How to Disappear
Page 35
It must be their hire car, a Land Rover none of them likes driving. ‘It feels like a fucking bus,’ Joe had said on the first day.
She breaks into a proper run down the road. Right and then left, just like Frannie said.
Cathy’s pace slows when she sees the silhouettes. She would know them anywhere: her siblings. Joe, standing by the Land Rover, his hands on his hips. And Frannie, kneeling down, her hair and long limbs illuminated by the headlights. She is so beautiful, has always been so. A wide nose. Cat eyes. A mane of dark, shiny hair.
Why is she on the floor? Cathy stares, then takes a breath, just one. She breathes it out as slowly as she can. This is … she stares at the shadows and the lights. Something has happened. A sweep of fear covers her shoulders. She starts to go cold. It’s not from fear exactly. It’s from knowledge. Knowing that – if she walks forwards – something is going to happen. A light breeze flutters Cathy’s hair across her face. She tucks it behind her ears, breathes again, and walks forward.
Joe has evidently just arrived too, from his villa, and he walks across the lights, in and out of shadow, like a flickering bulb. Cathy wraps her arms around her middle. The bad feeling settles over her, like she is being watched, as she stares at them, as yet unseen.
She turns the torch from her phone on and shines it along the pale, dusty ground in front of her. Around her are the smells of Verona: dry heat, parched grass. It’s been the hottest July on record. Cathy’s family have had to buy after-sun most days. They’ve been through bottles and bottles of it. All of her clothes are oily at their hems. She can hear only the car’s engine and the crickets. Otherwise, silence.
Cathy moves towards them and sweeps the torch slowly towards where Frannie is kneeling. And that’s when she sees it.
Frannie is leaning over something. Cathy stops walking, but can’t stop staring at Frannie. She has something – a T-shirt? – in her hands. As Frannie stands up, Cathy realizes Frannie’s taken her own top off, that she’s in just her bra.
She is in the dead centre of the two pools of headlights, lit up like an actor on a stage. In the glare of the lights, it’s clear that her hands are bloodied. She lifts them up. Red drips run down her wrists. Her stomach is streaked with the blood. It’s dried, burgundy, the colour of red wine. She is a terrible tableau. Nausea rises up through Cathy. ‘Fucking hell,’ she whispers to nobody.
Joe is leaning over her now. Frannie extends her hands to Cathy and shouts: ‘Help me.’ A single plea that sets something off in Cathy. Something deep, familial, something protective rises up through her. It brings back when Frannie fell off a swing on to her back when she was three, when she choked on a sweet and Cathy thumped her hard between her shoulder blades and she coughed it right up. The first time Frannie went out as a teenager and Cathy waited up for her even though their mother had gone to bed. She still remembers it now: the ticking of the grandfather clock in their hallway, the hum of the fridge. And the relief as Frannie’s key turned in the lock. And, of course, it reminds her of Rosie.
Cathy runs to Frannie. The headlights are a Venn diagram of light, a portrait of her sister, and a body lying at her feet.
Joe
What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, Joe is thinking as he arrives in front of the car and stares at his sister. She is kneeling on the ground. He can see each individual knot of her spine, illuminated in the headlights in alternating patterns of shade and light. She’s too skinny. Always has been.
‘What …’ he says, but his sentence ends there, like a match that fails to strike. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. A body. ‘What the fuck!’ he whispers. ‘What the fuck!’
‘Help me!’ Frannie shouts over her shoulder to him. In the distance, he can see the pinprick of Cathy’s torch. Thank God, he thinks. She’ll know what to do.
‘I hit him,’ Frannie screams to both of them. ‘I hit him with the car.’ Cathy’s torch beam wavers as she runs towards them, leaving tracks in the night air like a sparkler. ‘It’s the man from the market.’
‘What?’ Joe says. He can’t stop looking at the man lying underneath her. He’s totally wrong looking. His skin both bloodied and waxy.
Frannie shouted at this man earlier today. He lit a cigarette up in the market and blew smoke all over her baby, Paul, who she was holding on her hip. Joe and Cathy had intervened, talked her down, but an Italian carabinieri – policeman – had seen and moved them on. His gaze was judgemental and unforgiving, a hand passing subtly over some weapon attached to his belt. ‘Let’s not cause trouble here, on this nice day,’ he had said, looking at Frannie.
Joe approaches Frannie, even though he doesn’t want to. Her face is blood-stained, streaked with tears and snot, too. He wants to turn away from it, run back to his villa, and to Lydia. Away from this – this grotesque mess.
It feels like he’s walking through water that won’t part in front of him. He tries to step forward, but he can’t. He forces himself to look at the person lying on the ground. Tall, slim – his hip bones are visible. Frannie’s lifted his shirt up. His torso is bleeding. His glasses are cracked.
He’s very obviously dead.
Their family are almost all vets, including Joe and Cathy, and death is obvious to vets. It’s the blood. It’s the quantity of the blood. Pints and pints of it. He gets his phone out as Cathy has and shines his torch across the road. The blood shimmers back, like petrol. There’s so much blood. Joe tries not to gag. It smells fetid, both metallic and rotten, like just-turning food.
He turns to look at his sister, in a begging position on the road. Her nose ring shines in the light from his torch. ‘What the fuck’s gone on?’ he says.
‘I hit him – I hit him.’
‘I can’t – how?’
‘Please help me,’ she says, gesturing frantically to the body.
Joe kneels down next to it. Cathy joins him, but she’s just looking, silently. He wishes he had her cool head. He and Cathy recently operated together on a Labrador and she spent at least a minute, after they’d opened him up, just looking. Not rushing. Just gathering information, in that way that Cathy does.
‘Frannie,’ he says, the words forming and exploding out of him like a cough.
‘I hit him on his side,’ she says, gesturing. ‘It was my fault. It was my fault. It’s the man from the market.’
‘Shit,’ Joe says. ‘Shit.’
‘Please help me,’ Frannie says. ‘Please help – if we try to stem the bleeding, we … we just need to stop the bleeding, then he’ll be okay, he’ll be okay.’
Joe glances sharply at Cathy. She’s the smartest of all of them, and he can see that she knows exactly what he knows.
‘Hold your T-shirt to the wound,’ Cathy says. ‘Tight as you can.’ Her face is inscrutable. ‘You’ve called someone?’ Her voice is clipped but as she raises her phone to gesture, Joe sees the beam of her torch zig-zag across the body, leaving a shaky trail of light which fades to blackness after a second or two. Straggly-lined evidence of her panic.
Cathy moves towards the body. Her long, thick hair is piled on the top of her head. She is a less beautiful version of Frannie. Thicker set. Features slightly distorted somehow, or perhaps they only look so compared to Frannie’s.
Cathy peers at the body. Joe can only just make out her face beyond the light of her torch. ‘That’s a lacerating wound,’ she says. ‘He’s bleeding a lot for something like that.’ She reaches to take his pulse.
‘He’ll be okay, won’t he?’ Frannie says.
‘How fast were you going?’ Joe says. He thinks he’s going to be sick. Sweat has broken out across his forehead and his stomach is rolling over and over like a rough ocean. He’s fine with blood usually. But this is – it’s panic. His sister has hit somebody and there’s blood everywhere. And now – now it’s his problem too. He’s got to fix it for her. His sister who wasn’t always the youngest sibling, but is now.
‘Barely,’ Frannie says, but Joe’s forgotten what he asked.<
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‘Have you called an ambulance?’ Cathy says to Frannie, kneeling over the body.
‘Has he got a pulse?’ Frannie asks.
‘How have you not taken a pulse?’ Joe says. He leans over, his hands on his thighs, breathing heavily. Stomach acid sloshes up his oesophagus. Get it together, he tells himself.
Cathy is starting CPR, though she must surely know it to be pointless. He takes the heart while she straightens the head. They’ve done it a thousand times before on animals. The body is cool beneath his fingertips. He darts a look at Cathy, who doesn’t meet his gaze. He stares back down at it in the gloom. A man, his jeans and T-shirt dirty, blood circling beneath him. Four cuts on his arms, one oozing a small amount of blood. A bump already appearing on his forehead.
What are they going to do? She’ll go to prison. Joe’s stomach lurches at the thought of it.
His mind turns immediately to Frannie’s son, Paul. Twelve months old, and he looks just like Joe. They laugh about it, compared baby photos of the two of them. The same heavy brow, dark features. Paul has the beginnings of Joe’s Roman nose. Paul, innocent Paul, who loves cheese sandwiches, party rings, and his mother. What the fuck are they going to do?
The ground blurs beneath Joe. He’s going to faint. A few minutes ago, he was sleeping off another day of sun. And now this. A body. No pulse. His culpable sister. He pumps at the man’s chest, his fingers just a few inches from this stranger’s heart.
‘What happened?’ Cathy says, checking and opening the man’s airway, a quick finger swabbing around his mouth.
‘I was on the wrong side of the road,’ Frannie says. She drops her head towards the body like a condemned woman. Joe stares at her, aghast. Cathy closes her eyes.
‘Shit,’ Joe says softly. He looks at Frannie. Then at the body.
He knows the man is dead. But what he hasn’t quite wrapped his head around is that that means his sister is a killer.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published 2020
Copyright © Gillian McAllister, 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover photo © Evelina Petkova/Arcangel
ISBN: 978-1-405-94243-0
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