In a Dark, Dark Wood (31 page)

I drop the rock, and make my way slowly, painfully around to the back of the house. My feet are totally numb, and I stumble more than once, seeing the blood coming up between my toes as I do. I push away the thought of how I will get away from here – I can’t walk, that’s for sure. But I have a horrible feeling it will be in a police car. Or worse.

The back of the house looks equally unpromising. I try the long, sliding French door to the rear of the living room, prising my nails around the flat glass panel and trying to pull it sideways, hoping, desperately, that the catch is not locked. But it stays firm, and all I manage to do is break my nails. I look up at the sheer side of the house. Could I climb up to the balcony where Nina smoked?

For a minute I consider it – there’s a zinc drain pipe. But then reality bites. I’m kidding myself. There’s no way I could climb that slippery glass wall, even with climbing shoes and a harness, let alone in flip-flops and with numb fingers. I was always the first person to fail the climbing ropes at school, hanging there pathetically, my skinny arms stretched above my head, before I dropped like a stone into a crumpled heap on the rubber mat, while other girls swarmed to the top and smacked the wooden bar overhead with the flat of their palm.

There’s no rubber mat here. And the zinc pipe is slippier and more treacherous than a knotted gym rope. If I fell, it’d be all over – I’d be lucky to get away with a broken ankle.

No. The balcony is not going to work.

At last, almost without hope, I try the back door.

And it swings open.

I feel something prickle across the back of my neck: shock, disbelief, a kind of fierce elation. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe the police didn’t lock it. Can it really be this easy, after everything else has been so hard?

There’s police tape across the opening, but I duck under it and half-walk, half-crawl inside. I straighten up, almost expecting sirens to go off, or a policeman to stand up from a seat in the corner. But the house is dark and quiet, the only movement a few flakes of snow scudding across the slate floor.

I put my hand out to swing the door shut, but it doesn’t close properly. It hits the frame, but bounces back open. I grab it, to try again, and as I do I notice something. There’s a piece of tape across the tongue of the latch, preventing it from shutting completely.

Suddenly I understand why the door kept swinging open that night – why, even after we locked it, it was never secure. The lock is the kind that just immobilises the door handle, stops it from turning the latch. But if the latch itself is pushed back, the handle is useless. It feels stiff when you rattle it, but there’s nothing holding the door shut but its own inertia.

For a second I think about ripping the tape off – but then I realise how stupid that would be. This – finally – is proof. In front of me, hidden innocently within the door frame, is cast-iron proof that someone set James up to die, and whoever placed the tape was that person. Carefully, without disturbing it, I push the door shut and then I drag a chair across the kitchen to rest against the inside of the glass.

Then, for the first time, I look around.

The kitchen looks strangely undisturbed. I don’t know what I was expecting: fingerprint dust, perhaps, that strange silver sheen on every surface. But as soon as I think about this, I realise how pointless it would be. None of us ever denied being in the house. Our prints would be all over the place, and what would that prove?

I want more than anything to crawl upstairs to one of the beds, and sleep. But I can’t. I may not have much time. By now they’ve probably discovered my room is empty. They’ll know I can’t have gone far under my own steam – not without money, shoes and a coat. It won’t take them long to find the taxi driver. And when they do …

I walk through the kitchen, my footsteps loud in the echoing silence, take a deep breath, and then open the door to the hallway.

They’ve cleared up, to some extent anyway. Much of the blood has gone, along with most of the glass, although I can feel the occasional tiny sliver crunch under my plastic soles. In its place there are markings on the floor, on the walls, bits of tape with notations I can’t read in the darkness. I don’t dare switch on a light. There are no curtains to draw and my presence would be visible from right across the valley.

But there are specks left here and there, dark rust splashes of something that used to be James – and now is not.

It’s the strangest thing – he is gone, and his heart’s blood is still here. I kneel on the soft wooden parquet, pitted with chunks of glass ground in by our shoes and marked by the soaking blood, and I touch my fingers to the stained grooves of the wood, and I think
This was James
. A couple of days ago, this was inside him, keeping him alive, making his skin flush and his heart beat. And now it’s gone – it’s lying here, wasted, and yet it’s all that’s left of him. Somewhere his body is being post-mortem’ed. And then he’ll be buried, or cremated. But a part of him will be here, in this house.

I get up, forcing my cold, tired legs to work. Then I go to the living room and grab one of the throws off the sofa. There are dirty wine glasses still on the table, from our last night. Fag butts are stubbed out in the dregs of wine, Nina’s roll-ups bloated into soggy white worms. But the planchette has been packed away, and the paper has gone. I cannot suppress a shiver at the thought of the police reading those deranged scrawlings. What did it mean, that long, looping
murderer
? Did someone write it deliberately? Or did it simply float up from the group subconscious, like a sea monster surfacing from someone’s inner-most fears, and then sinking back down?

The throw smells of stale cigarette smoke, but I hug it round my shoulders as I glance up at the empty pegs above the fireplace, and away. I can’t really bear to think of what I’m about to do. But I must do it. It’s my only chance to get to what really happened.

I start at the top of the stairs, standing where we all stood that night in a little huddle. Flo was to my right, and I remember putting out my hand to the gun. Clare and Nina were on the other side, Tom behind us.

The scene, with the quiet and the darkness and my own thudding heart, is so close to that night that for a moment I feel almost faint, and I have to stand and breathe through my nose, and remember that it is done, James is not coming up those stairs. We killed him – between us, with our drunken hysterical fear. We all held that gun.

I have to force myself to retrace what happened next, James’s body tumbling down the stairs, Nina and I stumbling after. This time I walk down slowly, holding the bannister. There is still glass on the stairs from the broken window, and I don’t trust my flip-flops in the darkness, not with the skidding shards underfoot.

Here was where Nina tried to resuscitate James.

Here was where I knelt in his blood, and he tried to speak.

I feel tears, wet on my face, but I scrub them away. There is no time for grief. The hours are ticking down until dawn, until they come and get me.

What happened next?

The living-room door is still off its hinges from when Tom took it down and we struggled with it out through the front door to where Clare was waiting in the car.

The front door is not deadlocked, and I open it from the inside without difficulty. When I do, the force of the wind nearly bangs the steel door into my face, and the snow rushes inside like a living thing, trying to get in, trying to force what little warmth is left in the house back out.

I screw up my eyes and, holding the throw hard around my shoulders, I step out into the white blizzard. I stand on the porch, where I stood that night waiting for Nina. I remember Tom calling out something to Clare, and Clare gunning the engine.

And then I remember noticing that her coat was lying over the porch rail.

I put out my hand, pretend to pick it up.

I’m shivering, but I’m trying as hard as I can to remember back to that night, to the shape of something small and round in the pocket.

I hold out my hand, my eyes watering with the hard pellets of driving snow.

And suddenly I can remember. I can remember what I was holding in my hand.

And I know why it set me running.

It was a shell. A shotgun shell. It was the missing blank.

Standing here, in my own footsteps, the thoughts shoot across my brain just as they did that night, and I can remember them: it’s like watching the snow melt, and the familiar landscape emerge from beneath.

It could have been there from the clay-pigeon shoot earlier. But I know enough now, from our shoot, to tell the difference between a live round and a blank. Live shotgun rounds are solid in your hand, packed with pellets that make them feel heavier than their compact shape suggests. What I held that night was light as plastic with no shot at all. It was a blank.
The
blank. The blank that was supposed to have been in the shotgun.

Clare had been the one to substitute the live round for the blank.

And now she’d just driven off into the night with James dying in the back of the car.

Why?
Why?

It made no sense then, and it still makes no sense to me now, but then I had no time to consider. I had only one option: to catch them up, and confront Clare.

Now, I have time. I turn slowly and walk back into the house, and I shut and lock the door behind me. Then I go into the living room and sit, my head in my hands, trying to figure it out.

I cannot leave here until dawn – unless, that is … I get up, stiff with cold, and pick up the phone.

No, it’s still dead, the line simply hissing and crackling quietly. I am stuck then, stuck until daylight, unless I want to stagger back down that icy, rutted lane in the darkness once more, and I’m not sure I’d even make it.

I go back to the sofa and huddle deeper into the throw, trying vainly to get some warmth back into my limbs. My God, I’m so tired – but I cannot sleep. I must figure this out.

Clare substituted the live round.

Therefore Clare killed James.

But it makes no sense. Clare has no motive – and she is the only person who could not have faked those texts.

I have to
think
.

The question I keep coming back to is why; why would Clare kill James on the eve of their own wedding?

And then suddenly, with a coldness that’s totally different to the chill in the air, I remember Matt’s words in the hospital. James and Clare were having problems.

I shake it off almost immediately. This is ridiculous. Yes, Clare’s life has to be perfect; yes she has incredibly high standards, but for God’s sake, she’s been dumped before. She held a massive grudge, I know that, because I sat by while she signed Rick’s email up to every porn site and Viagra newsletter she could find. But she sure as hell didn’t kill the bloke.

But there is one big difference.

When Rick dumped Clare, Flo wasn’t in the picture.

I think of Flo’s words, as she sobbed outside the bathroom on the first night:
She’s my rock, and I’d do
anything
for her. Anything
.

Anything?

I remember her reaction to me going to bed – the way she’d exploded, accusing me of sabotage.
I’ll kill you if you ruin it
, she’d promised. I hadn’t taken her seriously. But maybe I should have.

And that was just a hen. What would she do to the man who was planning to leave her best friend at the altar?

And who better to take the fall than the bad ex-friend who stole Clare’s rightful property and then walked away for ten long years.

But now it has all spiralled out of control.

And then I remember the matching clothes Flo was wearing on that last night – and suddenly I realise: what if it wasn’t Clare’s coat on the rail, but Flo’s, and Clare simply picked it up by mistake?

Flo. Flo was the one who picked up the gun.

Flo was the one who told us it wasn’t loaded.

Flo was the person who set this whole thing up, persuaded me to come, arranged the whole thing.

And Flo
could
have sent that text.

I feel like a web is closing round me, like the more I fight the more I will be tangled in it.

James is dead.

Clare is dying.

Flo is dying.

And somewhere, Nina is in her B&B at breaking point, and she and Tom are facing questions they cannot answer, suspicions they cannot shake.

Please let me wake from this.

I curl up on the sofa on my side, and draw my knees into my chest, the throw tucked around myself. I have to think, I have to decide what to do, but in this confused, exhausted state I find myself going round in circles.

I have a choice: wait here for the police, try to explain my presence, explain about the blank and Flo’s jacket and hope they believe me.

Or I can leave at the crack of dawn, and hope they don’t realise I was here.

But where do I go? To London? To Nina? How will I get away?

The police will find me of course, but it will look better than finding me here.

Almost against my will, I can feel my eyes closing, and my limbs, quivery with tiredness, slowly relaxing, the muscles twitching with exhaustion every few minutes as they loosen into sleep. I cannot think. I will try to work it out tomorrow.

A great yawn comes up from somewhere deep inside, and I realise I have stopped shivering. I let the flip-flops fall off my feet, and realise a thin line of tears is tracing down my cheek from the yawn, but I am too tired to wipe them away.

Oh God, I need to sleep.

I will think about this … tomorrow …

It’s night. It’s the night of the shooting. And I’m crouched in the blazing hallway, bathed in the golden, streaming light and in James’s blood.

The blood is in my nostrils, on my hands, beneath my nails.

He’s looking up at me, his eyes wide and dark, and shining wet.

‘The text …’ he says. His voice is hoarse. ‘Leo …’

I reach out to touch his face – and then suddenly he’s gone, the blood is gone, and the light is gone.