“But I need to know,” Adrian shouts, and he bangs his hands against the door. “Please. It’s important. I have to know. Have to!”
“I can show you.”
“No, no, you have to tell me.”
“Why?”
“In case the police find her,” Adrian says.
“You’re lying,” Cooper says.
“Please, I just really need that body. I promise when I get back things will change. You want water, right? And you said it’s too hot, right? Tell me where she is and I’ll give you water and fresh air. If you don’t tell me then that means you don’t want to be my friend so I may as well close this slot and never come back.”
As much as Cooper would love to never see Adrian again, being locked in here would be an awful, awful way to die.
“I’ll tell you where she is,” Cooper says, “and then we start working as a team, okay?”
“Okay.”
“But first, Adrian, you still haven’t told me where the girl from last night is.”
“In the ground, of course.”
“How far away from the building?”
“I think the police have already found her,” Adrian says.
“Shit,” Cooper says, banging his fist against the door. The body will give them a whole lot of evidence to work with. “And the knife?”
“The knife is here,” Adrian says. “I would never throw it away.”
Good. That’s at least something. “Listen to me, it’s time you let me out. I can’t afford to get caught. Neither of us can. We have to get away from Christchurch. We have to try and leave the country. If we work together we’ll be okay, but you have to start by letting me out and we have to trust each other.”
“You said you were going to tell me where the girl is,” Adrian says, almost whining.
Yeah, he knows what he said, but his mind is all over the place, probing at every possibility. “There’s a path that goes around the back,” Cooper says, giving him directions to the girl who gave up on him last year and died. “Keep following it, it follows a low brick wall. You come to the end of that brick wall and you turn right. Walk fifteen meters parallel to the building and you’ll find a ditch. Follow the ditch further from the building another twenty or thirty meters and you’ll find a tree that’s fallen over. Cross over that tree, walk another ten meters, and that’s where she is.”
Adrian closes the slot.
“Hey, hey, Adrian,” Cooper says, banging against the wall, but Adrian is gone, and all Cooper can do is lie back down and wait.
chapter forty
Adrian feels agitated. He needs to do something to release the anger and there are only a couple of things he’s good at. His face is hot and he digs at the itches and flicks the hair off his forehead as he runs back out to the car. He’d left it running. It’s not like there was anybody out here to steal it. Up on that hill looking down at those men, they all looked like ants. He pinched his forefinger against his thumb and pretended to squash them, then he turned his fingers into a gun and pretended to shoot them instead. It’s what he should have done to those boys back in school. Should have gotten a gun and finished them off instead of killing their stupid pets.
He snaps off a branch from the tree the car is parked under and uses it to get at the itch centered in his back. It tears at his skin but it’s immediately soothing. The backs of his arms are starting to get blotchy, his skin raised up and raw-looking. This only ever happens when the stress arrives quickly. He snaps the stick in half and throws it onto the driveway. He wants to scream, to release some energy. He would get like this on occasion during his Grover Hills years. Things would upset him, and he wouldn’t be able to calm down. Things like eating nothing but mashed potatoes for a hundred days in a row or not being allowed to go outside for an entire summer. He would panic and scream and he’d be put into the Scream Room and left there for a couple of days, sometimes he’d be beaten. Other times he’d be left alone until his frustration faded and he’d forget why he was so mad. More than once he’d be left down there and he’d beat his hands bloody on the door, begging to be let out.
He gets into the car and drives fast down the driveway. It’s getting dark out now, with shapes in the distance only shadows within shadows now. It feels good to be on the move again. It releases the pressure in his chest a little, but it’s nowhere near enough.
His home is no longer his home! Even at the halfway house the Grove remained out here safe and untouched and waiting for him, and now. . and now these people have ruined it! Why are they being so mean to him?
He knows the roads out here, and stays well away from the main ones in case there are cop cars about. After all, he’s still driving a dead girl’s car. He reaches the highway without seeing anybody, then it’s a trip further west until another set of back roads. There isn’t much in the way of traffic. The sun gone now, but the sky not yet black. There are no other cars around and he goes beyond the speed limit, something he’s never done before, the headlights swaying across the roads as his shaking hands move the wheel. He keeps his grip tight. He’s doing nearly 100 kph and his heart is racing. He has never driven this fast before.
He knows Cooper thinks their temporary home is Sunnyview, but Cooper doesn’t know everything. Adrian has driven here twice. The first time was when he was learning to drive and Ritchie thought it would be fun for them to learn on back roads without risk of being caught. They drove here and parked at the top of the driveway, both of them too nervous to go any further, both of them daring each other and laughing. The second time was Monday night when he followed Cooper out here when Cooper had the girl in the trunk of his car, and that time he stayed well back in case Cooper heard him.
This time he pulls up the driveway, there is nobody to dare him, nobody to laugh with. Sunnyview is a much bigger building than Grover Hills and he doesn’t like it; it doesn’t have the homey feel that the Grove has. It’s more modern, it’s made from brick and it’s more boxy and in better condition and life may have been different if he’d been sent here instead. The lawns are overgrown with patches of thistle coming through, and around the back it’s knee length and tickles at his legs and he hates it. The skin on his back tingles as he carries the shovel and follows the path by the brick wall, using a flashlight now to light the way. At the end he turns left and takes a few footsteps before remembering he was supposed to go right. He should have taken notes. He knew it at the time, but he thought he would do okay. The sky is mostly dark now, purple way in the distance. There are big trees only a short distance away and thankfully Cooper didn’t bury the girl in there otherwise he’d never find her. He runs in line with the building and actually trips into the ditch. It’s about a meter lower than the normal level. He follows it looking carefully at the dirt. He finds the tree. It’s a silver birch and the branches are all brittle. He climbs over it and it snags at his shirt and tears a small hole in it. He reaches back and drops the shovel and his foot gets tangled and he falls into the ditch, tearing his shirt even more. He picks up the shovel and bangs it flat against the ground twice, then tosses it forward a few meters, bangs his fists into the ground, and starts to cry. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.
It takes him a minute to get back up. His shirt is ruined. He finds the shovel and carries on. He has a headache. He counts out what he thinks are ten meters. The dirt looks different, it’s raised up a little at the ten-meter mark, and he stabs the shovel into the ground. His itches fade as he digs, but he doesn’t have to dig long before he finds her.
For a girl who has been dead only a couple of days, she is a real mess. In fact she is so much of a mess that he wonders if this is the girl at all and not another of Cooper’s victims. After all, he did say he’d killed six people.
He is frightened that if he picks her up she is going to fall apart. And anyway, he doesn’t want to touch her with his fingers. There are bugs and worms squirming around in her body. He looks around, sees nothing useful, then decides to use his shirt. After all, it’s already damaged. He takes it off, wraps it around the dead girl’s foot, and pulls.