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

a deep breath. ‘If they hear the car and ask about it later, we can say one of us couldn’t sleep and went for a drive.’

‘Okay.’ Kirsty nodded. ‘But if they’re still out there searching… once we start digging, if someone finds us, there’s no way we could explain it. And once we get it – him – out of there…’

‘Well, what’s the alternative?’ Bram snapped.

Kirsty lifted her shoulders helplessly. ‘Maybe we should wait another hour or so? So it’s less likely anyone will be out there?’

‘Okay.’ Bram put down the bag and took her in his arms. ‘Thank you for doing this. Thank you for – for helping me to – Oh Christ, Kirsty! I’m a murderer!’

‘No, you’re not! You were terrified!’

‘But I wasn’t – not at that point. I was angry. I wanted to hurt him.’

She hugged him close. ‘You were protecting us.’

They took off the waterproofs and crept through the house to the Room with a View, where they lay without speaking on the sofas. Bram must have drifted off to sleep, because soon Kirsty was shaking his arm. ‘It’s half past one. Let’s do it.’

They put the waterproofs back on and walked in silence to the shed, where they numbly set to work by torchlight. Kirsty sloshed diluted bleach over the floor and walls while Bram took everything out of the boxes – tins of paint, old plant pots, wood stain, ice cream tubs containing recycled bits of string and screws and nails – and stacked it on the floor and on the workbench. Then he ripped up the boxes and bagged them. They’d stop at a wheelie bin on the way back and dispose of them. Some of the cardboard was stiff with dried blood.

All the time he was working, he kept expecting a policeman to loom up in one of the darkened windows, or Andrew Taylor to suddenly appear in the doorway.

When he’d finished, he took the bin bags down to the stream and left them in Max’s car, which was parked on the other side of the collapsed bridge.

Then he returned to the shed.

‘Okay. I think we’re done here,’ he whispered to Kirsty. ‘How much bleach is left?’

‘Enough.’

Bram got the spade and the bleach and they walked together, again in silence, to the vegetable patch. He glanced at his phone. It was 2:40 and already the sky was lightening. Sunrise would be at about five o’clock, but it would be almost fully light long before then.

‘We’d better hurry,’ he hissed.

Kirsty nodded.

But for a long moment, they just stood there, looking at the veg patch.

Okay. Don’t think about it. Just dig.

He sank the spade into the soil and immediately hit something soft that gave under it. God. He wasn’t even two feet down. The sniffer dogs would have found him immediately.

It took a surprising amount of time, though, with just one spade between them, to remove all the soil from the tarpaulined body. Whenever he was digging, Bram kept having to stop, sure he’d heard a sound, a stealthy footstep. He kept pausing, freezing, ears straining. But it was just the many normal, small sounds of the night – a branch scraping against another branch, the wind in the trees, a bird flapping.

‘We need the barrow,’ Kirsty whispered. ‘And scissors to cut the string round the tarp. And more string to tie it back round him again once we’ve… once we’ve…’

Bram didn’t want to finish the thought, but, ‘Bleached him,’ he managed to get out.

Kirsty swallowed.

Bram nodded. ‘I’ll get all that.’

He made his way back to the shed. He could see the fuzzy outline of Henrietta the goose in the long grass. He imagined her staring at him, and into his head came an image of himself as a child, innocently playing next to Henrietta in the garden at Primrose Hill, chatting to her as he constructed one of his elaborate villages from twigs and leaves, little thinking that one day –

But he couldn’t go down that road or he’d lose it.

Another dreadful thought came to him: what if the police had decided to start the search with the sniffer dogs at dawn, when humidity would be high? The optimum time to pick up a scent trail? What if they rolled up when Bram and Kirsty were manhandling Finn Taylor’s body into the boot of the Polo?

Well, there was nothing he could do about that possibility. He concentrated on locating a pair of scissors and some string, and dropped them into the barrow, which he wheeled back to the veg patch. Between them, they hauled Finn out of the earth, another surprisingly difficult task. It seemed all wrong, that the boy had been under the ground, in the suffocating earth.

He’s dead. He’s dead.

There was no need now for the torch. The night was fast retreating. They needed to get this done! They unwrapped the tarpaulin and removed the mask and sloshed bleach over it and the body, turning Finn so they could do both sides of him, almost like – Bram gagged as the thought occurred to him, and he had to turn away, take a step away.

Like he was a piece of meat.

He swallowed bile. ‘We have to do this,’ he muttered, his hands shaking as they spread out the tarp and pulled him onto it, threw in the mask and tied the tarp back around him with the string. Finally, they hefted him into the barrow and returned the soil to the hole.

‘If the dogs show an interest, and the cops ask why the soil’s been all dug up,’ Bram whispered, ‘we can say the veg patch was poisoned with weedkiller and we were digging it over to disperse the poison.’

‘But that doesn’t make sense!’

‘So? We’re ignorant townies.’

Bram hefted the barrow and they made their way to the stream, waterproofs creaking as they walked, the sound horribly loud in the still, cool, pre-dawn air. The night was melting away, the sky no longer black but an ever-lightening blue. He could see the