That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  She looks at Joe, whose eyes are on her, his expression drawn. He holds her gaze for a moment longer than he would usually.

  He clears his throat, moves away from his position by the door and sits next to Frannie. He scoots his chair slightly closer to her.

  ‘We need to do something to make the police think he is alive,’ Joe says. ‘We need to stage a missing person’s investigation.’

  Cathy pauses for a second, digesting this. ‘False hope,’ she says softly. She tucks her hair behind her ears, saying nothing, thinking. Thinking how they can’t do this, how they’re monsters. If Frannie is the baby of their family, then Cathy is the conscience. Isn’t it up to her to stop this? ‘That’s – that’s wicked,’ she says quietly.

  ‘What do you suggest, then? Hand her in?’ Joe says, not gesturing to or looking at Frannie. ‘It’s done,’ he adds. ‘We can’t take it back. We can only go forward.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘We need to do it,’ Frannie says.

  Joe looks at Cathy. ‘Do you still have his wallet?’

  It is a sentence which, Cathy feels sure, is significant. The moment they cross from panic to planning. From an accident to behaving like killers. She shakes off that feeling, surely incorrect – how could she possibly tell the future? – and meets her brother’s eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I do.’

  13.

  Now

  Jason’s Office, mid-to-late February, 5.00 p.m.

  Jason has a plate of custard creams on his desk. ‘Left over from a team meeting,’ he says vaguely, gesturing to them as I walk across his office and sit down in the chair. ‘Help yourself.’

  I reach and take one.

  ‘You are clearly reluctant to discuss what you did,’ he says bluntly. He takes off the top of a custard cream, brings the cream side to his mouth, then seems to think better of it and eats it in one go. ‘Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘I mean – wouldn’t you be?’

  Jason has his head in profile, studying the bookcase. I can’t read his expression. ‘Sure,’ he says, and I think he means it. He doesn’t think that I am a monster. ‘Okay. Let me ask you this: can you pinpoint the moment that you knew you wouldn’t get away with it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Absolutely, definitely.’

  ‘All right, then – why don’t we start there, today?’ He passes me the plate. I take another two biscuits. We eat them wordlessly, looking at each other. As he holds my gaze, he inclines his head to the left, like a bird listening out for noise.

  ‘I was sitting on reception,’ I say. ‘It was late. Late-ish. We’d already closed up. It wasn’t getting dark yet but it was that kind of gloomy day.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jason says. Still no pen and paper. Just the custard creams and his sharp mind. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘I’d done some general filing … things like that.’

  ‘Right. So this was – back in the UK.’

  ‘Oh yeah – of course. Back to work. We were all trying to pretend everything was normal. Everything was fine.’

  ‘How successfully, would you say?’

  ‘Pretty unsuccessfully …’ He throws me a wan smile that says, clearly. I look around me at his office. A place I never thought I’d be.

  ‘So, next …’ he prompts.

  ‘I logged on to the computer.’

  Jason keeps his body language casual, dunking a biscuit in his tea, but his gaze is as sharp as a needle, never leaving mine.

  ‘And that was when I saw it. That was when I knew,’ I say.

  ‘Knew what?’ he asks, looking directly at me.

  I shrug. ‘That we had no choice.’

  14.

  Then

  Joe

  The villa is full of signs. Little metal statutes of Jesus on the walls, tiny, palpable stigmata on his hands. A palm-sized ceramic sacred heart nailed to the top of the fireplace, a cross erupting from the top of it like a sword. Their presence has never felt significant, until now, when Joe feels watched and judged at every turn. He doesn’t even believe in God. And yet.

  He rubs at the back of his head. He’s bone tired, the night of no sleep and physical activity beginning to catch up with him. He keeps thinking of the body, the blood slowly pooling in the crevices and creases of his palms, just outside, just over there. You buried him. This single fact keeps repeating on Joe, as though, if his brain tells him often enough and in different, more shocking ways, it might sink in, and he might accept it. Your sister killed that man. You hacked through a tree root with your spade and huffed like it was merely an inconvenience, in order to bury him. Cathy closed his eyes for him.

  ‘Right. We don’t know anything about him,’ Joe says. ‘Except that he was half British.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Frannie says.

  ‘And was staying near here?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘So it’s quite likely – if he’s staying around here, or lives around here – that the police will question us.’

  ‘It is,’ Cathy says.

  ‘And if they find the body,’ Joe says. ‘Then they will find our DNA.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Frannie.

  ‘So we need to destroy all the evidence we can,’ Joe says. ‘And make it seem like something else has happened. A different – narrative.’

  He takes the pen and starts to write down the evidence on the back of an Italian pizzeria menu that he will burn later.

  The hire car.

  Their whereabouts.

  The crime scene.

  He clicks the top of the pen, on and off again, on and off again.

  ‘This is madness,’ Frannie says. ‘This is actually mad.’

  ‘We need to be meticulous.’ Joe finds his jaw is tensed. He wishes she’d keep up with him. He’s trying to undo her mess, after all.

  ‘You sound like Mum,’ Frannie says softly. Their mother would say that sort of thing, Joe concedes. She’s never quite been able to relinquish control of the practice, regularly going over and over the books, interrupting operations.

  ‘Don’t X-ray clients’ pockets,’ Cathy says, their mother’s number-one catchphrase.

  Joe gives a wan smile. ‘Treat each animal as you find them,’ he finishes. ‘Regardless of their owners’ income.’

  Cathy smiles across the table at him. ‘I was just thinking that. You really do,’ she says. ‘Joseph, Catherine, Francesca – whoever you are!’ she says, an exact imitation of their father’s chaotic inability to discern which of his children he’s speaking to.

  ‘God,’ Frannie says, throwing her head back. ‘We’re mad to be laughing.’

  ‘They’re old jokes,’ Joe says with a half-smile. ‘Our mad parents.’

  Their parents used to be similar, both fans of hard work and dedication. Owen, their father, grew up in a council estate in Birmingham. When he was twenty-five, he had been sweeping the floors of the factory where he had worked for a decade when it went into administration. According to Owen, he knew who worked hard, and who didn’t, and where the systems did and didn’t function well, and so he made the administrators an offer. They accepted it, he got a bank loan and went from cleaner to CEO. He now owns fourteen factories. But, where their mother has remained hard working, since Rosie, their father has retreated into himself, fallen into sullenness.

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ Joe says lightly. And he does. Here, in crisis, he can be the patriarch, the rescuer he never was.

  ‘Do,’ Frannie says with a tiny laugh.

  He makes a pot of coffee, faffing with the ignition on the gas hob. They drink old-fashioned coffee here in Italy, dripped slowly through the moka like a work of art. The nutty aroma fills the kitchen. ‘I just need to check on Paul,’ Frannie says.

  When they’re back around the table, Frannie creeps sideways, towards Joe. Cathy scoots her chair in. Together, they pore over the list, heads bent, dark hair mingling together. Something about their proximity, the coffee, the earlier joke about their
father, a pause in the panic, relaxes Joe. He is glad to be here, safe, with his sisters. He’d do it again, he thinks, looking sideways at Frannie, his sister who can make him cry with laughter at impressions of their parents, gradually becoming more accurate over the years as their mother and father have become caricatures of themselves. The other option – Frannie arrested last night, beginning an indefinite stay in an Italian prison today, the call to their parents – is unthinkable.

  ‘The car has got a massive dent in it,’ Frannie says. She rakes back her hair from her smooth, tanned forehead, releasing smells of orange shampoo. ‘I parked it in the usual spot, I thought … anything else would look suspicious.’

  ‘I have a plan for the car,’ Joe says. ‘Leave it to me.’

  ‘Okay,’ Cathy says. She is used to placing her trust in Joe, and he in her. They do it all the time at work, on operations requiring two vets, when he calls her into a tricky consult he can’t figure out.

  ‘Right. Look. We can’t report him missing. That would be even more suspicious. So we need to … we need to make it look like he is alive. I think we should use his debit card,’ Joe says. Despite himself, as he puts forward his plan, he feels something rising up through him. Pride, maybe? A sort of male confidence, a protective animalistic instinct.

  If Joe didn’t know Cathy, he would think she hadn’t heard him. Her gaze stays trained on her coffee cup, her body completely still. But then she raises her eyes to his. She doesn’t want to do it, he can see that, but she also knows that she has to.

  ‘You really mean that,’ she says coolly.

  ‘Don’t you?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t relish pretending a dead man is alive to his family.’

  ‘Neither do I. Tell me if you think we have a second option,’ he says tightly. ‘Since you’re not into resurrections.’ He says it to elicit a reaction from Cathy. As ever, he doesn’t get one. She turns away from him, whatever feelings she has buried deep, sealed off.

  ‘We don’t need your wisecracks, Joe,’ Frannie says in a bored tone.

  ‘What we need is a plan. A direction,’ Joe says forcefully.

  Cathy sighs, a long exhale that doesn’t seem to end. ‘Fine,’ she says.

  ‘Fine?’

  ‘I’ll sort the debit card,’ Cathy says quietly, her face still turned to the side. ‘You do the car.’

  To Frannie, Joe says, ‘You come up with a version of events for last night that we’ll all stick to, in case we’re questioned.’

  Frannie nods. ‘Okay,’ she says in a small voice, the same voice she used when she found out she was pregnant, the same voice she used when she left veterinary school and decided she would just man the reception instead. Scared, but pretending not to be. ‘Okay.’

  15.

  Cathy

  Cathy is standing by the hire car. The sun is slowly cooking her skin. A relentless, dry, deep heat, like an oven door is open somewhere in the universe. Her heart is straining to pump because of the pressure in her chest. She wants to release it, to shout from a cliff-face, to grab a stranger’s lapels and tell them: We are killers! Cathy often fantasizes about saying exactly how she feels sometimes – that she’s pissed off with an owner who let their dog get ravaged by fleas, or that she feels so lonely she sometimes eats dinner in front of a mirror – but this is different. This is worse.

  ‘It’s pretty bad,’ she says to Joe.

  ‘I’m going to take it back early.’

  Cathy runs a hand over the dented front bumper. Frannie’s done a good clean-up job, which is surprising. Frannie is messy. The receptionist desk at work is always cluttered with her things – some of them good ideas, like the lamp they turn on if a euthanasia is taking place, so people know to be quiet. But most of it is clutter, sometimes her ASOS deliveries that she tries on in the staff room while Cathy gives her opinions.

  ‘Won’t that look more suspicious?’ she says to Joe. ‘It’s not due back for two days.’

  ‘Better than the police inspecting the car, isn’t it?’ Joe says. He shrugs, looking at Cathy.

  ‘They won’t look at the car,’ Cathy says, but she’s merely reassuring him. She thinks about her own behaviour at work, how she forensically goes through each possibility when an animal is sick, running down a list of less and less likely outcomes, never really intending to stop. Yes, if someone were missing, she’d check everyone’s stories, everyone’s cars, she thinks. She’d interview every pair of eyes in the vicinity. She shudders at the thought of it.

  ‘Here it is,’ Joe says, handing her the wallet. They’re safe out here on the winding driveway, which meets the track road where it happened. Both are lined with scrubby weeds, the road untended, unvisited, thankfully. She takes it, feeling like a thief. The leather is warm against her fingers, soft as a worn cloth. It’s a simple black wallet, holding only cards, three crude slashes on each side forming the pockets.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. Joe stands in front of her, his hands on his hips. The setting is too idyllic for the conversations they’re having: the sky a wide blue dome up ahead, the grass a parched yellow, pretty weeds growing by the side of the track road.

  ‘I think it should be in a shop,’ he says to her. ‘Use contactless. Choose one with no CCTV or – if you can’t – a crowded one so you blend in. Buy something … a bottle of water, I don’t know. Something mundane.’

  Cathy nods quickly, following his logic. She stares up at him for a beat or two.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he says curiously.

  ‘No, nothing,’ she says, turning slightly away from him. She puts the wallet in her handbag. ‘I’ll get the bus,’ she says. ‘We’ll say I was sightseeing.’

  ‘Unlikely you’d stop working long enough to sightsee.’

  ‘Well, it’s all unlikely.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll tell Frannie. She can add it to – to our thing.’ Joe waves a hand, intended to be a substitute for words, and he looks so exhausted, suddenly, that Cathy wants to reach out to steady him.

  ‘Yeah.’ Cathy begins walking down the track road to the place where she waited for the bus the other day, back when she was a completely different person.

  Parked just down from the bus stop is a news van. Excited Italian reporters gather, smoking, making phone calls, and typing on their mobiles. Cathy stares at her feet as she waits for the bus, wishing she weren’t a blusher.

  The bus is air conditioned, the temperature of a fridge, and Cathy can’t help but wonder how William is faring. How cold is it seven feet under, in the middle of the day? She can’t bear to think of it. Of him in that way, the healthy, alive man from the market.

  Cathy had watched something develop from across the square. The man they now know to be William – wearing a denim jacket and holding a cigarette – had been standing too close to Frannie, who was gesturing with a pineapple she’d bought. Paul was on her hip.

  Cathy heard her sister’s voice over the hum of the market.

  The owner of the stall offered up the chip-and-PIN machine to Cathy, who paid for a fountain pen she didn’t need. She refused a receipt, said, ‘My sister,’ in English, though she knew he wouldn’t understand her. She weaved her way across the market to Frannie, who was standing alone with Paul next to a towering pile of oranges.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Cathy said.

  ‘That man,’ Frannie said, pointing across the market to the dark-haired man, still smoking, then ducking under the awning and leaving, ‘lit up and breathed over – everything.’ She gestured briefly to Paul. ‘Over him.’ She wasn’t indignant, exactly. That wasn’t Frannie’s style. She was just bewildered. So shocked someone could be so rude.

  ‘Oh,’ Cathy said, nodding quickly. ‘Okay – well –’

  Frannie was holding a canvas bag that she’d filled with fruit. ‘Paul breathed loads of it in, and these pears’ – she pointed to the bag – ‘now stink. I don’t understand it. Why you’d …’ She pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear, her hand shaking. Cathy’s gaz
e lingered on it, on that small window into Frannie’s vulnerability that only she would notice.

  ‘Let’s just go,’ Cathy said, always keen to avoid conflict. ‘I’m boiling.’ She glanced sideways at her sister. ‘Where’s Joe?’

  ‘Over there somewhere,’ Frannie said, gesturing to a stand selling espressos. Frannie led Cathy away from the market and stood in the heat of the sun. Around them were the smells of Verona: garlic, dry heat, hot rubbish bins. There was no breeze at all. Cathy would almost be glad to go home, back to the mild British summer. Frannie stood next to Cathy, still looking for the smoking man, but they were too far away now. Frannie’s back was red and sunburnt. Cathy instinctively wanted to reach a palm out to see how hot it was, to soothe her little sister. Something about her shoulders, the visible spine, made her wince.

  Joe emerged, carrying a tiny paper cup filled with coffee. He was holding hands with Lydia.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘Since when do you drink espresso?’ Frannie said with a laugh that sounded somehow forced. ‘Who are you – a mob boss?’

  ‘I’m on holiday,’ Joe had said.

  ‘We’re done,’ Cathy said.

  ‘We left because some bloke blew cigarette smoke all over Paul,’ Frannie said, tugging Paul’s white sunhat down more tightly. He reached up unconsciously to adjust it.

  ‘What?’ Joe said sharply, still sipping the coffee, his shoulders tensed. Cathy glanced at him and a feeling of unease settled over her.

  ‘Look – let’s just –’ Cathy said, reaching for Frannie’s arm.

  ‘You can’t just smoke these days, all over food,’ Frannie said. ‘Even here.’

  ‘Frannie,’ Cathy said. She darted another look at Joe, who had puffed up, somehow bigger, his feet planted far apart, his shoulders rounded.

  ‘It’s not fucking on,’ Joe said, his voice raised above the hum of the market.