That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  The Plants own their villa, and they go to this nearby villa with a restaurant that serves a cooked breakfast some mornings. They have an unofficial agreement to meet here, around now, but last night Frannie said she would come to Lydia’s at seven to collect Paul. But she didn’t.

  Lydia sighs, standing there in the hot, coffee-scented, sunlit room. The entire holiday had been leading up to this day, the day she found out she was pregnant. She knows it’s absurd to have believed that eighteen months of failure wouldn’t become nineteen, that she’d be able to cancel their referral to the fertility clinic. But she thought it might. Just maybe. Didn’t everybody say to go on holiday? To relax? And Lydia has relaxed with intent.

  For once, she hasn’t minded the Plants’ inside jokes, their private language, the natural order of Frannie’s banter, Joe’s protectiveness, Cathy’s seriousness. Lydia has relaxed as though she’s been prescribed it. Three hours on a sun-lounger, twice a day. One book read. One swim. Ten hours’ sleep.

  As she’s choosing a topping for her pancakes and trying to distract Paul with the knobs on the serving cabinet, she sees two shadows at the door. Men in hats, weapons on their belts. She stops for just a second and looks at them, a dark cloak of dread drawing over her shoulders.

  ‘Let’s go and chat to those nice men,’ she says to Paul, praying that these are not the men who cautioned Joe the other night, and praying too that they haven’t come across him more recently.

  ‘Nice?’ he says, with a toothy grin, pointing to the exact centre of his chest.

  ‘You’re nice, yes,’ she laughs.

  ‘I nice!’ The full sentence bursting free from him surprises her, and she feels something pleasurable bubble up through her.

  ‘No one is as nice as you,’ she says. She picks him up, breathes in the lavender biscuit smell of the folds of his neck, abandons the warm plate of pancakes, and approaches the police. ‘Is everything okay?’ she says, not even attempting Italian.

  ‘Sorry?’ one of the Carabinieri says to her. He has high cheekbones, large eyes, heavy lidded. Black hair under his hat. His face is expressionless. Not kind or unkind.

  ‘I – I just wondered … why you are here,’ she says, trying to enunciate. ‘I can’t find the people I’m staying with,’ she says with a tiny laugh. ‘I just wondered – that they’re okay.’

  ‘Their names?’ the policeman says to her in perfect, almost accent-less English.

  ‘Plant. My husband – Joe Plant.’

  ‘Joe Plant,’ the policeman says slowly.

  Lydia fell in love with his name first. A simple name for a boy that was anything but. It was Easter, and she was sixteen. He was eighteen. He hung out only with his sisters on his lunch breaks at school. She once heard him say that all the other students were twats, that he wanted to be a vet because he liked animals and hated people, a stance Lydia could get on board with.

  He enjoyed science and wore trainers even though the uniform code said shoes. One evening, she got her Nokia 3210 and went up to her bedroom and sat on the bed and texted him. He replied – about homework – in a perfunctory way, and she replied to him, and it had stopped there. Lydia had sat, cross-legged and disappointed, on the latest bed in the latest foster home, until he had sent another message. That is, Lydia believes, when she fell in love. When that strong, simple name flashed up on her phone unexpectedly. Joe Plant.

  And so Lydia has loved Joe for more than half of her life. When he was twenty, and she was eighteen, he had finally asked her to go out for burgers with him. He’d been unable to hold back when the waitress asked if they’d like a table – that was the idea, yeah – but he was not caustic with Lydia. That was the day she entered the inner sanctum and discovered the real Joe. The Joe who falls in love with dying dogs, the Joe who can’t resist sarcastic remarks but then calls himself an arse on the way home from parties, the Joe who sometimes drinks too much, the Joe who gets angry at people who can’t afford to pay for their pets’ treatments and then operates anyway, for free.

  ‘Anyone else?’ the man says to Lydia now.

  ‘Frannie, Joe, Cathy. All the Plants. I’m here with them – the whole family. Three siblings.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks. Do not worry. I bet they are fine – I will check.’ He leans over to the other policeman as she leaves, feeling relieved, and whispers something that she can’t hear. She pauses for just a second before walking away.

  11.

  Joe

  ‘Where have you been?’ Lydia says to Joe when she arrives back in their room. She’s holding Paul, obviously pissed off.

  ‘Uh …’ Joe towel dries his just-showered hair, stalling for time. He had got his story straight in his mind, but he’s forgotten it. His brain feels fractured, his thoughts, feelings, chemicals put through a centrifuge and spun out into disparate pieces.

  Lydia has croissant flakes down her t-shirt. Only two. They’re minuscule. Joe’s eyes keep straying to them. How many minuscule bits of evidence have they left down there? Something rises up through him. Some misguided, over-the-top urge to rush back to the scene of the crime and obscure it further so that nobody can ever get to the bottom of what happened there. To detonate a bomb, to set the entire forest alight. To make such a mess that theirs is eclipsed.

  ‘Have you been fighting?’

  ‘No,’ Joe says testily, resenting the assumption. He almost tells her, right then. It’s Frannie you should be worried about, not me. He rakes back his hair and looks at her. ‘Sorry, I went earlier,’ he says.

  ‘To breakfast? Where’s Frannie?’

  ‘She went too. Yeah. I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to wake you.’

  ‘Well – does she want Paul back or not?’

  Joe looks at Lydia dumbly, thinking of the blood that Frannie is probably washing off her body.

  ‘I’m sure she does. Look – I’ll text her.’ He brandishes his phone. It doesn’t matter if Lydia’s mad at him, he thinks. He’s protecting her from knowledge she’d rather not have, if she could choose. Rather a cold husband than be privy to a killing.

  ‘Right,’ Lydia says faintly. She looks like the same Lydia he went to high school with, today, here in the Italian sun. She’s hardly aged. She has a face he sometimes sees places – on the news, on friends of friends. Wide-set eyes. Full cheeks. A snub nose. The kind of face people think they know. That’s how it felt to fall in love with Lydia: familiar, warm, like turning over in the sun. Each day at work, he looks forward to going home to her. She is always home before him, and always doing mad things. Potting loads of plants she bought on a whim, cooking wearing crazy pyjamas with feet. Just a few weeks ago, she had tried to do her own gel pedicure and had stuck her toes together. ‘Okay, we have a situation,’ she’d said, when he walked in from work. He’d used a spare scalpel to remove the hardened gel while they’d giggled.

  He stares at his hands. He’s showered off the dirt. It took over half an hour, but it’s still there, in the grooves of his fingernails. There are dry, hairline fractures of mud running through them. Impossible to get out. He stuffs his hands into his shorts pockets. His dirty clothes are in a carrier bag in his suitcase. He intends to throw them, somehow, somewhere.

  ‘Text her, then,’ Lydia says.

  He can’t deal with this, being under the spotlight of Lydia’s gaze. There’s so much to think of. To work through.

  ‘There were two police down at breakfast – not sure why. I was worried,’ she adds.

  Joe steadies himself on the bed, palms out. It’s lower than he thought, and he stumbles slightly as he does it. ‘What police?’ he says, clearing his throat. He coughs. Lydia looks at him strangely. Why the fuck are the police out so soon? William hasn’t even been dead for twelve hours. Has he been reported missing already? Or – worse – been found?

  Joe wants to look at himself in the mirror. The paranoia stepped into the shower with him, and now it won’t let him go. What if there’s dried blood on his forehead? Just at the hairline? It would be ea
sy to miss.

  He goes into the bathroom. He’ll wax his hair.

  As his brown eyes meet his reflection’s, he tells himself he hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s cleaned up somebody else’s mess, that’s all. He’s helped his little sister. He hasn’t killed anybody. He looks at himself. Hooked nose. Large eyes. Clean face. No blood. No soil. Nothing. He holds the blue metallic tin of wax in his hand.

  Is he a hero or a villain? Has he protected his sister from harm, or has he orchestrated other crimes? He looks away from his own intense gaze. He doesn’t know, can’t decide. ‘What police?’ he says again to Lydia, his tone imbued with what he hopes is a curious casualness.

  ‘The ones with the hats,’ she says. ‘The black hats and suits with the red stripe down their sides.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Joe tries to say casually, rubbing wax into his hair. What if William had told somebody exactly where he was heading? It would be so easy to find the grave if you knew …

  Lydia meets his eyes in the mirror. She has pale brown freckles across her nose, hardly noticeable unless you’re very close. ‘I said I wasn’t sure where you were.’

  ‘You what?’ Joe says. He turns around to face her, the cold basin cutting into the backs of his thighs.

  ‘I didn’t know where you were,’ Lydia says. She leans over and grabs some concealer, starts rubbing it underneath her eyes. ‘I’m tired and old,’ she moans. ‘And I look it. An old crone. With old ovaries.’

  Joe tries to steady his breathing. He’s got to act normally. This is his life now. Filtering every action, every word. He gazes at the clean sink. The taps are gleaming. Lydia must have wiped them. She’s so neat. He finds it comforting. She would never be involved in something as messy as killing. As messy as dead bodies.

  What would he usually say to her? He would find her self-deprecation amusing. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he says woodenly, knowing he has to say something. Lydia may take the piss out of herself, but she’s got a hard edge too. He loves that also, but boy is he afraid of it sometimes.

  With no warning, the smell of the memory overpowers him. The soil. The metallic, tart scent of the blood. The body, the skin, in the earliest stages of decomposition. He pushes Lydia gently out of the way and leans his hands on his thighs, heaving into the toilet bowl.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Must have had a bad sausage,’ Joe says, though the only thing he is heaving up is stomach acid.

  It comes to him a few minutes later, as he’s brushing his teeth, the acidic smell of sick slowly disappearing. If they don’t want the police to find the body, the police have got to think William is alive. But missing. A missing person’s investigation. But false. Staged.

  12.

  Cathy

  Cathy has decided to ask Frannie exactly what happened last night. She wants a minute-by-minute account from her elusive sister. To cover it up, they must understand it, Cathy believes.

  They’re in their kitchen, which is both rustic and basic. Copper pans hang over the top of the window, which has old-fashioned red gingham curtains covering it.

  Joe is standing by the door like a guard, in case Lydia comes in. Cathy stares at the wall above him, where a bronze Jesus sits against a dark-wood cross.

  The owners who converted it from the convent wouldn’t throw away the crucifixes, wouldn’t take them with them either. Said it was bad luck. They were left with them, having inherited both the crosses and the superstition. Frannie tried to take some of them off the walls, but Cathy always stopped her. ‘Better to be safe than sorry,’ she’d said. ‘Yeah, because God will curse us,’ Frannie laughed. If there is a God, Cathy finds herself thinking, they will never meet him now. Surely.

  Cathy looks at Frannie. Her arms have gone from propping up her head to being stretched out along the table, her head lolling on top of them, like a student asleep during a class. Her pink fingernail polish has started to grow out, little crescent moons showing at her cuticles.

  The lights are on in the cool, dim kitchen, the curtains closed to the view of the pool, where Lydia sits. The bulbs above them flicker, as they have most nights of the holiday, out here in the Verona countryside, but this time it seems ominous, a sign from God. Cathy stares at the old-fashioned chandelier fittings. Each time they come over in July, they say they will renovate, but they never do, preferring to drink cocktails and read by the pool instead.

  ‘We need to make a plan,’ Joe says softly. Frannie doesn’t even turn her head. ‘Are you even awake?’ Joe says drily, and Cathy’s glad of it, for once.

  ‘Of course I’m awake,’ Frannie says. ‘I haven’t fucking slept since.’

  Cathy blinks, surprised by her sister’s irritability. She’s usually so full of positivity. Dashing off after work to see one of her many friends. Deciding whether or not a t-shirt with a bow on the back was special enough to buy. ‘It’s a big decision, Cathy,’ she’d said smilingly, her finger hovering on the order button. Frannie is both a bargain-hunter and a spender, always finding discounts that allow her to buy the things she wants on the salary she has.

  ‘Join the club,’ Joe says.

  ‘The police were in the main villa this morning,’ Frannie says.

  ‘Is it too early for a drink?’ Joe asks.

  That’s one of the things that they do together at home. Every single Friday, no matter what, they share a bottle of wine together, in Frannie’s open-plan kitchen. Often at her large oak table but, more often, they fold back her bi-fold doors – even in the cold – and they sit there, on the doorstep, three siblings in a row, their legs stretched out in front of them on to the patio, and they drink and talk together. They like Frannie’s house because it’s warm and smells like a home and is full of interesting things. She has two copper kettles, a weather vane that looks like a snow globe, a cuckoo clock that hoots on the hour. Cathy loves it there. ‘How do you know?’ Cathy says, noticing that Joe doesn’t seem surprised.

  ‘Lydia told me,’ Joe says softly.

  And you told Frannie? Cathy thinks. Something about it makes her pause. Her brother and sister are so close to each other. She’s out in the cold, and she needs not to be. They need to stay tightknit to survive it.

  Cathy looks at her brother. She can’t say it. She’ll sound mad, paranoid. ‘Lydia doesn’t know, I guess?’ she asks instead. Lydia isn’t a Plant. She wouldn’t get it.

  ‘No,’ he says shortly. ‘No, she doesn’t know. And she isn’t going to know. She’s pissed off with how much she’s had to have Paul.’

  ‘Paul is no bother,’ Frannie says defensively. Her face lights up, just for a second or two, as she speaks his name.

  Joe is about to start planning. Cathy can tell. She knows all of the clues her brother’s body gives away. Poised, somehow, like a runner on the starting blocks, holding an intake of breath, eyebrows raised, about to speak.

  So many questions need to be asked before they can start to plan. ‘Look,’ Cathy says. She pulls out a wooden chair – still with the purple crochet cushion from the previous owners – and sits opposite Frannie. ‘I think it would help to understand it properly,’ she says. ‘If we could just talk about – about exactly what happened?’

  Cathy detects nothing in Frannie’s reaction. No flinching, no tension. She cups her face in her hands and raises her gaze to Cathy. ‘I pulled out on to the left, not the right,’ Frannie says. Outside, the old clock that sits at the centre of the convent chimes, ten o’clock. They pause, as though undertaking a minute’s silence, then Frannie resumes. ‘I hit him before – before I could even tell I was in the wrong place,’ she says. ‘I turned – and there he was.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you – you said you couldn’t stop?’ Cathy says, trying not to sound like a police officer. Frannie might not notice what she is implying, but Joe will. It takes hardly anything for him to become her defender, for both to turn their backs on her.

  ‘It isn’t that I couldn’t stop,’ Frannie says, her expression open and earnest, a fi
ngernail following a striation in the wood of the pine kitchen table. ‘It’s that I didn’t know where he was.’ She reaches a hand through the gingham, checking on Paul.

  ‘William?’

  Frannie nods. She reaches to untie her dark hair from the thick bundle on the top of her head. It falls around her shoulders like a shampoo advert. ‘I couldn’t stop immediately. Obviously. And, when I did, I had to find him. The impact –’ She pauses for just a second. ‘It moved him. And I couldn’t work out how far I had travelled after the impact. It was so dark – you know what it’s like here. It took ages. To find a – a person in the … to find him on the verge.’

  Cathy says nothing, trying to think it through. It does make sense, in that real life is often more complicated than hypothetical situations. Cathy once ran into the back of a taxi and, in her panic to pull over, steered to the right instead of the left. Nobody would believe that if she said it in defence of herself, but it was true nevertheless.

  Frannie’s eyes are clear as Cathy’s meet hers. Unwavering. Naturally sunny and unsuspicious, she is the alkaline to Joe’s acid. I couldn’t stop immediately. The words echo in Cathy’s mind.

  ‘And then,’ she continues, dropping her gaze, her voice low, the exact same voice she uses when Paul is asleep and she doesn’t want to wake him, ‘I called you two because … I wanted you there. In my …’ Cathy can tell she is trying to hold back tears. Gone is the chaos of last night, when they wrung out blood-soaked t-shirts and shouted. ‘In – at a time when I felt scared and I needed you, I wanted you,’ she says. ‘I know it should have been an ambulance.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cathy whispers, looking at her sister. ‘Yes.’ She understands completely. Frannie is the youngest sibling and they have never quite forgotten that. Cathy makes Frannie’s lunch most days and brings it into the practice. Not because Frannie can’t, but because she’s … well, she’s babied.