . . . no, they won’t do it. Trust me,” I said. I looked up. “Here comes Sophie now. Ask her if you can babysit tonight. Tell her it would be nice.”

Kerry took the baby back to Sophie. I saw her ask the question with hesitation, and I could tell by the way she began to twist her earlobe, as though trying to separate the healed flesh, that it was not good news. Everything rested on Tara now. She took Sophie by the arm and leaned in close. I hoped the seed I had planted that morning had begun to germinate.

Half an hour later, Will and Sophie emerged from the mudroom. They both wore washed-out but genuine smiles and said that, actually, if it was still OK, they would take Kerry up on her offer to babysit and Sophie would come out to the Tar Barrels. The little boys bundled onto their parents as though they had been given a gift they had long wished for but never really believed was within their reach.

•   •   •

While various MacBrides tore about the barn looking for lost mittens, gathering pound coins for the fairground, and, in Sophie’s case, prepping the baby’s room, I ran through the falling dusk to the cottage, where I raised the grille, laying a few blankets inside as a concession to comfort and care. In the kitchen, I took my paring knife, sharp as a diamond, located the telephone cable’s entry point just outside the kitchen window, and sliced the outer wire so that the live ligaments inside were exposed. Then I sawed through them to sever the connection. I checked that no one had reattached the bulb in the outside light.

While they piled into the car, I ran over the plan with Kerry one last time.

“OK. So we’re all coming back at around eleven. That means that at half ten, you go and hide. I tell you what, I’ll set an alarm for you.” I programmed the phone to vibrate at the appointed time. “It’s important that we give them a scare, remember?” Kerry nodded.

“You remember the cottage we saw, that one that Felix used to play in?”

“It’s got a big cage over the door! I’ll never open it.”

“You won’t have to. I’ll have done that before I leave. There’s a knack to opening it. It’s not easy to raise the grille up but it’s easy to pull it down, you can do it one-handed. It’s nice and warm, I’ve made it comfortable.”

“Will it be dark?”

“Well—yes, but you want the baby to go to sleep, don’t you?”

“I won’t put her down in the cot,” said Kerry. “She can just fall asleep in my arms; then I won’t have to disturb her when we get up and go.”

“Whatever. And then you just wait, and I’ll come and get you both. You don’t come out for anyone but me.”

“And then it’ll all be over?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “It will all be different afterward.” Reflexively, my hand went to the knife in my pocket. The success of my plan would make Kerry redundant, and whatever path my new life took there was no room for her in it. I almost felt sorry for her.

42

I
T WAS INCONCEIVABLE to me that people would go to something like this Tar Barrels festival voluntarily and, once there, behave as though being rammed shoulder-to-shoulder in filthy narrow streets was something to be enjoyed. The mist had thinned almost to transparency yet I would have been grateful not to see most of what was on offer. It was like a scene from a Viking raid only instead of fleeing the burning village the crowd continued to pour into it. People hung from upstairs windows, laughter and song spilled from pubs and houses. The smell of bodies and beer and hot dogs and fire assaulted the nose and disorienting cheering rounded street corners like wind. I watched in contemptuous disbelief as the MacBrides smiled and hugged one another and greeted old friends with kisses and waves. As the crowd pressed against the buildings to make way for some village idiot giving a piggyback to a ball of flame, Felix hoisted a small boy onto my shoulders. Instinct told me to fling the child into the crowd, but I controlled myself even when he found handholds in the hair at my crown. It would not do for me to come this far and lose my temper with a child. Salvation came in the form of a leering yob who shouted something about Felix’s face, and I thanked my thirteen-year-old self for providing me with a get-out clause now. As Felix stormed off to the pub, I handed the child back to its father. I stretched my hands up, reached first to the left and then to the right as though warming up for an aerobics class. Something in my back went click, like a twig underfoot. “I’ll go and make sure he’s all right,” I said, nodding toward Felix. As soon as the others were out of eyesight, I stopped following Felix and shouldered my way out of the crowd.

There was a church at the top of the village and the surrounding streets were lined with Georgian houses in ice-cream colors. I sat in the relative calm of the churchyard. A plaque there commemorated the town as the birthplace of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. No wonder he turned to drugs. Up there the mist returned, like a chiffon scarf loosely held six feet above the ground. It was far easier to breathe. I projected onto the flickering sky images of my life leading up to this point; myself at various stages, from underfed child to nervous young man to whoever the hell I was now.

At half past nine, I went to the Lamb and Flag, the pub I had seen Felix enter. He was swilling a pint of dark ale in a plastic glass on the pavement outside, deep in conversation with a bearded yokel. He waved me over and introduced me as his “brother-in-law, or as good as.” I had expected him to drown his sorrows, but he seemed entirely sober and I was glad; I did not want alcohol to numb any of what would come next. We spent a good hour wandering around looking for the others, through a fairground and briefly along a riverside and over a bridge next to which a huge bonfire blazed so fiercely that to stand too close was to feel your ears and nose begin to sizzle. At a quarter to eleven, we gave up looking for them and began the trudge back to our cars, my heart beating faster for reasons unrelated to the steep trek up the hill. I had told Kerry to leave the barn around now, and hoped it would not be too early. The press of bodies and the bonfire and the exercise meant it was difficult to gauge the true temperature. If she left too early, she might grow too cold and return too soon. The blankets I had left for them at the cottage should stop this from happening, and my brief experience carrying the child earlier that evening had taught me that they generated heat disproportionate to their size, but still . . . If they were in the sitting room when I returned, the logistics would be that much harder. I would have to somehow create a separate space for me and my hostage without raising suspicion; how much more powerful if I brought her in, let them think for a second that I was restoring her to them, and then played my card.

When we got back to the car, everyone was waiting around that stupid space cruiser bus Sophie insisted on driving. I did a quick head count: in addition to me and Felix there was Will, Tara, Rowan, Jake, two of the boys.

“Where’s Sophie and Charlie?” asked Felix as I rounded the minibus to see a strip of bare grass where there should have been a BMW Z4.

“Where’s my
car
?”

“Don’t be cross, but I let Sophie drive it home,” said Tara, directing her reply at me. “Charlie was playing up something rotten, he was really frightened by it, she had to take him home.”

Fuck fuck fuck fuck
fuck.
Tara misread my expression and put her hand on my arm. “She’s a good driver, she’ll be fine.”

“When did she go?”

“An hour or so, I’m not sure.”

I sat in the passenger seat and pressed my temple to the cool glass. It took an age for everyone to match the maypole of dangling seat belts to their correct buckles.

Will was driving at fifteen miles an hour. “I knew I should have taken him back; Soph will have
hated
driving in this.”

“Yeah, but then Sophie would have had to drive this bus through the mist rather than Matt’s little car,” said Felix. “She’ll be fine. She’ll be doing an inch a minute. We’ll probably overtake her.” I prayed that he was right.

If they had already gone, though . . . Sophie could have made the search herself and found Kerry and Edie waiting in the cottage. Under interrogation Kerry might have broken, told Sophie everything without my even being there. Or she could have discovered them missing, got to a place with reception, and called, if not the police, then at least one of her family, who were presumably an emergency service themselves as far as she was concerned.

Behind me, Tara’s phone buzzed. My heart leaped into my mouth. In the passenger mirror I watched her pull out her phone. It was evidently an innocuous text from a friend because whatever she read made her chuckle, then set the phone down again. From then on, I held my breath until we began the descent into the valley that marked the end of civilization. I kept my eyes on my own phone and watched with relief as five bars flickered into four, three, two, one, none.

A couple of minutes later the car came to an abrupt halt, throwing us all forward in our seats. Will, squinting into the mist, had seen what it took the rest of us a second or two to grasp; our path was barred with a diagonal light, two lights, they were—

“That’s Matt’s car!” shouted Jake. “Matt, that’s your car!”

“Oh shit,
Sophie
!” said Will. He unbuckled his belt and leaped from the driver’s seat without bothering to kill the engine. “Matt, there’s a torch in the glove compartment, can you get it for me?” he said over his shoulder. I picked my way after him, torch in hand, closely followed by Rowan and Tara, who was trying in vain to restrain three curious and frightened boys.

The car’s back end was in the ditch. It was empty. The doors were closed. The problem of Kerry and Edie’s whereabouts was now joined by another: if it did all go according to plan, my getaway car was stuck.

“It’s unlocked,” said Will, trying the passenger door. “That’s good, isn’t it? All the windows are intact, they can’t have been thrown through solid glass. What the hell
happened
here?”

“Please God they’re in the barn,” said Rowan. “Please God they’re not hurt.”

I hoped he was right, but for different reasons. Just because we hadn’t passed her on the lane didn’t mean anything. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Children, back into the car, now,” said Rowan. I was almost amused to see that he was talking to all of us.

•   •   •

All the lights in the barn were on, white squares checkering the black. The front door was wide open. Sophie was silhouetted in the middle, wild hair, wilder eyes. The emergency was clearly not over and while the others doubtlessly assumed that this was related to the crashed car, I tried desperately to gauge the true situation before they did. “Tara, can you get the boys to bed, please?” said Sophie. Tara marched to scoop Charlie from the sofa and bundled the other children upstairs so quickly and with such determined conviction that I wondered if I had missed some rushed exchange of précis and instruction between the sisters.

No one saw me slip around to the side of the barn. There, I tiptoed and craned toward the cottage to see if they were where they ought to be but it was almost hidden even in daylight, and tonight visibility was down to about ten yards.

Back in the sitting room, we heard the solid sound of Tara closing the bunker door behind her and then Sophie said, “They’ve gone.” Will started firing questions at her and she dissolved into nonsense. I unraveled her words; she hadn’t yet made any contact with anyone outside the barn. Clearly, she hadn’t searched the cottage. Concern was turning to suspicion, fast. To buy myself time to think, I made a big show of getting involved in the search and did a quick tour of the upstairs of the barn.

Downstairs, Rowan and Will were ignoring Sophie to struggle with the telephone. This distraction bought me a few seconds more. I needed to ensure that everyone stayed in the barn so that when I brought Kerry and Edie back I could make my threats to the assembled family. It was no good if one of them was on the loose. They all needed to hear me at the same time, and besides, I wanted them all where I could see them.

“Right, I’ll go and use my mobile,” said Will. I tensed. Events were spiraling away from me. I had to stop Will from making that call. He asked her how long they’d been missing, and Sophie sniveled something about there having been no one there when she’d got back.

“Hang on a sec, Matt,” said Will. I shot back in from the kitchen. “I’ll go and call for help,” he said, “and then I’ll go out in the car and look for them. If I give you a lift to the top of the lane, do you think we can get your car out of the ditch and you can take it around and do a separate scout?”

“Of course,” I said desperately. “Anything, whatever.”