The Society

by Karen Guyler

  “I need to check her—”

  “You need to sit. Here,” he was in front of her brandishing a handful of what turned out to be freezer bags. “I have to bag your hands for evidence. It’s okay, he’ll be here, he only lives round the corner. He’ll check the lady, do all his cop stuff. You let me, yeah?” He gestured with the bags. Eva nodded. “Sit, come on.”

  She sank onto the chair as though her knee had given way again and held out her bloody, shaking hands.

  “I’m Rajiv, what’s your name?”

  “Eva.” She focussed on Rajiv, not looking at the table where Charles had broken her heart.

  Happy that he’d done a good job of encasing her hands in the freezer bags, tied at her wrists, Rajiv brought her a cup of tea that looked like it could dissolve the straw in it.

  “Strong and sweet, my mum swears by it. Tell you a secret, yeah, tastes crappy but it works.”

  They both looked up at the sound of more than one siren. “See, my cuz has got it.”

  Customers came and went, a surprising number considering it was still the middle of the night, tea and coffee drunk, bacon sandwiches, the smell of which made Eva’s stomach churn harder, eaten, all satisfied with Rajiv’s explanation, ‘incident, yeah’.

  “Eva,” her name pulled her from her half-dozing state. “Are you hurt?” The man sitting opposite in a bright blue down jacket asked.

  “Detective Elliott? Smith, I mean.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “The woman?”

  He shook his head. “No visible blood on her, so where did this come from?”

  “The man I saw kill her, he attacked me. Did you find him?”

  “There’s a unit outside, they’ll take you to the station where you’ll be forensically examined for evidence. Then I have a few questions.”

  Eva put her hand out to cup the empty mug, the freezer bag reminded her not to. “I couldn’t save her, I would have, even though.” She couldn’t make herself say it, but that half sentence was enough for DI Smith to pay her more attention until she had to ask.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “One thing at a time.”

  30

  Eva stared at the table in the police station interview room at which she was sitting. Its hard rigidity looked ridiculously inviting. She wanted to cross her arms on it, lay her head down. She put her fingertips over her eyelids, rubbed them. It was going to take a lot more to get rid of the grittiness.

  A sudden knocking at the door jerked her into her present. Thud, thud, thud.

  “Eva, open up.” An urgency not quite muffled through the wood.

  She did as asked and DI Smith burst into the room, depositing two vending machine cups onto the table. He flicked his hands up and down.

  “Coffee, not that great, but it’s hot. Milk, no sugar, right?” She looked her surprise at him. “I watched you make us a drink.”

  “That’s observant of you.”

  “That’s what they pay me for. So,” he closed the door and sat opposite her. “talk to me. You’ve had an extraordinary week, you’ve been around more murders than I have.”

  Eva focussed on the coffee. If they’d discovered the man who’d come after her at Charles’ lab, he wouldn’t have tied it to her yet. Either way there was no explaining that. Self-defence again, but from some shadowy secret order of assassins trying to kill her. Who would believe that? His next question would be why, and she couldn’t tell him something she didn’t know.

  “Tell me why you were there in the middle of the night, when you’re struggling to walk.”

  “I didn’t—I forgot it.” She went to rest her forehead in her hands, remembered her stitches. “I used my daughter’s bike. I left it there, outside the café.”

  “A bike ride, that’s still going to need some explaining.”

  She let her explanation drop onto the table, each word destroying something inside her. “I followed my husband, he’s having an,” she whispered the most terrible word as if it could make it untrue, “affair.”

  “With the victim?”

  Eva nodded, swallowed hard. “I realise that makes me a suspect, but I didn’t hurt her, I just wanted to talk to her. It sounds awful and you probably don’t believe me.”

  “So tell me what happened.” With a weighty sense of déjà vu she gave her statement while he wrote it down. His face remained deadpan, impossible to tell what he was thinking, where the questions would go next. Eva’s gaze dropped back to the tabletop, the pen looked small in his hands.

  When he’d read her the events of the night, encapsulated in the dry black and white of her statement, and had her sign it, he sat back in his chair, watching her.

  She had to ask. “Are you going to charge me for what I did to that man? I carved him up quite a bit.”

  “From the look of your neck I’m minded to believe it was self-defence, but we’ll see once we’ve accumulated all the evidence.”

  She touched her throat, another soreness. She was a limping injury.

  “Once we’ve been through the CCTV footage from the area, we’ll have a better idea of how things played out. In the meantime, don’t leave the country.”

  She shook her head; he didn’t need to know she couldn’t.

  “I’ll take you home, you’re probably still in shock, so go to bed. In fact, I’d say stay in bed for the rest of the week.” His smile was more surprising.

  Eva hesitated outside her front door. This was her home, it should be her sanctuary.

  It would be again, once this was over. Part of finding out what the ‘this’ was might be found inside, if Charles had come back. And, if he hadn’t, that confirmed her worst fears. Then how would she find him? Should she try? She hiccupped in a breath, her throat closing, nothing to do with her bruising.

  Why had he done this? A surge of anger settled around the weight in her chest. She rammed the key in the lock, raised a hand at DI Smith in his car and let herself in.

  The mess everywhere surprised her all over again. She threw her keys into the glass bowl on top of the tiny hallway cupboard. The tinkle summoned Charles to the top of the stairs.

  “Eva? What are you doing here?”

  Up the stairs, each step seemed to grow higher as she climbed them.

  “Where’s Lily?” he asked.

  “Hugo’s.”

  She searched his face, but Charles looked no different to how he had at CJ’s when they’d last been together. Had she been seeing only lies since he came back to her, was that why she hadn’t known?

  “Who is she?” she blurted it out.

  “Who?”

  “The woman in the café, the black-haired lady you met.” She said them as though they were just words, but each one splintered something inside her. He looked shocked, at least, sideswiped.

  “You followed me?”

  “If it makes you feel better, I wish I hadn’t.”

  There was something different about him, a nervous energy fizzing through his veins. She was used to him pacing while he thought his deepest thoughts, but this was different, more. He fidgeted with the banister.

  “Are you having an affair?” The word hit her hard, said out loud, but she had to hold herself together.

  “No, nothing like that. I knew Nancy a long—”

  “I don’t need her name.”

  He nodded once, message received and understood. “What do you want to know?”

  Nothing, everything.

  “How long have you been seeing her now?”

  “I haven’t. It’s not what you think, Eva.”

  “What is it then? I saw the way you looked at her.”

  “I. . .I needed to. . .The Society’s after her, too. I had to warn her.”

  “They were, they just killed her.”

  The words punched him. She’d been too cruel, bursting out with it like that, wanting him to hurt like she was. But at the look on his face, she smothered her softening apologies.

  “You love her.” H
er stunned whisper gathered strength, her pain hitting out. “You’re in love with someone else.” The pressing double weight of grief and betrayal on her chest stopped her breathing enough. In her heart it crippled her, in her mind paralysed anything else.

  He loved that woman.

  “How?”

  Eva gave him a wide berth on her way to their bedroom.

  “How?” Almost animalistic, his howl of grief and pain crammed into that one short syllable.

  “She was run over, then a man suffocated her.”

  “You know this for certain?”

  “I saw it happen, he tried to do the same to me.”

  Charles whirled away from her and ran down the stairs. He didn’t care?

  Eva closed her eyes as though that might shut it all out. She wanted to sleep more than ever, not for the rest she needed but for the oblivion it promised. But Lily would be getting up soon, time for her and Eva to leave. And figure out how to explain why her dad wasn’t coming too.

  Eva stopped in her bedroom doorway. What? A brown holdall she didn’t recognise was on their bed, and on the floor beside it, one of their big suitcases zipped up. Charles was leaving? Not what she thought? He was leaving. It was everything she’d thought, dreaded.

  Downstairs he was slamming doors, Eva got in the shower.

  She leant her hands on the tiles, bent her head, let the water pummel away the man’s blood from her hair, from everywhere she hadn’t been able to wash at the police station. She watched it swirl away down the drain as though it might take her pain away with it. Her gaze traced the patterns in the woven bracelets on her wrist. What would you say now, Daddy? How would you make this all better?

  Dressed in leggings and a fleece, Eva inspected her neck. DI Smith was right: as clear as if he’d painted it on, the imprint of the man’s fingers, all swabbed, photographed and measured at the police station, was bruising. She stuck a clean dressing over her stitches and went into their bedroom to pack.

  “We have to go now.”

  “I see you’re all ready to do that.” She gestured at the luggage.

  “Eva, after Nancy we’re next.”

  “Lily and I are leaving soon enough. You can leave, it’s clear that’s what you want to do.”

  He grabbed her arm; she pulled it away. “Just go, Charles.”

  “Listen to me, they’ve planted something on the gas inlet pipe outside, some kind of timer. It could go at any time, make it look like we died in a gas leak explosion. We have to get out. Now. Get Lily, next door is still too close.”

  Eva hammered at Hugo’s door while Charles warned the neighbours on the other side.

  “Get out, there’s a gas leak.” Eva screamed over Hugo telling her something about Lily and breakfast.

  Lily appeared at the kitchen doorway, holding Cynthia. “Lily, out quick, run!”

  She did.

  “Out, go, go.” Eva pushed her from behind. Hugo, Charles and the other shocked neighbours following.

  Halfway up the street, their charge petered to a halt. Was this far enough away? Should they tell more neighbours? Eva looked back. Their houses as solid and safe as always, brick exterior, curtains closed in the lounge bay window, the ones in their bedroom open. Built at the end of the Victorian era, these houses had survived the best efforts of the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. Solid, invincible almost, they’d witnessed generations come and go, the rise of the cars that now clogged the roads, the climate emergency that made the residents appreciate the plane trees planted at the kerbside. Yet they weren’t safe from a fanatical group?

  Charles had left their front door open, another departure from his methodical self.

  “Have you called it in?” A neighbour asked.

  Who to? Bomb squad, police, MI5?

  “Do we just have to stand here?” Lily asked.

  “You said no time to get anything.” Eva pointed at the unrecognised brown holdall in Charles’ hand.

  “There isn’t.”

  “What’s in there that’s so important?” It had to be more than clothes, the way he hefted the weight of it.

  “We should go, we shouldn’t be outside watching when it goes up, we want them to think they’ve succeeded.”

  “Shouldn’t you have shut the front door then?” Eva looked at Lily. “Wait there.”

  “Mum, where’re you going?”

  “I’ll be just two minutes.”

  “You might not have two minutes.” Charles pointed out.

  She knew where her father’s memory box was, she’d need only one.

  31

  It wasn’t the boom action movies had taught Eva it should be, but the drawing away from her of all the air, as if their house had inhaled it. A crumpled collapsing inwards and then the house sighed it out again in a concussive wave that knocked her backwards. Another collision with unyielding concrete.

  She lay where she fell expecting a rain of debris to sear her skin, stab and maim, like in her father’s photo. But maybe he had a hand in directing it away from her because nothing hit her. She staggered to her feet, her ears ringing a loud silence.

  Their house had imploded into a tangled mass of bricks and wood, plastic, roof tiles. Fires sprouted where the gas fire had been, where the oven was, spreading over the debris, seeking anything flammable. The houses on either side were okay, if not leaning towards the mangled mess that had stood between them for so many years, as though bowing to their fallen neighbour.

  Lily, Charles and the others got to their feet, their shocked faces popping up on the other side of parked cars that screamed their indignation at the disturbance in flashing hazards and beeping.

  “Mum!” Lily screamed.

  “Stay there, I’m coming.”

  Lily hugged her tightly enough to hurt. She was safe, that was the important thing. Eva’s memory box, it was gone, nothing left except for the bracelets she could feel on her wrist, the tiniest of comforts.

  A far away siren penetrated the fog in Eva’s ears. No more police questions.

  “Thanks, Hugo, for having Lily last night. I’m so sorry about this.” Eva waved a hand at their street, they’d all have to be evacuated while the non-existent gas leak was checked out, while their homes were made safe.

  “I was going to redecorate,” Hugo stared at his house. “No excuse now.”

  “I’m just taking Lily to find a toilet.”

  He nodded, distracted by a wriggling Cynthia, staring at the shocking scene as though he could wish it into being normal.

  Charles followed them while Eva limped past the coffee house to the internet café at the top of the high street. She chose the biggest chocolate extravaganza for both of them and looked the question at him.

  He handed her a couple of twenties. “Just coffee, I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Eva barely processed his words, what his absence might mean. “Go wash your face, sweetheart.”

  When Lily rejoined Eva, her face lit up at the pile of marshmallows, cream and chocolate sprinkles in the biggest mug the café had. Oh, to be eleven and believe everything was right in your world no matter what happened. And that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, your parents had everything under control.

  Eva couldn’t help herself. She’d bought the minimum fifteen minutes of internet time and opened a Google tab, closed it, tried again on DuckDuckGo who promised no tracking. She’d pretend she didn’t know someone like CJ could probably still follow what she was doing. It wasn’t a secret anyway.

  She didn’t have to go any pages in this time to find mention of the unrest at Tirupudur. It was hard to see the scenes of desperate people pulling the aerial network of water pipes down, the precious resource it carried being spilt onto the shacks and into the dirt. Fury spilled like the water through the streets, fuelled by old fears the people had believed forgotten. Betrayed and frightened, Eva understood why they were so angry. She needed to get out there.

  Charles reappeared while she clicked into the next article.
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br />   “What’s happening?”

  “More sickness at Tirupudur, there’s fighting, people are angry.”

  He leant in closer and peered at the photo of the unrest. “They shouldn’t be pulling the pipes down, they’re keeping them safe.”

  “They think it’s the water that’s making them sick.”

  “They shouldn’t be pulling the pipes down.”

  Eva closed the browser. It felt like torture not being able to do anything, to show them Every Drop was only trying to help, to push to get samples tested, to figure out what was causing this. To fight it.

  “There you are.” Charles held out a box to her. A knee support. “I thought it might help, make things easier for you.”

  “Thank you.” The stiff formality of strangers hurt, but she didn’t know what they were now.

  “We can’t stay here.” Charles murmured when Lily went to get another serviette and a packet of crisps.

  “Let her be, she needs to eat, to—”

  “I meant in the UK.”

  “I can’t go anywhere, your ‘friend’ took care of that.”

  “I persuaded him to do you a passport. We all have new ones.”

  “Fake ones.” Eva couldn’t keep the snap out of her voice.

  “Does it matter if they get us out of here?”

  “And go where, with what money? Your emergency fund will stretch to that, will it?”

  Lily looked at them as if she could see the tension that curled between them. She placed the change coins on the table like they were made of dynamite.

  “Can you get me some of those, sweetheart?” Eva lightened her tone. Lily nodded, went back to the counter.

  “Can’t you get one of your big shot donors to help?” Charles asked.

  Eva sipped her drink. “I can’t take advantage of a donor.”

  “You’re not at Every Drop anymore.”

  How did Charles not look any different to the man she loved on the outside when his entire personality seemed to have changed?

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “Not even to keep Lily safe?”

  “Here you go, Mum.” Lily handed her the crisps with a smile.

  “Thanks.” Eva pulled her to her and kissed the top of her head.