It was his recording of that conversation that clinched everything with the police, and even now Hannah goes cold with a mixture of relief and fear when she thinks of that split-second choice, of what might have happened if Will hadn’t made the decision to record her call. She could have ended up in jail herself—or Will could have. Because when the police had finally arrived, to find Hannah hysterical, Hugh dead, and Will shot through the side and bleeding out into the sandy soil of the clifftop, they had been inclined to treat Hannah as the potential killer, cuffing her and bundling her into a separate ambulance as Will was blue-lighted away into the distance.
Her story, after all, was almost too fanciful to be believable—a decade-old murder, her own growing doubts, and Hugh’s actions—the kidnapping, the struggle, the shooting, first Will, and then himself, through the heart. Had his gun simply gone off as he and Will struggled back and forth with the barrel between them? Or maybe… Hannah thinks of his weariness in the car, the weight that seemed to be pressing down upon him as they drove deeper into the night. Maybe he had finally grown sick of the toll, of everything he had sacrificed to protect his own secret.
They will never know the truth about those final moments. Not even Will knows—the dark nightmarish struggle is as unclear to him as it is to Hannah, and all he remembers is his own pain, the shocking realization that he had been shot and was bleeding out, great gouts of spreading warmth. But it was Will’s phone in Hannah’s hand, sticky and red, the phone she had passed across to police, unlocked with shaking bloodied fingers, that spelled out everything else, Hugh backing up Hannah’s story in his own words. Bravo, Hannah Jones. So. You finally figured it out. I knew you would eventually.
But she hasn’t figured it out. Or not completely.
Because she still doesn’t know why he did it. No one does.
* * *
IN THE TAXI ON THE way back from the hospital she calls November on her new replacement phone, fills her in on the funeral, on how Will is doing.
“He might be out tomorrow,” she says, and just saying the words sets up a little thrill inside her—the thought of having Will back home. Battered and bruised, to be sure, with a hole in his side the size of a fist, and black and yellow hemorrhaging that’s spread across most of his torso, but home. It has been lonely these last couple of weeks, just her and the baby. Lonely, waking in the night gasping from nightmares that she is still there, still in that car driving to an unknown destination, with a man she knows to be a killer. Lonely, knowing that if something happens, if she goes into early labor or begins to bleed, it will be just her in the cab to the hospital, waiting for the doctors, trying to plead her case. The bruise where Hugh hit her has gone from blue-black to a sickly yellow-green, but she can still feel it sometimes in the night when she turns awkwardly, her whale-like belly dragging the blankets with her. It twinges, the torn muscles aching deep inside.
Her mother came up to stay for the first week, making her comfort food dinners like spaghetti and meatballs and big stodgy lasagnas. But after seven days, Hannah told her, gently, that she needed to go home. That she, Hannah, needed to get used to this, to managing by herself. And besides, she might need her mother here even more if Will wasn’t out before she gave birth.
“Come and stay with me,” her mother urged. “Just until Will’s well again.”
But Hannah shook her head. She couldn’t leave Edinburgh, not with Will so sick, not even in the early days when all she could do was sit by his bed and watch his eyes flickering restlessly beneath closed lids. Still less once he woke up enough to miss her presence.
“And how were Hugh’s parents?” November asks now, dragging her back to the present and Hugh’s funeral. “Was it weird?”
“Oh God, November, it was so weird. I just…” Her throat fills with tears at the memory of Hugh’s mother’s fragile bewilderment, his father’s stiff, brittle courage. “I had no idea what to say. He was their only child, their everything. What can you say?”
“And they didn’t… they didn’t throw any light on… why?” November asks.
“No,” Hannah says sadly. “I mean… I didn’t ask them. But they clearly loved him so much. I keep thinking about that last conversation I had with him at Pelham, before April died. When Hugh walked me back across the quad and talked about his father, and how proud he was of getting in to study medicine in his dad’s footsteps… it just… it kind of breaks my heart a little.”
“April always said he didn’t belong at Pelham,” November says. She sighs. “She told me once… how did she put it? Something about giving him a leg up, but it wouldn’t do him any good in the end if he couldn’t keep up.”
“Giving him a leg up?” Hannah is puzzled. “But April didn’t study medicine, how could she possibly have helped Hugh?”
“I don’t know,” November says. “I think a friend of hers helped people with their exams or something? Some kind of tutor maybe?”
Hannah’s breath seems to stick in her throat. April’s voice comes to her, as clearly as if she’s on the other end of the line, with November. Oh, that! I had an ex at Carne who made a pretty good living taking people’s BMAT for them.
And suddenly she knows.
It’s like the last few boxes of a sudoku, with almost every grid completed so that the remaining numbers simply slot in, as easily as one, two, three.
One. Hugh’s desperation to follow in his GP father’s footsteps.
Two. April’s leg up.
Three. The way Hugh had never quite felt up to the work at Pelham.
What was it Hugh had said? Chin up, and we’ll go easy on you in the exams. And Emily’s dry retort, just a few weeks ago but it feels like a lifetime now: Ain’t that the truth. There’s no way I deserved a first, and I’m pretty sure Hugh wouldn’t even have passed if it wasn’t for April.
So many small things made sense now. Hugh’s shocked horror that first night, at finding April in the dining hall. The way April ordered him around, made him fetch and carry, forced him to come to her play, even the night before his most important exam. Why did Hugh keep saying yes? Hannah had never understood that. But now it made sense. Hugh literally could not afford to say no.
And finally… the pills. The innocent little capsules on April’s bedside table, half-colored, half-clear. They had never figured out where April was getting those—it was before anyone knew about Silk Road and all the other darknet market sites. Back then, you had to know someone with access to a prescription pad. NoDoz for grown-ups, but not NoDoz at all. Stronger. Much stronger. Just as April had said to Hugh, that night at the theater. Sod flowers. You should have brought something stronger than that, Hugh… Just what the doctor ordered, am I right?
“Hannah?” November is saying now, on the other end of the phone. “Hannah? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” she says. Her throat is dry, and she swallows against the obstruction. “Yes, yes, I’m still here. I think I know. I think I know what happened. Hang on.” The taxi is pulling up to the mews, juddering over the cobbles, and she leans forward and pays the driver with her new, uncracked phone, and slides out to stand in the drizzling rain as the car drives off.
She feels a coldness sink over her as November says, “Hannah?”
“I’m still here,” Hannah says. The rain is running down the back of her neck. “November, I think I know why Hugh killed April.”
“Wait, what, you know? But just a second ago you were saying—”
“Yes, I know, but it was what you just said—about April giving him a leg up. She told me once, she told me that she had a friend, an ex-boyfriend, who took people’s BMATs for them.”
“What’s a BMAT?” November sounds more bewildered, rather than less.
“It’s the exam you have to take to get into Oxford to do medicine. It’s really important—Hugh told me once that if you do well in the BMAT, that basically overrides your interview, it probably even overrides your A-levels to an extent. And Hugh did well. He did really well. He got one of the highest marks in his year. It was what made me so puzzled, when he was so anxious about his prelims—because he’d aced the BMAT, so why was he worried about some crappy little first-year exam? Except maybe… maybe he didn’t ace the BMAT. Maybe someone else did.”