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

his arms, guiding them into the sleeves of his T-shirt, his warm cashmere jumper. As she tied the laces of his trainers, she asked him, ‘Did anyone see you and Dad together?’

It was an effort to speak. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘Okay.’ Kirsty took his hands in hers. ‘Everything’s going to be okay. You went to meet Dad at Anagach, but he wasn’t there. You came home and tried calling him. We should do that now. Where’s your phone?’

‘In the car.’

She came back with the phone and made Bram call David and leave a message.

‘And Mum called before, wondering if I’d heard from you. I said the pair of you had probably gone for a drink… I’ll have to call her back. Oh God! I’ll have to say you wandered about for ages looking for him… You forgot your phone so you couldn’t call him…’ She fell silent, staring off. Obviously thinking about Linda.

Bram sobbed: ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

‘He tried to kill you! You’ve nothing to be sorry for!’

‘What are we going to say to Max? What are we going to do? Should we go and get him?’

‘Mum will need to report Dad missing. And then – Bram, I’d like her to come and live with us. Wherever we move to.’

Linda! Oh, poor Linda!

‘Of course.’

‘We’ll need to tell Max about Finn. That you didn’t mean to kill him. We can delete the footage from the cloud. Dad’s phone… The footage was on Dad’s phone, and there’s your confession on there too, but maybe his body will never be found. Or if it is, the phone will be too waterlogged to work.’ A silence. ‘If it does work…’ She caught herself up. ‘But we can only deal with the things we can control. And hope for the best.’ She nodded, and repeated quietly, as if to herself: ‘Hope for the best.’

For two days they lived in a terrible kind of limbo while the police searched for David in Anagach Wood. The sniffer dogs seemed to pick up a trail but then lost it again. Fraser and his mates assisted with the search, as did Bram, Kirsty, Max and Linda. Linda walked the paths through the wood with Bertie and Kirsty, and Kirsty said it was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, pretending to Linda that there was still hope.

When she wasn’t helping with the search, Linda moved about the house like a ghost, hardly speaking, her sightless eyes seeming to accuse Bram whenever she turned to him. Phoebe was unnaturally quiet too, bursting into tears at random moments.

Max, presumably in deference to Linda, was behaving impeccably.

It was like living with a polite stranger.

Bram longed to be able to talk to him about that cloud footage, but if he had supposedly not met David at Anagach Wood, there was no way he could know about it. They had decided that it would be too suspicious to suddenly confess to Max about Finn’s death right after David had gone to meet Bram to show him the cloud footage, so were waiting for Max to bring it up himself. If he didn’t do so soon, though, they would have to broach the subject, regardless.

And then Scott called round to tell them that David’s body had been found, several miles downriver from Grantown. The theory was that David had arrived early for his meeting with Bram, gone off to look at the river in spate, and somehow fallen in.

They needed someone to look at the body and identify it.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Bram at once.

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Linda dazedly.

He had prepared himself for David’s face to be a mess after being bashed about in the water, but, apart from a pasty, doughy appearance and some bruises, it was remarkably unchanged, so much so that Bram could almost imagine his eyes opening, his mouth moving as it framed an accusation, the muscly body propelling itself off the gurney, hands reaching for Bram’s throat –

Linda stood quietly until Bram said, ‘Yes, it’s him,’ and then she asked if she could touch his face. Bram had to turn away at that point. It took all he had to master his emotions, to put his arm around Linda, when she was ready to leave, and speak hollow words of comfort.

That evening, after Linda, numb with shock, had gone early to bed, Max asked if he could speak to Kirsty and Bram, and they all sat down at the kitchen table. Bram’s heart was pounding, but he managed to offer coffee without his voice sounding too strange.

‘No, thanks,’ said Max politely. ‘Dad, could you come and sit down?’

Bram obediently subsided onto a kitchen chair.

‘Did you kill Grandad?’

Time seemed to slow right down. Bram was aware of the fridge chuntering; a weird buzzing in his ears; his own breath filling his lungs.

‘No,’ he said at last.

‘But you did meet him, didn’t you?’ Max’s tone was flat. ‘You know about the cloud footage. You know – you know that I know about Finn. That you killed him.’

Bram nodded. Expelled the air he’d been holding in his lungs.

He tried to explain, and Max heard Bram’s halting recitation in silence, just saying, at the end, ‘I know you wouldn’t have meant to kill Finn, Dad. And I get that you only let them arrest me because you knew they could have no evidence against me. But Grandad… You were going to stitch up Grandad?’

‘Yes, we were,’ said Kirsty. ‘He hit Finn too, Max. It could have been those blows that killed him. And Grandad – he’d killed before and got away with it.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘He killed Owen. My boyfriend when I was at school.’

Kirsty told Max about Owen, and suddenly it was obviously too much. Max jumped up from his chair, sending it crashing back onto the slate floor, and then he was striding across the Walton Room to the front door.

‘Max!’ called Bram.

At the door, Max stopped and turned. His chest was heaving.

Bram ran