Complicit (3 page)

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Sorry?’

‘That it was you I called.’

Finally she turned to me. Her eyes flickered. She dropped them from my face to the bruise on my neck.

‘Were you and he…?’

‘Involved?’ I said. ‘Kind of.’

She gave a long, deep sigh, as if she had been holding her breath since she stepped over the threshold. Her voice came out in a soft wail. ‘Why am I here?’

Before

‘I don’t know, Bonnie.’

‘That means you might?’

‘I hardly touch the guitar nowadays.’

‘That doesn’t matter!’

‘Are you going to tell me it’s like riding a bicycle?’

‘Would that persuade you?’

Neal gave me a smile, which made him look more like the man I remembered from university. We hadn’t seen each other for nearly ten years and even then I hadn’t known him well. He had been a friend of Andy’s and had been hauled in to play bass guitar, reasonably competently. In fact, that was how I used to think of him – as competent, practical. His hair was darker than I’d thought, but not long as it had been then when it had fallen to his shoulders. He had filled out, was no longer the skinny young man everyone in the band had liked because he was always ready to help out, fix things when they broke, ferry things when they needed ferrying. Liza had taken a bit of a shine to him in those days; maybe she had even made a drunken pass. But it had come to nothing, and after university he had slipped out of our lives. I hadn’t really thought about him since.

We were sitting in the small garden of his tiny house in Stoke Newington. I’d told him, when I’d found his number in the phone book and rung, that I could meet him outside his workplace, but apparently he worked from home, supplying garden sheds to people who didn’t want to move but needed more room. I had an example of the shed in front of me, at the bottom of the garden. He had erected it himself and apparently it served as his office and a demonstration to interested clients of what they could get for their money. It was really just a simple extra room or a large version of a child’s playhouse, with a pitched roof, two windows, a door, and enough space inside for a sofa, a desk and a bookcase.

It was mid-morning, and we were drinking coffee in the warm sunlight. Clematis was climbing one wall and the flower-beds were crammed with plants. A bee buzzed above my head. I took a sip of coffee, leaned back in my chair and sighed. ‘This is good,’ I said. ‘I’m not surprised you work from home.’

‘It’s not always like this.’

‘I’ve got a flat that’s about as big as your shed, but not nearly as nice. Maybe I should get one to live in.’

He laughed. I saw a faint scar slanting from the corner of his left eye. His eyebrows were thick and dark. I found myself wondering if anyone lived with him in his little house, helped him water his flowers and do the accounts.

‘All right,’ Neal said.

‘Sorry?’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘You will?’

‘I’m not going away until the end of September this year. It’ll brighten up my summer.’

We looked at each other. Both of us were smiling.

After

We were speaking in frantic hoarse whispers.

‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘I called you because I trust you.’

‘For what?’ Sonia’s eyes returned to the body, darted away again; went to my face and then away, as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to look at me full on. I saw she was clenching and unclenching her fists.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t know what else to do. Sonia? I need help. I can’t –’ I stopped, swallowed hard. ‘Oh, God, oh, God,’ I said. ‘I just had to have someone else here.’ My words came out in a gabble of sound and I couldn’t tell if Sonia could actually understand them.

Sonia still wasn’t looking at me properly. Her face was stretched into a sour kind of grimace, her mouth slightly open, and she was wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘Before you say anything else, Bonnie, let me say this just once. You should call the police. Whatever’s happened here –’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘Fucking right I don’t. Fucking right.’ Sonia rarely swears; even now it sounded wrong, as if a stranger was speaking out of her.

‘I can’t explain,’ I said. I was trying to focus on her face but it kept blurring, as if I was very tired or very drunk.

‘This is a nightmare. Jesus.’

‘I know.’

‘Why am I here?’

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ I said wretchedly. ‘And I couldn’t be alone with –’ We looked towards the body, and away again. ‘With him.’

Sonia put her hand in front of her mouth as if to stop herself making a sound. She muttered something under her breath. Her face was pale and I could see beads of sweat on her forehead.

‘You were lovers?’

‘What?’ Even now I couldn’t say it.

‘I said: you were
lovers
?’

Blood pounded in my head. I could feel myself turning hot and red with such shame I felt I’d scorch and burn up with it. ‘None of that matters now.’

‘You stupid, stupid, stupid idiot. Oh, Bonnie! Why?’ She gestured blindly towards the body.

‘There’s nothing I can say.’

‘This is so, so…’ Sonia trailed off. Again, she put a hand over her mouth as if to stop unwanted words spilling out of her. ‘We’re standing here talking quite calmly,’ she said, ‘and all the time –
this
.’ She gestured with her hand, blindly. Her face wrinkled for a moment.

‘I know. I know.’ My words seemed to fill the room. I realized I was shouting and dropped my voice to a whisper. ‘I
know
.’

‘Know what? What do you know?’ She put a hand on my arm. Her fingers pressed painfully into my flesh.

‘Don’t.’

‘Why are you showing me this? What are you doing?’

‘I didn’t –’

‘Don’t say you didn’t know what to do again!’

‘Sorry.’

‘He’s dead.
Dead.
And you and he – Christ, Bonnie, what have you done?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What makes you think I won’t just call the police myself?’

I shrugged. A sudden weariness came over me, so heavy that I almost lay down under the sheer grey mass of it and closed my eyes. ‘You could,’ I said, ‘and I know you’re right. It’s probably the only sane thing to do.’

At last Sonia looked at me properly, with an intense, almost fierce gaze. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright. She seemed almost unreal. ‘I need to think,’ she said.

‘I shouldn’t have called you. It was wrong. Everything’s wrong. Oh, God, everything’s so wrong. How did it all turn out like this?’

‘Be quiet. Just don’t say anything.’

Suddenly I could no longer stand up. I sat down on the floor, my back to the body, wrapped my arms around my legs and pulled up my knees so they were pressing into my eye sockets. I tried to make myself as small as possible. Curled up into myself, I could hear my heart beat. I waited. My neck throbbed, my ribs throbbed and, around me, the room seemed to throb. At last I lifted my head on the wobbly stem of my neck. Sonia walked to the window and stood by the tiny strip of half-light between the closed curtains, looking out onto the shabby, silent little street. She was frowning, her eyes narrowed as if in intense thought; her lower lip was trapped between her teeth and I could see her chest rise and fall with her breathing. At last she turned back to the room and stared down at the body. Something in her appearance seemed to have changed. She stood straighter, and when she spoke, her voice was clearer. It was as if a fog had lifted.

‘OK,’ she said, as if she had come to a hard decision. ‘You turned to me for help.’

‘Yes,’ I said, in a whisper from the floor.

‘And you won’t call the police?’

‘I can’t.’

‘You say you trust me. That’s where we’re going to start from. Trust.’ She was speaking very slowly and clearly, enunciating her words with exaggerated precision as if she was talking to a small child or a foreigner with only the most basic grasp of the English language, but I knew that she was actually talking to herself, going through the jumble of thoughts in her head and trying to order them. ‘So, I trust you as well. You’re my friend. I’m not going to ask you what happened here, though it seems pretty bloody obvious. If you want to tell me about it, save it for later.’

I nodded. I would never want to tell anybody about it, not ever.

‘I have a horrible feeling that I’m going to regret this, but I won’t go to the police. That’s the first thing.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do. But what I don’t understand is what I
am
supposed to be doing. Bonnie?’

‘It’s – I don’t know how to say it.’

‘You didn’t just get me to come over here to give you a hug?’

‘No.’

‘Why didn’t you run away?’

‘I thought –’ I stopped. I couldn’t really remember what I’d thought.

‘Bonnie.’ Sonia’s voice was sharp, calling me to attention. ‘Why am I here? What do you want me to do?’

It was my turn to pause for a long time.

‘I said I called you because I didn’t know what to do and I thought you’d somehow be able to tell me. But that’s not quite true. I do know what to do – or, at least, one thing I could do. You’re the only person I felt I could turn to, but by doing that I think I’ve done something terrible to you. So I just want to say this: say the word and you can walk out of here and I’ll wait until you’re safely away and then I’ll call the police. I’ll have to. Because, you see, what I’ve been thinking of needs someone else. I can’t do it alone.’

Sonia looked at the body lying out of sight behind me, and this time she didn’t glance away. She was like someone standing on the edge of an abyss and staring down into it, unable to drag herself away from the horror.

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘I want –’ I took a deep breath, and then the words came out in a blurt, sounding even more absurd and impossible than I’d imagined. ‘I need you to help me get rid of the body.’

Sonia gave a gasp and took a step backwards so she was almost against the door. ‘Get rid of it?’ she said weakly. I noted that she was saying ‘it’ not ‘he’, as if she was trying to forget that here was a man she had once known, had not long ago talked to, argued and laughed with. ‘Are you serious?’

‘If we got rid of it, maybe nobody would look. Not for a long time at least.’

‘You are serious? You think that you and me – No, Bonnie. No. You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘I couldn’t do it on my own,’ I said. ‘I tried to think of a way but I couldn’t.’

‘This is crazy. Look at him. He’s big. We can’t just – I mean, how?’ She gave a small, high laugh that stopped as abruptly as it had started, though the harsh sound seemed to hang in the room. ‘You’ve been watching too many films.’

‘It’s the only thing I can think of.’

‘It’s mad – and it would be horrible. I feel sick even thinking about it. Have you allowed yourself to imagine what it would be like? He’s dead. He’ll be starting to go hard or something soon.’

‘Oh, no! Don’t.’

‘What? Don’t talk about it? If you can’t even bear to talk about it, how will you actually do it? That’s what happens, isn’t it? Everything starts to change.’

‘Oh, God.’

‘You don’t want to touch him. The dead aren’t like the living.’

‘I have to, Sonia.’

‘It’s a crime, don’t forget. Maybe that doesn’t mean so much to you, not now, but for me…’ She stopped and swallowed hard. ‘Covering it up, blocking the investigation. We could go to prison for a long, long time. I could, I mean. Have you thought about that?’

She stood over me, her face blazing, and my head sank back onto my knees.

‘You’re right and this was unforgivable,’ I mumbled. ‘Get out of here this minute, and I’m terribly sorry I ever rang you. I mean it. Go.’

‘Get up, Bonnie.’

‘What?’

‘Stand up. I can’t talk to you while you’re crouching on the floor like that.’

I stumbled upright. The room seemed to sway around me. ‘I feel drunk,’ I said. ‘Or as if I’ve got flu.’

‘You really thought we could just get rid of it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You were right and you should go.’

‘How? I mean, how on earth would we even get his body out of this flat without being seen? And then what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When does Liza get back?’

‘September. But we can’t just leave his body here for her to discover.’ For the briefest second I allowed myself to think of decomposition and decay, of his body seeping and crumbling into the carpet. My stomach turned and I whimpered.

‘So?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The only thing I’ve thought about is getting rid of it. Making it go away.’

‘Yes, that,’ said Sonia, grimly, pulling back her mouth again. She almost looked as though she was smiling. But she wasn’t.

‘Which is why I knew I needed someone. You. I needed you.’

‘Did you think about how you – we – would do it?’

‘I just thought about putting it somewhere where it would never be found.’

‘Brilliant. Like where?’

‘Like really, really deep woodland where nobody ever goes.’

‘For God’s sake, Bonnie, this is England,’ said Sonia. ‘There aren’t deep woodlands where nobody goes. And if there were, how would you – how would we – get it there? I can tell you that, wherever you put it, someone walking their dog would find it. When you read in the papers about bodies being found, that’s what happens. A man walking his dog.’

‘Couldn’t we bury it somewhere?’

‘Where? That’s got all the problems of finding somewhere to dump the body without being seen, and then when you’re there you have to dig a huge hole, deep enough so it doesn’t get dug up by scavengers. There’s a reason why they make graves six feet deep. And, wherever you do it, it shows for a long time. It’s not just a matter of going to Hampstead Heath after midnight.’