Mice

27

Mum and I were wired when we got back to Honeysuckle Cottage, euphoric that we were free of the burglar’s car at last, and that it no longer squatted beside the house like a terrifying bird of ill omen.

We sat in the lounge going over our adventure again and again — not being able to find the car’s headlights, nearly going into the ditch, setting off the alarm in the car park, the confrontation with ‘Four-wheel-drive Man’, as we’d christened him.

‘You were amazing, Mum,’ I said. ‘The way you stood up to him! I’ve never seen you so — so fearless. You were like a completely different person!’

Mum didn’t say anything, but I could tell she was proud — and maybe a little surprised too — at the way she’d got us out of such a difficult situation.

‘I mean,’ I went on, ‘he was a really scary guy! He was like a gangster or something. I was getting ready to run!’

‘Well, this calls for a celebration,’ Mum said, and went to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of wine. She drank three glasses while I was still on my first, and before I could protest went off to open another bottle.

We were like players on a winning team or actors after a performance; we couldn’t come down after the intense excitement we’d just lived through. I had Mum in fits doing impressions of her confronting Four-wheel-drive Man — outrageously exaggerating her posh accent for effect — ‘I haven’t got time for this nonsense! We haven’t damaged your stupid little car, you stupid little man!’

‘But your line was best of all,’ Mum said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What you said to him — I must have bumped it with my backside!’

I’d forgotten that I’d actually said that. It sent me off into hysterics, and the more I cracked up, the more Mum screamed with laughter too. We laughed and laughed until the tears streamed down our faces. At that moment, I must have bumped it with my backside was the funniest thing I’d ever heard in my life.

We talked for so long that it was nearly eleven before we got round to going through the items we’d brought in from the back garden. The tools in the canvas bag looked like ordinary work tools, but we assumed the burglar regularly put them to other uses. In the pockets of an anorak, which Mum had also taken from the boot, there was a Stanley knife, a filthy handkerchief, a disintegrated cigarette and a cinema ticket. We flicked through the road atlas, but there was nothing marked or written on any of the maps, just a few telephone numbers on the inside front cover. As I’d thought, the notepad was full of mathematical calculations. Mum sat back in her chair and flicked through the pages.

‘Drug calculations,’ she said. ‘Quarters, eighths, sixteenths. He wasn’t just a user, it looks like he was a pusher too. I don’t think he’s a great loss to the human race.’

Her face became thoughtful. She struggled to sit back up, and I could tell she was already quite drunk.

‘You know, Shelley, this could work out well for us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, think about it. The management of the Farmer’s Harvest will report the abandoned car to the police. The police will try to contact the driver — without any luck — and they’ll end up impounding it. They’ll search the car eventually and they’ll find the drugs.’

I wasn’t sure how this helped us, and my confusion must have shown.

‘Well, how hard are the police going to try to find a missing drug dealer? They’re not going to make the same sort of effort they would if a young child had gone missing, are they? I’d imagine that drug dealers disappear all the time. Just up sticks and vanish if they think the police are about to arrest them.’

‘What if they think he’s been — ’ the word stuck in my throat for a second and wouldn’t come out — ‘murdered?’

‘They’re most likely to suspect other drug dealers, aren’t they? Why would they suspect us? There’s nothing in the car that could lead them to us, and the car’s their only clue.’

‘But what about Four-wheel-drive Man? He saw us leaving the car. He won’t forget us after what happened with the alarm and everything. He got a good look at my face. He’s bound to remember me.’ (He’s bound to remember my scars.)

‘You’re missing my point, Shelley — I don’t think the police are going to look very hard for a drug dealer. They’ll have his drugs. He’d have every incentive to make sure the police never find him.’

‘But someone’s looking for him, Mum. They’ll report him missing.’

(I heard those eight cheery musical notes in my head again, the terrifying music the dead could still play.)

‘OK,’ said Mum, visibly warming to her theme, ‘let’s say the police decide he hasn’t just skipped town because things were getting too hot for him, but that he really is a missing person. Then let’s say that — in the worst-case scenario — Four-wheel-drive Man reads about the car abandoned at the Farmer’s Harvest and remembers that that was the car he saw us getting out of — do you really think he’s the type to come bounding forward to help the police with their enquiries?’

I shrugged.

‘I mean, you saw him,’ she went on. ‘You said yourself he looked like a gangster, and you’re probably not far wrong. I know these sort of people, Shelley. I’ve had them as clients for the last two years. They don’t talk to the police about anything. Full stop.’

It seemed to me a very weak foundation on which to build with so much confidence, and I wondered if it was the wine talking.

Mum tossed the notepad onto the pile on the floor and leaned forward and stroked my hand.

‘I think we’re going to be all right, Shelley.’ She smiled. ‘I think we’re going to get away with this.’

I couldn’t help cringing a little. It was partly superstition, it was partly a habit of fearing the worst, but talk like that always made me feel uncomfortable — it felt too much like a direct challenge to the gods.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t speak too soon, Mum, you’re assuming too much — there’s so many things we don’t know. .’

Mum laughed. ‘Your problem is that you’ve seen too many movies. You expect to get caught, you expect something to go wrong. No one ever gets away with anything in the movies because they can’t have an audience thinking that crime pays. But this isn’t a movie — this is real life. And people get away with things all the time in real life.’

I hoped she was right, but I didn’t want to tempt fate by saying anything. I didn’t think we’d really know we were safe until months, maybe even years, had passed. It was still too early to say. There were too many imponderables. I still couldn’t help thinking that this would all end in flashing blue lights and that sickening knock at the door. I preferred to change the subject.

‘The trench coat,’ I said. ‘We haven’t looked in the trench coat that was on the back seat.’

The khaki trench coat was on the floor by the TV. I went over and picked it up. ‘It weighs a ton!’ I exclaimed, walking over to Mum.

And then the material slipped through my tipsy fingers and the coat, which I’d picked up by the bottom instead of the collar, unrolled in my arms, and something heavy birthed through the lining of the pocket. It struck my stockinged foot a glancing blow, flooding me with searing pain, and clattered, spinning, across the wooden floorboards.

Normally I’d have screamed the house down, but my surprise acted as a sort of anaesthetic. I merely flumped back onto the sofa, holding my injured toes, my bottom lip clamped under my top teeth, and stared stupidly at the gun that lay in the middle of the lounge floor.

The storm broke in the middle of the night and I lay awake for a long time listening to it. I’d never heard it rain so hard; when I thought it had reached the fiercest intensity possible, it would rain even harder, even louder. It felt as if the entire world outside my bedroom window had been turned to liquid — everything ran, everything dripped, trickled, spattered, bled.

The gusts of wind were so violent that they were like lunatic hands beating against the windows, and there were moments when I really thought the glass was about to break and let all that howling, screeching chaos inside. It was as if something dangerous and obscene had escaped from its prison and was running amok. And now it was loose, it would only be subdued again after a titanic struggle.

As I lay there listening to the deafening torrents of rain drumming on the roof, I imagined the garden and all the surrounding fields flooding, the rising waters slowly loosening Paul Hannigan’s body from its muddy mooring and floating it away on the current for all the world to see. I saw the police in a landscape transformed into one vast lake, leaning from their dinghy and trying to gaff the bloated corpse from the branches of a tree where it had become entangled. .

Forty days and forty nights of rain like this would be enough to drown a world, I thought. And I was so full of foreboding about the future that part of me felt that mightn’t be such a bad thing.