Left You Dead

30

Roy Grace arrived home just before midnight, but despite being tired, his brain was buzzing. He now had more than enough to put a sock — or rather a blood-spotted T-shirt — in Cassian Pewe’s mouth tomorrow. And he dearly wished he’d have the opportunity to shove that torch right up his jacksie.

Humphrey greeted him at the front door with a chewed-up pink unicorn in his mouth, stuffing tumbling from its ripped-open midriff all over the floor. He let him out into the balmy, warm air and the light of a near-full moon, and took him for a short walk along the cart track that was their drive. As he walked and the dog ran off after a scent, Grace breathed in the delicious, sweet smells of freshly mown grass and of the surrounding countryside that he loved so much. Strange to think, as he did this time each year, that the nights were starting to draw in and autumn was on its way.

A bat flitted overhead. He could hear the distant baa-ing and bleating of sheep. He really fancied a drink and suddenly a cigarette, too — which he hadn’t had for ages — but decided against both. He needed to get some sleep, as tomorrow, with all they’d found tonight at the Paternosters’ house, promised to be a long day. But he hoped the brief walk might be enough to settle both Humphrey and himself.

Ten minutes later, he opened the front door, knelt and scooped up the bits of the unicorn’s white fluffy innards, then led the dog through into the kitchen, and opened the treats tin. He took a bone-shaped one out and held it up. Obediently, Humphrey jumped into his basket and Grace gave him his biscuit. ‘Night, boy!’ Then he turned the light out and headed upstairs as quietly as he could.

As he switched the landing light off outside their bedroom, he turned on his phone torch at the same time in the hope of not waking Cleo. But he could see she was awake.

‘Hi, darling!’ she said as he crept into the room, her voice only very slightly sleepy. An instant later her bedside light came on and she peered at him, blinking.

‘Sorry to wake you, darling,’ he said.

‘You didn’t, don’t worry, I’ve only just come to bed.’

‘You stayed up late. Everything OK?’

‘Not really. Some issues with Bruno — tell you tomorrow.’

He sat down on the bed and kissed her. ‘You can tell me now, if you want?’

Looking down ruefully at her swollen midriff, she said, ‘What I really want is a glass of wine. Or two. Or three.’

Alarmed, he said, ‘Why, what’s happened?’

‘Your sweet little boy.’

Grace had noticed over the past months that whenever Bruno was well-behaved, Cleo referred to him as our son. But when he’d behaved like a little shit, he suddenly became your boy.

‘Tell me?’

‘I had a crazy day in the mortuary, didn’t get home until nearly 7 p.m. Kaitlynn collected him from school much earlier. You’ll never guess what he did?’

‘Try me?’

‘He’d let out all the hens.’

‘He always does that.’

‘Yes, in the garden. But this evening he’d let them out into the field — he said he’d decided it was cruel to keep them cooped up in such a small garden as ours. It must have been that fox, the one we’ve seen in the garden, right? It got Bella while they were out there.’

‘Bella?’

She nodded.

‘No, not poor Bella.’ He felt really upset.

Bella was their favourite hen, named after one of Roy’s team, Bella Moy, Norman’s fiancée, who had sadly lost her life two years ago. She was the smallest and the most affectionate of all the hens they had, always coming running towards them and the only one that would let them pick her up and cuddle her.

Cleo had tears in her eyes. Grace kissed her again. ‘How bloody stupid of him. What did he say?’

She shook her head, signalling disbelief. ‘That it would be wrong to blame the fox. That it was probably hungry.’

‘He didn’t accept any blame himself?’

‘I don’t think he knows the concept of blame.’

Before he could respond, she went on. ‘That’s not all. I had Mr Hartwell on the phone for half an hour.’

Hartwell was the headmaster.

‘What did he say?’

‘He’s a nice man and he really wants to help, but he said they’re at their wits’ end with Bruno. Apparently his behaviour hasn’t improved over the summer: he still won’t engage with any of his fellow pupils and has already been rude to all his teachers, and it’s only the first day back. Mr Hartwell says that unless Bruno’s attitude improves before the end of this term, he is very sorry but he won’t be able to return next year.’

Grace said nothing for some moments, reflecting. Bruno was the son he never knew he had. He had learned, only on her deathbed, that his long-missing wife, Sandy, had left him soon after discovering she was pregnant with this boy. He’d subsequently found out that, in those years after she’d left, she’d led a wayward life, joining first the Scientologists, then another cult in Germany. She got bigamously married to a rich guy, then they separated after just two years. Unbelievably, at some point she’d become a heroin addict, before getting clean and working to help addicts, first in Frankfurt and then Munich.

Grace wasn’t sure at what point it had all gone wrong for her, but from what Sandy had told him, she had drifted into a hedonistic lifestyle while in the company of the persuasive, charismatic cult leader, and she’d found it nearly impossible to pull herself out of it. He’d tried to get Bruno to talk about this time without much success, and he could only guess at what impact this peripatetic life with an unstable, erratic single parent had had on him.

And he was well aware that uprooting Bruno from his roots in Germany and bringing him to England at the age of ten was again disruptive for him. But he’d hoped that introducing him into a stable, loving and welcoming family environment might have helped him settle down. So far, it seemed not. Whatever Sandy — the woman he had once considered his soulmate — had instilled in their son, she’d left him with strange values and a seriously skewed moral compass.

‘I’d be happy to go and speak to Ted Hartwell. Maybe we’ve never explained Bruno’s background fully enough to him. What do you think?’

‘It’s worth a try. I’ll come with you. I’m sure there is good inside Bruno — maybe we just have to dig deeper to mine it out.’

‘I’ve got it in my diary that I’m taking him to school tomorrow, is that right?’

‘Please. I’ve got eight postmortems. I’ve got to be in at 7 a.m.’

‘No probs, I’ll take him and have a chat with him in the car.’

‘Good luck with that.’

He cocked his head. ‘Meaning?’

Cleo gave him a sleepy smile. ‘I do think he responds to you better than he does to me. But...’

He kissed her on the forehead, undressed, hanging up his suit and his tie, then went through into the bathroom and dumped his underwear and shirt in the laundry basket. He picked up the tube of toothpaste and, as the electric brush whirred, tried to focus back on the Paternoster case, but it was Bruno at the forefront of his mind.

And it was Bruno that kept him awake for much of the night. When he did lapse into brief sleep, he repeatedly dreamed of the boy and woke each time with a feeling of dread.