What We Saw

Chapter Twenty-Nine

My whole body shook as we followed Donald’s lead. My throat felt like sandpaper had scratched against it for hours. I could not speak, and I could barely walk. I felt like a prisoner being led to execution.

I couldn’t get the knickers out my head. The way that Donald had picked them up and put them into his rucksack. I knew what he was doing. Clearing up his tracks. And we’d been stupid enough to fall right into them.

Donald did not speak at first. I wanted to run away. I needed him to say something, I needed to confront him and ask him why. Why us? What had we ever done wrong or to upset him? Why Emily? And why his daughter? But I choked as I tried to speak. I could only walk, following the light like a moth, dazzled by the glow.

As we reached the flat ground I saw the house up ahead, its dark exterior even darker than the night sky above. As terrifying as the woods were, this was worse. In the forest, we could run or hide behind a tree. We could even find a log to hit him with if we needed to. But here, out in the open, there was no hiding.

I looked at Donald. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked sad or disappointed even. The bag in his hand was like a rucksack, and it looked rather heavy. I wondered what could be in there, and if we could grab it from him and run, but it was no use. My heart battered my ribcage as dark thoughts whispered in my ears. He’s going to murder you. This is it.

Adam stopped, freezing like a statue. I could see his legs shaking. I slowed down and stood next to him, with no real idea of where we were going to take things from here, or how we were planning to handle the situation. My mind was blank and my fingers rattled against my palm.

‘Donald, we just can’t,’ Adam said. His voice was croaky and the words sounded forced. ‘We just can’t.’

Donald turned towards us both, his eyebrows scrunched up. It was hard to read his thoughts, and even harder to see beyond his eyes and into the deranged brain underneath. Adam was completely rigid in Donald’s torchlight, dazzled like a small animal in front of a car. Donald was the predator, waiting for an opportunity to mow him down and indulge in his prey.

Adam began to cry and collapsed to the ground in a heap. His hands clutched at the grass below and tore it up, before he rubbed his forehead against the muddy earth. ‘I just—we can’t, Donald. I don’t know why, but we can’t. I can’t.’

He began to thump his head on the ground, the damp soil underneath splattering upon impact, like a meteor crashing into the Earth’s surface. I looked at Adam and at Donald. We both exchanged a glance before Donald nodded at me. I walked towards Adam and pulled him from the floor. His body was limp, like he was magnetically attached to the ground. Grabbing his shoulders, I dragged him back to his feet. Mud tattooed his head. It ran and smudged down his face with his tears. The wet soil dripping down his cheeks looked like thick, crimson blood in the glow of Donald’s torchlight.

I leaned towards him and grabbed his shoulders, resting my forehead against his, regardless of the patch of mud on his head. Adam’s bottom lip quivered. Thick beads of saliva dripped down his chin.

‘I’ll sort this, cuz. I really will,’ I whispered. I turned past Adam and walked towards Donald, eyeing him up as he towered above me.

His eyes shifted around the field before meeting mine, tilting his head.

‘I don’t get it, Donald.’ I clenched my fists together. ‘Why you’d do what you did to your daughter and why have you done what you’ve done to Emily? Cause I know it’s you. We both know it’s you. We’ve known for a while. We’ve seen the initials on the ring and we’ve seen her in the photo album. I guess we just figured that it would be best to wait and find out as much as we can because we’re kids and that’s what we do. But we know it’s you. And it doesn’t matter if you do something to us, anything to us, because you’ll get found out, and that’ll be the best thing. I’m not f*cking scared of you anymore.’

The last part of my speech was a lie. I shook from head to toe. But I still felt better. I’d said it. That was it. That was all I had to say.

What chilled me most about the whole scenario was the way that Donald looked back at me with his mouth slightly ajar as I finished my speech. Maybe it had been because I’d sworn at an adult. That was the first time I’d sworn at an adult and they’d heard me. Or maybe it was the realisation that we knew. Maybe he really didn’t know that we were on to him all along or how much we knew anyway. But now it was out in the open. The truth was out there. No more lies or games. I looked back at Adam for some sort of approval. It did not feel right, me standing up like this, but Adam just looked back at me too, wide-eyed. He had stopped crying. His sniffing was the only thing breaking the deadness of the silence right now.

Donald slammed his mouth back shut and clicked out of his trance. He looked up to his left at the stars above, which barely peeked through the thick layer of cloud. His hand stroked the handle of the bag, his fingers clawing round it. He turned back to me. His eyes were damp, and his mouth straight. Out of nowhere, he grinned and let out something of a chuckle.

‘Boys, I really am sorry about all this. About how you’ve been dragged into things. But you should come with me to the house. You need to see what’s there. You don’t have to worry about me.’

He smiled as he delivered the last line and looked towards Adam, who shuffled behind me. ‘Dragged you into things.’ I felt even more uneasy now that he had spoken and acknowledged that something really was going on. Reality felt strange. I did not like it.

‘The bag…’ Adam whispered, as he slumped further behind my back.

I found it trickier to summon that voice within me the second time, but once I had started to speak, the words seemed to come naturally. It was as if somebody were typing a speech into a computer, and I was imitating. ‘We saw you burying your daughter. And with Emily, hugging her, touching her. And all that stuff with Carla and the ring. You’ve been messing us around and now you’re going to kill us. You’re going to take us up to the house and you’re going to kill us and bury us and do what you did to Emily.’ I exhaled heavily now. Sharp waves of air shot in and out of my chest, which tightened up. Donald’s jaw sunk again and his smile disappeared. A soft frown grew on his head, and behind his thin glasses, his eyes misted over.

He shook his head and bit his lip, then spoke. ‘Boys, you’ve… I don’t think you get it. I’m… boys, you need to come to the house. We’ll talk there?’

I edged back a step, pushing Adam slowly as I did. If we were going to run, we had to do it soon. And with some sort of confession from Donald. Something we could take to the police. My heart raced and my legs began to rattle at the knees.

‘Did you kill your daughter?’ The words sneaked out from beneath the lump in my throat.

Donald shook his head some more and muttered under his breath.

‘Did you kill her?’

The flashlight turned towards the ground, limp in Donald’s hand. He continued to shake his head. Only the silhouette of his body was visible now.

I edged back further. The butterflies in my stomach turned to ants, nipping inside me. My legs shook, and I just wanted to run free, burst from this cocoon. Adam rubbed my arm and tried to slip his hand into mine, but my fists clenched tighter than a vice grip. I took another breath and readied myself one last time. ‘Did you kill your daughter—’

‘Yes!’ Donald screamed, projecting saliva towards us. He fell down to his knees, the bag in his right hand collapsing with him. ‘Yes, I did kill her, alright? I killed her, and it’s all my fault, it’s all my fault, and there’s nothing I can f*cking do about it. I’ve tried to do everything, tried to fix things, and tried to be better, but she’s f*cking dead, and I can’t do this anymore.’

The butterflies in my stomach receded and my fists opened. It felt like a bubble had been burst; a bubble that had been on the verge of popping for a while. But right here, in the low light of Donald’s torch, the bubble burst in silence. Donald’s glasses slipped off his nose as he buried his head in his hands, spluttering and crying, choking on his tears and inaudible words. I didn’t feel like running anymore.

Donald looked up at us from his hands. He looked different without his glasses on. He looked pitiful. I reached for the torch that had rolled towards us when it fell from his hands. The predator became the prey. But it felt horrible being in this position. Something wasn’t right about it. Donald looked… upset.

‘Boys, I swear. I swear to you. I wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt anyone. I swear to you. You’ve got things wrong. I swear to you.’ He kneeled and parried towards us, and we shuffled back as he did. He opened his tear-drenched hands and threw them at us, eager for us to hold them, but we couldn’t. They were dirty hands. Hands of a killer.

I didn’t know what else to do, what else to say. We knew he’d killed his daughter. That was our mystery. Our mystery had been solved. And yet it felt so horrible. So wrong. Staring down at Donald in the light, his tears reflected into the night sky. This wasn’t the way it was meant to happen. He wasn’t supposed to be upset. It didn’t make sense. That’s what scared me the most about all of this.

‘Come on, Adam, we should go,’ I said.

‘No! No, boys, please.’ Donald kneeled like a monk, clasping his hands together. ‘I beg you. It was an accident. She said she needed her pills and… I guess I must have given her too much. Her mother, she was so good about it. But I… I couldn’t handle it, and I didn’t plan it. It just happened.’ Donald was tortured, tears rolling down his face and wet mud staining his corduroy trousers. He was a shadow of the confident, witty man who we’d played with in the woods. I almost felt sorry for him, as he begged and begged. And yet, I still could not find the words to speak to him. He was a murderer now. He was different, wasn’t he?

‘Boys, you believe me, it was an accident. Stupid, stupid accident. You can’t understand, but it was. I’m not a killer. It just happened and it’s done. I love her. I loved her, my Patricia. Love her. She loved this place. It’s so long ago now. It’s why I couldn’t tell you about the ring. I just wanted her to be here.’

Patricia. P.S. Her name rang in my ears like a gunshot and echoed around my skull. She had died in an accident, and he had buried her ring here because she loved the place. It made sense. But it wasn’t as exciting as in the books or on the telly. It wasn’t as… evil. It made too much sense. It was an accident, and it had killed her. Beth Swanson was just a coincidence. It was an accident. Like Gran had told Adam about his mum and dad. Just an accident.

‘We just need to know what happened to Emily,’ Adam said from behind my shoulder. He sounded confident again, the croakiness of his voice nowhere in sight.

Donald looked as though he was in a trance, shaking his head against the ground. And yet, he was smiling. Almost laughing at everything, the truth of it all being out in the open for the first time. Adam’s words vanished into the night, unheard and ignored.

I took his place. ‘Donald.’

He jolted up, his head snapping back into place, and looked at me. ‘Wha—wh—’

‘You say your daughter… it was an accident. Right, but we just need… why have you killed Emily?’

He stopped whimpering and looked deep into my eyes. ‘What do you mean, killed her?’

Adam intervened, storming from behind me towards Donald. ‘We know, Donald. We’ve seen you messing with her, saw those knickers that you picked up back there. What have you done with her?’ I held Adam back as he bombed forward like an angry dog on a leash.

Donald squeezed his eyebrows together as he reached towards his glasses on the ground. He was silent for a few seconds, his mouth open, bewildered. ‘Boys… why would I kill Emily?’

I felt my arms go light. Maybe he was playing games again. Tricking us into a false sense of security before killing us. We had the upper hand, and we couldn’t afford to let it slip now.

‘We know you’ve got her, Donald. Done something to her. So tell us what it is,’ I said.

Donald laughed and shook his head. His smile was discomforting. ‘Sorry to disappoint but… I thought you’d figured it out. That’s why—boys, we’re going to see Emily now.’

A chill ran down my spine. She was in the house, of course she was. But Donald’s delivery was eerie. ‘We’re going to see her now.’ I scratched at my arms and pulled my neck round to face Adam.

‘What’ve you done with her?’ Adam asked. His voice was quieter than before. The aggression wasn’t there anymore.

‘Boys, she’s absolutely fine,’ Donald said. ‘And if you don’t want to take my word for it, look in the bag.’

I did not know how to react to this. It could be a trap. Donald rose to his feet as if he were reading my mind and threw the bag towards us. It was an old black sports bag, like one a tennis player carried all their gear in. I scratched at my wrist and looked at my watch. It was 2:30. If Granddad walked into our room now, he’d go crazy. I wish he was here.

I crouched down and looked between Adam and Donald.

‘Don’t worry, Liam,’ Donald said. ‘Your guard is keeping a close eye on me.’ He put his hands in the air and waved them from side to side, like a criminal caught by the police.

I pulled the handles out of the way and clenched the zip before tugging it along, my fingers weak. For a sickening moment, I expected to see Emily’s head in the bag, like on that film that Jay West had told me about before summer, where the murderer sends the policeman’s girlfriend’s head to him in a box.

But there was no head and there was no weapon. Just sandwiches. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. A snuggly pink blanket. And the knickers. I looked back up at Donald, who raised his eyebrows. He carried on smiling. My mouth and lips opened and closed as I tried to make sense of things.

‘Like I said—Emily’s absolutely fine, boys. Maybe you should come see for yourselves.’ He walked towards me as I gawped on the floor. He reached for his rucksack and slid the torch from out of my hand. ‘I think that’s mine,’ he said, before turning and striding towards the house in the distance.

Adam and I were stuck to our spots as he strode off ahead. What did all of this mean?

Donald turned round to face us again. He shook the flashlight at us to capture our attention, like a slap across the face. ‘I’m heading this way, boys. If you want to know what all this is about before you get any more wild ideas, I suggest you come along, too.’

I looked up at Adam, who nodded his head. We followed Donald from a distance, baffled by the events of the last few minutes. We walked hand in hand towards the towering derelict house up ahead, surrounded by the silence of the night.