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 knewno 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 showmeleaving 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 withoutacknowledging the enormity of all of this? Fuck, maybe Iwasin 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.
