Chapter 18
Runyon Canyon Trail, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles
Antoinette is ten years younger than I am.
And it has never shown more than now. Somehow she’s managed to convince me to get up early and go on a morning hike with her.
It goes to show how much I want to bond with my sister because I am not a fan of either of these things usually.
But there’s something to be said for being up and at it this early.
The searing LA heat hasn’t quite kicked in yet and I feel almost healthy halfway up a mountain at a time I’d usually be silencing my alarm.
Or I would do if I wasn’t suddenly wheezing like a sixty-a-day smoker.
And if my actual lungs didn’t feel like they’ve had acid thrown at them.
Am I dying?
Is this what my death will look like?
Antoinette, however, is skipping along like a happy gazelle, swinging her water bottle and stopping every few metres to take in the scenery. And wait for me to catch her up.
‘Are you having fun?’ she asks me as I huff up beside her.
‘Yes,’ I lie. ‘I actually love early mornings and exercise.’ It’s just a white lie really. Just a tiny one so I can bond with my sister.
‘Have you had any thoughts about what we’re going to do with him?’ she says, handing me her bottle.
‘Not yet,’ I say when I’ve recovered my breath.
I look around.
Despite the early hour there are already several people out on the trail apart from us.
And they’re all filming content. Two girls in co-ordinating exercise outfits are laughing as they set up a tripod and yoga mats.
There’s a young couple with a selfie stick strolling along, their limbs wound around each other.
And a man with no shirt and very precise facial hair is filming his dog doing tricks.
Or at least he’s trying to. The dog is much more interested in sniffing and digging.
My first – and only – idea for Ron Wilde was to cut him into even smaller parts and distribute them along a walking trail.
My thought was that the coyotes and mountain lions would do the disappearing for me.
But that wouldn’t work with all these people and phones and dogs about.
I can just imagine tossing a body part from my backpack only to have a Cavapoo immediately fetch it for me, its owner calling out, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, you dropped something. ’
Yeah. That totally wouldn’t work.
‘Can we stop for a minute?’ I say to Antoinette, who’s still several steps ahead of me.
She turns back and gives me a puzzled look as I double over, putting my hands on my knees and taking some deep breaths.
When did I get so unfit? I need to address this pretty quickly as it’s kind of crucial to be in peak physical condition if I’m going to be slaying men and hefting their bodies around.
‘Do you want to sit down for a minute?’ Antoinette asks as she walks back over to me. ‘Are you struggling a bit there?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say but the words come out in choked gasps.
‘Sit down, Kits.’
I do.
Antoinette drops down beside me. ‘Actually, there’s something I wanted to show you,’ she says, taking her phone out of her Lululemon belt bag and opening Reddit.
She hands it to me and I peer at the screen. It’s open on a subreddit dedicated to the man in our cellar.
The dead man in our cellar.
There’s a thread at the top with hundreds of comments.
r/RonWilde
Still Wilde. Ron’s allegedly ditched his latest filming commitments and gone on a bender. Off the wagon and MIA.
I work in the film industry and people here are going nuts because Ron’s missed several meetings. No one is saying anything because he’s made such a big thing about going sober but everyone has accepted he’s disappeared off on a bender.
I skim through the comments. No one is surprised. Some people even claim to have seen him in various places from downtown dive bars to an alpaca farm in Ohio.
But most importantly, no one has suggested he’s been murdered, butchered and is currently residing in a Spanish villa in WeHo.
‘Good,’ I say, handing Antoinette her phone back.
She nods. ‘What are we going to do with him then?’ she asks.
I still haven’t come up with a good plan.
Even if it’s just assumed that he’s come crashing off the wagon and is currently on the mother of all benders, at some point people are going to start wondering what’s happened to Ron Wilde.
A-list actors can’t just disappear. The trouble is, I just don’t know what to do with a dead body in LA.
If we were at home in London, it would be so simple.
We’ve already dismembered the body so all we’d need to do would be to move the body parts to one of my family’s abattoirs and pop them into one of the mincers.
It’s an extremely efficient way of getting rid of corpses.
Okay, so some bits might end up in the food chain but, honestly, it’s probably better than some of the stuff that ends up in mass-produced sausage rolls.
Having grown up with a family in the meat industry there’s a very good reason why I’m vegan.
Sadly though, the family business never quite made it out to the States.
So it means I’ve got to go back to the drawing board when it comes to body disposal.
And the problem with Hollywood is that it’s a living, breathing movie set; cameras are everywhere and there are always eyes on you.
Where do you go to be invisible in a city obsessed with being seen?
I turn to my sister, who is still looking at me expectantly.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I really don’t know.’
Antoinette’s brow furrows a little. I must remember to talk to her about preventative Botox. She might only be twenty but you’re never too young to start future-proofing your skin.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘No biggie. We just need to do some brainstorming.’ She opens the Notes app on her phone.
‘What are you doing?’ I say.
She stares at me like I’ve asked her what colour the sky is.
‘Making notes,’ she says.
I reach across and snatch the phone from her. ‘Are you insane? Why don’t you just open up an email, put “Ways to Get Rid of a Dead Actor I Murdered in LA” in the subject line and send it straight to the police?’
Antoinette stares at me. ‘Oh,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Oh. Pen and paper only. And that’s only if you can’t possibly keep everything in your head. And you have to tear the paper up and burn it after.’
‘Got it,’ Antoinette says. ‘Pen and paper only.’ She pauses for a second and looks around. ‘Do you have a pen and paper?’
‘We’re on a hike,’ I say but she pulls a puzzled face again. ‘No. I did not bring a pen and paper.’
‘Oh. I guess we’re using our heads then.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We are. So. Have you got any ideas?’
‘Not really,’ Antoinette says. ‘I suppose Google is out of the question?’ She looks longingly at her phone.
‘I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,’ I say. ‘The best thing we can do is get rid of the body some place where it’s never going to be found. So if we’re caught it’s much harder to prosecute for a murder if they can’t actually prove that a murder hasn’t taken place.’
Antoinette nods. ‘No body, no crime,’ she says. ‘Like how we fed Ben to the pigs at your mum’s farm.’
Earlier this summer Antoinette and I killed her brother Ben, who had been leading a secret double life as a misogynistic content creator, and then fed his remains to pigs my mother adopted.
‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘So how can we get rid of a body and ensure it’s never found?’
My sister frowns in concentration. ‘We could get some pigs?’
‘And where would we keep them? In the pool? Or maybe our new friends in the guesthouse would like them living with them?’
‘There is no need to be sarcastic,’ Antoinette says with a pout. She thinks for a moment, chewing her lip thoughtfully. ‘How about here?’
I shake my head. ‘I’ve already thought of that. Full of tourists.’
‘In the day, yes. But not at night,’ Antoinette says. ‘We could bring the pieces in backpacks and scatter them in the dark. The coyotes and mountain lions would have cleared them up by the morning.’
I shake my head again. ‘I’m not hiking in the dark.’ I point at my feet. ‘These ankles are too pretty to break.’
‘Okay then.’ Antoinette is thinking again.
‘I read something online recently about how a family discovered another person’s remains in the same grave as like their nana.
Turned out it was some snitch that local gangsters had unalived and buried in the cemetery.
Doesn’t Hollywood have that super famous graveyard where Judy Garland is buried? ’
‘Hollywood Forever Cemetery,’ I say. It’s not actually a terrible idea. ‘Although I don’t think Ron Wilde deserves to be buried alongside Judy Garland. But maybe we could look into somewhere a bit more low key.’
‘What about the big lake?’
‘The Hollywood Reservoir,’ I say but shake my head. ‘Too much CCTV.’
‘Could we just make it look like an accident? A drug overdose?’
I stare at her. ‘Antoinette,’ I say. ‘You sliced his throat and cut his body up into six pieces. I think we’d struggle to pass it off as an overdose.’
Antoinette sighs. ‘Well, I don’t know then. But then I’m just an amateur, aren’t I? What do you suggest, wise one?’
But I just don’t have any ideas.
Other than buying an actual abattoir over here. Actually that’s not a terrible idea. I should check out whatever the US equivalent of Rightmove is.
‘I guess he can just stay in the cellar for now,’ I say. ‘It’s probably safest down there.’