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

coming to arrest Bram? But how could he be? He was probably just coming to update him on what was happening.

He looked down at the phone still in his hand. He should clean the blood off it, but he was strangely reluctant to do so, as if it were some sort of penance, to carry around something with Finn’s blood on it. He shoved it back in his pocket and was descending the stairs when David called: ‘Bram? Bram? Get your arse down here.’

David and Fraser were sitting in the Walton Room, and Scott was in his usual pontificating position by the hearth. ‘Finn Taylor’s beanie hat has been found in your wood,’ he said.

‘Beanie hat?’ Bram repeated.

‘His parents have identified it.’

Bram walked across the room towards them. Should he sit down? Offer them something to eat and drink? He stared at David, welcoming the spurt of anger he felt, now, in his father-in-law’s presence. It was as if Bram was carrying too much guilt for one person and he had to shift some of it onto this man, this abominable man who’d got inside Bram’s head with his macho bluster and destroyed them all.

It felt good to hate him.

‘They last remember seeing him wearing it a couple of days ago,’ Scott went on. ‘He generally wore it when he was out on these late-night walks of his, apparently. So – well, I’d say it’s concerning.’

Bram supposed he was expected to make some sort of comment about the hat.

‘So do you think he might have had some kind of run-in with whoever’s been terrorising us? And lost his hat in the scuffle?’ But how had Finn lost his hat in the wood?

Scott grimaced. ‘It’s possible. Anyway, we’ll be bringing in sniffer dogs. Hopefully we’ll be able to get them here early tomorrow afternoon. See if they can pick up a scent trail from where the hat was found.’

Sniffer dogs?

‘Right. Won’t that be too late? Won’t any scent trail have disappeared by then?’

Scott shook his head. ‘The Taylors are agitating for an immediate deployment – regardless of logistical practicalities – but in a wood, a scent trail will last for days. Relatively high humidity and low air movement.’ Scott, of course, would be an expert on scent trails as well as everything else.

‘Right. Uh, good.’ They would have to move the body. And blitz the shed. They’d have to do that tonight. But where the hell were they going to put the body?

Scott was looking at him a bit too closely for Bram’s liking. ‘Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary last night? Anything strange?’

Bram pretended to think. ‘No. No, I don’t think so. Well, David and Fraser–’

‘Anything strange?’ David interrupted him. ‘No offence, eh, Bram? Yeah, we called in. We didn’t see or hear anything either.’

And the penny, belatedly, dropped. Of course David, with his record, wouldn’t want the police knowing that he and Fraser had been out in the woods ‘on patrol’ last night. That was why he was so on edge.

‘How’s Sylvia doing?’ David went on.

Scott grimaced. ‘Not good, as you can imagine.’

That poor woman. And things were only going to get a whole lot worse for her.

‘She’s pretty frantic.’ Scott looked at his watch. ‘Okay, I’d better get back to it.’

When Kirsty got back with the shopping, Max took a couple of the bags from her, but Kirsty clung on to the third one. ‘Stuff for the utility room,’ she said, diving off down the corridor past her study. Bram hurried after her and closed the utility room door behind them.

‘Did you get it?’

‘Three big bottles.’ Kirsty opened the bag to show him the bottles of bleach and several packs of cloths. ‘That should be enough.’

One of the Netflix serial killer episodes, Bram had remembered, had featured the perp using bleach to destroy DNA evidence. They would slosh some over Finn’s body to destroy any of their DNA that might have transferred onto him, and they also needed to clean the shed.

‘Should be,’ he agreed.

He’d called her after Scott had left, and told her about the sniffer dogs. ‘They’re going to follow Finn’s trail to the shed, and then back into the woods, and then to the veg patch. Or actually, no, they’ll probably go straight to the veg patch because he’s only a couple of feet down. Dogs have an incredible sense of smell. They’ll be able to tell there’s a rotting corpse in there–’

Kirsty had made a wordless sound.

‘So we’ve got to do it tonight. We have to move Finn and blitz the shed. We need proper bleach, not the eco stuff.’

Now, as he took the bag from Kirsty and shoved it into the cupboard under the sink, Finn Taylor flashed into his mind again, Finn Taylor coming back to consciousness in the shed…

Why hadn’t they called an ambulance? How could they have just left him there to die?

He slumped against the cupboard. ‘We have to be sure that this is what we want to do. This is our last chance to confess. If we dig him up and re-bury him somewhere else, we’re compounding what we’ve already done, big time. We can’t say it was spur of the moment. How’ll they spin it in court? The Hendriksens brazenly assisted with the search for Finn and then that same night they dug up his body and–’

‘We can’t confess to it. We can’t go to prison.’

For a long moment, they stared at each other. How on earth had they come to this?

‘We have to do it, then. Tonight. We have to dig him up and dispose of him properly.’

20

Max went to bed at 11:30, and they left it another half hour to make sure he was asleep before donning waterproof overtrousers and coats and gloves in the utility room. Then Bram retrieved the bag of bleach from the cupboard under the sink.

Kirsty put a hand on his arm. ‘What if the Taylors hear the car on the track?’

Those poor, poor people!

He took