by Anita Waller
They were quiet on the journey. Heather helped Claudia into the flat and emptied the car of the bags before taking it across the road to the garage. Heather called into see Michelle as she passed the shop, to tell her of Claudia’s return and to pick up some bread.
‘I’ll leave her a couple of days, then come and have a cuppa with both of you,’ Michelle said. ‘She’ll not be wanting visitors yet.’
Heather walked into the lounge and Claudia was sitting on the sofa. ‘It’s lovely, Heather, just a tad comfier than the sun loungers.’
‘You’ve seen nothing yet,’ Heather said with a grin. She moved to the side of the sofa and pressed a button. The footrest rose, and Claudia sighed.
‘Heaven,’ she pronounced. She fought sleep for half an hour and then succumbed.
By Saturday things had improved, including the weather, and they sat out on the patio all morning.
‘I’ve been doing some thinking,’ Heather said, ‘making some decisions. I’ve decided to sell the house. I had intended renting it out, but that would mean me having to visit it occasionally, and I think it’s time to cut the strings with that part of our lives. I hate having to avoid going there in case I bump into James. So, it makes sense to sell it. I’ll clear the last part of the mortgage with Owen’s insurance money, and I reckon the house is worth around quarter of a million. I’m also going to sell the car. It was always too big for me, so I’m going to get a smaller one.’
‘We can only get one car in this garage,’ Claudia warned her.
‘It won’t matter, will it? James won’t know I’ve got a new one. I can park mine on the road with no problems. I’m going up to the house Monday morning, bringing down here some stuff that I need, and I’ll make a start on the packing. I’ll organise putting everything into storage, then get it on the market when it’s empty. I’ll hang on to the car until the house is sold, so that James never sees whatever the new car will be. And then we’re going on holiday.’
‘And if I need treatment?’
‘Then we’ll postpone the holiday until after the treatment. I’ve already told Michael I won’t be going back to work, I’ll look for a new job when I feel ready. I won’t be short of money, I can wait for the right position. My main concern now is getting you fit again.’
‘And you’re going to the cemetery this afternoon?’
‘I am, don’t worry. And I’ll explain to her that you’re much better.’ Heather crossed her fingers at the lie.
Claudia wasn’t looking well at all; her skin was like parchment, and she slept a lot. In addition, the area on her leg that had donated the skin for the graft was also troubling her; she had confessed it was more painful than the entire underarm and shoulder area. Heather assumed it was the major surgery she had had, causing theses issues in her friend; she prayed it wasn’t anything more serious.
They had some lunch on the patio and then Heather helped her back inside and made her go for a nap. ‘The more you sleep, the quicker you’ll heal,’ she said. ‘I’ll wake you when I get home. Your phone’s on the bedside table, ring if there’s a problem.’
Claudia nodded, and closed her eyes.
Heather pulled up outside the cemetery gates to buy some flowers.
‘Afternoon, Clark. Busy day?’
‘Nah, think they’re all doing their gardens now the weather’s picked up.’
‘You could be right. I’ll have two bunches of those carnations, please – oh, and one of those mixed bunches.’
She handed the money over and walked back to the car. The mixed bunch was for the flat, and they would all have to go in the one vase they had. The pretty pink and white carnations were for Ella. She drove slowly around to the small carpark and walked to the graveside.
The sun passed behind a cloud as she knelt to cut the stems shorter on the fresh flowers, and she sensed someone behind her. She froze. She had allowed her mind to be on other issues, mainly surrounding the complexities of selling her house, and she hadn’t kept a watch for anything else. She was still holding the scissors when she whirled around.
‘Where the fuck is she, Heather?’
James was standing there, fury evident on his face.
‘As if I’d tell you,’ she sneered. ‘Go back to your Marilyn – or is it Will?’
‘You bitch. You absolute bitch. What the fuck have you been saying? The kids won’t have anything to do with me and I can’t find my wife. Where is she, Heather? I need to see her.’
Heather glanced around – Clark had been right, it was devoid of people. No help for her there.
‘Go away, James. She’s out of your life now, and if you’ve lost the kids as well, doesn’t that tell you something? That you’re just not a very nice person to be around? Go and let Marilyn/Will nurse your bruised ego and let me get on with tending to your daughter’s grave, the daughter you haven’t bothered with for seven years. And Claudia’s fine, she doesn’t need you.’
Heather knew she was winding him up but couldn’t help herself. Her hatred for him knew no bounds at that point.
‘You…!’ He launched himself at her and she fell backwards, cracking her head against the headstone. His weight pinned her down and she saw his arm raise to hit her. Her right hand, still clutching the scissors came up to try to stop the onslaught; she felt blood spurt and thought it was her own. He was going to kill her.
The scissors were embedded in James’s neck and he collapsed against her. His blood was gushing out, covering her clothes and face. She tried to wriggle out from underneath him, but it wasn’t easy. It was all over within a couple of minutes, and she finally sat by his side, stunned in every sense of the word. The crack against the headstone had brought blood and dizziness, but equally shocking to her system was the dead body by her side. She had killed him.
Her first instinct, to ring 999, was being thought through with some care. This would be the second dead man linked to her in a couple of weeks, men that the police knew had treated her badly. They would never believe her version of the events of the last few minutes.
She had to get him away, then make decisions. She searched his pocket for his car keys, took off her bloody jacket and covered his face, then ran up the incline to the top car park. His was the only car there, and she drove it around to within ten feet of Ella’s grave.
There was nothing in the boot to help her except a shovel which she guessed he had carried throughout the winter in case of snow. Blood was dripping onto her top from her own head wound, mingling in with the initial spurt of blood from James, and she felt an increase in blood loss as she heaved James down the slope towards his car. She levered him into the boot and slammed it shut.
Parking the Kia alongside her own in the lower car park, Heather staggered painfully back to the grave, clutching the shovel. She began to dig the large puddle of blood by the headstone into the soil, but when she sat on the grave to rest after managing to blend it in, she saw the streak of blood gleaming wetly on the grass where she had dragged him down to the car.
It took a dozen journeys with the small container from the grave, as she fetched water from the tap and poured it on the blood. The cleaning of the headstone was even more difficult, but at least she could explain that – the wound on her head would show where that was from.
Finally, she was done; a casual observer would see nothing amiss. A policeman would.
A car came through the ornate stone entrance and parked in the small car park, so she decided it was time to move.
‘Bye, Ella,’ she whispered. ‘Mummy will come next week, I promise.’
She finger-kissed the headstone and headed down to the Kia. There was a smear of blood on the bumper, and she took out the baby wipes and cleaned it. Her top had very little blood on it, the jacket had absorbed the bulk. She climbed into the car and left through the cemetery gates.
She reached James’s house a quarter of an hour later and parked the Kia on his drive. Once again the high privet hedge was effectively hiding all activity. Usi
ng his keys, she went into the house and prayed he hadn’t changed the alarm code. The beeping stopped, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
She moved towards the back door and around to her own house, where she spent another quarter of an hour showering and changing her clothes. Her blood-soaked items she put in the washing machine. As she went out of the back door, she could hear it churning all the blood down the drain.
Heading back through James’s house felt so wrong; she reset the alarm, made sure the car was locked, pocketed his keys and headed for the bus stop.
Twenty minutes later, she was in Claudia’s little car, heading home.
Claudia had slept; she woke to the sound of her bedroom door opening and Heather walking in with a cup of tea.
‘Ella sends her love and wants Mummy to visit her next week, if Mummy is well enough,’ she said with a smile.
Claudia swung her legs off the bed, and shook her head, trying to clear away the fuzziness in her brain.
‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly five o’clock. Drink this and we’ll decide what to do about food.’
She left Claudia to come around and headed into the lounge. She needed a few minutes of solitude, just to get her head around what had happened. She had covered for today, but knew she had to do something about James very quickly.
With the warmer weather, she reckoned she only had a day at the most before the body started to smell. She had to get rid of him, one way or another.
Her biggest worry was the body being discovered with the wound in the neck; she couldn’t put the car in his garage with the engine running to make it look like suicide – and that would have to happen immediately anyway. Her thoughts churned; by the time Claudia joined her in the lounge Heather had decided she had to burn both him and the car, to the point of destruction.
Claudia came up behind her and bent to kiss her head. She winced and felt Claudia touch her head.
‘What on earth have you done? There’s a gash that I suspect needs stitches in it!’
‘It’ll be fine,’ Heather said. ‘I slipped in the cemetery and smashed it on Ella’s headstone. It’s why I was away for so long. I had to clean up all the blood – you know how much a head wound bleeds. Then I had to clean me up, so I sneaked back home and changed my clothes after I very carefully showered. There was no sign of James, so I was okay. I didn’t want to wake you by coming back here and showering.’
‘I’ll get the first aid box. Let’s hope James never needs a plaster, because I brought everything with me,’ she said with a smile. ‘I think I have some steri strips.’ Heather doubted that a plaster would help James.
Nursing accomplished, they sat for a while, Claudia reading and Heather planning.
She soon began to realise that burning the car was impractical, she needed him to disappear completely, and even burnt bodies would give something up forensically. He had to be buried. And the logical place was in the large area of knee-high grassland under their elevated patio. If she dug the grave directly underneath, she would be hidden from the sight of everybody, and secure in the knowledge that the council never cut the area because they couldn’t get a grass cutter to it, the supporting uprights for the patio prevented access. But she could get the Fiesta down the side alley leading to it if she pulled in the wing mirrors and drove very carefully.
Swapping James’s dead weight from the Kia to the Fiesta wouldn’t be easy, but did she have a choice? She stood and moved to the kitchen. Two painkillers would help with the ever-increasing headache, and maybe she should have a sleep. It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 14
Heather reversed the Fiesta as close to the back door of the Sportage as she could get it, then pressed the button to raise the tailgate of the big car. She stared in horror at James’s face, his eyes wide and glassy. In the blackness of midnight, and a moonless midnight because of the heavy cloud cover, his face glowed eerily translucent.
She opened the boot of the Fiesta, glad that she had thought to lay down the back seats and cover everything with a blanket. No way would a man’s body fit in the small boot space. His body was stiff, and it took her fifteen minutes to transfer him to the smaller car, then cover him with a second blanket. She removed the plastic sheeting James always had in his car to keep the boot clean and stuffed it into the Fiesta. She intended wrapping him in it before burying him. She checked over the Kia, wiped down everything she had touched when she brought him home from the cemetery, packed the shovel she had last used at the graveside, and then locked the car. It was now out of her hands.
She started the engine, and then sat for a minute while she watched for anyone moving curtains to see who was making the noise. All appeared normal and she put the car in drive and edged slowly out of the driveway. She drove down the road, not switching on her lights until she reached the crossroads, then turned right and headed for home.
It was nerve-wrackingly difficult driving down the tight alleyway leading to the unkempt grassed area around the back of the flat. She had to turn off her lights so that no one in the houses opposite would think it strange that a vehicle was travelling along a route not meant for cars, and she breathed a long sigh of relief when she reversed the little car as close to the spot where she intended digging as she could get it.
Heather sat for five minutes, calming her trembling hands and legs. Reaching into the back of the car, she grabbed hold of the shovel, and then opened the door. Heather chose not to close it; she needed no noise alerting anyone.
The grass sods were removed as solidly as she could keep them and stashed to one side. They had to go back on top of the disturbed earth, even though she knew it was highly unlikely anyone would ever see them.
The ground was solid, and it took her two hours to dig a hole big enough to take James. Her head was throbbing, and she hoped it was stress causing it, and not the head injury from earlier. She quietly laid out the plastic sheet and dragged James from the boot. His head cracked against the bumper and she flinched.
‘Silly bugger,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Don’t think he’d feel it.’
Rolling him in the plastic wasn’t easy, but finally she got him to the edge of the hole and tipped him over. She immediately went to work filling the hole with the mound of soil stashed by the side of it; after she had flattened it by walking up and down on it, she relaid the grass sods.
To her eyes it was obvious it was disturbed soil, that it was a body-sized area of disturbed soil; there was nothing she could do about that. She was exhausted. She hid the spade in the long grass, quietly closed the boot and started the engine, aware that Claudia was sleeping fifteen to twenty feet above her, fortunately with the help of a sleeping tablet.
Heather once more navigated the alleyway without lights, then drove the few yards necessary to get her to their garage.
The garage door screeched as she raised it, but she didn’t care. She was now officially just a neighbour arriving home and parking her car.
She returned the rear seats to their more normal position, gathered up the blankets, and locked the garage door behind her as she walked across the small road to her home.
The flat was in total darkness, and she headed for the kitchen. She put the two blankets in the washer and switched it on. It sounded extra loud in the quietness of the early hours, and she heard Claudia call her name.
Moving across to Claudia’s bedroom, she opened the door, just allowing her head to go around it. It wouldn’t be good for her friend to see her in jeans and a sweater at that time of night. ‘You okay, Claud?’
Claudia struggled to sit up, hampered by the dressing on her shoulder. ‘I’m okay. Thought I heard a noise.’
‘You did. I’ve just vomited on a couple of blankets. I was too hot with the duvet, so put blankets on last night, but I couldn’t get out of bed fast enough. Everything’s okay now, I’m back with the duvet and I’ve popped them in to wash. You want anything? I’m going to have a cup of tea.’
‘
Yes, please. I’ll have one as well. Sleeping tablets make you really dry.’
‘Okay, stay where you are, I’ll bring it in to you.’
She closed the door and ran to her own room. Her pyjamas were on inside thirty seconds, and she moved back to the kitchen.
Claudia had put on her lamp and picked up her book. ‘I’m a bit concerned that you’ve been sick,’ she said, as she looked up at Heather. ‘It’s a sign of concussion, and that’s a hefty whack you’ve taken to your head.’
‘Honestly, I’m fine. I feel much better now I’ve been sick.’ She handed the cup to Claudia, who smiled at her.
‘I don’t know how I would have managed without you, Heather. It’s a fact James wouldn’t have looked after me, he’d have had to check with his bosses first, to make sure it came under Labour party guidelines.’
Heather really did feel sick now. How could she explain to her best friend that she had just buried her husband twenty feet below them? She knew she wouldn’t even be able to mention James; sooner or later somebody would report him as a missing person, and the police would arrive to find out what Claudia knew about it. It had to be nothing.
‘You’ve got me, Claud,’ Heather eventually said. ‘I’m here for you until you’re able to manage on your own, and then I’ll still be here for you anyway.’
‘You’re a star, Heather, you really are.’ Claudia sipped at her drink. ‘And it’s not fair you having to look after me, you’re going through enough in your own life. I should be the one comforting you. I know I’ve left James, but I can’t begin to imagine how I would feel if he died.’
Pile on the guilt, why don’t you? Heather’s brain felt on fire. She needed to change the subject, she couldn’t handle talking about James, not now, not ever really.
She stood. ‘I feel better for having been sick, so I’m going back to bed now. And you need to sleep. I’m sorry I woke you.’
Claudia smiled at her. ‘Don’t worry about it. I sleep without even realising it at the moment. This has been like a midnight feast.’