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‘I can’t hear a thing,’ Anna says, and Nicole sees that she understands exactly what Nicole is proposing and that she hates Olly as much as Nicole does.
‘So, we wait,’ Nicole says.
‘There will be a body,’ Anna says softly.
‘I know.’ Nicole hasn’t worked out what to do about that, but they’re resourceful women, they’ll think of something.
‘I have an idea what to do about that,’ Anna says and Nicole smiles.
‘How long do you think it will take?’ Anna asks.
‘I don’t know. A few hours?’
Nicole picks up her phone. She feels pleased with the house and with Tom. They protected her today. It is some sort of justice. She returns to the menu on the systems app, feeling emboldened now, and after a few minutes finds the correct way to disable Patrick’s guest pin. She wonders how Olly got hold of it. To check she’s disabled the pin correctly, she looks at the plan of the house. There are red lines around the perimeter of every room in the fitness suite, indicating thatit’s locked down, but the light has disappeared from the sauna. Now, not even the house knows that Olly is in there.
She works through a few more menus, connecting her phone to the house’s speaker system. Why didn’t she do this before? It’s so much easier than she thought it would be. She looks up at Anna.
‘Do you like opera?’ she asks.
83
FRIDAY
Anna
Anna lies in bed in Nicole’s guest suite at the Barn. She can’t sleep. Her window is open, and she listens to all the familiar sounds of Lancaut at night yet knows that everything is different.
She thinks about Olly, downstairs. Is he dead yet?
She thinks about Nicole, presumably in bed in her room down the hall and presumably awake, too, because who could sleep tonight?
The police came back briefly, at around eleven, to say that they were ceasing their search for the time being and that the squad car would remain in Nicole’s drive for the rest of the night, for protection. They told Nicole that Sasha had given a statement suggesting that Olly left the Manor House on the morning of Tom’s death.
She and Nicole chewed that over. Why did Sasha say it now? Did she know all along that Olly killed Tom and was coveringfor him? Or did she just find out? It’s hard to know. They agreed it’s probably nothing to do with Sasha having a conscience and more to do with her saving her own skin. Anna wonders if Sasha is staying in the Manor tonight. If I’d thrown Olly under the bus, I wouldn’t stay there on my own, she thinks. Perhaps Sasha has police protection, too.
She yawns. Her body and mind feel shattered, but both are humming. I want to have my home back, she thinks. I want myself back. She will deal with Sasha, somehow, and reclaim the Manor. She has no doubt that Nicole will help her.
Anna lies awake for a long time, but eventually she starts to feel drowsy.
When I wake up in the morning, she thinks, it’ll be done, and she feels incredibly peaceful. Sleep comes easily then.
84
SATURDAY
Nicole
Nicole wakes early, just before it’s light. She knocks softly on Anna’s door and slips in.
‘Help me?’ she asks.
Anna gets up quickly. They move downstairs silently. In the glass corridor they can see stars in the dark navy sky but also the suggestion of a rim of light on the horizon. They must hurry. Nicole turns off the sauna, reverses the emergency lockdown and the door at the end of the glass corridor swings open.
Outside the sauna the heat can be felt in the corridor. Through the strip of glass in the door, Nicole can see Olly lying limply across the bench. He’s dead. It’s not a pretty sight. In his efforts to get out, he’s skinned his knuckles and done some damage to the room, but not much.
They wrap him in a sheet and pull him along the glass corridor as swiftly as possible. Nicole can’t stop the floor lightscoming on as they move through. If the police were to look in at this moment, they’d see them. But they have no sightline to here from where they’re parked at the front, and she’s got to hope they’re not patrolling at this hour. But still, it feels like the riskiest part of the operation and she’s relieved to have him in the living area. From there, they drag him down the stairs to the basement garage. His body is very hot and heavy. Nicole opens the boot of her Mini and can see that they won’t be able to fit him in.
‘We’ll have to use the Maserati,’ she says. ‘But I don’t know how to drive it.’
