WE MET UP only once more, all of us, and it was at my mother’s funeral, a grey spring day in the year I turned eighteen.
I was not expecting them. I hoped – I couldn’t deny that. I had emailed and told them all what had happened, and the date and time of the funeral, but without any kind of explanation. But when I turned up at the crematorium in the car with my father and brother, they were there, a huddle of black in the rain, by the gate. They lifted their heads as the car made its slow way up the crematorium drive, following the hearse, such sympathy in their eyes that I felt my heart crack a little, and suddenly I found my fingers numbly scrabbling for the door handle, heard the crunch of tyres on gravel as the driver stamped hurriedly on the brake, and I stumbled from the car.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I heard the driver saying, ‘I would have stopped – I had no idea she –’
‘Don’t worry.’ My father’s voice was weary. ‘Keep going. She’ll make her own way up.’
And the car engine roared into life again, and disappeared up the drive into the rain.
I can’t remember what they said, I only remember the feel of their arms around me, the cool of the rain, dripping down my face, hiding the tears. And the feeling that I was with the only people who could fill the gaping hole that had opened up inside me, that I was home.
It was the last time the four of us would be together for fifteen years.
‘DOES HE KNOW?’ Thea’s voice, croaky with smoke, at last breaks through the silence of the room where we have been sitting, and thinking as the candles burnt low in their sockets and the tide outside swelled to its height and then slowly retreated.
Kate’s head turns, from where she has been staring out at the quiet black waters of the Reach.
‘Does who know what?’
‘Luc. I mean, he clearly knows something, but how much? Did you tell him what happened that night, what we did?’
Kate gives a sigh, and stubs out her cigarette in a saucer. Then she shakes her head.
‘No, I didn’t tell him. I never told anyone, you know that. What we – what we –’
She stops, unable to finish.
‘What we did? Why not say it?’ Thea says, her voice rising. ‘We concealed a body.’
It’s a shock, hearing the words so baldly spoken, and I realise that we have been skirting round the truth of what we did for so long that hearing it aloud is like a kind of reality check.
For that is what we did. We did conceal a body, although that’s not how the courts would phrase it. Preventing the lawful and decent burial of a body would likely be the offence. I know the wording, and the penalties. I have looked it up enough times under cover of checking something else, my fingers shaking every time I read and reread the words. Possibly also disposing of a body with the intent to prevent a coroner’s inquest, although that made me give a little, bitter laugh the first time I came across the phrase in the law journals. God knows, there was no thought in our head of a coroner’s inquest. I’m not sure I even knew what a coroner was.
Was that part of the reason I went into law, this desire to be armed with the knowledge of what I had done, and the penalties for it?
‘Does he know?’ Thea says again, banging her fist on the table with each word in a way that makes me wince.
‘He doesn’t know, but he suspects,’ Kate says heavily. ‘He’s known something was wrong for ages, but with the newspaper reports … And on some level he blames me – us – for what happened to him in France. Even though it’s completely irrational.’
Is it? Is it really so irrational? All Luc knows is that his beloved adoptive father disappeared, that a body has surfaced in the Reach, and that we have something to do with it. His anger seems very, very rational to me.
But then I look down at Freya, at the cherubic peacefulness of her expression, and I think again of her red-faced fear and fury as Luc held her out to me. Was that really the act of a rational person, to snatch my child, drag her screaming across the marshes?
Christ, I don’t know, I don’t know any more. I have lost sight a long time ago of what rationality was. Perhaps I lost it that night, in the Mill, with Ambrose’s body.
‘Will he tell anyone?’ I manage. The words stick in my throat. ‘He threatened … he said about calling the police …?’
Kate sighs. Her face in the lamplight looks gaunt and shadowed.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t think so. I think if he were going to do anything, he would have done it already.’
‘But the sheep?’ I say. ‘The note? Was that him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kate repeats. Her voice is level, but her tone is brittle, as if she might break beneath the strain one day. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been getting things like that for –’ She swallows. ‘For a while.’
‘Are we talking weeks? Months?’ Fatima says. Kate’s lips tighten, her sensitive mouth betraying her before she answers.
‘Months, yes. Even … years.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Thea shuts her eyes, passes a hand over her face. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
‘What would be the point? So you could be as scared as me? You did this for me, it’s my burden.’
‘How did you cope, Kate?’ Fatima says softly. She picks up Kate’s thin, paint-spattered hand, holding it between hers, the jewels on her wedding and engagement rings flashing in the candlelight. ‘After we left I mean. You were here, all alone, how did you manage?’
‘You know how I managed,’ Kate says, but I see the muscles of her jaw clench and relax as she swallows. ‘I sold Dad’s paintings, and then when I ran out I painted more under his name. Luc could add forgery to the list of things he thinks I’ve done, if he really wanted.’
‘That’s not what I meant. I meant how did you not go mad, living alone like this, no one to talk to? Weren’t you scared?’
‘I wasn’t scared …’ Kate says, her voice very low. ‘I was never scared, but the rest … I don’t know. Perhaps I was mad. Perhaps I still am.’
‘We were mad,’ I say abruptly, and their heads turn. ‘All of us. What we did – what we did –’
‘We had no choice,’ Thea says. Her face is tight, the skin drawn over her cheekbones.
‘Of course we had a choice!’ I cry. And suddenly the reality of it hits me afresh, and I feel the panic boiling up inside me, the way it does sometimes when I wake in the middle of the night from a dream of wet sand and shovels, or when I come across a headline of someone charged with concealing a death and the shock makes my hands go weak for a moment. ‘Christ, don’t you understand? If this comes out – I’ll be struck off. It’s an indictable offence, you can’t practise law with something like this on your record. So will Fatima – you think people want a doctor who’s concealed a death? We are all completely screwed. We could go to prison. I could lose –’ My throat is closing, choking me, as if someone has their hands around my windpipe. ‘I could lose F-Fre—’
I can’t finish, I can’t say it.