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

thinking – rationally.’ The last word was gasped out as Sylvia rounded on him. And now she was hitting Andrew, pounding at his chest as he held on to her shoulders. ‘This isn’t helping!’ he half-shouted over the noise she was making, a wailing sound that went straight through Bram, jangling all his nerve endings. Andrew pulled her against his chest and she collapsed against him, the wail now a thin, hopeless sound that Bram just couldn’t listen to any longer.

He pushed past them and fled the room, fled to the bathroom, rushed inside and locked the door behind him.

He couldn’t do this.

He couldn’t do this any more.

Whack whack whack! on the door.

‘Bram!’ Kirsty. ‘Bram, please, come out of there! They’ve gone. The Taylors have gone.’

Bram opened the door. ‘I need to tell the police what I did. We can’t put them through this. Sylvia and Andrew. Sylvia knows, somehow. Or suspects. I don’t know how, but–’

Kirsty put her fingers to his lips. ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘You’re not going to the police. You’re not going to ruin your life, all of our lives, the kids’ lives, just because you can’t take the guilt. Sylvia–’ She dropped her voice again. ‘Sylvia can’t possibly know anything.’

‘But you heard her! “What have you done to him?”’

Kirsty shook her head. ‘Maybe she suspects that it was Finn who was responsible for terrorising us. If it was Max, if he’d been doing something like that, he’d have a hard time pulling the wool over our eyes, wouldn’t he? But she can’t possibly know that we – that we have anything to do with his disappearance.’ She kissed Bram on the mouth, tenderly, gently. ‘We have to hold it together. No one knows a thing. And that’s how it’s going to stay. Okay? Bram?’

In the end, Bram nodded.

‘Right. I’m going to the shops, and I’ll get rid of the cameras. Then I’ll be straight back. Get back out there with Dad and Fraser and make out you’re as keen as mustard to participate in the search. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Bram, if we don’t do this, if the police find out what we did, we’re both going to prison – and that can’t happen. It can’t. Right?’

He nodded. ‘Right.’

Bram told David and Fraser that he was going to do a blog post about Finn to ‘spread the word’ and retreated to his and Kirsty’s bedroom. He couldn’t face going back out there. He couldn’t face Andrew and Sylvia and Cara.

He watched David striding across the paddock to the woods, Fraser following, both in their hi-vis tabards. He didn’t go out onto the balcony. He opened the sliding door an inch so he could hear what was going on but stayed inside, hopeful that the sun glancing off the glass would stop anyone down there spotting him. The police were always on the alert, weren’t they, for anyone acting strangely in these circumstances? The missing teen’s neighbour skulking in his house watching the search would presumably ring all kinds of alarm bells.

He could see occasional glimpses of fluorescent yellow tabards moving amongst the trees. Maybe it was the presence of the searchers, but what he was looking at now, the paddock, the woods, the hills beyond – it all seemed different. Like it was an entirely different place. It was as if everything had shifted onto a new plane and was no longer quite as it had been, but the changes were so subtle that he couldn’t have named them. Would everywhere be like this, now? When he went back to Islington, or to visit his parents in Primrose Hill, would he find that everywhere had slid sideways, become a different version of itself?

Of course it would.

The whole world had changed. He’d be seeing everything, now, from the perspective of the man who had killed a nineteen-year-old boy. All his life, whatever else he did, if he found a cure for cancer or stopped global warming or reversed habitat destruction, he would still be first and foremost Finn Taylor’s killer. Finn Taylor would still have ended his life in unimaginable pain and terror, stumbling around that shed, falling and falling again –

How could he ever come to terms with that?

He couldn’t.

There was no way to make Bram Hendriksen back into a worthwhile human being.

All he could be now, he supposed, was someone who helped Kirsty and Max and Phoebe make good lives for themselves.

Yes.

They were all that mattered.

Kirsty and Max and Phoebe.

But he was a murderer! How could it be a good thing that he was in their lives?

Was he really a murderer, though? Finn Taylor had been terrorising them. He’d been wearing a mask! For all Bram knew, he’d been heading for the house to break in and – what?

What had Finn been intending to do?

Was it possible that Phoebe had been right all along and Finn Taylor was a psychopath? It wasn’t as if he had the excuse of a horrendous childhood that had turned him feral. He was a privileged young man with perfectly nice and very wealthy parents. He had to have been a pretty disturbed individual to have taken all that trouble to victimise the Hendriksens, for no good reason that Bram could think of.

Was it possible that Bram’s actions had actually averted an even worse tragedy?

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there when his phone buzzed. Mechanically, he took it from his pocket. The dried blood was still on there, streaked over the screen. A forensic specialist’s dream.

He supposed he needed to clean that off.

It was Kirsty.

‘Mission accomplished,’ was all she said. ‘See you soon.’

‘Okay.’

After he’d ended the call, he stood staring down at the vegetable patch. Little did they all know, little did Finn Taylor’s father and mother and sister know that their beloved boy was dead, battered to death by Bram, his body shoved unceremoniously into a hole in the ground like a dead cat or dog.

People were coming towards the house from the wood.

Scott. And David and Fraser.

Was Scott