Not the most detailed plan, but this thing had been sprung on us and we weren’t in the habit of plotting ways to get rid of bodies. Now I think perhaps everyone should have a contingency plan because you never know when it might happen to you. We were all quiet, thinking about it.
“We’ll need a car,” Zak said. “He’s too heavy and awkward to carry far.”
But we’d have to get him into the car somehow. I couldn’t bear the thought of touching the body. I kept thinking about things I’d read – bodies on the battlefield falling apart as they were picked up.
Stuart and Xanthe were the only ones with cars and Dollie, Xanthe’s 2CV, was barely capable of getting across town. If a trip involved a hill she’d have to circle round it – and that was without a body in the back. The driver’s door had been held together with gaffa tape since she opened it without paying attention while trying to get a jammed cassette out during the middle of an anecdote and the door had been ripped off by passing traffic.
Her car also had a tiny boot and the thought of having to hack off limbs in order to origami the body in was too horrendous to contemplate – not to mention hardly fitting the appearance of suicide.
Stuart scraped his chair back. “No way, not mine. I’m not risking getting the blame for everything this time. If I’m going down, you lot are coming with me.”
Zak fumbled for his cigarettes. “For God’s sake, you’ve never been down anywhere. And have you got a better plan?”
Stuart sank his head into his hands. The Capri might have been an ugly orange rust bucket but I knew how much it meant to him. It was the only possession he really cared about and there was no way he’d be able to afford another car now we were stuck with an ever-increasing mortgage, the cost of a new boiler and an ever-mounting pile of bills. That legacy from his grandpa had been swallowed up, largely because of his generosity in helping Xanthe out as well as paying his own bills. The car was all he had left.
The hand on the clock clicked forward several times.
“All right,” he said at last. “Two of you take the car. Don’t bring it back and don’t tell me what you’ve done with it. I’ll report it stolen tomorrow morning. The other person needs to stay and help me clean up. We’re in this together, all equally culpable.”
“I can’t drive,” I said. I didn’t add that I’d never learnt because of my fits. It didn’t seem like the right time to get into all that.
Silence hung between us. Zak took a long draw on the cigarette, ground it out in his empty mug and said, “Fine, okay, I’ll do it.”
He turned to me and he suddenly looked so young and vulnerable. “Come with me?”
I felt like someone had driven a stake through me. It wasn’t fair to leave him to do this alone and yet I was terrified. If we were caught…
“It would give us a better chance of success,” Stuart said. “A couple will attract much less attention than a young man driving on his own in the dark. Especially, no offence but,” he squeezed Zak’s shoulder, “one with your colouring.”
Xanthe’s eyes on me were huge, round and unblinking. I was never sure what to expect with her. As useless as I knew myself to be, I felt Xanthe would be even more likely to freak out and do something daft – especially with the level of hatred she was feeling for Zak at that moment, now she’d found out about her dog. I put my head in my hands. I don’t know how long for, but I suddenly became aware of the stillness as they waited for an answer. I shrugged and nodded. What else could I do?
We waited another hour, then another. It was one thing having the idea – quite another doing it for real. Eventually, having discussed all manner of scenarios and solutions, the other three located the key to the external door and hoisted the body up the cellar stairs while I scraped the car windows except for the boot. It took them ages and it was such a cold night the ice was packed hard and refroze as fast as I scraped.
I was shivering so violently I dropped the scraper more than once and had to scrabble for it in the dark. A rosy glow emanated from the bedroom window next door and I kept thinking someone was watching us but whenever I looked up there was no sign of movement.
The boys walked to the car with the backpack man draped around Zak’s shoulders like a drunk, whispering instructions to each other and doing the occasional forced laugh to make the whole thing look like typical weekend behaviour. The breath of two men froze in the air.
I lifted the boot as quietly as I could. The car was parked side-on so with the boot up our actions were shielded from the Nosy Parkers’ house on our right and the one on our left was empty but there was still the very real likelihood of passers-by hearing us through the hedge.
We stood in a huddle around the car while Stuart wrestled the corpse into the boot. It wasn’t easy – a tight fit – and involved a lot of grunting, panting and swearing. I heard the crack of a bone breaking and had to run back into the house to be sick.
Xanthe was standing in the hallway when I came out of the bathroom. Her eyes looked like huge hollows in her white face.
“Is this really happening?” she asked.
“I suppose it must be.”
She pulled me into a fierce hug and whispered, “Be careful, won’t you? Don’t do anything unless you’re absolutely sure no one can see. And make sure Zak doesn’t do anything stupid.”
I clung to her skinny body for what seemed like a long time. The truth sank in – that this could be the last time we’d see each other. If only I could persuade her we shouldn’t be doing this and that the two of us should just walk away but in the end I knew it was useless. She’d had trouble from the police when she was living in the squat and found them no help at all when she’d reported abuse while she was in care. She wouldn’t trust them any more than she trusted Zak but oddly she seemed to trust me which I found strangely touching and terrifying.
When I came back out into the darkness I could just make out the orange glow of a cigarette in Zak’s hand. “Let’s go,” he muttered, tossing it to the ground and grinding it underfoot.
My legs felt like concrete. I was surprised I was even able to walk. The whole thing felt like a ghastly dream. Mechanically, I opened the passenger door and climbed in. This could only happen to me, I kept telling myself. My life couldn’t have taken a more bizarre turn. I was in a car with the man I was in love with – and a corpse.
“So where shall we go?” Zak’s voice sounded unnaturally loud as though he was suggesting a day out.
“The gorge?” I suggested.
He nodded as though it was where he’d had in mind too. Clifton Suspension Bridge was the obvious place for suicides but far too public for staging one. There were however lots of dark crevices and steep drops around Avon Gorge, clumps of bushes for concealment and at least one point where the netting put up to prevent falling rocks had broken.
We tried the area around Sea Walls but just as we found an ideal location we spotted a car already parked by the trees.
“Shit,” Zak whispered.
The car was rocking, and its windows were steamed up so there was a chance the occupants would be too busy to notice us, but it was too big a chance to take. We tried another place near the Observatory. The same thing happened only this time there were several other cars.
“Fuck.” Zak’s head thumped against the windscreen. “Don’t any Bristolians do it in their own beds?”
“We could try later?” I whispered.
He shook his head. “We can’t keep cruising round. Someone will see us and think we get our kicks from watching.”
“So where do we go?”
He looked straight ahead. “Away. As far as we dare before it gets light.”
It was the last thing I wanted to hear. I was desperate to get rid of the body as soon as we had the chance, so we could put the whole thing behind us and pretend it had never happened, but I had to accept the chances of abandoning it around the gorge or parks of Bristol without being seen were now pretty slim.
The roads g
littered with frost. The city lights were dazzling and disorientating against the dark night as we left the Downs behind and descended the steep hill back into town. We passed all the places that had become part of our lives – the bus stop, the curry house, the Spud U like, the laundry. I thought about the people in the houses we passed living their lives, washing the dishes, curled up together on the sofa in front of The Late Show, putting the bins out, sleeping, checking on their children, making love.
Everything appeared in sharper clarity than usual. I noticed pointless details like carved figures over doorways; the pattern on a stained-glass panel, a couple hanging out of a window smoking, a pair of shoes left out on a step.
We filled up with petrol on the outskirts of town and each took out as much money as the hole-in-the-wall would allow. We didn’t talk about it, just did it. Zak bought a bottle of whisky. I hoped he wasn’t planning to drink himself into oblivion while he was at the wheel, but he placed it in the glove compartment. Neither of us spoke for a long time. I could hear Zak’s breathing, watched the windscreen cloud. He wiped a circle with his gloved hand.
I reached out to turn the heating on but he caught my arm.
“Don’t.”
“Just to clear the windows.”
“No. The last thing we want is him heating up.” He jerked his head back as though I might have forgotten who he was referring to. My legs felt like they were made of ice. I stretched my skirt over my knees clad in opaque tights, but it kept springing back. I wished I’d changed into jeans and a chunky jumper, but sartorial matters hadn’t been uppermost in my mind when I’d left the house.
After a while the silence between us was unbearable. Zak shoved in a CD but after a few Enya songs muttered, “Christ, what is this shite?” and fiddled with the radio until he found something he liked. I wish he hadn’t because I can never hear songs like Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car without being back on that road knowing what we were about to do.
The speedometer lurched to the right as we joined the motorway. Dark shapes of trees and buildings flickered past. The lights on the opposite carriage swarmed towards us like searchlights.
“What year?” he asked when a song by Squeeze came on.
I looked at him.
He looked down at the wheel. “Sorry. I’m just trying…”
He was right – we’d go crazy just sitting and thinking about what we were doing.
“I know, yes. Sorry. Um, no – can’t think straight. Nineteen seventy-six? Seventy-seven?” I said at last, trying to stop my teeth from chattering.
He frowned. “I was thinking a bit later.”
We raced to guess the songs by their intro and sang on when we went through tunnels, so we could try and hit the right word when the sound came back. But the singing and the guessing were subdued. I panicked every time a car drew up close to us or we saw a police car. It seemed like everywhere people were leering in through the windows. Lights were too bright, other cars were accidents waiting to happen. Zak must be over the limit. We’d drunk a couple of bottles of wine between us while trying to stave off our hunger while Stuart was cooking. Funny how that desperation to eat had seemed so real. Now so trivial. My stomach was knotted so hard I didn’t feel as though I’d ever want to eat again.
“Are you all right?” he asked after a while.
I almost laughed. “Been better.”
He nodded and said quietly, “It’s shit, isn’t it?”
“Do you think this is going to work?”
After a long pause he said, “Honestly? No idea.”
I looked out into the night. “If we get caught do you think the others will stick with us?”
He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Would you?”
I imagined Stuart and Xanthe staring blank-faced at the police, denying any knowledge of anything and appearing shocked to discover there’d been a body in the car their housemates had taken. But we who were driving the car with the body in it were surely never going to get away with protesting our ignorance. Fear sat like a stone in my stomach. I just kept praying to something to get me out of there, make it all stop.
He squeezed my hand. “We’ll get it right.”
Fields of darkness spread out around us. I wished we could go back but we were on this road now and Macbeth’s argument came into my head about returning being as risky as carrying on. Riskier even. It had been bad enough getting the body into the car in front of the neighbours. How much harder would it be to try and get it back into the house? And what would we do with it then?
Nobody had walked down the road as we were getting him into the car. We couldn’t hope to be that lucky twice. And we could hardly leave it in Stuart’s car, taking it to and from work as if it was a perfectly normal thing to drive around with a body in the boot. I had to fight off an unhelpful cartoon image of the car being pursued by dogs everywhere we went.
I was so cold I’d lost all feeling in my legs and my lips were so stiff I couldn’t talk properly. Road signs came and went and each time I wondered if the name would be significant. We hit traffic around Taunton but after that the road was clear.
An hour passed and then another.
In the middle of nowhere Zak pulled over. “Sorry, got to pee.”
“What? Where? You can’t leave me here. With that.”
He raised his brows. “Want to come?”
“I’ve had better offers. Didn’t you go before we left?”
He gave an incredulous laugh. “Strangely I had other things on my mind.”
“Can’t we stop at the next services?”
“Who says there’ll be any? I won’t be a minute.”
I’ve never felt more alone than sitting there watching his figure being swallowed up by the darkness. At first the silence roared. Then the rain started, drops spattering onto the windscreen like machine gun fire. Was he ever coming back?
A knocking. My blood froze. I was getting horrible flashbacks of an urban myth that had gone around our school about a woman turning round and seeing a crazy man banging her husband’s decapitated head on the car.
Surely I must have misheard. But no, there it was again. For God’s sake he wasn’t dead at all! He was awake and banging on the boot to be let out. A part of me wanted to punch the air - and a part was too terrified to contemplate what he’d do to us when he got free. And who he’d tell…
At the corner of my eye something moved. My heart exploded as I snapped my head round. A luminous jacket flashed past the rain-streaked window, then a face appeared. I screamed. No sound came out.
“Can you open the window please, madam?”
Heart lurching, barely able to breathe, I leaned across and fumbled with the catch. All the time I was looking desperately for Zak.
“Are you all right?” asked the police officer as he shone his torch in.
Trying to control my trembling I forced a smile and assured him I was fine.
He poked his head inside the car. I drew back.
“We thought you’d broken down.”
“Oh. No. My friend had to – you know, he needed the bathroom.” I could hear myself jabbering.
He frowned. “The hard shoulder’s not for parking.”
“Sorry. I’ll tell him.”
The officer took a few steps away and spoke into his phone. This was bad. If one thing led to another and he asked to look inside the boot I couldn’t think of a single plausible explanation. Yes, I’d try and feign surprise but given the way I was behaving I didn’t stand a chance of convincing him.
I stared at the place where Zak had disappeared. Where had he got to? Was it possible he’d seen the police car and legged it?
“Going far?” asked the policeman popping his face in at the window again.
I gave the name of a place I’d seen on a road sign.
“That’s nice. Visiting for the weekend? Made an early start, haven’t you? Where are coming from?”
What was this? Despite the cold, I felt a bead of sweat run down my face. W
hy were we having this casual conversation? Didn’t he have more important things to do? Or was he working up to the real question?
I mumbled something about a friend’s birthday.
He moved round to the back of the car, his feet crunching on the asphalt. I counted the steps towards the boot. My breath was coming in juddery gasps. All I could do was wait for him to spring the catch.
Then out of the darkness walked Zak. He stood haloed in the headlamps and I read his expression. The police hadn’t seen him yet. He had a chance. He could melt back into the darkness, run into the trees and afterwards deny he’d ever been in the car with me. Join the others back home and they’d all say they knew nothing about a body in the house. It must have been Emily.
Zak seemed to be thinking about it for a long time but slowly, trance like, he walked up towards the car. “Everything okay?” he asked the officer casually, but I could hear the catch in his voice.
“Are you the owner of this vehicle, sir?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Stuart Mountford.”
“Can I see your licence please?”
I heard Zak mumble something about it being at home.
“Do you have your insurance details?”
“Not on me either, I’m afraid.”
“You’d be able to produce them though at your nearest police station?”
“Yes of course.”
I couldn’t hear the rest of the questions and answers because they were turned away from me and the wind was buffeting the car.
“One of your rear lights isn’t working, Mr Mountford,” the officer said, turning back again. He pointed out the offender. They were standing inches away from the body.
Zak bent down and examined it. “See what you mean, officer. I’ll get it fixed.”
“You certainly will and at the first opportunity. Do you realise how dangerous it is to drive without a light? It means cars behind can’t tell if you’re slowing down. If you had to brake suddenly someone could easily smash into the back of you. You could end up causing a serious accident or even death. Think how you’d feel about that.”
The Suspects Page 6