by Luca Veste
Then, as daylight began to creep overhead, we moved him. Stumbling through the woods, sweating and struggling, we carried the dead boy to the other side of the woods.
Finally, we reached it, and we were able to lay him down again. Stuart removed the sleeping bag carefully, then walked away.
I stood over the teenager for a few seconds before I felt Chris’s hand on my shoulder. Heard him whisper my name, then we moved back the way we had come.
“Do you think anyone saw us?” I said, surprised I could still talk. My whole body screamed with exhaustion. “I didn’t look around us. Anyone could have been in—”
“No one saw us,” Alexandra replied, catching up and then passing us in an instant. “I was watching the whole time.”
I wanted to say something else. To run alongside her and be of comfort. I simply didn’t know what I would say.
She knew what we had all done. What we all were now.
I didn’t know if there was a way back from that.
I tried talking to Alexandra as we started the drive back home, but she was staring out of the passenger window at the passing scenery. On the single-lane road behind my car, Chris and Nicola were probably having the same trouble. I tried to see in the rearview mirror if they were talking, but they were too far back.
Michelle and Stuart had seemingly forgotten about the argument they’d had before, sitting together in my back seat. Michelle was staring ahead, her eyes tired and unmoving. Stuart had passed out as soon as I’d started driving.
“We had to do it,” I said, breaking the silence in the car. I couldn’t seem to bear it for any period of time now. “We had no choice.”
“Who are you trying to convince, us or yourself?” Alexandra replied, not even willing to turn to me when she spoke. I could hear it in her voice even then. She had been the last holdout. She didn’t want to leave the woods behind. In some way, I guessed none of us ever would, but I couldn’t see any other choices than the ones we made.
“He’ll be found,” I tried again, thinking again of the young boy Alexandra had found a few yards from the man we’d killed. “It probably won’t take that long at all. There was nothing else we could have done for him. You know that. No one will ever know we were there.”
“We will know,” she said, her voice flat and dry. “And isn’t that enough?”
I didn’t have any answer for that, so kept my mouth shut and tried to concentrate on the road ahead. Suppressed a yawn as tiredness washed over me.
I wondered if I’d ever sleep again. Whether I would forever see the battered face of the man, as we rolled him into an unmarked grave.
A grave only we knew about.
Whether we had done the right thing in moving the young boy, I knew there was nothing else we could have done. Not if we wanted to avoid questions that would have been impossible to answer. It was the right thing to do. That didn’t mean Alexandra was wrong. That was the problem. What we had done—to save ourselves—would haunt us for years to come.
Maybe forever.
Something had seemed to pass across her eyes at one point. I wasn’t sure what it was, or if I wanted to know.
We had placed him in a sleeping bag, but that didn’t mean I was sure we hadn’t left behind some evidence. Careful wasn’t sure.
Once it was done, we had packed up our tents and left.
I could still feel the dirt under my fingernails, even though I’d washed my hands over and over back at the campground.
“I need to stop,” Michelle said, and her voice didn’t sound like her own. “I need to get out.”
“There’ll be a gas station on the highway.”
“I need to stop now.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror, seeing Michelle staring straight back at me. There was a look in her eyes as if she was daring me to disagree or go against her wishes. I sighed and shook my head. “Hang on.”
There was a turnout a hundred yards or so ahead; I pulled into it and shut off the engine. Michelle was out of the car as soon as it came to a stop. Alexandra didn’t move beside me. I stepped out, needing the fresh air to try to keep me awake.
The smell of countryside assaulted me as I stepped out and away from the road. Then, the sound of Michelle’s throat evacuating her stomach contents onto the grass only compounded the situation.
Everything was hell.
A good few minutes passed and then I saw Chris slowing down. He pulled over and his car went silent. I raised a hand to acknowledge him, then felt in my pockets for cigarettes that weren’t there. I really wished I still smoked at that point. I’d never really missed it, but could think of nothing better right then.
I noticed something else wasn’t there.
I opened my car door and rummaged around the front seat, sticking my hand down in the gaps that ran alongside it and silently cursing. Alexandra turned her head slowly to me, her brow furrowed in confusion. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t find it,” I said, not waiting for a response. I ran round to the trunk, hearing the sound of Chris’s car door opening and shutting. His voice asking something, but I wasn’t listening. I pulled the trunk open, then began shifting things around. We’d left quickly early that morning, barely packing anything up properly at all. There was a mess of stuff piled up, shoved in without regard or forethought. I began pulling things out and delving into half-filled backpacks and hidden pockets.
“What’s going on?”
I ignored Chris and continued filling the turnout with various items from our weekend stay. I pulled out clothes—all of them mixed together, to be sorted at a different time. I didn’t wait to see if they were mine or not, simply pulling them all out and going through each individually.
The clothes I had been wearing the previous night were buried in a bag near the bottom. A thought came to me then—if we’d been trying to cover our tracks, we should have burned them out in the woods. Or tried to get rid of them some other way. Maybe one of the large industrial-size bins at the festival. Instead, if we were pulled over now, we’d all have clothes with a stranger’s DNA on them. A stranger we had killed.
“Matt, what’s going on?”
The trunk was empty now, but it still wasn’t there. I turned around, surprised to see Chris standing right behind me. “It’s not here.”
“What isn’t?”
I shook my head and jogged toward the back of his car. “Open the trunk, maybe it got tossed in there.”
“Matt, you need to calm down and tell me what’s going on.”
A car blazed past us doing over sixty, but I was only faintly aware of it. I turned to Chris, and he flinched. I must have looked crazed enough for him to take a step back from me.
“It’s my wallet,” I said eventually, unable to find it anywhere. “It was in my pocket when… It’s not here anymore.”
Chris sucked in air past his teeth. “Are you joking?”
“Do I look like I am? It was in the jeans I was wearing when it happened. I just threw them on from last night. My phone was in the tent, but I left my wallet in the back pocket.”
“Right, right. Well, we were using those woods for the past three days. It’s not like we wouldn’t have a good story to tell anyone if it was found.”
I shook my head. I realized I was wringing my hands together but couldn’t stop. When I spoke, my voice sounded alien to me. Shaking and on the verge of full panic. “I can’t just leave it there. They’ll ask questions, and we won’t be able to answer them all. We’re gonna look guilty as hell and that’s the end for us.”
I heard a car door open and close. Stuart emerged from the side of the car and joined us at the open trunk. “What’s going on?”
I looked at Chris, then at Stuart. “We have to go back.”
Ten
It was different in the woods, now that it was daytime. The trees s
eemed to move more easily, there were no dark shadows or strange noises. Or silences.
The stillness of it was almost offensive to me. As if it hadn’t understood what had occurred within its tree-lined walls the night before and adjusted accordingly. It should have changed in some way. Instead, it was sitting there like nothing had happened.
I was slowly losing it. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold on, without giving up and waiting for the police to take me away. Calling 911 and telling them everything we had done. I shook the thought away and tried to concentrate.
We parked on the other side of the woods this time. Google Maps had informed us that there was another way in, which saved us trying to wade our way through a festival that was now over. The traffic and witnesses would be easier to avoid.
Stuart came with me. The others stayed behind at the cars. We walked without talking for the first five or ten minutes, silently trudging through, as if we were out for a walk, rather than for what we were actually doing.
Retrieving evidence. That’s what they would call it.
It took us half an hour of walking before we found the first clearing. We wordlessly took an area each and began searching.
“What’s it look like?” Stuart said quietly, after brushing aside branches and leaves for a few minutes. “I mean what color is it?”
“Black, with the Liverpool Football Club badge embossed on the front.”
Stuart chuckled, then stopped almost as quick as he’d begun. “Should have guessed.”
I was about to respond in kind—it had always been our go-to way of winding each other up, the Liverpool-versus-Manchester thing—but kept quiet when I remembered everything that had happened in the past twelve hours.
It was difficult to believe it had only been that long. I felt like I had aged at least ten years since the previous day.
Perhaps this was how we would be now. This would be our new normal. None of the laughter and the in-jokes we’d had before. What we’d done collectively would be with us always, hanging over us like a dark cloud. Ready to empty and drench us with our sins.
“We shouldn’t have buried him,” Stuart said, turning to me as he swiped a foot along the ground, his voice cold and wearied. His unlined face and the dimples in his cheeks that kept him looking young now diminished. Now, there was darkness under his eyes and a weathered look to his skin. “I think that was a mistake.”
“I think the whole thing was a bit of a mistake…”
“I know, I know. I just wonder if we acted too quickly. We were all running on adrenaline, fear, exhaustion. That’s before we get to the hangovers and shock. We were too ready to believe we wouldn’t have been able to get through this. I’m sure they would have realized the truth quickly enough. We should have just called someone. We’re going to have to live with this forever now.”
“Yeah, we are. But that would have been the case anyway.”
“I guess that’s our punishment.”
I looked over at Stuart for a little longer, then turned back to the ground. There was something in his tone that made me look over at him again, but he was getting farther and farther out of sight.
We were murderers. That was all I could be certain of at that moment. Whether we had murdered a serial killer or some random attacker, I wasn’t sure there was much difference. Not for me. I had been responsible for ending someone’s life. That was enough for me.
“Maybe it’ll be like grief,” Stuart said, emerging from the tree line ahead. “You don’t get past it—you just learn how to live with it, you know?”
I did. I remembered my dad’s funeral and how I’d only gotten through that day with the help of my friends. They had picked me up and brought me back to life. Now, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see any of them again.
Alexandra…I hoped she was different.
“I don’t know,” I said eventually, my eyes scanning the ground, my heart pounding against my chest the closer we got to where we’d buried the dead man. “Grief is something that is done to us. Someone is taken from us and then we’re left behind. We did this to ourselves.”
“He was going to kill me, Matt,” Stuart said, stopping and turning to face me more fully. He folded his arms across his chest, and I could see grazes and the beginning of a bruise on his arm, running from his elbow to his wrist. “I don’t know why, but I think we can work that out. Problem is, we’ll never know for certain, will we? Because even when they find that young boy, they won’t know his killer is underground. Literally. So not only did we kill someone, but we also robbed who knows how many people of seeing any justice for it.”
“He won’t be able to do it again. Isn’t that justice enough?”
Stuart shrugged his shoulders, but it seemed as if it took some effort to do so.
We continued on, searching the entire area we had moved through the night before. I grew increasingly desperate as it became more and more apparent that I wasn’t going to find the wallet. I imagined some police dog retrieving it in a slobbering mouth, dropping it at a copper’s feet, and them opening it up. Seeing the driver’s license, the bank cards, all with my name on them.
I traipsed through the ever-thickening forest, scouring every possible place I could. Stuart was beside me the entire way, but I knew he was thinking the same as me.
“I ran off when Alexandra disappeared,” I said, grasping Stuart’s shoulder as I almost fell over a fallen log. He winced immediately, and I mumbled an apology before continuing. “Do you remember though? When she went off, I ran after her. I don’t know where I went.”
“I watched you go, mate,” Stuart replied, rubbing his shoulder and looking at me with something approaching pity in his eyes. He knew what I knew. “I’ve… We’ve looked everywhere. I know it seemed massive last night, but you were running in circles, Matt. If it was here, we would have found it by now.”
“Where is it then?”
We both looked around us as my voice reverberated around the trees and settled above us.
“It’s going to be okay,” Stuart said, making a calm down motion with his hands. “Can you think of anywhere else it could be?”
I shook my head, but I knew that wasn’t true. It wasn’t where we’d been camping. Not in the woods, as far as we could tell. I looked up at Stuart and he knew what I was going to say without another word.
“We best hurry up then,” Stuart said, biting on his lower lip and shaking his head. “If he hasn’t been found yet, it won’t be long.”
It took us another twenty minutes to make our way to the far end of the woods. I had called Alexandra on the way and told her to move the cars farther afield, given how long it was taking us to come back. She gave me a noncommittal grunt in response, which I hoped was agreement.
I ended the call and took a breath in. I didn’t think I’d ever be back there. At that place. My muscles felt weak and tired, exhaustion threatening to take hold at any second. I kept my eyes peeled on the ground as we moved, hoping against hope that I’d spot my wallet on the way there.
As the trees began to open and become more sporadic, a large field opened up. We skirted along the edge of it, as we had done the previous night. We could hear traffic more clearly now, as we came closer to the country roads that bordered the farmland here. They connected to the main roads farther down, finally merging onto the highway. In the daylight, the view was something to behold. We were on a rise, meaning we could see across the field and beyond, green belt land as far as we could see.
I wished I could spend some time appreciating it.
Instead, we slowed as we approached the place we had found the previous night, closer to humanity than nature. Hoping the boy would be found sooner rather than later. Now, I hoped he hadn’t been found at all.
In fact, I wanted to go back a few hours and run from the woods entirely.
We reached the thin copse of shorter tr
ees and moved into the clearing where we had left the body. I could still feel the weight of him in my hands. The disgust I felt for disturbing his final resting place. It had felt like a final act of despicability, in a night that had been nothing but that.
We had left him near the edge, hoping he would be noticed by someone passing alongside the road. An early morning jogger or a dog walker maybe. We could hear traffic quite clearly now—through the high bushes that almost blocked out the view from the road. A car went past every twenty seconds or so.
I heard three drive by before I took in what I was seeing.
It was almost midday, I hadn’t slept, so I still checked with Stuart first. I looked across at him, but he was seemingly struggling with the same disbelief as me.
“Are you sure we—”
“Yes,” Stuart replied before I had the chance to finish the sentence. “I remember the way that tree was positioned over there. The way we came in—the way it all looked six hours ago.”
The clearing was empty. No disturbance whatsoever.
The body was gone.
We had left him in that clearing, removing him from the sleeping bag we’d carried for an hour. Laid him on the ground and then left him there. Alone.
And now he wasn’t there.
I could feel eyes on us.
I looked around, waiting for the inevitable. I knew what Stuart was saying, even as I stopped listening and the world disappeared around me. It went silent as I blocked out what was happening, closed my eyes and waited. I could almost picture them now: a swarm of police officers, emerging from between trees, from the road, from the bushes. They had known we would return, because my wallet had been found. They would be coming from all angles, trapping us in there, so we had no escape. I scrunched my eyes shut tighter and didn’t move as the hand laid itself on my shoulder.
It gripped me harder as it began to shake. I thought of my mum. We barely spoke, but I still loved her enough to think about how she would feel about this. The attention it would bring. She’d had me late in life and was in her seventies now. Dad was gone. I was all she had left and even though we weren’t close, she knew where I was.