“It’s taken care of.” Norris signalled to the policewoman Ben had spoken to earlier. “Will you show Mr Murray out, please?”
After the warmth of the trailer it seemed colder than ever outside. He went back to his car, ignoring the curious stares of the neighbours. He told himself that the police knew what they were doing, that Jacob would be safe. There was nothing else he could do.
It never occurred to him to ask if the shotgun was still in the shed.
He drove along his old route to the hill overlooking the town. He parked in the same spot and climbed over the wall. The woods seemed dead beyond any hope of resurrection. He slipped and fell on the slick ground and rotting leaves as he made his way down through them. Mud smeared his coat and clogged the gash in his hand made by a broken root. He wadded a tissue against it.
The huddle of oak trees seemed smaller than he’d remembered, more barren and exposed. He found a Snickers wrapper twined in the brittle remains of the grass in the entrance to his den. There was no other evidence that he had ever been there. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.
The hillside running down to the houses looked as though it had been scoured with acid. A pale polythene canopy had bloomed in the Kales’ back garden, screening the area inside the dark ring of scrap metal. Children were gathered around the fence at the bottom, trying to see in.
A branch snapped behind him. Kale, he thought, and spun round to see a policeman in a reflective yellow jacket tramping down the slope towards him. The policeman stopped a yard or two away.
“Having a good look, are we?”
Ben’s heart was still thumping. “Not really.”
The policeman’s eyes were unfriendly. “Mind telling me what you’re doing?”
It must be something in the air up here, Ben thought. Or perhaps it’s just me. “Just walking.”
“That your car parked on the road up there?”
“If you’re talking about a red Golf it is.”
“What’s the registration?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“What’s your name?”
Ben told him. The policeman spoke into his radio, still watching him. He seemed disappointed by the response from it.
“All right, go on.” He motioned with his thumb towards the road.
Bloody-mindedness made Ben say, “You sure you don’t want to arrest me?”
The policeman gave him a psychopath’s stare. “I’m not going to tell you again.”
Ben took a last look down the hill, then trudged back to his car.
He went back to the studio, even though the shoot had been cancelled. He’d unlocked and gone in before it occurred to him that perhaps he should be more careful.
Kale had already killed his own wife, and Ben had no illusions about what would happen if he encountered him again. But he couldn’t take the threat to himself seriously.
He didn’t doubt that Kale would kill him, given the chance, but he also knew what the man’s first priority was.
Jacob.
He tried to reassure himself that there was nothing to worry about. Kale was only one man, and, with his limp, neither an inconspicuous nor a very mobile one. Ex-soldier or not, it was only a matter of time before he was caught.
And then the entire question of who would have Jacob would be raised again, because no one could doubt now that Kale had forfeited the right to his son.
Except Ben couldn’t quite make himself believe it would be so simple.
He busied himself with make-work jobs; checking his darkroom stocks, minor repairs; anything to keep himself occupied. He’d almost resorted to cleaning the studio when he remembered the film he’d shot at the cemetery.
He wasn’t expecting anything from it but developing it gave him something to do. The first prints were enough to show that the film had been faulty. It happened occasionally.
The exposure was out, the colours so smudged and without resolution that the flowers were completely unrecognisable.
The wire mesh of the bin had become a blurred geometric pattern over abstract slashes of spectrum. He tossed them down in disgust. Then he looked at them again. He picked them up, turning them this way and that.
Actually, he thought, it was quite an interesting effect.
He printed the rest. It was the ambiguity that appealed to him. It changed mundane objects into something at once less concrete yet more substantial. What should have been representational now only hinted at its nature, provoking a vague sense of familiarity that defied recognition. He was considering how to reproduce the effect intentionally when the phone rang.
He snatched it up on the second ring.
“Hello?” he said, breathless.
“Is that Mr Murray?” He recognised the police inspector’s voice.
Oh, God, please. Please have caught him.
“Yes.”
The potential for good news remained for an instant longer, then it was shattered.
“I’m sorry,” the inspector began, and suddenly Ben didn’t want to hear the rest.
“Kale forced his way into the school this afternoon,” the policeman’s heavy voice continued, delivering all of it. “He’s got his son.”
It was on the TV. There were the school gates, the school itself a squat brick building behind them. There were crying children being led away by adults. There were eye-witness accounts, a police car with its rear end crumpled. There was a corroded bumper lying dented in the kerb, crystalline scatterings of glass.
The inspector had been apologetic. He’d had two officers stationed in a car right outside the main gates. They’d been warned how dangerous Kale was, told not to take any chances, to radio for assistance at the first sight of him.
But that hadn’t been until the rust-coloured Escort flung itself around the corner in a squeal of tyres and rammed into their car. Before it had stopped rocking Kale had materialised with a shotgun and blasted the radio and dashboard into fragments. He’d smashed the gun butt into the nearest policeman’s face, ordered the second one out and clubbed him unconscious as well.
Then he’d gone into the school, taken Jacob and driven away.
“We didn’t know he was armed,” Norris said. “If we had...”
“If you had, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Somehow Kale would still have taken Jacob.”
Even as he added the forgotten shotgun to the list of blame he had to carry, Ben felt the inevitability of it, as though this was the way it had to be, that events were drawing together towards an unavoidable resolution whose shape he could almost make out, but was frightened to see.
He barely heard the policeman’s assurances that Kale would be caught, that the car had been damaged, that a crippled man and an autistic boy couldn’t get far on foot. He was remembering how Kale had shot the bull terrier rather than let anyone else take it.
It’s my dog.
He’s my boy.
He didn’t think he’d ever felt so scared.
The phone rang constantly at first. It wore him down, the hope and fear that each ring provoked. But it was only people wanting to offer their support, asking if there was any news. He told everyone the same thing. Thank you, no there wasn’t, he’d let them know. He asked them all not to phone again, explained he wanted to keep the line clear. Eventually the calls dwindled and stopped, leaving him alone.
That was just as bad.
It was impossible to sit still. He moved from room to room in the house, just to keep moving, to evade the panic that threatened to overtake him. He poured himself a drink, but left it after the first mouthful. It would only have been an artificial relief and he didn’t want to feel dulled. The sandwich he made went uneaten.
It was a completely different feeling to when Sarah had died. Then it had been disbelief and numbness. Even when she was dying, as bad as that had been, he had known what was happening, had been there with her. Now he didn’t know anything, not even if Jacob was alive or dead, his brains blown out like Kale’s dog.