Dead of Winter (11 page)

He drove aimlessly for an unreckoned period of time before the shock set in and he started to shake so badly that he pulled into a lay-by. There was no way he could begin to comprehend what had just happened. He was certain that if he just went back to the caravan Dan would be snoring in front of the telly, out of his brain on booze and dope. He would wake him up and they’d go out and buy two chicken tikka masala pizzas and some beers, a bottle of whisk—he stopped himself. Just the beers; then they would return to the van, pop the beers and watch the latest porn movie until unconsciousness or sleep took over.

His eyes misted sentimentally. Despite his refusal to allow the truth into his mind he knew the image was false. He would never see Dan again. They would never pick up women and share them like they used to; never visit their mum together. Mum! He shivered in fear.

Without warning gut-wrenching sobs burst from his mouth. He cried without restraint, collapsed against the harness of the seat belt, his face drenched, hands balled into fists so tight the nails cut his palms. His sorrow was as much for himself and for a future destroyed as it was for his dead brother. Even though he would
miss him, theirs had been a relationship forged in the necessities of survival, sustained by shared enjoyment of easy pleasures rather than affection. Superficial, maybe, but it was the only lasting bond he had ever known.

His wife was a selfish cow who grew indifferent to sex within twelve months of trapping him into marriage by pretending to his mum that she was pregnant. Almost as soon as the honeymoon was over she claimed she’d had a miscarriage but he suspected otherwise and what little affection he had felt towards her vanished. Of course, she had called him unfeeling about the baby and what she described as ‘the tragedy’ but he told her the tears were bollocks and that she should be grateful they wouldn’t have the inconvenience of a kid. It had been a bloody argument but one he still felt good about. Dan had thought the whole thing a joke.

Dan. He was the only one who’d ever taken him as he was. The line of self-righteous prats who had looked down on them stretched back a long way, starting with his dad, who’d buggered off when he was ten, leaving Mum right in it with two kids to raise, precious little money apart from benefits and dodgy health. He and Dan had learnt fast and the first lesson had been that life could be better without their dad. With no one to tell them what to do they’d been able to stay out on the streets until too tired to want anything more than their beds. And Dan always had a new game to try.

New tears arrived with the memory of endless versions of hide the neighbour’s cat down the drain, moving on to how many plants they could uproot from poxy Mr Sallow’s garden after he threatened them with the strap for frightening his little Annie. If he’d only known what his precious daughter liked to do in the park on a Saturday for a bit of extra pocket money he’d have taken his belt to her but he and Dan never told. Why risk spoiling their fun? Annie had grown up sweet and accommodating. Ah, Annie.

The crying stopped as he recalled the girl who had helped him lose his virginity at the age of fourteen, but then started as he remembered she had done it as a favour to Dan.

What had he done? His hands gripped the steering wheel, trying
to hold on to a world that was being shaken apart by the reality of his brother’s death. He could feel his muscles spasming as he tried to control the shivering in his arms. From nowhere he realised that he was going to be sick and only just made it out of the car in time. A stream of vomit splattered the frozen ditch at the side of the road, joined quickly by another as his stomach heaved.

The evening was suddenly threatening. Headlights on a distant road became police cars out searching for him because they’d found Dan’s body. His fingerprints would be all over the van, even on the broken bottle. He hugged himself, terrified by the thought that he would be arrested and sent to prison.

‘Should’ve burnt the fucking van!’ He spoke into the silver stillness, unaware that he had made a noise.

There was banging from inside the boot and he looked at it stupidly. The memory of the girl rushed back like a tidal wave, sweeping him from his feet so that he lost his balance and fell, his hand slipping in the pile of fast-cooling sick. He looked at it with disgust, more concerned about the stink than the returning second slice of reality, erased from his mind by the shock of Dan’s death.

‘Fuck,’ he said getting up and wiping his palm fastidiously on a rag, ‘Fuck!’

He went over to the back of the car and kicked it viciously.

‘Shut up!’

The banging continued so he found his keys, unlocked the boot and yanked it open, standing over the girl inside with a raised fist, ready to use it. She cowered away, eyes so wide that their whites shone in the moonlight. He frowned; why was she tied up? Oh yes, he’d done it with some nylon ties he had in the boot. He’d made a loop, slipped it over her hands and then down to her legs, his movements quick and smooth, as if directed by a part of his brain unaffected by the traumas shattering his life.

‘You either keep quiet or I’ll gag you. Understand?’

She nodded and he slammed the lid shut. He waited by the car to see if she dared make another sound. Nothing, so he climbed back into the front seat, suddenly aware that he was freezing cold.
The tears had gone but he was physically exhausted, in no state to make the decisions he knew were needed. He had no idea what to do. Life was so unfair!

He was consumed by self-pity, certain he was again Life’s victim in a game with rules he’d never been told and which he still didn’t understand. The feeling was familiar, one he had lived with since childhood; one that provided excuses whenever things went wrong. It wasn’t his fault, he decided. Dan’s death had been an accident, the result of an argument that had been the bloody girl’s doing. He never should have taken her to the van, wouldn’t have done if she hadn’t complained about the cold in the car and the smell of exhaust when he had tried keeping the engine running to please her. Picky little madam. Now look at her, hanging around his neck like an albatross, bringing him nothing but bad luck.

Lines from
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
came back to him from a school lesson long ago. ‘
God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!
’ It was the only piece of literature ever powerful enough to hold his attention for more than the opening line. The coincidence with his name and the sense of doom that filled every verse had somehow echoed his own world order.
‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross.’

An albatross, yes, that’s what she was, but the Ancient Mariner was cursed because he killed the bird and he hadn’t done that. So that meant there could still be a way out. He looked at his watch; it read twenty-five past nine. His shock at the time was as difficult to cope with as everything else. How could it be less than two hours since he’d met Dan and they had made their way to the van together? He shook his arm, held the dial to his ear even though it had a quartz mechanism, and then looked at the dashboard. The luminous readout said 21.26. The idea that his world could have changed so completely in so little time destabilised him, bringing fresh tears to his eyes so that he shut them tight, pressing the balls of his palms into them until they hurt.

Red stars burst behind his eyelids, swirling with flashes of white light. In his imagination he saw himself walking along a path with
many turnings. Each fork he took brought him closer to the point of Dan’s death. Any single choice would have meant things would turn out differently. If he hadn’t joined the search party, thinking that it would make him look innocent; if Dan hadn’t called, saying they needed to talk at the van; if he hadn’t encouraged Dan to stop at the pub first and then smoke more dope than usual in the hope that he would pass out and he could sneak the girl away; if Dan hadn’t woken when he did, or had kept his keys on a hook like a normal person. The list went on spooling in his mind; pieces of bad luck, choices made, paths taken.

Slowly it dawned on him that he was still on the path. It lay ahead of him, seemingly endless, with more choices ahead. Perhaps he wasn’t yet doomed; his albatross might be trussed up but she wasn’t dead.

The idea of escape fell into his mind like a stroke of genius.
Nobody
knew his brother was dead, let alone who’d killed him; no one had any idea that he’d taken the girl or that she was with him. The thought came to him that he could go to the boot of the car, lift her out, dump her on the ground under the trees by the side of the road and drive away. If a car came along and saw her in time she’d live; if not, she’d die. It wouldn’t be his fault; it would be Fate. It was tempting and he got as far as stepping out of the car into the bone-numbing chill before common sense took over.

He needed time to get away. If she was found and told her rescuer what had happened, it would all be over. The alternative, of killing her first before dumping the body, never occurred to him. He wasn’t a murderer, that much he knew about himself despite his brother’s death. If the girl died it would be because of an accident or from natural causes, not because of anything he did to her.

Slowly, his mind started working again and with the thinking came a sense of hope. No matter what Life had thrown at him today he could survive. He’d go away. Somewhere at home he had a passport, a relic of the hopeful honeymoon in Menorca. He’d get on a ferry over to France, hire a car and drive wherever the road took him. Maybe he could work his way to Spain, it would
be warmer than here at any rate; he could go even further south: Morocco, Africa, anywhere but here. Mariner slipped the car into gear and executed a neat three-point turn.

As he guided the vehicle carefully on icy roads, always on the speed limit, never drawing attention to himself, he started to imagine his alternative future. By the time he arrived at the familiar semi on Goosegreen Avenue he was already halfway to a new life somewhere warm, where girls would be plentiful and the beer cheap. He steered the car into the garage, locking the door behind him. Leaving the girl where she was he went inside to check his wife was still away at her mother’s as he expected; she was. There was a note on the calendar explaining there was shepherd’s pie in the fridge for reheating and a casserole in the freezer. That was all; no kisses, not even her name.

The small hall was stuffy and smelt of drying washing. He turned down the thermostat in one of the daily battles in which he and his wife engaged, the futility of his action lost on him. He would stay home tonight – easy to carry the girl in via the back door from the garage. She would have to be gagged of course; no way could he trust her to keep quiet all night. At least they’d be warm. The missus wasn’t due back for two days but he’d call her just to make sure. It was a plan.

He went round the house closing all the curtains and made sure that the front door was double-locked. Then he carried the girl inside, stuffed a clean sock from the airing cupboard in her mouth and tied her to the bottom of the stairs while he went and had a long, hot shower.

Dressed in clean clothes he felt a new man as he left his bedroom, only to recoil from the stench on the landing.

‘What the …?’

It was the girl. She stank after two days in the van and needed cleaning up. It was easy to lift her, she weighed almost nothing. He dumped her as she was in the shower and turned it on, letting the warm water flow over her huddled body. While it ran he found some clothes that might just fit her. A pair of his wife’s jeans she
hadn’t been able to get into for years and was keeping for some reason he had never fathomed. A T-shirt, jumper and fleece that were all too big for her but were better than the stinking rags from the van. Only the socks were the right size. His wife had little feet.

He turned off the water and undressed her despite her protests.

‘Stop wriggling or you’ll stay filthy. You can’t stay inside smelling the place out. If you won’t be cleaned I’ll just leave you outside soaked through and you’ll be frozen solid in no time.’

That quietened her down. He stripped her and retied her hands and feet immediately. As he soaped her pure, white skin, he felt himself become aroused.
Not yet, not like this,
he told himself,
you’re not an animal. She’ll be grateful and want you soon enough.
Drying her took all his self-control. Dressing her while she was tied up proved impossible. He undid her feet first and started to put on the clean clothes. The sight of his wife’s grey-white grandma knickers over her tight buttocks and slim hips made him laugh. After he dressed the bottom half he re-tied her feet and undid her hands. She started to squirm immediately, like an eel in his grip, grunting against the gag.

He didn’t mean to bang her face on the tiles and he had to find tissue for her nose. Then he realised she couldn’t breathe and he pulled out the sock quickly.

She took an immediate gulp of air and he clamped his hand over her mouth, too aware of the thin party wall and his nosy neighbours, who would probably already be commenting on two showers in quick succession.

‘Scream, make any noise, and it goes back in. With this nosebleed you’ll suffocate.’

He doubted he would be able to do it but she believed him and stayed silent while he cleaned her up and finished dressing her. Her wrist was an angry mess so he rubbed on some antiseptic cream and put big a plaster over it.

‘I suppose I’d better feed you. Shepherd’s pie and beans all right?’

She nodded and he fireman-carried her downstairs to the
kitchen, checking again that the blind was down. He reheated the pie – more than enough for two, the way it always was when his wife cooked – heated the beans and made tea for them both, adding a generous slug of cooking brandy to his. After they had eaten he found an anorak of his wife’s and went to put it on her.

‘Time to go back in the car.’

‘No! Please, not again. I hate it in there.’

‘You can always share my bed instead,’ he smiled at her.