We could not drag the suitcase through this—we had even slipped pairs of Joel’s trainers on to disguise our shoe size if tracks were located. It had rained only yesterday—and god, was it really only yesterday that I’d run from the station to the hotel? Collided with Harper? That she’d followed me back to ensure I made it to my room?
The air was still damp and earthy, the ground still soft enough to suck our footprints right up. But it was forecast to rain more for the rest of the week. If we could keep them from looking here until then, they might wash away.
We carried the body between the two of us, still wrapped in the garment bag. If we were discovered now, it would all be over.
There’s not much to say about it other than I was exhausted: the scrubbing, the hauling and soon, the digging, the shovel strapped to my back slapping my knees with every fatigued step. Harper had a torch tucked under her arm, but it didn’t stop us from tripping, from stumbling, from dropping the corpse strung between us.
And of course, the sheer weight of all of this, especially the feelings I had struck far from view.
By the time my shovel broke the ground beneath, I had to choke my tears back—did they carry DNA? If one landed on him, would they know? But then I’d wrestled him into that bag with Harper. I was all over him and clearly complicit.
Worst case I’d say the threesome was with them. That ought to keep the gossip mags churning.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said—because planning this out was a distraction. Saving Harper was a distraction. “Tonight, you’ll drop me back off near London, and I’ll get a cab into the city. I’ll claim I’ve been partying across town, and I’ll meet up with Caleb. We’ll get photos. In the morning, you’ll be furious that I slept with your ex-fiancé.”
She looked up from her own shovel, her expression hardly visible in the dark yet clearly displeased. “Areyou going to sleep with him?”
“Yes, Harper. I am.”
She made a noise of discontent.
“Oh, please. You can’t still be jealous over a man you dated years ago. You’re married. And I’m doing this for you.”
I didn’t have some burning desire to have sex with Caleb, but I wanted to—it was clever, it was a distraction, and it was doing what needed to be done: surrounding this night with so much drama and chaos it would be near-impossible to piece together what actually happened.
And if he wanted to sleep with me too then what did it matter? He was probably using me to boost his profile as much as I would be using him for a B-plot in a murder.
Harper pressed her shovel back into the ground—for this the rain was beneficial, making the ground soft, malleable, and quick to shift.
“Alright, so you’ll craft yourself a nice alibi,” she said bitterly, like I was being selfish in this regard—as though any of this wasn’t for her.
“I’m creating a catalyst, you entitled bitch,” I snapped. “You and Joel will wake up to the news, and you’ll be furious. And thenhe’llbe furious—demanding to know why you care so much about an ex. In a fit of jealousy, he’ll storm off. You’ll go about your day—go to the gym, see a friend for lunch. You’ll be seen, out and about. Later, you won’t be seen, when you park that Jaguar somewhere and very conveniently forget to lock it. You’ll get a taxi back near your house but not to it, doing your bestnotto be seen and not to be recognized. You’ll say he came back that evening but wouldn’t speak to you soyoustormed off instead. Again, you’ll be seen somewhere, doing something.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“I wonder what that’s like,” I snapped as I threw another mound of dirt to the side. My shoulders trembled, the muscles across my back screamed, and my thighs burned from leaning over the pit.
“Before you leave,” I continued. “You’ll search things on his computer. The best places to hide from the press, ways to swindle your wife out of divorce payouts, countries that don’t demand child support, things like that.”
“I doubt that’s the sort of thing Jeeves can answer.”
“You don’t need the answers, just the search history. Let the world think he skipped out on you all, went into hiding, and that’s when something happened. Maybe he got mixed up in the wrong thing, maybe someone found him where he wasn’t supposed to be and took advantage. Send an email from his computer to his PA, requesting that he arrange for thirty thousand pounds to be moved to one of his bank accounts and for five thousand pounds to be delivered to the house in cash. You’ll give me the money when we’re back in LA.”
“Don’t tell me you helped me commit murder for petty cash.”
“It’s insurance,” I growled. “Because you’re going to get twitchy after this, and you’re going to suspect me and you won’t understand why I helped you. Giving me that money will tie me to the crime and put you at ease enough that you’ll stop wondering if and when I’ll turn you in. I won’t. I’m nothing if not stubborn and evidently I’ve made my bed.”
Harper stopped digging and leaned against her spade. “You know me well enough to have my future responses mapped out.”
“Yes, Harper, you’re predictable. Now dig.”
“Okay, so what next, oh grand criminal mastermind?”
“You’ll say you left the package for Joel on the table not knowing what it contained. When you came back, it was gone, and so was the car and so was he. You’ll tell people he ran out on you without notice over a stupid argument. You’ll fly back to LA. You’ll pretend you knew nothing about the affair. And you won’t report him missing—you’ll wait for his team to get in touch, saying they can’t find him and you’ll say he’s probably licking his wounds somewhere from your argument.”
“This argument of yours is giving me quite a motive.”
“Days after he was murdered. Days when you are seen and accounted for. Besides, no one is going to consider that enough for a motive. Meanwhile, you’ll have made it clear that you knewnothingabout the thing that would give you real motive. And you’ll only start to panic when the rest of the world does.”
