That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  31.

  Lydia

  Lydia is pretending to pack, but really she is going through Joe’s things, a task she has never once undertaken in their entire relationship. But he is keeping something from her. She isn’t an idiot, so here she is, with his iPad, the quiet of the villa beyond.

  She has all of his dirty clothes here too. She starts her search methodically. First, the clothes. She pauses, his shorts in her hands. If she looks, she can never go back. If she finds something.

  What is she looking for? She knows Joe. She knows him. He wouldn’t – what? Cheat on her? Here in Verona? The thought is ridiculous. She puts down the shorts.

  But then she remembers his facial expression. And – worse – Cathy’s. They looked guilty. All of them did. Maybe it’s something financial. Gambling. IVAs. Business debts. Personal guarantees given. Lydia can’t help her mind spiralling.

  There’s nothing in the shorts. A voided prescription with the dose scribbled out. A used tissue. Three euros and an Italian car-parking ticket.

  She goes to the iPad next. It doesn’t have a passcode. She goes through his emails, social media, search history. All present, and nothing sinister. He has googled recent veterinary cases, things to do in Verona, and – she will forgive him this one, if this is all it is – ‘Megan Fox hot’. Her heartrate is slowing down the less she finds. Maybe it’s nothing. Old traumas resurfacing, a gut feeling that is still misguided. Maybe her Joe is good, the man who looked at an error message on a recent pregnancy test and said, ‘Yep, you’re a nutcase.’ Maybe he is still hers.

  She navigates to his WhatsApp next. He has the app on his iPad. There’s the family group. She was added to it only last year, after she asked. Joe had downplayed it – It’s boring, honestly, full of photos of Paul and vet questions – but, last year, just before Christmas, when they did a secret Santa, Lydia had finally been added. She’d felt a thrill at it, at the proximity to a proper family, with all its complexities and simplicities. Frannie had wanted a higher budget – ‘What can you even get for twenty quid?’ she’d said, and Joe had said, ‘A better vets’ receptionist?’ Lydia had enjoyed reading it, the barbs and the easy banter of a functional family.

  She looks at the rest of his texts. Banter with two friends. Professional communications with Evan. She lets her shoulders sag.

  But … something is niggling at her. She pauses, wondering what it is, before she realizes. Look for what’s missing, as well as what’s there, one of the lawyers at work once told her when she helped him with a disclosure bundle. What’s missing?

  His sisters. He hasn’t texted either of them for – according to his phone – three days. But … he texted Frannie. The morning after she had Paul. Didn’t he?

  That can’t be true. She stares at the threads of text messages and WhatsApps, neither name present. She goes into the deleted files of both. Nothing.

  She sits back, the iPad held loosely in her lap, thinking. Thinking about what to do next.

  And feeling relieved too that at least it isn’t an affair.

  But what is it? Something to do with the three of them. And something that – he thinks – doesn’t concern her. But something that requires him to cover his tracks.

  She will have to ask him, she decides. She will have to ask him, and not take no for an answer, until he meets her eyes and tells her the truth. They’re married. They share a bed, sleep naked, share showers, sometimes. Rescue animals together, laugh together, want a family together. It’s only right that he tells her the truth.

  32.

  Cathy

  Cathy can hear Lydia packing next door. She’s decided to burn the wallet and the warrant, and she hopes Lydia won’t come investigating.

  A couple of matches does it, in an old bowl by an open window, the leather catching fire and curling, giving off an acrid smell. She has a jug of water handy, but luckily it smokes and burns to ash, and then to nothing.

  Next, the warrant. It’s tucked in the side of the suitcase, and, as she gets it out, she is still thinking of Frannie and Jason Granger. She spreads out the pieces on the bed and leans over them, hands either side of them. They’ve dried out since that night when they got covered in blood and Frannie’s tears and the sweat from their panicky hands. Some parts are harder to read, but some are easier, the blood having paled.

  But wait, what’s that? Her eyes scan, trying to make out any further words. An s, maybe. An o. A p …

  She stands and holds up one of the pieces to the light like it’s an X-ray. There is something, down there, right before that rip.

  The letters have been torn horizontally through their centres, that missing piece discarded somewhere so the remaining parts don’t fit together. But Cathy recognizes what is half written there. As easily as she would recognize her own name. Joseph Plant.

  Cathy is standing in the airport next to Joe, wondering quite who he is. What does her brother know? Was Will already known to him? She thinks about his lie to the police, that he never saw Will, and of Frannie hiring a lawyer, and can’t help but wonder if they’re playing some sort of game that she doesn’t know the rules of.

  ‘Where do we check in?’ Frannie says, holding Paul, twenty minutes after everyone else has done it while she was in duty free. Cathy tries not to be irritated by her as Joe shows her where. ‘I can’t believe you did it without me!’ Frannie says to him as they walk off. ‘Your old Saturday Show colleague.’

  They’re all nervous. But, so far, nobody’s told them there is a block on one of their passports. Nobody’s said they will be searched, and Cathy is pleased about that too, because before she burned the wallet and the warrant she took a private, encrypted photo of them on her phone. She knows it is a risk, but she couldn’t part with them entirely. Couldn’t quite leave the mystery alone. Might need them one day, to atone. Or to solve the mystery of who he was and what he wanted with them.

  And yet Cathy knows they are all expecting sniffer dogs and armed police and a last-minute announcement over the tannoy on the plane.

  Lydia has been quiet. She’s now browsing the perfumes in duty free, but in the manner of somebody who isn’t really looking. Cathy is privately worried. Lydia doesn’t miss a trick. And it is impossible to act normally when you have been complicit in the burying of a body seventy-two hours earlier.

  ‘Giant Toblerone?’ Joe says, walking over to Cathy as he holds one up. Cathy looks at him, her complicated, tender, brittle brother. How can he act so normally? She’s got to raise it with him.

  Together, they drift into the make-up section. Their eyes are reflected all around them in a hundred mirrors, bouncing off the bright, white spotlights up ahead.

  ‘Joe,’ she says.

  He looks at her wordlessly.

  ‘Why is your name on the document Will had?’

  ‘What?’ Joe says. His mouth falls open in shock, his eyes squint up, as though he is studying something very close up that he can’t quite make out.

  ‘Why is your name on the warrant?’

  ‘Not here,’ Joe says, and Cathy feels a flash of relief, of hope that he might explain. Cathy leads Joe out of the shop, away from the multiple refracting fairground mirrors and the CCTV.

  They leave through one of the automatic doors that fronts the runway, leading to a smoking area. A plane, just taken off, banks and loops back on itself as they watch it.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he says.

  ‘Your name is on that warrant, Joe. Right at the bottom. Along a rip.’

  ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘You don’t know why it says Joseph Plant?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Joe says. He waits a beat, then says, ‘What kind of a conversation is this?’ It’s become a family phrase, that sentence. Frannie started it. She’d been through a phase of drinking, smoking, skipping school. She used to try to control her tellings-off, like she was a CEO or something. ‘What kind of a conversation is this?’ she’d said, bold as anything, standing in their hallway, an
hour past her curfew, in a skimpy dress, smelling of cigarettes. Joe had caught Cathy’s gaze and they’d both dissolved into giggles, much to their parents’ annoyance.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cathy says quietly.

  They walk further outside. A gust of air carries the smell of hot engines and petrol on it. It whips Cathy’s hair around her face. She pushes it impatiently behind her ears and carefully hands Joe her phone, keeping it angled close to their bodies.

  Joe stares at the phone cradled in his hands. His body is bent over it, his head dropped downwards. He stands with his weight on one leg, the toe of the other foot resting behind him. He looks both curious and casual. Totally natural, Cathy thinks as she assesses him.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Joe says eventually, his tone mystified. If he’s lying, he’s convinced her.

  They stand there in the sun for a few seconds, Cathy feeling like a police officer, hoping the silence will be filled. But Joe doesn’t provide any further information.

  ‘Could it be the – you know, the punch, you said about? In the bar?’

  ‘I mean, maybe?’

  ‘Okay, well,’ Cathy says, still looking closely at him. What kind of a conversation is this?

  ‘I don’t know what to do about this,’ Joe says. Another plane roars along the runway and they move instinctively away from it even though they’re nowhere near it. ‘Should I … I mean –’

  ‘Well, you can’t tell anyone.’

  Now in the shade of the building, Joe turns to Cathy, his eyes dark, his skin sallow. ‘We should use an untraceable computer, when we’re back,’ he says. ‘Put in as much of this document as we can. Internet café or something.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ Cathy says, though it’s useless. There are only four legible words. Stato, Mandato, Joseph and Plant.

  He hands her back her phone as they enter the departure lounge and sit down, waiting to be called for their flight. Cathy watches the officials. The people scanning the bags. The cabin crews. Customs. And the police too, by the gate. Two German shepherds with them, different sniffer dogs. Joe is watching them too, as they sit there like sentries.

  She closes her eyes against the sniffer dogs and the airport and the Italian police and wishes as hard as she’s ever wished for anything that her family, in ten years, will have got away with it, and have forgotten about this holiday, will never, ever reference it, like an event that truly never really happened. She wishes and wishes for it, the world black against her closed eyes. She stays there, the world black, and wonders if they will ever go back to Verona.

  ‘We can’t ever sell the villa,’ she murmurs to Joe, her eyes still closed.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And we can’t go back.’

  ‘What if he’s on us?’ Joe says. Cathy opens her eyes. He’s turned to her, his elbows on his knees, body bent over double in the plastic chair.

  ‘On us?’ Cathy says.

  ‘His smell.’ There’s something about Joe’s expression that makes Cathy uneasy. She blinks, trying to dispel the feeling. Joe has never once made her uneasy.

  ‘They’re airport sniffer dogs. They’re looking for drugs.’

  ‘I think they’d raise an eyebrow at a dead body,’ Joe says bluntly.

  ‘Who knows. We’ve washed a lot,’ she says. A throwaway bit of reassurance. An alternative scenario plays out in front of her. One where he cracks a joke. Can dogs even raise their eyebrows? he’d say, and Cathy’s smile would turn into a laugh.

  Their flight is called: 1573A to Birmingham International. Cathy will be relieved to be in her own bed, away from it all. Back to before, she hopes, and away from her siblings; somewhere she’s never before wanted to be.

  She passes her bag through the scanner. A bored-looking airport worker looks at the screen through heavy-lidded eyes, head tilted slightly backwards. There’s nothing in my bag, she repeats to herself. She doesn’t look at Joe. Her whole body is tense as the scanner stops, then restarts again, as though God himself, Jesus from the Verona crucifixes, is toying with her.

  She steps next into the body scanner. It beeps. Her heart speeds up. A man waves a scanning wand over her. She finds she is holding her breath. It moves between her arms and the sides of her body. It moves between her legs. It comes back up, down the length of her arm and, just as it does, she meets his eye, just briefly. A dark-brown eye, long lashes, a moment of contact. And, as she meets it, she thinks, I buried a body just a handful of days ago. There’s a manhunt for him, and I need to escape.

  The airport worker can’t read her mind, of course, and Cathy passes through without incident. But the thoughts still burn on to the inside of her brain. As though they are all there, queued up in her head, waiting to tell somebody. Waiting to be spoken.

  In Birmingham, Frannie, Joe and Lydia have gone to the car while Cathy waits in the airport. She is working on her phone, chasing up scans and prescriptions. Her bag is missing. Only hers and a stranger’s, a tall, lithe man who stands next to her. He has a shaved head and is tanned, one hand resting on a hip. He’s wearing a white t-shirt that has three distinct purple blobs down the front of it that for a second Cathy thinks are blood.

  He catches her looking. ‘Aeroplane wine,’ he says with a shrug. ‘I hate flying.’

  Cathy nods. There is something about his body language that makes her want to keep looking. His weight on one hip. The way his waist is slim compared to the width of his shoulders. The blond hairs on his forearms.

  She forces herself to turn away. She’s tired, her feet cold in flip-flops. Gone is the refrigerated air-con of Italy but so too is the heat. It feels blustery even here, inside at the baggage claim, as though a door is open somewhere.

  ‘Yours lost too?’ the man says. He doesn’t appear to be particularly annoyed. He sits down, right there on the baggage carousel. Cathy stares at his slim ankles and feet bare in his trainers and feels a swoop deep in her gut.

  ‘Apparently so,’ she says tightly, wondering why she finds this hard, an attractive man sitting near to her, solo, evidently waiting too and wanting to talk to pass the time. Cathy’s shyness is doubled in weight by the shame of it. Why can’t she learn from her date with Pete the rabbit owner? Why can’t she just be like everybody else?

  ‘Probably being lobbed around somewhere.’ He leans back on his hands and looks at her. His face is open, a wide, white smile aimed at her. Right where his t-shirt meets his shorts is a thin slice of tanned skin, only a millimetre wide. Cathy can’t stop staring at it. The hint of a curl of dark body hair. Her cheeks flush against her will, against the knowledge that she shouldn’t be attracted to anyone right now, not in the current circumstances.

  Their bags land on the carousel, which starts moving, startling him to his feet. He laughs, looking at her. She blinks, staring ahead as her suitcase approaches. As their cases arrive, pressed close together, he reaches for hers, first, and drops it by her feet. ‘Later,’ he says. As he turns away from her, she catches his scent. It’s like a summer. The smell of stepping into a hot greenhouse. That night, Cathy smells it suddenly on her, on her arms, and sniffs and sniffs until it’s gone.

  33.

  Joe

  Joe is back home, and back to work, as though none of it ever happened. He’s in the backroom, which runs along the width of the building behind the consultation rooms that open out on to it, centrifuging blood, and making a coffee, and being careful not to mix the two up. He held his breath this morning while drawing this blood. The metallic smell of it. Sharp and cloying. He’d almost been sick.

  ‘Yum, blood and coffee,’ Frannie says as she drifts by. She has no shoes on, and is carrying a can of Coke.

  ‘Might check my coffee for diseases,’ he says, and he hears Frannie’s laugh bloom as she reaches the reception.

  He did bloodwork on his first work experience, much to his disappointment. He wanted to treat animals, and instead he processed results for two weeks. He still remembers now, seventeen-year-old Joe, who hadn’t yet grown i
nto his nose, peering through the window into the treatment room, hoping for a glance of a cat or a dog.

  Evan comes in through Consultation Room One. Joe’s back stiffens. He can’t be bothered with Evan at the best of times, but especially not today. He glumly dribbles milk into his coffee and tries to ignore him. Evan is good at client care, Cathy tells him all the time. He hardly ever has to write down a bill, never gets complaints. ‘That is because he is a fake,’ Joe had said a few weeks ago, deadpan, and Frannie had barked out a laugh. ‘He’s not a fake,’ she’d said, laughing. ‘He’s totally upfront about what a twat he is.’

  Evan is a terrible medicine vet. That’s the truth of it. He’s okay at surgery, has steady hands and can talk the talk, but that’s about it.

  ‘We can’t bully the only non-Plant,’ Cathy had said with a sigh.

  Joe moves across the office, away from the spinning blood and the freshly made coffee, and begins signing a worming prescription for a cockapoo. Something about the sterile snap of the lemon disinfectant, the coffee, the mostly mundane list of problems: vaccinations for cats and dogs, conjunctivitis, Labradors having eaten knickers – these things are comforting to him after the blood and terror of Verona.

  Cathy is in Room Three, directly behind him. Frannie is out front, on reception. It’s their mother’s day off, but she will probably come in at some point, almost always does. Cathy’s dog Macca is sleeping in the corner.

  Evan flicks on the kettle, which comes to a boil again quickly. ‘How was Verona?’