At the reception in the Majestic hotel we entered into the ridiculous charade of keeping up with the jollity, laughing at the innuendos, conjecture and attempts to out-pun each other in order to break the ice.
When we found ourselves alone for a few moments Stuart put an arm around Zak's and my shoulders as though giving a drunken embrace and said quietly,
“Did you take the plates off the car before you set light to it?”
We looked at each other. Zak closed his eyes. “No,” he admitted at last.
“But you checked the car for any of our belongings before dumping it?”
“Yes,” I said, waving back at the woman from a rival magazine who’d been with me on a press trip to Belgium. She signalled that she liked my dress and I indicated that her hair looked great.
We had checked the car although perhaps not as thoroughly as he’d have liked. It was only half light and we’d been in such a panic to get away.
Stuart threw his head back and looked at the ceiling or heaven. “All right. And you stayed until the car was burned? Until the number plate was unrecognisable?”
“No. We never said that,” I told him.
“No?”
“Did you suggest that at the time? Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,” Zak snapped. He smiled clench-teethed at the managing director of Ace Kitchens. “And anyway, if we’d hung around we’d have been spotted.”
But Stuart wasn’t satisfied with that. He was silent for a few moments, pinning us into the hug until it was difficult to breathe. “I can’t believe, can’t believe you didn’t think of it.”
“Look, Stuart, shut up, please. This is not the time or the place. We did the best we could,” I said. “We agreed to trust each other and that’s what you’ll have to do.”
“Hey, what’s this?” asked Donald, the publisher, appearing from nowhere like some unwelcome genie. “I’m not paying you to stand around gossiping amongst yourselves. Get out there and mingle – bring back some useful insider info.”
He looked from one to the other of us. “There’s one missing. Where’s Xanthe?”
“Not feeling well,” said Zak. “She sends her apologies.”
Donald looked disappointed. I suspected he was planning a reprisal for when we got back to the office.
We drifted away, and I found my place name on a table of tanked-up people from some of the leading rival industry brands. On one side of me a red-faced man from a well-known appliance manufacturer. On the other the bearded CEO of a shower company.
“So, I’m next to the lady in red,” he said, breaking into the Chris de Burgh song as though I wouldn’t have understood the connection.
I laughed jovially. It was going to be a long evening. But this was normality I reminded myself. This was where I wanted to be. I had to hang onto this.
He asked if I was married or living with someone. His eyes lit up when he heard I was sharing with several people. “So, tell me how it works,” he asked, wiggling his eyebrows. “Who’s sleeping with who? Or do you all change round?”
The more I denied it the more he was convinced he was onto something so in the end I let him have his little fantasy.
A good-natured argument broke out over the chronology of some events. A woman whose friend worked for one of the tabloids was telling anyone who’d listen how her friend had been offered a ludicrous sum to trick a footballer into bed and give them a story.
A man next to her was dating a woman who knew for an absolute fact that a well-known member of the royal family had been having it away with a pilot and now had Aids. “I swear to you, everyone in the press knows. They’re just not allowed to print it,” he kept saying.
All the time I was trying not to think about the post mortem being carried out on Bob’s remains.
There was the usual gossip about members of the industry. The MD of Ace Kitchens had been married to the owner of Carberry Kitchens but was now shacked up with the owner of Ascot Appliances. The owner of Bloomsbury Cabinetmakers had started Carberry Kitchens with Richard Carberry but Richard Carberry had stolen Bloomsbury’s wife and his business from under his nose so Bloomsbury was out to destroy Carberry Kitchens. I tried to keep up.
The surprise entertainment was a well-known comedian who did a good job given the material he was stuck with. As the evening wore on the drinks were topped up and there were bawdy comments and more remarks about my house share. I drank more than I should to blot out the thought that at any moment the doors could bang open and a police squad would storm the place and strong-arm us out of there.
My thoughts were interrupted by Stuart’s braying laugh. My stomach knotted even tighter. I knew that laugh. It was the one he did when he was really drunk and was about to get emotional.
I shot my chair back and grabbed Zak. “We’ve got to stop him drinking.”
Around us people guffawed and someone kept shouting, “Straight up, I swear to God that’s what happened!” and another voice squealed, “Impossible — unless she was a contortionist.”
Zak looked over. “He’s probably more of a danger sober. With any luck he’ll fall into his cheesecake and snore through the rest of the evening.”
“Yes but…”
“What?”
“He gets confessional when he’s drunk. He told me something once – that time at the party – that he’d never have told me if he was sober.”
Zak frowned. “What did he tell you?”
“Well that’s the thing, I don’t actually know.”
He shook his head. “You’re not making much sense.”
He turned his chair round, rested his hands on my knees and I recounted the whole thing, speaking into his ear.
“Aye, aye!” said the man next to me, giving his neighbour a nudge. Zak stuck up his middle finger, but laughed along.
He blanched as I told him as much as I’d heard of Stuart’s tearful confession, his fear that I’d tell someone and his weird behaviour the next day.
Someone announced the awards and there was a scraping of chairs as people sat back in their seats and a round of applause.
“Bathroom break,” said Zak as he moved his chair back round. “Meet me out there.”
He slipped out and after sitting like a frozen rabbit for a few minutes I headed out too. I found him skulking in the corridor by the Ladies. He pulled me inside a cubicle and got me to repeat the whole thing. His face was etched with fear.
“Are you serious? Shit. You see what that probably means?”
“That Stuart killed him? Yes, it has occurred to me. But wait a minute, you’re the one who took offence when I suggested one of us might have done it.”
“But I wasn’t in possession of all the facts then, was I? Obviously, this changes things. He’s killed before – or come close enough to have got put Inside. They don’t do that for nothing. And we all know about his violent temper.”
I wasn’t so sure. “It explains why Stuart’s afraid of the police and being sent back Inside but not why he’d kill some random bloke who gatecrashed our party.”
Zak rubbed his hands over his face. “But what if it wasn’t that random? What if Stuart knew Bob?”
I digested this. “I don’t see how he could have killed him. He was slumped on top of me all night.”
Zak grabbed my arm. “Not all night. Only from around eleven-thirty. He could have done it before his big confession. It could be what triggered his memory and guilt feelings.”
I felt the hairs on my arms rise. “But why would Stuart want to kill Bob? He didn’t know him.”
“How do we know that? And even if he didn’t, so what? You know how quickly he flares up. Suppose he lost it with Bob the way he did with me when he nearly broke my nose. What if he followed him down the stairs to the cellar and laid into him there? He’d have had the advantage because there was no light and he knew the layout of the place, how many steps there were, the ones that were broken…”
It still seemed a leap from head butting Zak to actually ki
lling someone. I had to agree Stuart was obviously stressed to the point of near-lunacy tonight by the discovery of the body but I didn’t feel so different myself. But could he have pushed Bob in a fit of anger? That was easier to imagine.
“The fact remains,” I said, “that if he starts opening his heart to someone tonight and telling them what we did then we’re all going down. We have to get him out of there.”
We shot back into the dining room hoping to slip into our seats unnoticed, but a raucous cheer went up as we sat down. Donald sprang over to us. “Where the hell have you been? You missed our award.”
Apparently, Exhibition News had won a surprise award but only Imogen had been there to collect it with Donald. She was none too pleased either.
“You left me looking like an arse. I had to come up with a speech just like that and Donald kissed me.” She wiped imaginary saliva off her cheek. “Stuart’s completely off his face. And I really hope Xanthe’s throwing up everywhere because if this was just an excuse to lie in bed with room service while watching Blind Date I’ll kill her.”
“I mean everyone has something to hide, don’t they?” Stuart’s voice rose above the general conversation. It had that high, hysterical note. “Zak you might think is a bit odd but Emily there – looks like butter wouldn’t melt, doesn’t she? But she’s as bad as the rest of us.”
“I bet she is,” said the woman next to him giving me a broad wink.
Zak was out of his chair in seconds. He put his arm around Stuart and dragged him out of his seat, winding one of Stuart’s arms around his neck. “I’m sorry, he gets like this.”
People round the table were laughing. “Leave him alone – it’s just getting interesting.”
“I’ll tell you what’s really interesting,” said Stuart. His eyes were filled with a strange light.
Zak planted a kiss on the side of his face and said into his ear just loud enough for me to hear, “Shut the fuck up” which seemed to do the trick at least for a few moments. Until Stuart shook him off and took a swing at him.
“Whoa!” A red-faced man from a tile company shot back as Zak cannoned back into the table toppling glasses and a half-full wine bottle. A woman from a rival publishing company shrieked as she was drenched in Merlot.
Donald appeared out of nowhere, red-faced and fulminating. “That’s it. Get him out of here. In fact, you’d better leave too.” At least he was on-side now. He helped manhandle Stuart out through reception and called for a taxi.
“I mean things happen, they just happen, and you can’t get back,” Stuart was saying as we propelled him into the back of the cab. He was slurring his words and I was hoping by some miracle they weren’t as clear to other people as they were to me. “All that time and we had no idea he was there. What if Xanthe hadn’t gone down there that night…He’d still be there now.”
“I swear to God,” hissed Zak. He must have dug his fingers into Stuart’s gut because Stuart let out the kind of squeal that chills your blood.
Donald sprang back, wiped his face with a tissue and said, “I want to see him in my office first thing on Monday morning.” He half-closed the cab door and then pulled it open again. “No, make that all of you.”
“But Monday’s our day off in lieu for working over the weekend,” Zak reminded him.
“Not any more it’s not.”
The door slammed shut. Back at our own hotel I helped drag Stuart out, apologising for his teary tirade as we crossed the floor to the lifts. A group of Japanese business people inside the lift stared at us curiously.
Outside Stuart’s room Zak slammed him back against the wall, searching through his clothes for his room key. Stuart who was notoriously ticklish started laughing. We jumped back as he turned aside and spewed all over his clothes. He sniffed disapprovingly. “Did I do that?”
When he was safely shut in his room, I went to my own, locked the door and lay on the bed watching the ceiling spin and waiting for the telephone to ring or the door to be kicked open. I was reminded of the night we’d left Bob and I wondered if Zak might knock on the door, but he didn’t. When I finally fell asleep I dreamt of a torch shining in my face, the bedcovers being ripped off, being wrenched out of bed and marched in handcuffs past all the people I’d been at dinner with the night before, their faces shocked and hostile.
In the half-light, unable to sleep, I got up and sat hugging my knees, watching some idiotic cartoon and only vaguely aware of the light in the room changing as a weak sun struggled up. A look at the clock told me I’d made it through the night and I wondered if I’d go through this same feeling every night until it was over.
I looked out over the car park at all those business people who’d been at the dinner and were going back this morning to their showrooms and factories and offices and getting on with their lives just as they had before. Would we be the subject of their next awards dinner chit chat? That group of journalists who’d sat among them hiding a terrible secret – it would become an industry legend.
Of course, they wouldn’t believe we’d just moved the body – they’d go for the full gory details of how we’d killed Bob, probably as part of a sex game that went wrong. And how they’d love it. They could spout on about it for years, competing to be the one who divulged the most sordid details they “knew for an absolute fact.”
My head felt tight as though someone had stretched an elastic band around it. I was still in my clothes from the previous night. I hadn’t dared get undressed. The only thing worse than being dragged out of bed by police in the middle of the night would have been being dragged out in my knickers and Snoopy T-shirt.
Perhaps they were outside the door waiting. I slid clothes off hangers and stuffed them into my travel bag. The least I could do was to be ready for them.
But no one came.
When it was time to get ready I tried to disguise my puffy eyes and pallid complexion with a heavy application of eyeliner and concealer. My skin was so sensitive it seemed to sizzle at every touch and my hand was too shaky to get a nice, even line. I looked like a ghost.
Something else was nagging at me. Something that should have happened by now, but I didn’t want to give myself anything else to think about. I’d have to deal with that later.
***
An hour later I met the others downstairs in the dining room for breakfast. I had no appetite but couldn’t face being alone with my thoughts any longer. Stuart sat huddled over a cup of tea with that battered, baby bird look, very contrite. Zak hovered round him, apparently solicitous but I knew he was keeping watch. Imogen sat white-faced and fuming about how we’d all gone off and left her again.
“I will never, ever drink again,” said Stuart. His meaning was clear to three of us, but Imogen just laughed.
“I’ll remind you of that at lunch time.”
Xanthe walked in and helped herself to a full English, ignoring Imogen’s incredulous stare and sarcastic comment about a miraculous recovery. She’d applied an extra thick layer of eyeliner that morning but otherwise looked remarkably serene and sat eating her breakfast as though in a trance.
The one good thing was that Donald had left early because of some crisis in the office so at least we didn’t have to face him.
We got the train back to Bristol in silence. It was packed with industry people, so we couldn’t risk talking about what had been on the news even when Imogen went off to the loo or share our observations about the exhibition and after a sleepless night we were too tired for bright chitchat. But I picked up a newspaper at the station and we passed it around, trying not to spend too long looking at the story about a washed-up body.
We shared a taxi from the station to the house. As we pulled up in front of it we noticed the light in the kitchen. Something cold crept over my scalp. There was someone inside. The four of us slid looks at each other but we couldn’t say anything in front of Imogen.
“Anyone fancy going for a drink?” asked Zak.
It was tempting to take off and ho
le up in a pub but being arrested in front of a crowd of people would be even worse than being arrested at home.
“Let’s just get it over with,” said Stuart.
“Get what over with?” Imogen demanded but getting no response rolled her eyes.
We followed Stuart up the path. He paused momentarily, then stuck his key in the lock. We looked at each other one last time before going inside. I had no idea what we’d find on the other side – the same officer who’d come over when Stuart reported his car missing? Or a bank of armed police? I drew in my breath as a figure appeared out of the shadows.
Rick.
Imogen squealed, dropped her bag and jumped into his arms. She caught him off balance and the two of them fell over, sprawling on the floor, ending up in a snog. My breath was still caught. I looked round at the others and their frozen expressions told me they’d had the same fear as I had.
Rick greeted us coolly. He’d cooked dinner for him and Imogen. It was as if he’d forgotten we lived there.
We cooed at the table set for two in the living room with a candle and vase of roses. Then the four of us cosied up in Xanthe’s room with a bag of crisps, feeling like interlopers in our own home.
The candlelit dinner was followed by a romantic video.
“Why don’t they just go to bed?” moaned Stuart. After a while he said, “I refuse to skulk any longer,” and marched into the living room to play gooseberry.
Zak, Xanthe and I slept in Xanthe’s bed, sprawled across each other like children.
Xanthe gave a sleepy laugh. “Your friend from the awards dinner would love it if he could see us lying here together.”
Chapter Ten
We slept most of Sunday and returned to work on Monday, our cancelled day off in lieu. Donald seemed to have forgotten that he’d asked to see us when we got back and was surprised when we turned up in the office. He slapped Stuart on the back as if they were old friends, asking how he was as if they’d been on a lads’ night out together.
Another thought that plagued me during those first weeks was what if Bob hadn’t actually died that night of the party? What if he’d only fallen or been injured and hadn’t been able to get up? What if he’d been calling out for days, getting weaker and weaker, and none of us had heard him as we went about oblivious, playing our music and arguing about the mortgage?
The Suspects Page 11