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Jen remembers that there are probably plenty of bodies in the ground and she hopes that won’t complicate things. Finn is looking around as if he’s not sure which way to go. She’s lost all sense of direction. ‘Do you know where we are?’ she asks.
‘It’s this way,’ he says. ‘I think.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No,’ he admits. ‘We ran quite far. But I think we need to go uphill.’
‘Let’s go.’ She walks behind him, and she can’t shake the feeling that they’re being watched. She compulsively checks over her shoulder, seeing nothing apart from a patchwork of shifting shadows, and she hopes they’re not hosting some kind of horror.
71
FRIDAY
Sasha
Sasha walks carefully through the woods, as silently as possible, forcing herself not to cry out when she almost trips, or is whipped by a branch or a bramble. Her left arm feels ablaze after it was raked by nettles. Her breathing is heavy. She had to run hard from the plague pit. What were the police doing there? They’ve already searched the peninsula thoroughly.
She shouldn’t have gone back, but she had to get out of the Manor, away from Olly, because what he did to Patrick horrified her. It was reckless and stupid. He didn’t give her a chance to get Patrick onside and she’s certain she could have. Olly’s arrogance has gone too far. He’s so sure of his own brilliance that he’s put them in jeopardy, even more than they were already in. It’s hard to know if she can keep getting up every day and putting on a ‘normal’ face while everything is in tatters around them.
She didn’t know where to go once she’d left the Manor. She was afraid of being seen by the police or the press, so she avoided the lanes and headed straight into the woodland, thinking she might walk down to the river and try to get some peace by sitting on its banks, watching the water, feeling its flow, enjoying the anonymity of the darkness.
On her way, she felt drawn to revisit the plague pit because of a sudden paranoia that they’d left something there when they moved the body. When she’s anxious, her perfectionism ramps up. She feels a pressing urge to check and double-check things. Even as she was walking to the pit, she thought, this is dumb, I should turn back and return to the Manor, I should trouble-shoot there, make sure that Olly has cleaned up properly and there’s no trace of Patrick anywhere. But she couldn’t face Olly yet, so she kept going.
What Sasha was not expecting to see at the plague pit was torchlight. She was walking by the light of her phone’s torch and extinguished it before she was noticed, but when she hastily turned to leave, she gave her presence away by stepping carelessly and snapping a twig. She was very close to being discovered by the police.
Tonight isn’t just unnerving her; it’s threatening to unravel them completely.
She skirts around the edge of the orchard and slips into the Manor House by a back entrance. A strip of light shows beneath Olly’s study door. She opens it. He’s at his desk but his laptop is closed. He looks as pale and shattered as she feels.
‘Where have you been?’ he asks.
‘The police are at the plague pit.’
‘What?’ His eyes look a little wild. ‘Is that where you went? Why?’
‘Did you clean up?’ she asks.
He nods. ‘He’s in the septic tank. I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if I did the right thing.’
Well, it’s too late now, she wants to spit at him, but she’s not one hundred percent sure he’s being honest, or whether he’s trying to suck up to her by hinting that she might have been right. Olly doesn’t suffer from doubt or regret much. Not the way she does. She says, ‘What’s done is done. What did you do with his bags?’
‘In the tank, with him. I cleared up properly.’
She knows she’ll check anyway. ‘I’m going to get changed.’
‘Your arm’s scratched and stung.’
‘I know,’ she says.
‘We don’t want anyone to see that.’
‘I know!’ Her voice is raised. She has a feeling that they’re going to get a visit from the police tonight.
Upstairs, she pulls off the leggings, T-shirt and socks she was wearing and replaces them with a shift dress. She uses a flannel to wipe under her armpits and her breasts, washes her face and the cuts on her arms, dries everything, then pulls her hair out of its ponytail and brushes it in front of the mirror until it shines. A small twig falls from her hair onto her lap. She throws it out of the window. Finally, she shrugs on a light cardigan that covers her arms and checks herself in the mirror. She no longer looks like someone who’s been chased through the woods.
She hears a car parking on the drive as she walks downstairs. She stands in the hall and takes a few deep breaths. A silverlining occurs to her: she’s thankful that Kitty isn’t here tonight. Though perhaps, if she was, Patrick would still be alive.
The doorbell clangs. To maintain her composure, she counts slowly to fifteen before opening it. The porch light is on, casting an unflattering glow over the pair at the door. It’s the detective, Jen, who she presumably just heard in the woods, and another, younger man, who she doesn’t know. He was probably there too.
