Page 33 of To All the Men I’ve Killed Before

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?’