by Ruth Ware
A knock at the door broke into the hush, making all us jump, and all our heads turned, as the door opened and Miss Rourke came into the room, a box in her hands.
She nodded at Miss Weatherby, and then tipped the contents onto the table in front of us, and it was then that Thea broke her silence, her voice high with fury.
‘You searched our rooms! You bitches.’
‘Thea!’ Miss Weatherby thundered. But it was too late. All the pathetic contraband – Thea’s hip flask, my cigarettes and lighter and Kate’s wrap of weed, the half-bottle of whiskey Fatima had kept under her mattress, a packet of condoms, the copy of The Story of O and the rest of it – they all lay spilled over the desk, accusing us.
‘I have no choice,’ Miss Weatherby said heavily. ‘I will be taking this to Miss Armitage. And given a large proportion of this was found in her locker, where is Kate Atagon?’
Silence.
‘Where is Kate Atagon?’ Miss Weatherby shouted, so that I blinked, and felt tears start.
‘We have no idea,’ Thea said contemptuously, turning her eyes from the window to rest on Miss Weatherby. ‘And the fact that you don’t either says volumes about this school, don’t you think?’
There was a long pause.
‘Get out,’ Miss Weatherby said at last, the words hissing between her teeth. ‘Get out. You will go to your rooms and stay there until I send for you. Lunch will be sent up. You will not speak to the other girls and I will be telephoning your parents.’
‘But –’ Fatima said, her voice quavering.
‘That’s enough!’ Miss Weatherby shouted, and suddenly I could see that she was almost as distraught as we were. This had happened on her watch, whatever it was, and it would be her neck on the block as much as ours. ‘You’ve had your chance to speak, and since you didn’t want to answer my questions, I’m certainly not going to listen to your objections. Go to your rooms, and think about your behaviour and what you’re planning to say to Miss Armitage, and to your parents when she sends for them, as I have no doubt she will.’
She stood at the door, held it wide, and her hand on the door handle trembled, ever so slightly, as we traipsed out, one after the other, still in silence, and then looked at each other.
What had just happened? How had those drawings got into the hands of the school? And what had we done?
We didn’t know, but one thing was clear. Whatever it was, our world was about to come crashing down, and it had taken Ambrose with it.
IT IS LATE. The curtains, what curtains the Mill possesses, anyway, are drawn. Liz went home hours ago, picked up by her dad, and after she left Kate bolted the door of the Mill for the first time I could remember, and I told them about the conversation with Jess Hamilton.
‘How do they know?’ Fatima asks desperately. We are huddled together on the sofa, Freya in my arms. Thea is smoking cigarette after cigarette, lighting one from the butt of the other, breathing the smoke out across us all, but I can’t bring myself to tell her to stop.
‘The usual way, I’d imagine,’ she says shortly. Her feet, curled next to my hip, feel cold as ice.
‘But,’ Fatima persists, ‘I thought the whole point of us agreeing to leave mid-term was so that it wouldn’t get out. Wasn’t that the point?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kate says wearily. ‘But you know what the school gossip circuit is like – perhaps an old teacher told an old girl … or one of the parents found out.’
‘What happened to the drawings?’ Thea asks.
‘The ones the school found? I’m pretty sure they were destroyed. I can’t imagine Miss Armitage wanted them found any more than we did.’
‘And the others?’ I ask. ‘The ones Ambrose had here?’
‘I burnt them.’ Kate says it with finality, but there’s something about her eyes, the way her gaze flickers when she says it, I’m not absolutely certain she’s telling the truth.
It was Kate who salvaged the situation – as far as it could be salvaged – back at school. When she turned up on Sunday afternoon, pale but composed, Miss Weatherby was waiting, and Kate was marched straight into the headmistress’s study, and didn’t come out for a long time.
When she emerged, we flocked around her, our questions beating at her like wings, but she only shook her head, and nodded towards the tower. Wait, her nod said. Wait until we’re alone.
And then, at last, when we finally were alone, she told us, while she packed her trunk for the last time.
She had said that the drawings were hers.
I have no idea, even today, whether Miss Armitage believed her, or whether she decided, in the absence of concrete proof to the contrary, to accept a fiction that would create the least fallout. They were Ambrose’s sketches, anyone with an eye for art could have told that. Kate’s style – her natural style at any rate – was completely different – loose, fluid, with none of Ambrose’s fineness of detail.
But when she wanted, Kate could imitate her father’s style to perfection, and perhaps she showed them something that convinced them – made a facsimile of a sketch in the office, maybe. I don’t know. I never asked. They believed her, or said they did, and that was enough.
We had to go – there was no question of that. The breaking out of bounds, the alcohol and cigarettes in our room, all of that was explosive enough – grounds for expulsion, certainly. But the pictures, even with Kate’s confession, the pictures added a dose of nuclear uncertainty to the whole thing.
At last, the unspoken pact was arrived at. Go silently, without expulsion, was the message, and pretend the whole affair never happened. For all our sakes.
And we did.
We had finished our exams, and it was only a few weeks until the summer vac started, but Miss Armitage wouldn’t wait for that. It was all over astonishingly fast – within twenty-four hours, before the end of the weekend, we were gone, all of us, first Kate, packing her belongings into a taxi with white-faced stoicism, then Fatima, pale and tearful in the back of her aunt and uncle’s car. Then Thea’s father, excruciatingly loud and jovial, and finally mine, sad and drawn beyond all recognition almost.
He said nothing. But his silence, on the long, long drive back to London was almost the hardest to bear.
We were scattered, like birds – Fatima got her wish, at last, and went out to Pakistan where her parents were finishing up their placement. Thea was sent to Switzerland, to an establishment halfway between a finishing school and a remand home, a place with high walls and bars on the windows and a policy against ‘personal technology’ of any kind. I was packed off to Scotland, to a boarding school so remote it had once had its own railway station, before Beeching closed it down.
Only Kate stayed in Salten, and now, it seems to me, her home was as much a prison as Thea’s finishing school, except that the bars on the window were of our own making.
We wrote, weekly in my case, but she answered only sporadic-ally, short, weary notes that spoke of an endless struggle to make ends meet, and of her loneliness without us. She sold her father’s paintings, and when she ran out she began to forge them. I saw a print in a gallery in London that I know for a fact was not one of Ambrose’s.
All I knew of Luc was that he had gone back to France – and that Kate lived alone, counting down the weeks until she turned sixteen, fending off the endless questions about where her father had gone, what he had done, and realising that slowly, slowly his very absence was turning the vague suspicions of wrongdoing into hardened certainty of his guilt.
We wrote, on her sixteenth birthday, each of us, sending our love, and this time at least she wrote back.
‘I am sixteen,’ she wrote in her letter to me. ‘And you know what I thought, when I woke up this morning? It wasn’t presents, or cards, because I didn’t have any of those. It was that I can finally tell the police he’s gone.’
WE MET UP only once more, all of us, and it was at my mother’s funeral, a grey spring day in the year I turned eighteen.
I was not expect
ing them. I hoped – I couldn’t deny that. I had emailed and told them all what had happened, and the date and time of the funeral, but without any kind of explanation. But when I turned up at the crematorium in the car with my father and brother, they were there, a huddle of black in the rain, by the gate. They lifted their heads as the car made its slow way up the crematorium drive, following the hearse, such sympathy in their eyes that I felt my heart crack a little, and suddenly I found my fingers numbly scrabbling for the door handle, heard the crunch of tyres on gravel as the driver stamped hurriedly on the brake, and I stumbled from the car.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I heard the driver saying, ‘I would have stopped – I had no idea she –’
‘Don’t worry.’ My father’s voice was weary. ‘Keep going. She’ll make her own way up.’
And the car engine roared into life again, and disappeared up the drive into the rain.
I can’t remember what they said, I only remember the feel of their arms around me, the cool of the rain, dripping down my face, hiding the tears. And the feeling that I was with the only people who could fill the gaping hole that had opened up inside me, that I was home.
It was the last time the four of us would be together for fifteen years.
‘DOES HE KNOW?’ Thea’s voice, croaky with smoke, at last breaks through the silence of the room where we have been sitting, and thinking as the candles burnt low in their sockets and the tide outside swelled to its height and then slowly retreated.
Kate’s head turns, from where she has been staring out at the quiet black waters of the Reach.
‘Does who know what?’
‘Luc. I mean, he clearly knows something, but how much? Did you tell him what happened that night, what we did?’
Kate gives a sigh, and stubs out her cigarette in a saucer. Then she shakes her head.
‘No, I didn’t tell him. I never told anyone, you know that. What we – what we –’
She stops, unable to finish.
‘What we did? Why not say it?’ Thea says, her voice rising. ‘We concealed a body.’
It’s a shock, hearing the words so baldly spoken, and I realise that we have been skirting round the truth of what we did for so long that hearing it aloud is like a kind of reality check.
For that is what we did. We did conceal a body, although that’s not how the courts would phrase it. Preventing the lawful and decent burial of a body would likely be the offence. I know the wording, and the penalties. I have looked it up enough times under cover of checking something else, my fingers shaking every time I read and reread the words. Possibly also disposing of a body with the intent to prevent a coroner’s inquest, although that made me give a little, bitter laugh the first time I came across the phrase in the law journals. God knows, there was no thought in our head of a coroner’s inquest. I’m not sure I even knew what a coroner was.
Was that part of the reason I went into law, this desire to be armed with the knowledge of what I had done, and the penalties for it?
‘Does he know?’ Thea says again, banging her fist on the table with each word in a way that makes me wince.
‘He doesn’t know, but he suspects,’ Kate says heavily. ‘He’s known something was wrong for ages, but with the newspaper reports … And on some level he blames me – us – for what happened to him in France. Even though it’s completely irrational.’
Is it? Is it really so irrational? All Luc knows is that his beloved adoptive father disappeared, that a body has surfaced in the Reach, and that we have something to do with it. His anger seems very, very rational to me.
But then I look down at Freya, at the cherubic peacefulness of her expression, and I think again of her red-faced fear and fury as Luc held her out to me. Was that really the act of a rational person, to snatch my child, drag her screaming across the marshes?
Christ, I don’t know, I don’t know any more. I have lost sight a long time ago of what rationality was. Perhaps I lost it that night, in the Mill, with Ambrose’s body.
‘Will he tell anyone?’ I manage. The words stick in my throat. ‘He threatened … he said about calling the police …?’
Kate sighs. Her face in the lamplight looks gaunt and shadowed.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t think so. I think if he were going to do anything, he would have done it already.’
‘But the sheep?’ I say. ‘The note? Was that him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kate repeats. Her voice is level, but her tone is brittle, as if she might break beneath the strain one day. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been getting things like that for –’ She swallows. ‘For a while.’
‘Are we talking weeks? Months?’ Fatima says. Kate’s lips tighten, her sensitive mouth betraying her before she answers.
‘Months, yes. Even … years.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Thea shuts her eyes, passes a hand over her face. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
‘What would be the point? So you could be as scared as me? You did this for me, it’s my burden.’
‘How did you cope, Kate?’ Fatima says softly. She picks up Kate’s thin, paint-spattered hand, holding it between hers, the jewels on her wedding and engagement rings flashing in the candlelight. ‘After we left I mean. You were here, all alone, how did you manage?’
‘You know how I managed,’ Kate says, but I see the muscles of her jaw clench and relax as she swallows. ‘I sold Dad’s paintings, and then when I ran out I painted more under his name. Luc could add forgery to the list of things he thinks I’ve done, if he really wanted.’
‘That’s not what I meant. I meant how did you not go mad, living alone like this, no one to talk to? Weren’t you scared?’
‘I wasn’t scared …’ Kate says, her voice very low. ‘I was never scared, but the rest … I don’t know. Perhaps I was mad. Perhaps I still am.’
‘We were mad,’ I say abruptly, and their heads turn. ‘All of us. What we did – what we did –’
‘We had no choice,’ Thea says. Her face is tight, the skin drawn over her cheekbones.
‘Of course we had a choice!’ I cry. And suddenly the reality of it hits me afresh, and I feel the panic boiling up inside me, the way it does sometimes when I wake in the middle of the night from a dream of wet sand and shovels, or when I come across a headline of someone charged with concealing a death and the shock makes my hands go weak for a moment. ‘Christ, don’t you understand? If this comes out – I’ll be struck off. It’s an indictable offence, you can’t practise law with something like this on your record. So will Fatima – you think people want a doctor who’s concealed a death? We are all completely screwed. We could go to prison. I could lose –’ My throat is closing, choking me, as if someone has their hands around my windpipe. ‘I could lose F-Fre—’
I can’t finish, I can’t say it.
I stand up, pace to the window, still holding my baby, as if the strength of my grip could stop the police forcing their way in and snatching her from my arms.
‘Isa, calm down,’ Fatima says. She rises from the sofa to come over to where I’m standing, but her face doesn’t comfort me, there is fear in her eyes as she says, ‘We were minors. That has to make a difference, right? You’re the lawyer.’
‘I don’t know.’ I feel my fingers tightening on Freya. ‘The age of criminal responsibility is ten. We were well over that.’
‘What about the statute of limitations, then?’
‘It’s mainly for civil matters. I don’t think it would apply.’
‘You think? But you don’t know?’
‘No, I don’t know,’ I say again, desperately. ‘I work in the Civil Service, Fatima. There’s not much call for this kind of thing.’ Freya gives a sleepy little wail, and I realise I am hurting her and force myself to loosen my grip.
‘Does it matter?’ Thea says from across the room. She has been picking at the dead skin around her nails, and they are raw and bleeding, and I watch as she puts one finger in her mouth, sucking the blood. ‘
I mean, if it comes out, we’re fucked, right? It doesn’t matter about charges. It’s the rumours and the publicity that’ll screw us. The tabloids would fucking love something like this.’
‘Shit.’ Fatima puts her hands over her face. Then she looks up, at the clock, and her face changes. ‘It’s 2 a.m.? How can it be two? I have to go up.’
‘Are you going in the morning?’ Kate asks. Fatima nods.
‘I have to. I have to get back for work.’
Work. It seems impossible, and I find myself giving a bubbling, hysterical laugh. And Owen. I can’t even picture his face, somehow. He has no connection to this world, to what we’ve done. How can I go back and face him? I can’t even bring myself to text him right now.
‘Of course you should go,’ Kate says. She smiles, or tries to. ‘It’s been lovely having you here, but anyway, regardless of anything else, the dinner’s over. It will look more … more natural. And yes, we should all get some sleep.’
She stands, and as Fatima makes her way up the creaking stairs, Kate begins to blow out the candles, put out the lamps.
I stand in between the windows, watching her gather up glasses, holding Freya.
I can’t imagine sleeping, but I will have to, to cope with Freya and the journey back tomorrow.
‘Goodnight,’ Thea says. She stands too, and I see her tuck a bottle beneath her arm, quite casually, as if taking a demijohn of wine to bed were the normal thing to do.
‘Goodnight,’ Kate says. She blows out the last candle, and we are in darkness.
I put Freya, still heavy with sleep, in the middle of the big double bed – Luc’s bed – and then I make my way to the empty bathroom and brush my teeth, wearily, feeling the bitter fur of too much wine coating my tongue.
As I wipe off the mascara and the eyeliner in the mirror, I see the way the fine skin around my eyes stretches beneath the cotton-wool pad, its elasticity slowly giving way. Whatever I thought, whatever I felt tonight, walking through the doors of my old school, I am not the girl I once was, and nor are Kate, Fatima and Thea. We are almost two decades older, all of us, and we have carried the weight of what we did for too long.