In A Dark, Dark Wood Part 28

If I sleep, I will die. I know that. But I don't care any more. I am so tired.

No.

I want to sleep.

But something won't let me. Something inside me won't let me rest.

It's not a desire to live I don't care about that any more. James is dead. Clare is hurt. Flo is dying. There is only one thing left and that is the truth.

I will not die. I will not die because someone has to do this has to get to the truth of what happened.

I get up. My knees are shaking so much that I can hardly stand, but I do, steadying myself with a hand on the fallen tree.

I take a step.

And another.

I will keep going.

I will keep going.

30.

I DON'T KNOW how long it takes me. Dark has fallen The hours seem to drift together, blurring into the snow that is speckling the frozen mud. I am tired so tired that I can't think, and my eyes water as I walk into the wind that has begun to blow.

My face is quite numb, and my eyes are wet and blurred when, at last, I look up, and there it is: the Gla.s.s House.

It's no longer the great golden beacon I saw that first night instead it's dark and silent, blending into the trees, almost invisible. A half moon has risen, and it reflects off the bedroom window at the front, the bedroom that Tom slept in. There's a frost halo around it, and I know the night is only going to get colder.

The darkness is not the only difference. There's police tape across the door, and the broken window at the top of the stairs has been boarded over with a kind of metal grille, the sort you see on vacant houses in rough areas.

I walk the last few painful yards across the gravel and stand, s.h.i.+vering and staring at the blank gla.s.s wall in front of me. Now I'm here, I'm not sure I can do this, go inside, revisit where James died. But I have to. Not just because of James, not just because it's the only way I will ever find out the truth about what happened. But because if I don't get inside, into shelter, I will die of exposure.

The front door is locked, and there are no windows I can force. For a moment I pick up a rock and consider the huge gla.s.s wall of the living room. I can see inside, to the cold, dead wood burner and the flat blackness of the TV screen. I imagine heaving the rock at the giant pane but I don't. It's not just the huge noise and destruction, but I don't think it would break the pane is double, maybe even triple glazed. It took a shotgun blast to break the one in the hall; I'm pretty sure my puny rock would just bounce off this one.

I drop the rock, and make my way slowly, painfully around to the back of the house. My feet are totally numb, and I stumble more than once, seeing the blood coming up between my toes as I do. I push away the thought of how I will get away from here I can't walk, that's for sure. But I have a horrible feeling it will be in a police car. Or worse.

The back of the house looks equally unpromising. I try the long, sliding French door to the rear of the living room, prising my nails around the flat gla.s.s panel and trying to pull it sideways, hoping, desperately, that the catch is not locked. But it stays firm, and all I manage to do is break my nails. I look up at the sheer side of the house. Could I climb up to the balcony where Nina smoked?

For a minute I consider it there's a zinc drain pipe. But then reality bites. I'm kidding myself. There's no way I could climb that slippery gla.s.s wall, even with climbing shoes and a harness, let alone in flip-flops and with numb fingers. I was always the first person to fail the climbing ropes at school, hanging there pathetically, my skinny arms stretched above my head, before I dropped like a stone into a crumpled heap on the rubber mat, while other girls swarmed to the top and smacked the wooden bar overhead with the flat of their palm.

There's no rubber mat here. And the zinc pipe is slippier and more treacherous than a knotted gym rope. If I fell, it'd be all over I'd be lucky to get away with a broken ankle.

No. The balcony is not going to work.

At last, almost without hope, I try the back door.

And it swings open.

I feel something p.r.i.c.kle across the back of my neck: shock, disbelief, a kind of fierce elation. I can't believe it. I can't believe the police didn't lock it. Can it really be this easy, after everything else has been so hard?

There's police tape across the opening, but I duck under it and half-walk, half-crawl inside. I straighten up, almost expecting sirens to go off, or a policeman to stand up from a seat in the corner. But the house is dark and quiet, the only movement a few flakes of snow scudding across the slate floor.

I put my hand out to swing the door shut, but it doesn't close properly. It hits the frame, but bounces back open. I grab it, to try again, and as I do I notice something. There's a piece of tape across the tongue of the latch, preventing it from shutting completely.

Suddenly I understand why the door kept swinging open that night why, even after we locked it, it was never secure. The lock is the kind that just immobilises the door handle, stops it from turning the latch. But if the latch itself is pushed back, the handle is useless. It feels stiff when you rattle it, but there's nothing holding the door shut but its own inertia.

For a second I think about ripping the tape off but then I realise how stupid that would be. This finally is proof. In front of me, hidden innocently within the door frame, is cast-iron proof that someone set James up to die, and whoever placed the tape was that person. Carefully, without disturbing it, I push the door shut and then I drag a chair across the kitchen to rest against the inside of the gla.s.s.

Then, for the first time, I look around.

The kitchen looks strangely undisturbed. I don't know what I was expecting: fingerprint dust, perhaps, that strange silver sheen on every surface. But as soon as I think about this, I realise how pointless it would be. None of us ever denied being in the house. Our prints would be all over the place, and what would that prove?

I want more than anything to crawl upstairs to one of the beds, and sleep. But I can't. I may not have much time. By now they've probably discovered my room is empty. They'll know I can't have gone far under my own steam not without money, shoes and a coat. It won't take them long to find the taxi driver. And when they do ...

I walk through the kitchen, my footsteps loud in the echoing silence, take a deep breath, and then open the door to the hallway.

They've cleared up, to some extent anyway. Much of the blood has gone, along with most of the gla.s.s, although I can feel the occasional tiny sliver crunch under my plastic soles. In its place there are markings on the floor, on the walls, bits of tape with notations I can't read in the darkness. I don't dare switch on a light. There are no curtains to draw and my presence would be visible from right across the valley.

But there are specks left here and there, dark rust splashes of something that used to be James and now is not.

It's the strangest thing he is gone, and his heart's blood is still here. I kneel on the soft wooden parquet, pitted with chunks of gla.s.s ground in by our shoes and marked by the soaking blood, and I touch my fingers to the stained grooves of the wood, and I think This was James. A couple of days ago, this was inside him, keeping him alive, making his skin flush and his heart beat. And now it's gone it's lying here, wasted, and yet it's all that's left of him. Somewhere his body is being post-mortem'ed. And then he'll be buried, or cremated. But a part of him will be here, in this house.

I get up, forcing my cold, tired legs to work. Then I go to the living room and grab one of the throws off the sofa. There are dirty wine gla.s.ses still on the table, from our last night. f.a.g b.u.t.ts are stubbed out in the dregs of wine, Nina's roll-ups bloated into soggy white worms. But the planchette has been packed away, and the paper has gone. I cannot suppress a s.h.i.+ver at the thought of the police reading those deranged scrawlings. What did it mean, that long, looping murderer? Did someone write it deliberately? Or did it simply float up from the group subconscious, like a sea monster surfacing from someone's inner-most fears, and then sinking back down?

The throw smells of stale cigarette smoke, but I hug it round my shoulders as I glance up at the empty pegs above the fireplace, and away. I can't really bear to think of what I'm about to do. But I must do it. It's my only chance to get to what really happened.

I start at the top of the stairs, standing where we all stood that night in a little huddle. Flo was to my right, and I remember putting out my hand to the gun. Clare and Nina were on the other side, Tom behind us.

The scene, with the quiet and the darkness and my own thudding heart, is so close to that night that for a moment I feel almost faint, and I have to stand and breathe through my nose, and remember that it is done, James is not coming up those stairs. We killed him between us, with our drunken hysterical fear. We all held that gun.

I have to force myself to retrace what happened next, James's body tumbling down the stairs, Nina and I stumbling after. This time I walk down slowly, holding the bannister. There is still gla.s.s on the stairs from the broken window, and I don't trust my flip-flops in the darkness, not with the skidding shards underfoot.

Here was where Nina tried to resuscitate James.

Here was where I knelt in his blood, and he tried to speak.

I feel tears, wet on my face, but I scrub them away. There is no time for grief. The hours are ticking down until dawn, until they come and get me.

What happened next?

The living-room door is still off its hinges from when Tom took it down and we struggled with it out through the front door to where Clare was waiting in the car.

The front door is not deadlocked, and I open it from the inside without difficulty. When I do, the force of the wind nearly bangs the steel door into my face, and the snow rushes inside like a living thing, trying to get in, trying to force what little warmth is left in the house back out.

I screw up my eyes and, holding the throw hard around my shoulders, I step out into the white blizzard. I stand on the porch, where I stood that night waiting for Nina. I remember Tom calling out something to Clare, and Clare gunning the engine.

And then I remember noticing that her coat was lying over the porch rail.

I put out my hand, pretend to pick it up.

I'm s.h.i.+vering, but I'm trying as hard as I can to remember back to that night, to the shape of something small and round in the pocket.

I hold out my hand, my eyes watering with the hard pellets of driving snow.

And suddenly I can remember. I can remember what I was holding in my hand.

And I know why it set me running.

It was a sh.e.l.l. A shotgun sh.e.l.l. It was the missing blank.

Standing here, in my own footsteps, the thoughts shoot across my brain just as they did that night, and I can remember them: it's like watching the snow melt, and the familiar landscape emerge from beneath.

It could have been there from the clay-pigeon shoot earlier. But I know enough now, from our shoot, to tell the difference between a live round and a blank. Live shotgun rounds are solid in your hand, packed with pellets that make them feel heavier than their compact shape suggests. What I held that night was light as plastic with no shot at all. It was a blank. The blank. The blank that was supposed to have been in the shotgun.

Clare had been the one to subst.i.tute the live round for the blank.

And now she'd just driven off into the night with James dying in the back of the car.

Why? Why?

It made no sense then, and it still makes no sense to me now, but then I had no time to consider. I had only one option: to catch them up, and confront Clare.

Now, I have time. I turn slowly and walk back into the house, and I shut and lock the door behind me. Then I go into the living room and sit, my head in my hands, trying to figure it out.

I cannot leave here until dawn unless, that is ... I get up, stiff with cold, and pick up the phone.

No, it's still dead, the line simply hissing and crackling quietly. I am stuck then, stuck until daylight, unless I want to stagger back down that icy, rutted lane in the darkness once more, and I'm not sure I'd even make it.

I go back to the sofa and huddle deeper into the throw, trying vainly to get some warmth back into my limbs. My G.o.d, I'm so tired but I cannot sleep. I must figure this out.

Clare subst.i.tuted the live round.

Therefore Clare killed James.

But it makes no sense. Clare has no motive and she is the only person who could not have faked those texts.

I have to think.

The question I keep coming back to is why; why would Clare kill James on the eve of their own wedding?

And then suddenly, with a coldness that's totally different to the chill in the air, I remember Matt's words in the hospital. James and Clare were having problems.

I shake it off almost immediately. This is ridiculous. Yes, Clare's life has to be perfect; yes she has incredibly high standards, but for G.o.d's sake, she's been dumped before. She held a ma.s.sive grudge, I know that, because I sat by while she signed Rick's email up to every p.o.r.n site and v.i.a.g.r.a newsletter she could find. But she sure as h.e.l.l didn't kill the bloke.

But there is one big difference.

When Rick dumped Clare, Flo wasn't in the picture.

I think of Flo's words, as she sobbed outside the bathroom on the first night: She's my rock, and I'd do anything for her. Anything.

Anything?

I remember her reaction to me going to bed the way she'd exploded, accusing me of sabotage. I'll kill you if you ruin it, she'd promised. I hadn't taken her seriously. But maybe I should have.

And that was just a hen. What would she do to the man who was planning to leave her best friend at the altar?

And who better to take the fall than the bad ex-friend who stole Clare's rightful property and then walked away for ten long years.

But now it has all spiralled out of control.

And then I remember the matching clothes Flo was wearing on that last night and suddenly I realise: what if it wasn't Clare's coat on the rail, but Flo's, and Clare simply picked it up by mistake?

Flo. Flo was the one who picked up the gun.

Flo was the one who told us it wasn't loaded.

Flo was the person who set this whole thing up, persuaded me to come, arranged the whole thing.

And Flo could have sent that text.

I feel like a web is closing round me, like the more I fight the more I will be tangled in it.

James is dead.

Clare is dying.

Flo is dying.

And somewhere, Nina is in her B&B at breaking point, and she and Tom are facing questions they cannot answer, suspicions they cannot shake.

Please let me wake from this.

I curl up on the sofa on my side, and draw my knees into my chest, the throw tucked around myself. I have to think, I have to decide what to do, but in this confused, exhausted state I find myself going round in circles.

I have a choice: wait here for the police, try to explain my presence, explain about the blank and Flo's jacket and hope they believe me.

Or I can leave at the crack of dawn, and hope they don't realise I was here.

But where do I go? To London? To Nina? How will I get away?

The police will find me of course, but it will look better than finding me here.