The Guilty Party

by Mel McGrath

  Doing nothing doesn’t mean you’re innocent.

  As I’m making my way through a narrow thicket to where the road curves away to the south across the cliffs to the quarry, I am checking for a signal. A fold in the land is blocking it here, but a few steps further up the hill behind the tangle of the wood lies the car park from where I picked up my texts and emails and where Gav was parked behind the ice cream van what seems like an age ago now. Back then all I wanted was to forget Marika and have fun. Looking back, whatever fun we had seems beside the point, a smokescreen, a cover, the mist across the water that vanishes with the sun. The bond is broken. Marika broke it. Marika set us free.

  The sun is sinking over the sea, casting long, low shadows. To the east, the cliff face burns in its borrowed light. The peregrines are gone and the ravens are heading to their rookeries. I’m rounding the bushes at the entrance to the car park now. There’s a rustling in the bin and something wild suddenly scoots away into the undergrowth, setting off a chorus of bird alarms. There are three bars on my phone. The world has shrunk to those three bars. I need to gather my courage. Fifteen years of my life has come to this. It is the time to step out from the noise and be the signal. I have never been surer of anything nor less certain. My heart is jamming in my chest and my heart is saying go. Pulling up my contacts I scroll down until I reach Luke Bowen and for a few wild seconds all the memories come flooding back. The late nights laughing and the soul searching and the growing up together. Then my finger moves across the screen and I tap the phone icon.

  At that moment a shout echoes off the cliffs, a raw screech powerful enough to send roosting birds spraying from trees. It’s the sound crashing trains would make if they were human, a cry of derangement, of distress so terrible it rips holes through time. For a brief nanosecond I think that shout is coming from me until, looking about, I see Anna standing at the entrance to the car park, one hand pressed over her mouth, the other on her chest, too shocked to move. The shout has died on her lips, replaced by odd keening bleats, like a dog tied up too long. How silly of me to imagine I could outrun Anna or ever leave her behind.

  A solitary midnight blue Audi is parked at the far end of the car park where the tarmac gives out to a wooded path leading up to the quarry. The engine is running but at my current vantage no one is visible through the windows. The doors are all closed and from the exhaust pipe a length of green and yellow garden hose runs around and up through the window on the passenger’s side. There is a terrible stillness to the scene. Then Anna crumbles, the way a tower block or skyscraper crumbles when dynamited, as if from the inside out and I’m running towards her, shouting her name but before I can reach her she is waving me away, pointing to the car and screaming, ‘No, not me, go to Bo.’

  I am conscious that I have ceased to be a bystander and become a witness. But everything is happening in such an odd, dreamlike way, as if I am hardly part of the action at all.

  What did we do?

  We did nothing.

  The tarmac is firm beneath the soles of my boots though and I am tearing across it. I’m nearly there now, part running, part stumbling, my breath spitting and gasping like a cornered cat, a terrible drumbeat in my chest. Reaching the vehicle, my eyes scan the interior, taking in the leather seats, taking in the polished dashboard, taking in the pipe and the gap in the window where it has been forced through, taking in the daypack on the back seat, my heart an engine driven in the wrong gear, my heart a view from a high speed train, my heart the undertow you have to fight to get back to shore. I’m afraid to open the door. I am afraid of suffocating. I’m afraid of what I might see. I am afraid because Bo isn’t there.

  Breathe.

  The sound of my voice carrying across the expanse of tarmac.

  ‘No one in the car.’

  Anna’s head shoots up. She is reconstructing her body, rebuilding the spine, the muscles and nerves and sinews, gradually coming back to life.

  ‘Check the boot.’ The boot is locked. But the engine is on. I’m afraid of whatever might be in there. I’m afraid of finding nothing.

  ‘I’m calling the police.’

  Anna is beside me now, panting, her tongue lolling like a greyhound’s.

  ‘No.’ Her chest is heaving and she’s hunched over, one arm resting on her knee, the other patting the air to stall me. She gulps, sets herself upright. Her chest is spasming as if she’s about to be sick but she’s dancing around the car peering inside, one hand shielding her eyes, nose pressed against the glass as if she doesn’t quite believe me or the evidence of her own eyes.

  ‘No, we have . . .’ between intakes of breath, ‘. . . to open the door . . . unlock the boot.’

  Calmer now, I am able to see what Anna is not, that, unlike the other doors, the driver’s side door is unlocked. But which of us will risk the life-stealing air? Not me. I am already feeling quite suffocated enough.

  ‘I’m going to take the hosepipe out of the exhaust.’

  Anna blinks an acknowledgement.

  I make my way round to the back of the vehicle. The pipe is resting inside the exhaust but there’s no seal. If I hold my breath and lean down keeping my head held high I figure I should be able to pull it out without the fumes overwhelming me. I grasp the hosepipe and give it a yank. As it slides, I whip away my hand and spring back.

  ‘Open the door now.’ Even as I’m saying this I can see Anna’s in no state to follow instructions. She has moved away and is clutching her hands and rocking. It’s up to me. A blast of carbon monoxide in high concentration can cause collapse and death in seconds. I read that somewhere.

  No, I am not going to do nothing but I am not going to do this.

  ‘I’m calling the police.’ I take out my phone and am plugging in the passcode when there’s a sudden rush of cool air and Anna comes bowling towards me, her arms raised like a kick boxer’s and with a sideways spin her right leg rises from the tarmac and whips out and smacks into my hand, loosening my grip on the phone, which arcs up and into the air and lands with the shattering sound on the ground. And Anna and I are left staring at one another, speechless with shock.

  In a quiet tremble Anna says, ‘Just open the door and get the fucking key.’ And although I could say no to Anna, it occurs to me that I never have, not once, not directly and I’m not about to now.

  Because me.

  Because Anna.

  So I go in and, holding my breath, reach for the car door handle. It gives surprisingly easily, pops open almost, letting a plume of fumy air billow into the wind. I wait for a moment then dive in, grab the keys and switch off the engine. Anna’s head is in her hands and her body is shaking. That’s when the dread sets in. Something about seeing her so undone, so absolutely unravelled is paralysing. For a moment neither of us can move. Then, rising to her full height, Anna gulps in a breath and begs me. The key fob is in my hand. All it takes is a press of the button. The contact between thumb and plastic. The tiniest pressure. An electronic peep.

  ‘Unlock the boot.’

  A click, a slow swing and a sharp cry. And nothing.

  Fuck.

  Anna, grim-faced and string-mouthed.

  Me calling Bo’s name.

  Again, nothing. Where is Bo and what has become of him?

  Anna will not calm herself until we have found him, so there is nothing for it but to search, first the periphery of the car park then, when that yields nothing, one or other of the paths. But which? The pathway leading back down the hill to Fossil Cottage, the bridleway into the woods I took at Will’s advice that first morning, or the rough track running along the cliff up to the quarry.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Right now Anna cannot think. For the first time in the fifteen years we’ve known one another, Anna wants me to do the thinking for both of us. So I set myself to the task, gathering the info, mustering all I know about Luke Bowen.

  In all the years we’ve been friends, what has mattered most to Bo is to win. Bo is good at winning;
so good, he’s forgotten that winning is not the same as getting everything you want. Winning is not control. This is what the car and the exhaust pipe is all about. It’s Bo trying to take control of a situation he cannot win. Where will he be now? I’ve no idea but wherever he is, he’ll be dangerous. The truth about Bo, the hard, shiny truth lurking under the years and years of rocky sediment, is that Bo is afraid. He is afraid of not knowing who he is or what he will turn out to be. He is afraid to discover that the real Bo is just a series of stratifications, a series of sedimentary layers built up over the years. He is afraid to discover himself at the bottom of all of that, to find someone hardened and ossified, someone who is no longer real at all.

  ‘I think he’ll have climbed higher. He won’t have wanted to descend. It’ll feel too much like failure. He’ll be up there somewhere.’ I point to the path leading up out of the woods onto open terrain. Anna takes a deep breath.

  ‘OK, let’s go.’

  The path runs between brambles and low wind-torn shrubs up to the lip of the cliff and runs alongside for a while before access is blocked by a gate and a sign.

  Danger, erosion, do not pass.

  Anna calls Bo’s name. The sound bounces off the stone and falls over the rocks to the sea below.

  An alternative path turns inland and snakes through the gulley between two bluffs and into the quarry where several pathways push between strewn boulders, rubble heaps, pocked cliffs and man-made caverns.

  Anna has recovered her self-possession now and, with it, the need to organise. We should be systematic, she says. She will search the quarry nearest the road if I will comb the area around the cliff edge. She doesn’t say but the implication is clear. If Bo has gone over the edge, she doesn’t want to be the one to find him. She tells me to text if there’s any sign. Which is when I remember that I’ve forgotten to pick up my phone. It’s lying in the car park where Anna propelled it. Well, never mind, we’ll just shout.

  Though the path across the cliff edge itself is closed, from the quarry there’s a track leading to the crumble of smaller rocks and scree at the cliff’s edge. Here the wind is punchy and raw. Seabirds rise up like balloons, bank and head inland to their roosteries. From the cliff’s edge it’s a long drop. All that is visible below is a short curl of pebbly beach battered by waves.

  I move back along the path as it snakes between two vertical faces of cut rock, clambering over cracked slabs and rectangular-shaped boulders graffitied with names, dates, hearts, the occasional Green Man, Mer-Chicken or some other mythic beast. A flash of red appears out of the corner of my eye. At first I think it’s a bird, but there are no red birds here, nor anywhere around, unless you count robins. And the flash is pillar box or London bus. As I approach, the redness grows in size and resolves into an outdoor jacket. The patch of darkness in its midst becomes human hair. Bo is squatting in the shelter of a cave made of quarried boulders. On the ground around him are strewn old crisp packets, dirty tissues, a fire ring from where someone has lit a barbecue. He’s sitting all curled up, his hands clutched around his legs, shaking and biting his lip and, shocking to see, since, in all the years I’ve known him, this is the first time I’ve ever witnessed it, Luke Bowen is crying. Nothing like the Bo I know. I shout out to Anna to let her know I’ve found him.

  ‘Mate.’

  He mutters, ‘Leave me alone.’

  Anna arrives and rushing to him leans in between the rocks, sweeps him up in her arms, strokes his hair and covers his head with kisses. For a moment Bo is still, passive in Anna’s embrace. Then very gently, with the palms of his hands, he pushes her away. She hops backwards, stunned.

  ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ There’s an edge to her voice, some thread of vindictiveness. She’s tired and angry and tired of being angry. Exhausted, finally, of his running away. Rage won’t help here. Bo has neither the will nor the resources to combat it now. Sensing this, Anna pulls away, defeated, and takes up a position nearby, clenching her hands and forcing herself not to say anything she might regret. What Bo needs now is to be managed. And that, at last, is something I think I can do.

  ‘Mate, you are sitting in a cave. You are literally a caveman right now.’

  Bo looks up and stares at me, as if trying to recall who either of us is. I watch his mouth move from a miserabilist curl into a baffled wobble and at last into something approaching a smile. I’ve amused him. He’s never been able to resist a joke.

  ‘Come out of the cave.’

  Again the smile. He runs a hand through his hair and rearranges his face. His body stirs and relocates its strength. Falling onto his knees he scrambles to the edge of the rocks and taking a deep breath, stands. Whatever creature he had become has gone.

  ‘If you’re so keen to do yourself in, the cliff edge is right there.’

  He glances over, shrinks back a little, blinks.

  ‘We need to talk.’

  He takes a seat on a partially carved stone at the edge of a large array, his body framed now by the bluff. Anna perches on a stone beside him, looking dazed and defeated, like a stunned animal waiting for the death blow. I am the only one standing now.

  ‘She knows,’ says Anna.

  In a small voice, Bo says, ‘I hate myself.’

  ‘You’re not alone.’

  He looks up, expecting some kind of redemptive confession. ‘I hate you too, mate.’

  He’s clutching his knees now, the knuckles frosty with tension, gathering strength in the way a snake gathers itself before it strikes.

  ‘It’s not like I ever hurt anyone.’

  Anna chimes in. ‘Really, Cassie, he didn’t. Most of those women won’t even know anything happened.’

  ‘It’ll stop, Casspot. Never again, I swear. I don’t even know why it started. It was after Anna’s accident. My head got muddled.’ He’s crying again now, running off at the mouth with excuses and lies.

  ‘There was no violence,’ Anna says.

  ‘Christ, Anna, date rape is violence.’

  ‘If you make me go to the police station I’ll hurt myself,’ Bo says. ‘I already tried, you saw the car. Next time I’ll go through with it.’

  ‘Cassie, it’s me, Anna. Your friend. And I’m begging you. Please don’t get Bo involved in this. Don’t get any of us involved. What good would it do? I’m a mother. Think about Ralphie. We can get through this, all of us, the Group, together.’

  ‘They dragged her body from the Thames.’

  ‘He didn’t have anything to do with that woman at the festival, did you, Bo?’

  ‘Absolutely not. That girl delivered a pizza earlier that evening, I always order from the place she works for. Christ, I was the one who recommended them to Dex. But that was all. I never even saw her after that. Except in the alley.’

  ‘You saw Bo, Cass, remember, behind Dex in the churchyard? Bo didn’t have anything to do with it. It wasn’t him then and it wasn’t him last night.’

  Swipe right, swipe right. Say yes. Say no one was hurt. Say you understand. Believe. But why is Anna still trying to protect us? What is she still hiding?

  Bo is quiet now, shaking his head. ‘For chrissakes, just tell her the truth. It’s not like she can do anything about it. Tell her. If you won’t I will.’

  What happens next takes a second, less than a second, a fragment of time that is here and gone but seems to last forever. I don’t see it coming. None of us does. It’s as if time has stepped over us and turned back on itself. All I see in that second, that everlasting moment, is the hand and the rock inside it and the blurry outline of the figure who has sprung from behind the rubble and then the look of absolute shock on Bo’s face as the rock crashes down on his head.

  40

  Anna

  2.45 a.m., Sunday 14 August, Wapping

  Cassie has her by the hand and is shouting, though it’s impossible to hear what she’s saying. The noise in the street is bad enough but the racket in Anna’s head is so deafening it’s threatening to blow her skull
into tiny fragments.

  Who knew that thoughts could be so uncontainable? They’re spilling from her head, entering into her general circulation. She can feel the poison of them trickling through her system, pricking her neck, her palms, the soles of her feet. Is there any rowing back from this? A way to unsee the unwatchable? How can she speak of this, even to herself, most certainly not to Cassie. Squeezing her friend’s hand, she turns her head to see, touched by Cassie’s desire to rescue her. But Cassie has not seen what she has seen. Cassie does not know.

  A single thought coalesces from the stream and rises to the surface, foamy and rank, like the scum on a pot of boiling bones. It takes a moment for it to collect into something approaching language. The instant she hears it she recognises its truth.

  Something will have to be done.

  In moments it establishes itself as a horrible chorus line in Anna’s head. An earworm that needs digging out. This has gone too far now. The other party is out of control so it’s going to have to be Anna who takes care of the situation. Anna who sorts it. Anna who makes it right. No, not right. It’ll never be that. It falls to Anna to make it go away. She must do it in a hurry. Now. She stops looking ahead and turns her attention to the crowd. The press of people. Cassie is ahead of her, their hands still clasped. All she has to do now is to let go.

  Let go.

  Her hand springs back. She sees Cassie’s head swing round, the alarm in her eyes. Cassie waves but she’s helpless, drawn inexorably forward by the human current. This is what Anna has hoped for. She sinks back and allows Cassie’s head to blend with the others around her until it melts into the crowd.

  Then Anna is being pressed forward too. She puts one foot in front of the other, dodges under an arm, and in an artfully strategic move steps to the side, out of the current, a black Rook edging towards a white Queen. The woman in the alleyway will most likely be gone, her attacker most definitely so, but there is always a chance Anna might catch up with them. With that thought in mind, she edges her way back until she’s reached the open gates to the churchyard. It’s dark and a couple of the street lights have been smashed but the moon is a polished hubcap. As Anna dives back inside the churchyard, she thinks how easy it would be to do nothing now. To dissolve into the flow of people, cast her lot in with Cassie and claim ignorance. What is it that keeps her focused?