by Alison James
‘Fine. They’re with a friend of mine. I’ll go back for them later.’
Adele glances out of the window. It’s seven thirty, and just starting to go dark. ‘Reckon it’s safe to move him now?’
‘Let’s give it ten more minutes…’ A thought occurs to Lucy. ‘While we’ve got a bit of time to kill…’ She winces at the unfortunate choice of word, ‘… I could pop over to the hospital quickly and see my dad. He’s just been admitted.’
‘No way!’ Adele sucks on her cigarette and taps the ash into the sink. ‘You’re not leaving me alone here with that again. My nerves can’t take it.’ She extends her hand, palm facing down, to demonstrate the shaking. ‘Anyway, I’ve just thought of something else.’
‘What?’ Lucy eyes her over her lager can.
‘Well, there’s a sensor that switches on the lights in the fire exit stairwell automatically once it’s got fully dark. And they’re really effing bright, you know? We can’t exactly take him down in the lift, can we?’
‘No,’ Lucy agrees.
‘So we’re stuck with using the stairs, and it’ll be a lot less risky before the lights come on. In terms of someone spotting us. So we should do it now, before it’s fully dark out.’
‘Okay…’ Lucy exhales hard and tips the remains of the beer down the sink. ‘In that case, let’s get it over with. But I’m going to stop off and see my dad quickly on the way.’
‘You’re crazy. It’s too risky.’
‘Just for five minutes. Anyway, hospital visiting is a normal activity. The more normally we behave, the better it’ll be. If I’m picked up on CCTV in the hospital, so much the better.’
‘Like an alibi, you mean?’
‘Yes, exactly.’ Lucy wipes her damp palms on her blood-stained jeans. ‘Shall we?’
Moving Jason’s body down from the second floor is more difficult than either of them had anticipated, but they’re forced to move as quickly as they can to avoid discovery. The stairwell is narrow, with tight turning spaces, and the PVC-bound package refuses to bend to accommodate their manoeuvring. It also weighs more than two hundred pounds.
On the first floor mezzanine, Lucy leans back against the wall, hands on her thighs and closes her eyes for a few seconds.
‘I don’t think I can do this. I think I’m going to pass out.’
She’s picturing herself in the dock in the Crown Court, being sentenced to ten years in prison for manslaughter. And then it occurs to her that if they’re caught trying to cover up the crime like this, it would be worse. It could be a life sentence. Perhaps they should take their chances and just own up, claiming self-defence or duress. And what about Adele’s part in it? Adele was simply the victim of a vicious knife attack, but if she’s caught trying to dispose of a corpse, she will face charges too. ‘Look, maybe we should go back. Unwrap… him… and call the police. Take our chances. It’s probably less risky.’
‘How are we going to convince them it wasn’t premeditated?’ Adele demands.
Lucy points to her neck, still obscured by the polo neck. ‘He tried to cut your throat.’
‘Yeah, but I’ve already got a criminal record for fraud; no one’s going to take my word for anything. They’ll say I did it myself. Anyway, I’m not going back up them fucking stairs again. It’ll kill me.’
Lucy closes her eyes again. ‘I don’t know, Adele…’
‘Come on, it’s only a bit further,’ Adele tips up the baseball cap that’s covering her hair, so that Lucy can see her face. ‘We can do this.’
By the time they reach the tiny lobby on the ground floor, they’re both red-faced and sweating with exertion. But so far, at least, no one has seen them.
Adele waits just inside the fire door while Lucy fetches her car and reverses it as close as she can to the doorway. With a final surge of energy and effort, they lift the body over the sill of the boot and Lucy pulls the retractable parcel shelf closed to hide it from view.
Once they’re parked outside the hospital, she hands the car keys to Adele. ‘You’d better hang on to these, just in case. But I promise I won’t be long.’
Adele frowns at the stains on her jeans. ‘Bit of a giveaway, isn’t it? Haven’t you got anything you can change into?’
Lucy grabs her gym bag from the back seat of the car and changes into workout leggings and a zipped top, shoving her bloody clothing into the bottom of the bag before heading through the main doors of the building. Upstairs on the ward, she finds Jeffrey drowsy from morphine but sufficiently aware to be pleased to see her.
‘Sorry I haven’t had chance to bring you anything,’ she says, kissing him on the forehead. ‘I can pop down to the shop in the foyer.’
He shakes his head. ‘I’m nil by mouth… preparation for surgery tomorrow. I’ve got to have a hip replacement apparently.’
‘I’ll try and come back tomorrow then,’ Lucy squeezes his hand, ‘and I’ll bring some cake, and something to drink.’
Tomorrow, she thinks. How wonderful it will be to get to tomorrow and engage in a mundane task like shopping for my dad. To have this nightmare over with.
She’s relieved to have had the chance to see him, but nevertheless walks briskly out of the hospital with her head down, hoping not to draw attention to her bedraggled state. The place is alive with comings and goings, with the usual spectrum of medical triumphs and tragedies and nobody pays her any attention. When she emerges through the automatic doors into the car park, squinting at the darkness, her heart leaps in her chest. She swivels her head from one side to another, looking in every direction.
But the car is gone.
Thirty-Nine
Yanking her phone from her pocket, she dials Adele’s number.
No reply.
Her pulse pounding, she tries again: once, twice, three times. Still no response.
It occurs to her suddenly that she has been incredibly naïve. Adele has already set out to deceive her in a calculated and manipulative way, conspiring with a seasoned criminal not just to take her money but to frame her for Marcus’s murder. So why on earth is she trusting her now? Who was to say that Adele hadn’t just driven her car to the police and told them that Lucy has murdered Jason Fox? After all, it would be easy to prove that the hammer was the murder weapon, and the hammer is conveniently parcelled up with his body. It has her DNA on it.
Lucy starts walking quickly round the perimeter of the car park, searching every row in turn, but the car definitely isn’t there. She leaves the car park and heads out on to the main road, passing the station and Redgate Lawn Tennis Club. Searching for a midnight blue car in the dark is a fool’s errand and she ends up staggering along the pavement, half-blinded by oncoming headlights.
Then her phone buzzes in her pocket. Adele calling.
‘Where the hell are you?’ Lucy demands angrily. ‘I’m going out of my mind here!’
‘All right, all right, calm down. There was a security guard, okay, patrolling the car park and looking at all the number plates. He kept stopping by your car and it was freaking me out, so I decided it was best I moved.’
‘Where? I can’t see you.’
Adele tells her she’s in Maidwell Lane, a narrow track running down the western extremity of the tennis club. It’s banked on both sides by tall hedges and devoid of either street light or security cameras.
As she trudges down the lane, at first Lucy can only see the car. There’s no sign of Adele. Once again her mind starts working overtime. Is this some sort of a trap? Drawing nearer, she catches sight of a pale flash of colour near the rear tyre of the car, and realises it’s Adele’s pink trainer. She’s crouched down on her haunches with her hands gripped round a cylindrical dark object. After a few seconds Lucy realises it’s the snow shovel from the car’s winter emergency kit. Adele has the tip of the shovel blade inserted inside the number plate, and is using force to try and jemmy it off its fixings.
‘Adele, what the—’
‘I’m removing the reg plates,’ Ade
le tells her through gritted teeth. She doesn’t have enough purchase from the shovel and ends up falling backwards onto the gravel. ‘I swear that security guy was taking a note of the number.’
‘Why would he do that? We were legally parked.’ Lucy steps forward and pulls the shovel from Adele’s grasp.
‘Ideally we’d cover the plates with that stuff you can use to stop the number being picked up on camera, but since we haven’t got any of that, then this is the next best thing. If we’re got no licence plate then our movements can’t be traced,’ Adele insists gruffly, snatching the shovel back from her.
Lucy glances around her before lowering her voice. ‘Have you any idea how suspicious a car with no plates is going to look? If we’re spotted by the police – or anyone who then decides they should report us to the police – we’re going to be pulled over, and they’re going to search the car. And how are we going to explain why we’ve got…’ Lucy feels bile rising in her throat at the image… ‘why we’ve got what we’ve got in the boot.’
Adele sinks back onto her heels, loosening her grip on the shovel. ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I didn’t really see it like that. But then you always were the clever one, weren’t you?’ She uses the word as an insult.
‘We just need to concentrate on driving legally and not draw attention to ourselves.’ Lucy prises the shovel from Adele’s hand and tosses it onto the rear seat. ‘Come on, we need to go.’
On the main carriageway again, she takes the turning for the heath road, and stays on it until they reach the track down to the reservoir. Only then does she switch off the headlights. They haven’t discussed or even mentioned Blackwater Pond, and yet they both knew instinctively that this is where they would go. There’s an inevitable logic about it. It could only be Blackwater.
Even with the car as near as possible to the reservoir’s edge, they still have to carry the body some distance in the dark, and over uneven ground. The plastic sheeting slips from Adele’s hand at one point and she stumbles backwards, with the remains of her former lover landing on top of her. She yelps with alarm, before letting off a volley of swear words.
‘Thank God you’ve already weighted it and we don’t have to waste time looking for something to do the job with,’ Lucy says, once they reach the dark, glassy expanse of water. A slight breeze ripples its surface and makes the leaves of the overhanging trees give a sighing sound. A solitary owl calls from the far bank.
‘If we dump it at the edge, it’s not going to be deep enough,’ Adele says quietly. ‘Bits of it might be visible.’ She’s looking to her right, to the flat rock that acted as their diving platform twenty-four years ago. It projects several yards into the pond, to the deeper water that’s required.
‘Yes,’ Lucy says simply, and they drag their burden through the long grass and out to the edge of the rock.
‘Now?’ asks Adele.
‘Now.’
Adele hesitates a beat, laying down her end of the body long enough to cross herself, before they slide it into the water with one coordinated movement. It sinks without a splash, without a sound, into the same expanse that swallowed up Joanne Beckett.
‘I wish I hadn’t killed Joanne,’ Adele says suddenly. ‘I think about her all the time. He was right, Denny… I mean, Jason… what I did was a terrible thing. I never meant her to die, though. I know you know that.’
Lucy simply nods.
‘Anyway, I guess we’re one for one now.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lucy asks, although she fears she already knows the answer.
‘I’ve killed someone, and now you’ve killed someone. You kept my secret, and now I’ll keep yours.’
They turn and face one another in the dark. The expression on Adele’s face is unreadable, her slanting eyes just glittering specks. She holds out her hand, palm upwards, and Lucy realises she is expected to lay hers flat on top, just like they did all those years ago.
‘To seal the pact,’ Adele says, and for a few brief seconds their hands connect.
Forty
‘Rough day?’
Lucy looks down at herself. She may have changed into her workout gear but is still in her mud-splashed shoes and her fingernails are filthy. She knows that if there was a mirror in front of her, she would see dirty hair plastered to her scalp, pale skin and haunted eyes; just as Noah was seeing them now. On a normal day she wouldn’t dream of appearing in front of him in such a state. But today was not a normal day.
‘It’s been a very long one,’ she says honestly, then realises she has no idea what time it is. A glance at the clock on the wall of Noah’s flat tell her it’s now five past nine.
‘I’ve got a nice white Burgundy on the go…’ Noah walks over to the kitchenette and picks up a half empty wine bottle. ‘Want a glass?’
Lucy does. She wants to drink the wine, and soak in the bathtub until she’s thoroughly clean and then – in bed in the dark – tell Noah exactly what has happened that day. But she can’t even risk the wine; not least because she is barely holding back a torrent of tears. She shakes her head with a feigned decisiveness. ‘I’d better get the girls back,’ she tells him, beckoning to them. They’re lolling on the sofa in front of Ratatouille, eyes half-closed. ‘They’re usually in bed by now.’
‘No problem; they’ve been good as gold.’ He lowers his voice slightly. ‘Is everything going to be okay with them… you know, back at home. Only, you said there were problems?’
Lucy nods. ‘Their mum’s been the victim of domestic violence.’
This was not a lie: Adele had been in a relationship with Fox, and he had attacked her. He had chained her up and threatened her life. But it was far from the whole truth, and much as she longed to, Lucy knew she could never tell Noah the whole truth.
‘Everything’s been sorted out now though.’ She forces a smile. ‘They’ll be quite safe.’
‘Good.’ Noah holds up the wine bottle. ‘This will have to wait for another time. Or maybe we could go out for a drink somewhere? It would be good to catch up properly.’
‘Yes,’ Lucy smiles again, though it takes every ounce of energy left in her body to do so. ‘I’d like that.’
She and Adele mutually agreed that it would be safest if Lucy’s car wasn’t seen anywhere near the Danemoor estate again, so she drops off Paige and Skye in an unlit layby on the Redgate ring road.
Both girls have been asleep all the way back from London, and when they’re woken, Skye whimpers and Paige stares around her, confused.
‘Will you manage to get them home okay?’ Lucy asks, handing over their sweaters and the backpack containing a selection of their toys.
‘I’ve got a taxi waiting,’ Adele nods in the direction of the convenience store a couple of hundred yards away. ‘They’re not going to want to walk there, but that’s just too bad. It’s for the best.’
‘Sure,’ Lucy reaches into her purse and pulls out a fold of twenty-pound notes. ‘Put this towards a new carpet,’ she mutters, then sticks her hands into the pockets of her sweatpants and looks down at her feet. ‘Well, I guess I’ll say goodbye. I hope things, you know…’
Adele juts her chin, proud to the end. ‘We’ll be fine.’ She moves as if to embrace her friend, but then thinks better of it and wraps an arm around the shoulders of each daughter instead. She looks back as she walks away, and Lucy watches her go. And both women know with absolute certainty that they will never see one another again.
Epilogue
February, 2019
‘Name please?’
Lucy blinks, startled. Even now she’s taken aback by the question. ‘Um, Lucy. Lucy Gibson.’
The barista smiles and scribbles ‘Lucy’ on the side of her coffee cup, leaving her to queue at the collection point at the far end of the station coffee bar. A few minutes later, coffee cup clutched in her gloved hand, Lucy moves out onto the platform to wait for her train. It’s a sharp, frosty day, and her breath makes clouds, which mingle with the steam from her latte.
S
he makes this fifteen-minute journey between Bath and Bristol every weekday morning. Taking the car would be more convenient in some ways, but ever since the previous September, Lucy has disliked driving. She sold her large blue SUV at the same time that she sold the house in Barnes, and now owns a modest hatchback that she uses for the occasional trip to the supermarket and to visit her father.
Home is now a flat-fronted Georgian town house on a hilly, honey-coloured terrace in Bath. Vicky is nearby, and through her, Lucy is slowly starting to meet like-minded people. She’s volunteering at Umbrella, the refugee charity in Bristol that caught her eye nearly a year ago, when she was first planning to leave Marcus. It’s an unpaid position, but she has been assured that she will be considered for the next suitable permanent vacancy. Megan, at Pink Square, has generously agreed to give her a reference, even though Lucy’s employment with them was short-lived and fraught with problems. Problems caused by Jason Fox.
Fox’s body was discovered by anglers a few weeks after Lucy and Adele dropped it into Blackwater Pond. The discovery warranted a small piece in the local news but did not become a national story. He had made plenty of enemies during his time in prison and was on the wrong side of a local gang after drug deals he was involved in turned sour. So there was neither shock nor surprise when he was killed. Although the article mentioned briefly that Adele (‘a local woman known to Fox’) was questioned by police, she was not arrested or charged. Nor did she ever mention Lucy’s name in connection with Jason Fox. She kept her pact of silence, and so did Lucy. Just as she had all those years ago.
In November, DC Andrewes followed up with Lucy, wanting to know if she was still being harassed by whoever was passing themselves off as Denny Renard. She wasn’t, Lucy told him truthfully: it had stopped. But she let him know that she had put her house on the market anyway, and was planning to leave London. Given the absence of recoverable DNA from the paper fire bomb, Dale Andrewes said that he would mark the case as inactive for now. But, of course, she was welcome to get in touch if there was any further trouble.