Читать книгу The Killer Inside - Cass Green, Cass Green - Страница 17

The first thing I did, half asleep, was flail an arm under the bed, still programmed to reach for that baseball bat of my youth. But as I properly woke up, I leaped out of bed so fast I cracked my knee – the other, non-injured one – against the bedpost. Swearing, I stumbled out of the room in the T-shirt and boxers I slept in, then crashed down the stairs, almost falling on the way.

Bursting into the living room, I couldn’t see anything unusual, so I walked into the kitchen, wincing at the cold tiles beneath my bare feet. The cold air, laced with rain, was the first thing I noticed, right before I almost stood on the broken glass.

The brick lay in the middle of the kitchen floor. Standard red house brick. My first, strange, thought, was that would have come from the house a few doors down that was currently having a loft conversion. But who would do this?

‘Oh my God.’ Anya was behind me now, her face ashen.

‘Right?’ I said, my jaw tight. I was suddenly picturing Lee Bennett and his smirking face. As if on cue, my grazed hand throbbed and I discovered I was clenching my fist.

Could it really be him? Surely not?

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m calling the police.’

‘Wait!’ said Anya, grabbing hold of my arm. Her hand felt hot against my goose-pimpled skin. ‘And tell them what?’ she added, her face creased with disapproval. ‘That a bunch of kids threw something through the window? What do you expect them to do? Send in Special Branch?’

‘What if—’ then I bit off the end of the sentence.

‘What?’

I felt stupid even saying it out loud.

‘What if it’s that Bennett bloke from school?’ I said, with heat. ‘What if he tried to knock me off my bike too?’

She gave me a strange look. Obviously thought I was being ridiculous. I was probably being ridiculous.

‘Ell,’ she said, ‘if it’s him, then I think you’d need more evidence before you start accusing him.’ I was surprised, having expected her to dismiss my paranoia.

She went on, gently placing her hand on my arm. ‘But look, you know how stretched the police are round here. You’ve seen the same reports I have. Let’s just assume it was kids and get the window fixed, yeah?’

I hesitated, knowing she was right. The local paper had been covered in screaming headlines a few weeks back about the low rates of arrest for robberies around here. Apparently, the police had almost stopped investigating minor crimes like that. This wasn’t even that serious. I had no real reason to think Bennett was behind this anyway. I was probably putting two and two together and coming up with a paranoid five.

Anya left the room, coming back in with my trainers in her hand. She had her sandals on now.

‘Well, we can sit here and wait with the wind blowing through the window, or we can clear it up and sort out a glazier.’

We got to work.

The glazier took hours to come. I insisted Anya go back to bed, which she reluctantly agreed to, then set up camp in the living room, with my iPad on my lap and the sound turned low.

It took no time to find Lee Bennett’s Facebook page. It was pretty much exactly what I’d expected. Selfies with his shirt off; posts with such gems of wisdom as ‘Mourinho really has fucking lost it now. Time to go’ and a couple of pictures with Tyler in them, mainly at football matches. He hadn’t made much effort over his settings, so I delved back a bit until I found some with a woman in them.

She was blonde, and delicate-looking with a pointy chin and large eyes. She and Bennett together, clearly on holiday, with tall cocktails, tans, and lots of flesh on show. Only one with her and Tyler, where he was sitting on her lap on a train and clearly reaching for something out of shot.

The thought of anything happening to Anya caused a tight feeling in my throat, not unlike the sensation just before you throw up. What if, for whatever reason, he was going after me and putting my wife in danger? He thought he knew me. Maybe he was incubating some perceived slight based on mistaken identity.

I must have dozed a little because when my phone started to ring from the floor next to me, I leapt from the chair in shock. It was the glazier, telling me he was outside.

It was almost four thirty am when he was finally done. He was a taciturn Eastern European man, who had barely said a word the whole time he was here. I presumed he was usually called out to deal with robberies and the aftermath of fights in bars. I was a bit surprised to discover that all he was prepared to do was board up the thing. Seems you had to pay all over again to have the actual window replaced, at a sensible hour.

He was probably wondering why we didn’t patch the window up ourselves, just for the night. But there was no way we could have gone back to sleep; it wasn’t a huge window, but it was quite big enough to allow someone in who had any kind of malign intent. I had, after all, hoped my days of sleeping with a baseball bat next to the bed were long gone.

Anyway, I didn’t imagine the man was complaining, judging by the eye-watering amount of money he charged before I was wearily able to send him on his way.

In the bedroom, Anya was sleeping deeply and making small, endearing sounds through her nose. I climbed into the bed, desperate to warm my frozen limbs against her body, but I knew it would wake her up. One of us might as well get some sleep on this miserable night. So, I forced myself to keep away from her sleeping form, huddling into the duvet, trying not to think about how soon it would be before I had to get up again.

I reached for sleep, telling myself to clear my mind. I counted down in eights from four hundred, a trick I’d read on some website for insomnia, and got all the way beyond zero, but my mind still buzzed and sparked like a faulty strip light. I kept thinking about Lee Bennett, and Anya’s weird mood lately.

Almost inevitably, however much I tried to yank them back to the present, I found my thoughts drifting back in time.

Mum, sitting in her favourite chair, fags on one arm and a glass of lager on the table next to her, gusts of husky smoker’s laugh at The Vicar of Dibley.

Our windows had got broken a couple of times, on the estate. But we didn’t summon twenty-four-hour glaziers who charged two hundred quid an hour. We boarded it up until a man who knew a man came and sorted it as a special favour to Mum.

When the alarm went off, it felt as though I’d only been asleep for minutes. Parts that hadn’t ached previously now hurt – elbows, the other knee, and, weirdly, my neck. Anya had to leave early to get into London and when I came out of the shower she was almost ready to leave. She was drinking a cup of coffee and staring out of the window.

She was dressed in a silky blouse and black trousers, her glossy red hair in a ponytail and a slash of bright red lipstick standing out against her pale, freckled skin. For about the millionth time I wondered what on earth I did right to end up with someone like her.

It was only after she had gone that I remembered my broken bike. I’d intended to leave with her and get her to drop me at school. I didn’t know anything about buses here. It took a good half an hour to walk and I was meant to be in early today for the weekly staff meeting.

I was sweating profusely by the time I got to school.

The meeting was almost over as I came into the staffroom and I caught Zoe’s eye. She pulled a doomy face and sliced a finger across her neck.

‘Elliott,’ said Jackie Dawson, our head teacher. ‘So glad you could join us.’

I smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry. I had an accident on my bike.’

I knew it was a mistake the second the words left my lips because I saw Jackie’s eyes sweep over my sweaty, but clean, light blue shirt and grey trousers. I didn’t look remotely like a man who had just taken a tumble onto a road.

‘I mean,’ I added quickly, ‘I came off it last night and, er, it took me longer to get to school this morning.’ I found myself holding up my scratched palms as proof.

Jackie liked me, but for some reason this morning her expression was cooler than I would have expected. She nodded after a moment and said, ‘Okay, well I’m sorry to hear that. But can we have a quick word before you go off to your class?’

‘Sure,’ I said and something uneasy twitched inside me.

Meeting over now, staff scattered to collect belongings and down the dregs of drinks.

I followed Jackie to her office, which was down a corridor in a part of the school. She gestured for me to close the door and my worry increased.

Jackie had been the head here for ever, as far as I could tell. Late fifties with curly brown hair, she had a mumsy softness about her appearance that belied how tough she really was.

‘I won’t keep you, Elliott,’ she said. ‘But I have to tell you that a parent has made a complaint against you.’

I let out a heavy sigh.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I bet I can guess who. Tyler Bennett’s dad, by any chance?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Look,’ I went on, leaning forward in my seat. ‘It really was nothing. This guy just took against me, I think.’ I paused. ‘Didn’t like the cut of my jib.’

Jackie was blank-faced. ‘He said you pushed Tyler and then you were rude to him.’

A hot blast of outrage. ‘That’s ridiculous!’ I said. ‘I didn’t even touch Tyler.’

As I said it, I remembered this wasn’t strictly true. But it was such a gentle push to his shoulder, so it hardly counted.

‘Are you sure?’ said Jackie, her expression now softer. She wasn’t enjoying this any more than I was.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Absolutely. It’s something and nothing.’ Part of me wanted to tell her about the bike incident and the brick. But that just made Bennett’s allegation sound as though it had more merit, so I kept quiet.

She looked relieved. ‘I knew it would be, Elliott, but unfortunately we have to follow procedures, as you know, when this happens. I’ll get you to write up exactly what occurred and I’m going to have to inform LADO too.’ She was referring the Local Authority Designated Officer, appointed to look into any issues to do with safeguarding.

This was such bullshit. What a waste of time for everyone concerned.

Trying to quash the weariness I was feeling from my voice, I said, ‘Of course. I’ll get onto it.’

I had a strong desire to slink out of the office and go straight home but I forced myself to head down to my classroom. My hands were throbbing and my back hurt. Today was not shaping up well so far.

Halfway down the corridor I saw Zoe, who made that face again.

‘You okay?’ she said.

‘Yeah. Tell you about it later.’

I got my class started on their English project, which this term was all tied up with a Viking theme, hence the visit to the museum. They were writing letters to their families at home as Viking settlers.

Ryan Reece, the class wag, shouted out, ‘Sir? Do Vikings rape and pillinge?’ to which I gently put him right on the word ‘pillage’ and got round any tricky issues by telling them that some historians felt their bad boy reputation had been exaggerated a little.

It was hard to focus though, that morning. I kept thinking about the complaint that Lee Bennett had made. Writing it all out was just going to be a drain on my time. And what for? It was such a pointless sort of disagreement, over nothing. I was angry with myself too. I knew that if I hadn’t been sarcastic with him, he wouldn’t have taken such grave offence.

It was something that used to occasionally get me in trouble at school, this need to make the smart comeback, both with teachers and other pupils. I knew that I did it, yet somehow I still never managed to rein it in. This was the first time I’d had a complaint like this though.

While the class had a rare five minutes of quietly getting on with their work, I opened a document and started to make a note of what had happened yesterday morning. I felt uneasy when I remembered what I said to Jackie, that I hadn’t physically touched Tyler at all. Was it too late to say so now? I made a decision. I’d include it in the report and deal with the fact that I remembered differently when I gave it to her.

The other thing I intended to do was find out what sort of car Lee Bennett drove. Because if he was in such a strop that he was prepared to knock me off my bike for it, I might have an even greater problem than I first realized.

At the end of the day I lurked in the playground on the guise of checking an outdoor display of bamboo fencing that last year’s upper school had made. Tyler was late coming out and I wondered if he had been given a telling-off as he crossed the playground, all slouch and sad-sack trousers. His thick, pale ankles with pooled off-white socks ended in a pair of non-regulation trainers. He held his trendy but impractical messenger bag so low that it scuffed along the surface of the playground.

I pretended I was looking around but kept one eye on the gate for any signs of Lee. And there he was. Standing just outside and smoking a fag, which he extinguished and chucked onto the pavement. His expression didn’t change when he saw his son, but he rubbed his knuckles on the boy’s head in a way that looked mildly uncomfortable.

They began to walk off towards a side road and I was willing to bet that was where, like many of the local parents, he parked his car. I hurried across the playground to follow them, ignoring another parent’s attempt to catch my attention. I caught sight of Milly, a reception teacher, who was watching me for some reason, but I ignored her too and hurried out of the gate before I lost sight of them.

I was about to dash across the road when a white Range Rover, driving far too quickly, screeched to a halt by the yellow zigzags outside the school gates, about two feet from me.

A woman with oversized sunglasses and even bigger hair was glowering at me over the steering wheel, as if I was the unreasonable person in this scenario.

‘Hey,’ I called. ‘This is a school! You don’t drive like that on this road. You could kill a child!’

She made a ‘wanker’ gesture at me. I crossed the road and I find myself calling, ‘Yeah? Well you too,’ as she drove away.

A couple of parents clucked sympathetically at me, but I was too distracted to respond. I hurried into Caversham Road and cursed when I saw that I had missed them. Two cars were currently having a standoff, not wanting to give way, and there was a lot of angry honking and beeping. I swear half these families lived within a five-minute walking radius. We used to give out badges to reward children for walking to school but then we discovered that a small number were being encouraged to lie about it by their parents on the basis that they were otherwise ‘missing out’.

I quickened my pace just in case they were on the next road up. The pavement was thick with parents, buggies, and children of various ages and so I said, ‘’Scuse me, ’scuse me,’ as I made my way through them.

It suddenly felt imperative that I found them, and I began to run as the pavement became emptier. I turned the corner into the road at the top and almost collided with a man who was leaning against the wall there and making a phone call.

Of course, it was him.

Tyler was standing next to him, kicking at a stone with a scrunched brow of concentration.

Lee Bennett’s eyes widened, and he moved away from the wall with a fluid push from his foot.

‘Call you back,’ he said, then, more aggressively, ‘You looking for someone?’

‘No, I, er …’ My brain went blank. I couldn’t think of a thing to say and my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. ‘I’m just …’ I waved my hand ineffectually as I fought for sensible words. ‘I needed to give a message to a … another parent.’

Bennett swept his arm around in an exaggerated gesture. ‘No one else here, mate,’ he said.

I decided I had nothing to lose. ‘No car today?’

He frowned and pulled his head back a little. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’

Face still burning, I turned away and could hear him say to Tyler, ‘You stay away from him. I don’t like him.’