The Pact: A dark and compulsive thriller about secrets, privilege and revenge

by S J Bolton

  No sooner had the other car flashed past than she’d restarted the engine and driven at eighty miles an hour along the inside lane to get them off the motorway.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, when they got back to Tal’s house. ‘We were bloody lucky just now. We’re not risking it again.’

  Shaken, they’d all agreed, and it hadn’t been mentioned again. Until tonight.

  And so now, after all, it was Daniel’s turn.

  Not long after three o’clock in the morning, the B-road heading north out of Talitha’s village was empty. They drove with the top down, because Amber was still feeling queasy and the night air smelled of honeysuckle, which seemed to bode well, and muck-spreading, which didn’t.

  Daniel drove slowly and badly, his acceleration uneven, over-compensating on the steering. At the tiny hump bridge over the stream, he nearly hit the wall.

  ‘Watch it.’ Felix, as usual, was in the passenger seat.

  ‘I’m not used to this car,’ Daniel complained.

  ‘OK,’ Felix said, as they approached the junction with London Road. ‘We all know the drill if we’re stopped. We were heading back to Tal’s house. Daniel wasn’t sure of the way and got lost. We’re all a bit pissed, and we weren’t concentrating. “We’re all terribly sorry and upset and we’ll never do it again, Officer.”’

  ‘You don’t have to do it, Dan,’ Megan said. No one replied.

  ‘Everyone got their seat belts on?’ Xav asked.

  ‘Hold tight, Meg,’ said Talitha.

  ‘No hesitation, straight into the middle lane,’ Felix said, as Daniel turned right at the junction and drove onto the slip road that would take them down to the A40. ‘You need some speed.’

  Daniel edged the car up to thirty miles an hour; the bend in the road was sharp, veering south, then south-east. The correct route – the only legally permitted route – made an almost complete circle onto the A40 heading into Oxford. At its south-eastern tip, the carriageway split; one way entered the A40, the other allowed traffic to leave it.

  Black and white chevrons, indicating that all vehicles should turn left, came into view, then came the no-entry signs that flanked the right-hand side of the carriageway. It couldn’t have been clearer which way they were supposed to drive. Daniel gave a low-pitched moan.

  ‘Hold your nerve.’ Felix sat forward, as though craning to see around Daniel onto the carriageway they were about to enter.

  ‘Oh God, I hate this bit.’ Amber tucked her face into Xav’s shoulder; Talitha sat forward, holding tight onto the back of Felix’s headrest.

  ‘And go,’ Felix called at the crucial moment. The car swung right, past the no-entry signs, and onto the wrong carriageway of the A40. The dual carriageway ahead, two lanes, unlit, was clear.

  ‘Oh, thank God, thank God,’ Talitha muttered.

  ‘You need some speed,’ Felix warned. The car was moving at a little over thirty miles an hour. ‘Two and a half miles, that’s all. Less than three minutes if you get your foot down.’

  Jaw clenched, eyes unblinking, Daniel pressed down on the accelerator and the speedometer moved up to forty miles an hour, fifty, fifty-five. The intermittent white line that divided the lanes flashed past.

  ‘Nothing behind,’ Megan called.

  ‘We need to get a move on.’ Felix was drumming his fingers on the dashboard.

  ‘Not fast enough, Dan.’ Xav’s voice was strained with tension.

  The gear box screamed as Daniel made a clumsy change into top gear.

  ‘There’s a fox. Watch out for the fox!’ Amber grabbed hold of Daniel’s shoulder.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Amber,’ Talitha snapped.

  ‘I’m good, I’m good.’ Daniel steered into the lane closest to the central reservation.

  ‘Motorway coming up,’ Xav said.

  ‘I’m never doing this again,’ Talitha moaned.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Felix said. ‘Move into the middle lane when you can. The turn will be easier.’

  Maybe the bend in the road took them all by surprise. One moment, all ahead was darkness, the next blinding lights were speeding towards them. Out of nowhere, another car had appeared.

  Amber screamed.

  ‘Hard shoulder!’ Felix yelled.

  All of them were thrown forward by the sudden loss of momentum as the acrid smell of brake fluid filled the car. Felix pushed the steering wheel out of Daniel’s grip and the car swung hard to the right. It should have been enough.

  But the other car matched their movements, as though a huge mirror had been dropped in front of them. They were feet away from it. Daniel had frozen, his eyes wide and staring.

  Felix pulled the wheel back. The car rocked and seemed to scream at them. They could hear the squeal of brakes, the blasting of a horn. Light filled the car, illuminating their horrified faces. There was a split second of silence, then the other car was gone and they were stationary on the carriageway. The world had stopped spinning.

  3

  Tiny whimpering sounds filled the night and it took them a moment to realise they were coming from the car engine as its component parts protested at their treatment of it. A moth attracted by the headlights bounced against the windscreen and, in the heavy silence, they could hear its gentle, reproachful thudding. What did you do? It seemed to be saying to them. What did you do?

  ‘Shit.’ Felix dropped his head into his hands and spoke through his fingers. ‘Get out of here, Dan. Now.’

  ‘We didn’t hit it,’ Daniel said. ‘That car. We missed it, didn’t we? Someone tell me we missed it.’

  ‘It’s crashed,’ Megan whispered, as though if she said it softly enough, it might not be true. ‘It’s hit a tree or something.’

  None of the others moved.

  ‘Dan, we have to get out of here.’ Felix grabbed hold of Daniel’s shoulder. ‘Get out of the car. I’ll drive.’

  Daniel didn’t resist Felix’s shaking. He’d become limp, unresponsive.

  Xav leaned towards the driver’s seat. ‘Dan, we can’t stay here. Something else will be along.’

  Gently, Talitha took Felix’s hand away from Daniel. ‘Dan, please,’ she said. ‘We’ll all die if we stay here.’

  Daniel turned on the ignition. Nothing happened.

  ‘Again, do it again,’ Felix yelled.

  The second time, the engine started. Daniel swung the car onto the hard shoulder and stopped.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Felix said. ‘We have to get out of here.’

  A smell of burned rubber flooded the car. The night was silent.

  ‘We have to see if they’re OK,’ Amber said.

  ‘Are you mental?’ Felix snapped back. ‘We’ll go down for this. Dan, give me the keys.’

  ‘Amber’s right,’ Xav said. ‘We have to check.’

  Dan glanced once into the rear-view mirror and clamped his eyes shut tight. On the other carriageway, a vehicle entered the motorway and sped away.

  ‘I’m getting out.’ Megan pushed herself up so that she could sit on the car’s side panel. She swung her legs over.

  Moving slowly, his eyes not quite focusing and his limbs unsteady, Xav opened his door. On the other side, Talitha did the same.

  ‘I swear, if you lot get out, I’ll leave you here,’ Felix warned. ‘Meg, get back in.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Xav volunteered. ‘Don’t let him leave me behind.’ Still, he didn’t move.

  With a sudden rush of movement that took them all by surprise, Daniel climbed out through the driver’s door and stood looking back down the carriageway. Seeing his chance, Felix jumped out and ran around the front of the car. Before he could reach the driver’s seat, though, Xav reached forward and grabbed the keys from the ignition. Then, at last, he got out of the car. Amber slid across and followed him. On the other side, Talitha climbed out. />
  The six of them, diminished, stared back at the devastation they’d wreaked.

  The other car, a white Vauxhall Astra, was thirty yards away. Its rear wheels were still on the hard shoulder, but its front end had vanished into undergrowth. Its headlights illuminated a mass of vegetation and the trunk of a tree.

  The tree seemed to accuse them, as though if they closed their eyes, they would hear it moan with pain. Then the silence was broken as screaming sounded from inside the wrecked car. Thin, high-pitched, terrified.

  ‘I think that’s a—’ Amber stopped, unable to finish her sentence. Xav moved towards the Astra.

  ‘Give me the keys,’ Felix demanded. ‘Xav, give me the fucking keys.’

  Ignoring him, Xav took another step forward. Megan did too, as movement became apparent in the headlights of the crashed car; something hardly visible, nebulous, an upward drift. The screaming stopped, only to be replaced by the sound of hammering on glass.

  Xav took out his mobile phone.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Talitha demanded.

  ‘We need help.’

  She wrapped her hand around his, enclosing the phone. ‘We can’t call the emergency services.’

  ‘Dan can turn the car round,’ Xav told her. ‘We’ll say we were travelling the right way and there was an accident. We don’t know how it happened.’

  ‘Dan’s over the limit,’ Amber said. ‘He’ll go to prison.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Xav pulled away for Talitha. ‘And only for a short time. It can’t be helped. We can’t get away with this.’

  ‘Smoke,’ Megan whispered. ‘Smoke coming up from the bonnet. It’s on fire.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Felix strode ahead and turned to face them, his hands held up as though in surrender. ‘This is the plan. We make sure they’re OK, then we get back in the car. We drive to the nearest phone box and we call an ambulance from there. We won’t give our names.’

  ‘We can’t leave them,’ Megan said.

  Felix reached out, his eyes darkening when Megan flinched away. ‘They’re probably fine.’ He looked from one friend to the next. ‘It’s just a bump. They didn’t hit us. Xav, you and me, we’ll go and check now. OK?’

  Without taking his eyes off the Astra, Xav nodded.

  ‘Turn the ignition off,’ Talitha said. ‘You have to do that. It’s the ignition that causes the sparks.’

  ‘It’ll be OK, guys. It’ll be cool.’ Felix put his hand on Xav’s shoulder. ‘Get back in the car and wait for us. Dan, get in the back. I’m driving us home.’

  Daniel and the girls stayed where they were as Felix and Xav walked towards the car. They’d covered roughly half the distance when a bright bubble of flame appeared on the Astra’s bonnet.

  Talitha wailed. A second later, the Astra’s petrol tank exploded.

  4

  The night was transformed, as though someone had turned on floodlights. A wall of heat hit them, and both Felix and Xav took an instinctive step back. For what felt like an age, no one moved and then the two boys, acting as one, turned and ran back to their own car. Xav threw Felix the car keys; Felix jumped into the driver’s seat.

  ‘What are you doing? We can’t go?’ Amber wailed.

  Talitha grabbed Amber and threw her inside the car. She followed so quickly the two girls made a heap of flesh and limbs on the back seat. Daniel leapt in and then Megan as Felix pulled away. He drove a hundred yards along the hard shoulder before swinging onto the exit slip road.

  The junction to the A329 was clear. Felix turned left and within minutes they were back on the village roads that led to Talitha’s house. The world seemed oddly normal, as though nothing dreadful had happened.

  The stone mansion was in darkness when they arrived, and that was one good thing at least. No need to start lying quite yet. They got out of the car, slowly, stiffly, as though their bodies had aged in the last hour; as though standing upright, walking forward, speaking normally, had become beyond them. Acting on instinct, moving like a small and damaged herd, they made for the pool house. At the last moment, Megan hung back, her attention caught, it seemed, by the glistening of the water, but when Felix took her hand and coaxed her inside, she didn’t resist.

  In darkness, they sat and waited, although it is likely that none of them could have said what they were waiting for.

  Finally, Xav spoke. ‘We won’t get away with it. They’ll find us.’

  ‘I can’t believe we left them.’ Amber’s make-up was streaked with tear stains. Tiny rivulets of water were running down her face and showed no sign of stopping.

  ‘There was nothing we could do,’ Felix said. ‘Once the car went up, that was it.’

  Amber stared back at him. ‘We should have called the police.’

  Felix kept his voice low, uncharacteristically gentle. ‘They wouldn’t have arrived in time. You saw how quickly it happened. We were right there and we couldn’t do a thing.’

  ‘The police will be there by now,’ Talitha said. ‘The next car along the road will have called them. There’ll be a major incident now. Still nothing they can do. A car explodes, that’s it.’

  ‘We should go back and see,’ Amber said.

  ‘Are you mental?’ Talitha snapped.

  ‘We need to call the police.’ Xav reached out and took Amber’s hand. ‘They’ll find us, sooner or later. It’ll be worse if we don’t own up.’

  ‘I’ll go down for murder.’ Dan was huddled in a corner of the room, sitting on the floor, his arms wrapped around his knees as though trying to hide himself away. ‘It was me behind the wheel. You can’t make decisions for me.’

  ‘We’re all to blame,’ Amber said. ‘We all agreed to do it.’

  ‘That’s not how the law will see it,’ Daniel argued. ‘The driver is responsible.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Talitha said.

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ll tell them you’ve all done it. I was unlucky, that’s all.’

  ‘You weren’t unlucky, you twat,’ Felix snapped. ‘You were incompetent. If you’d driven onto the hard shoulder when I told you, we’d have missed them.’

  Daniel wiped a hand across his nose. Even in the darkness, they could see the gleam on it. ‘You grabbed the fucking wheel – you caused it!’

  ‘Stop it,’ Xav said. ‘We stay calm. We work it out together.’

  ‘We can’t go to the police,’ Daniel said.

  ‘They’ll find us,’ Xav insisted. ‘Someone died in that car tonight. I know no one wants to hear it, but we need to face facts. Someone died. I pray to God it was only one person, but—’

  ‘There was a kid in that car,’ Amber said.

  There was a moment of horrified silence, and then Xav let go her hand. ‘That’s not helpful, Amber.’

  ‘That screaming we heard, it wasn’t an adult.’

  ‘Amber, please don’t.’

  ‘Look, guys, we can’t change what happened,’ Talitha said. ‘I wish to God we could, but we can’t. We have to come up with a plan.’

  ‘We say nothing,’ Felix said. ‘There were no witnesses. Or no witnesses left. Sorry to sound heartless, but we need to focus. No one but us knows what happened, and I am not waving goodbye to my whole future for nothing.’

  ‘That car on the other side of the motorway,’ Amber reminded them. ‘The one that joined at junction seven. They would have seen us.’

  ‘We don’t know that.’ Felix’s voice was rising. ‘The car hadn’t exploded when it went past. We were all still in our car. There are no lights on that stretch of the motorway. They might have seen nothing. Or they might have thought they saw something but couldn’t make out what. The chances of them having got our registration number are zero.’

  ‘They must have seen something,’ Daniel said. ‘The police will know there were two cars involved.�
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  ‘We didn’t hit it. There will be no marks on our car.’

  ‘They’ll find us,’ Xav insisted. ‘This isn’t a prank any more. Someone was killed. The police will throw everything into the investigation. They won’t rest until they know what happened.’

  Amber started to cry audibly. Talitha stood up. ‘I’m going to find my mum,’ she said. ‘I can’t do this.’

  Daniel scrambled up off the tiles and beat her to the door. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Just a few more minutes. We can figure it out.’ He looked from one face to the next and it seemed to the others that time had unwound in the last few hours, and Daniel had become the boy they vaguely remembered from years ago; small and shy, clumsy on the sports field, wary of showing his intelligence in class in case the bigger, cooler kids labelled him a nerd.

  ‘Is anyone actually sober?’ he went on, and his voice too seemed to have regressed to the time before it broke. ‘If the driver was someone who’d passed their test and who hadn’t been drinking, then all we need to do is say we were driving the right way and it was an accident. We might get away with a few points on someone’s licence. If we all stick together.’

  ‘You want one of us to take the blame for you?’ Felix moved a step closer to Daniel, his shoulders squaring up, fingers twitching, as though about to clench into fists.

  ‘It was your fucking idea!’ Daniel yelled. ‘I didn’t want to do it. No one wanted to do it but you and Xav. I’m not taking the blame for what you did.’

  Felix stepped closer still, pointing a finger in Dan’s face. ‘You were behind the wheel, tosser. We can say we were innocent passengers, who begged you not to do it.’

  ‘You fucking shit.’ Daniel launched himself at Felix. He was several stones lighter but, knocked off balance, Felix stumbled over a chair and both boys fell against the wall. Taken by surprise, Felix lay stunned as Dan rained several punches on the bigger boy’s head and shoulders. Xav and Talitha rushed to pull them apart. It didn’t take long. Neither boy really had the heart for a fight. Red-faced, sweating, they sank back down onto chairs.