Seven Days(91)

The police exhumed them, and they were not the only bodies they found. There was a pet cemetery of people’s dogs and cats, along with the body of a woman in her twenties. The police thought it might be a prostitute who had gone missing in the late nineties.

She sat at the front, and looked at the two coffins. They were closed – there was not much left of Seb and Leo – and she was glad. She preferred to remember them as they were. She had described them to James and her parents, although they would never know what their other two grandsons looked like. There were no photos. That was one of the many things that Colin Best had taken from them and from her.

Her dad sat on her left, his hand on her arm. He was exactly as she remembered him. Warm, thoughtful, loving, and still telling his terrible dad jokes. There was a wariness to him that was new – he didn’t let her go anywhere alone, which she was going to have to talk to him about – but other than that he was the dad she remembered.

Mum had been ill, it turned out, and you could see it in the lines on her face. According to the doctors she was fine now, but it had left its mark.

And James. Her little brother, James. He was over his addiction, although she still saw the hunger in his eyes from time to time.

Max was – incredibly – fine. At first he had asked about the room and the man all the time, but that had gradually slowed until he didn’t mention it at all. He still saw a child psychiatrist; she told Maggie that, although he had some developmental delays, they would resolve themselves on their own and he would grow up a normal, well-adjusted child. Maggie marvelled on a daily basis at how easily he had adapted. He went to a pre-school, had a group of friends, watched television, and sat, for hours on end, watching his grandad build a huge, electric train set for him.

And her? She saw a psychiatrist too. She had nightmares; she didn’t like sleeping with the door open; she struggled to trust people, especially men. The weirdest part had been when she had, for a few days, started to miss the room. Everything felt like a threat; she didn’t dare take her eyes off Max. At least the room was safe.

Except it wasn’t. It was slowly destroying her, and the man would have killed Max. He was going to do it that day. She had the scars on her fingers to prove it.

And the feeling of missing it didn’t last. Now she was glad, every day, to wake up and look out of a window and see a tree or the rain on the glass or a bird in the sky. She’d taken Max to see some of the things she’d described to him: the sea, the forest, the mountains. He’d especially loved the animals at Chester Zoo.

It was time for Seb and Leo to be cremated. She had wept when Best confessed where their graves were, images of them playing and laughing coming back to her. They would never meet Max, but when he was older she would tell him about his brothers, share the daydreams she had about the people they might have become.

That, though, was for another day. After the funeral they were going to travel, her, Max, James, Mum, and Dad. She had a list of places she wanted to see. Places she wanted Max to see.

Places she had told him about.

Australia. Thailand. Nepal.

London. Paris. New York.

Mountains. Lakes. Rivers.

They were going to see them all.





Read on for a sneak preview of Alex Lake’s new novel


Coming Autumn 2020





Prologue


I told them I was trouble.

I told them I would not allow them to do this to me.

I told them I would take revenge.

But they did not believe me. And now they will find out they made a mistake. A big mistake. A mistake which – although they did not know it at the time – changed their lives.

You will think of what I have done – what I am doing – as the worst crime imaginable. You will read about it in the news and hear about it on the radio and gossip about it with your colleagues and say how wicked and evil I must be to do such a thing.

But you will be wrong.

You will hate me, even though you will not know who I am. All you will know is that I have done this terrible thing to these lovely people.

I don’t deny it.

And I would do it again.

Because they deserve it.

And I deserve it, too.





1


It was the smell that woke him.

Graham Dean opened his eyes. The room was dark, the curtains drawn. The small fan on his bedside table buzzed gently.

There was definitely a smell.

He sniffed.

It was the smell of smoke. He glanced at the curtains. He thought the window was closed, but it was possible they had left it open. The neighbours were younger than him and Kathryn and didn’t have kids, so at the weekends they often had people over. Maybe they were having a fire in the garden.

He reached out and turned off the fan. He listened for the sound of voices. Nothing.

Which was not a surprise. When he turned off the fan he had seen the alarm clock. It was just past three in the morning; even their noisy neighbours wouldn’t be up this late.

He sniffed again, smelling the air. There was definitely a smell of smoke. It wasn’t wood smoke, or the smell of cooking food. It was harsher, more chemical. Acrid, almost. He paused, waiting for it to pass. It didn’t. If anything it got stronger.

Not a fire next door, then, but a fire somewhere. Maybe a building, or a car. He’d seen a news story about kids stealing cars and setting them alight, but that didn’t happen around here.