The Guilty Party

by Mel McGrath

  He takes a deep breath and blinks. A look of defeat comes over him. ‘OK, right, so she came to the house to deliver a pizza and I got distracted and left her at the door for a moment. I didn’t even know anything was missing until Gav got back later and texted me. I just happened to see her at the festival. Obviously she didn’t know I’d be there or she wouldn’t have showed up. When I confronted her she just got all weepy on me and denied it. I was probably a bit heavy with her, trying to check her bag, but there wasn’t any cash in it. I don’t know if she had some drug thing going on. Maybe that’s why she took the money. She seemed pretty out of it, to be honest.’

  ‘But you didn’t say any of that to the police, or to Gav, did you?’

  ‘Mate, look. I had a guy over to the house that evening. He could easily have taken the money. It was in the same drawer as the house keys and I had to open the drawer to open the door for the pizza. Gav would go ballistic if he knew – you know he’s got a thing about me not bringing dates back to the house – and with this bloody cancer thing hanging over both of us, I don’t want to put him through that.

  ‘You know Gav had a CCTV installed at the front door. We’ve laughed about it, remember? It was a condition of the insurance apparently. High value art, blah, blah. There are Bridget Rileys in there, Anish Kapoors, a Grayson Perry pot. He’s got a Damien Hirst, for crap’s sake. Why he’s paranoid about strangers in the house. If I’d told the police everything they’d have wanted to see the CCTV and I didn’t want to take the risk of Gav finding out. Honestly, when they came around I didn’t even know that woman had died.’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t intervene when you saw Marika in the churchyard? She deserved what was coming to her?’

  ‘No, of course not. I just thought she was probably wrapped up in some drug gang thing and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. And so, yes, I didn’t do anything about it. But I wasn’t exactly alone in that, was I?’ He rolls his eyes, irritation in his tone. ‘Seriously, this weekend is turning out to be a shit show.’ And with that he’s out the door, slamming it behind him, and racing down the stairs at a clip.

  Some minutes later Anna appears carrying a mug of tea. ‘What was that all about?’ She comes over, lays the mug on the limed oak stool serving as a bedside table and sits down beside me.

  ‘Just Dex being Dex.’

  There’s a pause while Anna takes this in and evidently decides not to pursue it.

  ‘Anyway, how are you feeling? Did you manage to get some more sleep?’

  ‘A bit groggy from painkillers, but fine.’

  When she runs a hand through my hair it’s as if some dark spider has made its nest there and is preparing to lay its eggs.

  ‘Did you speak to Will?’

  ‘Uh huh. Some woman got attacked last night. The police seem to think it was that guy who broke in here.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she says, her energy softening, moving her fingers once more across my scalp. ‘God, Cassie darling, you were so lucky that Dex came down when he did. It could have been you. I was wondering, maybe the best thing would be for you to go home after all? Bo’s gone off to watch the game, but his car’s still here. I could give you a lift to Weymouth station. I think there’s a fast train at forty-seven past the hour,’ she adds, casually, as though the timetable was some factoid she had stumbled upon in the course of a mental rummage. ‘I’m sure the boys would understand.’

  A brief silence falls before I ask, ‘What were you and Bo arguing about?’

  ‘Oh, you heard that? It was nothing really. I just thought we all should have a late lunch together but Bo was being an arse about going to the pub to watch the game.’ She smiles and pats my hand, a co-conspirator.

  ‘You must have seen the woman when you were in there last night.’

  ‘What woman?’ Her expression is a perfect blank.

  ‘The one who was attacked. Apparently she was drinking there and probably got followed home.’

  ‘God, how awful.’

  A space opens up in the conversation and into it falls the thick, grey, cosmic web of lies we have all been spinning, together and alone, long before the weekend, before the festival even. What is wrong with us? Have we forgotten how to tell the truth? Do we even know what it is any more?

  ‘Are you OK, darling?’ Anna says. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go home? I really think that would be best.’

  ‘I probably just need a walk.’

  ‘In that case, why don’t I come with you? We could go up to the quarry and look at the view?’

  ‘I think I’d prefer to go on my own.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, in that case, I’ll be here when you get back. But don’t be gone long, will you? You’re obviously still a little bit in shock.’ She’s stopped stroking my head now and in an odd, hectoring tone in which it is possible to sense the faintest hint of a warning, adds, ‘I don’t want to have to worry about you.’

  A little later, after Anna has gone downstairs, I pull on my walking boots and leave the cottage but I do not go to the quarry. I’m afraid Anna might follow me there. Instead, I make my way down the path into Fortuneswell. The peregrines are sailing over the cliff tops, calling and hacking. In the right-hand pocket of my jacket lies the ammonite Bo gave me. In the other, the one I found for myself. For fifteen years I have spun in the Group’s orbit but lately I have been a bad comet, unruly and unpredictable. I’m spinning out, I’m going it alone. With a steady heart I make my way towards the bus stop by the church where Rachel and her boyfriend were sitting. I could go back and collect my things but there is nothing in Fossil Cottage I can’t afford to lose now and everything in me is screaming it’s too late. Now is the time for action. If I do not return soon, Anna will come looking for me.

  Up on the road by the quarry a cream and green bus appears from around the headland. I finger the ammonite Bo gave me and think of Marika. There is too much to untangle. Too many lies. I think about the Mer-Chicken, the hideous, mythical beast invented to fill a gap in human understanding. The harbinger of death. This is what the Group has become. A monster of the imagination. A conjured creature which can now only bring misery and torment. Up on the headland the bus grinds to a halt. A solitary woman gets out and a thought flies by about Anna and how lonely she must be, trapped in her web of lies. How lonely all four of us are, stuck in our pretence at friendship. In the light of Dex’s phone in the alleyway, I saw that clearly for the first time. We have not been best buddies for a long time. Perhaps we never were. What we are now is frenemies. The bus pulls out and picks up speed. The bus stop is still fifty metres away. Shall I? This is the time. It is now or never, now or I am lost.

  As the bus roars around the final corner on the approach into Fortuneswell, I can feel myself rising from the pavement, sprinting, my arm flapping a signal. The sound of compressed air and a squeal. The whoosh of the doors opening.

  ‘Nearly missed it,’ says the driver as I step in. ‘Where to, love?’

  35

  Cassie

  2.30 p.m. Sunday 2 October, Train to London

  The text comes through as the train is drawing into Southampton. I hit call back. There are no preliminaries. The voice is a knife to the jugular. ‘I am so angry with you right now I don’t know if I’m going to be able to be your friend. You promised not to tell Dex I told you about the police. And now I can’t trust you ever again.’

  No more avoidance. No more hesitation or creeping around or pretending not to know what has become common knowledge. The train is slowing. You are now approaching Southampton Airport Parkway.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re on a bloody train? You’ve just abandoned everyone?’ No answer required. ‘That chap you had a fling with just went to see him. Will, is it? He seems to know all about the police visiting Dex after the festival too. Now Dex is too scared to leave the island. He thinks the police are going to come after him about this woman who got attacked. For God’s sake, Cassie, what did you do, walk round the island
with a loud hailer? Who didn’t you tell?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gav. It all got too complicated. The Group, everything.’

  ‘You know what, Cassie? Fuck you. I don’t use that language often, but fuck you.’

  The world outside is dragging its heels. A series of drab warehouse buildings and box stores trudges across the windowpane. It’s too late for an apology. Outside in the corridor between the carriages a few passengers have already gathered by the doors. A fishy smell of brakes is rising up from the tracks.

  ‘Dex is really scared. Go back and give him some support. Do the right thing. Talk to this Will chap and get him to shut his mouth. Please. Before I have to.’

  The next stop is Southampton Airport Parkway. Southampton Airport Parkway will be the next stop.

  And so I find myself on the platform, waiting for the next train back to Weymouth and killing time surfing around a few of the local Portland news sites. A single line on a local Twitter feed noting the escape and re-apprehension of the young offender. No mention of an attack on a woman or Dex or Rachel. I consider calling Gav back, then think better of it. Right now, what is there to say? Gav is right. Dex is the man who rescued me from my loneliness. If I owe a debt to anyone in the Group, it’s Dex.

  The train to Weymouth trundles through countryside I had hoped to leave behind. A couple of stations further on from Southampton, a woman boards the train, stops at my aisle and makes as if to settle in the seat beside me, but the train is nearly empty and with one dark look, I hustle her away to another seat a few rows further up the carriage. As she turns to put her belongings up on the overhead rack she narrows her eyes and gives me the death stare. Too bad. I have something to do and I need to do it in private.

  There’s Wi-Fi on the train but it’s not until we reach the outskirts of Bournemouth that a stable 4G connection appears. I bring the secure folder in the Cloud and click. Up come the Big Black Book entries, some of them pictures of men I’ve had sex with, captured mostly when they were unawares, their faces sometimes doughy in sleep, occasionally a flash of torso or a shoulder, an arm loose, skin still slick with sex sweat. Back and back I go, through thumbnail after thumbnail, trying to ignore the creeping shame because I need to be clear-eyed right now and to see this through this to its conclusion, to unpick the whole tangled mess of it.

  If I don’t who will?

  In any case, it’s really Bo’s entries I’m interested in, pictures of sexual encounters which, most likely, not even Bo remembers. Each thumbnail needs to be opened and viewed with new eyes. What I’m looking for, I’m not sure. Something in the eyes, perhaps, a certain slackness of the jaw. There is a kind of drowsiness that steals over a person after sex, a kind of melting, but it’s not that. I’m looking for people who seem incompletely shut down, as if, behind the drooping eyelids and the corpse mouth, something inside themselves remains silently screaming. People who look like Marika did in the alley that night. Back and back I go, inspecting each image, but nothing surfaces until I reach Lucy, Black Book entry 289 and there it is, the encounter I’ve been looking for, the one that had even at the time lodged itself in my mind. A young woman, early twenties with dyed pink hair. She appears to be asleep, but there’s something which, even when I first saw it, troubled me. Back then I didn’t understand its significance or maybe I chose to ignore it. But I clearly remember looking at that face and feeling unsettled. It’s in the eyes which, though unseeing, are partially open, the pupils wildly dilated, and in the slack-lipped set of the mouth.

  Most tellingly it’s in the thin stream of foam pooling from the edge of her lips down the right side of her chin. Lucy isn’t sleeping at all. She’s overdosing.

  Bo’s dirty little secret.

  Not so secret any more.

  I did nothing for you, Marika, and I’m truly sorry. But this is what you have given me, the moral courage to act. I will not let this pass. The time has come for me to act.

  The ticket collector appears, stops beside my seat, says a cheery ‘Hello!’ and waits to be handed a ticket. He checks it, scribbles over the date and hands it back. A young man trundles by with the coffee and tea trolley. By the time I return my attention to the Big Black Book something odd has started to happen. Entries are disappearing, one by one, a slow progression of deletions. A quick check confirms that this is not a signal problem nor the result of my fingers on the virtual keyboard. The Big Black Book is steadily growing smaller before my eyes.

  But this is not Wonderland and I am definitely not Alice.

  I tap into preferences and a notification appears on my screen.

  Administrator access required.

  In goes the password. Up comes the same message. The entries in the Big Black Book continue to disappear. I log out. In the few seconds it takes me to log back in more entries have vanished – too late, I fumble to take a screenshot but now, when I try to go into the settings, I’m automatically logged out. And that’s when it hits me. Someone has logged in and changed the administrator protocols. That person is deleting the Book, entry by entry, slowly but surely erasing what has taken years to create. Destroying the evidence. By the time I get back to the Isle of Portland all that will remain of the Group’s dark little secret will be a series of deletions. The Big Black Book is transforming in front of my eyes into the Big Black Blank.

  36

  Cassie

  Afternoon, Sunday 2 October, Isle of Portland

  As the cab from Weymouth turns off the high street onto the road leading up to Fossil Cottage the signal bars on my phone slip away. I called Will at Weymouth station and left a message but he hasn’t responded. It’s too late now. Whatever is waiting for me is mine to deal with alone. It’s raining and the trees in the little wood below the cottage, which once seemed so romantic, are strung with ravens, their sodden wings hunched against the weather. The driver approaches the driveway too fast and the gravel sinks against the undercarriage. No sign of Bo’s Audi. The wind stirs the trees. Otherwise nothing moves. Then from the kitchen window Anna’s face appears and vanishes just as quickly. I pay the driver and watch the cab slide back down the hill before heading heart-sick towards the front door. There are only two ways to escape the Group. I see that now. Either I’ll be the death of it or it will be the death of me.

  The door will not open so I ring the bell and wait. A long time passes before the chain rattles, the lock slides open and Anna appears. Something about her has changed. Or maybe it’s just the way I see her now; beautiful still but in the way that, at a distance, a snake is beautiful; the way a drop of mercury is beautiful when it is behind glass.

  ‘I’ve come back to try to make things right.’

  ‘It’s too late, Cassie. We don’t need you any more.’

  ‘Dex needs me.’

  Anna considers this for a moment, hand on hip, her shoulders hunched forward slightly as if she’s about to spring. A coldness in her eyes. Then, turning her body away, she waves me inside. I follow her into the living room in silence. Only a day or two ago the cottage seemed cosy. Now it’s dank and cold.

  ‘Dex isn’t here. He’s at the police station helping with their enquiries.’

  Anna’s chest heaves, moving the skin around the collar bones. Her eyes on mine feel predatory. The set of her mouth could stop a stampede. ‘What were you thinking, telling the milkman about that nonsense at the festival? You must have known he’d go straight to that awful snoop of a policewoman? How else would she know about it? Now they’ve put Dex’s name into their computer or whatever and they’ve obviously put two and two together and made twenty.’

  ‘They’ll find out Dex is gay and it’ll be fine.’

  Anna, who has been pacing and clutching her fingers through this, suddenly stops and faces me.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Cassie. Your little-girl-lost act won’t wash any more. You told the milkman you and Dex were an item. This is all because of you, your spinelessness, your endless pathetic need for approval. Do you have any idea what you
could be bringing down on us? Not just Dex. All of us.’ She’s in my face now. ‘You do not keep secrets from me, do you understand? There are things you don’t know. I have to manage all of this now. The boys, the Group, everything. And you are going to do whatever I need you to do.’ She’s right over me now, pressing her finger into my chest where the pain is. ‘You. Do. Not. Keep. Secrets. Not from me. Not ever.’

  ‘We’ve all been keeping secrets; from the rest of the world, from each other, even from ourselves.’

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Have you deleted the Big Black Book?’

  The room falls silent save for the beat of the rain on the windowpanes, the sigh of wind down the chimney. Anna has slumped in the armchair. She is shaking and crying now but there are no tears. It’s not sadness. It’s more like fear.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about but I think you should just shut up.’

  ‘Don’t do this. Don’t lie.’

  Her head shoots up and there’s a wild quality to her. ‘Explain to me how I would have done that, Cassie. I’ve been here, waiting for Dex to get back. There’s no phone signal and no Wi-Fi.’

  ‘Then it can only have been Bo. Anna, we need to find him. I think he’s done something bad – really bad.’

  Anna’s eyes have turned inward now. In her mind, she’s scrolling over everything she knows, trying to make sense of it.

  I say, ‘Where is Bo?’

  ‘Out. At the pub. I don’t know. Maybe he’s run away, like you.’ As she says this her arm floats out and into the air. Gone. ‘The point is, Cassie, that Dex is being questioned right now, and you know he didn’t attack that woman at the festival because you saw him with Bo on the other side of the alleyway. And you know he was here last night because he came down the stairs and saw off that bloke. We were here, Cassie, we were all right here.’ She pushes a finger through the air for emphasis. Here, in this place, with the listening walls.