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

by S J Bolton

  ‘I can’t believe she never said anything,’ Xav said.

  ‘She never mentioned her dad,’ Amber added. ‘When I asked her, she said they’d lost touch years ago.’

  ‘Probably because he’s been in and out of prison for much of his adult life,’ Talitha went on. ‘Not exactly a parent to be proud of.’

  ‘Could he be the reason her exams went pear-shaped?’ Amber asked.

  ‘Possibly, but what interests me more is that Echo Yard is very close to my parents’ house in Little Milton,’ Talitha said. ‘Less than a ten-minute drive. You know how we’ve been asking ourselves what she could have done with that film and the signed confession between leaving us and getting home?’ She looked back down at the photographs. ‘I’d say we’ve got our answer.’

  Felix could see his own excitement reflected in the faces around him. Daniel leaned back in his chair and exhaled noisily.

  ‘You think it’s still there?’ Xav asked.

  ‘We know it’s not in her bedsit. And she doesn’t carry it around with her.’

  ‘But that stuff is for sale,’ Daniel objected. ‘She couldn’t risk her hiding place being shipped off to some barn conversation in the Cotswolds.’

  ‘That makes it easier,’ Felix said. ‘We can ignore anything with a price tag on it.’

  ‘There must be some things they’re hanging onto for sentimental value,’ Talitha said. ‘Or maybe that they can’t sell. Maybe this angel. It’s worth checking out.’

  ‘Can your detective friend do it for us?’ Daniel asked.

  Talitha’s face tightened. ‘We can’t risk him getting his hands on anything that will incriminate the rest of us,’ she said. ‘And frankly, I can’t justify the cost any more. If we want to search the place, we have to do it ourselves.’

  ‘At night?’

  She shuddered. ‘God no. Megan’s dad has a frigging German shepherd. I’m not tangling with that. I’ll go during opening hours and have a look round. Someone should give me a hand, though, it’s a big place to search alone.’

  ‘We can’t all go,’ Felix said. ‘It will look too suspicious if she shows up.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Xav offered. ‘We need to do some work on the house this year anyway.’

  Felix said, ‘We can’t rely on finding it. We need a plan B.’

  Talitha gave him a cold smile. ‘So, why don’t you share yours?’

  Felix looked around the group. Amber, he knew, he was about to have trouble with; the others, not so much. Tal, in any case, was already on board.

  ‘Tal explained to me that while Megan might be out of prison, a life sentence is never officially over,’ he said. ‘So, if she commits another crime, one that’s sufficiently serious, chances are she’ll be locked up again, probably for a considerable time, and our problem goes away.’

  Silence. Even Amber didn’t object as quickly as he’d expected her to.

  ‘What’ve you got in mind?’ Xav asked.

  ‘Sarah gave me the idea,’ Felix said, and wondered if he was, in some small way, passing the blame onto his wife. ‘She was ranting about how Megan could clean out the entire company, just make a few cash transfers to an offshore account, and that’s it. Company folds.’

  ‘Megan’s not a thief,’ Amber said.

  ‘I’m not suggesting we wait for her to do it herself,’ Felix said.

  It didn’t take the others long to catch up.

  ‘Is that even possible?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘Of course, it’s possible,’ Felix said. ‘I can access any computer in the building. I know every password there is. Setting up a destination account will be harder, but luckily we know someone with investment and IT skills.’

  They all looked at Xav.

  ‘Possible?’ Talitha asked him.

  ‘Easy in theory,’ Xav replied. ‘I could probably do it remotely. It would be better if I come in, though, sometime when we’re sure she doesn’t have an alibi and could have been the one doing the deed.’

  ‘We’re not doing it,’ Amber said.

  ‘Let’s hope we don’t have to,’ Talitha said. ‘I had the same thought, although it would be trickier for me to organise something. I’d need the PI again, and it wouldn’t come cheap.’

  ‘What?’ Daniel asked.

  Talitha shrugged. ‘Kiddy porn on her computer, stealing her car one night, driving it dangerously and abandoning it somewhere. She’d have to prove she wasn’t driving and given that she lives alone, that would be quite tricky.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Amber said.

  Tal turned on the other woman. ‘So, what’s your brilliant idea? Come on, Am, you can’t keep shooting down our plans and not giving anything yourself.’

  Amber wasn’t backing down. ‘We could take care of her. Give her the money, allow her back into our lives.’ She looked around the group. ‘It might not be so bad. She’s good at her job – Felix, even you admit that. Tal, you can easily be her solicitor – you can do that with your eyes shut. I don’t mind if she wants to become some sort of honorary aunt to the girls.’

  Silence.

  ‘We can deal with this,’ Amber was pleading now. ‘We don’t have to throw her to the wolves. Again.’

  ‘How’s Dex going to feel about a convicted child killer getting involved in his daughters’ lives?’ Talitha asked. ‘How will your constituents? The national press? I’m not sure about anyone else, but I reckon this could throw the Profumo scandal into shade.’

  ‘OK, take it easy.’ Xav reached across and put a hand on Talitha’s arm. Felix expected her to throw it off, but to his surprise she took a deep breath and picked up her glass again.

  ‘Sorry, Am,’ she muttered.

  ‘There’s another way,’ Xav said. ‘If we’re thinking outside the box.’

  ‘What?’ Amber asked.

  ‘If we really do think the shit’s going to hit the fan and that Megan won’t keep quiet, we do what we did last time,’ Xav began.

  ‘I’m not following,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Twenty years ago, one of us took the blame for the group,’ Xav went on. ‘Megan took one for the team. So, if we have to face it again, someone else steps up.’

  Felix saw his own puzzlement reflected on the others’ faces.

  ‘How can that even begin to work?’ Talitha asked. ‘If Megan drops one of us in it, she drops all of us in.’

  ‘Not if we stick together, if it’s our word against hers,’ Xav said. ‘One of us agrees to confess to being in the car with Megan that night, even though she took the blame. The rest of us support the story. That person will serve time, almost certainly, maybe even more than Megan did, but my point is, it’s only one of us, not all of us.’

  ‘And how do we decide which one?’ Daniel’s face had lost all colour.

  ‘Xav, you’re talking bollocks,’ Talitha said. ‘Megan has a signed confession.’

  ‘She has a false confession,’ Xav countered with a cold smile. ‘That was her price for agreeing to take the blame and let Daniel – just plucking names out of the air – get away with it. We signed that confession for Dan’s sake, but it wasn’t true. The rest of us never left Tal’s house.’

  ‘I can’t see that working,’ Amber said.

  ‘It will be Megan’s word against the rest of us,’ Xav said. ‘Has to be worth a shot, doesn’t it?’

  ‘How do we decide who takes the blame this time?’ Daniel asked again.

  ‘Any volunteers?’ Xav smiled around the group and Felix noticed he had one hand tucked inside the pocket of his jacket.

  ‘Xav, we can’t do this,’ Amber protested. ‘I have two children.’

  ‘Oh, I think we all have a reason or two for wanting to stay on the outside,’ Xav said. ‘My point is, we might not be able to. Maybe we let Megan decide.’

 
‘Well, she won’t choose you, will she, not if she still has the hots for you,’ Amber snapped. ‘And she probably won’t pick Felix either, or she loses her job.’

  Xav pulled his hand out of his pocket. Sticking out from his clenched fist were five coloured plastic straws. ‘Pick one,’ he said.

  Nobody moved.

  ‘One is two inches shorter than the rest,’ Xav said.

  ‘This is bogus,’ Daniel said. ‘You know which one.’

  ‘So I pick last. That’s fair.’

  Talitha slid her chair a couple of inches away from the table. ‘I prefer my plan,’ she said. ‘We find the signed confession and the photograph, then no one needs to confess to anything.’

  ‘Oh, I prefer your plan too,’ Xav said. ‘Don’t get me wrong. This is plan B.’

  ‘It’s a shit plan,’ Amber said.

  Xav turned on her. ‘So, are you reconsidering the transfer of money from Felix’s company into a Channel Islands bank account?’ he asked. ‘And if that doesn’t work, Tal’s idea of crashing her car one night.’

  Amber dropped her forehead onto her hands.

  ‘Are you?’ Xav insisted.

  Amber let her head nod up and down. Xav pressed home his advantage. He pushed his clenched fist across the table towards her. ‘Pick one,’ he insisted.

  She looked up at him, tears in her eyes. ‘I agree. You win. Let it go.’

  ‘You still need to pick one, we all do. We need a plan C.’

  Without moving his hand, he looked around the group. ‘If nothing else, it will focus the minds.’

  Muttering something, Amber pulled an orange-coloured straw from Xav’s hand. ‘Well, is this it? Is this the short one?’

  Felix leaned across the table and pulled the red straw from those remaining. Acting as one, he and Amber held their straws up to compare lengths. Both were the same. He was ashamed of how relieved he felt because this was absurd.

  Then Talitha’s hand shot out, like a snake after a mouse, and the blue straw was loosened. The same length as his and Amber’s.

  Only two straws left now in Xav’s clutched fist: one green, one pink.

  ‘Feel lucky?’ Xav grinned at Daniel.

  As though he was about to stick his hand in the fire, Daniel grasped hold of the green straw and pulled it out. Same length as the others.

  Xav opened his hand and let the pink straw fall onto the table. Same length as all the others.

  ‘Just kidding,’ he said.

  Amber suppressed a sob, Daniel ran his hands over his face and Talitha turned white.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Xav,’ Felix snapped. ‘What the hell was the point of that?’

  Xav got to his feet. ‘Establishing a principle,’ he said. ‘Next time, we do it for real.’

  31

  Xav and Talitha went to Echo Yard late on Monday afternoon. A spring storm had broken over Oxfordshire when he pulled up alongside Talitha’s white Range Rover. She waited until Xav had got out of his car before lowering the window.

  ‘Think this is going to stop?’

  ‘I’ve got a spare umbrella.’ He opened the boot, took out his umbrella and the one Ella used and opened both. ‘Come on, it closes at six.’

  The yard didn’t really feel like a yard once they were through the gates. Much of the salvage on show was intended for outdoors, so efforts had been made to fake the sort of gardens it might sit in. Scrubby patches of lawn held moss-covered birdbaths, the central feature was a pond, surrounded by reeds and flowering yellow marigolds, a fountain playing in its midst. Garden benches sat everywhere, most laden down with neglected pot plants. Wrought-iron gazebos on stone pillars, tall columns and huge statues formed a skyline, and rusting iron railings created paths and enclosures. Gates, all of them for sale, blocked the path at irregular intervals. Dozens of terracotta plant pots, every shape and size imaginable, sat on wheeled trolleys and in one corner Tiffany lamps hung from lamp posts. A hazel tree, its branches so gnarled and twisted it belonged in the darkest sort of fairy tale, was festooned with lanterns.

  The rain, and the late hour, had deterred all other customers, and he and Talitha were alone in the yard as they made their way along the first gravel path. Even in the poor light, Xav’s eyes were drawn to a huge golden globe towards the back of the yard. Nearly ten feet in diameter, it sat on top of an enormous stone box. Beyond it towered a massive concrete structure, not part of the yard, but strangely in keeping with it. A water tower from the mid-twentieth century.

  ‘Christ,’ came Talitha’s voice from under her umbrella. ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘Let’s go around the perimeter,’ Xav suggested. ‘I’ll meet you at the far end. Ignore anything that could be for sale. And try to think like a kid. Megan could have been coming here for decades.’

  Without waiting for a reply, he set off, following a line of fireplaces. He passed a collection of urns on columns like an outcrop of fungi and moved on through a menagerie of stone animals – lions on pedestals, crouched griffins, recumbent hounds – feeling himself watched by dozens of lifeless eyes. Relieved to leave them behind, he reached an outbuilding of dirty brick.

  The roof was hidden beneath the lowest branches of an ash tree and layers of trailing ivy. The part of the wall that he could see was covered, practically every inch, in stone gargoyles. Some had teeth, some fangs, even tusks, many stuck out thick, sponge-like tongues in his direction; all of them were screaming at him. Some covered their eyes, some their ears, others clutched weapons in claw-like fists. Many, dripping with rain, seemed to be weeping. The theme was continued at Xav’s feet, where imp-like creatures gazed malevolently up at him. Gargoyles were hollow, he remembered, basically elaborate drainpipes; they all had an empty cavity inside.

  ‘Help you, mate?’

  A man of about sixty-five in a green oilskin coat and flat country-style cap on his grey curls had approached. He looked like a farmer.

  ‘Sorry,’ Xav gave the bloke – who had to be Megan’s dad; they had the same dark eyes – the smile he saved for clients with upwards of ten million to invest. ‘I’ve got a bit of a thing about gargoyles. The wife’ll kill me if I come back with one, though. She’s sent me for wood.’

  ‘Over that side.’ Gary Macdonald gestured to the opposite side of the yard, beyond the golden globe, past a statue of dancing wrought-iron skeletons, to where wooden doors lay stacked up like packs of cards beneath a makeshift awning. ‘What you looking for exactly?’

  Macdonald gestured that they should cross the yard and Xav followed. As they walked behind the huge golden globe, he spotted a Victorian roll-top bath that might work in his bathroom at home. Maybe he’d bring Ella here if things ever went back to normal. On the other hand, maybe not; there had to be other salvage yards.

  ‘We’ve bought a house in central Oxford,’ he explained, as they circumnavigated the pond. ‘We’ve got a lot of internal wood from the 1970s and my wife wants to replace it with something more appropriate.’

  ‘Well, if you want to give me some details.’

  Talitha found him thirty minutes later, ten minutes before the yard was due to close for the night. She shook her head at his raised eyebrows.

  ‘I think we’re wasting our time.’ Xav kept his voice low. Megan’s dad had vanished, and he wasn’t entirely sure where he’d got to.

  ‘You don’t think it’s here?’

  ‘Oh, I think it’s here, all right. Just not accessible.’

  Xav had had plenty of time to think while he’d been listening to Macdonald senior drone on about reclaimed oak, South American walnut and Polish pine.

  ‘She wouldn’t risk putting it anywhere that could be sold or moved,’ Xav said. ‘Even things like this monstrosity,’ he gestured at the golden globe, ‘could tickle someone’s fancy. She’d have left it somewhere permanent, somewhere not for sale, under any circumstances.
’

  ‘Where then?’

  Xav nodded towards a structure at the very rear of the yard, one that loomed over everything in it.

  Talitha said, ‘The water tower?’

  ‘Who visits a water tower?’ Xav asked. ‘The water authority, once in a blue moon. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that one’s no longer in use.’

  ‘You think Megan climbed that?’ Talitha shuddered and Xav remembered that a fear of heights was one of the very few weaknesses his old friend had ever admitted to.

  ‘She was pretty fit at eighteen. She ran cross-country, and she was in the climbing team.’

  Talitha gave the slow, slight nod of the head that indicated agreement. ‘Can we get up there?’ she said.

  Xav had been asking himself that same question. ‘I think we have to,’ he said. ‘I think we have to come back after dark.’

  When Xav arrived home, his wife met him in the hallway; she was wearing her wedding dress.

  He said, ‘Did I miss something?’

  Ella had a goofy, even weird sense of humour, but this was a new one. She marched up to him, heels tapping on the floor tiles; she was in full make-up, only the coronet of flowers was missing. Reaching him, she spun on the spot.

  ‘Unzip me.’ She told him.

  Wondering how he’d explain to a wife, ten years younger and married less than two years, that he really didn’t fancy sex right now, Xav did what he was told. His wife’s skin, the gold of newly opened sunflowers, seemed to burst from the white silk.

  ‘Easier, or harder?’ she asked when the zip was fully down.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Easier or harder than on our wedding night? This dress is my litmus test. If it’s easier to pull the zip, I’ve lost weight; harder and I’ve gained. Tondy says I’m looking chubby.’

  Tondy was his wife’s agent. As Ella turned again to face him, he said, ‘You couldn’t step on the bathroom scales?’

  ‘Pounds and ounces are deceptive, inches are what count.’ She stretched up to kiss him, catching hold of his tie and tugging him closer. ‘So, harder or easier?’

  He hadn’t a clue. ‘’Bout the same.’