Chapter Seven
On Thursday morning I was making my way across the hall when there was a knock on the door. Not thinking, I went to answer it and had the fright of my life when I saw two police officers standing in front of me!
It didn’t seem right, after I’d worked so hard to destroy evidence and had every intention of making amends in a different way.
Had we missed something? It was possible, given the number of things there were to think of.
Had they found the phone and tracked it back to us?
Or sifted their way through a million splinters of headlight cover?
“Morning, morning,” one of them said. “Nothing to worry about, we’re just speaking to everyone who might have seen Lennie Green on the day he went missing. We were given your name by the party hosts. Can we come in?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“We just need to take a statement. Crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.”
I let them in because I didn’t think I had a choice, and before I could stop them, they hung a left into the very room in which Lennie had passed.
I followed them and took a dust sheet off one of the chairs, sniffing the air as I did for the telltale scent of death I had often heard of.
There was nothing discernible, not to me at least. I watched to see if they were going to turn up their noses, but there was no reaction.
I looked round to check they hadn’t brought one of those cadaver dogs—that could have been a death blow to us—but there were no pets whatsoever.
“Have a seat,” I said and they said “thank you” and took the sheet off the very chaise longue on which Lennie had expired!
“Everything alright?” one of them asked. He was tall and thin, with a very pasty complexion, but he said to me, “You’re looking pale.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I’m alright.”
“Are you sure?”
“That’s a very old piece of furniture,” I said. They both stood up, and I tried to look as if that had solved all my problems.
In the end we went through to the old kitchen. The walk gave me time to take a few deep breaths and get my shaking hands under some control.
There I told them that it was true I had met Lennie at the party; I had been matching the labels to the canapés, and he was looking for a drink.
I had a brief wobble here, remembering the drink he’d poured me, but I recovered myself and told them that he and I spoke briefly about canapés, then he’d left to answer his phone.
I tripped slightly on the word “phone,” but they didn’t seem to notice.
The next time I saw him, he was presenting a check for a charity.
I had never seen him before, or since, I stressed to them.
“I didn’t even know he was the national treasure, Lennie Green,” I said. “I didn’t know we’d had—no, we have—a national treasure called Lennie Green.”
“Haven’t you found him yet?” Mrs. Billings clattered into the kitchen, seeing the police officers and catching the end of the conversation.
“Not yet,” the first officer said. “And you are?”
“Brenda Billings, head of housekeeping and lifelong fan of Lennie Green.” She put her hand out and shook hands with the officers. “Why are you looking here?”
“We’re just speaking to everyone who was at the same party as Mr. Green,” the officer said, and Mrs. B looked at me.
“You never said you were at the same party,” she said.
I shrugged. “I thought you knew. I thought it was obvious.”
“But you didn’t even know who he was when it was on the radio the next day?”
“I didn’t realize it was him.”
“Young people,” Mrs. B said disparagingly to the police, although they were younger than me.
They said they had no more questions and asked where they could contact James. I gave them his mobile number and saw them out.
I flopped down onto the chaise longue, then remembering once more who the last person to lie there was, leaped back up again.
I spent the rest of the afternoon replaying the interview in my head and wondering if they had thought “aha” at the moment I said Lennie had been a national treasure.
Or if maybe everyone behaved like that when they were interviewed and they thought nothing of it.
Or perhaps they weren’t that experienced and had been overawed by the house.
I should have spoken to them in the hall, where they would have had the Elizabethan armor and the empty family tree to take their minds off me.
I could have told them about how there once was a beautiful decorated document which started in the fourteenth century and followed the family right down to Lord Ashbury and how James got rid of it.
To see James that evening, you would never have known there was anything to worry about.
“You can tell by how long it’s taken them to get to us how far down we are on the list of priorities.
It stands to reason. We’d never met him before that night.
Why would we have anything to do with it?
” he said, watching me microwave a bowl of Waitrose carbonara, the film of which had been pierced in front of him.
Regardless, when I served it up, he peered closely at it, then he poked around at it with his fork.
“Not going on a killing spree, are you?” he asked.
“I know this is your favorite MO.” Finally, he ate it, after first swapping his plate with mine, then saying, “Double bluff” and swapping them back.
I wanted to tell him that he needn’t have worried: Revenge was a dish best served cold and that little bowl of pasta was piping hot.
Afterward, we decamped to the lounge to watch the local news. That evening, Lennie was a much smaller item, just a reminder that he was still missing and that the police would like to thank everyone so far who had provided camera footage; they were currently reviewing it all.
Then I had a thought: “James, we haven’t taken the dashcam out of the Audi.”
“Shit!”
Who would have thought there was so much to think of in the aftermath of a hit-and-run?
The body had proved to be the least of our problems; there were cameras, phones, bags, and damaged cars to consider, all while acting normally.
Next time, I’d draw up a checklist first. Not that there would be a next time.
Unless the victim was James, which was something to think about.
But I cast that thought aside. I had to concentrate on the matter in hand.
We went running out to the garage to retrieve the camera.
Back in the house, James logged onto his laptop.
“Do you want to see it?” he asked. “Your best bits?”
No, I didn’t, but he downloaded the dashcam footage anyway and played it back.
You could hear me trying to get him to look at the ghost in the back seat as we wended our way toward the country lane.
You could see the tail lights of the bus disappearing around the corner and Lennie at the side of the road—so maybe I did have time to notice him.
He started to cross. At the same time, you could hear James’s yelp as he pulled the sun visor down and the spider fell out, then a split second later, Lennie’s horrified expression as he flew toward the windshield.
The dashcam had a much better view than I had had from behind the airbag, and you could clearly see the horror on his face.
For a time I was back in that moment, and I had to sit down.
If only I’d remembered to take that spider out. Or to play the trick when I first set it up. If only I hadn’t forgotten about it.
“Any news on the phone?” James asked me, and I shook my head. “Keep an eye out for it. We’ll get rid of the Audi this weekend.”
As simple as that. An accident had happened, but it was being cleared up. It seemed wrong that such a big event could be laid to rest so easily, but I kept reminding myself that, once the immediate danger had passed, I would carry out some kind of penance for this.
***
James woke me before 2:00 a.m. on Saturday morning.
“Rise and shine,” he said. “We’re going to the seaside.”
And he made me get up and dress and pack, as if for a day at the coast, although being only April, we didn’t go for full beachwear.
“Bring these,” he said, and he handed me the earrings my mum had given me for my twenty-first birthday. Puzzled, I started putting them on, but James said, “Leave them in the box.”
“What for?”
“You’ll see.”
When we were ready, we climbed into the battered Audi. James told me to put the earrings in the glove compartment, then we drove, on dipped headlights, for more than an hour and a half to Brean Down, on the coast.
There, we drove the car off the road, onto the footpath, where cars are not supposed to go, and up to the top of the cliff.
It was only just wide enough for the Audi, but at least we didn’t have to worry anymore about the paintwork getting scratched.
Then we went along the clifftop, which was slightly easier than the path but terrifying in case we made a mistake and went over the edge.
Eventually, we stopped where the water below was deep.
James took a cloth out of his pocket and wiped our fingerprints off everything he could think of.
Then we got out and he wiped the doorhandles.
“Shouldn’t our fingerprints be on our own car?” I asked.
“Not if we’re going to say it was stolen and there are no one else’s prints on it.”
Then he reached inside, took the handbrake off, said, “Wrap your hands in your sleeves when you touch anything,” and he made me help him push it off the cliff into the sea.
“My earrings!” I shouted, remembering them as it went over the edge.
“Exactly,” James said. “When we report it as stolen, we can say it had items with sentimental value inside. It’ll make it sound more convincing.”
“But my mum gave them to me.”
“Yes, so we didn’t have to sacrifice an expensive pair. Win-win.”
I didn’t have words. They were the most valuable I had, worth more than all the jewelry he’d bought me combined.
I hated him, I hated him, I hated him. If we’d been nearer the edge at that moment I would’ve tried to shove him over too.
And I’d have told the police what I’d done, and I’d have told them why.
We walked down to the seaside and stayed out of view as we watched the sun come up and the town come to life.
Then we walked up and down side streets, and James chose a place to tell the police we’d parked it when he reported it as stolen later that day, a spot that was secluded and untroubled by CCTV.
“They’ll only give us a crime number anyway; they won’t investigate it,” he promised me, and that promise came true.
After that, we went for breakfast. I was exhausted by then, but I had to undertake a full day out, experiencing the wonders of Burnham-on-Sea because we couldn’t go out for the day and be ready to go home by seven in the morning.
“Why didn’t we just smash the lock on the garage and tell them we found it stolen when we got up?
” I asked him. After all we didn’t have external CCTV at Langley Hall, just an alarm for the living quarters to protect all his electrical gadgets.
James put up cameras when he first bought the house, but a few years ago the subscription lapsed and he decided not to renew.
“In all the years we’ve been here, no one’s tried to break in,” he’d said.
The worst had been the odd teenager on the grounds.
“We’ve still got the box up there; that’s enough to scare people off.
Double bluff.” James was a fan of the double bluff and in this case, so far, it seemed to be working.
Maybe the place just looked too dilapidated to contain anything worth stealing.
We endured a day out until midafternoon, then we went to the spot James had chosen and he phoned the police to report the car as stolen. I managed to cry when we told them about the earrings. They were tears of fury. We got a taxi home and I cried all the way.
We didn’t wait for the Audi to be written off before I drove James to the dealership to buy a new one.
James only had insurance because it was less trouble to have it than to deal with the potential legal ramifications of not having it.
In fact, he decided not to bother the insurance company at all; he just added another car to the policy.
“We don’t want them looking too closely at the damage, do we?” he said. “Might turn out to be incompatible with a fall from a cliff.”
And in the end, I got my earrings back. They found the car and pulled it out of the water. Someone was good enough to look in the glove compartment and phoned me to say I could go and get them; they weren’t too badly tarnished. So all was well that ended well.