The Glass Tower

by Gregg Dunnett

  "I say, I'm not boring you am I?" Geoffrey said suddenly. Julia had no idea what he might have been talking about.

  "No. Of course not. I might be a bit tired still."

  "Even after all that coffee? I was telling you I have a book signing in Dorchester next week. I’ve had two dozen copies of The Apple Tree Killer printed, and I was hoping you might want to come along? Obviously I know you're a superstar now, and I thought it might encourage a few other people to actually turn up."

  Julia nodded. She felt too weak to protest the idea that without her no one would attend.

  "You know what?” Geoffrey said a few moments later. “I'm going to love you and leave you. It looks like last night really took it out of you."

  Julia gave silent thanks, and managed to raise a weak smile to her lips.

  "It did a bit."

  "Unless you fancy another cup of coffee first?" Geoffrey's eyes went to the kettle hopefully.

  "No, really…" Julia began.

  "Well, let me just wash these up then." Before Julia was able to raise a protest, he had collected the cups and plates and carried them to the sink.

  "Hey, what's this?"

  Julia looked up in time to see Geoffrey lifting one of her muddy driving gloves out of the sink.

  "Urgh!" Geoffrey said. "What have you been up to?"

  Julia blinked twice before an answer came to her.

  "Gardening. I was... I was out in the garden yesterday. Trying to calm my nerves. They're gardening gloves."

  "Really?" Geoffrey inspected the glove he was holding. "They're rather nice for gardening use." He gave her a funny look.

  "Well, anyway," Geoffrey said. This time he gathered up his things and put on his jacket.

  "Let me know if you need anything. I can always drop it in."

  Julia smiled and walked with him to the door. As they passed through the hallway she saw the shoes she had worn the night before, covered in mud and discarded on the floor. She kicked them to one side. Geoffrey didn't seem to notice.

  Outside, she watched as he climbed into his Land Rover, then waved as he drove away. Then she shut the door, put her back to it and slid down onto the floor.

  It was twenty minutes before she moved. Twenty minutes while she considered the trail of evidence around the cottage. Evidence linking her directly to the killing of the night before. How had Geoffrey not seen it? How could she now cover it up? She was momentarily overwhelmed.

  When she did finally get up she gathered her shoes, and tipped them into the sink with her ruined gloves. Then she turned on both taps and left them running, washing away the mud. She picked up her keys and went outside to move her car, before her neighbours saw how she'd parked. The little car looked comical buried up to the front wheels in the leaves of her hydrangea. She was amazed that Geoffrey hadn't said anything.

  She climbed into the driver’s seat and was hit by a wave of nausea. Just being inside the car brought everything from last night back into focus. The way the windows had steamed up with the three of them breathing so hard. The silence in the car as Rob had driven them away after dumping the bike.

  She backed up a few feet and straightened the car. Then she climbed out, feeling better, but nervous too. Rob had pointed to scratches on the bonnet the previous night, but she hadn’t seen them in the light. Now she crouched down to look. There were several scratches and smudges on the metal of the bumper, and when she looked closer, a significant dent in the flared wheel arch on the passenger side. All of them looked fresh. There was paint, too. Blue paint, scratched deep into the maroon of the car. An image came into her mind. Of a police team, in those funny blue suits they wear when collecting evidence, poring over her car. What would they be able to prove from those scratches and smudges? She licked a finger and tried to rub the blue paint away, but only some of it came off, transferring to her finger, and she flared in panic at the thought of that. There was more blue paint deeply embedded in the scratch. Could they link it to the bicycle? She didn't know for sure, but she'd seen enough crime dramas on the television to have a pretty good idea.

  She suddenly felt exposed, standing there by the incriminating scratches, and she went inside again. The sink was now blocked with mud, and water was flowing onto the floor. She rushed to turn off the taps, and threw tea towels down to soak up the worst of the water. When that little crisis was resolved she sat at her writing desk and tried to think. But from there she could see the car again. And the dents seemed to grow with each time she glanced at them. They were like a guilty beacon, flashing for the world to see. Eventually she went outside and parked it back in the hydrangea.

  She tried to pull herself together. She lit a fire in her wood burner, building it up with dry logs until it roared behind the smoked glass. Then she wrung out the gloves from the sink and fed them in, one by one. They were too wet to burn well, but after a few minutes or so of hissing steam, they dried out and finally caught. Once they did they were soon unrecognisable, just twisted black carcasses where the leather had been. The shoes were still too wet to do the same, so she hung them on the top of the iron burner to dry them first. Then she took her stockings from upstairs and burnt those. She cut her skirt and jacket into pieces with her sewing scissors, and bit by bit she fed them into the fire, too. Finally, she built the fire up again with dry wood and added the shoes. She watched as they twisted and melted behind the glass. Even with the door closed the smell was horrible.

  Then she turned to her computer. She opened the internet and navigated to the website of the local newspaper. She screwed her eyes shut as the page loaded, expecting it to pop up with an image of the woman, being hoisted out of the ditch – or worse – her own face, with a policeman asking if anyone had seen this woman. She steadied herself with a vice-like grip on the mouse, then opened her eyes.

  There was nothing. Just some scandal about primary school meals funding. She browsed around the site, as if it were possible that a woman left for dead on the road might be pushed from the front page by this story.

  But it wasn't there. That meant... Julia tried to think what it meant. It meant no one had found the woman yet. That was the only thing it could mean. And, after all, why would they have? There was nothing to suggest that section of the road should be searched. Perhaps the woman hadn't even been reported missing yet. She might live alone. If Julia herself were to disappear it could be days before she were reported missing. Unless Geoffrey popped around sooner than that.

  Two thoughts occurred to her. First, this gave her an opportunity. She could – still – do the right thing. She could hand herself into the police, and confess what had happened. Surely they would understand? She could explain it had been late, and she'd been tired – not drunk, there was no need to mention that – and perhaps use the excuse they had come up with last night. That they hadn't known what they had hit. There were a lot of deer around here. She could see them sometimes from the kitchen window, nibbling the grass around the edges of the fields.

  But attractive as the idea was, there were holes. Holes that she could see straight away, so how long would it take for an experienced policeman to notice them? There was the bike to begin with. Deer might be more common these days, but they hadn't started riding bicycles yet. And the fact that they had moved the bike. What did that show? That they planned to cover it up. Was that an actual crime, even if she confessed to it now? She didn't know. She thought it probably was.

  And if she confessed to the whole thing, then surely the police would also want to know where she had been coming from, that late at night? If they spoke to anyone at the party – she could barely imagine the horror of the police interviewing Deborah Gooding or Marion Brown about her – they would surely confirm she had been drinking.

  It was all too awful.

  Why had they moved the bike? Why had they been so stupid as to move the bike?

  No. Why had Rob been so stupid? The original idea had been to throw it in the ditch with the dead woman. But he had panicked
...

  She stopped herself. What if there was no bike – might that actually work in her favour? After all, the scratches on her car were from the bicycle. So if the police believed the woman had been walking, they might never think to look for a bicycle. And therefore they might never think to look for a car with scratches on its bonnet filled with blue bicycle paint.

  But the moment of hope died as soon as it arrived. Julia blinked as a truly horrible memory crystallised in her mind. The old woman’s bony ankles. The feeling of her own hands around them, and the thin metal bands of the bicycle clips that tucked her trousers tight to them. They could have removed them. They could have slipped them off, then there would have been nothing to suggest she had been riding a bike. But they hadn’t. It would be the first thing the police would discover.

  Around the edges of Julia's vision a fierce darkness appeared, threatening to expand and take over everything. But she fought against it, gripping the sides of her chair until it receded.

  She had to confess. To everything. It was the only way.

  But if she confessed she would lose everything. Her book deal. Her new life. Her old life.

  No. There must be another way. Think. She just needed to think. To address every issue. What else made them vulnerable? What other mistakes had they made?

  Fingerprints. The police always looked for fingerprints. But Julia had worn driving gloves. So there wouldn't be any. At least, there wouldn't be any of her fingerprints. She remembered how Rob had instructed Becky to wipe the bicycle clean. How good a job had the girl done? There was no way to know.

  And what about DNA? Julia remembered how she had vomited all over the road. Yes, she'd tried to wash it away. But wasn't DNA tiny – you couldn't get it all off, surely? Presumably – she reasoned – the longer the woman went undiscovered, the better the prospect was of her DNA (if it were there at all) being washed away by rain. Or perhaps eaten by animals. She recoiled at this thought, but swept it aside. Was there anything she could do about it? After a moment's consideration she decided there was. She could fill bottles with water mixed with bleach. She could return to the spot where it happened and do a better job of washing the road. It was a risk – she might arrive there only to find it swarming with police, who would ask her what she was doing. They could discover the bleach – the black panic began to intrude upon her vision again – but she could approach carefully, turn around if she saw any sign of police.

  She envisaged how she would feel once this task was done. Comforted. For sure.

  Okay. What else? Rob's DNA, on the woman's lips. Could anything be done about that? Had they done enough the night before? She cringed at the memory of her rubbing the woman's face with leaves and grass pulled from the bank of the ditch. But this time it was less from the horror of doing it, and more about the practical problems this might now present. Would it have unnaturally stained the woman's face? By now Julia's mind had the dead woman lying on stainless steel in a laboratory while a white-coated doctor calmly examined it, dictating his expert findings into a tape recorder and easily revealing everything the poor woman suffered up to and after her death. Would the police and the pathologist think this might have simply happened as she fell into the ditch? Or would this be evidence of a crime? Again, she had no way of knowing.

  What she did know, however, was there was no way she was going back into that ditch. Revisiting the scene was one thing, climbing back down into the ditch quite another. If Rob’s DNA was a problem it was one he would have to worry about.

  That left... Oh God. Her eyes shot once again to her car sitting outside her window, as if it were patiently waiting for her thought processes to catch up with it. The car. The scratches on the front. How long would it take for the bike to be found? She imagined police divers already searching the lake nearby to the dead woman. It was the most obvious place to hide the damned bicycle. And once the bicycle was found, there would presumably be maroon paint scrapings on its frame. They would be a perfect match with the dents and scrapes on her car. Perhaps even with the woman's clothing. And then what? The car was registered in her name. No one else was insured to drive it. When the police found the bike it would lead them to her car, and they would have the proof. One hundred percent proof that Julia had done it.

  Until that moment, Julia had loved her car. She took a certain pride in how slow it was, in how much it rattled, and even in how hard it was becoming to buy leaded petrol to keep it running. But now that pride was swept away. Now she suddenly and viscerally hated it. Feared it. It was like she could sense it sending out an invisible message to the police. It was a flashing beacon of guilt. She could imagine the police, already tuning into it. They could arrive at any moment. Drawn to her through that car.

  She had to get rid of the car. Right now.

  Julia's frightened mind struggled to operate. How do you get rid of a car? You sell it.

  Quickly, she grabbed the mouse again and opened up her email. She began searching back through her messages. She occasionally got emails from people interested in buying her car (she had no idea how they found her email address; technology was something of a mystery to Julia). And sometimes if she parked it out in public – in the supermarket for example – she would come out to find a note stuck under its dear little wipers. She quite liked these messages; they reinforced her belief it was worth driving around in a draughty, expensive-to-run car that felt dangerously unsafe if she ever had to take the motorway.

  Ah. There it was. An email from a polite gentleman in Bath. She realised she hadn't actually replied. Julia felt a stab of guilt at that. She considered it rude to not reply, even to an unsolicited approach like this one. He'd come across her ownership of the car from the Morris Minor Owners Club website (she dimly remembered that she had once joined). He wanted to register his interest should she ever consider selling. He'd left a telephone number as well as an email.

  Julia picked up her phone, and before she could change her mind, she dialled the number.

  On the third ring she slammed the phone back down.

  What was she thinking?

  If she simply sold the car, the marks on the bonnet would still be there, in all their evidential glory. And there would be a record of when she sold it. It would be the easiest piece of police work ever to connect the two. Worse, the fact she had begun selling the car the day after the accident would be concrete proof of her attempt to cover it up. It was a disastrous idea.

  No. She had to destroy her car.

  She turned back to the computer, pulled up a search window and began typing the words 'car crushing service, Dorset'. She moved her hand back to the mouse. Her finger was pressing the button to run the search, when she froze again.

  She swallowed carefully. Her finger was so close to pressing the button that it felt impossible to pull away without actually doing so. But she knew that would spell disaster. Slowly – as if she were defusing a bomb – she moved her finger away. And she breathed again only when she saw the webpage didn’t load. She hadn’t pressed the button.

  What happens Julia, in nearly every murder mystery you read these days? (It was a genre Julia was mildly addicted to.) The police catch the killer because of their internet search history (Julia wasn’t quite sure on the exact term). It didn't matter if they tried to erase them on the actual computer. The service company, or whatever they're called, they keep a separate record. So how's it going to look if you're searching for a car crushing service the day after being accused of running someone over?

  My God. She had to be more careful.

  Suddenly she got up and paced the room, breathing heavily. Then her phone rang.

  She didn't recognise the number at first – and then she did. It was the one she'd just dialled – the man who'd wanted to buy the car. She answered it.

  "Oh, hello," a voice said. "I've just had a missed call from this number?"

  "I'm sorry," Julia replied. "I dialled the wrong number."

  "Oh, I see. Well, never mind."<
br />
  "Goodbye," Julia blurted out, and ended the call. She set the phone down again, then stared at her reflection in the mirror on the wall. Her own, wide staring eyes looked back at her.

  Everything she did right now, everything mattered. The police could find the body at any moment. They could be here at any moment. And the situation was far more serious now than it had been last night. Had they waited by the road, yes, it would have been disastrous, for her. She would have been breathalysed and goodness knows what would have happened then. She would have been ruined, and maybe even gone to prison. But if she was caught now – having conspired to cover up the crime – well that would be worse. Far, far worse. If she was caught now, prison was a certainty. Julia felt dizzy at the thought of that. The certain reality of it. Her skin flushed hot. She wanted to take off her clothes, take off this new, terrible reality as if it were just a set of garments, climb into the bath, and scrub it from her skin. Oh, the bliss of being able to soak and not worry about this.

  And she could. She could still do that. But first she had to get rid of her car.

  She went downstairs and made herself another coffee while she thought. She had already drunk three cups with Geoffrey, and normally she limited herself to just one cup a day. But she barely registered this. Besides, today wasn't normal. Today was anything but normal, and while she drank her coffee, another idea came to her.

  Nine

  Her first reaction was to dismiss it out of hand. But the more she thought about it, the more she was sure there was no alternative. It was an insane idea. Unthinkable. But it was the only thing she could do. And if she didn't, then it would simply mean waiting here in terror until the police came to take away her life. Not just the wonderful new life that was just coming into reach. But everything, her old life as well.