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He creeps down the hall, opens the Lovegoods’ front door a crack.
There is no one about. He checks the upstairs windows. No, no one. He runs as far as the kerb, throws the toy into the gutter, legs it back inside. He closes the door, pushes his hands to his knees and slides to the floor. He is hyperventilating, crying and cringing. Please God let no one have seen him do that. Please God don’t let this be the end of him. Little Abi, his darling little Abi, it’s not possible, it can’t have happened, it can’t be happening. For a moment, she is still alive. He’s got it wrong. When he goes back and checks, she will wake and look at him in confusion.
‘NeeNee,’ she will say. She will wonder what she’s doing there.
He will take her in his arms and carry her back to her mother. Here, Ava, look who I found, cheeky monkey. No. No, he won’t, because she’s gone; he knows it’s impossible just as he knows it’s true. But nothing good can come of coming clean. Nothing nothing nothing good can come of coming clean nothing good can come nothing good nothing nothing oh God oh God oh God.
‘Abi!’
Ava. Ava is on the street. He checks his watch. Holy Christ, he’s been here over ten minutes, caught in some sort of daze.
‘Abi? Abi, darling, where are you?’
A rivulet of sweat runs from his forehead; the salt and grease sting his eyeballs. His breath comes fast, faster; the air thin.
‘Abi? Abi!’
This is hell. This is what hell is and he’s in it. There is no way out. All he can do now is fix it. All he can do now is take control. He has to work fast.
Back in the work site, he clears the trench in one stride and studies the bag. He’ll have to get it out of here but the street is too risky. The back of the house is open. The gardens on this street are long. Should he take the bag now? Whatever, he can’t be here. No one apart from Jasmine knows he’s here.
The bag.
He picks it up, weighs it. It is heavy. Big. There’s no way he’ll get it to his own house if he goes the back way – he’ll have to sneak behind the sheds and that’ll be a tight squeeze as it is, and there’s no way he can throw her over the fences. No way. On his own, he can, he reckons, get back to his house. He’s done it enough times as a lad, fence-hopping through gardens much smaller than these for a dare.
He puts the bag back on the concrete floor, the beginnings of a plan forming in his mind.
The police will be here soon enough. Ava will start to panic. And only now does he wonder how the hell Abi got into the Lovegoods’ house.
The front door, of course. That wasn’t him; that was fucking Johnnie, fucking idiot. She would have seen it open and she would have known he was in here because she’s seen him coming in and out these last few weeks. She must have toddled in looking for him. For him, oh God. For Uncle NeeNee. It must have all happened in seconds, split seconds. But how did she get out of her own house, unless… unless Ava left her front door open too.
Not one door left open then. Not two. But three.
And he’s only to blame for one of them. There’s no way he could have known. If it’s his mistake, it’s Ava’s too. And Johnnie’s.
Enough.
None of that matters.
What matters is now, what he does now.
Think. Think, Neil.
He studies the bag. Steels himself. Opens it and removes Abi’s hat. Then, cringing, her little coat. He needs to lay a trail. A plan forms in his mind. The coat he wraps in a dirty work towel and stuffs it into the washing machine. It is too big, too blue to hide in his pocket. He’ll come back for it later. The hat. The hat he can place. But he needs to be quick.
He runs out of the open work site, climbs over the Lovegoods’ back fence, lands in the flower bed of the flats beyond. His heart bangs. If Johnnie for some reason comes back to check on him…
Stop thinking. Just act.
He crouches and runs, like that, eyeing the windows of the flats. It is the work of seconds and he is out on Thameside Lane, almost opposite the Oasis. He could drop the hat here and run back. The traffic is light. He spots a young mother pushing a buggy, her son in a school uniform on a scooter about five metres ahead. They’re early. Some pre-school club maybe. He waits.
When they’re far enough down towards the school, he walks calmly across the road. Sits on the wall by the leisure centre. A car passes. Then nothing. All he needs is this second. He drops the hat and he’s back, back across the road, back into the flats’ bushy overgrowth. He scales the fence. Back in the Lovegoods’ garden, he studies the work site. It looks normal, like nothing has happened, but still, a doubt about the bag has him running back. It’s closed. He closed it. It will have to hide in plain sight. There’s no way he can risk being seen carrying it out now.
He’s about to grab the coat and get the hell out when he glances down at the trench. He should wash it, he knows. If they bring forensics in here, they could pick up some trace of something he can’t see. Yes. He should wash it. Quickly.
He detaches the washing machine from the standpipe and uses it to fill his bucket, along with some of the Lovegoods’ detergent. Down on his hands and knees, he sponges the sides of the trench, the base of the trench, rubbing hard, hoping the water dries before anyone looks in. He can’t see any blood – she must have cracked her head and that was it. He washes the floor of the site, washes the hallway, up to the front door.
Sweating hard, he empties the bucket into the flower bed and stashes it back behind the washing machine. The detergent he places carefully, adjusts it, thinks it’s in exactly the same position. He reconnects the washing machine, stands back and takes one last look.
