of her since she was bludgeoned with his golf club.
‘You must admit, Vince,’ Steve said, ‘that you were provoked by her. It’s understandable that you would kill her.’ What was Steve – the witness for the prosecution? Wendy had haggled for custody of the dog but she didn’t want the barometer. ‘You can have it,’ she said, as if she were being generous. Tell you what, Vince, I’ll keep the dog and you take the barometer. No, she hadn’t actually said that, but she might as well have done. He must try to get Sparky back. He would have no idea what was going on. Neither did Ashley, of course. Still no word from her. Where was she? Was she all right? Was she still with the orang-utans?
Ashley would return to this house, her childhood home, and find it had been transformed into a murder scene. He ought to leave her a note in case he wasn’t here. He tore a piece of paper off the pad they kept by the telephone and scrawled a message for his daughter on it. He propped it up in front of Wendy’s bonsai. The little tree already looked bigger, as if it was free of the straitjacket of its jailer.
Wendy’s car was in the garage. The route to the garage took you past the lawn and Vince couldn’t help staring at it. This was where she died. She must have been running, trying to flee from her attacker. For perhaps the first time since it had happened, Wendy’s death felt real to him. It had been only a handful of days (he had lost track of time) since her murder, but the grass had already grown higher than she would have found tolerable.
In the garage he found the small stepladder that lived on a hook on the wall and positioned it beneath one of the joists. To anyone watching, he might have looked like a man about to hang himself. The image of the girl’s face in Silver Birches flashed up before him and he wobbled precariously for a moment, but then he regained his balance and ran his hand along the top of the dirty joist. A splinter jabbed into his palm but he carried on searching until he found what he was looking for.
He got in the car, started the engine and backed out of the driveway. I’m in the driving seat now, he thought. He laughed. He knew he sounded like a maniac, but there was no one to hear. He surprised himself by remembering the route to Silver Birches.
When he arrived, he marched inside without any trepidation. He was a man on a mission. The first person he encountered was Andy. Andy stared at him in horror. ‘Vince?’ he said. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Vince? Vince?’
Sometimes You’re the Windshield
Andy had picked up the requested kippers on the way to Silver Birches. He was starving, he couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten, although not starving enough yet to eat a cold kipper. Could you even eat them cold – like some kind of weird sushi?
He was meeting Tommy here – he could see his Mercedes slewed casually in the drive. Tommy was an arrogant parker. Silver Birches appeared to be in the calm after the storm. There was still the problem of the missing Jasmine, but apart from that, the hatches seemed to have been securely battened down ready for decommissioning. If they were going to move the girls and shut down the place they would need Vasily and Jason, but there was no sign of their vehicles.
It was as quiet inside the building as it was outside. It was suffocatingly warm, as though the good weather of the past few days had entered and been trapped in here and had transformed into something torpid, an almost tangible thickness in the air. The place was deathly quiet too – the whole atmosphere was beginning to make Andy feel uneasy. There was no one in the rooms downstairs. Where was Tommy? Where were Vasily and Jason? Where were the girls, for that matter?
And here was – not Tommy, but Vince. Vince, who was striding purposefully along the corridor towards Andy, aiming a gun at him. A gun! Vince!
‘Vince?’ Andy said as Vince continued to advance. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Vince? Vince?’
Without any warning, Vince pulled the trigger. The force of the shot propelled Andy backward, sending him flying in a kind of comedy