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

As well as the mud, there were heather roots to negotiate, black, slippery trip hazards crossing the path, but David didn’t break stride.

‘David,’ said Bram in the end, exasperated. ‘I thought you wanted to talk?’

He turned. ‘Aye, but not where any bastard could hear us.’

Bram gestured at their surroundings. There wasn’t a sound except for the wind in the tops of the tall pines. Not a soul around. ‘Isn’t this private enough for you?’

David, hands on hips in Henry VIII pose, scanned the path behind and in front of them, and nodded. ‘Okay.’ He took his phone from his pocket. ‘Max wanted to help me out. See if he could find something that would exonerate me. You’d said the cameras were stolen a couple of days before the night Finn was killed, although, weirdly, you didn’t report this to the police. Max decided to see if they’d picked anything up. Maybe someone suspicious hanging around. Maybe one of Finn’s dodgy mates. The real killer. Something that might get DI Cromer off my back.’

Bram had gone cold. ‘But – with the cameras gone, how could Max check any footage that might have been on them?’

‘The cloud.’ David’s unwavering gaze seemed to bore into Bram’s head. ‘He looked on the cloud.’

Bram couldn’t speak.

He and Kirsty weren’t tech-savvy. They tended to leave any IT stuff to Max who, like most of his generation, seemed to have absorbed his knowledge of it through osmosis. Bram hadn’t even thought about cloud storage. He remembered, now, Max burbling on, when Bram had moved the cameras from the wood to the house, about how this meant they were now in range of the Wi-Fi, but Bram hadn’t thought through what that meant.

It meant that all the footage taken near the house had been stored, through the Wi-Fi, on the cloud.

Wordlessly, David handed him his phone.

On the screen were infrared images of two figures, one holding the other, moving in a sort of macabre dance, the shorter of the two shaking the other, whose floppy head was flung back, again and again, to bounce –

To bounce off the wall of the shed.

It was Bram, bashing Finn’s head against the hose bracket.

As he watched, Finn flopped to the ground and Bram stood looking down at him, then stooped and put his hands to Finn’s head. Not to try to help him, not to try to staunch the blood, but to roughly pull off the mask. Finn’s face immediately glowed brighter as the mask was removed, and the residual heat gave the mask in Bram’s hand form, briefly, a dull orange face with dark circles for eyes and a dark leering mouth, before the heat dissipated in the night air and only a ghostly imprint of it remained.

Bram watched as the glowing alien version of himself moved off screen, and all that was left was the glowing shape of Finn lying on the ground. Glowing as brightly as ever.

Then Bram was back with another person.

Kirsty.

The two figures dragged the third into the shed.

Bram continued to stare at the screen as the glowing white and yellow shapes of himself and Kirsty – glowing brighter now, for some reason – left the shed and disappeared.

It was the end of the clip.

David snatched back the phone and switched it off.

‘I – we–’ Bram swallowed. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him!’

‘Keep your bloody voice down!’

‘He came for me. You must have seen, on the footage just before the bit where – where I’m pushing him back against the shed – he came for me. And then… I lost it. But I didn’t mean to kill him.’

Max had seen this. He’d gone onto the cloud hoping to see some random thug prowling about, and been confronted with this. His own father battering the boy to death, and then both his parents concealing the body in the shed… He must have found the footage today and fled the house, gone to his grandad.

Oh, Max!

‘You killed him,’ spat David. ‘And then you dragged Kirsty into it, you made her an accessory, you made her help you hide that lad’s dead body in the shed and then – what? You buried him in the veg patch? Then decided to dump him further afield?’ He snorted. ‘Talk about bloody incompetence! And then you let Max be arrested! You let me be arrested! No – you engineered my arrest!’

‘All we did was show the police the petcam footage,’ Bram got out.

With a look of disgust, David turned on his heel and marched off down the path.

Bram ran after him. ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to the police? Is Max – Is he all right?’

‘Of course he’s not all right!’ David flung over his shoulder, not stopping, not slowing down.

Oh God.

Bram followed him. The path wound into a thicket of trees where it was difficult to see the path, the trees blocking out the low evening light, and Bram slipped and fell onto his side. By the time he’d picked himself up, David had disappeared.

Oh God, oh God!

He had to persuade David not to go to the police. And he’d have to talk to Max, explain what had happened.

He scrambled down the path where it headed off downhill, and then he was coming out of the trees onto a narrow tarmacked road. He could see David ahead, striding off into the gloom cast by tall pines. He hurried after him, but as they came in sight of a house, David turned to snarl: ‘Keep your mouth shut!’

So they kept walking along the road in tense silence. On one side was a band of trees beyond which Bram got glimpses of fields. Where were they? Did this road lead back to the car park? In one way he wanted this nightmare of a walk to end, but in another he wanted it to go on forever because what was waiting at the end of it? An excruciating talk with Max. With Linda,