EIGHTY-NINE

Josh remained quiet. He sat at the kitchen counter, staring into the coffee cup between his hands. Amber could see him through the window from where she stood beside the dusty, gritty paving stones on the driveway, where the pile of rubble had built up throughout the day: a mound of broken concrete, gravel, sand, crushed rock, wooden boards, wire mesh from the vapour barrier, disconnected PVC pipes and severed wires that had been drilled, hammered, chiselled, and cut from the floor of her garage. The builders had kindly taken most of the debris with them.

Before the remains of a perfectly good floor had been shipped off, she had raked through the rubble as it built up from noon until seven p.m. Even wheeled the barrow from the excavation to empty it onto the drive. In between making endless cups of tea for the two men who dug out her garage two foot deep, and then as far into the soil as was safe before subsidence became an issue, she had sorted through and sifted the rubble until her fingers bled. Picked up each grey or discoloured stone to make sure it was not bone – a metatarsal or finger joint encased in cement – while the ache in her head had gradually grown to match, and then exceed, the pain in her lower back from being stooped over for hours. She had cuts on her knees from crawling around in the wreckage while checking all the white bits she could find to make sure they were not premolars.

Occasionally, her frantic antics were watched by the workmen. Jeff Finney, the older man she had spoken to on the phone, and whom she had paid, had often caught the younger man staring at Amber while she scrabbled about on all fours, and sometimes attacked the larger chunks of concrete to break them apart with a hammer they had loaned to her. And when the builder noticed his young assistant gawping at the crazy, dirty girl, with cement dust wiped through the sweat on her face, he would whistle quietly and nod his head at the ground to draw his lad’s attention back to the job in hand.

Unable to watch the destruction of her garage, Josh had gone back to the caravan site to meet the police. Then returned to the farmhouse and sat in the garden with a newspaper, or more often than not, staring across the maize field beyond her garden. Amber guessed he had been thinking of what to do with her now that she had gone crazy – or crazier.

The sun was sinking. The security lights on the front of the house illuminated the front drive for as long as Amber remained there, like a flood-lit fool. She moved slowly to her car and sat down with her back resting against the side and looked at the paving between her feet.

She didn’t hear him approach, but Josh came and sat down next to her. His knee joints cracked. For a long time he never said anything, just tapped the back of her hand with the base of a cold glass bottle. Beer, and probably the best beer she had ever drunk; half a bottle of chilled, fizzing, hoppy loveliness taken in a long draught that slipped down her throat and made her burp. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, as an afterthought.

Josh smiled. Then sipped from his own bottle.

Amber gazed at the house. ‘I’ll have to get a bag together. Find us a hotel.’

Josh turned his head to look at her but never spoke.

‘I can’t stay here.’

‘This a temporary measure?’

Amber shook her head. ‘Permanent.’

‘Once the garage has been put back together, you’ll get a good price. Far more than you paid for it. Sell it to a rock star.’

‘No one can live here. Not any more.’

‘You are kidding, right?’

‘Can’t risk it.’

They sat in silence for another ten minutes and finished their drinks.

Josh swallowed a mouthful of beer. ‘No body. No box.’

Amber shrugged. She didn’t even know how Fergal might have planted the relics, the trophies. She’d assumed they were inside the curtained wooden box, that it was some kind of shrine she was unable to imagine in too much detail because it upset her so much. But as the rubble mounted up and the soil revealed itself to be harmless, she’d begun to think that he might have scattered the hair and bones like seeds, for some hellish crop to germinate later, fertilized by her own presence inside the house; scattered bits of dead women, and her boyfriend’s missing teeth, all through the house’s foundations or inside wall cavities. It was possible. She didn’t know for certain, but if her hunch was correct about the trophies carrying the presences of their former owners to the farmhouse, the entire house could be contaminated.

Or perhaps the remains were out there, in the fields. Or under the driveway. Or buried beneath the garden; hadn’t she dreamed of an excavation? They could be anywhere. She could spend a lifetime digging, but she did not have a lifetime. She had little idea of what was coming next, coming for her, but she doubted she would last more than a couple of nights at the farmhouse. Too much more of this and her mind would go out with a flash anyway, like a wet circuit. And if she were wrong about how the influence reanimated, and it all started again someplace new . . .

She looked up at her beautiful home. The whole thing would have to come down. Amber felt her head swim at the thought of it, then thought she might throw up; she had drunk the beer too fast on an empty stomach.

Josh got to his feet and went and stood at the lip of the driveway, looked down into the foundations of the garage. ‘The builders who poured the concrete. They would have seen the box.’

Under the strong overhead light, the scene reminded her of the garden in Edgehill Road, revealed under the portable police lights as detectives sifted through every inch of soil looking for more evidence, more bodies.

‘How much soil came out?’ Josh asked without turning his head.

‘Loads. As much as they dared. A few feet down. Any more would have created subsidence.’

Josh nodded his head, whistled. He said, ‘four grand’ under his breath, but Amber still heard him. He picked up a length of copper pipe the builders had left behind, and even dismantled carefully so she could reuse it.

‘I’m going to get a shower, mate.’

Josh nodded. ‘Right.’

‘Then I’ll call a place in town. Pack a bag. Find us somewhere to stay. I’ll spring for dinner.’

Josh stared into the garage, but didn’t answer.