The Sum of All Sins Read online

  The Sum

  OF

  ALL SINS

  Mark Sennen

  This novel is a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  First published 2018

  Copyright © Mark Sennen 2018

  Mark Sennen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Web: www.marksennen.com

  Twitter: @marksennen

  The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Part Four

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Rain. Slatting down in a deluge. The wipers going double speed. Swish-swish, swish-swish, swish-swish. The windscreen clears for a fraction of a second with each sweep, and she is able to catch a glimpse of the way ahead. Water lies in puddles in every dip and torrents crisscross the road. It’s as if all the winter’s rain has come at once. Forty days and forty nights in a single evening.

  The car radio is tuned to a news station and the storm is the lead story, the only story. High winds have knocked down electricity pylons and whole towns are without power. The ports are closed and all flights have been grounded at Heathrow and Gatwick. Two people have been killed in central London by debris blown from a tower block. A man has been crushed by a tree in Manchester. A lorry has ploughed into the rear of a coach on the M1, leaving four dead and twenty injured. The emergency services are struggling to cope. And there’s worse on the way, the forecasters predict. The weather becoming colder, the rain turning to snow. It’s the kind of night where only the mad or the foolhardy would venture out. The mad, the foolhardy, or the desperate.

  She hunches at the steering wheel. Dabs the brake to slow for a corner. On the next straight she urges the car on and rips through a deep tranche of water. The wheels aquaplane and for a moment her heart is in her mouth, sheer terror creeping across her skin, before the wheels grip the road surface and the car forges on.

  Not long now. Perhaps fifteen minutes. Perhaps half an hour. Fuck knows to be honest. She’s been here once before, but she wasn’t driving back then and the roads are unfamiliar. Roads? No, not roads, lanes. Twisting between low walls of stone and climbing over the undulating terrain. Not that she can see much in the darkness and the rain. The occasional road sign picked out in the car’s headlights. The pale glowing eyes of sheep on the verges. The glistening granite boulders ready to mangle the car should she stray from the narrow strip of tarmac.

  For a second, she loses concentration and almost falls asleep before she jerks back to consciousness and blinks. She cracks the window down a touch and cold air rushes in, reviving her. It’s been over six hours since she started out. Two hundred miles, most of it on the motorway, but much of the journey driven at a snail’s pace. Only the mad or the foolhardy would drive faster. Not the desperate. The desperate want to make sure they arrive at their destination.

  She’d set off from an anonymous street in an anonymous borough. Her house was a non-descript, semi-detached property, with a recent extension out the back. That was a good portrait of her too: non-descript, semi-detached, the add-on to the main event. She’d always been an appendage. To her cleverer siblings, to her more attractive friends, to her larger-than-life husband. The truth was she didn’t mind. Not everyone could be centre-stage. There was merit in standing off to the side and providing the occasional prompt. Working the lights. Moving the scenery. Even sweeping up afterwards. For the stars to shine, somebody had to do the dirty work.

  The dirty work...

  Like clearing the blood from the floor or sweeping away the fragments of bone. Luckily, she wasn’t squeamish, so cleaning up hadn’t bothered her. Before she’d married she’d been a nurse and vomit and urine and shit were part of the daily routine. If an auxiliary wasn’t around, you often found yourself wiping an old man’s arse right before your lunch break. No, dealing with the mess hadn’t worried her a jot. Especially not since they’d had new tiles put down in the living room. So easy to clean. Just wipe away the stains. Erase the evidence.

  ‘You’ll have to do it,’ he’d said to her beforehand. ‘To make this work.’

  ‘I understand,’ she’d said. It was all to do with suspects and alibis. They cancelled each other out. And, of course, her involvement implied she was the star for once. That meant something to her because she now meant something to him. He couldn’t do this alone. He needed her. Perhaps, after all, she was moving beyond nondescript.

  Water splurges up from a puddle and sluices across the windscreen. The wipers swish the glass clean and she’s back staring at the strip of road. The satnav app on her phone flashes up a warning and an insistent female voice tells her to make a U-turn if possible. Damn it, she’s missed the junction. She slows the car and inches along until she finds a place she can swing round. She eases off the road, but when she tries to go forwards to complete the turn, the car doesn’t move. She lowers the window, hearing the engine rev and the wheels spinning on t
he soft verge.

  She wrenches open the door and clambers out, her feet squelching in mud. The wind pulls at her hair and rocks the car as rain slants across in the headlight beams. The light is swallowed by the all-enveloping darkness. She’s stuck in a little cone of brilliance, and beyond the cone is a black void. No streetlights, no comforting glow from a town or a village, no stars, no moon. She doesn’t think she’s ever been so far from another living person in her life. She’s utterly alone.

  She shudders, but before the anxiety builds, she turns and peers at the rear of the car where the wheels have sunk deep into the grassy verge. She reaches back inside the car and nudges the handbrake off. She goes to the rear and pushes. The car rolls back and forth once, twice, and then she slips and tumbles to the ground.

  She cries now, the adrenaline that had fuelled her for the last few hours all used up, her will to go on broken. And without him, that’s what she’ll be: broken. She sobs as the rain soaks her clothing. She wants to lie there in the mud. Curl into a ball and hibernate. Let the cold take her as she sleeps. She’ll just fade away from this world and leave the pain behind.

  For a minute she stays still, knees drawn up to her chest as if she’s returned to embryonic form. A simple blob, knowing nothing, fearing nothing. The red glow from the taillights heightens the womb-like feeling and the cold slips away. A strange euphoria washes over her. This was meant to be. She’d been born screaming, but she’d die with a whisper on her lips.

  ‘Sweet,’ she says quietly, deliriously. ‘Lovely.’

  She closes her eyes to sleep, but all of a sudden there’s a voice in her head. Female. Demanding attention. She scrunches her eyes tight, trying to concentrate. Does the voice belong to her mother? One of her friends? She tries to listen as the rain lashes down, pattering in the dirt and thrumming on the roof of the car. A gust of wind howls and now she’s shivering, the euphoria snatched away. She pushes herself upright and stands. She doesn’t want to die. The voice may have been in her imagination, but it’s a sign. He’s sent her a message. He wants her to do this for him, for both of them. If she wants to be with him she must go on. She moves to the car door and bends to climb in. As she does so, the voice calls out once more.

  Make a U-turn if possible...

  She feels cheated, but then she looks at the display on the satnav. Three miles to go. She can do it.

  She pulls the phone from the holder on the dash and thumbs the navigation app off the screen. She brings up her address book and taps an entry. Not far from here a phone is ringing. Not far from here a friend is picking up and answering, the voice quiet and hesitant but profoundly comforting. Now all she has to do is slump down in the seat and speak.

  ‘Help,’ she says. ‘Please, Catherine, I need your help.’

  Chapter Two

  The trill from the phone jerked Catherine awake. As she opened her eyes, the surroundings seemed foreign. Even after three months in the house, the low ceiling and vast stone inglenook hadn’t lost their novelty. She pushed herself upright and gazed across the room. She’d fallen asleep watching a movie on TV, but the film had ended and now a news report showed pictures of the storm. Trees down, coastal towns flooded by high tides, the emergency services inundated with calls.

  She blinked and reached across for her mobile, thinking it was likely to be her husband, Daniel, but when she looked at the screen the number displayed was unfamiliar.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Help. Please, Catherine, I need your help.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ She didn’t recognise the voice. ‘Hello, who’s there?’

  ‘It’s Lisa,’ the voice said. ‘Lisa Paget.’

  ‘Lisa?’ Half asleep, Catherine took the phone from her ear and stared at the display. A bunch of numbers. Caller unknown. Then she had it, blurting out the answer before she realised how it sounded. ‘Toby’s wife?’

  ‘Yes. You could put it like that.’ There was another pause. ‘Look, Catherine, I need some help and advice and I don’t know who else to turn to. There’s no one like you. No one else who I can imagine ever understanding my situation.’

  ‘Lisa. God, love. It’s all a bit of a shock. You phoning like this.’

  ‘Sorry, but I didn’t know who else to call. When we had lunch at New Year I really felt we connected.’

  Connected? Catherine took a deep breath. The only reason she knew Lisa was that Lisa was married to Toby, an old university friend of her husband’s she didn’t think much of. They’d met a handful of times but were hardly best buddies, and Catherine hadn’t remembered their recent gettogether in quite the same way; Lisa and Toby had been subdued, the conversation somewhat pained. ‘OK, calm down. Tell me how I can help?’

  ‘I’m in a pickle, Catherine. More than a pickle to be honest. I’m in serious trouble, danger even. If I don’t get help, I’m fucked.’

  ‘Look, Lisa, I don’t want to be rude, but there’s not a lot I can do from down here. This sounds like a matter for the police.’

  ‘No, that’s not possible. Not the way things are. When I see you I’ll explain, OK?’

  ‘When you see me?’

  ‘I had to come. I had to get away from London. It was my only chance. I thought I’d be safe down here with you.’

  ‘Safe down here... where precisely are you?’

  ‘Close. My car’s run off the road. The B3212. I missed the lane to your place. I guess I’m about half a mile farther on from the turning.’

  ‘Shit, Lisa, I—’

  ‘Can you come and get me? I’m soaked to the skin. Freezing.’

  Catherine glanced at the TV again where a weather forecaster was giving an update. The wind was predicted to get worse and even heavier rain was on the way. The forecaster was talking about snow in the coming hours too. Cold air sweeping down from the north and meeting a second westerly front. A red weather warning. Severe disruption. Danger to life. Remain tuned for further updates.

  She felt selfish. People were dying in the storm. Crushed by falling trees, killed in car accidents, swept away by floodwater. Lisa was out there as well. Alone on the moor in the wind and the rain and the dark.

  ‘Stay put,’ Catherine said. ‘I’m on my way.’

  ***

  Catherine Ross was thirty-six years old. She was half English, half Irish, her father’s family being of Norfolk stock, whereas her mother came from Galway on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. Her father’s shock of blond — now grey — hair and angular face had lost in the battle of the genes though, and she bore her mother’s dark locks and soft features as well as a hint of her silk-like accent. However, she credited her father for her practical nature. There’d been no hint of gender bias in the way he treated his son and two daughters. All three had been taught to bang in nails and knot ropes, wire up electrical plugs and change car oil filters.

  Her father’s profession was accountancy, but the minute he arrived home in the evenings he’d change from his pinstripe suit into a blue boilersuit, balancing the drudgery of the spreadsheet with a life-long passion for DIY and woodwork. In a shed at the end of the garden he produced the most beautiful pieces, turning chunks of oak, cherry and walnut into everything from huge items of furniture to delicately carved fruit bowls. She remembered standing watching him at work, seeing the chips fly from the lathe, or marvelling how he could carve perfect dovetails with a chisel. Her father had asked her if she wanted to have a go, but the young Catherine had shaken her head. She didn’t want to copy her father and end up second best. She wanted to make her own way.

  At secondary school she’d taken art at A Level, and an enthusiastic teacher had introduced her to sculpting, not in wood but in stone. Back home her father partitioned off a section of his workshop for her. ‘No half measures,’ he said. ‘You give it your all or you don’t bother.’ Soon, the whine of her father’s lathe was accompanied by a chip, chip, chip as she experimented with the possibilities of this new medium.

  By the time she went to university to re
ad history of art, she knew her eventual career would be far more practical and hands on, and once she’d graduated she supported herself with a number of boring jobs as she learned her trade. Little by little, her sculptures began to sell. There was an intricacy to her work which was distinctive, and the pieces she produced in marble and granite were highly detailed: birds and mammals, the occasional figurine, and her speciality — unique abstract shapes with random holes bored through the stone at precise angles. The novelty of the abstract works brought her to the attention of several top galleries and soon they were taking all she could supply.

  Then, when she turned thirty, came the move to London, the acceptance into an artistic circle, the invitations to exhibitions and gallery openings, the parties...

  It had been at a party where she’d first met her husband, Daniel. She’d glanced across a crowded room in a top-floor flat in Battersea to find a pair of startling blue eyes staring at her through a forest of bodies. Never one for being shy, she’d sauntered across and flirted and pulled him into the next room where several couples gyrated on a makeshift dance floor. Daniel soon had his arms wrapped round her as if they were already an item, and as they’d danced she’d fallen into those blue eyes, thinking that still waters ran deep. And she’d noticed the way his gaze had wandered to the other girls in the room. A mind never quite settled and a body with passion to spare. But that was part of the attraction. His energy. When he did focus on her, all that energy flowed like a lightning bolt arcing to earth.

  There were two sides to Daniel, however, two sides to his passion. On the one hand there was love, on the other an explosive anger that manifested itself in blazing rows. Never in violence though. At least not until Daniel had...

  The incident wasn’t an event she liked to recall, but it had been the catalyst for their move from London to Devon. They’d wanted to get out and get away. To never have to look back. Only now Catherine found herself looking back all-too-often, because the shift from a terraced property in a busy street to an isolated farmhouse on Dartmoor had been more than a relocation, it had been a dislocation, a shock to the system. That was what they’d wanted, of course. To banish the bad memories and jump start their marriage, but from almost the first day she’d felt uneasy. It was as if they were intruding in a landscape that regarded them as aliens, as if they were invaders who had to be repelled. The sensation was heightened when Daniel had to travel on business and she was left alone. As the darkness fell and the wind picked up, she would double lock the front and back doors and shut herself in her bedroom.