What We Saw

Chapter Seventeen

Kenny told me I had to pick up every single piece of litter spread across his garden. He sat perched on his step, newspaper in his wrinkly hands. He wore green shorts that looked like they’d shrunk in the wash, and he didn’t seem to notice the rain. His nostril hairs poured out of the end of his nose like an untrimmed hedge, and his ears were filled with brown wax.

‘I don’t understand why, Liam,’ he kept saying. ‘I know kids can be kids, but I don’t understand why me? What have I ever done to you or your family? It’s just not on.’

Adam stood with his arms folded next to Kenny. He shook his head from side to side and sighed as I looked at him. He was loving this. I dunked my fingers in ready-meal containers from days ago, the mouldy mush wedging itself between my nails. I heaved as the liquid food dribbled down the side of my hand, the smell of mouldy banana skin ripe in my nostrils. I wanted to tell Kenny who was really to blame, but that would be no good for either of us, not yet.

After half an hour of collecting Granddad’s pie tins and blackened banana peels, Kenny popped his head out from his paper, scratched his chin, and stuck his thumb in the air. ‘Right you, I think you’ve done a decent enough job. On your way.’ He turned back to his paper and waited for us to leave. Adam looked at Kenny, crinkling his eyebrows together.

‘Aren’t you going to tell on me?’ I asked, echoing what Adam was thinking.

Kenny stood up and patted me on the shoulder. ‘I don’t see a need for that,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’ve made a mistake, and you’ve cleaned up the mess. We’re even, so I don’t see why I should make a big deal of things. Isn’t that right, Adam?’ Kenny and I looked at Adam.

He sighed and muttered something under his breath. ‘I suppose,’ he said, his figure slumping.

‘Right then, off you trot. Next time you decide to throw stuff across my garden, make it something nice, like models dipped in honey!’

Kenny grinned as I tried not to cringe.

At least he’d taken it in good humour. His wife used to like me. She always used to give me Uncle Joe’s sweets and rub my arms with her hard hands. I wondered if her hands were still hard, underneath the earth. I wondered if Adam’s parents’ hands were hard.

And the girl’s hands.

*

We didn’t talk at all on the way back. In fact, Adam and I didn’t talk much that night. It was only when we sat in our bedroom, after Gran made her cocoa and Granddad finished reading the paper, that he finally opened his mouth and said something worth listening to.

‘So, aren’t you gonna ask me what I found out, honey?’ he asked, lazing across his white bed sheets like a seductress from a Bond movie. I could tell he was taking the piss out of me and Emily. He had this weird way of getting under my skin. Sometimes, I wanted to throttle him.

‘What d’you mean, found out?’ I said, tutting.

Adam sat up on the edge of his bed. He swayed his feet towards my bed and kicked gently enough to stay quiet but hard enough to make it impossible for me to get comfortable. Little dick. I sat up and kicked his leg, hard.

‘Bastard! Well if you don’t wanna know what I found out, that’s fine, I’ll deal with it myself,’ he said, rubbing at his thigh and leaning back in mock pain.

‘So you just expect me to start talking to you like normal again?’

Adam squinted towards me and screwed up his face. ‘Hang on a minute—it was you who ran off with your girlfriend instead of helping me out today. It was you that made me look like an idiot. You loved being the hero. So I had to do something about it, didn’t I? I’m always cleaning up your mess…’

He tutted when he said those last words. It’s what I always said to him when he’d got into a fight with a stranger or whatever other trouble he seemed to get himself into. The smile at the corner of his mouth said it all: he was toying with me and loving it.

Adam wouldn’t budge. He refused to tell me what he’d ‘found out,’ and I suspected that he hadn’t actually found anything out at all. It wound me up. I knew I bailed on him this morning but our friend needed us. My girlfriend needs me. Strange thought. Now that she was my girlfriend, not much was really different. Instead of just smiling at each other we were kissing and holding hands, and that was about it.

‘I’ll tell you about my day if you tell me what you got up to, lover boy,’ Adam said, poking his finger through a hole he’d formed with his thumb and other index finger.

‘Oh f*ck off, Adam. It’s not like that,’ I said.

‘So you didn’t sex her then?’

I blushed. I hadn’t really thought about Emily in that way. It seemed weird. ‘I think you still have a lot to learn about all that stuff, and I’m not gonna be the one to teach you.’

‘Well, who is? Granddad?’

I let out a little laugh at the thought of Granddad trying to explain the process of sex to Adam. Adam’s confused, nodding head stringing him along, playing innocent, trying to get him to indulge the details that he already knew everything about.

Adam joined in the chuckling, falling back onto his pillow. This was how all our arguments usually ended, not like on TV where adults ‘made up’ and shook hands. Adam and I found something funny to laugh about, got bored of being miserable, rolled our sleeves up and moved on.

After a few seconds of laughter, Adam told me everything Kenny had told him about Donald.

That’s when the laughter stopped.

Adam had begun giving Kenny a hand clearing up the mess when Kenny asked him whether he still saw a lot of Donald. Kenny told Adam that Donald was a great man. Adam had been fed the bait, so he tugged at it, saying that we did still sometimes go round to Donald’s cabin, but not as much lately. That he’d been acting weird and if Kenny knew why this might be.

‘And that’s when he told me that he didn’t want to spread rumours, but Donald had lost someone close to him not so long back.’

The words hit my ears like loud music. Donald had lost someone. That’s what he’d been telling people. That’s what the ring was all about—his loss. That’s why Granddad hugged him. He had the whole caravan site tricked into sympathising with him, but Adam and I knew that he was a killer. We saw him drag a girl into the woods and bury her. Why would a man do that if he’d just lost someone close to him?

‘His story doesn’t add up,’ I said.

Adam looked back at me, unsure. ‘But it sort of does. I mean, maybe this girl was a relative or something.’

‘Seriously, Adam—what relative gets dragged into a derelict part of the woods and booted into a grave like that?’

Adam looked reluctant. He knew what I was getting at. Gran and Granddad wouldn’t have done that to his mum, buried her in that way. Adam wouldn’t want that. No one would.

‘So you think he’s using this sympathy thing as like, a cover?’ I asked.

Adam shrugged and raised his eyebrows, tellingly. It felt like we were actually getting somewhere now. Adam’s reaction surprised me. He seemed more reluctant about things than usual. He wasn’t talking quite as much. Maybe this was the difference between a good detective and an excellent detective after all; the good detective was always too eager to move on to the next case, while the excellent detective pursued all the answers right to the end.

‘Did he say how ‘close’ this person was to him?’ I asked. I felt like an interrogator. It made me buzz inside. I could feel the mystery wrapping itself around me.

‘He, um, he didn’t say. I don’t really know whether he knew or not. But it doesn’t make sense.’

‘What doesn’t?’

Adam sat on the edge of his bed now, rubbing his hands against his knees. He squished his eyebrows together as if he were trying to get his head round something. ‘Well, the girl looked quite young. The dead girl. Older than us, but still younger than Gran. But he was showing us a ring, like a wedding ring. You said you never saw his wife, didn’t you? Always came here alone… so it doesn’t make sense.’

Adam had a point. Donald was good. He was trying to confuse us by the looks of things. Throw us off track. We needed to stay focused on the one thing that mattered: the body.

‘I don’t think the ring matters, Adam. He’s trying to throw us off course. Distract us from the body. That’s the main thing.’

Adam looked back at me. His eyes watered. He was trying to say something to me. ‘But that doesn’t explain the initials on the ring.’ His eyes drifted downwards and away from mine.

‘What init—’

Adam reached under his pillow and pulled out the dirty sock. It was damp and painted with bits of soil. He turned it upside down, and the ring fell into his hand.

My eyes couldn’t quite believe what they saw. ‘How did…’ I couldn’t finish. I knew Adam was good, but this was very good. What caught my eye, though, was what we hadn’t even noticed in the woods before, hidden from our view by Donald’s hand.

The initials, P.S., on the outside of the ring.