Beach Bodies, Part 3

by Ross Armstrong

  As Simon comes to, he meets Lance’s eye and tries to stand on impulse, falling back down into the tiles when he realises his legs don’t work as well when bound with two metres of extension cord.

  ‘We do not want to hurt you, we want to talk,’ says Justine.

  Simon breathes hard, blood ribboning from both of his nostrils, his eyes darting around to assess the danger level of the situation.

  Roberto’s eyes flick to Lance’s. ‘Well, some of us do want to hurt you. But they won’t be allowed to. For now.’

  Simon avoids Lance’s malevolent gaze as his mind rattles through the chain of events that led him here. ‘It’s not supposed to go like this,’ Simon whispers.

  Liv, in particular, is disturbed by these words, her mind spinning off down a host of avenues in search of possible meanings.

  ‘Don’t play punch-drunk,’ says Lance. ‘I only gave you a tap. If I’d really wanted to hit you, you would’ve known about it.’

  ‘Please – I don’t know what’s going on,’ says Simon.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ve pieced it together for you, mate,’ says Roberto. ‘We just need you to fill in the last couple of blanks. If you do that for us, we won’t hurt you. We’ll hand you over to the police once that boat comes, and you can deal with—’

  ‘We don’t even know if he called anyone. If there even is a boat coming,’ Summer says.

  ‘There is a boat coming. It’ll be with us at… 5 a.m.,’ says Simon, struggling to check his little round watch on his bound wrist. ‘That’s less than seven hours.’

  ‘Lie,’ says Lance. ‘That’s his first lie.’

  ‘How do you know?’ says Tabs.

  ‘I can tell. When you’ve worked the doors, you can tell a lie: I found the pills on the floor, I was just brushing up against her, this ain’t my Bowie knife. Trust me, I can sniff this shit out.’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ says Simon. ‘If you believe nothing else, hang on to this. I really don’t know how this is going to go. But if I don’t make it, remember, you just have to make it to 5 a.m.’

  The group want to be buoyed by this, but any glimmer they’ve had in the past few hours has been quickly snuffed out.

  ‘Okay, mate, here’s the meat of it,’ says Roberto. ‘We know you locked Dawn inside that office with you, and when she tried to escape you killed her with the shutter.’ Simon’s eyes look like they’re doing long division. ‘Then we figure you made your way upstairs without anyone noticing, saw Sly was apart from the group, you slit his throat and pushed him through the window. But how did you get the knife back into the kitchen without any of us noticing?’

  Simon lowers his head. They can’t see his eyes – he could be laughing or crying. ‘No, no, no,’ he says. ‘Dawn’s dead?’

  He moans, heaving large sighs.

  ‘Oh, give the man an Oscar,’ shouts Lance. ‘It’s you that ended her!’

  ‘Can’t be dead. Not her,’ he mutters.

  ‘Don’t act like you care!’ Lance shouts, Tabs holding on to him as he leans in further. ‘What d’you care?’

  Then Simon pushes his face towards Lance, their heads almost touching.

  ‘Because I lo…’ In the briefest fraction of a second Simon gives a rueful smile, then shakes his head again. ‘Because… she was a sweet and beautiful person. And this isn’t what was supposed to happen. It’s not…’

  Lance sits down, a look of triumph on his face. ‘I know you wanted to finish your plan, you probably had some order you wanted to pick us off in. But we got to you first.’

  ‘Someone’s making you look like fools. Someone here. But it isn’t me,’ says Simon.

  Uncomfortable glances get passed around as Simon spits, his mouth filled with blood, his chest with grief.

  ‘Dawn and I were locked safe in the office,’ says Simon. ‘I thought for a moment we could stay there together. Until the boat came. But I knew the one person who didn’t do this was her, which meant we were leaving all of you in the dark with a murderer. She said we had to do something. The least I could do was get those lights back on using the back-up generator.’

  ‘A real heart of gold, eh?’ says Lance.

  But he’s soon met with shushes, from the others.

  ‘So I opened up the shutter, climbed out the window into the rain, and told Dawn to wait for me and that she should pull down the shutter immediately if anyone else came. I found the generator and got everything working again. You didn’t think about how those lights came back on?’

  ‘But then you came back into the living room. You didn’t go straight back to Dawn, where it was safe. Why?’ says Tabs.

  ‘Conscience got the better of me,’ he says. ‘I brought you all here, and I know each and every one of you, maybe… better than you know yourselves.’ This isn’t a sentiment that sits well with any of them. ‘I am responsible for you. I decided I couldn’t very well leave you to fend for yourselves. I had to come back. But Dawn was safe and that was enough.’

  ‘Only she wasn’t, was she?’ Roberto scoffs, his tone getting him cold looks. He remembers it’s best not to stick your head above the parapet. Heads on display in this place have had a habit of being detached from their owners.

  Liv recalls a phrase she once heard: ‘The weak speak too much.’ Or perhaps it wasn’t a phrase, perhaps it was something her dad once said. But it was still true.

  ‘So,’ says Justine, picking up the pieces. ‘Tell us how a woman gets killed, when she’s all alone in a locked room.’

  And all eyes stay on Simon.

  London, Waterloo, Rennie Street…

  The phone rings and Mr Knight picks up immediately.

  Check the temperature, he’s told. Never done that before but he knows where the meter is and is thrilled to be asked.

  All controlled remotely of course, what happens in there, but you need to have someone look over the hard copies. Cos although everything can be everywhere, everything is really only somewhere. And these things are here. The hard copies.

  As he taps the readout – tactile, real, a nice feeling – Mr Knight notices the darkness in the cold storage room. So little light in a place of such importance. His eyes wander, picking out the interruptions to the dark. Shelves, lit by neon, a line of small drawers, almost like the ones Mr Knight remembers as a kid, that held index cards or public records, before all of that really was placed elsewhere and the real things destroyed. Because you don’t need hard copies of everything. Only some things.

  The only other light in there seems to be coming from a screen. He cranes his neck to see. It’s a smaller one that he’s used to seeing, that reminds him of old times. And there are old illusions flickering away on it.

  Mr Knight remembers they’ll be waiting for the okay at headquarters. One of the oldest and best tech companies around. He stretches his arms, his back, gives his neck a crack as his feet tap on the gleaming floor, the noises echoing around, his lonely reflection staring back at him in the glass as he walks. And past the glass, the river, chopping away in the dark and overflowing as it often does this time of year.

  ‘Fine and checked,’ he says into the phone and the voice repeats back some kind words for his efforts.

  He sits back in his chair and feels the pleasure of being active in the working world. Half an hour later he spins around on it. He has tap danced alone in this place. How he remembers tap dancing went anyway. He has wandered the corridors in the dead of night. He has rested his tired body on the gleaming floor at 4 a.m. He used to wear a suit.

  His mind wanders, and he observes the movement of his thoughts. He thinks of his mother in an old hospital bed. She was in a coma, but he still spoke to her. Left the radio on the whole time she was in there. Just in case.

  Mr Knight gets up and runs a hand through his wave of salt-and-pepper hair. He glances at the extravagant chandelier above, part glass, part diamonds, part feathers from rare birds, as his feet echo back to him from high ceilings. He approaches the temperature readout, tappi
ng it. All fine. Then looks through the window at the glow of the screen.

  He presses his face and hand against the glass to getter a better look at the screen in there. It shows an old television show repeat. Beautiful men and women in some exotic location. Just playing away in there on its own. For no one in particular.

  Tap, tap, tap. That hasn’t happened in a long time. Another pair of footsteps in the building. Unannounced. Impossible, he thinks. And his heart quickens a beat.

  11.08 p.m.

  Simon thinks, moving his tongue around his mouth, checking he still has all his teeth, which thankfully he does.

  ‘I can’t explain how a woman gets killed when she’s all alone in a locked room,’ he splutters out before the blood in his throat makes him cough.

  As he does so, Liv rises to grab a tea towel, wets it at the tap in the kitchen then heads towards Simon.

  ‘Careful,’ says Roberto.

  ‘He’s not Hannibal Lecter,’ says Liv, as she wipes his mouth dry.

  ‘More like “Have No Balls, Lecturer,”’ says Roberto.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ says Summer.

  Roberto keeps smiling but something inside him dies at another knock from Summer. And the group cringe again.

  ‘Okay, what if someone went down there and banged on the door,’ says Simon. ‘Said they wanted to come in so they could be safe in there with her?’

  ‘Not possible. You have to slide the door in the wall open to get down to your lounge, it’s conspicuous as hell and we were all here the whole time,’ says Tabs.

  ‘Okay. What if someone came from the outside? Tapped on the window?’ says Simon.

  ‘So now we’re back to the outsider theory?’ says Justine.

  ‘No, can’t be an outsider. One of us. Who wasn’t accounted for?’ he says.

  They watch the smoke from the fire eek out into the room as they recall how this started and everything that has happened since.

  ‘There’s just Zack,’ says Roberto. ‘Who I’ve thought was a shark for a while.’

  ‘And he’s out there somewhere looking for help. So he can save our skins,’ says Tabs, opting to defend the man who isn’t here to defend himself.

  ‘Or we gave our one phone to the murderer,’ says Justine. ‘And now he’s waiting for us to step outside, one by one, so he can—’

  ‘Or there’s you, Si,’ says Lance. ‘You and Zack are the only ones unaccounted for at the time.’

  ‘All right,’ says Simon, and for a second Lance thinks that’s a confession before Simon starts speaking again. ‘Sly was killed by that same knife in the drawer, yes?’

  Summer nods. While Simon was unconscious, she insisted they drag Sly’s body into the partial dry. She kissed him on the cheek and confirmed the shape of the smile that had been slashed across his voice box. A crescent with a serrated edge.

  ‘Then how did I get hold of that?’ says Simon, his voice raised in challenge. ‘Surely you can all agree I wasn’t in this room?’

  ‘We can’t agree on anything,’ says Tabs.

  ‘I certainly couldn’t have picked it up, killed someone and put it back without anyone noticing. There was someone here the whole time. Right?’

  Tabs looks to the others. ‘Yes. But… maybe someone could’ve slipped it out and slipped it back? Without me noticing—’

  ‘Someone must’ve been better placed to do that than me. Any theories?’

  The truth is, as they breathe in the silence, that no one has broached the journey of the knife because none of them has a single clue how that happened.

  ‘Nah. Real magic shit that,’ says Roberto.

  ‘No, no, not magic! All explainable by some kind of logic. It’s just logic you haven’t thought of yet,’ says Simon.

  ‘Shut it!’ says Lance, back-handing him across the face. ‘He’s trying to confuse me. But it’s harder to confuse a man like me than he thinks.’

  Simon leaves that one alone. ‘I’m merely trying to get you to reflect, like I always have,’ he says, taking a deep breath. ‘Look, so it’s all out in the open, there is one other insight we stumbled on. Isn’t there, Lance?’

  Lance folds his arms, shaking his head, but by now people are catching his eye and he knows he has to spill it.

  ‘What is it?’ says Summer.

  Simon gives Lance a ‘be my guest’ look.

  ‘Whatever,’ says Lance. ‘It don’t change the fact that it’s you, Si. But listen, when we viewed the footage, Zack and Liv’s stories checked out,’ says Lance, still uneasy about the fact that Liv didn’t appear to cut herself the first time they watched. ‘But we also found something else. Sly getting aggy with Tommy before the blackout hour. He cuffs him, like the one I just gave this mug. Something muggy had gone on between them and Sly didn’t like being mugged off.’

  The room shudders uncomfortably.

  ‘So. Anyone have any idea what happened between them?’ says Lance.

  And it doesn’t take long for the pressure to tell on one of them. Summer lifts her head from Liv’s lap.

  ‘I think I do,’ says Summer. She’s held this back for a while, not so much because she was worried it could implicate her, but because it’s hardly a great character reference. ‘I told Sly… that I was thinking about getting to know Tommy better. Because I didn’t want to keep all my eggs in one single basket.’

  ‘Wow,’ says Roberto, and gets a sharp look from Summer.

  ‘But getting to know each other is what this game is all about. Isn’t it? Well… isn’t it?’

  The words seem so simple but the consequence, including Sly’s on-camera attack on Tommy, is a little more divisive.

  ‘But that’s not quite all, is it, babes?’ says Tabs.

  Summer falters, looking around the room. She thought this revelation would be enough to pacify them.

  ‘Babes. I’m afraid Tommy told me everything,’ Tabs says.

  Summer braces herself for her big glossy magazine interview moment. Admission of guilt, sorrow, redemption, all in the length of a double-page spread.

  ‘Look, me and Tommy… had a moment in the Love Nest,’ she says.

  Judging by the open mouths that greet her, admission of guilt has landed heavier than she intended. She takes a look back at the steps that have taken her here, knowing it’s too far to go back, then looks forward to how far away sorrow and redemption seem. She might have to go with tears, platitudes and cries for mercy. The shamed internet star’s apology video full house.

  ‘We knew the cameras wouldn’t be on, so we snuck in there. For a little kiss.’

  ‘And…’ says Tabs.

  ‘Jesus Christ, he really did tell you everything,’ says Summer. ‘Yes, and the rest. We did it twice. Me on top, then I let him go on top. We tried to only do it once, to be respectful, but the moment got the better of us.’

  Summer looks pained. She tried to rip off the plaster in one swift painless move but seems to have taken half of her arm off in the act.

  ‘But me and Just never even got our night in the Love Nest,’ says Roberto, unerringly missing the point. ‘You have to be voted in by the British public. It has to be the will of the ruddy people!’

  ‘The people, just so you know, thought they just kissed,’ says Simon, still in pain. ‘So did I. I don’t know if Sly knew about any of it.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ says Summer. ‘He can’t have.’ And then her eyes turn to Tabs. ‘You didn’t tell him, did you?’ she says, through gritted teeth.

  Tabs says nothing, just shows her perfect smile for a second.

  ‘Of course not,’ Tabs says finally. ‘Girl code. Swear on my life.’

  The women of the group assess the state of the coven as the room falls silent.

  It was a pressure cooker atmosphere even before all this. Their pride and futures bound up in how they were perceived, their honour and sense of themselves as potent beings. Every day was literally survival of the fittest. People have left the show in the past, citing stress or emotional
difficulties. People have suffered after-effects, some citing PTSD, which critics have belittled as a very on-trend malady, but others, who know the spotlight and felt its burn, know the scars it can leave.

  ‘Listen, I started to think,’ says Summer, ‘we were such a strong threesome, it was almost polyamory. So I thought if I removed myself from it, Liv would be happier with Sly. I could be with Tommy. Dawn could go with Lance. And…’

  ‘Happily ever after,’ Liv bites.

  ‘I was going with my heart and my head. I thought that’s what you wanted?’ says Summer.

  ‘You never asked. But how benevolent of you to gift Sly to me,’ says Liv.

  ‘Well, it turns out he didn’t want that anyway,’ says Summer.

  ‘Even better,’ says Liv, throwing up her hands.

  ‘Wow,’ says Roberto, clapping his hands, a small laugh escaping from him.

  ‘Stop saying wow,’ says Summer. Oh, there are things I could say, Roberto, she thinks.

  ‘No, it’s just… Tommy, man, what a legend. In a manner of speaking,’ says Roberto. ‘You know, err, he shagged Dawn…’ He gestures to Lance and finds a stiff nod of confirmation. ‘God rest her soul. Then Summer. Anyone else?’

  ‘I snogged him before she did,’ says Liv, ignoring Summer’s glance.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Roberto. ‘And I mean, let’s be honest, we all thought he’d end up with Tabs.’

  It’s an uncomfortable thing to air. It was the type of gossip that gained greater thrill the more it was spoken behind the backs of the people in question. It acquired a quality of brilliance, like marble buffed to perfection. Telling one of them about it takes away the sheen and adds a glint of guilt.

  ‘The joke of it is,’ says Tabs, steadily, ‘we knew people thought we’d crack on. But we were only ever mates. That’s why he told me everything. That’s why people liked us, we had the feel of people with history. And that’s because that’s what we did have.’