Ben Cheetham - Blood Guilt

Over the next few days, Harlan spent every waking moment searching for Ethan. He trawled the suburbs, peering over fences and into garages. He drove around supermarket car parks, and multi-storey car parks, and industrial estate car parks, constantly moving, constantly looking.

Nothing. It was as though the VW didn’t exist. Harlan began to wonder whether the milkman had got the car’s make wrong. If so, he might as well be out hunting for a ghost. Whenever he returned to the flat, bone-weary though he was, he lay awake with doubts swirling inside him.

Days stretched into weeks. Harlan hardly slept, ate or washed. Telephone calls from his parole officer — he’d failed to report for a meeting — went unanswered. Mail piled up unopened. He was searching further and further afield. Villages and towns he’d never been to before. Sometimes he didn’t return home for days. He stayed in cheap hotels and B amp;Bs, and when he ran low on cash, he slept in his car.

With every passing day, the media and the public’s interest in the case waned. News reports got shorter and less frequent. Newspaper articles were relegated from the front pages. Volunteers pasting up posters and handing out leaflets disappeared from the streets. Ethan’s sun-and-rain faded face was gradually blotted out by fly-posters, defaced by graffiti, even torn down — some people, it seemed, objected to being constantly reminded that something so terrible had happened in the place they lived.

There was no longer a plainclothes on Harlan’s tail wherever he went. The police’s search — at least on a street level — was winding down. In the Northwest, whatever leads they’d been following had apparently led to nothing. Locally, they’d searched hundreds of addresses, spoken to thousands of people, pried into every corner of Ethan and his family’s life, but all their efforts had failed. The jigsaw remained incomplete.

Exactly a month after Ethan’s abduction a local Baptist preacher named Lewis Gunn whipped up interest in the case by appearing on the news to urge church members nationwide to continue the search. He announced that an all-night prayer vigil was to be held at tabernacles across the city at which he would be collecting donations for a reward fund. Harlan had previously stayed away from all such gatherings, partly out of fear of being recognised, but mainly because he knew Garrett would use his presence as an excuse to haul him in for further questioning, maybe even try to get his parole revoked. But now that he was no longer being followed he saw no reason not to go along. And there was little chance of him being recognised — he barely recognised himself with several weeks’ growth of beard on his sleep and food deprived face.

Harlan went first to Lewis Gunn’s tabernacle — an ugly brick building with a huge concrete crucifix over its entrance. Its car park was crammed with cars. People, many of whom held lighted candles, were filing inside it. There was a solemn hush over the gathering and, indeed, over the surrounding streets, as if the whole city held its breath in silent prayer.

Harlan parked on the road. He was about to get out of the car when he saw Susan flanked by Neil and the preacher — a vigorous looking middle-aged man with a bushy head of grey-black hair. It hurt Harlan like a knife to see Susan, her face devoid of colour, her eyes devoid of expression, like something dead but alive. Walking slowly, like an old woman crippled with arthritis, she headed into the church. Harlan left the car and made his way around the car park, checking number plates. His heart gave a double thump when he saw the silver VW Golf with tinted windows. His eyes darted down to the number plate. KY09 SGE. An exact match! But why the hell, he wondered, would the kidnapper — if that was who the car belonged to — risk coming here? Several possibilities occurred to him. Maybe the kidnapper was somehow connected to the church, and it would look odd for him not to be here. Or maybe he was someone from the local community who was trying to distance himself from the crime by staying close to it — there were plenty of cases where murderers had gotten involved in the search for their victims. Or maybe he was simply the kind of guy who got a kick out of seeing first-hand the pain he’d inflicted.

Harlan snatched out his phone to call Jim. The dial tone rang and rang. He pressed his forehead to the car’s rear-window, cupping his hand against the glass to cut out the reflection of the streetlamps. He could vaguely make out some kind of shape on the backseat, a rucksack perhaps, or possibly a bin liner stuffed with something. It crossed his mind that maybe this sick fuck was crazy or arrogant enough to bring Ethan — or rather, Ethan’s body — here. Maybe it gave him some kind of twisted thrill. Whatever it was in there, Harlan felt compelled to get a proper look. He ran to fetch the wheel-nut wrench from his car. As he returned to the VW, Jim finally answered. “Jesus, Harlan, what do you want?”

“I found the silver Volkswagen.”

“Holy Christ! Where?”

“The Baptist tabernacle on the Attercliffe Road.”

“Stay where you are. Someone will be there as soon as possible. And for God’s sake, don’t do anything. Do you hear?”

“Uh-huh.”

Harlan hung up and raised the nut wrench overhead to smash a passenger-door window. Before he could do so an angry shout rang out, “Hey you! What the fuck you doing?”

A heavily built man dressed in jeans and a leather jacket was approaching fast. He was about Harlan’s height and age, but his close-cropped hair was ginger, not dark.

His hands were up in a fighting position, and Harlan noticed that the backs of them and his wrists were greenish-black with spidery jailhouse tattoos — tattoos which in a semi-dark room to a terrified twelve-year old’s eyes might conceivably be mistaken for hair. One look at the man’s face told him there was going to be serious trouble if he didn’t act fast. He shoved the wrench in his jacket pocket. “Police. Is this your car?”

The man stopped a few feet away from Harlan, uncertainty puckering his forehead. He took in Harlan’s unkempt hair and creased clothes. “You’re police? Let’s see your ID.”

“Is this your car?” Harlan repeated more forcefully. The key to these situations, he knew from experience, was to take control, and to do so quickly with a calm aggressiveness.

“You’re not police. You look like a fuckin’ scag-head to me.”

“Sir, this vehicle is suspected to have been used in a crime. I need you to accompany me to the station for questioning.”

The lines of doubt on the man’s face deepened at Harlan’s official sounding language. For an instant, he looked as if he was going to accept Harlan’s claim to be a police officer, but then the pinpricks of his pupils flared. “Either you show me some fuckin’ ID, pal, or I’m gonna fuck you up so bad you’ll wish you were dead. You get me?”

The two men stared silently at each other. Adrenaline poured into Harlan’s bloodstream. He knew what he had to do — he had to put this fucker on the ground and kneel on his back until the uniforms showed up — but he couldn’t do it. His body was rooted, paralysed, while his mind looped back to the image of Robert Reed going over like a skittle. Yet again he heard the sickening crunch, yet again he saw the blood diffusing like wine through the snow.

The man swung at Harlan. Automatically, he jerked his arms up to block the punch. The man swung again. Harlan swayed out of his reach. “Motherfucker!” roared the man, throwing a flurry of punches, all of which either deflected off Harlan’s arms or missed their target. The man backed away, breathing heavily, a new wariness in his eyes.

Again, they faced each other silently for a moment. Then the man pulled out a key and unlocked the car. “Stop. I can’t let you leave,” said Harlan, but he made no attempt to prevent the man from ducking into the car. It wasn’t until the engine revved into life that he darted forward and tried to yank open the driver’s side door. He was dragged along, stumbled to his knees, and as the car turned sharply, narrowly avoided getting pulled under its wheels.