Flesh and Blood (5 page)

I wriggled over to squint at the clock. It was twenty past eight – I must have slept right through the alarm. If I didn’t hurry, I’d be late for school.

Jumping up, I checked the view from my window. Bierce Priory looked exactly the same as usual, silent and glowering. A large silver people carrier, a Renault, was sitting on the drive. There was no sign of movement in the house, no faces at any windows. Complete normality.

I hurried into my bathroom. Ten minutes later, I clattered downstairs.

Mum hadn’t left for work yet. She was standing in the hall, talking to a tall woman who was wearing an elegantly cut business suit. The woman had a refined, carefully made-up face, with high cheekbones and a smart black bob.

“Oh, here he is,” chirped Mum, “running late. Come and say hello, Sam.”

My face must have betrayed a certain wariness. The woman stepped forward and held out her hand
to shake. It felt cold and soft, like a recently killed fish. I’d guessed who she was before she said a word.

“Hello, Sam, I’m Doctor Greenhill,” she said in a voice like warm chocolate. “My daughter Emma mentioned she’d met you.”

“Yes,” I said feebly. Did she know I’d been seen last night? Did she know I knew about the dog?

“I was just saying to your mother,” she continued, “I’m so sorry we couldn’t come over and introduce ourselves yesterday. My husband had a function to attend last night. It’s so nice to have new neighbours.”

“Doctor Greenhill says she’ll take us on as patients at her surgery,” chirruped Mum. “Isn’t that lovely?”

Caroline Greenhill shot a glance at Mum. The air of amused condescension on Dr Greenhill’s face made me want to crawl under a stone with embarrassment. Mum was giving me one of her ‘go on, speak up’ looks.

“I like to have a good chat with my new patients, individually,” said Dr Greenhill. “I’ve made appointments for all three of you at the surgery. Yours is immediately after school today, Sam, all right?”

It was such a straightforward statement, so
casually said, and so apparently helpful and caring. It would take me weeks to realize its full meaning.

I might easily have fallen into the trap, but luckily the night’s events had put me on my guard. I wanted to keep my distance from the Priory’s inhabitants, at least for the moment, until I could make some sort of sense out of what I’d seen. I chose my words with care.

“I’m fine,” I said in a low voice. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Just a chat.” Dr Greenhill smiled.

“Just a chat.” Mum smiled.

“I may have to stay late tonight,” I said. “There’s work I have to catch up on.”

“I’m sure you can catch up later. Your mother’s been telling me what a bright boy you are. I’ll expect you at three forty-five.”

I felt a sudden flush of defiance. “I suppose I have been feeling a bit tired,” I said.

“Yes?” said Dr Greenhill. Her head tipped to one side a little.

“Yes, I didn’t get much sleep last night. I heard noises. Strange noises.”

“We didn’t,” said Mum. “What noises?”

“In the middle of the night,” I said.

“I’m afraid our household tends to turn in early,” said Dr Greenhill. “We’re all out like lights. Oh, perhaps you heard our old boiler? The pipes make some dreadful screeches and squeals but we don’t even notice it any more. I’m so sorry if it woke you, it can get horribly loud. We really must have it repaired!” She turned to Mum. “I mustn’t keep you any longer, Ellen. You’ll be late for work.”

“No problem, they can wait for me for once,” she laughed, a little too much. “I’ll tell Richard about his appointment. He’ll be terribly sorry he missed you.”

“Until later, then,” said Dr Greenhill. “I’ll see you at three forty-five, Sam.”

Mum waved at her from the front step as she crossed the street. A blast of cold air whipped into the hallway before Mum came inside.

“Don’t forget that appointment, Sam,” she said, gathering up her stuff for work.

“I’m not going,” I said firmly.

“Don’t be silly,” said Mum mildly. “Of course you should go. I’m going in my lunch hour. It’s very nice of Doctor Greenhill to fit us all in like that. I’m
sure she’s very busy.”

“It was a scream I heard last night, Mum.”

“You’ll hear me scream if you miss that appointment.”

“Seriously! Someone over in that house screamed!”

“You heard what she said,” said Mum. “It’s their pipes. I think if someone had actually screamed, Doctor Greenhill would have noticed, don’t you?”

“I think she did notice,” I said. “She must have noticed. I never said anything about a scream to her, I just said I’d heard a strange noise, and yet she came out with that crap about screeching pipes. As if she knew she needed a cover story. And I never said it was the Priory I heard it come from. She just assumed. She’s hiding something. I don’t know what, but something was going on over there last night. I went out to have a look, and—”

“What? You went out in the night?”

“Yes! To find out who screamed.”

“And did you?”

“No, but there was an injured dog in the Priory grounds. Someone from the house took it back inside.”

“Well, it was the dog that made the noise, then,
obviously. Dogs do howl, you know, especially if they’re injured. Oh, the poor thing! Doctor Greenhill didn’t mention it.”

“Which is also suspicious,” I said. “If your dog hurt itself, why wouldn’t you just say so? Why make up rubbish about heating pipes? Something was going on over there! And someone was at the window, I saw—”

Mum shook her head. “I’ve got to get to work, Sam.”

“Aren’t you listening to me?”

She turned to face me calmly. “Yes, I’m listening, Sam,” she said softly. “You’re speaking very loud.”

I walked up to her. “I’m sorry, but—”

“Now I’ve got to go. I’ll see you later. Have a nice day.”

She headed out to the car.

As soon as I arrived at my classroom that morning, I got Liam on his own and told him about what had happened. He snorted and pulled faces all the way through what I was saying.

“Is this a wind-up?”

“No,” I said wearily, the fatigue of an almost sleepless night already starting to catch up with me.

“Because if you’re interested in wind-ups, you’re never going to beat Mad Maxwell in 11B. He convinced the staff he had a disease. They were raising funds.
And
he pulled an Ofsted scam on the school office. He’s a comedy genius.”

“Look, I know it sounds unlikely,” I said, “but I promise you. There was a scream, there was a dog, there was a face. It frightened the crap out of me. I don’t know who screamed, I don’t know what happened to the dog, I don’t know who the face was.”

Liam eyed me silently for a moment or two. I could tell he was asking himself whether this new kid was a pathological liar or just a bit weird.

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “That’s why I’m telling you this. All I know is, last night happened, and this morning I’ve had a conversation with Emma’s mother that convinces me she’s got something to hide. I swear to you it’s true. I’ve got more than enough on my plate right now, haven’t I? Moving, new school, blah blah. Do you really think I’m going to start making things up on top of everything else?”

Liam shrugged. “I guess not. But … come on. Are you saying Emma Greenhill let out a blood-curdling scream at two in the morning? Why?”

“I don’t even know for sure if it was her who screamed,” I muttered. “But, assuming it was, then either she was in some sort of danger, or something scared the shit out of her. Have you seen her this morning?”

“Emma? I have, actually. She was coming along Maybrick Road at about the same time as me.”

“And?”

“And what? She looks completely normal. Exactly
the same today as she always looks. Fabulous. What, did you expect her to have been chopped into pieces by a homicidal axeman?”

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

He pulled another face. “It’s not that, exactly. It’s just… I’m not saying you’re making it up or even imagining it. But there’s got to be a simple explanation. What’s that thing about a blade…? We did it in PSHE. Occam’s Razor, that’s it! Doesn’t that say that the simplest solution is probably right? Well, the simplest solution is that the Greenhills have got a dog that howled like hell last night, because it got badly hurt, which was probably because of something one of them did, since today they don’t want to talk about it, or even admit to it. Maybe Emma’s dad is a secret drunk, and gave the dog a kicking? Oooor, alternatively, if you insist on it being a human scream, Emma heard a row, came down, saw what had happened to the dog, and let rip. Her mum’s embarrassed, so she made up a story about pipes in a panic, when she knew someone had heard a noise. There you are.”

I shrugged. “And what about the face at the window?”

“Granny’s staying, hears the commotion, wakes up, looks out. Simples. But if you ask me, there probably wasn’t any face at all. People see faces and patterns in things all the time. There’s that hill they photographed on Mars, isn’t there, that people swear looks like an alien. We’re biologically programmed to fit things together into shapes we understand. You said the light in the window was faint. Add a few reflections of objects inside, plus your own trouser-filling fear, and bingo, one terrifying apparition.”

“Whoever snatched the dog away wasn’t drunk,” I said.

“OK, maybe someone’s just a vicious bastard, and gave the dog a kicking when it chewed up a pair of slippers. Either way, Emma’s mum might want to hush it up, right?”

“I dunno,” I muttered. “You weren’t there. You didn’t hear that scream.”

Liam did an exaggerated flop on to the nearest desk. “Saaaam. Look, you said yourself you were scared, right? What if half of what you saw, or heard, didn’t actually happen as you think it did? Like when they say eye witnesses at a violent crime scene all give different accounts of what they saw.
Stress causes people to remember stuff in totally different ways. I bet if we went and asked the kids who saw that dead body in the park to describe it in detail today, you’d end up with a dozen different descriptions, not one of them matching another. Bet you.”

I thought about it. “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” I said. I thought about it some more. “But surely I’m not so stressed I’d misremember a scream or that face?”

Liam threw his arms wide. “Moving house, new school, tum-de-tum! Doctor Liam will see you now! Sam is a psycho-criminal maaaadman, it’s official!” He boggled his eyes and lolled out his tongue.

Is Liam right?
I thought. Were there other, simpler possibilities? Could I have just heard the howl of a fox, for example? Or a night-time yell from the Daltons’ toddler? The squeals a toddler makes can be ear-splitting. Could the sound have morphed, in my sleep-filled mind, into a piercing scream? If so, then was what I saw at the Priory even connected to the sound? Was it simply a coincidence? Had I merely been in the right place at the right time to witness the kind of nasty but commonplace scenario
Liam was talking about? And couldn’t my own fear have changed an ordinary face, looking out into the night – or an illusion of shadows and lines – into something sinister and frightening?

Liam’s off-the-cuff explanation seemed perfectly plausible. Something had happened to the dog. The scream was either the dog, or someone’s reaction to it. Emma’s mum didn’t want to admit to the truth. The face, if there’d been a face at all, was someone woken by the disturbance.

At the end of all this tortuous theorizing, I was still left with the same uncomfortable suspicion. No matter what the correct explanation of what had happened the previous night, it seemed to be the case that Emma Greenhill lived in a house where there was at least one unpleasant secret. And where there was one unpleasant secret, there would almost certainly be others.

At that moment, Miss Marlo came bustling in. Then it was registration, and then it was geography, and then it was English, and then it was break.

I met up with Liam again. He was sitting on the low wall outside the science block. It was a general meeting spot, with kids from various year groups
squashed together all the way along the length of the wall, the older ones dominating the sunny spots.

Jo was with him, nibbling at one of those oatmeal bars that taste of cardboard. She announced, blushing, that she’d uploaded her latest comic book art to the blog she kept. We took a quick look on my phone: it was the third chapter of a detective story called
Bullet-train
.

It was pretty good. The artwork was quite sparse, but it didn’t have that uncertain look about it, that slight distortion that shouts out that it’s been done by a kid.

“The story’s just basic,” she said. “It’s only meant as a showcase for the pictures, really.”

“Well, it’s very impressive,” I said, and meant it.

“Don’t you have a blog yourself?” said Jo. “If you’re an aspiring journalist?”

The true answer to that question was that I’d started one many months before. I’d been too hesitant and too doubtful of my abilities to keep it going. I’d never felt I had anything interesting to say, and finally I’d deleted it in frustration.

“I’ve not found the time,” I said, feeling my cheeks redden. “Too busy with school.”

I think she sensed the truth. She pursed her lips slightly. “Umm, on the subject of journalism, have you checked your email?”

I hadn’t. I tapped at my phone with a surging sense of excitement. There was a note from her dad, thanking me for the article, and turning it down. “Nicely written, but the descriptions are a little flowery, and also overall too graphic for us, I’m afraid. Keep going, it shows promise.”

Flowery and graphic. What was that supposed to mean? I could change it, couldn’t I? I felt as if I was being politely patted on the head and told to go back to my colouring books.

“Sorry if he’s been blunt,” said Jo.

“Oh, no, it’s fine,” I lied, forcing a smile. “I knew it was a long shot.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Sam’s got some news, too,” chipped in Liam. “He’s a psycho-criminal maaaaadman!”

“Eh?” laughed Jo.

I wanted to forget about it, at least for now, so in telling Jo the details I emphasized how I was now thinking Liam was right, and that there may have been less to the whole thing than I’d assumed.

Jo’s response was disconcerting. “What sort of dog was it?” she said. She was being serious.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was quite big, but it wasn’t an Irish Wolfhound, or anything like that. It wasn’t a Golden Retriever, I know what they look like. I don’t really know about dogs. Why?”

“Just a coincidence.” Jo shrugged. “At dinner last night, my dad was telling me about the running order of stories in his paper for this week. Third is a thing about pet snatchers. There’ve been several thefts in Hadlington and in the villages along the river.”

“Does your dad always run the
Hadlington Courier
’s editorial decisions past you?” said Liam.

“No, of course not. He was telling me because the lead today is about a girl I used to be at playgroup with. I think he was a bit shocked. My mum was shocked, anyway.”

“Shocked by what?” I said.

“This girl, Kat Brennan, has run away. She’s the second from Elton Gardens to do that in less than a month. The police don’t think there’s any link, but Dad says they both had boyfriends in gangs.”

“There you go,” said Liam, pointing a finger at me. “Gangs again, Elton Gardens again.”

“By the way,” said Jo, “Dad also said the cops have confirmed that the dead guy in the park had an Elton Gardens address.”

“Yeah, yeah, OK,” I said. “When did this girl go missing?”

“Oh, last weekend sometime,” said Jo.

“Not yesterday?” I said.

A scream in the night.

“No.”

“But your mum was shocked.”

“Well, yes,” said Jo, “because we know her. Or knew her, years ago. I can barely remember her myself, but Mum kept shaking her head last night and saying what a nice family the Brennans were and how could Kat have got herself into trouble like that. Mum stuff.”

I just couldn’t help instantly leaping to conclusions. The dog I’d seen – it had to be one of the stolen ones! The scream I’d heard – it had to be the missing girl!

I felt like smacking my head against a brick wall.
Don’t be a dribbling idiot
, I told myself.
Cut out the junior detective shit, life is not a paperback mystery plot!
At least I had the presence of mind not to say any of it out loud to Liam or Jo.

I wondered if I was overcompensating, because of the let-down over my article. I was looking for a story, a narrative that might be spun into a piece that
would
impress. Was I seeing connections that weren’t there and coincidences that didn’t exist, all for the sake of my ambitions? The thought made me feel even worse.

I managed to force everything to the back of my mind until the end-of-school bell went. School was harder work than I was used to. You could see why Maybrick High was so far up the league tables.

In the steady rush towards the main road, I found myself a couple of metres away from Emma Greenhill. She was chattering away with a girl from my class.

I wanted to talk to her, if only to help clarify some of my own thoughts. Speeding up a little, I managed to get ahead of them. Emma’s friend said her goodbyes and walked over to a waiting car. Timing it just right, I accidentally-on-purpose nearly collided with Emma’s school bag.

“Hello, Sam Hunter,” she said cheerily, beaming at me. “How are you?”

“I’m, er, I’m fine,” I said, desperately trying to
think of something to say. “I met your mum earlier.”

“Did you? Oh, yes, she said she might go over and say hello. Isn’t that weird, you’re our new neighbours! I didn’t know until this morning. Shall we walk home together?”

“Sure.”

My conversation had dried up. Luckily, Emma was keen to have a moan about her physics class. I kept glancing at her profile as she spoke. How many glances would add up to a stare?

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” I said, once her physics class had been firmly put in its place.

“Uh-oh!” she giggled.

“Do you have a dog?”

“A dog?” she said. “No. Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“I’ve never wanted pets, to be honest,” she said. “My parents won’t have dogs in the house, anyway. Did you know they carry lots of diseases? People don’t generally know that. Mum told me she’s had a couple of patients who died from things they caught off their dog. Cats are bad, too.”

“No, I’ve never had a pet, either. We, er, never had room. Before.”

“Where have you moved here from?” she said. The warmth of her voice made me feel as if I was the only living soul in her world.

“Oh, miles away,” I said. “Near Birmingham. Er, can I ask you something else?”

“Uh-oh again.”

“This might sound like a funny question.”

“Like ‘what colour is a kilo of noise’? That’s a funny question.”

I laughed. “No, like ‘do you have an elderly relative staying in your house?’”

“An elderly relative?” she repeated, turning her blue-grey eyes on me. “What makes you ask that?”

“Oh, er, just something someone said.”

“My grandpop lives with us.”

“Nobody else? Your grandmother?”

It was her turn to laugh now. “My last grandmother died, er, thirty years ago. My oldest relative after Grandpop would be my Auntie Cass, and she lives in London. And she’s not old, as such. Of course, my mother’s way past forty, so she’s pretty old. But whatever you do, don’t say that to her, because she’ll sulk. Seriously. And Grandpop never likes to be reminded of his age either. Hah! Speak of the devil!”

She waved at a man standing out on Maybrick Road. He raised his walking stick to her.

Emma’s words made me feel… What? Confused? Intrigued? I wanted to believe the best of her, I really did. She was either a truly brilliant liar, or she really
didn’t
have any pets or elderly relatives. Which supported the idea of the face as a fear-fuelled illusion, but put the rest of the day’s thoughts and theories back to square one.