by Gytha Lodge
Relieving himself took a long time, and standing made him feel hotter and sicker. He was close to vomiting as he made his way back to the fire and his backpack. He dug in it, pulling out a lighter, a pack of mints, a compass—a selection of the useless shit he’d got in there. Where was the aspirin?
He found it in a side pocket in the end. He remembered that he’d put it there for easy access. He took a half-drunk bottle of water and went to sit on a log near the fire. And then he sat there, staring at a single point of sunlight on the ground while he waited for the painkillers to kick in.
He remembered Topaz and Brett all of a sudden, and felt a rush of dread low down in his guts. They would probably still be asleep together, with Coralie. The three of them wrapped round each other.
Sickness and anger drove him to his feet. He was leaving. He didn’t want to be anywhere near any of them.
Part of the way to the car park, he saw Benners sprawled on his back on a patch of dry-looking grass. His sleeping bag was half over him, his mouth gaping open.
Connor was almost to the bikes when he remembered his sleeping bag, which was still next to Jojo. He thought about going back for it, but it seemed too difficult. Everything except treading onward was too hard. He focused on the ground and kept moving.
And then the memory of that other sleeping bag came to him and he paused.
Aurora’s. It must have been Aurora’s. Benners had his own, and Jojo’s was still in its bag next to her stuff. He didn’t know what Topaz and Brett and Coralie had got to cover them, but they wouldn’t have left a single sleeping bag at the far side of the camp.
He went on uncertainly, thinking that she might have got cold and gone to sleep in the car. He made it to the car park and peered in through the slightly dusty windows. There was nobody there.
It seemed like a very long way back to the camp, and farther still to where he’d seen that sleeping bag, but he turned round anyway. He had a silent monologue of rage the whole way back, telling himself she’d probably be back in the sleeping bag by now.
But when he reached the far side of the camp he saw that nothing had changed. The sleeping bag lay as it had, open and empty.
He stopped and crouched down. He thought he might actually be sick this time. He needed to eat something. But he needed to make sure she was OK first.
He put a hand into the sleeping bag. It was icy cold. He began to feel a sense of something wrong.
He thought about the river. She’d gone for a swim before. But once he’d made his tortuous way to the river, he found the tiny beach empty, the water clean and glittering and unmoving.
He could feel anxiety rising in him, part alcohol and part worry. As he hiked back up the bank, he thought about the one last place he needed to check. He felt like he’d rather die than follow the path Topaz had taken through the trees with Brett and Coralie. But he went anyway.
The first thing he saw was a mound of bodies, with bare, pale skin visible even at a distance. He hadn’t thought it was possible to feel any closer to vomiting, but he did. Yet it all stayed down somehow as he drew closer.
The skin was Coralie’s. Her short skirt had been pulled up to expose her backside. She wore no underwear and she was topless. He looked away from her, with the single-mindedness that came with a hangover.
Brett was not far behind her, lying on his face on a sleeping mat. He was clothed, which was a small mercy.
Topaz was beyond Coralie, and Connor trod toward her, trying not to look at any of them. Topaz was dressed, too, and even tucked into a sleeping bag. She looked untouched and uninvolved, and only the fact that he’d heard her gasping from his seat by the campfire told him she had been part of the fun.
There was no Aurora. Of course there wasn’t. Topaz wouldn’t have let her sister close to this.
Connor crouched down over Topaz, watching the frowning face; the spray of hair; the bronzed skin. He knew she would be angry if he woke her. But he knew, too, that she had to be woken.
“Topaz,” he said quietly. And then he pushed gently at her shoulder. “Topaz,” he said. “I can’t find Aurora.”
29
Jojo pulled her feet up onto the sofa and leaned her head against a cushion, grateful that in all Brett’s meticulous interior decoration, he’d managed to include a room that was genuinely comfortable.
It had taken her a long time to feel at ease here. The scale of the house, with its high ceilings and distant walls, had seemed all wrong. She’d been far more comfortable in Benners’s slightly tatty pile, where they’d gathered for years with the full blessing of his father.
Not that she and the others hadn’t been impressed with the place. But it hadn’t felt homely to any of them. When they’d first gathered here at one of Brett’s parties, surrounded by his newly created stark aesthetic, they had clustered together and spoken in quiet voices.
Then, little by little, they’d grown used to it. It was partly that Brett had been there, cajoling and smiling and trying so hard to make them comfortable. And partly that Anna was such a wonderful hostess, refilling glasses with a quiet grace before they’d even noticed they needed another one and producing exquisite food.
Jojo had also been here five days a week for six months the following year, turning the main gardens into the perfect creation they were. Well, a kind of perfect. Brett’s kindness in giving her the job had been matched by a very polite disagreement with her over what the garden should look like. And so they’d compromised, with Jojo accepting that he wanted manicured lawns and straight edges, but insisting on color and greenery and life. In the end, they had both admitted to each other that the place was spectacular.
And somehow, during that time, Brett’s house had morphed from somewhere that felt cold and unwelcoming to a form of refuge. Even after the garden had been completed, Jojo would come to see Brett and Anna, sinking into the sofa while the two of them chattered away so that she didn’t have to. She wasn’t sure she’d have managed the months after Aleksy died without this place, and without those two.
Tonight, feeling as though she might never stop reliving the caving in of the stash, she had instinctively sought this place out. Brett had let her in with an expression of understanding, and she could see the same shadow to his eyes that she’d seen in her own in the mirror.
“Come and drink tea,” he’d said quietly. He’d put an arm round her briefly and squeezed her shoulders, and then walked ahead of her to the sitting room without speaking. She was as grateful for his silence as she had been for the brief gesture of sympathy.
“You can have your usual spot,” he said. “Anna’s already making coffee and cookies.” He gave her a briefly worried look. “Will you be OK if Daniel comes, too? He called earlier.”
Jojo grinned at him, and curled into the corner of the sofa. “I’ll be fine. But I can’t promise we won’t gang up on you,” she said.
“I’d miss it if you didn’t,” Brett said wryly. “I’ll get you a cuppa.”
Jojo watched him leave, feeling a sudden stab of uncertainty. For the first time, it really struck her that nothing was going to be the same after this. How could they all trust each other, when it was overwhelmingly likely that one of them had killed Aurora Jackson?
Her customary spot on the sofa was just as comfortable as it had always been, but she couldn’t feel the implicit safety anymore. It had gone, and she doubted that it could come back.
* * *
—
BRETT RUBBED THE back of Anna’s shoulder once he’d returned to the kitchen. She was poised, a little nervously, in front of the oven, watching a timer.
“How are we doing?”
“Almost done, I think.”
Brett moved her gently out of the way, and pulled the door of the oven open, peering in at the slightly browned cookies.
“They need to come out now,” he said, and p
ulled the tea towel off the handle on the oven door.
“Sorry,” Anna said. “I was waiting for the timer to beep.”
“You have to look at how brown they are,” he said. “Nobody likes an overdone cookie.”
He slid the tray out, using the tea towel to keep the heat off his hands, and deposited it on the stovetop. They smelled right—chocolaty and wholesome—twelve of them in perfect circles.
“I should have done two batches,” he muttered to himself. “The others might turn up, and Connor will probably have four….”
“We’ve got biscuits if we run out,” Anna said, moving back over to the coffee pot and giving him a reassuring smile over her shoulder.
Brett wasn’t in the mood to be reassured. He felt like he had to get this exactly right, or it meant some kind of disaster was on the horizon. It wasn’t an uncommon thought process for him. That not being able to control a small thing meant that everything would slip.
It was a side he tried to hide from his friends. Only Anna really knew the anxiety that went into every social event, and that it had invariably been Brett doing all the shopping and fussing around making food beforehand.
It was more than control, though. It was how the group functioned now. Somehow, as Benners had morphed into Benham, and had become both a parent and a more solemn individual, Brett had become the glue that held them all together. He wasn’t convinced that the others really saw it, but he was conscious of the pressure on him, as much as he enjoyed it. He felt instinctively that without his willingness to soothe, to listen, and to persuade, the group would fracture.
He took a spatula and slid the cookies one by one onto a large plate, and thought they at least looked good. He wondered whether he ought to feed Jojo one or two now, or wait until Benners arrived. And whether he should have asked the other three, too.
Although neither Jojo nor Daniel had been invited, it somehow felt a little like complicity in something. The thought made his stomach knot up. He hated the idea that Aurora being found was going to finally, thirty years later, set them all against each other.
There was a clatter from behind him, and he turned with his heart thumping to see that Anna had knocked the jug of milk over before it had made it to the steamer.
“For fuck’s sake,” he said immediately. And then equally immediately regretted it.
“Oh God,” Anna said, grabbing for the dishcloth. “I’m so sorry.”
“Just an accident,” he said, quickly and apologetically. “It doesn’t matter.”
He moved over behind her and slid one arm around her waist. With the other he took the dishcloth. “I’ll do it,” he said quietly. He kept his arm round her as he mopped up the spillage. “See? All fine.”
He kissed her on the side of the neck, and she put a hand up to his cheek, and leaned into him.
“I’m a grumpy bastard today, aren’t I?” he murmured.
Anna laughed a little tensely. “I think you have good reason.”
“Never a good enough reason to be sharp with you,” he disagreed. “You look gorgeous in that dress,” he added. And then, with another kiss, he extricated himself. “I promised Jojo tea.”
“It’s brewing,” Anna said, tilting her head at the pot.
“You’re wonderful.”
He grabbed the big straight-sided blue mug that Jojo liked and put a slug of milk into it, and then poured in the tea. Which he worried was slightly too strong, but he decided to leave it. Anna had been trying to help.
He felt his phone buzz in his pocket as he carried the tea back through to Jojo. And then it buzzed again, a call instead of a text.
He knew, somehow, that it was Coralie, without having to check. He felt a slight sinking in his stomach. He should have told her that Benners was coming. She was wound up tightly at the moment, and somewhere between angry and devastated over Topaz rejecting her.
He pulled the phone out, and saw her name, plus the beginning of a message about needing to talk. With a slight sigh he put the mug of tea in front of Jojo, who had a brooding look about her.
“Coralie. I won’t be long.”
* * *
—
CONNOR WAS SICK of the car journey long before they arrived. Or, in fact, sick of the silence. Being in a car next to his wife simply amplified it. It was a sharp contrast to their usual openness, and to the way they both liked to think everything through by talking.
A large part of him wanted to comfort Topaz. But he felt resentful toward her, too. Was this really what they had come to after more than thirty years? This level of distrust and doubt?
It even told in the way she was driving. Where she was generally happy to fling the car around, tonight, Topaz was restrained. She accelerated slowly, stopped at every junction, and kept well within speed limits. Their progress was infuriatingly slow, and he wondered if she was doing it to annoy him.
“What do we do if he’s not there?” Connor eventually asked, set on getting some kind of response out of her.
Topaz gave a tiny lift of her left shoulder. “Go home,” she replied.
Connor couldn’t remember ever before feeling like he wanted to shake his wife.
Luckily, they didn’t have to deal with the possibility of going back home. Brett answered the buzzer with a voice that sounded more downbeat than usual.
“Hi, Brett,” Topaz said a little uncertainly. “It’s me and Connor. I’m sorry for not ringing….”
“It’s OK,” Brett said. “You know you’re always welcome. Come on in.”
Topaz kept up her moderate pace as she drove up the driveway. Connor was slightly disconcerted to see that Jojo’s Mitsubishi was already pulled up to the right of the house.
“Looks like we’re not the only ones,” he muttered.
Topaz, not unexpectedly, said nothing, but he saw a deeper furrow develop in her forehead.
He wasn’t quite sure why it bothered him that Jojo was already there. Perhaps because it was no longer all of them against the police. Not now they knew what had happened to Aurora.
But there was another feeling of unease. He’d always felt close to Jojo. Aside from Benners, she’d been his closest friend for most of his life. He felt jealous, somehow, at the thought that she might be closer to Brett now. But that was what happened when you married and moved away, he guessed. People forgot you.
The feeling didn’t improve when Brett ushered them into the sitting room and he saw that Jojo was at her ease on the sofa, a mug of tea in her hands and a distant expression on her face. It took a long moment for her to break into a grin and rise to greet them.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said in a husky voice. She directed it somewhere between him and Topaz as they hugged her in turn. Her hug felt reassuringly strong and warm, though.
Brett hovered behind them and said a little apologetically, “We’re going to have a full house. Daniel should be here any minute, and Coralie’s on her way now, too.”
“Oh,” Topaz said, rubbing at her arm. “You’d better tell her we’re here. I don’t think she’s very pleased with me right now.”
Jojo gave her a lopsided grin. “I don’t think she’s ever that pleased with me.”
“Tell me about it,” Connor said.
For some reason that seemed to upset Topaz. She gave him a quick, angry look, and stalked past him to sit on the other end of the sofa.
“It’s probably better if we’re all here, anyway,” Jojo said with a slight sigh. “Nobody should end up feeling like they’re being kept out of things.”
Connor wasn’t sure if he agreed with that. There were a number of things that he never wanted to talk about again.
* * *
—
THERE WERE LOOPING phrases running through Coralie’s head as she drove. Some of them she’d heard, and others read, but she could hear the
m as if they’d all been spoken aloud.
From Daniel, guardedly, Not tonight. I want to just sit at home and think things over….
Brett’s slightly guilty You should come over. Everyone’s here….No, don’t be silly, sweetheart. Nobody’s ganging up on you. If I’d had any warning, I’d have told you to come.
And over and over, Topaz’s words, spoken with venom: Fuck you, Coralie.
These people who were supposed to be her friends. The people she’d spent her whole life trying to please. The people who were supposed to be there for her.
Only it didn’t feel like they were anymore. Not since Topaz had chosen Connor over her.
It was a hurt that had never healed. She almost thought she could have stood it if it had been someone else. If it had been anyone but him.
Choosing him had poisoned their friendship. She had seen it within the first few months. And even if it had brought the others closer for a while, in the end it had leached into everything.
She felt sick and dizzy with fear as she climbed out of the car. What had they been saying about her? Had they decided to unite against her? How could they?
Her heart was thumping and her palms were sweaty as she rang the bell. She might have just let herself in, once. But she felt like an outsider tonight.
It was Brett who opened the door, and there was a hint of balm in the warm smile he gave her.
“I’m glad you came,” he said quietly, and gave her a brief, firm hug. “Come and bring a little sanity to the proceedings,” he added as he released her.
The panic lessened a little further, though she wished that he’d put an arm round her or something as they walked in. It felt like a hostile environment the moment she was through the sitting-room door. They were absolutely silent in that way that suggested she’d been the topic of conversation.
Daniel smiled at her, but then looked away quickly, and she wondered if he’d been the one doing the talking. Brett perched on a sofa arm, distancing himself a little, she thought.
