Neil White 3 Book Bundle - Neil White

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the side of the house. They were going in the same way, so would find the same thing that he had. Amelia, dead. Or perhaps they already knew that?

      Charlie was trapped. His car was further along Amelia’s street, but he couldn’t go back to it. They would see him. They might even know that it was his car, so would come looking for him. He had to get away from there.

      Noises came from the back of the house. Hisses, angry voices.

      Charlie started to crawl along the ground, trying to keep his head down. He looked along towards the reservoir and the paper mill, wondering if anyone was watching. There was a path that ran alongside the water and then disappeared into trees before coming out by a grid of terraced streets. If he could get that far, he knew a short cut back to his apartment building.

      He crawled quickly so that he could get to a point where he could look natural, as if he was coming from a different direction. He tried not to grunt or shout out whenever his knees hit a stone, and soon he knew that he was out of sight of the house. He straightened and tried to make like he was out for a walk, although he was in a suit and there was a sheen of sweat on his face, putting a gloss to his grey pallor and making the graze on his cheek brighter. None of this was natural, and he knew that people would remember him, because as soon as Amelia’s body was discovered there would be shockwaves in the town. People knew her. That was the way with defence lawyers, because the court stories are what people read in the local paper, and so the defending lawyer gets a name. So they will remember the tall man in a crumpled suit, his hair wild, his face covered in greying stubble, creeping round the house and crawling through the field. He would have to explain why he did nothing, but until then he had to work out what had happened to Amelia. He owed her that much.

       Chapter Twenty-Five

      Sheldon walked slowly through the streets of Oulton. It seemed quiet to him, even though the streets were busy. People were still curious about the murder, and so the activity around the police station attracted onlookers, those who were grateful to have something to fill their day, just hanging around, sharing cigarettes. But it was as if they knew to stay away from him as he shuffled along, each step taking him further away from the police station, one step nearer to an uncertain future.

      The parish church was ahead, dark grey stone with a high Norman-style tower at its centre, square with castellated ridges and a white-faced clock on each side. It had dominated the skyline of the town for five hundred years, from when Oulton was just a small wool trading village and the church served as the religious centre for the surrounding farms. It had drawn Sheldon today, as if he was seeking somewhere quiet to reflect.

      The low drone of the traffic was lost immediately as he went inside. Sheldon’s movements echoed and seemed to bounce between the majestic stained-glass windows. He looked up and felt small, insignificant. The ceiling was high and arched, traversed by oak beams, the lines broken by carved rosettes where they intersected, overlooking the black and white checks of the aisle. He let his hand trail over the pews as he went towards the altar, and when he got there, he sat down. He closed his eyes and tried to find some solace in all the years that the church had been there, that his problems meant nothing.

      But as he sat on the pew they all came back to him, the deaths, right back to his first, a bony old man found dead in his flat, killed for his pension money, the bravery that had made him carry a gun in wartime spilled over a blood-soaked rug, his life taken away in front of framed pictures of his grandchildren. And so the movie flew forward again, past car crash victims and fights that went too far, once more juddering to a halt at Alice Kenyon, floating lifelessly in Billy’s pool, her hair trailing around her like rags caught on a branch.

      Sheldon got to his feet. The church brought him no comfort. For all the years of prayer, he wasn’t sure any had been answered. Good people died, bad people lived. That seemed to be always the way, and Billy’s murder didn’t change that balance. It was a blip. He stepped up to the altar, unsure of what he was doing, but then saw a stone doorway that opened onto steps that would take him upwards in the tower. Sheldon thought of the view, the fields and hills surrounding Oulton, and he had an urge to go up there.

      He looked around to make sure no one was watching and then stepped into the tower. As he started to climb, the steps felt suffocating, winding in a tight spiral so that all Sheldon saw as he got higher was more stone, more steps, turning, getting narrower, so that he wondered whether he would reach nothing but a dead-end. But he was wrong. He burst gasping onto the roof, a small square hemmed in by the castellated ramparts of the tower. As Sheldon headed for the wall, he was breathing hard, the effort of the climb making his chest pump hard. Sweat flashed across his forehead, and as he pitched forward, the ground below swayed and blurred.

      Sheldon looked forward instead and sucked in clean air as he let the horizon settle down. It was as he imagined. The roll of the hills on the other side of the valley, and the chimneys and terraced streets in the nearby towns. As he looked further, he could see how the green around him turned grey and ugly as the sprawl of Manchester took over.

      He was cold. He was wearing just his suit, and although the sun was shining, the exposed tower chilled the wind, so that he folded his arms to try and keep warm. He felt his ribs under his fingers and wondered how they had got there. He knew he hadn’t been eating that well, surviving on sandwiches and microwave meals, but he was surprised. But then as he thought about it, he couldn’t remember his last meal.

      Sheldon looked down at his shoes. They were worn and scuffed. He could feel the ground through his soles, cold against his feet.

      How had he got to this? Pushed out of the station on forced leave. He had only tried to do what was right, to track down a killer. Why wasn’t that enough?

      The view held his attention for a few minutes, the rumbles of a diesel engine reaching him as a bus struggled up a hill. Cars threaded through the town. A train ran along the valley floor, Manchester-bound. The trains will keep running, the people will keep praying, and then his life would get lost in the fade of time, so that nothing about Alice Kenyon would matter anymore. Nothing about him would matter anymore.

      Sheldon put his head back and looked up, let the blue sky swirl above him, the view broken only by the occasional wisps of cloud. There was nothing of his life up there, just infinite emptiness. None of the failures, or the obsessions. For a moment, he felt a tight grip around his throat as he realised how his life was turning out. There was no real way forward.

      He stepped forward to the wall. He looked ahead and not down, just towards the roofs of distant buildings, and all he had to do was keep on walking. The stones scraped his hands as he lifted his foot and let it settle on the wall, and then the other one, so that he was crouching and the view below opened up in front of him.

      The ground was just stone a hundred feet below. As he looked down, he thought he could hear voices telling him to jump, that the ground would end it and bring him peace. But the voices got louder. He looked round again. There was a woman behind him. She was young, with long red hair, her face kind but worried. She looked like Alice.

      ‘Are you all right?’ she said. She looked scared, a tremble to her voice. ‘I saw you come up. I was at the back of the church.’

      He didn’t have the answer to that. He hadn’t seen her. His eyes welled up with tears, or maybe it was just the sharp cut to the breeze.

      ‘You shouldn’t do what you’re thinking of,’ she said, her voice softer now. She brushed her hair away from her face, the wind sending it into a tangle. ‘Things get better. They always do.’

      He swallowed.

      ‘Why should you care?’ His words came out thick with emotion.

      Her hand went to her mouth. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, just to calm herself. When she opened them again, she said, ‘I just don’t want you to do it, not here, not in front of me. Just step down. Please. For me.’

      Sheldon looked at her and the young woman reminded him not just of Alice, but also of Hannah, his daughter. He couldn’t let her remember him like this. He wiped

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