In the dim light it was just possible to make out an indentation in the wood doorframe. The mark had been painted over perhaps three or four times, and would be invisible in daylight. But in the angled light from the streetlamp, it was fairly clear. A vertical line, and halfway down it, attached to its right, a half-diamond. The mark that had been drawn in blood on the woven head of the dead bird.
Nicholas felt a cold wave of dread rise through him.
‘Let’s go home, Suzie,’ he said.
She was entranced, leaning closer. ‘This is a rune.’
‘Wonderful. Come on. It’s cold.’
‘Wait,’ she said, and reached into her purse. She pulled out a pencil and notepad and copied the figure.
‘Mrs Quill,’ she whispered to herself.
Nicholas put the necklace in his pocket, took his sister’s arm and gently led her out to the street. ‘We’re going. I’m starved.’
The lie hurried him along.
Katharine turned the oven on low and started doling mashed potato onto three plates. How strange. She was out of practice being a mother. Nicholas had left home nearly twenty years ago. Suzette had lived in Sydney for ten. Katharine had grown used to the silence around her.
It wasn’t fair. They left you and you coped. Then they came home and you had to worry all over again. Not fair. Not fair.
And yet now they were under one roof again, the instant they stepped on the street, she was anxious.
‘Nonsense,’ she whispered and reached for the saucepan of meatballs.
The front door rattled open.
Katharine jumped at the noise, dropping the ladle with a clatter on the tiles. Tomato sauce spattered blood red across the floor.
‘We’re home!’ called Suzette.
‘Miss us?’ asked Nicholas.
Footsteps tromped down the hall.
Katharine quickly wiped up the sauce as her children stepped into the kitchen. Both of them blinked at the red flecks, and both seemed to sag a little with relief when they figured out what it was.
‘You okay?’ asked Suzette.
Katharine smiled thinly and nodded. ‘You forgot the milk, I see.’
After dinner, the three members of the Close family sat on the lounge and watched the news.
No one said anything as the newsreader reported that Elliot Neville Guyatt, a thirty-seven-year-old cleaner recently moved up from Coffs Harbour, had presented himself at the Torwood Police Station and confessed to the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Dylan Oscar Thomas. The overlay pictures showed a slim paperclip of a man looking thoroughly confused as police escorted him from the paddy wagon into the watch house. Guyatt made no effort to hide his face. He walked as if he were caught in a dream.
Nicholas lay on the creaking single bed in his old room. He was awake, listening to the feminine lilt of his sister and mother talking. The wood walls filtered out the detail of words but left a melody that spoke of shared blood.
His old bed. The family together. Childhood again.
The shops remained the same. The woods remained the same.
Children were still dying.
He was suddenly wide awake.
Elliot Guyatt had confessed to killing the Thomas child, and the body was found in the river, miles from Tallong. Winston Teale had confessed to killing Tristram two suburbs distant, hiding his body at the construction site. Nicholas had always thought his memory of seeing Tristram’s drained, dead body floating past a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by sheer terror.
But Suzette said she saw Tristram after he died, running from Carmichael Road into the woods. And Nicholas himself had seen the Thomas boy’s ghost dragged into the trees. The boys didn’t die miles away. The boys died in the woods.
Nicholas rolled to look out the window.
Suzette had probably reached the same conclusion and dismissed it as irrelevant. So the men killed the children in the woods, rather than out in the streets. What did that mean? Probably nothing. Would it bring them back? No.
Yet, it was disturbing. Disturbing and unsurprising that the woods were a killing place. A small piece in a newly begun puzzle that just seemed to fit with a satisfying click.
He would pull Suzette aside in the morning.
For a long while, he stared at the stars. Without knowing when, he slipped into sleep, and dreamed that gnarled, shadowy hands were carrying him away through dark curtains of silk.
7
Knocking woke him. His eyes flew open, and for the first time since leaving London he woke knowing exactly where he was. Home.
KNOCK KNOCK.
The rapping of heavy knuckles on wood. Someone was at the front door.
The sea grey of pre-dawn stole between the venetian blinds. Nicholas rolled over and checked his watch. Quarter to six. He licked his dry lips and got out of bed. As he pulled on tracksuit pants, he caught sight of himself in the duchess mirror. A pale man with straw-blond hair, bleary eyes and a distracted expression. The look you saw on shoeless men in tube stations and on sparrow-fingered street-corner preachers — a face you’d give wide berth to because it seemed one ill-aimed word away from crazy.
He pulled on his T-shirt as he lurched like a newly docked sailor down the narrow hallway toward the insistent knocking.
His mother’s door was shut. Once again, hefty snores came from behind it. Suzette’s door was shut too; from behind it rumbled snores a half-octave higher but equally lusty.
‘How about I get it?’ asked Nicholas.
Twin snores answered.
More knocking. The patient raps of a visitor who knows that someone is home.
Nicholas passed the kitchen. The sky outside was low and pregnant with rain. Who knocks at quarter to six in the morning? Only bad news.
He unlatched the front door.
A man stood there. He was perhaps forty, but his face wore fifty years worth of miles. His suit was expensive but rumpled. His tie was neatly knotted and his hair carefully combed. He’d shaved, but small tussocks of whiskers sat out like reeds in a grey swamp. The skin under his eyes looked as thin as old chicken meat; the eyes themselves were blue and overly bright.
