That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  Gillian McAllister

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT

  Contents

  Prologue 1. Cathy

  2. Joe

  3. Cathy

  4. Now

  5. Then

  6. Joe

  Part I: Preventing a Lawful Burial 7. Joe

  8. Now

  9. Then

  10. Lydia

  11. Joe

  12. Cathy

  13. Now

  14. Then

  15. Cathy

  Part II: Criminal Damage 16. Joe

  17. Now

  18. Then

  19. Joe

  20. Joe

  21. Now

  Part III: Perverting the Course of Justice 22. Then

  23. Cathy

  24. Joe

  25. Joe

  26. Now

  27. Then

  28. Lydia

  29. Joe

  30. Cathy

  31. Lydia

  32. Cathy

  33. Joe

  34. Cathy

  35. Now

  36. Then

  37. Joe

  38. Now

  39. Then

  40. Joe

  41. Now

  42. Then

  43. Joe

  44. Cathy

  45. Lydia

  46. Joe

  47. Cathy

  48. Now

  49. Then

  Part IV: Conspiracy to Bribe 50. Joe

  51. Cathy

  52. Now

  53. Then

  Part V: Misappropriation of Corporate Assets 54. Joe

  55. Cathy

  Part VI: Fraud 56. Joe

  57. Cathy

  58. Now

  59. Then

  60. Joe

  61. Cathy

  62. Cathy

  63. Joe

  64. Cathy

  65. Joe

  66. Lydia

  67. Joe

  Part VII: Murder 68. Joe

  69. Now

  70. Then

  71. Cathy

  72. Now

  73. Then

  74. Now

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Gillian McAllister has been writing for as long as she can remember. She graduated with an English degree before working as a lawyer. She lives in Birmingham, where she now writes full-time. She is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Everything but the Truth, Anything You Do Say, No Further Questions, The Evidence Against You and How to Disappear.

  By the same author

  Everything but the Truth

  Anything You Do Say

  No Further Questions

  The Evidence Against You

  How to Disappear

  For Holly, who I would absolutely bury a body for

  Prologue

  ‘Help me, please help me,’ I say into the phone.

  ‘What?’ My sister has panic in her voice, her usually muted tone immediately alert. ‘What?’ The second what? is resigned, a full, heartbroken glob of a word, like syrup falling off a spoon.

  The line crackles as if paper is being brushed across the mouthpiece, the signal poor. ‘Please help,’ I say.

  It’s night-time, but there’s still just a hint of lightness at the edge of the horizon where the sun set hours ago, like somebody has torn a seam in the sky, just at the edge there. Otherwise, it’s completely black, the air scented with summer hay and the final embers of barbecues. ‘Please come,’ I add, though I know she will. This is what family means. This is what our family means anyway.

  She doesn’t say anything back, but that silence contains her agreement, I know it does.

  I move my gaze away from the sky and stare downwards, lighting up the ground with a torch which illuminates dust motes dancing in the air.

  I slowly run the torch over it. Over the body.

  1.

  Cathy

  Cathy only answers the phone call that comes in the middle of the night because she is awake, working. Chasing up bloods for a Labrador that she’s concerned about. The results are already late, and the unreliable holiday Wi-Fi keeps cutting off just as she tries to send the email.

  Frannie. Slide to answer. Cathy’s eyes flick to the top of the screen to check the time. It’s 1.25 a.m. The room is completely dark around the blue bubble of light the phone creates. All she can see is her sister, calling her in the small hours. Calling Cathy because she knows Cathy will be alone, because Cathy is always alone, whether on holiday or at home.

  She sits up in the bed and swipes to answer. The sheet falls away from her. She’s wearing pyjamas even in the Italian heat. It seems somehow wrong to sleep naked. That particular luxury, for Cathy, is reserved for the future, she hopes, with some as yet unknown man.

  ‘Help me, please help me,’ Frannie shouts as soon as Cathy answers. Electricity shoots across Cathy’s chest and down her arms.

  ‘What? What?’ Cathy says. Sweat forms on her upper lip and between her breasts.

  ‘Please help me,’ Frannie says.

  ‘Where are you? Are you safe?’

  ‘Please come. I’m on the road. Turn right off the track road and then left. Half a mile, tops,’ Frannie garbles.

  Cathy waits. For Frannie to start making sense.

  ‘It’s him. The man from the market,’ Frannie says, and then rings off.

  Him.

  Shit.

  Cathy gets out of bed and starts scrambling around for clothes to throw on. She finds a pair of pink shorts she bought in Verona a couple of days ago and pulls them on, the price tag scratching against her lower back.

  Why didn’t she stay on the line? Cathy tries to call back, but it rings out.

  She rams her feet into her dusty flip-flops and grabs her bag. As she leaves the silent villa, not thinking to wake anyone, the closing of the large wooden door behind her sounds like a gunshot in the night.

  The outskirts of Verona are completely black at this hour. Even after a week and a half, Cathy still isn’t used to it. Struggling to see her own feet as she walks.

  The only light comes from her bedroom window in the villa behind her. It projects a neat rectangle of light on to the patio. And then: nothing, like she might be at the edge of the world.

  Frannie sounded so scared. She tries to call again, but this time it goes to voicemail. Maybe she is exaggerating. Cathy hopes so. She’s always enjoyed the drama of Frannie’s hyperbole, the way she tells a great story. She’s the family dreamer. ‘There were literally fifty dogs in the waiting room today,’ she once said. She’s the receptionist at their family veterinary practice. She had refused to concede when Cathy probed. ‘Yeah, actually fifty,’ she’d said, and Cathy had thrown her head back and laughed. ‘You must have had to sit some behind the reception desk,’ she had said, while Frannie nodded emphatically.

  Cathy rushes, the long, tough grasses whipping and snapping around her ankles like snakes, muttering pointless prayers out loud. Please be okay. Please don’t be hurt, or frightened. As she reaches the end of the drive, she turns and sees headlights in the distance.

  It must be their hire car, the Land Rover none of them likes driving. ‘It feels like a bus,’ their brother Joe had said on the first day.

  She breaks into a proper run down the road. Right and then left, just like Frannie said. It’s him. The man from the market.

  It’s him.

  Cathy’s pace slows when she sees the silhouettes. She would know them anywhere: her siblings. Joe, standing by the Land Rover, his hands on his hips. And Frannie, kneeling down, her hair and long limbs illuminated by the headlights. She is so beautiful, has always been so. A wide nose. Cat eyes. A mane of dark, shiny hair.

  Why is she on the floor? Cathy st
ares, then takes a breath, just one. She breathes it out as slowly as she can. This is … she stares at the shadows and the lights. A sweep of fear covers her shoulders. She starts to go cold.

  She knows, somehow, that if she walks forwards, something is going to happen.

  Joe has evidently just arrived too, from his end of their large, shared villa, and he paces across the lights, in and out of shadow, like a flickering bulb. Cathy wraps her arms around her middle. A bad feeling settles over her, like she is being watched. A small, unsavoury part of her is disappointed that Frannie called Joe before her. Cathy would certainly not call Joe first in a crisis – she might not call him at all.

  She turns on the torch from her phone and shines it along the pale, dusty ground in front of her. Around them are the smells of Verona: dry heat, parched grass. It’s been the hottest July on record. They had to buy after-sun most days. They’ve been through bottles and bottles of it. All of Cathy’s clothes are oily at their hems.

  She can hear only the car’s engine and the cicadas.

  Cathy moves towards them and sweeps the torch slowly over Frannie, who is still kneeling. And that’s when she sees it.

  Frannie is leaning over, staring at the ground. Cathy stops walking but can’t stop looking at Frannie. She has something – a t-shirt? – in her hands. As Frannie stands up, Cathy realizes, stunned, that she’s taken off her top, that she’s in just her bra.

  In the glare of the headlights, Frannie lifts up her hands. Red drips run down her wrists. Her stomach is streaked with blood. It’s dried, burgundy, the colour of red wine. She is a terrible tableau. Nausea rises up through Cathy. ‘Fucking hell,’ she whispers to nobody.

  Joe is leaning over her now. Frannie extends her hands to Cathy and shouts: ‘Help me.’

  The headlights are a Venn diagram of light, a portrait of her sister, and a body lying at her feet.

  2.

  Joe

  Joe – highly strung, totally mad, actually – has always had bad dreams, and this must surely be one of them.

  What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, he is thinking as he arrives in front of the car and stares at his sister. She is kneeling on the ground. He can see each knot of her spine, illuminated in the headlights in alternating patterns of shade and light. She’s too skinny. Always has been. He used to make her snacks after school, cheese on toast, yoghurts with nuts and berries. Anything fattening. They called it her second lunch.

  ‘What …’ he says, but his sentence ends there, like a match that fails to strike. He shakes his head. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. A body. ‘What the fuck!’ he whispers. ‘What the fuck!’

  ‘Help me!’ Frannie shouts over her shoulder to him. In the distance, he can see the pinprick of Cathy’s torch. Thank God, he thinks. She’ll know what to do. He doesn’t. Joe is a panicking kid in a man’s body, it sometimes feels like. Cathy may be shy, but she’s cool in a crisis.

  ‘I hit him,’ Frannie screams to both of them. ‘I hit him with the car.’ Cathy’s torch beam wavers as she runs towards them, leaving tracks in the night air like a sparkler. ‘It’s the man from the market.’

  ‘What?’ Joe says. He can’t stop looking at the man lying in front of her. His skin is both bloodied and waxy, smears of red against the grey.

  Joe cautiously approaches Frannie, even though he doesn’t want to. Tears have left clear tracks in the blood on her face. A smear of snot sits underneath her nose. He wants to turn away from it, run back to his villa, and to Lydia. Away from this – this grotesque chaos.

  It feels like he’s walking through water that won’t part in front of him. He tries to step forward, but he can’t. He forces himself to look at the person lying on the ground. Tall, slim – his hip bones are visible. Frannie’s lifted up his shirt. His torso is bleeding. His glasses are cracked.

  He’s very obviously dead.

  Most of the Plant family are vets, including Joe and Cathy, and death is obvious to vets.

  There’s so much blood. Pints and pints of it. He begins to panic. He’s usually fine with blood, but not like this. He tries to slow his breathing. It’s a panic attack, he tells himself. Not uncommon for him, but not quite like ones he’s had before either.

  He gets out his phone as Cathy has and shines his torch across the road. The blood shimmers back like petrol. There’s so much of it. Joe tries not to gag. It smells fetid, both metallic and rotten, like just-turning food.

  He turns to look at his sister, in a begging position in the road. ‘What the fuck’s gone on?’ he says.

  ‘Please help,’ she says. ‘Don’t be –’

  ‘Don’t be what?’

  ‘Just help me,’ she says, through tears. Frannie hardly ever cries. She’s sunny and messy and imaginative and loves buying too many clothes on eBay. She isn’t a crier.

  Something deep and familial rises up suddenly through him. He felt it when Frannie fell off a swing on to her back when she was three, and was winded for ten whole seconds, the longest of Joe’s life. When she choked on a sweet and Joe thumped her hard between her shoulder blades and she coughed it right up. The first time Frannie went out as a teenager and Joe waited up for her, although even their mother had gone to bed. He still remembers it now: the ticking of the grandfather clock in their hallway, the hum of the fridge. And the relief as Frannie’s key turned in the lock.

  And, of course, it reminds him of Rosie.

  ‘I hit him – I hit him.’

  ‘I can’t – how?’ he says.

  Joe kneels down next to the body. Cathy joins him, but she’s just looking, silently. He wishes he had her cool head. He and Cathy recently operated together on a greyhound and she spent at least a minute, after they’d opened him up, just looking. Not rushing. Just gathering information, in that way that Cathy does.

  ‘Frannie,’ he says, the word exploding out of him like a cough.

  ‘I hit him on his side,’ she says, gesturing. ‘It was my fault. It was my fault. It’s the man from the market. If we try to stem the bleeding, we … we just need to stop the bleeding, then he’ll be okay, he’ll be okay,’ she begs them.

  Joe glances sharply at Cathy.

  ‘Hold your t-shirt to the wound,’ Cathy says. ‘Tight as you can.’ Her face is inscrutable.

  She moves towards the body. Her long hair is piled on the top of her head. She is a less beautiful version of Frannie. Thicker set. Features slightly distorted somehow, or perhaps they only look so compared to Frannie’s. Joe feels guilty every time he thinks it, but it’s true.

  Cathy peers at the body. ‘That’s a glancing wound,’ she says. ‘He’s bleeding a lot for something like that.’ She reaches to take his pulse.

  ‘He’ll be okay, won’t he?’ Frannie says.

  ‘How fast were you going?’ Joe asks. He thinks he’s going to be sick. Sweat has broken out across his forehead and his stomach is rolling over and over, like a rough ocean. His sister has hit somebody and there’s blood everywhere. And now – now it is his problem too. He’s got to help her.

  ‘Barely,’ Frannie says, but Joe’s forgotten what he asked. God, he wants a cigarette, for the first time in months. An old vice of his, he’s mostly quit, save for holidays, treats and times of stress, which amounts to, well – almost all of the time, actually.

  ‘Have you called an ambulance?’ Cathy says to Frannie, kneeling over the body.

  ‘Has he got a pulse?’ Frannie asks. ‘It will be fine, won’t it?’

  ‘How have you not taken a pulse?’ Joe says. He leans over, his hands on his thighs, breathing heavily. Stomach acid sloshes up his oesophagus. Get it together, he tells himself. ‘Where’s the ambulance?’

  ‘There isn’t one, okay?’ Frannie shouts. ‘I haven’t called one.’

  ‘Why?’ Cathy says. She draws the word out in shock.

  ‘I … I called you two, instead.’

  ‘We’re not doctors.’ Joe raises his head as he says it. ‘We’re not fucking doctors, Fran,’ he alm
ost whispers, turning his head to the side and looking into the distance.

  ‘We don’t have anything,’ Cathy says. ‘Adrenaline, bags of blood … look – you need to –’

  Frannie holds up a hand. ‘Please just help,’ she says. ‘If we save him – if he’s fine – then …’

  Cathy starts CPR, though she must surely know it to be pointless, and Joe joins in. He takes the heart while she straightens the head, the way they have with animals before. The body is cool beneath his fingertips. He darts a look at Cathy, who doesn’t meet his gaze. He stares back down at it in the gloom. A dead man.

  He pumps at the man’s chest, his fingers just a few inches from this stranger’s heart.

  Cathy checks and opens the man’s airway, a quick finger swabbing around inside his mouth.

  ‘How did you hit him?’ Joe puffs.

  ‘Turn the car engine off,’ Cathy says to Joe. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’

  It takes Joe two attempts. The world goes dark, pierced by a single upwards beam from Cathy’s phone. Cathy puts her ear to the man’s mouth in the silence. ‘How long has he been here?’ she asks Frannie.

  ‘He was right in my path, I just turned without thinking –’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  A beat of silence.

  ‘What? What’ve you been doing? In all that time?’ Cathy says.

  ‘Half a fucking hour!’ Joe shouts, walking over to them and going back to the chest compressions.

  Cathy puts her mouth over the man’s. She spits, licks her lips, then resumes.

  She takes off her own t-shirt. ‘Use this one to stem the bleeding,’ she says to Frannie. She passes her the t-shirt. ‘Yours is saturated.’

  He’s not the right temperature, Joe thinks, as his hands pump at the man’s chest. The Verona night air is warm, at least twenty degrees, and the skin against his hands is moist from it. But the man isn’t hot. He is slightly cooler than he should be, like a doll.