No Place Like Home Jane Renshaw (best books to read for beginners TXT) 📖

back before he lost his nerve. ‘Hi, Sylvia. No, Max hasn’t been in contact with him. Sorry.’

‘Right. We’re calling the police.’ Why did she sound so aggressive?

‘The police?’

‘We need to do a proper search. We’ve been out looking, in the woods, the nearest fields. But we have to organise a proper search.’

‘But Sylvia – don’t you think he’s probably just been out drinking with his friends and has crashed somewhere?’

‘No. He wasn’t with his friends. He went out for a walk on his own last night and, as I said, his bed hasn’t been slept in. He didn’t come back. We need to search your property.’

Oh God oh God!

‘He’s not here, Sylvia.’

‘The police need to do a proper search.’

‘Uh, right, yes, of course. No problem.’ Shit. Why had he said that? Why would it be a problem? ‘But we can do that. We’ll have a good look and let you know–’

‘We’ll send the police over when they get here.’

‘Right. Okay. I’m sure he’s probably–’

But she’d cut the call.

He stared at the screen of the phone for a moment. At the dried smears of blood on it.

Okay. Okay.

The shed.

The first thing was to deal with all the blood in the shed. They’d be bound to look in there. And in the wood, there were the holes they’d started to dig – those needed to be filled in. But if the Taylors had been out searching already, maybe they’d already found them, and it would look really suspicious if they were subsequently filled in?

Should he wake Kirsty? Get her to help?

No.

She’d fallen apart last night, when they finally had all the cameras down, when they’d smashed them with a mallet from the shed and bagged them up in bin bags. She’d collapsed, hands over her head, sobbing. He had had to half-carry her to bed, where she’d lain in his arms, crying away most of what remained of the night.

He would leave her be.

‘Daad,’ said Phoebe.

He marched into the kitchen, fished the eggs out of the hot water with his fingers, dumped them in egg cups. ‘Can you get your own toast? There’s a bit of a crisis – Finn Taylor’s gone missing.’

Phoebe was at the fridge. ‘Okay. Where’s the margarine?’

‘Bottom shelf. Did you hear what I said, Phoebs?’

Phoebe nodded. ‘Finn Taylor’s a bad person, Dad. Who cares if he’s missing?’

‘Now, Phoebe,’ he managed. ‘That’s not very nice.’

She shrugged.

Bram ran to the shed. It took him three attempts to unlock the padlock. How long would he have before the police got here? Or the Taylors? Or both? When he pushed open the door, the smell hit him: that stomach-churning butcher smell. And the blood – it was everywhere! On the cardboard boxes, on the floor… Spattered on the walls, on the window, on the floor next to the boxes…

Everywhere.

There were even some splashes on the ceiling.

How had it got right up there?

When Finn… He must have been stumbling about, and falling, and the blood – from his head wound –

He must have been so desperate. Bleeding everywhere, falling so hard onto the floor or onto the boxes that the blood was sent arcing – It hadn’t just been a case of him crawling, half-conscious… He must have been on his feet and then fallen, repeatedly, for this to have happened.

And then, like the terrible, evil person it seemed he was, the thought popped into his head: Thank God David insisted on varnishing the wood. Three coats of varnish, David and Fraser had applied. Bram had objected, at the time, to this profligate waste of the planet’s resources. But if the wood had been bare, there was no way he could have got the blood off it. It would have soaked in.

Okay. He needed to get pails from inside – some of them would already be full of water, hopefully, the ones in the downstairs loo, unless someone had used them to fill up the cistern. He ran back to the house.

Thank God, two of the pails were full. He detoured to the kitchen for cloths and hurried back to the shed, the pails slopping water as he went. In the shed, he started with the big pool of dried blood by the workbench. The water in both pails was soon scarlet, the cloths scarlet… His hands shook as he wrung them out in the already bloody water, the water that had Finn’s lifeblood in it –

Gagging, he only just made it outside before he was throwing up, as if his insides were rebelling against what his brain was asking his body to do.

But falling apart was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

He needed to get that shed cleaned up.

He tipped the pails of bloody water out on the grass and ran to the stream for more. It took four trips before the tiles and the walls and ceiling were clean. Clean enough, anyway. He’d need to use proper cleaning fluids on them to remove any invisible traces. Bleach, although he didn’t believe in the stuff and they didn’t have any in the house. Would eco surface cleaner do the job?

Now the boxes under the window, which also had blood all over them. He unstacked them and then restacked them with the bloody ones at the bottom and against the wall. But there was still blood visible on a couple of them.

Paint.

He could pretend he’d been in here painting something, and spilt paint over the boxes. There was plenty of paint in the cupboard, left over from decorating the house. He got a screwdriver and eased open the lid of a tin of the dark green eggshell they’d used for the woodwork in Kirsty’s study.

He splashed it over the boxes, over the bloodstains. The stains from where Finn – where Finn had tried to get to the window –

He needed to go to the police and tell them what happened. He needed to tell the Taylors. He needed to confess and take whatever punishment was coming to him.

We need you. The kids need you.

How