Neil White 3 Book Bundle

He had to think like a lawyer. There is always an alternative theory.

He should call the police and brazen it out, he knew that. But they would spot the missing knife, and so they would guess that it had been used. And he would have to stay with them, to tell them what he saw. They might even ask where he had been? He couldn’t just tell them that he couldn’t remember. If he tried to make something up, someone else somewhere might contradict it, and then he would be a liar. They would ask about the business, because that is what tied him to Amelia, but what could he say? That they were losing money and surviving on an overdraft, and that Amelia blamed him for the partnership failings, that their relationship was not always harmonious? And then the rest would come out. How he looked at her when she was in the office, and the more drunk he got, the more it was a leer. How he had acted strangely earlier in the morning. Vomiting in public. Sleeping on the office floor. Bloodstains on the cord on the Venetian blind, which would be Amelia’s blood, because it came from the knife. It will start to add up against him, and so they’d lock him up just so that they can have a poke around. And what would they find? The clothes he wore the day before in the washer, matched against the CCTV from the court waiting room, and the knife missing from Amelia’s knife block in his dishwasher. It would be like writing his own prison sentence.

Charlie was being selfish, he knew it, but he couldn’t bring Amelia back. He had to look out for himself, because they wouldn’t get any nearer to finding out who killed her if the police focus was all on him.

Except that what he was about to do could look even worse, because if he just left and someone remembered him through the twitch of a curtain, they would want to know why he hadn’t called it in. Charlie felt like the last piece on the chessboard, the white king being pursued around the board, with no winning move possible but not willing to give it up.

He looked at Amelia and told her that he was sorry, that he hoped she would forgive him if it turned out that his religious views had always been wrong, and that she was looking down on him. Then he backed out of the room.

Charlie was about to go to the back door when he heard a car pull up outside.

He went to the window, stepping round Amelia. As he looked through, he saw the two men in suits who had been at the office the day before, the private payers, emerging from a silver Audi. What were they doing here? They were clients, Amelia had said that.

They were talking to each other, looking around, and then they set off towards the front door.

Charlie panicked. He looked down at Amelia, and then back at the two men getting closer along the path. Did they have something to do with it?

He bolted for the back garden, the patio door opening with a swish. There was a knock on the door as he ran along the lawn, the pounding of his feet loud in his ears. He scrambled over the fence at the back, and then lay on the floor as he tried to get his breath back. He waited for a shout from one of the neighbours, but it was quiet.

The grass tickled his cheeks, his breaths hot as he panted into the ground. There was the sound of cars in the distance and the loud thump of his heart, and then he heard the clink of the gate. He remembered it from his own walk around the side of the house. They were going in the same way, so would find the same thing that he had. Amelia, dead. Or perhaps they already knew that?

Charlie was trapped. His car was further along Amelia’s street, but he couldn’t go back to it. They would see him. They might even know that it was his car, so would come looking for him. He had to get away from there.

Noises came from the back of the house. Hisses, angry voices.

Charlie started to crawl along the ground, trying to keep his head down. He looked along towards the reservoir and the paper mill, wondering if anyone was watching. There was a path that ran alongside the water and then disappeared into trees before coming out by a grid of terraced streets. If he could get that far, he knew a short cut back to his apartment building.

He crawled quickly so that he could get to a point where he could look natural, as if he was coming from a different direction. He tried not to grunt or shout out whenever his knees hit a stone, and soon he knew that he was out of sight of the house. He straightened and tried to make like he was out for a walk, although he was in a suit and there was a sheen of sweat on his face, putting a gloss to his grey pallor and making the graze on his cheek brighter. None of this was natural, and he knew that people would remember him, because as soon as Amelia’s body was discovered there would be shockwaves in the town. People knew her. That was the way with defence lawyers, because the court stories are what people read in the local paper, and so the defending lawyer gets a name. So they will remember the tall man in a crumpled suit, his hair wild, his face covered in greying stubble, creeping round the house and crawling through the field. He would have to explain why he did nothing, but until then he had to work out what had happened to Amelia. He owed her that much.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Sheldon walked slowly through the streets of Oulton. It seemed quiet to him, even though the streets were busy. People were still curious about the murder, and so the activity around the police station attracted onlookers, those who were grateful to have something to fill their day, just hanging around, sharing cigarettes. But it was as if they knew to stay away from him as he shuffled along, each step taking him further away from the police station, one step nearer to an uncertain future.

The parish church was ahead, dark grey stone with a high Norman-style tower at its centre, square with castellated ridges and a white-faced clock on each side. It had dominated the skyline of the town for five hundred years, from when Oulton was just a small wool trading village and the church served as the religious centre for the surrounding farms. It had drawn Sheldon today, as if he was seeking somewhere quiet to reflect.

The low drone of the traffic was lost immediately as he went inside. Sheldon’s movements echoed and seemed to bounce between the majestic stained-glass windows. He looked up and felt small, insignificant. The ceiling was high and arched, traversed by oak beams, the lines broken by carved rosettes where they intersected, overlooking the black and white checks of the aisle. He let his hand trail over the pews as he went towards the altar, and when he got there, he sat down. He closed his eyes and tried to find some solace in all the years that the church had been there, that his problems meant nothing.

But as he sat on the pew they all came back to him, the deaths, right back to his first, a bony old man found dead in his flat, killed for his pension money, the bravery that had made him carry a gun in wartime spilled over a blood-soaked rug, his life taken away in front of framed pictures of his grandchildren. And so the movie flew forward again, past car crash victims and fights that went too far, once more juddering to a halt at Alice Kenyon, floating lifelessly in Billy’s pool, her hair trailing around her like rags caught on a branch.

Sheldon got to his feet. The church brought him no comfort. For all the years of prayer, he wasn’t sure any had been answered. Good people died, bad people lived. That seemed to be always the way, and Billy’s murder didn’t change that balance. It was a blip. He stepped up to the altar, unsure of what he was doing, but then saw a stone doorway that opened onto steps that would take him upwards in the tower. Sheldon thought of the view, the fields and hills surrounding Oulton, and he had an urge to go up there.

He looked around to make sure no one was watching and then stepped into the tower. As he started to climb, the steps felt suffocating, winding in a tight spiral so that all Sheldon saw as he got higher was more stone, more steps, turning, getting narrower, so that he wondered whether he would reach nothing but a dead-end. But he was wrong. He burst gasping onto the roof, a small square hemmed in by the castellated ramparts of the tower. As Sheldon headed for the wall, he was breathing hard, the effort of the climb making his chest pump hard. Sweat flashed across his forehead, and as he pitched forward, the ground below swayed and blurred.

Sheldon looked forward instead and sucked in clean air as he let the horizon settle down. It was as he imagined. The roll of the hills on the other side of the valley, and the chimneys and terraced streets in the nearby towns. As he looked further, he could see how the green around him turned grey and ugly as the sprawl of Manchester took over.

He was cold. He was wearing just his suit, and although the sun was shining, the exposed tower chilled the wind, so that he folded his arms to try and keep warm. He felt his ribs under his fingers and wondered how they had got there. He knew he hadn’t been eating that well, surviving on sandwiches and microwave meals, but he was surprised. But then as he thought about it, he couldn’t remember his last meal.

Sheldon looked down at his shoes. They were worn and scuffed. He could feel the ground through his soles, cold against his feet.

How had he got to this? Pushed out of the station on forced leave. He had only tried to do what was right, to track down a killer. Why wasn’t that enough?

The view held his attention for a few minutes, the rumbles of a diesel engine reaching him as a bus struggled up a hill. Cars threaded through the town. A train ran along the valley floor, Manchester-bound. The trains will keep running, the people will keep praying, and then his life would get lost in the fade of time, so that nothing about Alice Kenyon would matter anymore. Nothing about him would matter anymore.

Sheldon put his head back and looked up, let the blue sky swirl above him, the view broken only by the occasional wisps of cloud. There was nothing of his life up there, just infinite emptiness. None of the failures, or the obsessions. For a moment, he felt a tight grip around his throat as he realised how his life was turning out. There was no real way forward.

He stepped forward to the wall. He looked ahead and not down, just towards the roofs of distant buildings, and all he had to do was keep on walking. The stones scraped his hands as he lifted his foot and let it settle on the wall, and then the other one, so that he was crouching and the view below opened up in front of him.

The ground was just stone a hundred feet below. As he looked down, he thought he could hear voices telling him to jump, that the ground would end it and bring him peace. But the voices got louder. He looked round again. There was a woman behind him. She was young, with long red hair, her face kind but worried. She looked like Alice.

‘Are you all right?’ she said. She looked scared, a tremble to her voice. ‘I saw you come up. I was at the back of the church.’

He didn’t have the answer to that. He hadn’t seen her. His eyes welled up with tears, or maybe it was just the sharp cut to the breeze.

‘You shouldn’t do what you’re thinking of,’ she said, her voice softer now. She brushed her hair away from her face, the wind sending it into a tangle. ‘Things get better. They always do.’

He swallowed.

‘Why should you care?’ His words came out thick with emotion.

Her hand went to her mouth. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, just to calm herself. When she opened them again, she said, ‘I just don’t want you to do it, not here, not in front of me. Just step down. Please. For me.’

Sheldon looked at her and the young woman reminded him not just of Alice, but also of Hannah, his daughter. He couldn’t let her remember him like this. He wiped his eyes and took a step back so that he was off the wall, level with her again. He looked at the floor for a few seconds and clenched his fists, trying to hold back the tears. But he couldn’t. They rolled down his face, his mouth quivering. He looked at her and said, ‘Thank you.’

His pace was quick as he walked away. She was right. There was so much still to do. He looked back just once, and he saw her watching him leave, her arms folded around her chest.

Sheldon headed swiftly down the stone steps, and when he burst out of the stairway and into the open spaces of the church, it felt like he’d been given another chance.

He ran out of the church and looked towards the town. All he could see were the stone buildings and slate roofs, dark and moody, but they were just facades, because behind those buildings was the rest of the town, and somewhere in there was the killer of Billy Privett. And as Sheldon thought of Billy, he remembered Alice Kenyon – as if he could ever forget her. The thought of the empty days ahead scared him, but of course they didn’t have to be empty. He could fill them. He could keep looking for Alice’s killer. And Billy’s.

As he crossed over the road, he walked with more purpose. He knew where he was going next.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Charlie went straight to his apartment, a long run from Amelia’s house. He was sweating and feeling sick, but speed was more important than appearances. He needed to get in and out quickly without being noticed, knowing that he needed to do something with the knife. Perhaps return it to the knife block and then call the police – provided that the two clients in suits had gone. He knew that was the riskiest option.

He sank to his knees when he got into his apartment, panting hard from the run. All Charlie could hear was the peace and quiet of his home. The hum of his fridge. The sound of the television from the apartment below. He closed his eyes, just to take stock, but his head was filled with the image of Amelia once more. That told him that he had to keep moving.

He went towards the bathroom, but the sight of his living room made him pause when he went past. It was just as he had left it the previous morning, with beer bottles and an empty pizza box. There was just one boozy night between then and now but suddenly it seemed like a different life so that just worrying about some untidiness seemed like bliss.

He went to the bathroom and rinsed his hands and face, not sure what forensic traces he had picked up at Amelia’s, like traces of her blood. He scrambled in the cabinet above the sink for a grooming kit that Julie had bought him a few months earlier, a hint that he had ignored. It had ended up at the back, pushed behind mouthwashes and razor packets. He pulled out the nailbrush and scrubbed his fingers under the hot tap, not sure what he needed to scrape away but feeling that it would be a good idea to do it.

When they were clean, he paused with his hands on the sink, his hair hanging down, sweat dripping onto the porcelain. Once more he thought of Amelia, but he willed himself through it. He didn’t have time for that.

As he looked in the mirror and stroked at his beard, he knew he had to look more respectable, not like a drinker bogged down with worry. Those that look guilty are guilty, experience had taught him that. But guilty of what? That was the problem. He had no idea. He just knew that it would all look bad to an outsider. A shave was a gamble though, because for every second he spent in the bathroom, it was another second with Amelia’s knife in the apartment.

As he held the razor, he thought of the people who might have seen him at Amelia’s house. He needed to look different. It was worth the gamble.

His hand shook, and so he took a few deep breaths to steady the tremble, not wanting to give himself away with nicks and cuts. He watched in the mirror as haggard was slowly replaced by smooth, some remnants of his younger days creeping back as the grey-tinged whiskers ended up in the sink. He couldn’t do anything about the graze though, and it just added to the redness in his cheeks. When he’d finished, he pulled on his other suit, still creased from the weekend, and went to the dishwasher, taking a step back as the steam assaulted him when he opened the door. The knife was there, hot and clean.