Mice (17 page)

‘What is it?’ she cried, lurching into my bedroom, deathly pale and out of breath.

I didn’t say anything. I just pointed outside.

She gasped when she saw the car and swore under her breath. She stood behind me at the window, her hands on my shoulders, her chin resting on the crown of my head and I could feel her whole body trembling.

 

We went downstairs together in stunned silence and went through the motions of having breakfast in the dining room – neither of us was ready to return to the kitchen to eat. I tried to force down some toast, but Mum didn’t want anything. She just drank cup after cup of coffee. Black and very strong. She was horribly pasty, her bruised eye tinged a dirty yellow round its edges.

‘We mustn’t panic, Shelley. We’ve got to stay calm and think this thing through logically,’ she said. But I could see that she wasn’t finding it easy to stay calm herself – she chewed her bottom lip distractedly and dragged her hand through her hair over and over again.

‘We’ve got to think this through,’ she said, more to herself than to me, ‘we’ve got to think this through.’

‘What is there to think through?’ I cried in exasperation. ‘The burglar’s car is parked right outside our house – it’s going to draw the police to us like bees to a honey pot!’ I was overcome with a suffocating sense of panic. ‘It’s going to lead them right to us! I
knew
something like this would happen! I knew it! I knew it!’

‘Calm down, Shelley. Let me think. It might not be his car. It could belong to someone who broke down in the lane last night. It might have been abandoned by joyriders. We don’t know that it’s definitely his car.’

‘Oh, come on, Mum. It’s a bit of a coincidence, don’t you think? It’s parked right next to our house! That’s the corner of the garden he was heading towards when I – when I caught up with him.’

‘But we didn’t see it yesterday. Maybe it wasn’t there yesterday.’

‘Mum, we were too out of it to notice anything yesterday – and anyway, it can only be seen from my bedroom window and I hardly went in there all day yesterday.’

Mum sat in gloomy silence, seemingly set on trying to convince herself that the car wasn’t the burglar’s.

‘Mum, we’ve got to move it! We’ve got to
get rid of it
!’

She looked at me as if I’d gone mad. ‘Move it? How?’

‘Don’t you remember? There was a bunch of car keys in his pocket, they’re upstairs in one of the bin bags now. We’ve got to drive the car away from here – leave it somewhere. We’ve got to do it right now!’

‘We can’t do anything right now, Shelley. There isn’t time. I’ve got to get ready for work, and besides, it’s too dangerous in broad daylight—someone might see us.’

I wanted to scream at her, to get hold of her and shake her out of her complacency. ‘We can’t leave it another day, Mum – it’s blocking the road out there. Someone’s going to report it to the police. They’ll come here. They’ll start asking questions!’

‘We can’t do it now, Shelley. It’s too risky. We’ll have to wait for it to get dark.’

I began to protest, but Mum interrupted me. ‘I know it’s a risk to leave it another day, but it’s a risk we’re just going to have to take. And now I’ve got to go and get ready for work.’

She got up as if she bore the weight of the world on her shoulders. At the door she stopped and said resignedly, ‘Get the keys from the bin bag and – if it is his car – we’ll move it as soon as I get in from work. It should be dark by then.’

‘OK, Mum.’

‘And Shelley,’ she added over her shoulder, ‘don’t go near that car until I get home.’

 

The day passed in agony as I waited for Mum to finish work. I couldn’t concentrate at all. I just went through the motions in my class with Roger like an automaton – glancing at my watch every few minutes and wondering how time had managed to slow down, to congeal, to no more than an excruciating trickle. As we sat at the dining-room table revising glacial drift and French irregular verbs, all I could think about was the burglar’s car.

Right at that moment, some busybody neighbour might be ringing the police to report a badly parked car obstructing one of the lanes. The police would come out and look the car over. They’d thread their way back along the lane and turn up the drive into Honeysuckle Cottage. They were bound to. It was parked right next to our back garden. There were no other houses around. They’d knock authoritatively at the front door and ask me if the car belonged to anyone in my family or if I knew anything about it. What would I say to them then? Would I be able to speak to them without saying something to make them suspicious?

Later in the day, they’d tow the car away and we would have lost our chance for good. When Paul Hannigan was reported missing the police records would show that his car had been found right outside our house. Surely they’d be able to put two and two together? And it was possible the car might contain clues to make it even easier for them – our address written on a scrap of paper, a map with our cottage marked on it. If Paul Hannigan had previous convictions for burglary, it wouldn’t take a genius to work out that he’d come to Honeysuckle Cottage to rob it – and that he’d never been seen again.

The more I thought about it, the more anxious I became and the harder it was to concentrate. I felt Roger growing more and more irritated by my inattention and my incorrect answers, but he said nothing. When he’d finally gone, I raced upstairs to my bedroom to see if the car was still there and let out a squeal of relief when I glimpsed its turquoise roof through the roadside greenery. I spent the whole lunchtime up in my bedroom kneeling on my window seat, staring at the ugly car, thinking, thinking . . .

I thought about Mum that morning and how she’d tried to convince herself it wasn’t the burglar’s car. I was tempted to go out there right then and try the car keys, so I could say to her when she came in that it definitely was the burglar’s car, so she’d stop clutching pathetically at straws. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to go against such a direct order from her. That would be like an open declaration of war.

In the hour or so that I sat up there, not a single car or tractor entered the lane, just a solitary cyclist in his skin-tight harlequin costume. He glanced at the car as he passed, but was more intent on getting something out of his back pocket with one hand as he steered the bike with the other.

Mrs Harris arrived with a birthday present for me – an expensive box of Belgian chocolates – but I hardly acknowledged it. While she droned on and on about prisms and the refraction of light, I had only one thought on my mind:
We have to move the car, we have to move the car!
I was convinced that if the police found it we’d be under arrest before the day was over. But if we were lucky, if it went unreported for just another few hours, and if Mum and I could safely get it away from the house without being seen, then we might have a chance, we might just have a chance.

The turquoise car was still there when Mrs Harris left. I stared at it from my bedroom window, drumming my fingers impatiently on the sill. Although it was only a quarter to five, I was pleased to see that the sky was already beginning to darken. In the west, long fingers of sunlight still pierced the banks of cloud here and there like theatrical spotlights, but over in the east black rain clouds were moving in fast, plunging the fields below them into premature night. It would be dark by seven.

A handful of rain suddenly spattered against the window, making me flinch. The dark rain clouds were spreading rapidly across the sky, extinguishing the luminous shafts one by one; the whole scene – the enormous sky divided almost equally between black and white reminded me of one of those nineteenth-century allegorical paintings with titles like
The Clash Between Good and Evil
.

I watched another delicate sunbeam become swallowed up in the swirling blackness. It looked as if the triumph of Evil would be absolute.

It was pitch dark when Mum got back at seven-thirty. The black rain clouds had strangled every last patch of light from the sky, but the storm they threatened had held off. Instead, a petulant, noisy wind had got up outside, roaring melodramatically in the chimney breast and rattling the windows in their frames.

Mum’s first words as she came in through the front door were, ‘Is it still there?’

‘Yes.’ I nodded excitedly. ‘Yes it is!’

We sat at the kitchen table and hurriedly made our plans.

‘I’m still not convinced it’s the burglar’s car,’ she began, her chest visibly heaving beneath her suit jacket. I rolled my eyes and folded my arms in irritation, and seeing me, she went on quickly, ‘But if it
is
, I don’t think we should just leave it in another lane around here. I think we should get it as far away from here as we can – leave it somewhere in town.’

‘Where?’

She pursed her lips before answering. ‘I was thinking the Farmer’s Harvest. The car park’s enormous and with so many people coming and going all the time we can just leave it and walk away without being noticed.’

It was a clever idea. Hide the car in plain sight rather than in some back street, where a nosy neighbour might be watching through the net curtains.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Sounds good.’

Mum glanced at her watch and stood up. I did the same, and felt momentarily groggy, as if I were in a lift that had suddenly started to descend.

She began to walk away, then turned sharply back to me. ‘And we mustn’t forget to remove anything from the car that could lead the police back here –
before
we leave.’

I nodded emphatically.

‘Now go and get dressed in the darkest clothes you have. And put some gloves on. I’ll go and do the same.’

As I searched through my wardrobe for my black polo-neck jumper, my black cords and the old black coat I’d had since I was twelve, I found myself giggling with nervous anticipation – just as I used to do when we played hide-and-seek when I was a little girl and I could hear the seeker’s breathing just inches away from my hiding place. How many times had I given the game away with my excited giggles? It was hard to believe that I was really dressing in black like a cat burglar so that I’d be less visible in the darkness, that I was really putting on gloves so that the police wouldn’t be able to trace my fingerprints. It was all too much like something out of a movie to have anything to do with
my
reality.

When we stepped out of the kitchen into the back garden, the profundity of the darkness took us both by surprise. For a few seconds it was like being blindfolded, and we both hesitated, unsure of our bearings and frightened to take a step into the unknown. The moon was no more than a fingernail indentation, regularly blotted out by the scudding black clouds that the blustery wind drove across the sky like a fleet of phantom galleons. The night was so dark I couldn’t make out a single star.

I set off cautiously in the direction of the car but hadn’t gone very far before I heard Mum’s anxious voice.

‘Shelley! Shelley! I can’t see anything! Wait for me!’

I stopped and waited for Mum to grab on to me. I led the way, but I could hardly see anything myself and shuffled forward hesitantly.
The blind leading the blind,
I thought. Disorientated, I veered too close to the fruit trees and walked straight into a branch. It dug sharply into my temple, just missing my eye, and I jumped back with a yelp of pain, stepping heavily on Mum’s toe.

‘It’s no good! It’s too dangerous!’ she said, having to raise her voice to be heard over the gale. ‘Go back into the house and get the torch! It’s in the second drawer down under the sink!’

I was back in a few minutes. Mum hadn’t moved from the spot where I’d left her. She put up her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the torch.

‘Turn it off if you hear a car,’ she said. She held on to me and I took the lead again.

The torch was a good one, bought in case of power cuts, but it wasn’t very effective outside in the allpervading darkness. Its beam illuminated an area no bigger than a dinner plate and our progress was still very slow. The grass looked strange in the torchlight, not green but silvery, ghostly, and the fallen branches were like skeletal hands reaching up through the soil. I thought about the burglar lying buried under the oval rose bed behind us. And I found myself thinking:
What if the dead don’t stay dead? What if the dead don’t really die?

I imagined him coming towards us through the murky darkness. I saw his dead face, the Neanderthal brow, the glassy eyes, the fractured jaw, the gaping wound in his neck. I expected his cadaverous hand to reach out and seize hold of me at any moment. I tried to walk faster, but it was impossible with Mum holding on to me so tightly. I tried to drive away my morbid thoughts, telling myself that there was no such thing as ghosts, that the burglar was Paul David Hannigan, a weedy twenty-four-year-old crook and he was
dead, dead, dead!
But his name wasn’t the talisman against fear that I’d hoped it would be.

At last we reached the hedge and I peered over it. The lane seemed to be completely deserted, but I could make out a strange sound when the gusts died down, an intermittent clacking and hissing coming from somewhere nearby and I held back. It took me a while to figure out what it was: a water sprinkler in the field across the road. There’d be little need for that when this storm broke, I thought.

I squeezed through the hedge and out onto the grassy bank, and Mum followed me. She went around to the driver’s side of the car and tried the key. I heard it slide home and unlock the door first time. I felt the childish urge to say something –
I told you so! I told you so!
– but managed to gag the impulse. When Mum yanked the door open, the interior light came on, taking us both by surprise. We scrambled into the car as if we’d been caught in the beam of a powerful searchlight, and quickly slammed the doors shut.