by S J Bolton
She’d be wanted for the rest of her life in connection with the deaths of Xav Attwood and Talitha Slater, but she hadn’t seemed fazed.
‘I know people,’ she’d told Felix, seconds before the two women had driven away. ‘I know how to vanish. And I have money, thanks to you guys.’ She’d smiled and touched the curve of his jaw in a gesture that might almost have been affectionate.
Felix let his hand stray to where she’d touched him. He could feel her fingers still.
Oh, Megan, of all the lives he could have lived, the one with you most haunts his dreams. You would have got over that childish crush on Xav, he would have made sure of it.
Felix took hold of Daniel’s body under the shoulders and dragged him out of the caravan. It was still a few minutes short of midnight.
Amber would resume her life as normal. In time, it was possible she’d rise to the cabinet once more. Felix wouldn’t bet on it though. He had a feeling Amber’s future would see more meetings of the PTA than Parliamentary Select Committees. Amber, he believed, would be spending a lot more time with her family.
His head was aching, and he could feel blood sticky in his hair. He still had a lot to do.
After the girls had driven away, he’d returned, briefly, to the factory and filled the boot of his car with sodium hydroxide powder and a loading trolley. He’d used the trolley to transfer the tubs to the roll-top bath tucked away behind the golden globe. Using a hose attached to the gargoyle shed, he’d half-filled the bath with water. He had a cast-iron sheet at the ready to keep the rain off.
All things considered, there were worse places to dispose of a body than an architectural salvage yard.
Daniel hadn’t been a heavy man, but his body was awkward to manoeuvre out of the caravan and across the yard all the same. Felix put his old friend face up in the bath, as though in a coffin, and crossed his hands over his chest. It seemed the least he could do.
When Felix had seen the red sunglasses in the evidence bag at the police station, everything had fallen into place. The sunglasses were Megan’s, but they’d never been returned to her after the lunch party at Talitha’s house. Daniel had kept them; Daniel had used them to frame Megan for Talitha’s murder.
Bubbles floated to the surface of the water as though Daniel were still breathing, but Felix was neither fooled nor spooked. He was a man of science. He knew Daniel was dead, and what he was doing now was entirely practical and necessary. Megan, though, had closed Daniel’s eyes and, foolish or not, Felix was glad of it.
His sports bag with the baseball bat went in the bath too, along with Dan’s various possessions. Then, one tub at a time, he poured in the sodium hydroxide powder. Daniel’s flesh began to sizzle as the compound ate away at his body’s proteins, and a flicker of steam drifted upwards as the water temperature rose. Putting the iron sheet over the tub to keep the worst of the rain off, Felix went back to the caravan. He’d already registered that the bottle of Scotch was intact.
Five hours later, when heavy cloud was holding back the dawn, Felix returned to the bathtub. Using industrial-strength gloves, he released the plug and let the thick crimson liquid drain away. The rain would clear all traces of it and if the grass around the tub’s base refused to grow for a season or two, well, who would give it much thought?
All that was left of Daniel was a shrunken and brittle skeleton; sodium hydroxide will not destroy bone. Felix scooped his old friend up, the bones crumbling and breaking as he moved them, and carried them in buckets to the back of the gargoyle shed where he’d dug a shallow trench. Once the bones were in the ground, it was easy to use Daniel’s own hammer to smash them to pieces. By the time he’d finished, the bones were unrecognisable as human. Felix turned over the earth a few times. Another couple of hours of rain and even someone venturing behind the shed wouldn’t spot anything unusual.
In the pocket of his jacket, Felix had the half-empty bottle of Scotch that had belonged to Gary Macdonald. It was untouched. The stopper fell to the ground and he smelled the familiar warm, peaty scent.
Upturning the bottle, Felix emptied its contents onto his old friend’s grave.
‘You can sleep now, mate,’ he said, and walked away.
Acknowledgements
Readers who know Oxford will quickly spot some physical resemblances between the fictional All Souls’ School and the real-life Magdalen College School, which my son, Hal, was privileged to attend for seven years, latterly as a senior prefect. The similarities, though, are entirely superficial.
MCS is a wonderful school, high-achieving, but with a strong moral code, staffed by exceptional teachers and attended by bright, talented, hard-working, funny and kind students. Being part of its community over the years has been a great pleasure.
The Pact is a work of fiction, derived entirely from my own imagination, inspired by no real-life events. To the best of my knowledge, every student and alumnus of MCS is a considerate and careful driver!
I’m grateful to Hal for making Felix’s knowledge of chemistry credible and to Dani Loughran of Aston Chemicals for giving him the work experience that made all the difference. Thanks also to my friend Lucy Stopford for helping me plan the Oxford locations, and my husband Andrew for being my first reader.
The talented triumvirate that is Sam Eades, Alex Layt and Lucy Cameron have been brilliant, as have all their colleagues at Trapeze and Orion. As always, my love and thanks to my agents: Anne Marie Doulton, Peter Buckman, Rosie Buckman and Jessica Buckman O’Connor.
Credits
Trapeze would like to thank everyone at Orion who worked on the publication of The Pact in the UK.
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Anne-Marie Doulton
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Sam Eades
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Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Trapeze
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London ec4y 0dz
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © Sharon Bolton 2021
The moral right of Sharon Bolton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
isbn (eBook) 978 1 4091 9833 8
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