The Torso in the Town

Fifteen

They tiptoed down the stairs. The door to the dining room was closed, with Grant and Carole presumably still behind it. There was no sign of Kim; no doubt in the kitchen, tidying up the lunch things.

Harry put his finger to his lips. He was enjoying the conspiratorial element in what they were doing. The torch was still in the large baggy pocket of his large baggy trousers. He wasn’t going to produce it until they were past danger of being spotted.

“I sorted out how to break the police seals, Jude,” he confided proudly. “Cut through with a metal saw and joined them together again with Blu-Tack.”

“Very James Bond,” she murmured. It was the right thing to say. The boy beamed. “Must’ve taken a long time, though.”

“Did it yesterday. They were all out for a walk on the Downs.” He invested the words with all the contempt a disgruntled fifteen-year-old can muster. “Took a while, but I made a neat job of it.”

As they reached the bottom of the stairs, a finger once again rose conspiratorially to his lips. Tentatively Harry reached a foot over the stripped floorboards of the hall. “Have to go carefully here. Some of them creak.”

They successfully negotiated the route across to the cellar door. Sure enough, it still had police tape and notices on it. The seals were threaded through rivets fixed into the walls. Proud of his handiwork, Harry pulled them gingerly apart.

“Why did you do it?” Jude whispered.

He shrugged. “I was bored. Wanted to know what the policed been up to,” he breathed back. “Also…” He gulped, suddenly losing confidence. “I wanted to go down there, to sort of, I don’t know, look at…”

“Confront your fear?”

Harry nodded. Boldly taking hold of the handle, he opened the door down to the cellar. At the same moment, he produced the torch from his pocket, and pointed its beam down the stairs. “Come on.”

He gently closed the door behind them, and they stepped into the void.

The cellar still contained police equipment, revealed by the sweeps of his torch. Lights on tripods, metal equipment boxes whose contents Jude could only guess at, unspecified objects binned in labelled polythene bags.

The effect was, if anything, antiseptic. The horror was gone. So was the chipboard partition which had screened the torso. The space where it had lain was clinically empty; every trace of body and box had been meticulously combed through, bagged up and removed for analysis.

“Was it just like this when you came down yesterday?” Harry nodded.

“But you still needed to be here?”

“Yes. I pictured it again. I concentrated, and recreated the image of what I had seen.”

“How long were you down here?”

“Two, three hours.”

“Did it help?”

Another nod. “As I said, nobody would talk to me about what I’d seen. But I needed to…” Though his words trailed away, they were very eloquent.

“Yes. I understand why you – ”

There was a sudden clatter from above them. Light from the hall flooded the cellar.

Framed in the doorway stood the outline of Grant Roxby. “What the hell’re you doing down here?”

The beam of Harry’s torch swung round to spotlight his father’s face, which was contorted with rage. Not just rage, though. There was another emotion there, and it looked like guilt.