The Burning Air (27 page)

“How are they?” Sophie asked Will.

“Sparko, all of them. How the hell do they sleep through that? I mean, I know you can’t hear anything in there, but how come they didn’t sense it? The air feels
live
.”

Outside two car doors slammed. A police radio crackled.

“We still haven’t decided what to do about
her,
” said Tara, fixing Kerry with a Medusa stare. “There’s no point in getting Jake out of the way if she’s still here to land him in the shit.”

Soft footsteps sounded outside. The family stared at the open kitchen door.

Rowan drummed his fingers on the table. Now, with seconds to spare, the decision was easy to make. He would just have to find a way to explain Kerry’s absence. “Yes, take her away,” he decided. “Take her up to your bedroom and keep her there until we come and get you. I’m sure we’ll clear it all up in a couple of minutes.”

Felix had loosened his jailer’s grip on Kerry and now took her elbow in a foolish act of vestigial trust. Rowan had no idea what to make of the meekness with which Kerry let him steer her away. In the sitting room, Felix exclaimed in surprise. She’s given him the slip, thought Rowan, and pushed back his chair. Will too rose from his bench. But before either of them could give chase, Felix and Kerry returned. Their strange embrace was broken and they were accompanied by two uniformed police officers. The sergeant was only ten years or so behind Rowan himself and the constable was a small Asian woman. Their faces were composed in twin expressions of professional concern and compassion.

“Sergeant Andrew Hough and PC Maya Rayat,” he announced. “Responding to a 999 call reporting a missing child.”

“They came in through the front door,” said Felix unnecessarily.

Hough sniffed the air like an animal. Rayat tried to look at Felix’s eye without making it look like she was looking.

Rowan put out a hand to the sergeant and saw that it was encrusted with earth. Suddenly, he seemed to smell the metallic edge of blood; he withdrew his hand just as the officer extended his own.

“Sergeant, thank you
so
much for coming out. But I’m afraid it’s been a false alarm.” He stepped aside so that they could see Edie slumbering on Sophie’s shoulder. “As you can see the baby is here and she’s perfectly safe. It’s been a horrific hour, but it was just a case of bad communication. A family misunderstanding. We were literally just about to ring you again and call off the search.”

“Right,” said Hough. He looked Rowan up and down, took in his filthy clothes.

“It’s been quite a search party, as you can imagine,” said Rowan. “Stumbling around in the woods like fools!” He forced a smile.

Kerry had positioned herself behind Rayat. Her eyes flicked between the officers to make sure she could not be seen, then she pulled up her sleeve to examine a smeared bracelet of blood on her left wrist. Felix’s fingers had left a mark on her forearm. She rubbed her jersey over the stained skin so that the blood was absorbed. Whether she was signaling cooperation or distancing herself, only the next few minutes would tell.

54

“
O
H, THAT’S SUCH good news,” said Rayat. “Better to be called out for a found child than a lost one. Better every time.” She crouched down next to Sophie, stroked Edie’s hair. “Hello, you. Have you been on a bit of an adventure? Oh, she’s
gorgeous.
Those
eyelashes
! I’ve got one her age at home. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through this evening. The thing about false alarms is you don’t know they’re false alarms until later, it feels real at the time, doesn’t it?”

Sophie kept staring at Rowan. He wished she would stop. It looked odd, unnatural.

Sergeant Hough seemed less pleased. “We’ve got a chopper with a thermal imaging camera already on its way from Bristol for this.” Rowan wondered if the others were thinking the same as him; Matt would be giving out heat for some time yet. How long
did
it take for a body to cool? How long had he sat with Lydia until her hand had grown—“Mind you, it’s the worst night for a heat seeker. It’ll all look like join the dots tonight. Big bonfires, kids setting fire to bins, piss heads sleeping in ditches, piss heads
shagging
in ditches. Still, kid’s here, that’s the main thing. I’ll have to cancel now, anyway.”

Hough harrumphed and began to pace the kitchen. He stood at the back door, next to the corner where shovels and mops, brooms, and a ladder leaned against the wall at a thirty-degree angle. A wicket and stumps lay in a little pile on the floor. The absence of the cricket bat suddenly gripped Rowan as the most incriminating absence in the history of detection, and he braced himself for the interrogation as to its whereabouts. “Any danger of a cup of tea?” said Hough. “So my journey wasn’t completely wasted?”

“Sure,” said Tara. In her haste, she swept a stack of pans off the top of the stove. They clattered to the floor; the noise was like a hail of bullets. Rowan hoped his glance at the baby monitor was surreptitious. The boys might have slept through raised voices but that noise would wake, if not the dead, at least sleeping schoolboys.

Tara handled the kettle and mugs with hummingbird fingers. “Milk and two for me, milk and none for her,” said the sergeant. The kettle’s boil was deafening, making conversation impossible. Had it always been like that?

“Well, listen, let’s just tidy this all up; I can write it up and go,” said Rayat. “Who made the call?”

“Me, Will Woods, Edie’s father.”

“God, you must be so
relieved
. OK, so my notes say that we’ve got a suspected abduction of a child by someone called Kerry Stone.”

Rowan cut in, hoping desperately that Kerry would keep her vow of silence.

“That’s Kerry, next to you. As I said, it was just a misunderstanding. She took the baby for a walk without telling us—”

“What, at night, in this fog?” said Rayat, eyeballing Kerry.

“Well, quite,” said Will. “We weren’t expecting it either, so when we came back from the Tar Barrels early, we naturally panicked. You know how it is.”

“And your relationship to the baby is?” Rayat asked Kerry.

“She’s a family friend,” interjected Rowan. Should he keep answering for Kerry? He knew it sounded odd. But what was the alternative? Who knew, once the girl began a dialogue with this woman, what she would say. It was impossible to tell which of her various truths would float to the surface.

“Right. So that accounts for Kerry. So, Will, my notes here say that on the call made at 11:59 p.m. you stated . . . and forgive me here, because you were a bit emotional, it’s not quite clear, that someone called Matthew Rider had tried to call us originally? So why didn’t he?”

Rowan held his tongue. To answer on Kerry’s behalf was one thing: to speak in Will’s place would definitely arouse suspicion.

“Oh, that was also a, ah, a misunderstanding,” said Will, flushing scarlet. “It was more that I think I just thought he had. You know. Heat of the moment.”

Tara had made enough tea for everyone. She served the police officers first and PC Rayat nodded in thanks. “So you both thought that you’d made the call but neither of you had? Seems a bit odd, that you left something as important as that to chance, don’t you agree?”

There was steel beneath this woman’s softness, like a skull beneath the skin. Will wore a gloss of sweat. “Like you said, I was emotional. Isn’t the main thing that Edie is here?”

“Firstly, of course you were, and secondly, I can’t tell you how happy I am about that, but questions are asked back at the station and I just want to tie up all the loose ends. I still have to make a report, since we’ve been called out.” She brought the mug of tea up to her lips but didn’t quite sip from it. “Which of you is Matthew?” she said, looking at Rowan and Felix.

And then it was all over.

Idiots. They were all idiots. They weren’t cut out for this sort of thing. Of course the police would want to talk to Matt. Of
course
they would. It was so
obvious
now. Rowan’s original plan, to tell her that Matt was still out looking, was useless if Rayat insisted on waiting for him to return. There was no way out of this. Worse—yes, it could still get worse—Kerry looked as though she was about to say something, and Rowan was all out of ideas to stop her. He watched helplessly as she nudged Felix in the ribs.

“Come on, Matt,” she said. “Speak up.” She stepped back into her shadow.

“Sorry,” said Felix eventually. “I think I’m still in shock. Yes, we, um, we got to the top of the hill where there’s a mobile signal, and in all the fuss and panic I thought he’d called you and he thought I’d done it, and, you know, just, crossed wires.”

Rayat’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a pretty big thing to get your wires crossed about. A missing child and you weren’t checking who’d made the call? If it had been my daughter,” she said to Will, “if I’d been in your shoes, I’d have stopped at
nothing
to make sure that call got through.”

“Don’t think I don’t know that! I
know
I fucked up. I doubt I’ll ever get over it.” Will’s voice broke on the last word. Rayat’s expression changed. She might not know the true context of his outburst but there was no denying its sincerity.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure you do. One thing I was wondering about; why did you have to go all the way to the top of the valley anyway? Haven’t you got a house phone?”

“It’s not working. I let the bill run out, we’re not here very often,” said Rowan, understanding only as he spoke that the dead telephone was no more due to his own neglect than the failure of the outside lightbulb had been.

“Sooner they get that bloody mobile mast up around here the better,” said Hough, whose pacing had landed him in the doorway. “Even our radios barely work down here. Speaking of which, I need to radio back to the station, get them to cancel that helicopter, redeploy the cover back to Ottery. Hang on, you’ve got a hill here. Let me walk a bit further up, see if it’s any different.” He shone his torch into the darkness, a finger of light pointing the way up to where Matt’s body lay.

“It’s a bit treacherous out there,” said Rowan. “You’d probably be better off trying to do it from the lane outside.”

“Fair dos,” he said. “Back to what’s left of the festival.” He drank his milk-and-two down in one and put the cup in the sink. Rowan’s eyes were drawn to the hand soap; a faint rosy lather still clung to the white slab. He held his breath until Hough retrieved his hat from the table.

“You ready, Maya?” he said.

“My heart was in my mouth on the way over here,” said Rayat. “Never had to deal with anything like that before, to be honest. I’m relieved. Not as relieved as you are, though. I bet you’ll sleep well tonight.” She stopped by Felix. “You sure you’re not family, Matt? You don’t half look like the others.”

Felix shook his head.

Hough chucked Edie under the chin on the way out. “I don’t want any more trouble from
you,
” he said.

Will’s answering laugh was far too loud.

•   •   •

They waited in perfect silence until the sound of tire on track was an echo in the memory. Felix was the first to leave the table. He opened the drinks cupboard, pulled down the brandy, and poured a good slug into each steaming mug, hesitating only over Kerry’s. Rowan drank it down. The spirit seemed to take the liquid beyond boiling point. It scoured his insides.

“Are you going to get Jake?” Sophie asked Tara.

Will put his hand on Tara’s arm. “I think it’s best if we get this all sorted without Jake; it’s a conversation for the adults only. I won’t pretend I’m happy that we lied to the police, but it’s done now, and I stand by it. We
all
stand by it. Isn’t that the point of family?”

Rowan could not have been prouder of Will if he were blood.

“
She
’s not family,” said Tara, gesturing to Kerry.

“I promise I’m not going to say anything, ever,” said Kerry, to bitter protest. “Didn’t I just prove that? Didn’t I just cover for you? I don’t want anything more to do with this no more than you do. Look, all the people who might notice he’s gone are in this room; he didn’t have no one else in his life. I won’t even report him missing. I’m
glad
he’s gone, I was terrified of him!” she beseeched Tara, then Sophie. “I don’t blame you if you don’t believe me, but I was always on your side, never his.”

“How bloody
dare
you . . .” Sophie began.

Kerry spread her hands wide. The lines on her palms were maroon threads. “I couldn’t say no to him, I didn’t know what he might do, but I was never going to take her away from you. I was always going to bring her back. I would
never
have hurt her.”

The clock struck once.

55

W
ILL CLEARED HIS throat. “Look, Kerry can wait, until the morning at least. I was thinking more about the
immediate
future. It’s one o’clock in the morning. Our boys will be up in a few hours and there’s no way I’m involving them in any of this. We need to clear things up.”

“No, hang on a minute,” said Tara, setting down her mug. “I’ve got to get Jake, if we’re talking about that. He must be worried sick. And I think he does need to be involved, now the coast is clear. He needs to see the consequences of what’s happened. Not to punish him, just for, you know, closure.”

“Are you sure?” asked Sophie.

“No, not remotely,” said Tara. “I’m not sure about anything.”

Rowan felt a swell of guilt follow her out the door. He was suddenly revisited by the memory of the father of a pupil who was experiencing rare bullying at the Cath. He’d come to see Rowan in his study and said, “Makes you wish you could suffer on their behalf, doesn’t it?” He wished now that he could shoulder Jake’s guilt for him.

“This doesn’t seem like a scene from my life,” said Felix, offering the bottle around again. Sophie shook her head but Rowan and Will gratefully accepted another shot.

Tara returned, her mouth working and her hands twisting the hem of her sweatshirt. “He won’t come out of my room. He says he wants to be on his own. I’m not going to let him, obviously, I’ve only come down to let you all know. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m ever going to sleep again.” A nervous giggle spilled over into crying. “Oh God, what am I going to say to him in the morning? How am I going to get him through the rest of his life?”

“You’ll manage,” said Sophie. “You’re a brilliant mum, you’ll get there. And he’s got all of us as well, hasn’t he?”

“What was I thinking, letting that bastard into our lives? I’m such a stupid cow.”

“Oh, Tara, honey,” said Sophie. “You weren’t to know. How could you know? How could
any
of us know? I’ll come up with you. Charlie’s going to wake up in what, six or seven hours? And Toby and Leo won’t be far behind him. Those boys need us.”

Half an hour earlier, when Edie was still missing, Sophie had depended on Tara for physical support. Now Tara shuffled like an invalid with Sophie as her crutch.

Will collected an armful of picks and shovels from the garden. He took the square shovel for himself and handed Felix a newer version of the same. The spade he gave Rowan had a rounded point. A child’s plastic spade, part of a seaside set, remained. Kerry knelt to pick it up.

“Shall I take that one?” she said pathetically. “I could help you.”

“Why, do you want to build a fucking sandcastle while we bury your—what
was
he to you, anyway?”

“Husband,” she murmured through her fingers. “Please don’t hate me for it, Fee.” She reached out to touch the cheek below his empty eye socket. Felix raised the hand with the shovel in it and for a moment Rowan thought that he was going to strike her. Kerry evidently thought so too; she did not cower but ducked to the side, with the practiced reflexes of a boxer who is always on guard for the next jab. It gave the possibility of truth to her claim that she had acted in fear. Felix lowered the shovel, gazed at his hands as if they were someone else’s.

“You must think I’m the biggest prick ever,” he said without looking up. “I bet you had a right laugh about me.”

“I’d never laugh at you. It started out pretending but, Felix, it changed. I love you
now.”

Felix winced. “Please shut up, Kerry. I think you’ve insulted me quite enough already.”

“It’s true! That’s why I took Edie, I was keeping her safe from
him
. I did it
for
you, to show you I was on your side, yours and your family’s. I did it because I want to
be
with you.”

Now he made an incredulous noise that was half laugh, half gurgle. “Be with me? I can barely even look at you! After what you put my sisters through? No way, Kerry. Just shut up and stay where I can see you for now. I’m going to help my dad and Will sort out this . . .
shit . . .
I’ll deal with you when the sun comes up.”

Kerry followed them into the garden. The mist had lifted a little and a soft-focus crescent moon helped to improve visibility. The ridge that separated the back of the garden from the surrounding land was now discernible, white light from the lantern rising over a fuzzy horizon.

“Are we really doing this?” said Felix.

“What choice do we have?” said Rowan.

They left their shovels at the edge of the trenches and were almost at the ridge when a cracked voice called him back.

“Dad?” Tara was silhouetted in the doorway of the kitchen.

Jake
, thought Rowan. What if, left alone upstairs—how could they have been so
stupid
?—he had done something rash. Why did we hide him away? Why didn’t I hide my dressing gown cord, thought Rowan, why didn’t I take the bleach from the lavatory, why didn’t we all hide our razorblades? He ran toward his daughter.

“What is it? Is it Jake?”

“No, he’s all right. I mean obviously he’s
not
all right, but . . .” Tara was wearing pajamas. She carried a black hold-all in one hand and had a tangle of clothes tucked under the other. “I’m going to bunk in with him, so I’m there when he wakes up.”

“Of course.” Rowan nodded down at the bundles she carried. “What’s all that?”

“These are all Matt’s things,” she said, handing him the hold-all. “You might want to have another bonfire.”

“Oh. Lord. Right. Good idea.”

“And then burn what you’re all wearing, too. Our stuff’s already in here.”

The topmost garment, Rowan now saw, was Jake’s bloodstained T-shirt. “I’ll load it and program it now so all you have to do is turn it on.” Tara’s eyes blazed with fear and pleading and a terrible, compromising gratitude. Looking into them was like staring into the sun. He had no choice but to drop his gaze.