The Trail Killer

Nineteen

The following day, Friday, April 4th

The two Dixon men stood in awkward silence on the gravel driveway, uncertain of how their farewell should play out.

With a nod back towards the house - its pretty bay windows, its veins of mock-Tudor timbering, the steeply pitched gable roof - it was Oliver who finally spoke.

"If it all goes smoothly, I guess I might never set foot inside my childhood home ever again."

His tone wasn't melancholic however, more just plain matter-of-fact. Had missed the start of a film on TV, burnt his toast, dropped a pound note somewhere on the street.

Bryan swung his gaze towards the For Sale sign which had been thrust into the middle of the front lawn the previous afternoon. He recalled the last time there'd been a For Sale sign there, the spring of '63. Melanie's hand tight in his as the estate agent had guided them towards the gate, the tingle of her whisper in his ear: Looks nice, Bryan. I've got a good feeling about this. Yes, more than any other, that had been the moment - the one where the reality of his situation had truly struck. That he would soon be marrying the beautiful young woman there at his side. Taking out a mortgage with her, raising a family with her. But rather than the sense of apprehension and dawning claustrophobia which he imagined many men experienced in such moments, it had instead felt joyously liberating. An official stamp on his one-way ticket to happiness.

But now...

Now he'd let that ticket slip from his grasp somehow. Had watched it sweep away in the wind, never to be found again.

"Place is too big for a man on his own," he murmured. "Too... unmanageable."

Turning, Oliver unlocked the rear door of his Morris Minor, with a muffled grunt tossed his holdall across the backseat.

Bryan gestured towards the garage behind them. "Could always take your mother's Renault if you like. Newer reg, passed its MOT just a month or two back."

It was a proposal which Oliver deemed worthy of only half a moment's consideration, however. "Nah, prefer the Morris. More me dad."

But Bryan knew that a question of stylistics was only a very minor part of the reason Oliver had turned the offer down. What son would want to take over the ownership of the vehicle his suicidal mother had driven? Had in fact taken for a spin the very morning of the tragic act. If the coroner's estimate of time of death were anywhere close to the mark, just an hour or so before tipping all those cursed, wretched pills down her neck.

He pictured the Renault there behind the metal curtain of the garage - the uncharacteristically skewwhiff angle at which Melanie had veered to a halt, the driver's door which had been left open. Wondered for the hundredth time just where the hell she'd ridden out to that tragic morning, what twisted helter-skelter of thoughts had been ripping through her mind.

"This dissertation of yours," he then began - the first mental distraction that had come to him. "What's it about exactly?"

Though Oliver tried his hardest to conceal it, there was a rueful, spilt-second shake of the head - that of someone who'd been asked and had answered the same question several times before.

"Orwell's Animal Farm and its allegorical parallels with the Russian Revolution of 1917."

Whatever the hell that meant, Bryan would try and remember it this time. Orwell's Animal Farm and its - what was the word? - algorithmic parallels to the Russian Revolution of 19-something-or-other. That the boy was much more his mother than his father had been in little doubt for many years; only now had it become a fact Bryan was more content than frustrated about.