Chapter 54: After

AFTER

It is the third pothole that does it, jolting Hannah so hard that her head cracks painfully against the car window and, with a sinking feeling, she realizes this is it. It is time to stop pretending. She can no longer feign sleep or ignorance because no one, not even Hugh, could believe that Hannah would trust this track.

“Where are we, Hugh?” She is, oddly, a little proud that her voice comes out steadily, without shaking, in spite of how afraid she is.

“What do you mean?” Hugh says, and then he looks across at her, and sees something in her face, palely lit by the dashboard display and the headlights reflecting off the rain, and he sighs. “Oh dear. I suppose it was too much to hope…”

He trails off, and Hannah finishes the sentence for him.

“Too much to hope that even someone as stupid as me would believe this was the route to the police station?”

“Hannah,” Hugh chides her gently. “That’s unfair. I never thought you stupid.”

“Oh really.” Her voice is bitter. “Not even when I went to court and gave evidence against an innocent man?”

“The evidence was pretty compelling, to be fair…”

“Not even when I came to you sobbing, believing that my own husband was a murderer?”

“Well, you had cause…”

“I had cause because you gave it to me, Hugh! Why? Why Will of all people? How could you? He’s your best friend.”

“Because he was the only person I thought you might care about enough to protect,” Hugh snaps suddenly. “You were clearly happy to throw anyone else to the wolves.” The car jolts through another pothole, making Hannah’s teeth crack together so hard that her skull hurts. The baby inside her kicks violently, as if in protest at the jolt, and she shifts uneasily in her seat, trying to take the pressure off her bump. The rain has slowed to a drizzle, but she can see nothing at all outside the car, no lights, no houses. No Will. They are very far down a long farm track; even if he’s heard all her messages, even if he’s followed the trail of clues she’s tried to leave him, the chances of him picking this tiny obscure road out of all the others is so impossibly remote…

“Where are we?” she says again, her teeth gritted. “Where are we, Hugh? You owe me that—you owe me the truth about one thing at least.”

Hugh laughs.

“Don’t you recognize it? Some wife you are.”

“What?” She frowns, puzzled. And then she realizes.

It’s the beach. It’s the beach where Will took her, that first week he came to Edinburgh. The beach where they swam and lay together on the sand, and where Hannah finally admitted to herself that she was going to love this man for the rest of her life.

The phone in her pocket is so hot now that she can no longer grip it. She can feel it burning her thigh through the thin layers of material. It’s almost painful, but she doesn’t move it away, because the heat is the one thing she has to hold on to. The one scrap of hope that tells her Will is there. He is listening. And perhaps, if she can keep Hugh talking for long enough, he is coming. If only she can manage to tell him.

“It’s our beach,” she manages now. “The one where we—near Tantallon Castle. But how—” she tries, and then swallows and tries again. “How did you know?”

“Because he asked me where to take you,” Hugh says. He looks… he looks weary, Hannah thinks. And perhaps he is. He has been carrying his secrets for more than ten years. It must, in a strange way, be a relief to set that burden down at last. “I’d just finished a summer work experience placement here, do you remember? He said he wanted to take you out somewhere, but it needed to be cheap; a cheap, romantic place that you could get to by train.”

“And why—” Hannah swallows again. She puts her hand on her bump, where the baby is quivering nervously, as though it can feel her unease. “Why here? Why now?”

Hugh’s face twists with some very strong emotion. Hannah can’t tell what it is. Disgust? Remorse? Pity? Maybe all three.

“Because it felt right,” he says at last. The car has stopped. Its lights are shining out over the headland. Far below, Hannah can hear the crash of waves beating against the rocks. It is high tide.

Right for what?she wants to ask, but in her heart she knows. And it is right. Because Hugh knows her almost as well as Will does, almost as well as she knows herself.

It is where she would come if she were going to kill herself.

The thought—the realization—should make her panic, but instead it is as if the opposite happens. Her pulse seems to slow down. Her head feels clearer than at any time since she drank that fucking tea—clearer than it has for weeks, in fact. Everything seems to shiver into focus, like a hand turning the dial on a microscope infinitely slowly, until suddenly the picture is crisp and unforgiving.

Hugh is going to kill her. He is going to make it look like suicide. And it makes a certain horrible sense—Hannah, running out of the house, distraught, after accusing her husband of killing her best friend. She jumps into a taxi. She takes off—to where? No one knows. She didn’t tell Will. She didn’t tell her mother. She could be anywhere.

The phone burns in her pocket, hotter than hot, but she knows she doesn’t have much time now. She has to stall Hugh for as long as she can—but if Will can’t find her, if Will can’t make it in time…

“Take off your shoes,” Hugh says gently, and she knows why. She can’t wear anything that would tie her to him. She nods and bends down, past her bump, wriggling her feet out of the borrowed shoes. There is no point in resisting. She is better off trying to delay for as long as possible.

“Isn’t it going to look strange?” she says as she inches one foot out of the plastic. “A corpse with no shoes? Will they really believe I came all this way on the train, with no shoes on?”

Hugh shakes his head.

“I’m hoping there won’t be a corpse.” He nods to the cliff, and Hannah hears again the pounding, sucking roar of the waves. “The currents around here…” He trails off. Hannah knows what he means. Every year people go missing—swimmers, fishermen, probable suicides. Only a few bodies are ever found. “But if there is,” he says, “who’s going to think anything of a missing shoe?”

Hannah nods. She knows she should be scared. But this is Hugh. Kind, gentle Hugh, with his surgeon’s hands and his flopping fringe. It feels like they are discussing a play, or a book. She has a sense of total unreality. The only thing that anchors her is the phone in her pocket, burning, burning against her leg.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how?” he says now, and Hannah looks up at him, frowning.

“What do you mean? April?”

“Yes. Don’t you want to know how I did it? How I was in two places at once?”

And suddenly Hannah almost wants to laugh, because this is so Hugh. It’s the Hugh who proudly took her out for a drive in his brand-new BMW two years out of med school. Isn’t she a beauty? It’s the Hugh who drops his Damien Hirst into conversation, the Hugh who wears his old school tie in spite of the fact that only a tiny number of people care or even know what that means, the Hugh who signs his personal emails MD, FRCS, EBOPRAS, and all the other myriad letters he is entitled to, just because he can.

He wants to show off.

Hannah grits her teeth. It’s against every instinct she’s got to indulge him—he killed April. He shouldn’t get to crow about that—even if he’s spent ten years waiting to be able to do it. But her best chance of buying time is making Hugh talk. So she takes a deep breath.

“I know how. I just don’t know why.”

“You know how?” Hugh sounds slightly annoyed. His expression is skeptical. Hannah nods.

“Yes. I know—I know I spent months, years barking up the wrong tree. But I’m pretty sure I know now.”

She thinks back to that moment in the car, the dial of the microscope inching round, the picture suddenly clicking into focus… She’s not pretty sure. She’s certain.

She sees the room again, April sprawled across the rug, her cheeks flushed, her arms flung out—like something in an oil painting, she had thought, even at the time. A set in a stage play. The beautiful girl, the tragic scene. Romeo and Juliet. Othello and Desdemona.

“You do,” Hugh says. He folds his arms. Smiles. “Go on, then.”

“I was half-right, in a way,” she says. “The fact that no one came out of the staircase between John Neville leaving and us arriving, that was a red herring.”

“And yet,” Hugh says gently, “I didn’t shinny down the drainpipe, Hannah. Or have I got it the wrong way around, did I somehow shinny up?”

“No,” she says. Her pulse is steady, her blood pumping inside her. She is suddenly conscious of her whole body doing its best to keep her and her baby alive. She wants to live. “No, I was the one who had it the wrong way round. Because April wasn’t dead, was she, Hugh?”

“What do you mean?” Hugh says, but he’s parrying, she can see it in his eyes. She has scored a hit, and they both know it. “You saw her dead body yourself.”

“But I didn’t, did I? I saw April lying on the floor, playing dead. Just as you and she had devised.”

There is a long, long silence, and then the stillness in the car is broken by a single clap that makes the baby jump inside Hannah’s belly, and then another, and another. Hugh is applauding.

“Bravo, Hannah Jones. So. You finally figured it out. I knew you would eventually.”

Yes. He had known she would get there eventually, if she kept digging and digging. And he had tried to warn her off, persuade her not to keep asking questions, and then when that failed, divert her attention to Will, the one person, as he put it, that she might have unbent from her dogged search for the truth to protect. But she had not. She had refused to turn aside, even for Will. The thought makes her heart hurt.

“It’s been bothering me,” Hannah says, almost to herself, “Why did April never do anything to me that last week? She was punishing everyone. Will for leaving her. Ryan for refusing to dump Emily. Emily for having the temerity to hold on to Ryan. But she never did anything to me. And that made no sense. At first I thought it was because she didn’t know about me and Will—I mean, there was nothing to know, really. We weren’t doing anything behind her back.” Except that kiss, her heart says, but she ignores it and pushes on. “But people had noticed. You said it yourself—you didn’t need to be Freud to see how Will and I felt about each other, and April was very, very good at reading people. She knew. She absolutely knew. So why did she punish everyone but me? And then I realized.”

“Yes?” Hugh says, with his gentle, old-world curiosity and politeness. “Do go on.”

“I realized she did punish me—and that was it. That last night, the night I found her dead in our room, that was my punishment. That was showing me what a bitch I was being. You’ll be sorry when I’m gone—it’s such a teenage reaction, and the people who say it never mean it, least of all April. She would never have killed herself. She valued herself and her life far too much for that. But she wanted me to know what it felt like. She wanted me to feel, even if just for half an hour, twenty minutes, that tearing, unbearable knowledge of what I’d done, and what it had cost me.”

The phone in her pocket is red-hot now. She will have a mark against her leg tomorrow—if she survives tonight. Will, where are you?

“So,” Hugh says. He folds his hands together, for all the world like a tutor, leading her through an argument, testing her case for weaknesses. “So, she waited for you to come up to the room, and played dead. What next?”

“You were in on it,” Hannah says. “You had to be—because she knew that if I got too close I’d be able to tell she wasn’t dead. So she enlisted your help. That was your role, to come rushing up the stairs when I opened the door, then fall to your knees beside her ‘corpse’ and tell me, with all the authority of a first-year medical student, that April was dead. Then send me running out to make a fool of myself by summoning the authorities, at which point April would sit up and claim to have been asleep or something, and I’d look a drunk, hysterical idiot.”

“Very good,” Hugh says. He pushes his spectacles up his nose and blows his fringe out of his eyes. “I’m impressed.”

“But of course what really happened was that as soon as I left the room, you killed her, probably before she could even sit up. Under the cover of the noise I was making, banging on doors, screaming in the stairwell, you strangled her. But a body that’s been strangled doesn’t look like someone lying there playing dead. You had to keep me out of the room when I came back up the stairs with the authorities. I remember you standing there at the top of the stairs, barring the door, saying Nobody must go in, no one should disturb the body, and you know what”—she gives a bitter, hollow laugh—“you know what, I remember being impressed at your forethought, at the way you knew what to do. But it was bullshit. You just didn’t want me seeing the body of my friend, her face swollen and her arms bruised from you kneeling on them, bruises that weren’t there a few minutes ago. The police surgeons didn’t know—how could they? By the time they came to examine the body, they couldn’t possibly tell if she was murdered at 10:59 or 11:05. And with you and I insisting that we both found April dead at 11:03…”

She swallows.

“Poor John Neville. He never had a chance. I made sure of that.”

“Neville was a pest,” Hugh says briskly. He turns off the engine, and Hannah feels a rush of fear. Oh God, oh God, where is Will?

And then, with a horrible lurch, she realizes the phone in her pocket is no longer burning her leg. In fact, it’s cooling rapidly.

Either Will has hung up or—and the realization comes to her with a sickening certainty, as she remembers the battery bar hovering at the 50 percent mark before she dropped the phone—the battery has died. She is screwed. She staked everything on Will getting here in time, and she has lost, and now she cannot even dial 999.

Just in case, hoping against hope, she presses the power button and the side button together, bracing herself for the siren, but it doesn’t come. She tries the side button and the volume button. Nothing again.

So. This is it. She is alone. It’s just her and Hugh.

But then the baby inside her kicks, and she realizes she is not alone.

And she is not going to die.

“It’s time,” Hugh says.

“But what about why,” Hannah parries desperately. “I told you I knew how, but why, Hugh? Why April?”

But Hugh only turns and looks at her, and then he shakes his head, as if he’s pitying her foolishness.

“I’m not going to tell you that, Hannah. This isn’t a James Bond movie. I’m not going to lecture you for forty-five minutes about my motives. They’re none of your business. Get out of the car.”

“Hugh, no.” She puts her hands over her stomach. “Please. You don’t have to do this. I’m pregnant, doesn’t that mean anything to you? It’s not just me, it’s my baby. You’d be killing my baby, Will’s baby.”

“Hannah,” he says, very slowly, as if he’s talking to someone very stupid, “get out of the car, or I will kick you in the stomach until your baby dies. Do you understand me?”

She goes completely cold.

Hugh is smiling at her pleasantly, and then he pushes his Stephen Hawking glasses up his nose.

“Please,” she whispers. “Hugh please, I wouldn’t tell anyone. I would never do that to you. You’re my friend.”

“Oh please,” Hugh says, and he sounds… amused, and a little sad at the same time. “We both know that’s not true, Hannah. You wouldn’t even turn aside when you thought it was Will you were protecting. Do you seriously expect me to believe you’d do it for me?”

“No,” she says, and her throat is dry. “Not for you, no. But for my baby, I would. For my baby, I would keep this secret. If you let me go, Hugh, I swear—I swear on my baby’s life—”

But he is shaking his head.

“I’m sorry, Hannah, it’s too late.”

He puts his hand in his pocket, and when he takes it out, Hannah goes completely still. He is holding a gun.

“You can’t—” she manages, but her mouth seems to be too numb to speak. “You can’t shoot me here—think of all the evidence—all the blood on your car. It won’t look like a suicide.”

Hugh sighs.

“I am aware of that, thank you. Get out of the car, Hannah.”

She shakes her head. If she gets out, that’s it, and she knows it. He cannot afford to kill her in his car; the evidence will be impossible to remove. Her only hope is to stay here as long as she can. But then, suddenly and without warning, he leans across the gap between them and slams the butt of the gun hard into her bump.

The shock is electric—a jolting pain that seems to run right through her body, making her scream, and the baby inside her flails like a fish, and Hugh shouts full into her face, “Get out of the fucking car, Hannah!”

It’s the first time she’s ever heard him swear, and she knows this is it—she can’t prevaricate any longer—and half bent over, cradling her throbbing bump, she fumbles for the door handle and stumbles out into the drizzling rain.

“Walk over to the cliff,” Hugh says. He is standing on the other side of the car, rain running down his face.

Stumbling, shivering, Hannah does as she’s told. Hugh’s jacket is still wrapped around her, and she has a sudden, piercing flashback to that night, so long ago, when they ran across the Fellows’ Garden together, Hannah wrapped in Hugh’s jacket. That was how it ended for April. And this is how it ends for her.

She is right on the edge of the cliff now. Behind her there is nothing but empty space and the pounding roar of the waves against the jagged rocks, ready to take her body and smash it into an unrecognizable pulp—a raw bloated mess that will cover up any bruises, wash away any DNA. And for Hugh, what’s the worst that could happen? The taxi driver remembers taking her to his house? She has his DNA under her nails? All he needs to say is that she left early that morning, told him she was taking a train. Or a taxi. Yes, she seemed depressed, Officer. No, he doesn’t know where she went.

Oh God, this is it.

“Throw me the jacket,” Hugh says, and, shivering even harder, she pulls her arms out of the jacket and tosses it towards him. It lands in a crumpled heap at his feet. He takes it, and then nods at the cliff edge. “Now, jump.”

Hannah looks behind her, over her shoulder, and shakes her head helplessly, hopelessly. She cannot do it. Not even if the alternative is Hugh shooting her, she can’t bring herself to do it, to throw herself and her unborn child into that sea. She can’t do it.

Hugh raises the gun.

And then Hannah’s heart seems to stop in her chest, and start beating again with a quickening hope. Because above the roar of the sea, she hears a different kind of roar. The roar of an engine, coming closer. And a light, twisting and turning along the narrow lane. It’s a motorbike, and it’s coming fast, faster than is really safe on the rutted, unfinished road.

It’s Will.

Hugh turns, distracted, shading his eyes against the glare as the light comes closer. And then he says something under his breath, something Hannah can’t hear, and he turns to face the track as the rider skids around the last bend and bumps into the clearing.

Will roars to a halt, just a few feet away from them both, and scrambles off without even killing the engine, pulling off his helmet. His eyes are black with fear, but Hannah can tell he is trying to seem calm.

“Hugh,” he says, holding out his hands. “Hugh—listen to me—you don’t have to do this.”

But Hugh—Hugh’s shoulders are shaking.

For a minute Hannah doesn’t understand. She looks from Will, hands outstretched, pleading, and then back to Hugh. Is he crying? He shakes his head helplessly, and then she sees—he is not crying but laughing.

“Hugh?” she manages. She takes a step forward, away from the cliff. The movement seems to tear at the muscles of her womb and a fresh wash of pain ripples across her stomach, radiating out from where Hugh hit her.

“You absolute imbecile,” Hugh says now. He wipes what could be tears of laughter from beneath his glasses, but might be rain, or just plain tears. “You idiot, Will. You could have lived, don’t you realize that? And instead, you’ve solved everything.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” Will says. He takes a step closer and Hugh turns swiftly, pointing the gun at Hannah’s stomach.

“Don’t come any closer unless you want to see your baby right now,” he says, and his voice is suddenly cold.

“Okay, okay,” Will says, and he puts up his hands. Hannah is trembling. Her eyes meet Will’s. I’m so sorry, she tries to say. Will closes his eyes, shakes his head very slightly. It doesn’t matter, it’s okay.

Then he turns back to Hugh.

“What do you mean? Solved everything?” He’s trying to sound calm, hopeful, but there’s a tremor in his voice. But Hugh is shaking his head.

“It doesn’t have to be a suicide anymore,” Hugh says wearily. “Don’t you get it? I mean I could have just shot her, but if the body washed up, a gunshot would have been hard to explain. But this—this is much better. You killed your first girlfriend, and then when your wife got suspicious…” He shrugs. “You shot her, and then you killed yourself. It’s almost too perfect.”

He raises the gun. Now it is pointing at Hannah’s chest.

“Hugh, no,” Will says. His voice is full of an agony so raw it makes Hannah’s heart hurt. “Hugh, you were my friend.”

“I’m sorry,” Hugh says. “But you just made it too easy.” He clicks off the safety.

Hannah closes her eyes. For a fleeting minute she wonders if dying this way will hurt, and how quickly her baby will die too.

And then she hears Will’s anguished roar as he tackles Hugh. The gun goes off, a bullet whipping past Hannah’s shoulder, and she ducks instinctively, even though the bullet is long gone, splashing into the sea.

Hugh and Will are rolling on the muddy ground, grappling each other, the gun sandwiched somewhere between them, Hugh’s finger still on the trigger.

“Will!” she screams, as the two men wrestle wordlessly in the rainy darkness. She has no idea what to do. She wants to run to help Will, pull Hugh off him, but she can’t risk another blow to her stomach. The side of her bump where Hugh hit her is throbbing now with a dull red heat and she is feeling an ominous tightening deep in her pelvis. “Will!” she screams again, his name tearing at her throat.

Hugh is below, and then on top, and then suddenly she sees the gun—he has dropped the gun, or Will has forced him to drop it, she’s not sure. It is lying on the wet grass as the two men roll away from it towards the cliff edge.

Hannah knows what she has to do.

She runs for it, her bare feet slipping in the slick muddy grass, her belly griping with every unwary movement. But Hugh has realized what has happened, and he scrambles for it too, reaching it, grabbing it—the gun comes up, pointing towards Hannah. Will tackles him again, with the desperate strength of a man with nothing left to lose, throwing himself between Hugh and Hannah with a terrible reckless abandon—and then she hears it—the second gunshot, and then a third. Far louder this time, two tearing bangs that leave her ears screaming with shock.

Will goes limp.

And the blood begins to pool.