Something Wicked (7 page)

Andrew glanced down at the notes Richard had emailed the previous evening. ‘How much do you know about “Lara”?’

The two Carrs exchanged a quick glance but it was Richard who answered again. ‘Not loads but a bit. She’s an orphan – his girlfriend and, of anyone, they spent the most time
together. We’ve not really seen her since he disappeared. I think she’s at university somewhere around here.’

‘Did she ever stay over?’

‘Once or twice. You can’t say “no” nowadays.’

‘Generally, were there any other problems at around that time?’

Richard Carr shook his head. ‘Only the usual things with teenagers. One minute they’d be shouting the house down because there was no Marmite in the cupboard, then it’d be all
sweetness and light five minutes later. He was just normal.’

That may well have been true but Andrew suspected that was what a lot of parents thought about their children until something happened. When it came out they’d been acting as a rent boy
for the local MP, no one would be able to believe it. There would definitely be something there, though probably not the rent-boy thing.

Andrew opened his mouth to speak again when Jenny breezed into the room, expertly balancing a tea tray on the tips of her fingers like a waitress in a posh restaurant. She placed four sets of
cups and saucers on the table, with a pot in the centre, a small jug of milk, and a separate egg cup of sugar next to each of the Carrs’ drinks.

Elaine Carr stared up at her. ‘Where did you find those?’

Jenny sat on the spare armchair, twiddling a strand of her hair. ‘That cupboard over the sink, right at the back behind the butter dish. Sorry, I hope you don’t mind. I was looking
for the teacups and they were just there.’

Elaine snorted slightly. ‘No, dearie, I didn’t mean it like that. I spent
ages
looking for them the other week. I thought Richard had thrown them out.’ She leant forward
and poured tea into the four cups, emptying the egg cup of sugar into her own and stirring twice clockwise, twice anti-clockwise like a James Bond villain. Muhahahahaha, Mr Bond. Just watch how I
stir my tea.

Andrew picked up his own and took a sip, mainly to be polite, before returning to his notepad.

‘Can we talk about the actual night Nicholas went missing?’

Richard was tugging at his jumper. ‘What’s to say? We weren’t there.’

‘But tell me what you understand happened.’

‘He went to some sort of gig, or perhaps just the pub with his friends and Lara. They all say he and Lara left the pub at around nine, he walked her home, and hasn’t been seen since.
She said he’d set off to walk back here. It’s perhaps a mile or two but he’d regularly walk to the city centre, so it wasn’t that rare.’ Richard leant forward, taking
out a padded envelope from underneath the coffee table and handing it over. ‘That’s everything we emailed you yesterday, plus a few other odds and ends. I found his mobile number after
all. When he went missing, we called it over and over but there was no reply. What’s that thing they do . . .’

He swirled his arm in the air, searching the word until Andrew gave it to him: ‘A trace.’

‘Yes, they did that trace thing but they said the card thing, simple something—’

‘A SIM card.’

‘Right, they said that had been removed, or it had been turned off. We found a few old bank statements around too, plus he’s had mail in the past few months. Mainly things from the
bank and college. We kept it all just in case and it’s in that envelope.’

Richard sat back with his tea, taking a sip and then gulping again. He’d just handed over his son’s life in a pack; no wonder he was a little upset.

‘Is there anything else you can think of?’ Andrew asked.

Richard shook his head, his blank expression matched by his wife’s. ‘I wish I could.’

Andrew gazed around Nicholas’s bedroom as Jenny approached the window and nudged aside the lace netting to peer outside.

Richard Carr waited in the doorway, bobbing from one foot to the other. ‘The police went through everything, obviously. They took away Nicholas’s laptop but returned it covered in
that dust stuff. Other than that, everything is pretty much how he left it.’ He paused. ‘I never used to come in here. I remember what it was like when my parents came into my room. I
hated it.’

He blew out uncomfortably, unsure what else to add. Andrew smiled weakly again; it was the best he could do. ‘If you leave us here, we’ll see if there’s anything that could
help and come downstairs when we’re done.’

Richard waited for a few moments before nodding, turning and closing the door quietly.

Andrew joined Jenny by the window, gazing out to where the boys were still playing football on the green.

‘I hated it when my parents came in my room too,’ he said.

Jenny turned with a smirk: ‘Is that where you stashed your massive porn supply?’

‘No.’

‘You kept it somewhere else?’

‘No, I . . .’ Andrew stopped himself, not taking the bait. ‘It’s just your own haven, isn’t it? When you’re that age, you need somewhere you can lock yourself
away and moan about the rest of the world.’

Jenny breezed across the room towards the bed. ‘I used to get pocket money if my room was tidy. My mum would come in every Friday and make sure there was nothing on the floor and that
everything was packed away where it was meant to be.’

‘How long did that go on for?’

Frown lines appeared on Jenny’s forehead as she stuck out her bottom lip. ‘Until I was sixteen, seventeen. Something like that.’

‘That’s quite, erm . . . strict.’

Dimple, get-out-of-jail smile: ‘Yeah, but it’s not as if she was
really
inspecting what I kept in my room. She’d have a quick rummage, make sure there was nothing lying
around the floor and then I’d get my money. It’s not as if she went poking around underneath my bed. I used to have this soft elephant thing that had been in my room forever. I
don’t remember being given it, it was one of those things that end up being around. I pulled all of the stuffing out of its arse for the perfect hiding place.’

Andrew wondered if he should follow it up by asking precisely what it was Jenny was keeping in her elephant’s backside but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

‘Did you find anything poking around the kitchen?’ he asked.

Jenny shook her head. ‘Lots of cleaning stuff. The cupboard under the sink is like that aisle in the supermarket where no one ever goes with all the detergents and stuff. Mix it all
together and you could probably whip up some crystal meth. The whole room was spotless, shiny handles, sparkling worktops – like an advert for Mr Muscle.’

Perfect: it wasn’t as if Andrew had expected her to find Nicholas’s body tucked into the freezer but you could tell a lot about people from their kitchen.

‘Draining board?’ he asked.

‘Clear.’

‘Dishwasher?’

‘They don’t have one.’

At least one of the Carrs preferred things to be cleaned away in that case – which explained a little about Nicholas’s room. Richard told them that his son’s room had been gone
through by the police but you wouldn’t know it to look at it. The bed was made with neat corners and tucked edges in a way that hardly anyone would be able to sleep in. There were two plump
pillows without the hollow in the centre from a dozing head, and underneath the bed, a neat row of shoes was lined up, heels facing outwards.

If the bed had been completely remade, then what else had been moved?

Jenny began taking photographs of the various corners as Andrew watched her work.

‘Do you think teenage lads are usually this tidy?’ he asked.

‘The ones I knew barely even changed their underwear, let alone lined up their shoes.’

As Jenny opened the wardrobes and began flicking through the rows of shirts and tops, Andrew focused on the shelves running above the bed. There were a dozen or so real crime paperbacks next to
rows of computer game cases. Andrew opened the first few, noticing the correct disc in each box, with the pristine instruction booklet tucked neatly into the clips.

Andrew turned to see Jenny sat cross-legged in the wardrobe, picking through a shoebox. ‘See anything?’

‘Not really. Some Top Trumps cards, an old mobile phone without a battery. There are a few boxes in here too from items he must’ve bought at some point. There’s one for a
PlayStation, with the receipt inside.’

Perhaps the neatness ran in the family after all.

Andrew sat on the floor and started tugging the shoes out from under the bed. He lifted up the overhanging covers and ducked underneath, pulling out a wide plastic tub from the far end, with a
bonus mouthful of dust.

As he spluttered his way through scanning the contents, Andrew stopped to take in the room again. The walls were clean and unmarked by pieces of Blu Tack or other pins to hold up posters. The
windowsill and the rest of the surfaces were all clear and polished to within millimetres of their existence.

‘Jen . . .’

‘What?’

‘Have you found anything . . . well, normal, I suppose? Ornaments? Trophies? Medals or certificates?’

‘No.’

‘Photos of mates?’

‘Nope, but everyone keeps that stuff on their phones nowadays.’

‘Come and have a look.’

Jenny emerged from the wardrobe and scuttled across the carpeted floor until she was sitting next to Andrew and the plastic tub. It was about a metre long with low sides and packed with an
assortment of objects.

‘This was under his bed,’ Andrew continued. ‘It’s like his parents – probably his mum – couldn’t bear looking at the room with all of the clutter
around, so she put it in a box and shoved it out of the way.’

Jenny began poking through the items, tugging out a film and holding it up. ‘“Killer Vampires versus Toxic Zombies”? Sounds good.’ She moved on to the next one.
‘“Attack of the Nightmare Mannequins” – I think I’ve seen that.’

‘Really?’

‘Probably on Channel Five or something. Look at this.’ She held another movie case in the air: ‘Night of the Killer Chainsaw Bitches’.

Jenny flipped the case around and began reading, putting on a deep-toned continuity announcer’s voice: ‘What do you get when you cross a chainsaw factory with a bachelorette party
and an alien invasion? “Killer Chainsaw Bitches”! This is the movie your parents warned you about. BANNED in forty-four countries around the world, OUTLAWED in nineteen US states,
SLATED by the British Parliament, SLAMMED by the US Senate, this is the uncut version of “Killer Chainsaw Bitches” with twelve new minutes of never-seen-before gore, gore, gore!
Warning: if you have a heart condition, do NOT watch this movie.’

She looked up at Andrew, verdict scathing: ‘Sounds shite.’

Andrew couldn’t disagree.

Jenny continued flicking through the items, taking out a framed photograph. Nicholas looked exactly the same as he had in the picture Richard had given them in the first place but the girl he
was with was a walking advert for emo chic: long black hair, a month’s supply of eye-liner, some sort of black corset with a matching tutu and long stripy socks up to her thighs.

‘Lara?’ Jenny said.

Andrew shrugged. ‘I guess so.’

‘She’s quite pretty under all of that.’

Jenny pushed the photo back into the tub and continued rummaging.

Andrew could sort of understand it; the room was now a shrine to their ideal of a perfect son. Everything was tidy and his taste in dodgy B-movies, his goth girlfriend and everything else was
shunted to one side as if it didn’t exist. If he somehow did come knocking on their front door one day, all of his things would still be here.

Jenny plucked out a hardback book with binding held together with sticky tape. The cover was cyan fake leather, with a faded gold imprint on the front. She started flicking through the pages,
sucking on her bottom lip.

‘What is it?’ Andrew asked.

‘I’m not sure. Some sort of spell book.’

Jenny passed it across and Andrew started to look through the pages. The paper was heavy, almost parchment, with a faint aroma that reminded Andrew of trees and leaves, although he wasn’t
sure why. He tried to read it but the contents were largely incomprehensible: a history of magic, mentioning various witch trials, interspersed with apparent recipes for potions and various chants.
There were two pages about the healing potential of bones, plus lists of useful herbs and plants. Aside from the quality of the actual book, the passages seemed a little juvenile.

Andrew glanced up to see that Jenny was flipping through a second, similar book.

‘What do you reckon?’ he asked.

‘Dunno. It’s all the rage nowadays, isn’t it? Vampires, zombies, witches, wizards . . . probably more of a girl thing than a boy thing, though, plus this seems a bit more real
than you might expect. It’s not all teenage girls fawning over boys, it’s actually “real” magic. Well, if that exists.’ Jenny turned the book around for Andrew to see.
‘Look, it’s some sort of recovery spell to reignite your karma, whatever that means. There was a hex in here too for getting back at your enemies.’

Andrew pulled out an A4 pad which looked and felt a lot thicker than a simple few pages of paper. Stapled throughout were pages printed from the Internet with various spells, hexes, curses and
symbols. The words were largely Latin-sounding, with instructions above and below about how dangerous the words could be if you misused them. To Andrew, it was all nonsense – but you could
apply that to any creed or religion. If you decided you believed in something and chose to live according to that, then it became your own truth.

‘Was he into magic?’ Andrew asked.

Jenny held up the photo of Nicholas and Lara again, pointing at the upside-down metal cross hanging around Lara’s neck. ‘Or she was?’

‘Perhaps they both were?’

Jenny shrugged, sliding the book back into the tub and crossing to sit at the computer desk. ‘Am I okay to go through his laptop?’

‘If you can get in. It sounds like the police already had a good go.’

‘They couldn’t find porn on a top shelf.’