Crusher Read Free Page A

backpack—planning to wash it at home—laced up my running shoes and headed out across the car park, dodging pedestrians as I built up speed. Pushing my pulse to 140, I pounded along the backstreet pavements, heading home.
    The street lights were flickering on as I pulled up, panting, outside the house. I stretched as I got my breath back, glad to see I was still supple enough to touch my knees with my forehead. But as my pulse slowed and my breathing found its resting rhythm I realized something was bugging me. The house was dark, as if Dad had gone out. But he usually worked on his writing till I came in from work—my coming back in was his excuse to knock off for the day.
    The curtains were already closed. Had they ever been opened? I fished my keys from my backpack and opened the door. As I reached for the light switch I registered something about the silence.
    “Dad?”
    It was too deep, as if the house was empty; but it didn’t feel empty.
    Our house was small—the door opened straight into the living room. The light came on dimly, brightening as it warmed up. Dad disliked the overhead light, and only switched it on when he had one of his fits of tidying-up. Now it flooded the room in the way he disliked, coldand harsh, and fell on him where he sat at the table. Not sat, so much as slumped, the way I’d seen him once or twice when he’d been to the pub and somebody else was buying.
    I paused in the doorway, certain something was wrong, trying to figure out what exactly. “Dad?” It was too cold in the room. He couldn’t hear me—he still had his earphones in.
    I’d found him like that before a few times, early in the morning. He’d be resting his head on his folded arms. Now his arms were pinned underneath him, at an odd angle, and he wasn’t breathing. I knew that, even before I consciously worked it out, even before I registered properly that the crown of his head was a sticky mass of blood, and something heavy and bulky lay on the floor by his chair, itself stained with red, with bloody hairs sticking to it.
    My dad was dead. He had been sitting at his desk, plugged into his music, and someone had crept up behind him holding his award for
Best Newcomer 1992
, and hit him over the head with it, and kept hitting him until he died. His eyes were open and his glasses had fallen off. There was blood coming from his mouth and clotting in his beard, and pooling on the table, and he was dead. And the house was empty and silent.

two
    The wall of the interview room was a regulation blue-grey, but I wasn’t really aware of that, although I’d been staring at it for what seemed to be hours. I was running through everything that had happened since I walked into the house; how the cold silence had been broken by sirens, faint at first but gradually growing louder and louder, one becoming two and then three, their shrieks overlapping into a cacophony. I was still standing there, mobile phone in hand, when blue lights started flickering through cracks in the closed curtains, illuminating the room in flashes like LEDs on a Christmas tree. Someone, probably me, had responded to the insistent rapping at the front door, and opened it. Two enormous coppers, stab vests over their jackets and peaked caps pulled down over their eyes, asked me to identify myself.
    Our narrow street was one-way, but when I waseventually led outside by a female copper I found police vehicles had come in from both directions and jammed the street solid. There were so many flashing lights it was like a rock concert, and the air buzzed and crackled with radioed conversations. Underneath it all, like the murmur of the sea, were the hushed conversations of neighbours craning their necks to see past the barricades of police vehicles and speculating about what had happened at our house, holding up phones to snap pictures of the chaos to stick on their Facebook pages. I knew most of them by sight, and they knew me, I presumed, but none of them were