“Oh, Han, no,” Hugh says uncomfortably, and then he holds out his arms, awkwardly, and almost in spite of herself Hannah stumbles into them. Hugh is not one of nature’s huggers. He is too tall and bony to be comfortable, too physically ungainly. But he is good, and kind, and he is Hugh. They stand, locked together in Hugh’s hallway, Hannah’s bump intruding uncomfortably between them, and she bawls like a child into the embroidered silk lapel of Hugh’s dressing gown.
At last her sobs subside into gasps, and then hiccups, and then finally just shuddering breaths, and she gets a hold of herself and pulls away. As she wipes her eyes, and then her glasses, she realizes with a kind of shameful horror that she has slobbered all over what is probably a very expensive dry-clean-only garment.
“I’m sorry,” she says. Her voice is croaky. “I didn’t mean—oh God, your beautiful dressing gown. I’m so sorry, Hugh.” She sniffs and gulps. “Have you got a tissue?”
“Here,” Hugh says. She’s not sure where it came from, but he’s holding out a laundered linen square with HAB on one corner. Hannah looks at it doubtfully. Handkerchiefs in her house are made of paper. But at last she blows her nose and then, unsure what to do with it—she can hardly hand it back to Hugh—she puts it in her pocket, intending to slip it into the laundry hamper when she goes to the bathroom.
“Better?” Hugh says, and she nods. It’s both true and untrue. She needed that cry, badly, and she does feel better. It was cathartic in a way no talk could ever have been. But in another way, nothing is better. It’s just as awful and fucked up and unfixable as it was when she walked through the door to Hugh’s flat.
“Come into the living room, sit down,” Hugh says, “and then I’ll make you a cup of tea, and you can tell me all about it.”
* * *
SOME HALF HOUR LATER, HANNAH is sitting on Hugh’s white velvet couch, with her slippered feet tucked under her and a blanket around her legs, and Hugh has his head in his hands.
“So he admitted it?” he asks now, as if he can’t believe it. “He actually said he killed April?”
“Not in so many words,” Hannah says. The sentences feel unreal in her mouth. “But I asked him, and he said—” She stops, gulps, and forces herself on. “He said ‘What do you think?’ And then he laughed.”
“Oh my God,” Hugh says wretchedly. He looks up at Hannah, his face utterly bleak.
“I wish—God, I almost wish I’d never told you about the noises.”
Hannah shakes her head.
“Hugh, no. God, no. If it’s true—” But she stops at that. She can’t bring herself to say it. “Hugh,” she asks instead, knowing she is clutching at straws, “Hugh, was it definitely him? It couldn’t have been a scout or sound traveling through the walls or something?”
But Hugh shakes his head. He looks ten years older, as if he is still coming to terms with what he set in motion.
“No,” he whispers now. “It—it was him, Hannah. I heard him, through the wall, speaking to someone. It was Will.”
Hannah feels her last shred of hope snap. She feels as if she has been hanging on to a fraying rope for dear life, and that last fiber has just been severed.
He was there. He was really there. And he has lied about it for more than ten years—for the entirety of their relationship.
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” she manages. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” She doesn’t mean it to sound as accusing as it comes out, but Hugh only shakes his head wretchedly, as if accepting any blame she wants to throw at him.
“Because he was my friend, Hannah.” He sounds broken. “And because I didn’t think it mattered. It was Neville—you saw him coming out of the staircase, we both did. There was no way anyone could have got up there between Neville leaving and us arriving—so did it really matter if Will arrived a few hours before he said he did? And besides, no one asked. They never said, Did you hear your best friend coming home at a time that totally breaks his alibi? I would never have lied outright, Hannah, never. But to go to the police with that—when we all thought Neville was guilty…”
He stops, takes off his glasses, covers his face. It must, Hannah reflects dazedly, be almost as much of a shock for him as it is for her. She has lost her husband. Hugh has lost his best friend.
She feels the tears welling up again, and grits her teeth. She can’t keep bursting into sobs. She has to get a grip.
They have to figure out what to do.
“He didn’t try to stop you leaving?” Hugh asks.
“He did,” Hannah says. She almost can’t believe it herself. “He—he ran after me. But he tripped over the table. I don’t know what would have happened if he’d caught up with me.”
A picture comes to her. Will’s lean, strong hands wrapped around April’s throat—
The image washes over her with a physical shock like ice water, making her cheeks flare and her breath quicken.
She pushes the thought away. She can’t think about that right now. About the reality of what this means. All she can do is put one foot in front of the other.
“Okay,” Hugh says now. He stands and paces to the end of the living room, to the beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street. He runs his hand through his hair. “Okay. Let’s think. Let’s think about what to do. Did Will know you were coming here?”
Hannah shakes her head.
“No.”
“And what about your phone—is there any way he could be tracking you? You should turn off location services.”
“I can’t.” Hannah digs in her pocket and draws out her cracked and broken phone. The screen is completely dark now, ink-black and unreadable. “I broke it this morning. It’s completely dead. But I don’t think it’s a problem anyway. Will had no—” She swallows, takes a breath, tries again. “He had no reason to—”
She stops again. It’s extraordinarily hard to say what she means: her husband had no reason to spy on her until today.
She cannot believe she and Hugh are having this conversation.
All she wants is to hear Will’s voice, hear his incredulous laugh as he says What? Are you crazy? Of course I didn’t kill April. But instead what she hears is that cold, brutal What do you think?
She puts her head in her hands. November was right. She can’t handle this herself anymore. It has gone too far, become much too dangerous. Whatever the truth, she has to hand her fears over to the authorities. And although the thought of sharing her suspicions makes her feel sick, there’s a kind of relief too, in the idea of passing on this burden to someone else. For more than ten years she has been pushing away these doubts, pushing away the certainty that there was something wrong in what she saw that night. It’s time to confess.
“I think… I think I have to go to the police,” she says. “Can I use your phone, Hugh?”
“Of course,” Hugh says, though he looks as sick as she feels at the thought. “I’ll speak to them too if you want. But, look—if you phone them, they’ll probably want you to come down to the station, make a statement. Do you want to get cleaned up first? You look absolutely all in.”
Hannah looks down at herself—at her crumpled sweats and her bloody feet in Hugh’s borrowed slippers. She wants to phone the police—get this over with. But at the same time she can see that Hugh is right. Once she has started the ball rolling, she can hardly say I’ll be down in a few hours, once I’ve had a shower.
“Okay,” she says now. “Good idea.”
Her stomach growls audibly, and she realizes suddenly that she is almost faint with hunger.
“Actually, before I do that, could I—could I have some toast, Hugh?”
Hugh nods.
“Of course. Come through to the kitchen and I’ll get you set up.”
* * *
IT’S MAYBE HALF AN HOUR later that Hannah walks into Hugh’s palatial marble bathroom to see a steaming bubble bath awaiting her, already run.
The sight makes her do a double take. She had been intending a quick shower and then straight down to speak to the police—it must be already getting on for 10 a.m. But it seems pointless to drain the water in an already-run bath.