In a Dark, Dark Wood

by Ruth Ware

  One more step. One more. I force myself on, round the bend – towards whatever has happened.

  But before I get there I hear a voice, a shaking female voice. She’s speaking into something – a phone? But as I get closer I see it’s a police radio.

  It’s Lamarr. She is standing by the open door of her police car. There is blood running down her face, black in the flashing blue lights of the emergency siren. She’s speaking into the radio.

  ‘Ground control, urgent message.’ Her voice is shaking, there’s a sob in it. ‘Request immediate assistance and an ambulance, to the B4146 just outside Stanebridge, over.’ She’s standing there listening to the crackling reply. ‘Roger,’ she says at last, and then ‘No, I’m not hurt. But the other driver – look, just send the ambulance. And a fire crew, with … with cutting equipment, over.’

  She sets the radio carefully down and then goes back to the other car.

  ‘Lamarr,’ I say, croakily, but she doesn’t hear. My limbs are so heavy I don’t think I can go another step. I hold myself up on a tree by the side of the road. ‘Lamarr …’ I manage, one more time, my voice a shaking thread against the hissing of the engine and the crackle of the radio. ‘Lamarr!’

  She turns and looks, and then at last I let my knees give way, and I kneel on the cold, snow-wet tarmac, and I don’t have to run any more.

  ‘Nora!’ I hear through the fog. ‘Nora! Christ, are you hurt? Are you hurt, Nora?’

  But I can’t find the words to reply. Lamarr is running towards me, and I feel her strong hands beneath my armpits as I collapse onto the road, holding me, lowering me slowly to the ground.

  It’s over. It’s all over.

  35

  ‘NORA.’ THE VOICE is gentle but insistent, tangling in my confused, restless sleep like a hook, dragging me back to reality. I know the voice. Who is it? Not Nina. It’s too low for Nina. ‘Nora,’ the voice says again.

  I open my eyes.

  It’s Lamarr. She is sitting on the chair at the edge of my bed, her dark eyes wide and bright, her shiny hair smoothed back from her sculpted forehead.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  I struggle up against the covers, and notice that she’s wearing a neck brace – incongruous against her silk tunic.

  ‘I came past yesterday,’ she says, ‘but they shooed me away.’

  ‘Are you in the hospital too?’ I croak. She passes me water, and I gulp it gratefully. She shakes her head, her heavy gold earrings swaying gently.

  ‘No. Walking wounded – I got sent home from Casualty yesterday morning. Good thing really, my kids hate me being away overnight. The littlest one is only four.’

  She has children? This information feels like a peace offering. Something in our relationship has changed.

  ‘Am I—’ I manage, and then swallow and start again. ‘Is it over?’

  ‘You’re OK,’ Lamarr says, ‘if that’s what you mean. And as for the case, we’re not looking for anyone other than Clare in connection with James’s death.’

  ‘How’s Flo?’

  I’m not sure if I imagine it, but it feels like a shadow flits across Lamarr’s face. I can’t put my finger on what changes, her expression is as smooth and calm as before, but there’s suddenly a presence in the little room, a dread.

  ‘She’s … holding on,’ Lamarr says at last.

  ‘Can I see her?’

  Lamarr shakes her head. ‘She’s … she’s with her family. The doctors aren’t permitting any visitors right now.’

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘Yesterday, yes.’

  ‘So she’s worse today?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Lamarr says, but her eyes are troubled. I know what she is not saying. I know what she’s skirting round. I remember Nina’s words about paracetamol overdoses, and I know that the destructive ripples from Clare’s actions have not yet stopped, even now.

  Of everything Clare did, I think that was the cruellest. What she did to James, what she tried to do to me, at least she had a reason. But Flo – Flo’s only crime was loving Clare.

  I don’t know when Flo began to realise the truth – when she started to put two and two together about the text Clare asked her to send from my phone when I arrived at the house. It was innocent enough: James, it’s me, Leo. Leo Shaw. I don’t know what Clare told her – something silly, I expect. A hen-night prank.

  The first inklings were probably when Nina spilled the beans about my past with James; perhaps she began to wonder why Clare, of all people, would want to stir things up again. Then when Lamarr started asking questions about phones … and texts … she must have realised that something was wrong.

  I don’t suppose she guessed the truth – or not at first. She tried to see Clare in the hospital, but they wouldn’t let her. Clare was too ill, and the police weren’t keen on the witnesses at the B&B visiting the hospital anyway; Nina said she’d had to fight like a tiger to see me, and then only after they’d gone over her statement a hundred times. And Clare at that stage was still feigning confusion and semi-consciousness, waiting to see what transpired with me and Lamarr, I suppose, before ‘waking up’.

  No. Flo stayed at the B&B, fretting, and wondering, and unable to ask Clare about what to say. She lied. She tripped herself up in her lies. She wondered what she’d done, what she’d set in motion. She started to doubt Clare’s motives. She got desperate.

  ‘Do you know?’ I ask, swallowing hard, trying to push away the thoughts of Flo lying somewhere up the corridor, struggling for life. ‘Do you know what happened? Did Clare tell you?’

  ‘Clare’s too ill to answer questions,’ Lamarr says grimly. ‘At least that’s what her lawyer says. But we’ve got enough to piece the case together. Between what you told us, the tox report on the drugs Clare gave you and, most importantly, Flo’s statement, we’ve got enough. She never did phone the ambulance, you know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘From the house. When James died. There was no record of her ever trying 999. That should have tipped us off, but we were too busy looking elsewhere.’ She sighs. ‘We’ll need to take a formal statement of course, when you’re well enough. But we can worry about that another day.’

  ‘I thought it was Flo,’ I say at last. ‘When I found Clare’s jacket, with the shell in it. I thought it was Flo’s jacket. I thought she’d changed the shells. I just couldn’t work out why Clare would do such a thing – she finally had what she wanted, the perfect life, the perfect fiancé. Why would she throw that all away? It was only when I thought about the text, really thought about it, I realised: James never called me Lee. She didn’t make that mistake twice. But I should have realised.’

  ‘She did it before, you know,’ Lamarr says. Her rich voice is like a soft, warm blanket around the coldness of her words. ‘Or a variant. It took us a while to dig it up, but there was a professor at her university. He was sacked for sending inappropriate emails to undergraduates, implying that they would get better grades if they slept with him and that there might be penalties if they told anyone. He denied it throughout, but there was no doubt that the students did receive the emails, and when his machine was raided, they were there in the deleted folder, all of them, although he’d made a clumsy attempt to destroy them.

  ‘It seems pretty clear now that Clare was involved, although at the time no one ever suspected her. She wasn’t one of the students he was emailing. But a few weeks before he had raised concerns with her that one of her papers was plagiarised, threatened to take it further. Of course in the ensuing furore the accusation was forgotten – but one of his colleagues remembered him discussing it. She said she’d always wondered …’

  I shut my eyes, feeling a single tear trace down the line of my nose. I don’t know why I’m crying. It’s not relief. I don’t think it’s even grief for James any more. Maybe it’s just fury and frustration at the waste of it all, anger at myself for not realising sooner, for being so stupid.

  And yet, w
hat then? If I had noticed? Would it have been me, lying with my guts splattered across the blond wood and the frosted glass?

  ‘I’ll leave you,’ Lamarr says softly, and she gets up, the plastic leather of the chair creaking. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow with a colleague. We’ll take your formal statement, if you’re up to it.’

  I don’t speak, I only nod, with my eyes still tight shut.

  After she’s gone there is silence, broken only by a soap theme tune filtering through the wall. I sit and listen to it, and to the breaths I draw in and out of my nose.

  And then, into the middle of the calm, there’s a knock at the door.

  I open my eyes at once, assuming it’s Lamarr come back, but it’s not. There’s a man outside. For a second my heart flip-flops, and then I realise it’s Tom.

  ‘Knock-knock,’ he says, putting his head around the door.

  ‘Come in,’ I say. My voice is croaky.

  He shuffles inside. His expression is diffident, unsure of his welcome. He looks pale, and far from the groomed urbanisto I’d met just a few days before. His checked shirt is crumpled and has some kind of stain on it. But I can tell from his expression that I must look even worse myself. The black eyes are fading to yellow and brown, but they’re still shocking if you haven’t seen them.

  ‘Hi, Tom,’ I say. I pull the hospital gown up, where it’s slipped down my shoulder and he smiles, the stiff, frozen smile of someone whose social graces have temporarily deserted them.

  ‘Look, I have to get this off my chest,’ he blurts at last. ‘I thought it was you. I mean there was all that stuff about your past with James, and then when the police started on about your phone and the texts, I just assumed …’ He trails off. ‘I’m … I’m very sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say. I gesture to the chair beside the bed. ‘Look, sit down. Don’t worry about it. The police thought it was me too, and they weren’t even there.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he repeats, with a crack in his voice, as he sits awkwardly, hugging his knees. ‘I just … I never thought …’ He stops, and then sighs. ‘Do you know, Bruce never liked her. He loved James. I mean, really loved him, even though they had their ups and downs. But he never had much time for Clare. When I rang him last night and told him everything that’s happened he said, “I’m shocked, but I’m not surprised. She never stopped acting, that girl.”’

  We sit in silence for a while as I ponder Bruce’s words, the judgement of a man I’ve never met on one of my oldest friends. And I realise he’s right. Clare never stopped acting. Even as a small child she was acting a part, the part of a good friend, the part of the perfect student, the ideal daughter, the glamorous girlfriend. And I realise, suddenly, that perhaps that’s why I found it so hard to reconcile the Clare I knew with these other people. Because she was a different person to each of us. What will happen to her, I wonder? Will a jury convict anyone so charming, so kind, so very, very beautiful?

  ‘I wonder …’ I say – and then stop.

  ‘What?’ Tom asks.

  ‘I keep thinking, what if I hadn’t said yes? To the hen night, I mean. I so nearly didn’t come.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tom says slowly. ‘Nina and I were talking about the same thing last night. The way I see it, you weren’t the point of all this. The point was James. You were just the icing on the cake.’

  ‘So you mean …’ I’m silent, working it out, and he nods.

  ‘I think if you hadn’t been there, it would have been one of us instead.’

  ‘It would have been Flo,’ I say sadly. ‘She sent the text, after all.’

  Tom nods. ‘It wouldn’t have been hard for Clare to twist the truth a bit, start saying she was afraid of Flo, that Flo was jealous of James, acting irrationally. The worst thing is, we’d probably have backed her up.’

  ‘Have you seen Flo?’ I ask.

  ‘I tried,’ he says. ‘They aren’t letting anyone in. I think … I’m not sure …’

  He trails off. We both know what he’s not saying.

  ‘I’m going back to London tonight,’ he says at last. ‘But it would be great to keep in touch.’ He fishes in his wallet and pulls out a thick, glossy card, embossed with Tom Deauxma and his mobile and email.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I don’t have a card, but if you’ve got a pen …’

  He holds out his phone and I type my email address into it and watch while he sends me a blank email.

  ‘There,’ he says at last, standing up. ‘Well, I’d better get on the road. Take care of yourself, Shaw.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘How are you getting back to London?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I do,’ says a voice from the door. I turn and there is Nina, lounging in the door frame, an unlit cigarette between her lips. She speaks around it, like a dime-store detective. ‘She’s coming with me.’

  36

  HOME. SUCH A small word, and yet, when I close the door of my tiny flat behind me and lock the door, I feel a spreading flood of relief that seems too huge to be encompassed by those four letters.

  I am home. I am home.

  Jess drove us back. She came all the way up from London to pick up me and Nina, and take us home. When they got to my road they offered to come in, help me carry my case up the three flights of stairs, but I said no.

  ‘I’m looking forward to being alone,’ I said, and it was true. And I knew that they were looking forward to being alone too – alone together. I’d seen the quiet affectionate gestures on the long drive, Nina’s hand resting in Jess’s lap, Jess rubbing Nina’s knee as she changed gear. But I didn’t feel excluded – it wasn’t that.

  I just never knew how much I loved my own space until now.

  Flo died a few hours after I saw Tom – three days after she’d taken the overdose. Nina was right about that. And right, too, that she’d changed her mind by the end. I never saw her, but Nina visited her, and listened while she cried, and talked, and planned for the future and what she’d do when she left hospital. Her parents were with her when she died. I don’t know if it was peaceful – Nina wouldn’t tell me, which makes me think not.

  I sigh and let my case fall to the floor. I am tired, and parched, and stiff from the long drive.

  I open up the coffee maker, pour in the water, and fold the filter paper just so. Then I open up my glass coffee jar and sniff the grounds. They’re a week old, but still fresh enough to make the inside of my nose sing.

  The sound the machine makes as it percolates is the sound of home, and the scent of the steaming grounds is the smell of home, and then at last I curl my battered body on the bed, my still-packed case on the rug, and I take a long, slow sip. The winter sun is filtering through the rattan blinds, and the traffic below makes a soft roar, too far away to disturb, more like the sound of the sea on a shore.

  I think of that glass house, far away, in the stillness of the forest, with the birds swooping past and the woodland animals padding quietly through the garden. I think of its blank glass walls, reflecting the dark shapes of the trees, and the moonlight filtering through.

  Flo’s aunt is selling, apparently. Flo’s parents told Nina. Too much blood spilt, too many memories. And she said she was planning to burn the planchette, when the police released it.

  That’s the one part I don’t understand. The seance.

  Everything else was necessary. Everything else was part of the plan. But the ouija board, and that creepy, creepy message?

  I can still see it now, looping and scrolling across the page.

  M m mmmmuurderrrrrrrrrrrrrer

  Lamarr thought it was deliberate, all part of the plan to unnerve everyone, get them sufficiently on edge so that when the back door swung open, we’d be more inclined to panic, and react to a suggestion to get out the gun.

  But I’m not so sure. I think again about what Tom said, about the messages that float up from the subconscious … was it Clare’s unwilling hand, spelling out what she was so des
perately trying to suppress?

  I shut my eyes, trying to block the memory of that night. But there is no way of shutting it out completely. Flo is gone, but the rest of us, Tom, Nina and I, we’ll have to live with what happened, with what Clare did, with what we all did, for the rest of our lives.

  My case is on the floor, and I open it up and pull out my laptop. The police still have my phone, but at least I can check my emails. It’s more than a week since I left London, and as I fire it up, a message flickers: ‘Downloading 1 of 187 emails’.

  I sit and watch as they drop, one by one, into my inbox.

  There’s an email from my editor. And another. Two from my agent. One from my mum, headed ‘R U OK?’ Then, last of all, come the emails from my website address: ‘Hot Thai Babes’ … ‘One weird tip to melt belly fat!’ … ‘You have three comments waiting for approval.’

  And in amongst the spam … ‘From: Matt Ridout. Subject: Coffee’

  I feel in my pocket for the curling piece of cardboard, torn off a paper cup. It’s nearly unreadable now, his number. The biro is blurring into nothing, and there’s a crease across the middle two digits, but I think I can make out that they’re both sevens, or possibly ones.

  I was going to let fate decide. If I got my phone back from the police before the number disappeared …

  And now this.

  I remember the way he buried his face in his hands as he cried over James.

  I remember his smile.

  I remember the expression in his eyes as he said goodbye.

  I’m not sure I can do this. I’m not sure I can let go of everything that happened, start again. For a minute my finger hovers irrationally over the delete button.

  And then I click.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First I have to thank my dear friends at Vintage for cheering me on every step of the way (and tactfully not asking me how it was going too often). It would take a phone book to do justice to everyone who deserves it, but particular thanks must go to everyone at Harvill, including Alison Hennessey my brilliant editor (and, indeed, Queen of Crime) who first said the words ‘hen party’ to me and set everything else in motion, to Liz, Michal and Rowena in editorial, Bethan and Fiona in publicity, Jane, Monique, Sam and Penny in rights, everyone in sales (too numerous to mention but I love you all!), Simon in production, the fantastic design team particularly Rachael, Vicki and the rest of the brilliant marketing team.