FEBRUARY 2003 #3
Harper had a singular job in all of this, and I was still concerned about her ability to pull it off.
I stood, cap drawn low over my face, refusing to lean because Joel did not lean, he stood tall and straight, but if I tried that the height difference between us might become obvious, so instead I rummaged through Harper’s handbag perched atop the suitcase containing the real Joel, feigning a search for the car keys already tucked in the pocket of my—his—tracksuit.
Harper was at the front desk, sliding their room keys across the desk.
“No, I know it’s early,” she said. “We just really fancy our own beds tonight. Thank you though, we’ve had a wonderful stay.”
Stop talking.
“We’ll definitely be back!”
I dipped my head again, feeling David’s eyes slide over me in the doorway. It was 2003. The CCTV was only in the foyer and the car park, not in every hall or every room. Now, hopefully, we had an eyewitness that Joel had left the hotel safe and sound.
I might not have been in many crime films, but I knew no body, no crime.
No crime scene, no murder.
“Thank you. Have a safe journey home.”
Harper came to my side and pressed her lips to my cheek, too quickly for me to register what she was doing, just the smell of her—strong disinfectant and an iron tang beneath.
(She’d used my shower and my toiletries. She’d washed off blood. So how was there still the faintest hint of her beneath? Blackcurrant and honeysuckle this time. Fruit and flowers, always. Ripe and in bloom.)
She took her bag and one of the suitcases—the far lighter one, into which we’d crammed as many of her and Joel’s belongings as we could.
Her dress was crumpled in a bin bag within, which left the garment bag she’d brought free to pile the remainder of Joel’s clothes into.
We’d had to make room for him in his suitcase somehow.
I grit my teeth, let one hand fall to the small of her back and dragged the suitcase with the other.
The moment we were out of sight of the front desk I spun, both hands on the handle and leaned back to haul the suitcase down the hall.
“You need to work out more,” Harper said, jabbing the button for the lift to come.
“Do you still have that knife?”
It was, of course, in the very suitcase I was pulling, along with every blood-soaked towel and cleaning rag we’d used.
(We’d tucked them around Joel’s cramped body like we were packing fine china, like we hadn’t considered breaking his bones just to make him fit—before he did, miraculously, like the case was made to be his coffin.)
The car park ran beneath the length of the hotel—private, gated, and secure. If Ruchi had been unable to erase the footage, at the very least it would show Joel leaving.
It just wouldn’t show me leaving when I later turned up in Soho. Which might not be a problem, even if it reached the point of an investigation. No one in their right mind would believe I helped Harper on anything, let alone this. And I could always claim I snuck out some back exit.
It took both of us to load the suitcase into the boot of the Aston Martin.
We threw everything else in on top, and I tossed Harper the keys.
“What?” she asked. “This is Joel’s car. He’d be the one driving.”
“I can’t.”
“What? Of course you can, I’ve seen you drive plenty in that godawful convertible of yours.”
“I can’t, Harper.”
It was hard enough in LA, to get back behind a wheel and not think about it careening into a mountainside, or the hot explosion of the air bags in my face, or stumbling out in the dirt, clutching my phone, surrounded by the flash of paparazzi bulbs.
But with these narrow twisting roads, an unfamiliar car, driving on the other side of the road and, of course, the mounting weight of all of this? I couldn’t. I’d choke.
And then what? If I broke now would I break about it all? Or was I already broken, to keep pushing on without acknowledging the enormity of all of this? Fuck, maybe I was in shock because I could just tell—like I could with my parents’ funeral—that when this hit it would hit hard.
Getting behind that wheel felt a surefire way to push me to the brink I was trying so desperately to edge away from.
I suspect Harper put all that together too, because my words hung in the air for only a beat longer before she nodded and started toward the driver’s side of the car.
I slid in beside her, keeping the cap low for any cameras along the road that might pick us up.
She turned the ignition, put the car in gear—I was glad I had protested because my LA license definitely did not cover manual cars—and pulled away.
It was only as the car pushed up the ramp toward street level that a thought occurred to me.
“How did you know which room was mine?”
Harper changed gear, swiveling the wheel to push us onto the street.
Eyes on the road, she answered. “I followed you last night when you were hammered. I wanted to make sure you got in safely.”
———
Somewhere around Maidenhead we turned off the motorway and onto long, winding country roads, barely a single lane wide, the only light shining from the beams of the car, which were blinding in such deep darkness.
If a car came from the other direction we would collide, metal grinding against metal, shredding through.
I shut my eyes and clutched the door handle like it might help in the event of our inevitable annihilation.
“Why are you doing this?” Harper asked. I opened my eyes again and turned to her—but she was focused dead ahead as she rounded yet another sharp, tree-lined corner. “Why didn’t you turn me in?”
I swallowed. I didn’t have an answer for her. (I didn’t have an answer for myself.)
So I turned from her back to the road ahead. I would rather face oblivion than this. Than her.
“Well, why did you come to my door?”
Her hands clenched a little on the wheel, but she didn’t answer. She faced oblivion too.
And we kept on driving.
———
We pulled up to the house just before midnight, though house was too modest a word.
You forget in LA where absurd sums are spent on a few stories just what money can buy you—and here it was, a sprawling mansion down a private country road.
It would have been popular out there, where a facade is a beautiful thing, a craft worth appreciating.
Here it felt gauche, new-build grandiosity trying desperately for a touch of antique glamour.
Harper leaned across me for the glove box, and I held my breath, like it might help (fruit and flowers and blood), until she fished out the key to the automated gate. The wheels crunched against gravel in the drive, and it sounded like gunshots in the quiet night air.
We slipped out silently in its echo.
“What now?” she asked.
Now? My plans reached about this point before fizzing out, focused on getting Harper and the body out of the city.
“We need to hide the body,” I said. “We need to convince the police that if something happened to him, it happened on another night when you have a solid alibi. So we need to do something with it now.”
She reached for the cap on my head, plucking it off and turning it in her fingers. “They think he made it home.”
“He did make it home,” I said. “You were upset that you didn’t win. He proposed coming home early, so you did. Tomorrow, or the day after maybe, you’ll get into a fight and he’ll storm off and that will be the last you ever saw of him. But he made it home.”
“He made it home,” she repeated, opening the boot so we could unload the suitcase and the body within. “Do you have anywhere in mind for this? We both left England so long ago that …”
That we did not know it anymore. If we were farther north, I might have options—forests, moors, the same ocean that swallowed my parents. I thought of Maldon, not too far away, two hours perhaps, but its tide was continuous, rolling in and out twice a day and dredging up history in its wake.
And then, I had a sudden thought.
“How far away is Barlam Thicket?”
———
Another half hour or so, it turned out. I traced it on a road map, marking out our path as Harper hunted down the keys for one of Joel’s other cars. He had several, apparently. Though all were expensive and hardly inconspicuous but better than taking the same Aston Martin back out.
We settled on the Jaguar.
“If they find his body there, they’ll know,” Harper said, chewing on a nail. “Everyone in our class was there.”
I agreed but we needed to do something, and we needed to do it quickly.
“It’s a wood near his house. Anyone could have dumped his body there. Besides, do you really think that retreat is as lodged in everyone else’s memory as it is ours?”
Harper lowered her thumb to smile. “Why Nadine, did something happen there?”
“We happened there.”
She could spout about stolen boyfriends all she liked—that’s where the rivalry sparked and bloomed, the same role, the tension, the woods late at night.
Not the perfect murder, just the perfect story.
And here we were, about to go again.
———
For the first few minutes, we drove in silence. My eyes kept flitting to the cars around us, terrified any might be the police, that we might get pulled over for some inane reason: Harper speeding, perhaps, or simply because they saw our reflections in their mirror and wanted an autograph.
They’d open the boot and find that suitcase. We’d be doomed.
“You haven’t even asked me why I did it,” she said.
My stomach clenched—no, I hadn’t asked. I didn’t need to, didn’t want to, there were too many things that might halt me in my tracks, and I knew that asking might shatter this.
I wanted, first and foremost, to help her.
Right now Harper’s biggest threat would be me turning against her—so I saw no reason to allow for that possibility.
(I … )
“Would it help if I told you he started it?” she asked, her knuckles paling as she clasped the wheel tighter.
“I could tell you he was trying to kill me, that it was self-defense. If it would make this easier for you. I could tell you he hit me. That he’s been hitting me for years. I could tell you he—”