by S J Bolton
He was out of breath by the time the rooftop came into view above the tree canopy, but he’d remembered every detail of that night twenty-one years ago.
It had been mid-June when Will celebrated his seventeenth birthday, and a marquee extension to the family home had meant he could invite the entire sixth form and a good chunk of those from neighbouring schools. Nearly three hundred sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds had been on the property that night. Many had gone home at midnight, but Xav and a small group had gathered around the fire pit at the foot of the garden, nearly a quarter of a mile downhill from the house. One by one, the others had wandered away, until only he and Megan were left. He’d been teasing her about boys she was keen on. She’d dismissed each of his suggestions, but not the idea that there was someone, and for some reason, it became very important to learn the identity of the boy Megan liked.
She’d left the fire as it began to die down, heading towards the woods; Xav had grabbed a blanket and lantern and followed her. By the perimeter fence, a few yards from a gate that led to open countryside, they’d stopped by a huge beech tree. The two of them had sat, and he’d had a feeling that something, something special, was about to happen.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s a trysting tree.’
Around the tree’s huge girth, couples had scraped away patches of bark before scratching out hearts, enclosing two sets of initials. Xav pointed to one shaky heart. ‘Felix and Ari Hughes,’ he said. ‘Remember the gathering we had here at Christmas?’
‘They lasted, what, six weeks?’
Xav found his keys, and the bark came away easily. ‘Go on,’ he said, handing the keys to Megan. ‘Give me a clue.’
Megan scratched out the outline of a heart, much neater than the one Felix had carved months earlier, and then her own initials: MM. Xav waited, feeling his heartbeat pick up a fraction, and then she’d stopped.
‘He can carve his own initials.’ She handed the keys back.
Maybe if he hadn’t drunk so much he’d have known what she meant, and in a way he had known. But he wasn’t even seventeen and girls were a foreign country, one he’d feel comfortable in one day, but back then, he’d been treading carefully down the strange high street, a tourist map in one hand, his phrase book in the other. He’d stared at her, waiting for the words to come, but they’d let him down. Feeling stupid, Xav put the keys away in his pocket, and a second later, Megan got to her feet and set off back towards the house.
The next day, he went abroad with his family and didn’t see Megan again until the start of the upper-sixth year at school when she’d become uncharacteristically cool and distant. By half term, he’d been desperate to have sex for the first time and when he’d heard that Amber was keen on him, well, she was one of the prettiest girls in the sixth form, of course he wasn’t going to say no. So, he and Amber had become an item and Megan – well, she’d become unfinished business.
She still was.
The gate at the bottom of the Markham garden was unlocked, and Xav slipped quietly through. The fire pit was still there, and the pale stone of the seats around it glowed in the moonlight. The huge beech tree stood out against the midnight-blue sky. Dropping to his knees in the long grass at its foot, he shone his torch on the carvings. There were more than he remembered, but Will had had younger siblings; there would have been other teenage parties, other couples to carve their initials. Xav moved the torch beam around until he found the patch of bark he’d cleared himself two decades earlier.
The heart shape he remembered had carried only one set of initials, two capital letter Ms, but it now had a second. Twenty-one years later, Megan had finally carved into the tree the initials of the boy she liked. XA. Him. And a tiny arrow, pointing downwards.
The part of the trunk closest to the ground wasn’t visible beneath a tangle of grasses and ferns, but Xav pulled enough away to expose the root structure and saw a small hollow. Dropping flat, he shone in the torch beam, but it revealed nothing other than a dark hole. He pulled up his sleeve and pushed in his hand. Soft ground, decomposing leaves, something sharp that scratched against his fingers, a mesh of twigs that he thought perhaps was an old nest and then cool, smooth plastic.
The Ziploc bag he pulled from beneath the tree was entirely unremarkable, as was the brown, A4-size envelope. Inside that were a reel of photographic film and the admission of guilt they’d all signed in Talitha’s pool house twenty years earlier. And a second, smaller envelope, hand addressed to him. Xav tucked the plastic bag into his pocket and took a seat by the fire pit to read the letter.
Eight hours later, the gardener, who’d been instructed by Mrs Markham to clean out the ashes in the firepit, had his day completely ruined by the discovery of Xav’s body.
52
Amber pulled up in St John Street with no recollection of the journey over. It wasn’t entirely impossible that she’d died on the way and was stuck in some weird purgatory because the world around her was not the one she knew. The graceful Regency terrace had lost its sharp outlines, edges had blurred, and the tarmac of the road was shimmering, as though in a heat haze, although the morning was quite cool.
Xav could not be dead; it was a cruel joke on Ella’s part.
Amber left her car without thinking to lock it and crossed the street, telling herself it was all a prank, that Xav himself would answer the door, apologies tripping over his tongue, and she wouldn’t care, she wouldn’t give a flying fuck, because the nightmare was over, Xav was standing right in front of her, and he wasn’t bloody well dead.
She pressed the bell. Open the door, Xav, open the goddamned door. The door opened and Ella towered above Amber on the steps, her lovely face a mass of blotches.
It was real then; Xav was dead.
‘Tell me what you can,’ Amber said, a few minutes later, when the two of them were sitting in the front room of the house that was no longer Xav’s, and her hands were being gripped so tightly by the other woman that her rings were digging into her fingers. Ella continued to sob and Amber glanced around for tissues, kitchen roll, a towel, anything, and wondered when she too could break down and scream.
‘None of it makes any sense,’ Ella managed at last. ‘What was he doing up there? We don’t know anyone up there.’
‘Up where? Ella, start at the beginning. What did the police say?’ Amber continued to look around, this time in the hope that a uniformed constable might be lurking in the kitchen. ‘They usually leave someone with a bereaved relative.’
Ella made a visible attempt to pull herself together. ‘I sent her away. She was making it so real, Amber. I thought if I couldn’t see her any more, it wouldn’t be.’ More sobbing, then, ‘It could be a mistake, couldn’t it? Mistaken identity. Do you think that’s possible?’
Amber would have given anything to think that possible.
‘It’s unlikely, Ella. The police are usually pretty sure about these things. What did they say?’
‘They asked me to confirm that I was Mrs Attwood, and then they said they were very sorry, but they had reason to believe my husband was killed in the early hours of this morning.’ She stopped, sniffed noisily. ‘But it can’t be him. We didn’t know anyone on Boars Hill. Why would he go to a house on Boars Hill so late?’
Ella was right, they knew no one on Boars Hill. Amber hadn’t set foot on one of the most expensive residential roads in Oxford for over twenty years. Not since Will Markham’s seventeenth birthday party.
‘They want me to identify the body – they say I have to as next of kin, but I can’t, Amber. I’ve never seen a dead body. How can the first one I see be Xav’s?’
‘Ella, did they say what happened to him?’
Was it possible this was a road traffic accident? She hadn’t seen Xav’s car outside. An RTA would be dreadful, but not totally out of kilter with the normal order of things.
‘Head injury, they said.’ Ell
a was having trouble both breathing and speaking; it was possible she was asthmatic. ‘They found him in the garden of a big house. By some stone seats. They think he may have fallen and banged his head badly and died waiting for help. I can’t bear it, Amber, him lying there all night, bleeding to death.’
Later, Amber, too, would struggle to think of it. For now she was thinking, stone seating area, sitting around a firepit, smoking weed, because they thought they were too far away for Will’s parents to smell it.
‘Ella, have you told anyone else?’ she asked. ‘Talitha or Felix? What about his parents?’
Ella shook her head. ‘No, I called you. You were always his best friend.’
A fresh stab to a heart that Amber didn’t think could hurt any more. His best friend. He’d actually said that. To his wife.
‘Will you come with me?’ Ella said. ‘To see him, I mean. I can’t go by myself. I’ll make his dad do it if you won’t.’
She meant to identify the body. Amber had never realised, before, quite how young Ella was, how completely unprepared for the harsh side of life. She would make that sweet elderly man look at his son’s corpse.
‘I’ll come,’ she said. ‘Is he at the John Radcliffe? Go and get dressed. We’ll drive up there now.’ Amber pulled the other woman to her feet. ‘Upstairs,’ she said. ‘Get dressed and I’ll drive you up.’
The second Ella left the room, Amber dialled Talitha’s number. ‘I don’t care who she’s with,’ she told Talitha’s secretary. ‘You need to interrupt her right now and tell her that Amber Pike, the junior minister, is on the phone, and that it’s a matter of the utmost urgency.’
She waited. She counted to ten. She wouldn’t put it past Talitha to refuse to take even the most urgent of calls. She counted some more.
‘Amber, what the fuck?’ Talitha said, after twenty-three seconds.
Don’t think about it, don’t choose your words, just out with it.
‘Xav’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not repeating it. Don’t make me repeat it.’
Silence. A weird gasp. Then, ‘Give me the facts.’
‘Early hours of the morning, up at Will Markham’s old house on Boars Hill. He was found with a head injury by that stone seating area. The police think he could have fallen.’
Another strange sound, that, if it were anyone but Talitha, would sound as though she were holding back sobs. ‘He didn’t fall. Amber, you know he didn’t fall, don’t you?’
Talitha had to shut up right now. Xav’s death was bad enough; the thought it could have been anything more than a terrible accident was too much for Amber to get her head around.
‘No, Tal, we don’t know anything.’ She had to be calm for a little while longer. ‘I’m taking Ella to identify the body. I have to go and see him, I have to look at him – the man I’ve known since we were kids and thought at one time I was going to marry – and I have to see his corpse. His parents don’t know yet, that sweet, old couple. I’ll probably have to tell them. It will kill them. They don’t even have grandchildren.’
‘Amber, for heaven’s sake, get a hold of yourself.’ Talitha sounded more like herself. ‘First Dan, now Xav. It was not an accident. Jeez, have you spoken to Felix this morning? What if he . . .’
Whatever the thought was, Talitha couldn’t finish it. ‘I’ll call him now,’ she said after a moment. ‘You take Ella to the mortuary. The police are likely to be there, so be very careful what you say.’
‘They’ll want to talk to me this morning?’ That was blind panic, rearing its head again. ‘What will they ask? Tal, I’m not sure I can do this.’
‘Yes, you can. The last time you saw Xav was at Waterstock on Monday. The four of us met up because we were worried about Daniel. That’s on record, and we’ve done all the right things, so no reason not to mention that. We met there because it’s a convenient place for you and Felix, who don’t live in Oxford, but we didn’t go into the house because we didn’t want to worry Dan’s parents. Before that, you don’t remember when you saw him, you’ll have to check your diary, and you don’t remember him being particularly worried about anything. Can you do that?’
No, she couldn’t; she wasn’t sure she could leave the room. ‘I think so,’ she said, ‘but Tal, I can’t bear it. It’s Xav.’
‘I know, I know. But listen to me, Amber, you have to be careful.’
‘I will, I won’t say anything stupid.’
‘I don’t mean that. Do you still have close protection?’
For a second, Amber was puzzled by the sudden change of subject. ‘No, I resigned, remember.’
Talitha sighed down the line. ‘Well, you’re going to have to take care of yourself,’ she said. ‘If Megan contacts you, do not meet her alone.’
‘Megan? You think Megan had something to do with this?’
‘Amber, grow up! If Xav didn’t have an accident – and I would put money on him not having – then of course it was Megan. Don’t let her into your house and don’t let her anywhere near the kids. Call their school, make sure the staff know there’s a risk.’
Amber would not have thought it possible to feel any more afraid.
‘She wouldn’t hurt Xav, she loved him.’
‘Hell hath no fury, Amber. He turned her down. She saw her plans falling apart. Promise me you’ll be sensible.’
The girls, oh God – she had to phone school. ‘I promise.’
‘I’m calling Felix. He should have been keeping track of her car. I’ll let you know. Now, I mean it, Amber, be very careful.’
53
‘Felix? Felix, are you still there?’
The line had gone silent. Talitha turned away from the window and wondered if she was about to scream.
‘I’m here.’ The man on the line sounded nothing like Felix.
She asked, ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yeah, I’m good. I’m— Shit, Tal.’
‘I know.’
Silence, but she could hear his breathing, fast and loud.
‘Felix, we need to know if it was Megan. Were you tracking her car last night?’
Another pause. ‘I checked a few times early evening,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘The car hadn’t moved. At least it didn’t look as though it moved, but the signal’s been weak. The battery may be on its way out.’
‘When was the last time you checked?’
‘Not sure. About ten. Hang on, I can find the last journey.’
Talitha waited. She heard sounds in the background, a clunk that might have been the phone being dropped, a drawer being opened, a mumbled curse, then—
‘Oh, Christ, Tal.’
‘What?’ When you think you can’t possibly be more afraid, you learn that you can be, that there is no limit to fear.
‘It was Megan,’ Felix said. ‘She was in St John’s Street a few minutes after eleven and then she drove up to Boars Hill. She followed him up there.’
Tal had to sit down. She opened her mouth to yell down the phone, to demand to know why he hadn’t checked the app last night, because if he had, he’d have seen the danger, would have been able to warn Xav.
There was no point. What was done, was done.
‘We have to tell the police,’ she said. So this was it, then. The end of the road.
Felix said, ‘We can’t. Not unless you can come up with a good reason why I put a tracker in her car.’
‘We have to stop her. She’s coming for us next.’
No sooner had the thought entered her head than Talitha was on her feet again, at the window, looking out to see if Megan was on the street below.
‘I know,’ Felix said. ‘And we will, but we can’t panic. We’ll take some time, we’ll speak later. And don’t tell Amber. It might just push her over the edge.’
There was no sign of Megan o
utside. ‘I’d say she’s teetering already.’
‘All the more reason. Come on, Tal. You and me, we’re the tough guys. We can do this.’
54
In death, Xav looked more beautiful than he had in years. His hair, left to grow long since Megan’s return, fell around his head in dark curls. His face was untouched by whatever injury had killed him, and his shoulders could have been carved from marble. As the curtain slid back, Amber held Ella’s hand and thought there was a bitter-sweet serendipity in that the two people by Xav’s side at the end were the first woman he’d loved, and the last.
‘Mrs Attwood, is this your husband?’ The detective who’d accompanied them into the mortuary was standing a respectful distance behind them.
Ella gasped, nodded and resumed crying.
‘This is Xav Attwood,’ Amber said.
The detective was playing with some sugar grains on the cafeteria table and Amber wanted to slap his hands, to yell at him to be more respectful.
‘Ms Pike, can you think of anyone who might want to harm Mr Attwood?’
And so it begins.
‘Harm him?’ Amber made herself look mildly shocked. ‘I thought it was an accident.’ Over the detective’s shoulder, she could see Ella talking to a second detective and told herself it was a good thing that neither of them had been asked to go to the station or to submit to a formal interview. Yet.
‘That was our first thought,’ the detective acknowledged. ‘Mr Attwood, possibly having had too much to drink, stumbled in the garden and banged his head on one of those stones.’
Amber waited. The detective examined the pad of his right index finger where sugar grains had stuck.
‘Two problems with that theory though,’ he said. ‘The first, there was no alcohol in Mr Attwood’s blood and, secondly, the post-mortem shows three distinct contusions to the back of his head. No one falls three times in a row.’
