Chapter 78 Anna
Chapter 78
Anna
The ground is sticky and wet underfoot. The grip on the soles of my wellies isn’t thick enough to stop me from sliding across the field’s uneven terrain. Drew’s laughter at my expense is irritating me. A low settling fog shrouds where we’re going, while behind me, I can barely see my house.
I lift the sleeve of my coat to my nose as I walk. It’s the first time I’ve worn it since Bonfire Night, but I swear I can still smell charred wood on it despite it twice being dry-cleaned. Perhaps the smell is like the blood I have on my hands: so deeply ingrained that it’ll never come out. I pause when I think I hear someone behind us. I turn, but it’s still just the two of us. Given my current state of mind, it’s no wonder my imagination is playing tricks on me.
‘What about over there?’ Drew suggests.
He’s referring to a clearing over by the mini-industrial estate that’s being built ahead. Roads have been dug, and sewers, waterpipes and cables installed. According to the construction company’s website, it’s ready for the next stage of development. We make our way towards it and he steers me in the direction of a manhole cover.
‘Down there?’ I ask. ‘You think it’ll work?’
‘The detective hasn’t been found yet, has he?’
When he told me weeks earlier that this was the detective’s burial spot, I remember being surprised it was close to home. I’d assumed Drew had driven him miles away. But he’s right, I suppose. I’ve done many bad things, if you want to call them that. But burying a body isn’t one of them.
‘As you well know, I’ve never disposed of anyone,’ I reply. ‘This is a first for me.’
‘Likewise,’ Drew replies. ‘I’ve never been asked for advice on where to bury myself.’
Again, I can’t argue with that either. Because Drew is dead, and has been since the early hours of the morning after Bonfire Night.
I didn’t want to kill my brother, but he left me with no choice. He only has himself to blame. He was on the floor of our kitchen, clutching with one hand the kneecap I broke with a pipe wrench. He used the other to throw me his phone.
‘Check out the iCloud file called “Ioana”,’ he said.
Inside was a file that contained two brief video clips. I let out a short sharp gasp when I recognised myself in the first. It was evening, and I was walking along a London pavement and towards a building. The footage was taken from afar but I’d been in that building so many times I knew it on sight. It was where Ioana lived. In the second clip, I was walking in the opposite direction.
‘The night you pushed Ioana over the balcony, a supermarket CCTV camera on the opposite side of the road filmed you entering and leaving her apartment block,’ Drew explained. ‘You’ll see it’s date- and time-stamped. It proves you were there the night she died. The police don’t know it exists because they had no reason to believe her death was suspicious. Feel free to delete it, but I have copies saved elsewhere.’
‘How . . . ?’
‘All you need to know is that it exists.’
‘Then you must have footage of Margot, too, because I passed her on her way out.’
‘The camera only captured someone wearing a long coat and a baseball cap pulled down to cover their face. Now press play on that sound file.’
I reluctantly did as I was told and heard my own voice. I sounded different; I was crying as I spoke and my words were hurried. I couldn’t place when it had been recorded until I heard myself revealing to Drew how I had killed Zain, Jenny, Warren and Ioana. Then I knew where and when.
‘The night you took me to hospital after I cut myself too deeply,’ I said. ‘You recorded me when I told you everything. When I was at my most vulnerable. Why?’
‘Just in case. And if ever there was a just-in-case moment, it’s now.’
I replayed the clips, then deliberately dropped his phone to the floor.
‘What are you going to do with this?’
‘You’re a serial murderer,’ he replied. ‘If I go to the police, you’ll be behind bars for the rest of your life.’
‘And I’ll tell them how you murdered that policeman here in this room in front of me and where you buried him.’
‘Which I’ll deny. There’s more evidence against you for crimes than there is against me. Now call me a fucking ambulance or drive me to A&E or, I swear to God, your life as you know it ends tonight.’
I hesitated, my mind racing through my options. But Drew had only left me with one. And a third person joined our conversation.
‘We are parting ways, aren’t we?’ Ioana asked suddenly. It was the first time I’d heard from her in a while. She sounded as if she had accepted her fate, which offered me reassurance I was about to do the right thing.
‘We are,’ I replied. ‘And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry for what?’ Drew replied, puzzled. I’d never told him about my passengers.
Before he could lift his arm to defend himself, with all the force of two strong women I hit him twice with the pipe wrench, both times across the head. It was the second impact that caved in his skull. The many blows that followed were unnecessary, but not entirely unwarranted.
I’ve not felt a shred of guilt since his death. It was either Drew or me, and I chose me because I am the only one of us who has a shot at living beyond the past. Even Drew now accepts it was the right thing for me to have done. I sense his presence inside me and sometimes I hear his voice, but it’s much less frequent than Ioana’s was. And it lacks her malice.
The only fallout from his death has been figuring out a way of successfully dumping his body. For the first few days he remained wrapped inside a tarpaulin I’d paid for in cash at a DIY store and secured around him with parcel tape. It was a fiddly job. Then I stored him in the utility room. Scented candles burned all hours of the day and night. But I couldn’t continue indefinitely with him in the house. Burying him in my own garden was asking for trouble. I ruled out shallow graves in wooded areas because dogs and wild animals have a tendency to dig them up. Bodies often float to the surface if they’ve been dumped in lakes. And I didn’t have the stomach to cut him into pieces and dissolve him in chemicals.
So, as a short-term solution, I splurged ￡200 in cash for a chest freezer I bought from a second-hand electricals shop. Although it took a hell of a lot of effort hoisting my brother up and getting him inside it. Twice, I accidentally tore open the tarpaulin, once exposing his knee and the second time his left hand. I gagged at the paleness of the lion tattoo on the back of it as I scrambled to push him into the freezer. In my haste, his hand caught underneath it and I swear I heard fingers crack and the metallic clink of his ring.
Armed with enzyme solvents to liquify dried blood and hydrogen peroxide Drew had bought to clean up after he killed the detective in the same room, I then scrubbed every inch of the kitchen and even used my cutting blades to scrape contaminated grout from between the kitchen floor tiles before filling them in again.
Then the second stage of my clean-up began. I used Drew’s phone to email his boss a resignation letter. It was accepted without question, which suggested Drew wasn’t a great loss to the company. I drove to two locations in town, one a bus stop just outside the village and the other the train station close to Liv’s studio. At each, I texted from his phone to mine a message announcing he was going away for a while ‘to find himself’. If his disappearance is ever questioned, police will discover via mobile phone towers where those messages were sent from. And there won’t be any proof that he didn’t catch a train to somewhere, because Network Rail’s CCTV footage is only kept for thirty-one days before being routinely wiped.
Finally, I packed most of his clothes into bags and left them left on the doorstep of a charity shop in town. The rest I’ve left in his bedroom, suggesting he might eventually return when he’s ready. I won’t have to do anything with our shared car, as that’s in my name.
But these are likely needless precautions, because no one will come looking for Drew. He has no friends, at least none that I’m aware of, and our aunt and uncle who took us in after our parents’ deaths have moved back to Pakistan. I was the only one to stay in touch with them.
I knew that he couldn’t stay in my garage forever and I was putting myself at risk each day he remained. Which is why, almost three months after his death, I need to find him a final resting place.
‘Well?’ Drew asks me, directing me again to the manhole. ‘What do you think? I can’t see me being found down here.’
‘Okay then, if that’s what you want,’ I reply. ‘I’ll drive us here and do it tomorrow.’
‘Do what tomorrow, Anna?’
I stop in my tracks.
Because that wasn’t Drew’s voice. It was someone else’s, and it’s not coming from inside my head.
I’m not here alone.