20. Wren
CHAPTER TWENTY
WREN
Tactics to keep calm: There are none.
Cuckoo is truly cuckoo now. She is laughing, she is full of glee, she holds that bloody knife in her hand, and she invites us to laugh along with her.
“Cuckoo, what have you done?” Goldie gasps, and it’s all I can think too.
What have you done, what have you done, what have you done?
“This is what we talked about,” Cuckoo says. “We’re making sure he doesn’t have Bishop’s House. I did it. I’m doing it. We all know he deserves to die.”
I stare at this man’s body as if I am assembling a jigsaw and the pieces in front of me will somehow come together to form a picture I understand.
It doesn’t work. He remains prone, in his running gear that he put on and did not expect to die in.
He has his wedding ring on. His wife is at home waiting for him, and he will never return.
How long will she wait before calling the police?
How long will she hold out and hope for a reprieve that is never going to come?
It is still silent. We are hidden here within the trees, and we have a good vantage point, and I can see no one is coming, no one has heard the attack.
There is no one out here apart from us and a body.
The air smells crisp and faintly of rain, and sure enough, looking up, I see the sky is cloudy, not a star to be seen.
Even the moon is hidden, as if it’s embarrassed to be seen with us.
As if it doesn’t want to bear witness to what Cuckoo has done.
But then Hugo Fletcher makes a choking sound.
He is still alive.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “He’s still—he’s still moving.”
“We could get help,” Crow says.
“Help?” Cuckoo echoes, appalled. “Do you really want to help this man? After knowing what he did to my mother?”
“No.”
Starling steps forward, hand outstretched. “Give me the knife. I’ll finish him off.”
Cuckoo’s eyes gleam. “Just like we talked about.”
“Just like we talked about,” Starling repeats. Cuckoo passes her the knife, and she grips it tightly, staring at it with a strange look of wonder. “Is this how they all felt, before their first . . . It’s like a true crime show, happening in real life.”
“And we’re the stars,” Cuckoo says.
The stars. Us. We take center stage. Everyone else might have forgotten about us, but we can make our own rules. It’s what we’ve been doing for weeks. Like when we trashed that garden. When the school was graffitied. We’ve done so much.
I want to be a star.
And this man deserves to die.
Starling stabs him in the back; then I can’t help myself.
“Wait,” I whisper. “I want to do it too.”
I take the knife from her and stab him, electrified by the way his skin becomes soft as butter under my hand. His blood is everywhere. For a second I think the sky is full of it too, and we are drenched in his slow death, but then I realize the rain has finally come, joining in the performance.
He transforms: He is not a man on the ground; he is a monster, a demon, the cause of everything that is wrong in our lives.
Goldie reaches for the knife. “He is a feast,” she says, and her eyes have the same burning Cuckoo’s and Starling’s and maybe mine do.
So I pass the knife to Goldie, and she stabs him too.
It is only Crow left, Crow who cowers away from us. She has become me. I thought I’d cower or run—that’s what I normally do. I’m normally always on the sidelines looking in. Not today. Today I’m a part of this. Cuckoo’s revenge. Our revenge.
We are breathless, we are smiling. Goldie holds out the knife to Crow.
“Your turn,” she says.
But Crow doesn’t have the same gleam in her eyes. She steps backward, shaking her head. She is paler even than usual. Her bottom lip is trembling.
“I can’t do this,” she says. “You’ve all—it’s like you’re feral. What’s happened to you? Trashing gardens and sneaking around is one thing. He’s dying.”
“You can’t not be a part of this,” Cuckoo says. “One for all and all for one, remember?”
“Some people deserve to die,” Starling says.
“The perfect murder means not only getting away with it, but choosing the perfect victim.” Goldie says this with a small smile. “That’s what you said, Crow, isn’t it?”
That conversation. The perfect murder.
I could never murder anyone. The perfect murder is none at all.
“Was that just big talk?” Starling says. “Crow putting on a show, as you always do? Never actually following through?”
“I follow through!”
Goldie shrugs. “Doesn’t look like it.”
“Big words, Crow, but no action,” Starling says.
“It’s fun,” I whisper. “We can do anything if we do this.”
“Wren’s right,” Cuckoo says. “There is nothing standing in our way.”
“But . . . if we do this . . .” Crow can barely string words together. “It might ruin everything. Don’t you see that?”
“You want to do these grand things,” Starling says, “and you can’t do this? For your friends?”
“It’s not like that. If we could get away with it, of course I would.”
“You’re strong,” Goldie says. “You’re Crow. Crows pass down grudges, crows stick together. Stick with us.”
Crow nods. She’s finally getting it. She takes the knife and steps toward Hugo Fletcher, who is writhing, groaning, putting up no fight. But she is still uncertain.
“Do it!” Cuckoo says.
“Do it!” Starling joins in. And then we’re all chanting: “Do it! Do it! Do it!” and Crow really has no choice.
She looks at us all, and we’ve never been like this, we’re so free, and then she stabs Hugo Fletcher, and he makes one final gasp, and then his entire body goes still. She has delivered the finishing blow.
He is dead.
“We did it.” Cuckoo punches the air. “He’s fucking dead.” And she kicks him for good measure.
“This is a crime scene now,” Starling says, eyes shining.
“I’m on it,” Cuckoo says.
Cuckoo wipes the knife clean with a cloth she has produced from her backpack.
We watch in silence as she takes out a cellophane bag, the kind you’d pack your sandwiches in for school, and places the knife inside.
It zips shut with a white plastic zipper.
She does the same with the cloth in another bag.
I notice for the first time the black gloves she is wearing, watching as she disposes of them in a third clear bag. They are all returned to her backpack.
“Murder weapon disposed of in a different place,” Starling says, nodding approvingly, like she’s listening to one of her podcasts she loves telling us about. “Good idea.”
“We’re really doing this,” Crow says, sounding strangled, “aren’t we?”
“No backing out now,” Goldie says.
“Check him over,” Starling says. “Make sure he doesn’t have a phone or smartwatch or something. It’ll reveal his location.”
We are lucky. He has a normal (very expensive-looking) watch and no phone.
The only thing in the zipped pocket of his jacket is his house keys and his debit card.
We take them out, and Cuckoo promises to get rid of these too, putting them in her coat.
His wedding ring is on his finger, and we debate whether to take this before leaving it where it is.
“Does his wife know where he runs?”
“I doubt it,” Cuckoo says. “He barely seems to talk to her. I think she’ll be pleased that he’s gone. And she won’t want to buy Bishop’s House now, not with him missing. There will be enough stress as it is. We all benefit from this perfect murder.”
“It’s not the perfect murder yet,” Crow says. “We haven’t sorted out the hard part. You said he’ll be missing. What are we doing with his body?”
“We dump him in the river of course,” Cuckoo says. “That’s why we’re here.”
The river runs along the west side of the park, then dips under the bridge to the street ahead and carries on, leading out to the River Avon.
And it runs fast, the gentle trickling of water a disguise for a mean current, one we were always warned about as kids.
A body might flow with it. Disappear forever.
“Like the girl who went missing,” Starling murmurs. “Remember? We had a detective come in from school. They never did find her.”
“That’s why it’s perfect,” Cuckoo says. “He’ll be gone for good.”
First we must get him there. Starling acts as lookout, giving us the thumbs-up while Cuckoo and I push his body toward the crest of the hill.
Crow and Goldie are waiting at the bottom.
He becomes covered in mud and wet leaves, and I can’t look at him because his eyes are open, watching what we do.
He smells of blood, but I’m not sure if I’m just imagining it, and every time I look at my mud-stained hands, I picture them crimson and gasp.
We get him to the hill and finally release him, and he tumbles and rolls like a sickening cartoon, coming to a stop at the bottom only a couple of feet from the river.
We stumble to him as Crow and Goldie start to pull him toward the edge, legs bouncy and footing uneven, as if we are toddlers.
“Wait,” Starling says. “Rocks. To weigh him down. Not too much—but enough.”
This time, I stay by his body while the rest of them search for stones, aiming for anything nearby.
We place them in his leggings, peeling back the Lycra, which sticks fast to him like glue, and stuff them down his shirt.
He looks misshapen, protruding bumps across his body sticking out at all angles.
“Don’t drop him,” Starling warns. She is relishing this, living out what she has read so much about. “We need to lower him. There can’t be a loud splash.”
So Cuckoo takes him by his shoulders, hands cupped underneath his armpits, Starling and Goldie have his torso, careful to avoid his seeping wounds, and Crow and I take a leg each.
He is still heavy. Almost impossibly so.
We bend awkwardly to put him into the water, straining with the effort of it, and then he is in, just as the cold water brushes my skin.
We wait, an agonizing breath, and then he sinks. The water is dark and murky, but we peer closely to be sure he is gone. The surface reveals nothing, liquid black and rippling in the breeze. Raindrops are falling hard now.
“The rain has done us a favor,” Cuckoo says. “It’ll wash away the blood. By the time an investigation is launched, there won’t be any evidence to speak of.”
“Your perfect murder,” Crow says.
Cuckoo juts her chin. “Our perfect murder.”
We return to the scene anyway, stare at the blood.
Stare at ourselves. We have his blood on us.
It’s on our shirts and scattered on our trousers.
It has marked Starling’s legs in the holes of her fishnets, the jagged pattern of blood like a tattoo.
The ground has a dark red stain, but the rain is doing its job.
“You have to clean your shoes when you get back,” Starling says. “As for the clothes, we can’t risk them. We’ll have to get rid of them as soon as possible.”
“I’ll sort that too,” Cuckoo says. “You have no idea . . . I am just so happy. We really did it.” She wraps a hand around the necklace we gave her, clutching the pendant tightly. “This is the best birthday ever.”
“The perfect murder means getting away with it.” Crow knows her lines now. She’s said them before. “A pact. We never breathe a word.”
“That’s it,” Cuckoo says. “This is between us. No one else.”
Us. The five of us. We are unstoppable.
“Pinkies,” Goldie says, holding hers out.
Our pinkie promise. Just like when we were kids.
We each raise our fingers, join them together.
No one else.
“Our first kill,” Starling says.
It’s only later, when I am in bed and I have washed away Hugo Fletcher’s blood, and the sun is rising and I am still wide awake, recounting the moment I took that knife in my hand, that I realize what Starling said. What we all cheered to.
Our first kill.
Because first means we have only just begun.