That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  Joe had backed away, suddenly frightened. And, that night, the first night of what was supposed to be their relaxing holiday, he had drawn his knees to his chest while Lydia slept, and gritted his teeth at what a dickhead he was. Why couldn’t he have left it? Why could he never take the moral high ground?

  What is he going to tell Lydia? She is already still mad at him about that first night, even though it’s been a week and a half since it happened. And now he’s left her sleeping, unknowingly in charge of Paul.

  ‘Tell me what else to do,’ Frannie says desperately.

  Joe tries to slow his breaths. Her voice. His sister’s voice. It does something to him. He used to read to her, she on his lap, when they were both little. A child holding a child. She never wanted to read the same book twice. He made sure they had different ones out of the library each week, their plastic covers sticking to each other in the bag when he unpacked them. Their parents didn’t care, let him get on with it, and he stepped willingly into the patriarchal role.

  ‘Just let me think,’ Cathy says. She cups her hands around her eyes, like blinkers, her elbows on her knees. ‘Be quiet.’

  Joe relaxes into himself for a minute. Cathy will figure it out. He stares at his flip-flops, put on unknowingly not even an hour ago, before this nightmare began. He wiggles his toes. He is here. He is grounded. Breathe in and out. In and out. They will sort it. Nobody will go to prison. A panic attack cannot last forever.

  ‘If the police get hold of this body, we will be implicated,’ Cathy says eventually, her hands still curled around the sides of her face, but now looking directly at him. A light breeze moves its way between them. He catches a whiff of sun-cream.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ he says, trying to be useful. What would his father have done? He tries to channel him as he used to be rather than as he is now. Authoritative Owen. Way more like Cathy than like Joe. ‘If we all backed Frannie up. If we all said, I don’t know – that he walked out in front of the car from nowhere …’

  ‘What, tell it to the policeman who gave me a fucking warning?’ Frannie says.

  ‘You and me both,’ Joe snaps.

  Think. Think. Joe tries to remember everything he knows about DNA. Hardly anything. He rubs at his forehead. He’s been doing routine operations for ten years, pigeonholed into it because of his steady hand. And his poor bedside manner, Frannie had once said with a smirk. But it’s true that he is better off doing the cutting, the anaesthetics, spaying, removal of hairbands and underwear that Labradors have eaten. He drags a finger through the dust in front of him. The line he draws is perfectly straight.

  ‘I’m pretty sure they will be able to tell what time he died,’ Cathy says. ‘And that you were here … did you touch him? The wound? Right after?’

  ‘Yes,’ Frannie says.

  ‘It’s something to do with how your DNA mingles with his blood, I can’t remember, I don’t know …’ Cathy says.

  Joe stares at the body. Its eyes are open. Mouth going from slack to stiff, like cooling candle wax. There’s a perfect oval thumbprint on his naked torso. Cathy’s or Frannie’s or his own, he can’t tell.

  ‘You’re right,’ Joe says eventually. ‘Plus the car is probably on some CCTV camera somewhere. Where were you going?’ he says to Frannie.

  ‘I wanted wine from that little all-night place, you know?’ Frannie says quietly. It sounds so trivial next to the body. Fucking wine. His hands have begun to shake again. They’re cold and clammy. He bunches them into fists. He needs some sugar and some sleep.

  ‘Is he getting rigors?’ Joe says. He directs this to Cathy.

  She immediately reaches for his feet, clad in white trainers. A hand around his black socks, she moves his ankles from side to side, then shakes her head. ‘Not yet.’

  But he will. Soon. And then his blood will begin to settle in the parts of his body that sit the lowest – his back, his elbows, the backs of his knees. He will begin to smell. That sweet, rotten-egg smell Joe comes across very occasionally, when somebody brings in a long-dead animal. Panic spews up through him. He’ll never be able to work again.

  He gets out his phone. ‘I’m calling the police,’ he says. ‘What’s the number?’

  ‘It’s 112,’ Cathy says quietly.

  Frannie rounds on Cathy. ‘How could you do this to me?’ she says. ‘Now is not the time to be good, Cathy!’ Joe winces. Cathy won’t like that, but it’s true. She is good, and controlled, and remote, at times too. She’s never had a relationship, to his knowledge.

  He dials 112 on his keypad, and Frannie lunges for his phone, batting it out of his hand. ‘What the fuck?’ Joe shouts. The phone lies face down, the soil and the blood bleached to a thin sanitized stripe around it by its light.

  ‘If you call the police, I will go to prison for decades,’ Frannie shouts. She sits back down on the ground, puts her head in her hands and begins to sob.

  ‘Stop it, Joe,’ Cathy says.

  ‘Who was I supposed to call?’ Frannie says, looking up at him. ‘If not you?’

  The pleading sentence, her huge wet eyes. He cannot resist. He was there for her when she laboured, alone, with Paul. He brought her whatever she wanted – and that was a lot. Iced water, a popsicle, a box of crackers she ate between contractions, and then – afterwards – a flame-grilled Whopper from Burger King that took him a forty-minute round-trip to get. Nobody is there for Frannie like Joe is.

  Cathy is biting the skin around her thumbnail, staring at Frannie, her eyes wide.

  Frannie passes him the phone, above her head, not looking at him. ‘But sure, do it.’

  ‘I …’ Joe says, hesitating, but he takes the phone. Cathy stares at the transaction, then at the lit-up rectangle in Joe’s hands. He looks at Frannie, and his resolve to do the right thing splinters to nothing, like a pane of glass being shattered. His little sister, his three-legged-race running partner, his Happy Meal sharer, his sibling, his best friend, his history.

  ‘I can’t,’ he says softly.

  Cathy looks at him. ‘You can’t,’ she echoes. A sheen across her eyes catches the moonlight.

  It looks just like the night-time at home. He, Cathy and Frannie live in a row of three cottages with no other neighbours – a feat they can’t believe they pulled off – and he almost always goes round to Frannie’s for bath time, closing his farmhouse door behind him and pushing open Frannie’s. Cathy’s and Joe’s used to be a shop and a post office respectively, with small rooms and low ceilings. Frannie’s was originally a house – part funded by their parents, for her – built in 1850, and is larger and airier than the others.

  He shoves his hands into his pockets. He could hand her in. Save himself. He’d be mad not to consider it, wouldn’t he? But she looks up at him now, his baby sister, her head tilted back. No. That isn’t an option. It began its life as Frannie’s problem, but now it’s shared.

  ‘We need to bury it,’ Frannie says. ‘Him.’

  Cathy waits a second, clearly thinking. After a moment, she says only one word: ‘Where?’

  6.

  Joe

  Joe’s shoulders feel like they’re made of metal, not bone and sinew. He rolls them, trying to relax. ‘We need to think clearly.’

  The man was a horrible bloke, according to Frannie. Besides, she didn’t mean to hurt him. It was an accident. A terrible coincidence. This is the hand they’ve been dealt, and now they need to play the cards. ‘We need to think about the evidence,’ he says, staring at the ground. ‘What gets rid of blood?’

  ‘Fire,’ Cathy says immediately.

  ‘Fire,’ Joe repeats, nodding slowly. ‘Okay.’ He looks left and right down the track road. It serves only their villa and two others. The site used to be a convent and was converted to villas in the fifties. The private road is supposed to be maintained by the three villas, though they don’t do enough. The grass is scorched yellow, the road not even tarmacked, just hardened mud, cooked by the Italian sun. Joe’s only ever seen cars come down it whe
n they’re lost. Joe briefly wonders why a stranger was walking down this road, alone, in the night …

  ‘We need to deal with the body first,’ Cathy says. She gets to her feet, hesitating just slightly, then walks on.

  Their villa is surrounded by fields, with woods lying beyond. They bought it five years ago on – embarrassingly – a whim. Frannie had been fantasy Rightmoving, as she called it, and the villa had popped up. It was old, shabby and going cheap. What began as a joke became a full conversation, then a budget scribbled on the back of a receipt, then a loan, secured against their business. That first summer they came out here, they couldn’t believe they’d done it. They had thirty bookings for the rest of the year, and they’d paid off twenty per cent of the mortgage already. When they got the statement, they opened a bottle of wine at Frannie’s. She’d raised a glass and said, ‘To not doing things like other people.’

  ‘There are shovels in the outhouse,’ Joe says quietly. They all pause for just a second in the darkness. They were in there earlier today, preparing for a barbecue. The sun on the backs of their necks. ‘We could … use the woods.’

  ‘We don’t own the woods,’ Cathy says. She pulls back her dark hair from her face, looking at him intently. She is trying to communicate something, he thinks, but isn’t sure what.

  ‘But they’re deserted. And the soil is soft,’ he says. Are they really having this conversation? Everything is upside down and unreal, like the sky is suddenly underneath them and the earth above. Joe shakes his head, trying to clear it. He thinks instead of Paul, who just yesterday over the dinner table very seriously handed him a speck of fluff so small Joe had to squint to see it. His resolve strengthens. Paul doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to pay for his mother’s mistake. He’s so tiny, so innocent.

  ‘Yeah,’ Cathy says softly, moving away from him. They went walking in those woods yesterday to cool down. As they stumbled over exposed tree roots, holding on to branches for support, they had talked about how Lydia and Joe were trying – unsuccessfully – to get pregnant. Cathy had said not very much at all, which was exactly what Joe had wanted, why he had asked Cathy to go, and not Frannie. They’d returned relaxed and tired, and opened a bottle of red wine.

  ‘Cathy and I need to dig,’ Joe says. She’s bigger than Frannie, but she’s meticulous too. Frannie would rush it.

  ‘It needs to be really deep,’ Cathy says. In the darkness, her voice is disembodied. Joe moves the beam of his torch to her. Her expression is blank, totally blank, a woman in shock.

  ‘You need to burn this blood,’ Joe says to Frannie, gesturing around.

  ‘How?’

  ‘You need to light every bit of it and burn it. Nobody ever goes up that road. Ever. We’ll just say we had a cookout on the grass. Make it look like a big barbecue. A bonfire. Something like that,’ Cathy says. Her words are matter of fact but her tone is kind, as it always is.

  ‘Okay,’ Frannie says in a small voice. ‘But won’t people wonder why we had a … I mean – next to the road?’

  ‘I know,’ Cathy says with a shrug. ‘We’ll have to deal with that question when it comes to it. Get the car close to the house and clean it up too. Hose it down. But prioritize the blood.’ She swallows. She looks at Joe. ‘The grave needs to be seven feet,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Because of sniffer dogs,’ she adds needlessly. Joe nods. Spaniels. German shepherds. He sees their noses quivering during his examinations of them. They can tell when their owner is due back from work by how much of them they can still smell in the air.

  ‘And then?’ Frannie stands opposite Joe, her bloody hands on her hips, leaving two perfect handprints against her bare skin in the torchlight.

  Cathy doesn’t answer her, just stands looking at the body for a few seconds more. She points to the feet of the body. Joe picks them up easily, like it – he, he – is a fallen soldier, and follows Cathy, holding the shoulders, into the gloom of the woods.

  Part I

  * * *

  PREVENTING A LAWFUL BURIAL

  7.

  Joe

  Joe is already out of breath by the time they reach the woods, his hands slipping on the body’s rubbery ankles. He reaches to wipe sweat away from his forehead. His muscles are shaking. He is so unfit. Joe hates the gym, once spent a week going before work like other people seem to be able to do and was useless all day, dropping scalpels and mainlining Mars Bars to recover.

  A little way in, Cathy stops, placing her end of the body on the ground, where it settles at an odd angle. ‘Here?’ Cathy says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joe says listlessly. He sees Cathy’s eyes flash in the light from his phone.

  ‘He was British, you know? You remember, at the market – he had an English accent,’ she says, looking down at the body. ‘On holiday or an ex-pat, I don’t know.’

  Joe lays down the body’s feet. ‘Right,’ he says.

  She moves away some leaves with her foot, still in flip-flops. Her toes come away dirty. Joe turns off the torch, and leaves them in the blackness.

  ‘Do you think we’re doing the right thing?’ he whispers. As his eyes adjust, she comes into view, like a slowly developing Polaroid. First the whites of her eyes, then her bare limbs.

  She bites her lip and looks away. He’s surprised to see Cathy’s vulnerability. She is one of those women who is always in the same mood. ‘I just … yeah. I don’t know.’

  It’s still the exact middle of the night. Hours until the sun comes up. Joe hopes they can do it.

  ‘I feel like I’m in a nightmare,’ he says.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘So, do you?’ He runs a hand through his hair, leaving grainy particles of soil behind which make him itch. ‘Think we’re doing the right thing?’

  ‘Do you?’ she replies and Joe almost laughs. Typical enigmatic Cathy.

  ‘Can you just answer a fucking question?’ he snaps.

  Cathy says nothing, leaning on her spade.

  ‘We don’t have to do it,’ he adds after a few seconds. He knows he’s needling her to discuss Frannie with him, but he can’t help it. This instinct he has, sometimes, to divide and conquer. It’s something to do with needing to be secure, needing to be … what, sibling number one? God, he’s an arse.

  Cathy stares at him. For a second, she looks exactly like Frannie in that eerie way that sisters sometimes do. ‘I know,’ she says.

  ‘We could stop now,’ he adds uselessly. ‘Call the police. End it.’ They look at the body at their feet. ‘Before it begins.’ His throat seems to close up after he’s said it. It’s just bravado. Suggestions. He could never do it. To Frannie or to Paul.

  ‘You don’t mean that?’ she says softly.

  Joe shrugs. ‘No.’

  They stare at each other for a few seconds more. ‘It’s forever.’ Cathy stares down at the body, now blackened by dried blood. ‘You know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What would she get? Really?’

  ‘She might get life, if they infer intent,’ Joe says. Lydia is a secretary at a criminal law firm, and he’s picked up bits over the years from the cases she tells him of that she should keep quiet. That, and television. ‘If they don’t believe it was an accident.’

  ‘Right,’ Cathy says faintly.

  She meets his gaze again. ‘We should check who he is,’ she says softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘His wallet. It’s better to know this stuff, isn’t it?’

  ‘I guess.’ Joe looks down at the body – at this person whose name they’ll soon know, who was living and breathing until just a few hours ago – and thinks he might be sick again. Cathy begins poking at the ground with the spade, so he kneels down and reaches into the man’s back pockets.

  A set of keys. A wallet. And a ragged and torn piece of paper. It feels inhumane, to him, like he is a robber, a looter, but he goes through them nevertheless. ‘Four keys, including one for a car,’ Joe says. ‘A few debit c
ards. ID,’ he adds. ‘I don’t know what this is.’ He gestures to the piece of paper, torn and fluffy. As he opens it up, it falls into four pieces. It’s sodden with blood.

  ‘God,’ Cathy says. She comes over to him and scans it with the light of her phone. Both of their hands are shaking.

  ‘It’s illegible. Let’s just bury them with him,’ Joe says.

  ‘No. If we take them, we might be able to … I don’t know.’ She shrugs in that way that she sometimes does. ‘Help in some way. If there is a next of kin.’

  ‘What – post them off?’ Joe says incredulously. ‘Dear sirs, we enclose –’

  ‘No. But you never know. We might be able to help,’ Cathy says. ‘We might be able to – to mitigate some of it. Some day.’ Joe watches her go back to the spades, her shoulders rounded and sad.

  He stares down at the body. What are they doing? He kicks a nearby rock, which goes flying.

  Cathy turns and looks at him. He watches her watching him, saying nothing, trying to calm himself down. ‘It’s for our family,’ he says quietly. ‘Isn’t it? This is what family is.’

  Cathy turns away from him again and begins digging. There are three hearts, here in the woods, but only two of them are beating.

  They’re five feet in, standing in the hole now, and it’s – Joe checks his watch – just after four o’clock. For two hours, they have dug in near silence, talking only logistics and how best to cut through the many tree roots. Owls hoot in the trees, but otherwise there is nothing except silence and darkness.