by S J Bolton
Megan’s hair was wet, sleek as a seal’s fur. She wore no make- up. Her eyes and lips were less startling than he’d grown used to, but her skin was paler and had the sort of radiance his wife talked about endlessly. Her dressing gown was made from a thin cotton and it clung to her damp skin. She didn’t look surprised to see him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Megan raised her eyebrows, perfectly shaped and dark as her hair.
‘We shouldn’t have let you do it, twenty years ago,’ Xav went on. ‘We should have taken the blame together.’
Apart from the blinking of her eyes, Megan gave no sign of even hearing what he was saying.
‘We should have known something was wrong, that something terrible had happened to you, and that you needed us. We were shit friends. You were supposed to ace your A levels, Meg, and it was our fault you didn’t.’
Something softened in Megan’s face; it wasn’t a smile as such, maybe the memory of one. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That, at least, was nothing to do with you.’
‘Real friends would have stuck by you, even when you went to prison. We should have written and visited and let you know that we were there for you, that we always would be.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That would have been good.’
‘And we should have welcomed you back; told you about the trust fund straight away; taken you back into our lives and helped you in any way we could. Waiting until we were forced into it, going along with the fantasy that you were guilty all along, is possibly the worst thing we’ve done in twenty years.’
Her mouth turned down, her head swayed from one side to the other; she was miming thinking about it.
‘But that’s it, Megan.’
Her eyebrows rose again.
‘This is where it ends,’ Xav went on. ‘I’m not giving into any of your cruel demands, and I don’t think the others will either. I’m not divorcing my wife. I love her. It took me a long time to find someone I loved, and possibly that was because of the promises I’d made to you and how I felt about you, but I found her and I’m not going to leave her. You and me are never going to happen.’
He saw her jaw clench as she swallowed; her eyes became a fraction shinier.
‘I’ll confess before I let you blackmail me,’ he went on. ‘I’ve been on the point of it all weekend anyway. Twice I put my shoes on to walk to the station.’
‘What stopped you?’ Her voice was cold as ice now; she’d show him no mercy.
‘I think I should give the others fair warning before I do,’ he told her. ‘But I will, make no mistake.’
‘So, you finally got your balls back,’ she said.
He deserved that.
‘Goodbye, Megan,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
As he opened the door and stepped out into the corridor, Megan uttered a sound that he couldn’t identify, halfway between a gasp and a cry. He didn’t look back.
41
Felix was already awake when the alarm on his phone sounded at three thirty on Monday morning. In the darkness he caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a younger face in the bathroom mirror. The coarsening of his skin, slacker jaw and the lines around his mouth had gone, leaving the face in front of him the one he remembered from his teen years – only with one big difference. The light had gone from his eyes.
His face, now, was that of an evil man. The mindless behaviour that ended three lives and ruined six others had been at his instigation. His idea, born on a late-night journey home in the passenger seat of his dad’s car, when, from nowhere, he’d pictured himself driving at speed into oncoming traffic. He’d been unable to get it out of his head, had introduced it into the group conversations, subtly at first so they were barely aware of what he was doing, but by the time he’d said, ‘Come on, let’s do it,’ they were primed and ready.
All his fault.
Sarah hadn’t moved as he crossed the bedroom. She slept on her back and a beam of light had fallen onto the side of her face. How easy it would be for him, an evil man, to drop a pillow onto her face and hold it down until she stopped fighting. He probably wouldn’t even feel remorse. He’d been struggling to feel anything since Megan had returned; it was like the evil inside him, kept in check for so long, had been unleashed by her sudden reappearance. Sarah’s face twitched, as though she’d sensed the danger hovering close.
Felix slipped soundlessly from the room. He wasn’t going to smother his wife, of course. Luke needed her, and besides, he had nothing against Sarah. Before Megan’s return, he’d felt something close to affection for her. Not love, of course; Felix had only ever loved one woman in his life, and she’d left it a long time ago.
Quietly, he climbed into Sarah’s car; his wife’s black, mostly silent, electric BMW was far more suited to his purpose than his own vehicle. Before turning on the engine, he checked his mobile phone, opening a recently installed app that he’d told no one about.
After discovering Megan’s trick with the photographs, he’d ordered a simple tracking device on the internet, the sort typically attached to lively dogs, and when he’d known Megan was in a meeting, he’d borrowed her car keys and slipped it under the spare wheel. It meant he knew exactly where she was twenty-four-seven, and right now she was tucked up at home in . . . actually, she wasn’t – her car was on Abingdon Road, about a mile from the city centre.
It didn’t matter, as long as she was nowhere near where he was heading.
He set off towards the motorway. Halfway there, his headlights caught the eyes of a fox at the roadside and the animal seemed to shrink into the undergrowth, as though instinctively avoiding him. When he was close to Echo Yard, the architectural salvage place where Megan’s father lived, he pulled over and parked beside a gated entrance to a field. It was two minutes to four in the morning; still time to change his mind.
Out of the car he stood listening for a moment, to the sound of a lorry heading up the M40 and the cry of an animal he couldn’t identify, and told himself he was stopping to think. If they’d done that twenty years ago, things could have been so very different. They might have changed their minds, driven back to Tal’s, got drunk and crashed out, and life would have gone on as planned. Except for Megan.
Felix had done enough thinking; he wasn’t going to change his mind.
From the boot, he took a small rucksack and an old university baseball bat. Pulling on gloves and a ski mask, he jogged a quarter of a mile down the road until he was directly outside the caravan where Megan’s father lived. From something Tal had told them previously, he knew there was a tree stump nearby that would get him over the fence.
The verge between fence and road had been neglected. The coarse grass was over a foot high and he had to stamp on a tangle of brambles. He was glad of the vegetation, though; it would keep him hidden.
Felix pulled the rucksack off his shoulders and rummaged around inside. The whistle he’d found on Amazon had a frequency of forty kilohertz, practically inaudible to humans but easily within the hearing range of dogs. Blowing it produced, to his ears, a quiet hissing sound, and he was rewarded by a yelp from the inside of the caravan.
He blew again.
The dog barked. Felix blew the whistle a third time and the barking turned into a frenzy as the animal began scrabbling against the caravan door. As his stomach twisted with nerves, Felix saw the door opening and the dog leap out. A male figure stood in the doorway.
Felix dropped to his knees and opened the rucksack again. He found the plastic bag, cold and squishy beneath his fingers, upended its contents and tossed the piece of meat through the fence. It landed directly in the path of the bounding German shepherd.
‘Duke, what’s up?’ Megan’s father called.
The dog, close enough to make Felix nervous in spite of the fence, emitted a low growl; but it had seen the meat.
‘Duke!’ called Megan’s fa
ther.
Torn between greed and duty, the dog remained where it was, eyeing up Felix, keeping his nose directly above the six-ounce piece of rib-eye steak. He growled; he licked the meat. Felix turned and crawled away. Knowing nothing about animal psychology, he figured removing himself from the scene might give the dog the victory it needed to give into temptation. A few feet from the road, he waited, knees and hands on damp ground. A nettle stung his wrist.
Megan’s dad called for the dog again. Felix heard the dog running and then the door of the caravan closing. Getting to his feet, he checked his watch.
The drugged meat would take fifteen to twenty minutes to work, taking him to around a quarter past four; Felix knew from reading every Lee Child book published that four o’clock in the morning is the time when the human body is at its lowest point, when sleep has its tightest grip. Attacks, invasions, ambushes are planned at zero four hundred hours for a reason.
At sixteen minutes after four, Felix climbed the fence and dropped down into the yard. He left his rucksack behind but kept a tight hold on the baseball bat. There was no trace of meat on the ground.
Not a sound could be heard from the caravan as he rapped quietly on the door. No response – from dog or human. Felix turned the handle and was unsurprised to find it unlocked; Megan’s dad thought himself safe, surrounded by a seven-foot-high metal fence and sleeping alongside a large dog.
The dog lay on the floor, out cold; the man was on a bunk at the far end of the caravan. Felix stepped over the dog.
‘Hey,’ he said, when he’d checked that he had plenty of room to swing. Then, ‘Hey!’ a little louder.
Megan’s dad sat bolt upright. ‘What the fuck—’
Felix didn’t let him finish. He swung fast and hard, and the bat made contact with the side of the other man’s head. Macdonald fell back and Felix struck again. A sound, something between a grunt and a moan came out of the other man’s mouth and he half fell off the bunk. His arms wrapped around his head, but he made no other move to defend himself.
Felix brought the bat down again, on the man’s shoulders this time, on his clenched hands, and thought he heard a bone snapping. On the caravan floor now, Macdonald curled himself into a foetal position. Short of breath, Felix grabbed hold of the collar of his victim’s T-shirt and dragged him across the floor to where he’d have more space. He kicked him, once, twice and then a third time where he judged his kidneys would be and then, when Macdonald uncurled, struck him once more across the face. A sickening crunch told him the man’s nose was broken.
On his way out of the caravan, Felix bent to check the dog. Assuming its weight to be around thirty-five kilos, he’d calculated the amount of ketamine needed to keep it unconscious for about an hour. Its chest was rising and falling more or less normally. He propped the door open, so that the dog could escape if Macdonald didn’t regain consciousness. He might be evil; he wasn’t a monster.
‘You’re welcome, Meg,’ he whispered to the wind, as he walked back to his car.
42
Felix got home, climbed back into bed without disturbing Sarah and, to his surprise, slept for several hours. His wife had to wake him, long after his alarm would normally have gone off, and he was running late when he arrived at the factory.
Climbing the stairs to his office, Felix braced himself to come face to face with Megan for the first time since Friday night. What he’d done to her dad made no difference. Beating up Macdonald had been an aberration, something entirely removed from the current situation. Hurting, maybe even killing, Megan’s dad had been something his eighteen-year-old self should have done. He owed it to her.
Didn’t mean she was getting half his company. And while he didn’t have any strong feelings about Amber’s kid, or Dan’s kidney, he wasn’t letting her go that far either. She might come for Luke next. No, the Megan problem hadn’t gone away and he hadn’t changed his mind about how he and the others should tackle it. He pulled open the door to the main office and got ready to face her.
She wasn’t at her desk.
He walked the length of the room, nodding to anyone who made eye contact, responding to those who wished him a good morning. Most of his employees, as usual, did not.
‘Megan not in yet?’ He’d reached her desk and could see no sign of anyone having worked at it that morning.
‘She’s on a week’s leave.’ His head of HR gave him the briefest of glances.
‘Since when?’
In a flash, the woman’s face became defensive. Jeez, could he not ask a simple question any more?
‘Since she filled in the form and put it on my desk,’ she told Felix. ‘I signed it off. She said she’d cleared it with you. Is there a problem?’
‘No, course not.’ He made himself walk on. ‘She probably did tell me and I forgot.’
Of course, it was a bloody problem – Felix pulled open his own door – and she sure as hell hadn’t told him. He pulled out his phone and opened the tracker app. She, or her car, was still on the Abingdon Road.
He was about to text the others but stopped himself after the first name came up. Talitha had warned them more than once against texting anything to do with Megan, even on the burner phones. Tal was an opinionated cow at times, but she was right on this.
Felix sank into his chair as another thought occurred to him. The police. Megan could have had a change of heart. She could be with the police even now. Except she wouldn’t have booked leave for that – what would be the point? No, she probably wasn’t with the police. Even so . . .
Feeling panic growing in his chest, he picked up the green-cased phone. Talitha wasn’t available, of course, because Talitha was never bloody available, and he wasn’t going to waste his time trying Amber. He left a message for Tal and tried Dan at school.
‘I haven’t got long,’ his friend said, when he answered. ‘I’m teaching in ten minutes.’
Did the bloke think he’d phoned to arrange a squash match? ‘Megan’s gone,’ he said. ‘She’s booked a week’s leave. Did you know anything about it?’
A slight pause. Then, ‘No. Has she told anyone where she’s going?’
‘No one in the office knows anything.’
Felix was on the point of telling Dan about the tracking device but held back. Frankly, he wasn’t sure which members of the group he trusted any more. He’d known about Megan’s visit to Xav’s the previous week, about her overnight stay, from the tracking app, but had Xav owned up about that? No, he bloody well hadn’t. Another reason he wasn’t sure he trusted Xav.
Dan said, ‘What’s she up to?’
‘Exactly what I asked myself. Do you know where she’s living now? Someone should pop round to her old bedsit, see if she’s still there.’
By someone, he meant Dan, of course; he was the closest.
Dan said. ‘I can go at lunchtime.’
Sooner would be good, but even Felix had to accept that the head of a school couldn’t simply walk away from the premises.
‘Soon as you can,’ he said. ‘This is something new. And she’s been planning it for a while.’
43
There was no sign of Megan at the bedsit. By pressing bell after bell on the communal intercom, Daniel eventually found what sounded like an elderly man willing to talk to him. The bloke didn’t know Megan by name but did refer to the murderess in room seven.
‘She’s gone,’ Dan made out over the crackling of the intercom. ‘No one wants her here.’
Booked leave without telling anyone and left her bedsit? Jesus, if Megan was going the extra mile to make them sweat, he really had to tell her it wasn’t necessary.
‘You all right, sir?’
Somehow, Daniel was back at school, by the bike racks, and two third-year boys were watching him, their faces a mix of concern and glee. He’d pulled off his jacket, a thing forbidden on school premises unt
il the usher declared that summer had arrived, even loosened his tie, and had been staring down at the tarmac. He had to pull himself together.
Attempting a joke about needing to work on his fitness, Daniel hurried upstairs and phoned Talitha. He caught her on her way out to a client lunch. ‘I was about to call you,’ she said, sounding out of breath. ‘Have you heard?’
He could hear the clipping of her high heels echoing along a tiled corridor. ‘Heard what?’ he asked.
‘Hang on a minute.’
In the background, a door closed.
‘It was on BBC Oxford an hour ago,’ Talitha went on. ‘Police are attending a salvage yard by junction seven of the M40. A man in his sixties has been badly beaten and left unconscious. The dog sounded the alarm first thing this morning. It has to be Megan’s dad.’
Unable to stay on his feet any longer, Daniel dropped into the chair behind his desk. Megan gone, now this.
‘That could explain why she’s not at work.’ He spoke slowly, trying to make sense of it in his own head. ‘She could be at the hospital.’
Talitha said, ‘What do you mean she’s not at work? Have you spoken to Felix?’
Even without his jacket, Daniel was too hot. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Megan booked a week’s leave without telling him. And she’s left her old bedsit.’
Talitha didn’t reply immediately and Daniel felt as though, if he opened his eyes, he would see the edges of the world melting away.
‘She’s more likely to be with the police than the hospital,’ Talitha said.
His eyes were open again; the world still as it was. ‘You think Megan beat up her dad?’ he said, as lurid pictures of Megan wielding a blood-stained cosh sprang into his head.
Talitha took her time. ‘Not really. Why ask me to get rid of him if she was planning to do it herself? Besides, Megan’s dad looked as though he could handle himself when I saw him.’