Blood Guilt (9 page)

After soaking in the
bath, Harlan towelled himself down, dressed and returned to the living-room. He
inhaled the scent of cooking, and his stomach growled. Like a moth to a flame,
his gaze was drawn to the photos of Tom. After a moment, he was amazed to
realise he was smiling. “Beautiful, isn’t he?” said Eve. Harlan turned and saw
that she was watching him intently from the kitchen doorway, as if trying to
gauge his reaction to the photos.

“He’s the most
beautiful thing I ever saw.” There was still sadness in Harlan’s voice, but no
trace of the old bitterness.

Eve’s features relaxed.
She approached Harlan and stood close enough that he could smell her wine-sweet
breath, studying his face as if she’d never seen it before. “I used your
razor,” Harlan said, dry-mouthed, restraining an urge to grab her and crush her
to him. “I hope you don’t mind.” 

Eve shook her head.
Hesitantly, she reached to stroke his cheek. “The food won’t be ready for a
little while,” she said, as he shuddered at her touch.

He opened his mouth to
reply, but before he could do so she kissed him. He kissed her back, hard. The
sensation was familiar, yet new at the same time. Blood pounding in his head
and groin, he ran his hands up and down her back. Urgently fumbling at buttons
and buckles, they undressed each other. Then they were on the floor, limbs
entwined, hips grinding, rushing towards a simultaneous orgasm. Afterwards,
they held each other close for a long while. When they finally drew apart,
Harlan saw that there were tears in Eve’s eyes.

“What’s the matter?” he
asked softly.

“Nothing,” she said,
turning her head away as if embarrassed.

“Tell me.”

“It’s just I haven’t
felt anything like that since, well, since we were first together.” Eve stood
up and pulled on her underwear. “I’d better check on the spaghetti.”

Harlan stretched out
naked on the rug, his body suffused with an almost floating sense of
relaxation. It was as though, for a brief time at least, Eve had drawn all the
guilt out of him and absorbed it somewhere deep inside her. She returned with a
tray loaded with two bowls of pasta and crusty bread. They ate on the rug,
Harlan pounding his food back as if there was no tomorrow. Eve laughed when he
asked if there was anymore, and fetched him a second helping. When he was
finished, he rested back against the sofa and sighed contentedly. He would’ve
liked nothing better at that moment than to curl up in bed with Eve and drift
off to sleep. “God, I’ve missed this,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too,
Harlan. More than I ever thought I could.” The tears were back in Eve’s eyes.
She swiped them away and cast him a glance, half hopeful, half fearful. “So
what happens now?”

What happens now?
It
was a question that tore away Harlan’s thin layer of contentment, gripped him
by either hand and pulled in opposite directions. On the one hand, he
desperately wanted to be with Eve. On the other, he didn’t know whether he
could allow himself to be with her. It wasn’t simply that he was an infertile
ex-con with zero career prospects – although that was a big part of it. It was
the guilt. Already he could feel it creeping back over him like a vine. Soon
the weight of it would be enough to drag him, and maybe Eve too if she was with
him, back down into a pit of self-loathing and despair. He would’ve rather
swallowed the tumbler of sleeping-pills than do that to her again. He had to
climb out from under the guilt. But he couldn’t do it by himself. He needed
help. And the only person who could help him was the person who hated him most
in the world – Susan Reed. He didn’t expect forgiveness, but he hoped that if
he helped get her son back, she would ease his burden enough to let him have a
life.

Harlan was reluctant to
explain the way he felt to Eve, knowing his words would cut deep. Bitter
experience had taught him that concealing his feelings wasn’t an option either,
though. He sat trying to work up the nerve to put his thoughts into words, but
when he eventually opened his mouth all that came out was a lame, “I don’t
know.” He dropped his gaze. Suddenly conscious of his nakedness, he started
pulling on his clothes.

“Why don’t we go to
bed?”

Harlan looked at Eve
uncertainly. A few minutes earlier, he wouldn’t have hesitated to go along with
her suggestion, but with so many conflicting thoughts and feelings battling for
space inside him he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. “We don’t have to talk,”
she continued. “We can just hold each other and forget the world for a while.”

“Forget.” Harlan said
the word with a sigh of longing. “Okay.”

Eve took Harlan’s hand
and led him to bed. He nestled into the soft, clean-smelling sheets with her
head on his shoulder and her leg crooked over his, feeling the heat of her
breath against his skin. At first, her breathing was a little shallow and her
body occasionally spasmed – she’d always suffered from hypnic jerks when tense.
After a while, though, he felt the heaviness of sleep overtake her. He watched
her and tried to exist only in that moment, but it wasn’t possible. In the end,
he gently disentangled himself from her, gathered up his clothes, went into the
living-room and switched on the television to check for any breaking news.
There was none. The promised press conference hadn’t yet occurred.

Harlan’s phone rang. It
was Jim. Heart thumping, wondering if this was going to be the call that
changed everything, he answered his phone. “What’s happened?” he asked, his
voice eager but apprehensive.

“Our man came out of
his coma last night,” Jim said. “His name’s Carl Gallagher. He’s thirty-two
years old and a real piece of work. He’s got a record for breaking and
entering, GBH, and, get this, the statutory rape of a fifteen-year old girl. He
also has warrants out on him for a string of armed robberies in the city.”

“So it was him. He took
Ethan.”

“He’s denying any
involvement.”

“Of course he is. They
always do. But he did it, right? I mean, what other reason could a scumbag like
him have for cruising Ethan’s street in the middle of the night?”

“He says he was
visiting a girlfriend, a married woman. He cruised the street several times to
make sure her husband wasn’t home.”

“Does his story check
out?”

“Yes.”

“What about forensics?”

“We’ve searched Gallagher’s
car, and we’re still searching his last known address, but so far we haven’t
turned up one scrap of physical evidence to connect him to Ethan.”

Harlan rested his head
against his clenched fist, disappointment coursing through him. “Where’s Gallagher
been hiding out these past few weeks?”

“He’s been sleeping in
his car, moving from place to place to avoid detection.”

“What was he doing at
the church?”

“He was going to rob
the donation box.”

It was the answer
Harlan had expected. As far as he could see, there were no holes in Gallagher’s
story, no unanswered questions. The lead was a dead end, which meant his life
remained a dead end. He ground his knuckles into his forehead in frustration.
“Thanks for letting me know, Jim.”

“No problem. I don’t
give a toss what Garrett says, you deserve it after what you did.”

“Have you got any other
leads?”

“You know I can’t tell
you that, Harlan.”

There was a weariness
in Jim’s voice that answered Harlan’s question well enough. “You haven’t, have
you?”

Jim was silent a
moment, then he admitted, “We’ve got shit-all. Unless we get a lucky break, I
can see this one going on and on.”

On and on
.
Harlan grimaced as the words echoed like a bell inside his head.
On and on
,
like being trapped in waking nightmare. Without knowing what happened to Ethan,
there could be no funeral for him, no closure for his family, no time to grieve
or heal. All there could be was uncertainty and pain. The thought of it was
almost too much to bear.

Harlan tried to say
goodbye to Jim, but his throat was closed up so tight the words wouldn’t come.
He hung up and lay back on the sofa, eyes closed. He wasn’t floating anymore,
he was falling, plunging helplessly into darkness. He jerked upright at the
sound of Eve calling to him from the bedroom. He couldn’t let her see him in
this state. He had to get out of there. Pulling his clothes on as he went, he
rushed out the front door.

Chapter
7

For days Harlan
hermited himself away in his flat, ignoring phone calls and knocks at his door,
venturing outside only when he ran out of food and to report to his case
officer. He didn’t watch the news anymore – hearing about the police’s
continued lack of progress only made him feel his helplessness with an even
more oppressive weight. He spent most of his time in bed seeking the blankness
of sleep, or sitting staring out the living-room window at a world he was in,
but wasn’t part of. He could see no way forward, no way back. He was at a dead
end, stuck in a morass of confused thoughts and emotions. What to do? What to
do? Sometimes he’d jerk awake clutching his head as if to keep it from
exploding.

After maybe a week –
he’d started to lose track of time – Eve came knocking. It wasn’t the first
time she’d tried to contact him. His phone was full of messages from her,
asking and then pleading with him to ring her back. “Harlan, are you in there?”
she called.

Harlan approached the
door, but made no reply.

“Please speak to me,
Harlan. You don’t have to open the door. Just let me know you’re okay.”

Harlan’s face creased
into lines of distress. It hurt him to hear Eve sounding so worried. But still
he said nothing.

“I’m not angry with
you,” she continued. “I understand why you left like that the other day. I’ve
spoken to Jim. I know how much it must’ve hurt you to find out the man you
caught wasn’t the one who took Ethan Reed.”

“Please go away,”
Harlan murmured, barely audible.

“I’m not leaving until
you speak to me.” Eve’s voice was as resolute as it was concerned. “Do you hear
me, Harlan? I don’t care if I have to stand here all night.”

Harlan knew she meant
it. She could be as stubborn as him when she wanted to be. That was one of the
reasons they’d worked so well together. “Please go away,” he repeated louder,
his tone apologetic.

He heard Eve draw a
breath of relief. “If that’s what you really want, I will. But not until you
tell me why.”

“You don’t need me in
your life, Eve.”

“Why don’t you let me
be the judge of what I need.”

“I’ll just end up
hurting you again.”

“Better that than going
through life feeling nothing, which is what I’ve felt this last four years.”

“You wouldn’t say that
if you could feel what I feel.” Harlan’s words came in a pained, weary breath.
“I’d give anything to feel nothing.”

“But then you wouldn’t
be you, and I wouldn’t love you like I do.”

Harlan closed his eyes,
pressing his forehead against the door. It made him want to weep with joy to
hear Eve say she loved him, but it also made the guilt flare like a furnace in
his heart. How could he let himself love and be loved when Susan Reed and her
family were enduring such torment? Bile rose up his throat at the thought of
him enjoying himself while Ethan, if he was still alive, was subjected to God
knows what kind of horrors.

As if reading his
thoughts, Eve said, “It seems to me that you want to punish yourself because
you think you’re somehow to blame for what’s happened to Ethan. But you’re not
to blame.”

“How do you know? If I
hadn’t killed his father, he might not have been taken.”

“Maybe that’s true,
maybe not. But either way, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve paid for what
you did.”

“I’ve paid my debt to
society, but not to them, not to Susan Reed and her kids.”

“You’ve done everything
you could possibly do to try and get that boy back.”

“Have I? I don’t know.
Maybe there’s something else I can do.”

Eve released an
exasperated sigh. “If there was, you’d be out there doing it.”

She was right, Harlan
knew. He’d racked his brain for some other line of inquiry to follow, but there
wasn’t one. He ground his forehead against the door in frustration.

“You have to forgive
yourself for what happened, Harlan,” continued Eve, “because there’s no way of
going back and changing it.”

Harlan shook his head,
muttering with savage self-recrimination, “I can’t forgive myself.”

“If you don’t, you’ll
throw away any chance of happiness we’ve got.”

“You don’t need me to
be happy, Eve.”

“There you go again.
Telling me what I need. Believe me, Harlan, I’ve tried to move on from you. I
thought I had done, until I heard your voice. Christ knows why after everything
you’ve put me through, but the fact is I need you. I need to be with you.”