The Six

by Luca Veste

  ‘Do you want me to call you Alex?’ I asked instead, trying to maintain the eye contact she was intent on giving me. I failed. ‘I can if you want?’

  ‘No. Keep calling me Alexandra.’

  The summer was almost over, what there had been of it anyway. A typical August in the north of England. The stress of GCSE exams over. The wait for results had been worrying, but we had all done well. Sixth form now awaited us. A-Levels and not having to wear a school uniform anymore. Growing up. I was enjoying the breeze that was lifting from the sea – calming and warm. The sun was dipping behind the odd cloud, but I was sitting in a T-shirt and feeling comfortable.

  ‘What did you want anyway?’ Alexandra said, turning her head in my lap and looking back out across the Irish Sea.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said my name . . . ?’

  I shook my head, trying to remember if there was a reason. Failing to think of one. ‘I think I just wanted to say it out loud again.’ I looked down at her, seeing her face in profile. Her face softened and the corners of her mouth turned upwards a little.

  ‘My mum is still going on about this Diana thing you know,’ Alexandra said after a few moments of comfortable silence. ‘Talking about going down to London for the funeral. Not sure what she expects to see.’

  ‘Queen of hearts, wasn’t she?’ I replied, wishing I could sit there forever. ‘I’m just glad it didn’t happen while we were at school. Not sure I could have handled all the crying. It was bad enough being woken up at six o’clock in the morning to be told about it.’

  ‘It’ll be different in high school this year,’ Alexandra said, sitting up and leaning on her elbows next to me, her long body stretched out on the wall. ‘First year of sixth form. Got to start thinking about uni and all that grown-up stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m not sure I’m exactly looking forward to that. At least when it was just us, no one could say a word against us. When we’re all apart, it’s only going to be harder to keep people from finding out what a complete geek I am.’

  ‘Not true,’ Alexandra replied, pulling herself up and sitting next to me. She leaned close and placed her head on my shoulder. ‘Plus, if I find out someone is taking the piss out of you, they’ll have me to deal with. No matter where you are.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I said, chuckling softly as I spoke. ‘Alexandra Thompson is going to come to my rescue?’

  ‘Damn right,’ she replied, laughing along with me. ‘I’ve got a mean right hook on me. I could knock out Mike Tyson, me.’

  We were still laughing as the others joined us. Chris and Nicola refusing to let go of each other’s hands as they sat down next to us, Michelle singing a No Doubt song that had been top of her playlist that summer. ‘Just A Girl’, being belted into the skies. She had a great voice, but we weren’t about to tell her that.

  We were just happy she’d moved on from ‘Barbie Girl’.

  ‘Do you think it’ll always be like this?’ Nicola said, as wistfully as a sixteen-year-old girl could possibly be. ‘The five of us, I mean.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Chris replied, sharing a look with me. ‘Someone is eventually going to be able to put up with her singing long enough to get off with her. Probably just to shut her up, to be honest.’

  Michelle stopped long enough to aim a wayward kick in Chris’s direction. He didn’t even flinch, all of us laughing as she placed her hands on her hips in indignation.

  ‘I’d like to hear you sing.’

  Chris needed no further invitation, belting out a tuneless version of Oasis’s latest song. It was barely recognisable, even though it was just the chorus over and over, until we were all screaming at him to stop.

  ‘You just can’t recognise talent when it’s in front of you,’ Chris said finally, a smirk of triumph on his face.

  When we’d stopped laughing and allowed the silence to creep over us, it was almost a minute before someone spoke again. It was Alexandra who broke it.

  ‘We need to make a pact.’

  ‘Not this again . . . ’ Chris said under his breath, shaking his head. ‘Every time with the pacts. Remember how we all promised not to get as bladdered as we did in the park last New Year? What happened a month later?’

  ‘This is different,’ Alexandra cut in, standing up now and facing us all. ‘This is about us. We’re mates, right? That comes before everything else.’

  I didn’t like the look she gave me as she said that, but I tried to hide my fear. Chris and Nicola had been together forever, so it seemed redundant for them, but I was starting to worry about something I shouldn’t have. A voice inside telling me this was just a summer romance for Alexandra and that we had a finite existence as a couple.

  ‘So, no matter what happens in the next year, or beyond, we always have each other’s backs, right? No. Matter. What.’

  We didn’t disagree.

  I thought back to a year earlier. About a scrapyard. About running away, forgetting about Chris and Nicola.

  And when I looked at Chris, I knew he was thinking the same thing.

  Later, as we headed to the bus stop to go home, Chris and I fell in step. I caught his eye and raised my eyebrows.

  We had barely spoken about that night since. I hadn’t wanted to talk about it and it had seemed like he’d felt the same. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

  ‘You did what you had to, mate,’ Chris said, as if he could read my thoughts. ‘We lost each other. It was dark. We’d filled our heads with silly ghost stories and you were on your own. I would have done the same thing.’

  ‘You had Nicola to look after,’ I replied, stopping and looking away and out towards the river. I could see Crosby Beach in the distance if I strained my eyes hard enough. ‘I’m still not sure what happened.’

  ‘Neither am I. And that’s what I told the police.’

  Chris and I talked about everything. I knew his life, his dreams, his hopes and fears. I knew him better than even Nicola, I reckoned. Yet we had made some sort of unspoken decision never to talk about that night in the days afterwards. At first, it had been all we had spoken about – what we should do, what we should say. Then, nothing. Not until now.

  It was as if the worst thing that would ever happen to us had made us shut down. We had concentrated on other things instead. Michelle would try to bring it up, but Chris and I would refuse to be drawn into it. Nicola dealt with her. As did Alexandra. Yet, me and Chris . . . we didn’t want to know. ‘Same,’ I said finally, turning around and facing him. The girls were still walking to the bus stop, oblivious to our not being behind them. ‘They reckon that guy will get life.’

  ‘So he should. Killing a fifteen-year-old kid just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  There had been a smell of death in that yard. A few victims of the drug trade, I’d read in my dad’s copy of the Liverpool Echo in the days after what happened. Mikey had been found killed in the same way. They’d arrested a number of people over the next week, eventually charging someone for his murder. When I saw his picture in the paper, I tried to put myself in Mikey’s shoes. Tried to think about his last moments – a thirty-odd-year-old bloke with tattoos up his hands, up his arms, across his neck, looming over him. Not thinking twice before ending a fifteen-year-old lad’s life over nothing. We’d been foolish enough to think we were invincible, but now, all I could think about was what if that bloke had found me instead of Mikey.

  ‘When they found Mikey’s body, they pulled me in again,’ Chris said, kicking at a stone. ‘Nicola too.’

  ‘Yeah, same.’

  ‘Probably wondered if it was us. Glad they got him. Hope he dies in prison. It could have been anyone of us. We didn’t even know they were there.’

  ‘We heard them. We just didn’t realise who it was.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have been there.’

  ‘As long as you know that wouldn’t happen again,’ I said, fixing Chris with a stare. ‘I wouldn’t leave you behind again. You understand? Never again. If we’
re in a situation where it gets a bit scary or whatever, I’m not leaving you behind. You get me?’

  Chris bit on his lower lip, looking away as his eyes watered. ‘Yeah mate. Same.’

  *

  We wouldn’t talk about that kid dying for a long time. Even though someone had died in our presence – even if we hadn’t seen it – we never spoke about it.

  As if the real pact had been about silence. About never discussing death of any kind.

  Twenty-Two

  After another sleepless night, I managed to leave the house again the following day. Three days in a row. It was a new record. Before Stuart had died, I could go a week without stepping foot outside. With weekly shops now delivering to your door and everything I needed no more than a click of a button away, there was no real need for me to leave.

  I could have quite happily gone on the same way forever.

  Well, happily might have been pushing it.

  I’d messaged Michelle as soon as it was a reasonable hour, waiting for a response before contacting Chris. She was okay, but I wondered how true that actually was. Lying awake the previous night, I knew she’d be doing the same.

  Someone was in her house and you left her there.

  I’d showered, again, then called Chris. Arranged to meet him in the usual place. Left the house a little quicker than the previous day, then sat in my car trying to work out what I was going to do.

  The only answer I had was to keep going.

  The usual place was a pub about five minutes from Chris’s office. It had been taken over by one of the chains a couple of years earlier, but we’d continued to meet up there at least once a week for lunch. Even as it became more and more difficult to leave the safety of my home, I still kept meeting up. It was as if by doing that I could ignore the fact there was something seriously wrong with me.

  I saw him walking up as I got out of the car and raised a hand in greeting.

  ‘Okay?’ Chris said, as I approached him. ‘Sounded a bit urgent on the phone . . . ’

  ‘Yeah, let’s talk inside,’ I replied, following him and finding our normal table empty as usual.

  ‘I’m buying,’ Chris said, as he noted the table number just in case it was different to the hundred other times we had sat there. I’d joked with him about it once, then felt like an idiot a few weeks later when the number did change.

  ‘You can’t take anything for granted, lad.’

  That was Chris. He was always right and always thinking ahead.

  It was why I spoke to him about everything I couldn’t work out. It was why when he came back to the table, I didn’t pause and told him what had happened in the previous twenty-four hours.

  When I was finished, he sat back in his chair and stayed silent for a few seconds. Then a few more. I was about to speak again, when he finally spoke.

  ‘What happened last year, it’s messed with all of us. Now there’s what happened to Stuart, just to screw us up all over again. We’re going to see things, do things, that don’t make any sense.’

  ‘Someone has been in Michelle’s house . . . ’

  ‘You only have her word for that and she’s been through a lot lately. Losing Stuart will have hit her the worst. Think of their history – everything that they went through and when they’re finally in the right place, last year happens and it all falls apart. Same for you and Alexandra. She’s not been sleeping and is living with a grief we can’t even comprehend. People in that position . . . they don’t just live a normal life in the aftermath. It affects them for a long time.’

  ‘I saw the candle, Chris . . . ’

  ‘You saw a candle, Matt,’ Chris replied, shaking his head as he curled a hand around his pint glass and lifted it to his mouth. He sat it back down and looked across the table at me. ‘We all know the story now. She could have bought that thing at any point, then finds it in the past week and is just forgetting that she lit it in the dead of night or something.’

  ‘Why though?’ I said, unable to keep the scepticism from my voice. It didn’t make sense to me and I wanted to hear that I was seeing things that didn’t exist. I knew Chris couldn’t do that. ‘It just doesn’t ring true to me.’

  ‘Same thing that Stuart was struggling with.’

  I was about to ask what he meant when our food was delivered. Chris wiped down a knife and fork, but I left the sandwich he’d ordered for me where it was. Waited for the waitress to leave and then spoke. ‘What was he struggling with?’

  ‘Same thing we’ve all been living with,’ Chris replied, placing his cutlery back down on the serviette. ‘Guilt.’

  ‘Maybe it’s gone on for long enough.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I took a swig from my own drink and looked out at the busy road outside the pub. Watched cars fly past, wondering where all the people were going at that time of day. I turned back to Chris and bit down on the corner of my bottom lip with an incisor. ‘Maybe it’s time we told someone what we did.’

  Chris breathed in deeply and set his glass back down on the table a little harder than he’d probably wanted to. I didn’t let him speak first. ‘Listen, hear me out, okay, then you can tell me I’m wrong. We’ve all been living with this thing in our heads for a year. This . . . knowledge, that we killed him.’

  ‘The Candle Man—’

  ‘Yes, but it’s more than just that. There’s got to be a reason why the police refuse to acknowledge his existence. Maybe they’ve been waiting for something to happen so that they can finally say it’s a definite truth. If we give them the location of where he’s buried, maybe that’s enough for them to finally close the investigation. The reason we haven’t told anyone what we’ve done is because we buried him.’

  ‘And you think a year is enough time for that to be forgiven?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said, earning a look from the woman behind the bar in the distance. I lowered my voice again. ‘I’m just saying look at it both ways – guilt and keeping this secret has started messing with our minds. What we’re suggesting is that it’s making Michelle see candles appear that she put there herself. Lit herself. It’s made Stuart take his own life. It broke me and Alexandra apart.’

  I paused before I continued on, making a quick decision not to lie anymore. ‘It drove me inside my house, scared to do anything but meet you here once a week. I mean, it’s a struggle to leave, mate. I stand at the door for ages, working up the courage. I don’t feel safe anymore. I can’t sleep, Chris. I can’t get that night out of my head. I know it’s affected you and Nicola as well. I don’t want to live like this anymore. If there are consequences, they’ll be better than this life.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  I thought for a second, but didn’t need much longer than that. I simply remembered the lad who disappeared and it confirmed my first instinct. ‘Yes. And then there’s the other side of it.’

  ‘If someone was really there and saw what we did.’

  ‘Exactly. Which, of course, is the only explanation for Mark Welsh’s body not being there when we went back into those woods. We never talked about that – just like we never talked about that boy back when we teenagers. Mikey. He died while we were in that scrapyard and we never talked about it. Not even when that drug dealer got life for his murder. We just pretended like it never happened.’ I paused, waiting for some kind of response to that from Chris, but I didn’t receive any. I sighed and shook my head before continuing on, lowering my voice further. ‘That lad’s body was moved. Someone took him. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but someone had to have done that. He didn’t just turn into dust like an Avengers character.’

  ‘And you think someone has waited a year for what?’

  ‘He wants revenge or something like that. It has to be someone connected to whoever the Candle Man was. Stuart didn’t kill himself, this person did. And Michelle is next.’

  ‘So, in either case, we go to the police and that all stops. That’s what you’re suggesting?�
��

  ‘I’m saying it’s worth discussing,’ I said, picking up the sandwich on my plate, looking it over, then laying it back down again. My stomach didn’t seem to be interested. ‘We all have to agree to it. That’s how we work.’

  ‘Then let me stop you now,’ Chris replied, swallowing a mouthful of his salad and putting his fork down. He picked up his napkin and wiped his hands. ‘I’m not doing that.’

  ‘Chris—’

  ‘No, I’m not interested,’ Chris said, an edge to his tone that I hadn’t experienced in a long time. ‘You might have decided that because you and Alexandra couldn’t make it through this, that you have nothing to lose anymore. Not like on that night, when if I remember correctly, you were right behind the whole idea. If that’s different now, it’s not my fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. I still have a lot to lose if the truth comes out. So does Nicola. Do you think we’d just get a slap on the wrist? That they’d let us off because we stopped a serial killer? How do we even prove that was the case? We got rid of everything. The candle in the woods, the boy he killed. It won’t work. We kept this secret for a year, while that boy’s mum has been everywhere trying to find out what happened to her son. We’d be the new enemy. We’d be his stand-in. They can’t be angry with the guy who killed that boy because he’s already dead. Instead, they’d be angry with us for not saying anything. We’d be pariahs, Matt. No one would want anything to do with us ever again. Everyone would know who we are and what we’d done. That would be our lives forever.’

  ‘I understand, but we need to do something . . . ’

  ‘We don’t need to do anything. The plan worked. No one knows what we did. Yes, it’s hard to live with, but that’s true for everyone.’

  I scoffed at that. Shook my head and placed the edge of my hand against my head and rubbed a temple with my thumb. ‘This is a little different. I hope you can see that at least.’

  ‘Of course it is, but I refuse to allow it to define me. Nicola too. That wasn’t us and all we are. It was a situation we dealt with and came out the other side with our lives. I don’t know what happened to that boy’s body and I don’t care anymore. I’m done with being scared and looking over my shoulder. If someone did move him – which I know is what happened – then that person obviously doesn’t want him to be found either. And if he comes after us, then I’m ready for that as well. I’ll protect my wife and myself just like I did a year ago. I can’t go to the police now because it’s just not going to help anyone if I did. It would only hurt everyone involved and why would I want to do that?’