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       Chapter One

       Alex

      Normally my sister Isobel would have got home from school before me, but that afternoon she’d been held up because she couldn’t find her PE kit in the changing rooms and she and a friend had stayed behind to look for it. I’d been let out of class a few minutes earlier than usual and I’d walked straight home, just as I always did. If Isobel had left at her normal time and got home before me, she would have let herself into the house before the police arrived to stop her and she would have seen everything. Maybe he would even have attacked her as well.

      The day it all happened was the 11th of January, 2002. It was a little after three-thirty in the afternoon so it was already on the verge of growing dark as I crossed the busy main road that ran between our home and our school. I was thirteen and Isobel was fifteen and we had been walking to and from school on our own for a good few years by then. There was nothing unusual about the journey, nothing to alert me to the waiting danger or to the horror of what had just happened behind our locked front door. I was thinking about normal, routine things like the homework I had to do and the after-school activities planned for that evening, and I was wondering what was for dinner.

      The first thing I noticed as I came into our quiet road was that Mum’s red Vauxhall Nova was parked outside the house. She wouldn’t normally have got home from her job as a school teacher for a couple of hours yet and she hadn’t said anything about being early when she set off that morning, so that puzzled me.

      I turned into our front garden and walked the few paces up to the house, then pulled out my front door key, just as I always did, without even thinking about it, ready to let myself in. As I lifted the key to the lock, a movement in the street behind made me turn and I saw a police car drawing up at the kerb, its vivid markings making it stand out amongst all the other parked cars. I paused for a second and watched as a young uniformed policeman, dressed in a bullet-proof vest and looking a bit like one of those SWAT teams you see breaking into people’s houses in television dramas, got out of the driver’s door. There didn’t seem to be any great sense of urgency in his movements so I turned back to the door and inserted my key in the lock. The policeman called out, making me jump.

      ‘No, no lad,’ he shouted. ‘Stop there. Don’t go in. Wait over there a minute.’

      He walked up behind me and nodded towards the low wall that separated our front garden from next door’s. There wasn’t anything particularly dramatic in his tone as he gave me those instructions; it all seemed a routine matter to him, although I found it odd that I was being stopped from going into my own house. Isobel and I had always been brought up to be respectful of authority figures so I did as he told me without question, leaving my key still in the lock, unable to work out what was going on and unsure what to ask. It’s always been my habit to stay quiet in new situations where I am unsure of myself, and wait to see what happens rather than launch in with lots of questions, demanding to know what was going on, which is probably what Isobel would have done if she had been in my shoes at that moment.

      Under my curious gaze the policeman composed himself and then politely rang the doorbell, as if he was just paying a visit. I wondered if perhaps Mum and Dad had been arguing again and neighbours had rung to complain about the noise or to express their concern for Mum’s safety. I decided I wasn’t going to interfere, in case it was Dad who came to the door; I would leave it to the policeman to sort it out.

      Dad had often threatened to hang himself or set fire to the house with us all in it. It might sound melodramatic but I believed anything was possible as far as he was concerned. Maybe this time he had actually carried out one of his threats and Mum had had to call the police. Isobel and I were so worried about his threats to set fire to us that before we went to bed at night we used to try to find all the matches in the house and hide them – which was pointless really as we had no idea what Dad kept inside his room. We had never been allowed inside the upstairs bedroom where he spent most of his days and nights; we didn’t even have any idea what it looked like in there.

      A few seconds after the policeman rang the bell, the door opened and Dad was standing there, holding it wide open and giving the officer a clear view right through to the kitchen at the back of the house. I was over to the side so I couldn’t see past them. Dad didn’t seem at all surprised to find a uniformed policeman standing on his doorstep; it was as if he had been expecting him. He’s a big guy, quite scary-looking, with a mean expression permanently set on his face. Whatever the policeman was able to see from there was enough to make him step back in shock and fumble for his radio, bringing it up to his mouth.

      ‘There’s been a blue murder,’ he announced to whoever might be listening at the other end.

      I was momentarily puzzled by the phrase. ‘Screaming blue murder’ just meant screaming at the top of your voice, as far as I was aware, but maybe this was police code for something else – or had I СКАЧАТЬ