“It’s a bugger about Stuart’s car being nicked,” Imogen was saying as she spread butter on her toast. She picked up a piece and crunched. “Still, they’ll probably find it. They can trace number plates in seconds these days, can’t they?”
My stomach burned as I met Xanthe’s eyes. “Guess so,” I said. I felt too sick to eat.
“Zak’s gone out on his bike,” Imogen continued. “He’s acting really weird today.”
“Is he?” I busied myself choosing a mug.
“Haven’t you seen him? I thought I saw him coming out of your room earlier.”
I shrugged but I was too battered by recent events to put up a fight. Her sandy brows shot up.
“Seriously? You and Zak?”
“Yes. No. Maybe - I don’t know.”
Stuart was busy in the basement finishing off the floor. Xanthe and I spent the day curled up on the sofa watching children’s television programmes, trying to cocoon ourselves in a happy, make-believe world and not allow ourselves to think about the car being discovered or police examining the tyre tracks on a Cornish cliff or a body being washed up alongside the surfers. A few times, I thought I heard Zak coming back but it turned out to be the wind rattling the door.
***
By midnight Zak still wasn’t back. The next morning, I thought he might have gone straight in to work from wherever he’d been. The rest of us travelled in Xanthe’s tiny car and when we got there I heard someone saying Zak had rung in sick. Walking back into the office, I felt as though I’d aged twenty years. It was like waking up from a dream and having to readjust your eyes to assure yourself that everything was still the same.
One or two people mentioned the New Year’s party, saying they’d had a good time or conjecturing about who had got off with whom, but there had been other parties that weekend and the conversation moved on to future events and plans for the week ahead. And yet one of these people hunched over their typewriters or sitting back and speaking into their phones or gathered in small groups discussing circulation figures or page proofs – any of them who’d been at our party – might be the killer. It made me suspicious of everyone I spoke to. I found myself watching for signs of them watching me. How could they live with themselves, knowing what they’d done, knowing what we’d discover, wondering what we planned to do?
Halfway through the morning Stuart accosted me by the fax machine.
“Where did Zak go?” he whispered. “What the hell’s going on?”
“No idea.”
“He didn’t say anything to you? What if he’s gone to the police?”
He wiped sweat off his face. He was having trouble breathing.
I touched his arm. “He wouldn’t. Let’s talk about it later. We can’t here.”
But of course it made it almost impossible to concentrate.
“Did you actually read this proof?” my editor demanded. “Because this here,” he jabbed at it with a Tipp-Ex-encrusted finger, “isn’t a word that I’ve ever heard of. There’s a whole paragraph repeated here,” another jab, “and the piece ends mid-sentence. How can you not have noticed?”
The veins at the side of his head bulged as he spoke. I took it back off him. I could hardly blame him for still thinking a few errors on a piece of paper were worth risking a heart attack over. It was a piece about a man being banned from a public swimming pool because he was HIV positive and a study into a drug that could potentially slow the disease. Interesting and important, and yet nothing on the page was familiar although I’d been staring at it for the best part of an hour and had put my initials at the top to show I’d read it.
I knew Zak wouldn’t have gone to the police, but I could imagine him making a getaway, putting as much distance as he could between him and the body. Which left me as the only traceable person who’d been in the car with the corpse. I felt horribly alone.
“Tell me it’s not true,” whispered Stuart when we met in the corridor on the coffee run later.
“What isn’t?” Was he referring to the body in the basement, the way we’d got rid of it, the lies we’d told the police? It was hard to keep up these days.
“Are you sleeping with him? Zak?”
It seemed such a pointless and trivial thing to ask in the grand scheme of things.
“That’s a rather personal question.”
His eyes flashed with triumph. “I knew it. I knew something was going on between you.”
I pressed the button for black coffee and watched it pour into a cup. He didn’t walk away, just stood there breathing too loudly.
“Look Stuart, nothing’s going on. Nothing that concerns you anyway.”
Surely, he wasn’t going to bring up the no-dating among housemates agreement? Our lives had moved on so fast now the idea seemed quaint.
He put a hand on the machine and leant on it. “But that’s just it, isn’t it? It concerns me very much. There I was thinking we were four individuals. Now I see you two have been secretly a couple. It alters the balance of things.”
He stopped as the guy from Carpets who looked like Jason Donovan came up behind us. “Jason” seemed in a hurry and was obviously relieved when we suggested he go ahead of us as we were each getting in a round.
“You must know where he is,” said Stuart as the man from Carpets walked away, clutching his coffee. “Are you going to join him? Is that part of your plan?”
I pressed the machine again, this time for white without sugar. “There is no plan. I don’t know where he is and we’re not a couple. Has it even occurred to you something might have happened to him?”
To be honest it hadn’t really occurred to me until that moment. I’d been so confused and annoyed with Zak for doing a runner without telling me but now I was thinking, what if he’d been so preoccupied by everything that had happened that he’d overshot a bend or pulled out in front of a lorry or taken an overdose?
Stuart pressed the hot chocolate button before I’d had a chance to remove the last coffee cup and dark, smelly mocha fountained up and dribbled down the machine.
“Stop. Stop!” he shouted, realising his mistake. He started kicking and thumping the machine. I was afraid he’d damage it. The last thing we needed was to attract attention to ourselves. One of the ladies from Reception came clucking over and told us off for making a mess. She fetched a wodge of paper towels from the loos and oversaw us cleaning it up and I took the opportunity to leave with her so he couldn’t ask any more questions.
***
Four days passed. I was living on a knife edge. On the Wednesday night voices on the stairs ripped me out of my sleep. For a moment I panicked thinking it was a police raid but as I came to, I recognised Stuart’s headmasterly tone followed by Zak’s Dublin drawl.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Look, I had to get away. Clear my head.”
“Where did you go?”
There was a pause before Zak answered, “What’s it got to do with you?”
“Everything. We didn’t know if you were planning to come back. We’re paying a mortgage together in case you’d forgotten. For God’s sake we didn’t…” He whispered the next bit so all I could hear were staccato sibilants. I could imagine his hands cutting through the air and a bit of spit flying.
Zak whispered something in return. Then he said, “Can I get past?”
“No.”
Another pause and Zak’s voice took on a harder note. “Sorry, who do you think you are? You can’t tell me when to come and go. You’ve got issues, do you know that?”
Stuart’s voice trembled as he said, “Don’t you think you at least owe Emily an explanation?”
A wave of heat rushed over me. This was excruciating. It sounded like I’d been crying on Stuart’s shoulder and declaring my feelings for Zak which by now were very confused anyway. The last thing I wanted was for Zak to think I was bothered by his disappearance.
“What’s Emily got to do with anything?”
“Oh, let’s see now, l
et’s suppose you spent the night in her bed just before you ran off.”
There was a long silence before I heard, “Is she okay?”
“What do you think?”
Zak’s voice tightened. “I think I don’t need your advice.”
“Oh, I think you do.” And then it all came out. “I cannot believe that you would use an occasion like that to get your leg over. Did you get some sort of sick thrill out of…?” The next bit was whispered but must have referred to dumping a body. “Did it turn you on? Did you feel you had to celebrate?”
Zak’s voice rose. “Get out of my fucking way.”
There was a scuffle, a couple of thumps and an alarming creak. I pictured Stuart forcing Zak back against the rickety banister until he was leaning over the edge.
I jumped out of bed. I got halfway across the room when Imogen’s door opened on the second floor above me. The landing shook as she stomped to the top of the stairs.
“What the hell is wrong with you two? Pack it in. Some of us are trying to get some sleep. I’ve got to be up at a crazy hour for a product launch in Stoke.”
“Ask him,” said Zak, getting his breath back.
But I heard Stuart going down to his room and Zak going towards his. I thought I heard his feet pause outside my room, but he didn’t knock. Moments later his door clunked shut.
***
“Stuart had a point,” Imogen said the next morning before running to catch her train. “What if Zak doesn’t come back next time? If he buggers off and doesn’t pay his way we’re all going to have to cover his share or get repossessed.”
“It was only a few days,” I pointed out.
“Yes, well you’re not thinking very sensibly at the moment, Emily,” she said, and I couldn’t really think of an answer to that.
Eventually Zak agreed to let us know if he was going to take off again for longer than a weekend although he muttered something again about how he hadn’t expected to feel as if he was living in a police state when he was in his own home. Over the next few weeks we tried to function as we’d always done. It was a relief when Imogen was around because there was no possibility of someone raising their latest concern:
You didn’t take off his clothes? Tell me you didn’t pay for the petrol by card? Did you look out for cameras? What did you do about the tyre tracks?
Sometimes we told the truth, sometimes we lied because it was easier. Sometimes we genuinely couldn’t remember. On more than one occasion Zak lost it with Stuart.
“But you didn’t take off his clothes?” Stuart asked yet another time.
“Of course we fucking didn’t. What weirdo takes their clothes off before they throw themselves off a cliff? In case you’ve forgotten it was your idea in the first place and I don’t recall you volunteering to strip him down at the time.”
Stuart made us rehearse our stories over and over. “Tell me again, from the beginning. What time did you leave here to go to London? How did you get there? Why did you only get singles back? Where did you stay and with whom? No, that’s not good enough. You’re sounding glib now, Emily.”
If we stumbled or gave conflicting answers or even answered too easily he brought his fist down on the sofa. “You’ve got to think this through. You have to give exactly the same story. Be a hundred per cent sure of what the other person is saying. They’ll try to imply other things. Trip you up. Confuse you so they can divide and rule. Don’t fall into the trap. You need to be absolutely sure of what the other person will have said and don’t let anyone fool you otherwise.”
Of course, we had to carry on with normal things like going to work, doing the food shopping and putting up shelves. We went to someone’s birthday bash and the leaving drinks for someone from Accounts. Went to press launches, saw a local band down at the harbour pub and The Unbearable Lightness of Being at the waterfront cinema.
Without Stuart’s car we had to rely on Xanthe’s 2CV which wasn’t a comfortable ride for four people and would be even worse with five on a wet day when Zak’s bike refused to start. Imogen kept insisting Stuart should put in an insurance claim for his car despite the fact he kept telling her it would be a waste of time. I wished she’d stop bringing it up. I could see his facial muscles tense a bit more each time.
That wet Thursday morning after Zak came back from his travels Stuart was concertinaed into the front seat and the rest of us were squeezed onto Dollie’s back seat. We were halfway to the office when the engine gave out. Xanthe hunched over the wheel and wailed, “Now what?”
Stuart looked across at the petrol gauge. “When did you last fill this car up?”
We ended up pushing Dollie to the garage, arriving at work late, aching and dishevelled – just what we didn’t need when we’d hope to stay under the radar.
But the strange thing about the office was that even after something so horrendous had happened it took you over. We had pages to fill, press releases to sub, people to interview. The phone trilled, typewriters clattered, page proofs landed on your desk. Life carried on.
I felt as though I’d been split in two. There was a life in which we were still young, hopeful trainees embarking on our journalism careers and another life in which we’d conspired to conceal a death and rob a family of its chance to grieve. I grasped any opportunity to be busy and I welcomed the tedium of writing product news and churning out stories about the Channel Tunnel, trading-up, and how companies were preparing for the Single European Market in 1992 – anything to take my mind off my other self.
“Oh my God! When did this happen?”
My heart lurched as I came downstairs one morning and found Imogen standing in the doorway of the basement. A shiver swept through my body. For a ghastly moment I thought she’d found a bloodstain or a shoe or something.
I battled to keep my voice under control. “What is it?”
But she gave a great whoop and I realised she was looking at the newly-decorated walls and floor. She hadn’t noticed before because she had no reason to go down to the basement.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have helped. Although wouldn’t it have been better to start with the kitchen?”
She gave Stuart a crushing hug when she found he’d laid the floor. “You’re good at this – you can do my room next.”
“Not a chance,” he said with a laugh.
Perhaps it sounds silly but there were brief moments when I almost forgot it had happened. IRA bombs, rail disasters and a fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie for writing Satanic Verses made the world seem a dark and dangerous place but also made you see your problems weren’t the biggest thing going on in the world.
But just as you thought you were coping okay it came back and hit you. You’d see a poster for a missing person or a bunch of criminal faces on Crimewatch that reminded you that you were now part of that sector of society. I began to go over and over how we could keep up our mortgage repayments if we were sent to prison. And if we lost the house because of it where would I go when I was released and how would I get a job?
And even if we got a non-custodial sentence how would having a criminal record affect our lives? Would we have to disclose it every time we applied for a job, opened a bank account, applied for a mortgage? Or would we be forced into a lifetime of lying?
We were strong at different times. One of us would be on edge and the others would have to cover for them but we were always aware that one of us could break down and bring things crashing down around us in a moment. In an odd way it drew the four of us closer together, making us look out for one another, although Zak and I avoided being alone together as much as possible. That night he’d spent in my bed hung there between us but was never mentioned.
It turned out that on the morning he went missing he’d got on his bike, crossed the channel and kept going until he reached Metz where he remembered a friend was living. I hoped the friend wasn’t Ellie, a girl who’d featured in a number of his anecdotes and wasn’t a girlfriend but with whom he always seemed to end up havi
ng sex when they met up.
Not that I wanted a relationship with Zak any more – I didn’t want to repeat anything from that disastrous weekend – it would always be impossible to think of that night I’d spent with him without also thinking about the events that had led up to it. I guessed it was the same for him.
And yet we were bound together by what we’d done. It would always be there between us, this shared knowledge. No one would ever understand me as well as he did because they couldn’t be allowed to know everything about me and yet ironically it was also that knowledge that kept him and me apart.
***
“We ought to give the body a name,” Xanthe said as we drove back from work on the Friday in the 2CV. Imogen was in London with Rick so we could talk freely.
“Just between us so we don’t have to keep calling him Backpack Man. How about Chris or Steve?”
“What if he really is called Chris or Steve?” I asked. “Loads of people are. It would have to be something none of our friends is called but that isn’t so uncommon people pick up on it.”
Outside, sleet was falling, and the roads were dark and wet.
“All right then. I wondered about Bib?” she said.
“Bib’s not a name,” Zak objected.
“It’s short for Body In the Basement.”
“Still not a name.”
After a while she said, “All right – Bob then?”
“I think Bob could work,” said Stuart. “We don’t know any Bobs and it’s not a name that jumps out at you.”
After much discussion we settled on Bob. In a way I didn’t like giving the body a name because it made him seem more human but on the other hand it made it easier to talk about without resorting to winks and hand signals. We’d talk about “the week Bob came over” or “after Bob left town.”
Once or twice Imogen asked, “Who’s this Bob anyway?” but it was easy to dismiss as she so often spent her weekends with Rick
Every day brought a sliver of hope. When we were sure no one could hear us, we whispered about our chances. The more time elapsed before Bob was found, the less easy it would be to identify him and establish any connection to us. With every week that passed another few thousand missing persons joined the files that the police would have to trawl through while searching for Bob, however briefly, before looking in our direction, putting a bit more space between us. I seemed to be permanently holding my breath.
The Suspects Page 9