‘Which book?’ I say, staring down at him. I pick him up from the cot bed, not yet ready to part with him, and hold him close to me. He isn’t Frannie, but he is part of her. The next best thing.
‘Gruffalo,’ he says. He brings the bottom of his jaw forward and his eyes catch the moonlight, and for a second he looks so like Joe that I clutch at my stomach, holding him even closer to me than before.
‘Okay,’ I say, plucking it off his miniature bookshelf and sitting in the dining chair I’ve brought up here. It has no cushion on it, isn’t a long-term solution, but we do the best with what we’ve got.
‘Mummy,’ he says, rolling deliberately from his back on to his side in my arms.
‘No,’ I say, pointing to my face in the twilight. ‘Auntie Cathy.’
‘Auntie Cathy.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Mummy?’ he says.
‘We’ll see her soon,’ I tell him, looking down into my sister’s eyes. ‘I promise, Paulie. I promise.’
‘And we’ll see the dinosaurs too,’ Paul says, dinosaurs and his mother both of equal importance to him. I look away with wet eyes, wait for the tears to clear, then look back at him.
‘Sure,’ I lie.
70.
Then
Cathy
‘I may be mad, but I thought – I wondered if we could have a coffee,’ Tom says, even though it’s late. ‘And a chat.’ He’s standing in Cathy’s living room, still in his coat. Cathy’s entire body is light with relief. She knows this is not a goodbye coffee. She knows in the deep, wise part of herself that’s only recently woken up. The part attuned to the way his eyes linger on hers, the way he stands self-consciously on one foot, the other toe-down to the ground.
‘I can do coffee,’ Cathy says. She touches his arm as she walks past him to boil the kettle. He follows her, watching as she gets out mugs and milk. He reaches over her to pour in the milk, while Cathy’s inside sings with happiness. She hasn’t lost it. She hasn’t yet lost him.
Her mobile is ringing in the living room where she’s left it. She almost doesn’t pick up when she realizes it’s Joe. Tom raises his eyebrows, but says nothing, so she answers.
‘Help me, please help me,’ Joe says into the phone.
As her gaze meets Tom’s, his eyes darken just slightly. She closes her eyes and concentrates on her brother’s panicked and tinny voice.
‘What?’ she says to him. She turns away from Tom, just for a second. ‘What?’
‘Please help,’ Joe says. ‘Please come – I’m in the big field to the left.’
Cathy knows it. It’s where she and Tom walked on that funny third date of theirs. Completely secluded, with a single track weaving its way through the long grass. ‘Why?’ she says.
Tom comes in front of her, gesturing for the phone, but she nods, letting him know she’s okay. His hand comes to her waist, instead, and rests there, a warm, supportive palm against the fabric of her t-shirt. She stares at the floorboards, trying to make sense of Joe’s panic. For a second, as she looks at a particular whorl of wood that she’s never noticed before, she is certain that Joe has killed Frannie. An eerie calm descends around her. A silence, like the room has hushed. All she has now is Tom’s warm hand and that whorled floorboard.
‘What’ve you done?’ she says softly.
‘I’ve killed someone,’ Joe says hoarsely.
‘Who?’
The whorl. The hand. The question that hangs in the air.
‘Evan.’
Perversely, Cathy’s entire body sags in relief. Tom’s hand is all that is holding her together.
‘He wanted more money.’ She hears Joe gulp down the phone. ‘I didn’t want to do it.’
A thousand childhood memories walk into the living room with her. When he got a B in A-level biology and had to wait to hear if he had been allowed to take a degree in veterinary medicine. The way he carried Rosie’s coffin. He carries it all, the eldest sibling.
‘What?’ she whispers in part sympathy and part horror; the potent familial mix they find themselves faced with.
‘Please come. I’ll come to you,’ Joe garbles. ‘Meet me in the outhouse.’
Cathy meets Tom’s brown eyes. His hand is still on her waist, the other still extended in an open gesture for her phone. ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I can’t – Joe.’
‘What?’
‘This has gone too far.’
‘No, Cath. I didn’t mean to do it. He – he fell.’
‘How did you do it?’
‘A punch,’ Joe says. He swallows again. Cathy hears his Adam’s apple moving up and down in his throat, a dry, dragging sound.
‘Joe – I can’t, I …’
Cathy wordlessly passes the phone to Tom, who hangs it up. He puts it on the table and stands there, his hands on his hips.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Cathy says. ‘I can’t … he’s fucking killed someone.’
The shade is back over Tom’s eyes. He avoids contact with her for a second, sighs and sits down on her sofa. Cathy joins him.
‘Look, I don’t want to tell you what to do,’ Tom says, a hand on her bare knee, his eyes on her phone.
Cathy puts her head in her hands and rakes her hair back from her face. ‘What do I do?’ she says. ‘Tell me what to do, Tom.’
He says nothing, his hand not moving from her knee.
‘I just want to go upstairs and get into bed and not wake up again.’
Tom laughs, a small, sad laugh. ‘Sounds good,’ he says. He can’t stop his eyes darting to her phone. The vessel through which they heard the news that changed their lives forever. Again.
‘What would you do?’ His body is completely still, and Cathy is grateful for his calm, her port in this storm.
He glances at the phone again, and that’s when Cathy understands what he’s saying.
‘You think I should hand him in.’
‘He’s killed somebody,’ Tom says, sitting back and making an expansive gesture with the wingspan of his arms. Her knee is cold where his hand used to be. ‘This is … you’ve got to do the right thing.’
‘For who?’
‘For you,’ he says simply. ‘And for him. Everyone has a limit.’
He hands her the phone, and, this time, she takes it. ‘I need to tell him first,’ she says, taking the phone but pausing. ‘I need to tell my brother that I’m ending this.’
Tom is waiting for her when she gets back from the outhouse, an exchange she is not ready to think about, not yet ready to dwell on.
He raises his eyes to her, and she dials.
The heat from outside is still on her skin as she makes the call. She speaks to a calm 999 operator, tells them what she knows, tells them the address and then she hangs up, just like that. This must be shock, she is thinking. Everything looks the same. Her sofa. Her boyfriend. She is suddenly tired, wanting to lay her head in his lap and fall asleep.
She shifts against him, moving her body underneath his arm, which clamps around her, like they’re out to sea and he’s rescuing her. She stays like that, half sitting, half lying, for several minutes.
There’s a noise outside. She flinches immediately against Tom, as though her body knows before her mind does that it’s all over. The living room takes on a strange tone. It’s lit up blue. Sirens. They’re coming. They’re here.
‘Will they be lenient with me?’ she asks Tom, who puts his hand on her shoulder. She leans her cheek down on it. It could have been really good, being with him, she thinks. It could have been perfect.
She blinks at him. The sirens are loud now, surely on her street, the living room a blaze of blue and white, flashing on and off, on and off.
She steps away from him.
He leads her into the hallway and reaches for the door handle for her. The sirens are so loud. ‘You’ve done the right thing,’ he says, but, already, the noise of the sirens is filling the house. Police cars and ambulances.
‘It’s not – it�
��s not – I’m sorry.’
The sirens strobe in the night.
Tom draws his mouth together in a tight line. And then his eyes meet hers. Sad eyes, like he knows something, can see something that she can’t, that she doesn’t understand. He raises his shoulders, just a fraction of a centimetre. If a stranger did it, she wouldn’t know what it meant, but she knows him, her Tom. The half-smile, the shoulders. A sad parting of ways.
She turns off the light in the hallway and stands there for a few seconds, her house bathed in police-blue, like an aquarium.
‘Stand down,’ she hears a tinny voice say outside. Cathy feels nothing. Not guilt at the betrayal of her family, not fear of her imminent arrest for her role in everything, not regret for everything that happened in Verona, and afterwards. Cathy feels nothing. Absolutely nothing.
‘Show yourself,’ the police say, and Cathy knows she should cooperate, but then she thinks of everything that’s happened since Verona, every desperate action, every lie, and she thinks that all is lost except this moment, with Tom still in her kitchen, for only a few minutes more. So, instead, Cathy watches them creep further and further towards her, like a slow, incoming tide that will eventually reach her and drown her but not quite yet. Not quite yet. She reaches for him. They still have a minute together. Maybe two.
71.
Cathy
Cathy isn’t handcuffed. Nobody pushes her head down into the back of the police car. Instead, she is read the caution, and then ignored, driven to Perry Barr Police Station, somewhere she has heard of but not ever been to, until now.
A separate police car came for Joe. An ambulance for Evan, though it was obviously futile. Cathy will never forget the sight of Joe, bloodied and mad, his eyes bright and feverish, in the outhouse as he pleaded with her.
The police car smells of synthetic-apple air fresheners and sweat. She is in the back. It’s overheated, the fabric of the seats soft and yielding, old foam that feels like it might never let her get out. It reminds her of car journeys taken with her family when she was younger and would almost always be sick. Frannie insisted on eating pick ’n’ mix in the back, even though the smell made Cathy worse. Joe always got the front seat. He was the eldest, he said, and those were the rules. Cathy leans her head against the window and closes her eyes to everything.
At the police station, Cathy is taken to an interview room. The calm that descended in her living room has stayed with her. She wonders if a jury might be lenient. Who will represent her. What their parents will think.
A police officer confirms in a monotone that Evan is dead.
Cathy stares at the wall for a while, waiting, with the artificial awake-ness that shift workers and people in crises carry with them. Two late-night phone calls in one single summer. Two bodies. Two sleepless nights. If they were here, in different circumstances, she’d make the joke they have about their father. ‘Joseph, Catherine, Francesca, whoever you are!’ She wouldn’t even have to finish it before they’d laugh. Her siblings, the people they once were.
‘The wait is because we’re assigning you a duty solicitor,’ a different police officer says to Cathy at eleven o’clock.
Cathy’s eyes are gritty and she rubs at them. Make-up comes away and she wonders what she must look like. A criminal? She thinks of the animals at the practice and hopes somebody is looking after them. She wonders where Joe and Frannie are. If her parents have been informed. What Tom’s doing. She is sequestered from it, here, from the information and the questions. A small self-contained room away from it all.
She stares at the wall before answering. It’s painted white, in cheap paint that’s bubbled like there’s grit underneath it.
Suddenly, here in the white room, she understands why she’s calm. The worst has happened. There is now a way out, even though she has had to detonate a bomb to expose the exit route from her family. She takes a breath. It’s over. The guilt and the panic and the waiting are over.
‘I have a criminal lawyer’s details in my phone,’ she says. ‘Can I call him? He’s called Jason.’
Cathy meets Jason in a meeting room an hour later. He has mismatched socks on, that’s the first thing she notices. He is somehow shabby-looking, but she can’t say why she thinks a lawyer shouldn’t have a partially grey shaggy beard, or not be carrying a take-out Costa coffee that’s dribbled down the side.
‘I’m Jason,’ he says to her, and sits opposite her, crossing his legs at the thigh.
‘You’re probably wondering how I got your details,’ she says.
‘Not really,’ he says with a quick smile. ‘Don’t worry. Right. Let’s start from the beginning.’ He sips at his coffee. It is sweet-smelling, some sort of syrup in it.
He looks down at his papers, shuffling them, then gets out a brand-new blue pad and a posh fountain pen, which Cathy likes, and writes the date along the top. He gets it right: it’s tomorrow. Just after midnight. It’s a good sign. He’s smart.
‘So,’ he says, looking at her again. ‘Why don’t you start from the beginning?’
‘The beginning is so far back,’ she says.
He makes a shrugging gesture, like, well, start there. ‘We’ve got all night,’ he says with a small laugh.
‘It started in Verona,’ she says.
‘Ah,’ Jason says. ‘The body that was just found.’
Joe told Cathy in the outhouse. ‘Right. How did they find it?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll find out,’ he says. ‘Tell me the rest.’ He reaches behind him and closes the door. ‘Tell me everything. Go.’
72.
Now
Second Day of Trial R. v. Plant
‘And that night in late August – you heard from your brother, Joe, is that correct?’
I nod, then say yes, in the witness box. I look directly at my brother, at the tufty grey hairs at his temples. ‘Yes,’ I repeat. For the first time, his eyes meet mine.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said he’d killed Evan. And that he needed help.’
‘Thank you,’ the barrister says to me. ‘Thank you, Catherine, for your witness evidence, which has been invaluable.’ He looks towards the public gallery, where my family stand. And to the dock, where my brother stands, solo and handcuffed, at his murder trial.
‘We will continue to hear evidence in the trial of the Crown against Joseph Plant,’ the judge says. ‘On the charges of’ – he checks a sheet – ‘preventing the lawful burial of a body. Criminal damage. Perverting the course of justice. Conspiracy to bribe. Misappropriation of corporate assets.’ The charges go on and on. He finishes reading them, his face completely expressionless. This must be so mundane to him. Cathy blinks.
‘Will there be any re-examination?’ my barrister asks the other barrister.
‘No,’ he says. ‘No need, I think. Thank you, Ms Plant. Hopefully justice can now be done.’
‘They won’t need me back?’ I say on the courthouse steps to Jason, freezing in my nude tights and skirt suit. I was given a suspended sentence for my role in the crime, in exchange for giving evidence against Joe. He loosens his tie and stares down at me.
‘They shouldn’t,’ he says. ‘It’ll be a few weeks, for the other witnesses. Then however long the jury deliberate for. There are a lot of charges.’ He lights up a cigarette, seemingly in no hurry to escape the bleak March cold. I draw my coat around myself and look at the lit-up tip, a layered rosebud set on fire, remembering how much Joe smoked in Verona. ‘So you’re free to go, I’d say. What’re you going to do?’
‘Go and see Frannie,’ I say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the town centre.
Jason nods, inhaling on the cigarette, and breathing smoke out into the blank sky, creating his own dense clouds of winter.
‘Well,’ I say, unsure how to end it, but something about Jason’s body language stops my sentence right there.
‘Do you think I don’t know?’ he says, dragging on the cigarette, his face at an angle, but not breaking
eye contact with me, not for a second.
‘Know what?’ I say, though I feel my cheeks heat up in the bone-cold winter air.
‘Let’s not pretend,’ Jason says. He taps ash off the end, which disperses on the breeze like a dandelion clock. I step out of the way, feeling panicked, feeling exposed.
‘Is it safe with you?’
‘Your secret? Always,’ Jason says. He reaches out to hold my shoulder. ‘I would have done the same thing as you,’ he says, before leaving. He rounds the angular corner of the Crown Court, his body disappearing, leaving a trail of smoke which hangs suspended in the air for a few seconds, then disappears too.
73.
Then
Cathy
‘I guess I’m here to report a crime,’ Cathy says carefully in the quiet room with this man, Jason, whom she barely knows.
‘Okay.’
She thinks of Joe’s eyes in the dark of the outhouse, his hands and face covered in Evan’s blood. She thinks of Frannie arriving, also responding to Joe’s call, and of her tears as he too became a murderer, both just normal people two months before, the transformation complete. She thinks of the pact they made.
‘They’ve found the body,’ Joe said, a bloodied hand on Cathy’s arm, those alien eyes on hers. ‘You need to say it was all me.’
‘What?’ she’d said, looking at the house containing Tom, not wanting to lose him, not wanting him to leave, even though she knew he wouldn’t.
‘Say it was me,’ he said again. He glanced at Frannie, who seemed to know exactly what he was saying. ‘I’ve fucked it,’ he added. ‘I’ve fucked it with Evan. There’s no way out, so you should say it was me.’
‘It was you,’ Cathy said softly.
‘Tell them everything.’ He stood behind Frannie, his hands on her angular shoulders. ‘Say it was me who killed Evan, and say it was me who killed Will. I did it all. Everything we did, I did. Say I confessed it all to you, right here. I’ll back up your story. Confess to perverting the course of justice when you covered for me. That’ll explain your DNA on the body. But tell them the rest was me. Eventually – and it might be as late as the day of the trial – they’ll offer you a plea in return for evidence against me. Hold out for it. Hold your nerve. Then take it. And then try to make your evidence reduce my crimes from murder to manslaughter.’
That Night Page 31