by Ruth Ware
Her voice shook, and broke on the last word, and I put my arms around her, turning my face away from the sight of Ambrose lying sprawled peacefully on the rug, his olive skin pale as beeswax.
Why? I wanted to ask. Why?
But somehow I couldn’t say the words.
‘Oh my God,’ Fatima said. She sank down on the sofa arm, and her face was grey. I knew she was probably thinking, as I was, of the last time we’d seen Ambrose, his long legs stretched out at the table in front of the Mill’s windows, smiling as he sketched us playing in the water. It was only a week ago, and yet there had been nothing wrong. No hint of what was to come. ‘He’s dead,’ she said slowly, as if she were trying to make herself believe it. ‘He’s really dead.’
With those words, the reality of the situation seemed to sink in to all of us, and I felt a shiver of cold run from my neck, all the way down my back, prickling at the skin, as if my body was trying to keep me here, now, in the present.
Fatima put her hands to her face and swayed visibly, and for a moment I thought she was about to pass out.
‘Why?’ she asked again, her voice choked. ‘Why would he do this?’
I felt Kate flinch beside me, as if Fatima’s questions were blows striking home.
‘She doesn’t know,’ I said angrily. ‘None of us do. Stop asking, OK?’
‘I think we all need a drink,’ Thea said abruptly, and she opened the bottle of whiskey Ambrose kept on the kitchen table and poured herself a tumblerful, gulping it down.
‘Kate?’
Kate hesitated, and then nodded, and Thea poured three more glasses, and topped up her own. I wouldn’t have chosen to drink, I wanted a cigarette more, but somehow when I raised the glass to my lips, I found myself gulping down the harsh spirit, feeling it burn acidly in my throat, and – somehow – it took the edge off what was happening, blurring the reality of Ambrose lying there on the rug, in front of us – dead.
‘What are we going to do?’ Fatima asked at last when the glasses were empty. The colour had come back into her face a little. She put the glass down, rattling slightly against the table as her hand shook. ‘Do we phone the police, or the ambulance …?’
‘Neither,’ Kate said, and her voice was hard. There was a shocked silence, and I knew my own face must be showing the same uncomprehending blankness that I saw reflected in the others.
‘What?’ Thea said at last. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t tell anyone,’ Kate said doggedly. She poured another glass and choked it back. ‘Don’t you get it? I’ve been sitting here since I found him trying to think of a way out of this, but if anyone knows he’s dead –’ She stopped, and put her hands to her stomach as if she had been stabbed, and were trying to staunch a terrible wound, but then she seemed to force herself on. ‘I can’t let anyone find out.’ Her voice was mechanical, almost as if she had been rehearsing these words, repeating them to herself over and over. ‘I can’t. If they find out he’s dead before I’m sixteen, I’ll be taken away, taken into care. I can’t lose my home, not on top of – on top of –’
She broke off, unable to finish, and I had the impression of someone holding themselves together with a great effort, someone who might snap and break down at any moment. But she didn’t need to say it, we knew what she meant.
Not on top of losing her only parent, her father.
‘It – it’s just a house –’ Fatima faltered, but Kate shook her head. The truth was it wasn’t just a house. It was Ambrose, from the paintings in his studio down to the red wine stains on the black boards. And it was Kate’s link to us. If she got sent away to some far-off foster home, she would lose everything. Not just her father, but us too, and Luc. She would have no one at all.
It seems … God, looking back, it seems not just stupid, but criminal. What were we thinking? But the answer was … we were thinking of Kate.
There was nothing we could do to bring Ambrose back, and even now when I weigh up the alternatives – foster care for Kate, and the Mill seized by the bank … even now, it makes a kind of sense. It was so unfair. And if we couldn’t help him, we could at least help Kate.
‘You can’t tell anyone he’s gone,’ Kate said again. Her voice was broken. ‘Please. Swear you won’t.’
We nodded, one by one, all of us. But Fatima’s brow was furrowed with worry.
‘So … what do we do?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘We can’t – we can’t just leave him here.’
‘We bury him,’ Kate said. There was a silence, the shock of her words slowly sinking in. I remember the cold of my hands, in spite of the heat of the night. I remember looking at Kate’s white, shuttered face and thinking, who are you?
But as she said the words, they seemed somehow to crystallise into the only possible course of action. What alternative did we have?
Now, looking back, I want to shake myself – the drunk, blinkered child that I was, swept along with a plan so stupid that it somehow seemed the only way out. What alternative did we have? Only a hundred different possibilities, all of them better than concealing a death and embarking on a lifetime of deceit and lies.
But none of them seemed like an option on that hot summer night, as Kate spoke those words, and we stood facing each other around Ambrose’s body.
‘Thea?’ Kate asked, and she nodded, uncertainly, and put her hands to her head.
‘It – it seems like it’s the only way.’
‘It can’t be,’ Fatima said, but she didn’t say it as if she believed it, she said it like someone trying to come to terms with something they know to be true, but can’t bear to accept. ‘It can’t be. There must be another way. Isn’t there something we could do? Raise some money?’
‘It’s not just the money though, is it?’ Thea said. She ran her hands through her hair. ‘Kate’s fifteen. They won’t let her live alone.’
‘But this is mad,’ Fatima said, and there was despair in her voice as she looked around the circle. ‘Please, Kate, please let me call the police.’
‘No,’ Kate said harshly. She turned to face Fatima, and there was a strange mix of pleading desperation, and reluctance in her face. ‘Look, I’m not asking you to help me if you feel you can’t, but please, please don’t tell the police. I’ll do it, I swear. I’ll report him missing. But not now.’
‘But he’s dead!’ Fatima sobbed out, and as she said the words something in Kate seemed to snap and she grabbed Fatima by the wrist, almost as if she was about to strike her.
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she cried, and the despair in her voice and face – I hope I never witness another human being go through that again. ‘That’s why this is the only – the only –’
For a moment I thought she might be about to lose control completely – and in a way it would have been a relief, to watch her scream and rail against what had happened, and the great hammer blow that had been struck against the security of her existence.
But whatever storm was passing through her, she reined it in with a great effort, and her face, when she let Fatima’s wrist drop, was calm.
‘Will you help me?’ she said.
And one by one, first Fatima, then Thea, and then last of all me, we nodded.
We were respectful, or as respectful as we could be. We wrapped the body in a groundsheet and carried it as far as we could, to a place where Ambrose had loved to sketch, a little headland a few hundred yards down the Reach, towards the sea, where the views were at their most beautiful, where the track petered out and no cars could drive, and where few people came, except the odd dog walker and the fishermen with their boats and lines.
There, among the reeds, we dug a hole, taking it in turns with the shovel until our arms ached and our backs screamed, and we tipped Ambrose in.
That was the worst part. No dignified lowering – we couldn’t. He was too heavy, even with four of us, and the hole was too deep and too narrow. The sound he made as he hit the wet, shaley bottom – it was like a kind of smack. I hear it st
ill, sometimes, in my dreams.
He lay face down, completely still, and behind me I heard Kate give a kind of retching, choking sob, and she fell to her knees in the sand, burying her face in her hands.
‘Cover him up,’ Thea said, her voice hard. ‘Give me the shovel.’
Slap. The sound of wet sand flung into a makeshift grave. Slap. Slap.
And over it all, the shushing of the waves on the shore, and Kate’s dry terrible sobs, reminding us what we were doing.
At last the hole was full and the tide rose to cover the marks we’d made, smoothing over our muddied, troubled footprints, and the scar we had cut in the bank. And we stumbled back with the torn groundsheet in our arms, holding Kate between us, to begin the rest of our lives as they would be from now on, in the knowledge of what we had done.
SOMETIMES, WHEN I wake in the night, the sound of a shovel grating on shale in my dreams, I still cannot believe it. I have spent so long running from the memories, pushing them away, drowning them in drink and routine and everyday life.
How. The word rings in my ears. How did you bring yourself to do it? How did you ever think this was right? How could you think what you did was the solution to Kate’s terrible situation?
And most of all, how have you coped, living with this knowledge, living with the memory of that panicked, drunken stupidity?
But back then it was a different word that reverberated in my head all that night as we smoked and drank and cried on Kate’s sofa, holding her in our arms as the moon rose and the tide washed away the evidence of what we’d done.
Why.
Why had Ambrose done it?
We found out the next morning.
We had planned to stay the rest of the weekend, to look after Kate, keep her company in her grief, but when the clock that hung between the long windows showed four, she stubbed out her cigarette, and wiped her tears.
‘You should go back.’
‘What?’ Fatima looked up from her glass. ‘Kate, no.’
‘No, you should go. You’ve not signed out, and anyway, it’s better that you’re not … that you have …’
She stopped. But we knew what she meant, and that she was right, and as dawn began to break over the marshes we set out, shaking and nauseous with wine and shock, our muscles still aching, but our hearts aching harder at the sight of Kate, huddled white and sleepless in the corner of the sofa as we left.
It was a Saturday, which meant that when we crawled under our blankets, drawing the curtains against the bright morning light, I didn’t bother to set my alarm. There was no roll call at Saturday breakfast, no one checked us in and out, and it was quite acceptable to skip it and go straight in for lunch, or make toast in the senior common room, with the toaster that was one of the privileges of being in the fifth.
Today, though, we didn’t get a chance to sleep in. The knock came early, quickly followed by the scrape of Miss Weatherby’s staff key in our bedroom lock, and Fatima and I were still prone beneath our red felt blankets, blinking and dazed as she strode into the room, pulling back the curtains.
She said nothing, but her shrewd eyes took it all in – the sand-spattered jeans lying on the chair where I’d left them, the sandals clagged with mud from the salt marsh, the red wine stains on our lips and the unmistakable cherry-ripe scent of alcohol leaching out through the skin of two hung-over teenagers …
In the bed across from mine Fatima was struggling upright, raking hair out of her face, blinking in the cruelly bright light. I looked from her to Miss Weatherby, feeling my heart begin to thump in my chest. Something was wrong.
‘What’s going on?’ Fatima asked. Her voice cracked a little on the last syllable, and I could feel her worry rising in pitch with mine. Miss Weatherby shook her head.
‘My office, ten minutes,’ she said shortly. Then she turned on her heel and left Fatima and me staring at each other, terrified but silent as unspoken questions passed between us.
We dressed in record time, though my fingers were shaking with a mix of fear and hangover as I tried to button my top. There was no time for a shower, but both Fatima and I splashed water on our faces and brushed our teeth, me hoping to mask the worst of the cigarettes on my breath, trying not to retch as the brush slipped in my trembling fingers, making me gag.
At last, after what felt like an impossibly long time, we were ready, and we slipped out of our bedroom. My heart was thumping so hard in my chest that for a moment I almost didn’t hear the footsteps from above. Thea was hurrying down the stairs, her face white, her nails bitten to blood.
‘Weatherby?’ she asked, and Fatima nodded, her eyes dark pools of fear. ‘What d’you –’ Thea began.
But we were on the landing now, and a passing crowd of first years looked at us curiously, wondering perhaps what we were doing up so early with our pale faces and trembling hands.
Fatima shook her head, a kind of sickness in her expression, and we hurried on, the clock in the main hallway striking nine just as we reached Miss Weatherby’s office door.
We should have got our stories straight, I thought desperately, but there was no time now. Even though none of us had knocked, it was exactly ten minutes since we’d been summoned, and we could hear noises coming from behind the door – Miss Weatherby gathering up her pens, pushing back her chair …
My hands were cold and shaking with adrenaline, and beside me I could see Fatima looking as if she was about to be sick – or pass out.
Thea had a look of grim determination, like someone going into battle.
‘Volunteer nothing,’ she hissed as the door handle began to turn. ‘Understand? Yes/no answers. We know nothing about Am—’
And then the door swung open and we were ushered inside.
‘WELL?’
One word, just that. We sat, ranged opposite Miss Weatherby, and I felt my cheeks burn with something that was not quite shame, but close to it. Beside me, to my left, I could see Thea, looking out of the window. Her face was pale and bored, for all the world like she’d been called in to discuss name tags and lost hockey sticks, but I could see her fingers moving restlessly beneath the cover of her shirt cuffs, picking, picking relentlessly at the dry skin around her nails.
Fatima, to my right, was making no pretence at coolness. She looked as shocked as I felt, slumped down in her chair as though she could make herself shrink down to nothing. Her hair had fallen across her face as though trying to hide her fear, and she kept her eyes firmly fixed on her lap, refusing to meet Miss Weatherby’s gaze.
‘Well?’ Miss Weatherby said again, something like anger in her tone, and she gestured contemptuously at one of the papers on the desk.
My eyes flickered to the others, waiting for them to speak, but they didn’t and I swallowed.
‘We’ve – we’ve done nothing wrong,’ I said, but my voice cracked on the last word, because we had, it was just not this.
They were pictures – pictures of me, of Thea, of Fatima, of Kate, spread out across the polished wood in a way that made me feel naked and exposed as I never had when Ambrose drew us.
There was Thea, swimming in the Reach, lying on her back, her arms stretched lazily above her head. There was Kate, poised to dive from the jetty, a long slim streak of flesh, pale against the azure splash of watercolour sea. There was Luc, sunbathing naked on the jetty, his eyes closed, a lazy smile on his lips. There were all five of us, skinny-dipping in the moonlight, a tangle of limbs and laughter, all pencil shadows and bright moonlit splashes …
My eyes went from one to the next, and with each sketch the scenes came back to me, leaping off the paper into my mind’s eye as clear and fresh as when we were there – feeling the cool of the water, the heat of the sun on my skin …
The last one, the one closest to Miss Weatherby’s hand, was me.
I felt my throat close and my cheeks burn.
‘Well?’ Miss Weatherby said again, and her voice shook.
They had been chosen, that much was clear. Out of al
l of the hundreds of drawings Ambrose had done of us curled on the sofa in pyjamas, or eating toast in dressing gowns at his table, or stomping in boots and mittens across a frost-flecked field, whoever sent these had picked out the most incriminating examples – the ones where we were naked, or seemed to be.
I looked at the one of myself, bent over, painting my toenails, at the curve of my spine, the ridges drawn with such care that it seemed as if you could reach out and touch them, feel the knots. I had been wearing a halter neck that day, in fact. I remembered it – the heat on my spine, the knot of the top digging into my neck, the acrid smell of the pink polish in my nostrils as I stroked on the lacquer.
But in the drawing I was seated with my back to the viewer, with the hair on my neck hiding the strings of the top. It had been picked not for what it was, but for what it looked like. It had been chosen with care.
Who had done this? Who would want to destroy Ambrose like this, and us along with him?
You don’t understand, I wanted to say. I knew what she thought – what anyone would think, seeing those drawings, but she was wrong. So horribly, horribly wrong.
It wasn’t like that, I wanted to sob.
But we said nothing. We said nothing while Miss Weatherby railed at us about personal responsibility and the conduct of a Salten girl, and asked us again and again and again for a name.
And we said nothing.
She must have known. There was no one who could draw like that, except maybe Kate. But Ambrose rarely signed his rough sketches and perhaps she thought that if she could just get us to say the words out loud …
‘Very well then; where were you last night?’ she said at last.
We said nothing.
‘You had no permission to leave the school and yet you broke out of bounds. You were seen, you know.’
We said nothing. We only sat, ranged together, taking our refuge in muteness. Miss Weatherby folded her arms and as the painful silence stretched, I felt Fatima and Thea exchange a quick glance at my side, and I knew what they were wondering. What did it all mean, and how long could we keep this up?
