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‘Exactly,’ Sasha says and repeats the mantra that they’ve used all along to justify their actions. ‘She needs us.’
They fall quiet, listening to the night sounds. Everything inside the Manor feels heavy and still. Sometimes, Sasha thinks the place feels a bit rotten, with all those soft stone windowsills that are crumbling and worn, the beams, panels and doors honeycombed with woodworm. It’s why she loves the Glass Barn so much, why she keeps imagining herself living there and teaching there. It would be sensational to wake up to that view every day.
Olly yawns. He’ll be asleep soon. He never has trouble sleeping except when there’s a problem with his book. She looks over at him and sees his profile in shadow: his long nose, the contours of his lips, full eyelashes and his closed eyelids, two small, pale moons. It startles her when he opens his eyes suddenly and turns to look right at her, as if he could feel her gaze on him.
He says, ‘But we need to move the body.’
53
FRIDAY
Anna
Anna wakes up early and checks the time. It’s 04:36. Almost dawn. She’s in the guest suite at the Barn. It’s luxurious. The bathroom alone is almost as big as her entire living space in the Coach House.
She left the blinds open last night and on the bedside table she can dimly see the pin that Nicole gave her. She must remember to wear it. Nicole spent a long time on the hub screen last night, trying to work out how to enable Anna’s pin, and treated it like a small triumph when she succeeded. Anna couldn’t help but smile.
‘Do you wear a pin?’ she asked.
‘No. The system knows me by facial recognition,’ Nicole said.
‘Amazing,’ Anna murmured.
‘It’s complicated,’ Nicole said. ‘And I need to learn how to use it properly myself because Tom did it all.’ Anna sat with her whileNicole went online and researched how to master the systems. She downloaded an app. ‘Oh! It knows my phone,’ she said. ‘Tom must have linked them. I have no idea if this’ll make me better or worse at controlling everything, mind you, but it’s worth a try.’
Anna admired Nicole’s independence, and her bravery.
She wonders if Sasha and Olly made their move during the night. If she was them, she would have. She wouldn’t want to waste any time. She gets up and pulls on sweatpants and a top over her nightie and slips on her trainers. She attaches the pin to her top and makes her way downstairs and out of the front door.
Outside, the birds are beginning to sing and the sky is a deep velvet navy, turning pale blue at the edges. The shadows between the trees are as black as tar.
She hurries towards the Coach House, just able to pick out her way in the lightening sky. She feels nervous. She’s not sure she’s right, but she has a good idea of where they hid Kitty’s body because she believes she found Kitty’s grave a few days after she went missing.
It’s not all she has to go on. Olly was fond of posing questions to her; often they related to his novel in some way. Usually, she learned, he didn’t want to listen to her answer, but wanted to tell her what he thought. It flattered her that he would use her as a sounding board.
One night, after a few glasses of wine, before Kitty disappeared, he asked where she would bury a body. It was for a plot point in his book, he said. Anna can’t remember her reply, but she hasn’t forgotten what Olly said. He told her that if he was going to bury a body, he’d do it where there were already bones. It made sense, he said. If the body was dug up years later, it wouldn’t be nearlyso likely to raise alarm bells. She thought it was clever and the old graveyard beside the ruined chapel came to mind.
She picks her way down the path behind the Coach House. It’s steep and uneven. She knows the lie of the land well, but she walks with intense concentration because she doesn’t want to slip or turn her ankle, and emerges with relief into a parched meadow where the ruined chapel stands on steep ground just above the riverbank, a small wall around it almost completely tumbled down and in places invisible amongst the long grass. It’s nearly light now. Anna walks alongside the wall, through the scratchy foliage, until she finds the opening where a gate once hung. She enters the old graveyard and navigates past fallen and tilted gravestones.
The chapel roof is long fallen in. Ferns grow between the chunks of stone on the inside and outside of the building. Anna stoops to enter. It’s tiny inside. When it was in use, it can’t have held more than twenty people; maybe thirty, if it was crammed full.
Parts of the stone traceries in the window in the west wall remain. She finds her footing on a stone ledge built into the wall below the window and heaves herself up, so she can better see out. Behind the chapel is a shady, scrubby area where the boughs of an oak hang so low they almost touch the grass.
This spot is where she stood three days after Kitty disappeared. They were long, lonely days when she missed Kitty keenly, and was disturbed by Olly and Sasha’s indifference to her absence. They didn’t want to discuss Kitty at all, and Anna wondered how they could so easily let go of someone who had been closely involved in their lives. If Anna mentioned her, she was met with silence, or with a swift change of subject.
The truth is that she didn’t actually see Olly and Sasha drag a body from the Coach House, but after she came here, and based on what Olly said, she’s certain they must have. She wrote a fictional description of them removing Kitty’s body from the Coach House in the version of the journal she gave to Sasha and Olly to try to smoke them out. The journal she gave the police is the original one. She did find Kitty’s insulin, and she did find Sasha cleaning out the Coach House, and that, along with her discovery of the grave site, convinced her that they had killed Kitty, but she never saw them.
It was a coincidence that she found this grave site. She was simply walking to one of her favourite places, trying to make sense of what she was thinking and feeling, and of Olly and Sasha’s behaviour since that night. When she got here, she thought of Olly’s comment about where he would bury a body and, as if living a nightmare, she began to notice unusual signs around her: the imprint of a foot, some flattened nettles and a long, narrow area of earth that looked disturbed. A torn branch had fallen over it, the leaves only slightly drooping but soon to crisp and fall. This looked like a fresh grave to her. She didn’t think she was imagining it.
She pressed her hands over her lips, trying to seal in her fears, before dropping into a crouch, her back against the chapel wall, the stone blocks, the ledge digging into the middle of her spine. Since then she’s asked herself many times why she didn’t go to the police immediately, why she ran away and hasn’t returned. Why she continued to live and work alongside them without doing anything. The answer is never easy. But she knows she thought then that she could never beat them, that they would control her, always. She was so divorced fromher former life at the time that there was even a sort of twisted comfort in believing it.
But the idea that they killed Kitty and buried her here has been a dark suspicion that she’s held inside since that night. It’s been burning a hole in her for far too long.
She finds the camera where she left it, tucked into the stone tracery overlooking the burial site, and removes the card before replacing it with a fresh one. She can’t tell if the ground has been disturbed. There’s a branch lying over the area, just like there was yesterday, but she thinks it might have been moved. She pockets the card. She’ll take it to the Coach House and have a look at it before she returns to the Barn. She can tell Nicole that she just popped home to collect some more of her stuff.
A breeze picks up and the branches shudder, leaves rustling. As Anna turns away from the chapel a chill crawls across the back of her neck and she thinks of Kitty, lying here amongst the other dead.
Just as she steps back onto the path, branches crack in the undergrowth and she freezes. She stands still for a few minutes, her heart beating too fast, too hard. When she starts to move again, she walks as quietly as possible, and it occurs to her to wonder why, although Sasha and Olly show so much concern about Nicole staying in the Barn alone, they’ve never once asked Anna if she’s alright in the Coach House alone. Not. Once. Nor did Sasha ask her if she would be alright walking to the Barn in the dark last night. Is it because they don’t care, because she’s nothing to them? Or could it be because they know she’s fine, because they know who killed Tom Booth? And the only way they would know that is if it was one of them.
