A Line of Blood (42 page)

‘Want to see any more?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No … It’s … I’m done.’

We thanked the agent, and took her card.

We rested against the low wall in front of our house, neither of us wanting to go in. I was aware again of my wallet, of something not quite right.

‘Scary,’ said Millicent.

‘What?’ I said.

‘That girl. So young, so smart, and
so
fricking confident.’

‘It’s an immoral profession,’ I said.

‘Is it?’ she said. ‘What do we do that’s so much better than that? What do I do? I’m not exactly a force for good.’

‘You help people.’ I slid an arm around her waist.

‘Do I?’ she said.

‘You get letters,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t everybody?’ she said.

‘Do you know what my mother said? When I told her that we didn’t make each other happy?’

‘What?’

‘She said, “see to it that you do”.’

She weighed this for a moment. ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘Not necessarily wrong.’

‘So let’s cut each other some slack. And try to be good to each other. And wait for life to get better, because it will.’

‘So for you it all boils down to that?’ she said.

‘It does.’

‘You’ve got to admit it’s kind of a passive philosophy. Maybe you need to stop just letting things happen to you.’

I kept noticing my wallet: it felt a fraction too thick, a fraction too heavy against my thigh.
Something isn’t right.

I trailed my right hand across the top of my thigh. There was something very wrong about the feel of my pocket. I hooked my thumb inside and felt. Smooth, slick almost, jammed in under my wallet. I stood up slightly, slid in my hand. Drew it out again.
Alex Mercer Esquire
. Copperplate handwriting. A tiny square envelope. I turned it distractedly over and over in my hand.

My unconscious mind understood what my conscious mind did not. I felt the blood pounding in my ears, though I did not yet know why.

‘Not from you, I’m guessing?’ I said at last, holding it up to Millicent.

‘Nope.’

Max, then. Obviously. ‘What does he think he can tell me that’s going to stop me from forgiving you?’

Millicent shook her head.
Surely there’s nothing more.

‘You should open it,’ I said, giving her the envelope. ‘I’m the passive one.’

I’m calm, I thought. This is over. This is done.
Breathe.

She ran her thumbnail along the gummed edge of the envelope, breaking the seal. Five sheets of paper, each with a pencil drawing on one side: the missing pages from Max’s book. She handed them to me, one by one.

On the first was a radio very like Bryce’s, drawn with great accuracy, as if from life. In red ink Max had drawn a heavy forward-sloping line over the radio. On the next page was an old-fashioned electric fire. Max had coloured the heating element of the fire in red ink. The fire, like the radio, was obliterated by a red slash.

I could taste blood in my mouth now. I knew before I saw it what was coming.

On the next page, Max had drawn the Black and Decker iron that we had found in Bryce’s bath. Then he had painstakingly drawn a large green tick that overlapped its lower right corner.

Fuck.

I looked at Millicent, saw the panic rising in her. I wondered if she could read the same panic in me.

On the next page was a three-pin plug, dismantled. The fuse had been removed, and replaced with something made of metal. How skilfully Max had drawn the metallic surface; it seemed to shine dully from the paper.

‘No,’ said Millicent, as if speaking to herself. ‘Please God, no, Max.’

The last page showed the circuit breakers from a fuse box. Bryce’s fuse box, I guessed, drawn in fetishistic detail. Over the breaker on the right Max had stuck a small piece of industrial tape. I ran my finger over the raised edge.

I looked at Millicent. Millicent looked at me, then looked away. She put the drawings into the envelope and handed it to me. She leaned back on to the wall, put the tips of her fingers to her temples, screwed her eyes shut, exhaled heavily. ‘Jesus,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘Please, no.’ She took a very deliberate deep breath, then exhaled noisily again.

‘Wait here,’ I said. I got to my feet, rang the bell of the next-door house.

‘Hello again.’ The agent was surprised to see me. ‘Have you and your wife reconsidered?’

I shook my head. ‘I wonder,’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘I wonder, would it be OK to look in the electric cupboard?’

‘Of course. That’s why I’m here.’

She led me to the area under the stairs. Four panels, flush with each other. She leaned gently in against one of the panels, and it opened. It was dark in the cupboard, but I could see a line of breakers just as Max had drawn.

‘I wonder,’ I said. ‘Do you have a torch?’

‘Just a sec.’

She produced a tiny two-cell flashlight from her inside breast pocket.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Impressive.’

‘Tool of the trade.’ She twisted it on and handed it to me.

These were the breakers in the drawing. There could be no doubt. I held the flashlight to the final breaker on the right. It looked a little different from the others, its surface a little rougher. I looked round at the agent, who was watching me attentively.
What to say?

‘I wonder … What would it cost for us to do this, do you think?’

‘The box? A couple of hundred? But if you mean a full rewire, well, it’s a bit of a piece of string.’

Please, I thought. Turn away.

‘Do you know a good electrician?’

‘I might do.’ She looked at me expectantly, her expression open and friendly.

Please, I thought, look it up on your phone.

‘I could probably ring you with the information. I mean, we aren’t allowed to recommend, but I can pass on details.’

‘OK,’ I said.

Someone knocked. The agent turned towards the front door.

I turned the torch around. I tamped the end of it gently against the breaker on the right. Some slight softening of the blow, almost imperceptible. I felt a resistance too as I drew it away from the breaker. I closed the cupboard, took two steps away. Then I turned the torch over and looked at the base. A tiny smear of adhesive. That was when I knew.

The gloves. The ball of tape.

Millicent was standing at the front door, frowning in at me.

I handed the torch back to the agent, apologised and said that we had to go. My wife and I had a lot of talking to do about the house.

‘What is it, Alex?’ said Millicent, as the neighbour’s door closed on us.

‘We need to go inside, Millicent. We can’t talk about this in the street.’

Millicent nodded.

Arla was drinking orange juice in the kitchen. ‘Hey,’ she said as we came in. ‘Coffee?’

‘Arla, do you know where Max is?’

‘Upstairs. In his bedroom.’

‘Would you check that for me?’ said Millicent.

Arla looked from Millicent to me, and back to Millicent. ‘Want me to ask what’s up?’

Millicent shook her head. Arla shrugged and went upstairs.

‘Those pictures,’ said Millicent, a half-whisper.

I shook my head. ‘Wait.’

‘Then I’m going to fix coffee,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Wait.’

Arla came back downstairs. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘Max is in his room, reading.’

Millicent and I looked at each other. ‘Would you ask him to please come downstairs?’ she said.

‘OK,’ Arla said. ‘Whatever you need.’ She went back upstairs.

‘We can’t talk to him about this, Millicent,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

‘I know,’ she said.

We looked at each other. Millicent looked emptied, exhausted. I badly wanted a cigarette. I wondered if she felt the same creeping nausea that I felt.

‘You and I have to talk,’ I said. ‘Before anything, you and I have to talk.’

‘I know, Alex.’

Millicent went back to making coffee. She didn’t turn to look at Max when he entered the room.

‘Max,’ I said.

‘I came straight home, Dad,’ he said.

‘You were supposed to come back to Dr Å’s,’ I said.

‘I didn’t
say
I would.’ His body was upright, his stance active. He was looking me directly in the eye.

I stifled the urge to run at him, to hold him by his bony shoulders and shake the swagger from him. Instead I turned away.

‘Arla,’ I said, ‘I want you to take Max out for exactly one hour.’

‘All good, Alex. Sure,’ said Arla, sounding anything but sure.

‘Sixty minutes,’ I said. ‘Go now, please.’

Max sloped from the kitchen into the living room. Arla closed the living-room door and said very softly, ‘What’s up, people?’

I looked at Millicent but she carried on making coffee, didn’t turn round.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Later.’

‘OK. All good,’ Arla said.

‘Yes. All good,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much. All good.’

When the front door had slammed shut I went into the living room and looked through the curtain. Max and Arla were walking down the street. Max’s stance was erect and alert, like a terrier on a rat-hunt. I thought Arla looked a little stooped, a little more stressed, a little more
British
than she had when she had arrived. But I was watching her from behind; I could have been imagining it.

I went back into the kitchen.

‘So,’ said Millicent.

‘So?’

‘So it’s kind of a witness statement,’ she said. ‘He’s saying the police were right. That it isn’t suicide.’

‘Hmm,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘It isn’t a witness statement,’ I said.

‘Not strictly,’ she said.

‘Not at all.’

‘What do you mean, Alex?’

‘Millicent, look at me.’

‘I’m looking,’ she said.

‘It’s a confession.’

‘This is no confession.’

‘Millicent …’

‘Max is my son, Alex.’

‘He’s
our
son. And this is his confession to the murder of Bryce.’

‘No. No, you are quite wrong.’

‘Millicent,’ I said, ‘listen to me. I found tape adhesive on the breaker switch in Bryce’s house.’

Millicent stared at me. Then she looked at the floor for a moment, then towards the window. Her eyes flicked as if she were watching a landscape pass by the window of a high-speed train. She looked back at me, looked away for a second, then locked her eyes on mine, searching for something. Finally she looked away and nodded.

There was something broken about her now, something unreachably, unfathomably sad.

For the longest time neither of us spoke. On the stove the water bubbled up through the coffee. Millicent poured us both a cup; then she opened the door into the garden. I followed her out and sat beside her on the love seat under the ivy by the wall.

We drank our coffee silently, watched a flock of starlings mobbing a crow in the sky above our heads. I thought about Max, and wondered what he would be thinking now. I was starting to realise how little I really knew about my son.

Little Max, who had put an end to Millicent’s affair, brutally and with great precision. Max had, I thought, been trying to tell me so for a very long time.
He takes his cues from you.
What did he think of me, that he should do such a thing?

The crow tumbled through the air, dropping to escape the starlings that massed around it, antibodies around a virus.

I watched Millicent as she watched the crow, her dark eyes tracking the predator, the desecrator of nests, as it rose and dipped far above. Her eyes flicked to me for a moment, then flicked back to the birdmass following the crow. ‘What, Alex?’

‘I suppose I was just wondering what your thoughts were.’

‘I have no thoughts right now,’ she said. ‘Although the birds are kind of beautiful. Like a living cloud of anger. You wouldn’t want to be that crow, right?’

‘I suppose.’

I thought of the time Max had found me at the open back door of the neighbour’s house. I remembered what he had said. ‘The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.’ Bryce was the
fucking fucker
. Bryce was
fucking fucked
.

He had spoken with such relish; he must have believed he had done the right thing, believed that the death of the neighbour would make things right between Millicent and me, that we could return to being the little tribe we had once been. I looked over at Millicent.

‘Do you know what Max said to me,
before
we found Bryce?’ I said.

Millicent said nothing, her eyes tracking the cloud of birds, dark eddies against the flawless sky.

‘He said, “Come and see”. And then he took me to see Bryce, dead in the bath.’

Above us the starlings shrieked in outrage, grouped and regrouped around the crow, wave on wave.

‘I know you’re right about Max,’ said Millicent after a time. She looked down, and touched my hand.

‘I don’t want to be right about Max.’

‘I know you don’t, Alex. You’re a good father.’

‘You’re a good mother, Millicent.’

Millicent’s nostril flared. She shook her head. ‘Not so much, not lately.’

The angry cloud shrank to a denser black, and the shrieking intensified. For a moment the crow disappeared.

‘We should go in,’ I said. ‘We really have to talk.’

‘Do you think that crow’s going to be OK?’ said Millicent.

‘It’s a crow,’ I said. ‘So, yes.’

‘I know it’s a crow,’ she said. ‘It’s not like I’m trying to make it a symbol for anything.’

The kitchen was jarringly tidy. We put Max’s notebook and the envelope with the extra pages on the table; then we sat drinking more coffee and staring blankly at the drawings. Radio, fire, iron, plug, breaker. The thought process was so clear, so confidently expressed. Max had made them in the expectation that they would be seen: there could be no doubt about that.

How to kill the neighbour? With a radio? No. With an electric fire? No. With an iron? Yes, perfect. But first I shall have to bypass the fuse in the plug, and disable the breaker circuit.

I picked up the book and looked at the pages that showed the neighbour in the bath. Bryce alive; Bryce dead. The space between was nothing more than a page turn, a second at most.