The Suspects

by Katharine Johnson

  “This is fun,” said Stuart uncorking the wine like a benevolent host and looking more relaxed than he’d done in days. “We should make it a regular thing. I’ll cook next time. How about Friday?”

  He seemed to have forgotten the way he’d attacked Zak and none of us wanted to remind him, so we found ourselves agreeing. What he didn’t tell us was that he’d never cooked before. He borrowed a book from the library and swotted over it for most of the day before embarking on a complicated shopping mission after work.

  He spent ages peering at the instructions, following them to the letter despite my assurances that measurements didn’t have to be exact for a risotto. Like an old-fashioned housewife, he barricaded us out of the kitchen, refusing offers of help.

  Hours passed. Stomachs groaned. We tried to take our minds off our hunger by playing Trivial Pursuit, but it only half worked.

  “I can’t think of the answer,” Xanthe whined. “All I see is food. Even these wedges are making me think about cheese.”

  There were some half-empty bottles left over from the party which distracted us for a short time but when they were finished the hunger gnawed away even stronger.

  “Do you think he’d notice if we sneaked out to the chippy?” Zak whispered.

  “Sadly yes,” I said. “But perhaps if we create a distraction we might be able to sneak in and make a sandwich.”

  “Hmm, not sure I want to risk the Wrath of Stuart twice in a week,” he said, nursing his swollen lip.

  “I’ve got some chocolate in my room,” Xanthe said, but she barely made it out of the door before Stuart came out of the kitchen.

  “Won’t be long. Where are you going?”

  “Er - can I help?” she asked brightly.

  “Certainly not. Get back in the living room.”

  She came back wincing an apology.

  “Actually, I tell you what you could do,” he called out from the kitchen. “Open a bottle of red to let it breathe. There’s a nice bottle in the cellar I got given at the Bologna press launch. I hid it before the party. Far too good for riff raff.”

  She spun round on her heel. “Right you are.”

  Liquid food. It was something. Zak and I turned back to the game but I was so hungry I’d nearly lost interest - I had a stomach cramp and my head ached. Xanthe’s footsteps disappeared down the hall.

  A scream shattered the silence. Something clattered in the kitchen.

  Zak let out a low groan. “Noooo. He’ll have to start all over again.”

  “It’s coming from the basement,” I said. “Xanthe?”

  I expected to see a rat or spider or be treated to one of her ghost stories, but nothing could have prepared me for what lay at the bottom of the stone steps. It took my brain a little while to catch up with what my eyes had already taken in but yes, it was a human being.

  Chapter Five

  The small figure on the floor caught in the wavering beam of the torch Stuart grabbed from the hook by the door wore a familiar grey hoodie, through which his shoulder blades stood out like wings. His ratty face was turned away at an odd angle, but the angry red complexion he’d had was now grey, and his mouth curled up into a snarl revealing long, gappy teeth. Dried vomit crusted around his mouth. He was very still.

  “Shit.”

  “Jesus, the poor bastard.”

  Xanthe was standing with her hands clamped to her face, hyperventilating. “I nearly stood on him,” she whispered, covering her face.

  I couldn’t work out if the smell in there was the stench of death I’d heard people talk about or simply vomit and other excretions mixed with the basement’s awful mouldy reek. There was a dark stain under the body that I didn’t even want to think about.

  “It’s that bloke from the party,” said Stuart after a few moments. “The one who was looking for someone.”

  “Fitz,” I said, remembering.

  “Is he definitely dead?” asked Xanthe from behind her fingers.

  Zak snorted. “Looks pretty dead from where I’m standing.”

  He moved forward but Stuart shot out an arm. “Don’t. Not yet. Not until we’ve decided what to do. We have to stick together and agree how to handle this.”

  I swallowed. “Yes. We need to call a doctor.”

  “Bit late for that.”

  “No, I mean – doesn’t someone have to sign a death certificate? Take him away? The police then.”

  Stuart’s voice was quiet but firm. “No.”

  “No?”

  “Think about it. How’s it going to look? He died at our party. Probably fell down these steps in the dark because we hadn’t fixed the light.” Stuart’s voice shook, and he leant on the wall for support. “I kept saying we needed to do something about it. Or someone hit him. Or…” He lifted his head as another scenario presented itself. “Or he reacted badly to something he was given.”

  Zak backed away, shaking his head. “Don’t look at me.”

  “I am looking at you.”

  “Fuck off, I didn’t give him anything.”

  “No? Prove it then. Because believe me, if they do tests on his blood and find he’s taken something, and the police start asking around you’ll be the first person they want to talk to. Everyone knows what happened to Xanthe’s dog…”

  “What?” Xanthe’s face drained of colour. I held my breath.

  “What are you—?” she began. She looked from one to the other of us, her eyes huge and glistening.

  “Not now,” said Stuart. But apparently, he couldn’t stop himself adding, “Did you really believe it was a road accident?”

  Zak was looking at Stuart as though he’d like to kill him. “Thanks for that.” Turning to Xanthe he said, “I’m so sorry. I swear to God he was already dead. I didn’t…”

  “I hate you,” she whispered. She turned to me in horror. I sensed what was coming. “Emily did you know?”

  Stuart cut across her. “Can we just focus on what’s happening here?”

  I felt furious with both men at that moment. I couldn’t take my eyes off the body, still couldn’t believe it was happening. During the period when I’d had most of my fits I could sometimes sense them coming on and I’d try and get away somewhere quiet even though I knew it made me more vulnerable to injury. This could have been me – a group of strangers recoiling from my dead body, wondering how to dispose of it, my parents and sister never finding out, wondering for the rest of their lives if I’d really gone or if I was going to walk back through the door. I clamped my hand over my mouth as bile crept up.

  Xanthe’s breathing was forced and shallow. “Whatever happened, it’s not our fault. We didn’t do anything. We’ll explain to the police —”

  A tic moved at the side of Stuart’s face. He closed his eyes and whispered, “God, you’re stupid.”

  Zak moved and I thought he was going to hit Stuart. But instead we watched in silence as he walked down step by step. You could hear the creak of his shoes and the grit on the stairs crunching under them. He circled the body, knelt down beside it, shielding his nose and mouth, choking into his crooked arm. Gently, he went through the pockets under the wavering beam of Stuart’s torch while we watched from the stairs, peeling the shirt fabric out of the vomit crust with such care tears stabbed the back of my eyes.

  As he lifted the body an arm flopped out towards me. I jumped back with a scream. I was having trouble keeping my breathing steady. He pulled out a train ticket from Leeds and a door key. The train had the same date as the party and was an open return.

  “No wallet,” he said, frowning.

  “He had a backpack,” I remembered. “One with a smiley face on.”

  Shining the torch onto every inch of space we concluded that the backpack had vanished.

  “So, I’m thinking either someone killed him to get the backpack or found him dead and took it,” said Zak.

  We digested what this meant. Someone else from the party knew he was here. One of the people who we’d invited, who’d be
en drinking our booze and eating our crisps, had not only killed this man – or stolen from him – but they’d left the body here knowing we were the ones who’d end up as prime suspects. What sort of person would do that?

  “We’ve got to get him out of here,” Zak said.

  “No, we’ve got to call the police,” I argued. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with. If we don’t tell them and they come looking for him…”

  “Why should they?” asked Stuart. His voice sounded far away. “There’s nothing to link him to us. We didn’t know him. He didn’t know us. He was at the wrong address, looking for this Fitz who none of us knows.”

  “Perhaps he found him – or her,” said Zak. “And this is the result.”

  My stomach was roiling. To think of someone committing murder while we were upstairs dancing and fooling about, Stuart slumped on my shoulder wasting his breath shouting his stupid story into my ear, Zak being chatted up by the German girl and Xanthe high as a kite in the arms of someone’s friend’s brother while Imogen and her boyfriend were doing their frenzied dancing. None of it seemed real.

  “But for God’s sake hundreds of people saw him here in this house.” I could feel the hysteria rising in my voice. “Someone will remember him, and the police will come here, and I don’t know what you get for disposing of a body but I’m pretty sure…”

  I looked round for support. If Imogen had been there she’d have backed me up, but she’d gone up to London to a concert with Rick, and Xanthe was in her own world, still reeling over what had happened to her dog.

  “This is mad. What about his family? Surely they deserve to know what happened to him?”

  “Will you shut up?” Stuart demanded in a stage whisper, grabbing my shoulders. “The neighbours don’t need any encouragement to dob us in to the police. There’s nothing they’d like more than to see us carted away.”

  Suddenly the spoof burial we’d carried out in front of their eyes didn’t seem so funny after all. I was shivering so violently now I thought I might have a seizure.

  “We can’t risk him being found here,” he said more gently. I flinched as he laid his hand on my arm. “You might be prepared to take the chance but I’m not. In case you’ve forgotten, I know what the police are really like.”

  The others looked at him and then at me, but he didn’t elaborate, and I couldn’t.

  My head swam. “I’m sorry, can we talk about this upstairs? I keep thinking that door’s going to swing closed and…”

  I had visions of being trapped down there with the corpse, unable to open the top or bottom door, trying and failing to devise ways of getting out of there and Imogen coming back from London but not having any need to look in the basement for ages when she’d find five bodies down there instead of one.

  We bolted up the steps. Xanthe locked the door, which took forever because her fingers were trembling so much. A hissing sound sent Stuart running into the kitchen to rescue the charred onions.

  “I’m guessing nobody’s hungry anymore?” he called over his shoulder.

  “I’ll make some tea,” said Xanthe.

  Ignoring Zak’s “Yeh, tea – that’ll solve everything,” she went into the kitchen and we followed.

  The light in the room seemed harsher than usual. The windows were steamed up from Stuart’s culinary efforts and there was an acrid smell of blackened onions and dry-boiled rice. I switched off the rings. I suppose we were lucky not to have burned the house down but I didn’t feel lucky. The clock on the oven said nine-forty-five.

  Xanthe opened the window to release the smell. Stuart shoved her out of the way and hauled it closed. “Do you want the whole world to hear what we’re saying?”

  Zak fell into a chair, rubbed his hands over his face, then pulled them backwards and forwards through his hair. “Fucking fuck-faced fuck, why did this have to happen to us? Whatever we do we need to decide fast.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table. “The longer he’s here the more chance there is of the police being tipped off and coming round. Even if they don’t, he’ll decompose and pretty soon the neighbours will get suspicious. I mean the Parkers were suspicious of us before this. So, do we tell the authorities or pretend he was never here?”

  We waited for the kettle to roar. Xanthe poured hot water into the mugs and slopped a teabag from one to another, an economy measure that Stuart insisted on. She made the usual mess on the counter and down the front of the units but for once he didn’t say anything. My arm was shaking so much I spilled half my tea down my top, but it seemed such a pointless thing to fuss about just then.

  “Okay,” said Zak, stretching out his fingers and studying them. “Dream scenario is that the police come, agree it was an accident, take away the body and apart from a small piece in the local paper about someone dying at a party in Bristol there’s no publicity.”

  Xanthe started to interrupt but he held up his hand. “Nightmare scenario is that the police come, get suspicious, take us all in for questioning, take statements from everyone who was at the party, question our employers, our friends, our neighbours, inform the press – and we get done for keeping the body hidden in the cellar for a week anyway.”

  “But we weren’t hiding the body,” I objected. “We didn’t know it was there.”

  “Yes, but are they going to believe that? They might not be able to get a conviction for murder or even manslaughter, but our careers would be wrecked, we’d lose the house, then there’s the effect on our families…This is fucking shit.”

  “We can’t afford to take time out if it goes to trial,” said Xanthe. “We can barely pay the mortgage as it is.”

  My head pounded as I thought of the reaction in the company. They’d thrown a reporter out a few weeks before for forgetting to pay for his petrol. Reputation was everything to them. They were hardly likely to give us a second chance after this.

  Zak pressed his knuckles into his temples. The fridge hummed. The puerile messages spelled out in magnets on the front seemed to have been put there by a different set of people in a different lifetime.

  “Stuart’s right, it doesn’t look good,” he said at last, wiping his face on his sleeve.

  “And wake up, Emily – do you think PC Plod and his chums are going to take our word for it? They’re probably on bonuses – nothing they’d like more than to take down some journos. Have you ever been to a football match? Seen how they treat people at demos? At Orgreave they were bludgeoning people who were on the ground. Or even walking away. When they raided the sect one of them dragged a disabled woman out by her hair.”

  “Sect?” I asked, distracted.

  He shook his head like it was perfectly normal. “Where I grew up.”

  Questions flew around my head, but I shelved them for later.

  “He’s right,” said Xanthe. “You can’t expect the police to be on your side. You should have heard the things they said to me when I reported something bad that happened in the foster-home. They laughed. Called me a liar, called me names – made me feel worse than I did before.”

  “But not all police are like that,” I said. And yet at the same time I was reliving the lecture I got from the officer back home after the firework throwing incident. It had made me feel so small and stupid and frightened. And they’d been wrong then, too.

  He’d made it clear he would like to have taken it further and it was only the boy’s parents’ – in his opinion misguided - generosity of spirit that stood between me and criminal proceedings.

  How much worse would it be now that I was an adult, trying to explain away a dead body in my possession? I was impressionable, always had been. If someone accused me of borrowing or breaking something, I’d always get a clear mental image of doing just that while I was denying it, which made me act guilty even if I wasn’t. I couldn’t see myself coming off well in an interrogation.

  “Not only that,” said Stuart, “but we’ve all been in contact with the backpack chap. We’ll all have left a trace. Th
ey’ll find the evidence they want and make it fit.”

  I caught Stuart staring at me, daring me to object. I thought about his secret and the way he’d flown at Zak the other day, the damage he’d done to Zak’s face in those few short seconds and wondered how he’d react to not getting his way now.

  “You have no idea what it’s like Inside,” said Stuart. The others probably thought he was talking about things he’d heard or read about but I noticed him shudder at some recollection. “The whole dehumanising horror.”

  I thought about the body in the cellar below us ticking away like a timebomb. The longer we left it the grislier the task would be. There was murmured assent around the table.

  “We have to agree on this,” Zak was saying. “Whatever we do we have to stick together and see it through. Otherwise we’ll all end up with a police record or worse still behind bars.”

  “Emily?” said Stuart.

  Three pairs of eyes looked at me expectantly. I pressed my hands to my head. Tension roared in my ears. I wished it would all just go away. Backpack Man meant nothing to us. He should never have been at the party. What did we owe him? Nothing. And yet he had the power to destroy our lives. Indignant anger swept through me. How dare he muck up everything I’d worked so hard for?

  “I suppose so,” I said at last.

  “But what are we going to do with him?” asked Xanthe in a small voice. “The Parkers will definitely get suspicious if we start digging up the garden. Again. She’s onto us if we just nip to the shops for some booze.” She closed her eyes.

  “Who said anything about digging up the garden?” said Zak.

  “What then?”

  “We take…” He froze as we heard footsteps and laughter in the street outside. A group of young people enjoying themselves. It could have been us on any other night. We waited for the noise to die away.

  “We take him away from here and make it look like a suicide.”