Complicit (4 page)

‘What about burning?’ I asked, a bit wildly.

‘It’s not like an old newspaper.’ She made a gesture of repugnance. ‘The human body is a difficult thing to burn.’

‘They do it in crematoriums.’

‘Yes,’ said Sonia. ‘With an industrial-strength furnace that can heat up to a thousand degrees. And even then it doesn’t destroy everything. It’s not something you can do in your back garden.’

I had a horrible flashback of cremating my guinea pig when I was small and the smell that had filled our garden. I put my hands over my face, feeling sick. ‘What then?’ I said. ‘What can we do? We can’t hide it and we can’t bury it and we can’t burn it. You’re not going to suggest cutting it up, are you? I can’t, Sonia. I’d prefer to die myself than do that.’ In fact, the thought of dying seemed inviting right now, to close my eyes on all this.

‘No, I’m not,’ said Sonia. ‘I’ve dissected animals and I’m just not going there.’

‘People do go missing, though,’ I said. ‘Some bodies are never found.’

‘Not very often, except in films. Not unless you’re the Mafia and you can bury a body in concrete and build a motorway on top of it. This is not an easy thing to do.’

My mind wasn’t working properly. Everything seemed to be shifting in and out of focus. His body, sprawled on the floor, seemed to fill my field of vision. Everywhere I looked, I saw it. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I can’t do this. I don’t know why I ever thought I could. Oh, God. Let’s just get out of here as quickly as we can.’ And I clutched her arm as if to pull her from the room.

But Sonia drew back. ‘Wait,’ she said.

‘We just leave,’ I said. ‘It’s like you were never here.’

She turned to me, her expression calm and almost tender. I could feel her taking charge of the situation and myself letting her – and, after all, wasn’t that why I had turned to her? So that someone else could sort out the ghastly, catastrophic mess?

‘We can’t bury it,’ she said. ‘We can’t burn it, we can’t just dump it. What’s left?’

‘Water,’ I said. ‘People are buried at sea, aren’t they? You see it in war films. They wrap them in a sail with weights.’

‘You’ve got a boat, have you?’

‘No.’

‘You know anyone who’s got a boat?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Friends of friends. I don’t think any of them would lend me one and let me take it out to sea on my own, though. Also, I don’t know much about marinas but I imagine they’re pretty crowded in the summer.’

‘It doesn’t have to be the sea,’ said Sonia.

‘Where, then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s no use.’

‘I don’t know
yet
. It’s the best idea so far. Water. A lake or a reservoir or a river. There’s a reservoir I’ve been to once; it’s quite near here. That might be the best place. There would definitely be no one around. First we need to sort things out.’ She walked over to the body and peered down at it almost dispassionately. ‘Why does it look so different from someone who’s just asleep?’

I’d seen him asleep and I’d seen him dead and I was trying not to think of the difference.

‘The blood’s all on the rug,’ said Sonia, ‘so I don’t think we need to do very much cleaning.’

She seemed to decide something and walked out of the room. I heard cupboard doors opening and closing. When she came back in she was wearing pink washing-up gloves. She threw a packet to me and I caught it. It was another packet of gloves, yellow this time.

I ripped it open and pulled them on. Sonia picked up an ornament from the table and contemplated it. It was made of dull grey metal, of a vaguely abstract design, and showed a big figure and a small figure linked together. It probably symbolized something like friendship or parenthood.

‘By picking this up,’ said Sonia, ‘and moving it, I’m interfering with a crime scene. I don’t know what the exact charge would be – interfering with an investigation, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, something like that. If it blows up, we go to prison for years, lose everything. Are you really up for this?’

‘Are
you
? You’re the one I brought into it.’

Sonia walked across the room and put the ornament on a shelf, placing it just so, like a conscientious housewife.

Before

‘You mean it?’

‘Don’t get too excited, Joakim,’ I said drily. ‘It’s not going to make you rich and famous.’

‘A professional band.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

‘Playing a proper gig at last – not just some poxy school dance full of fourteen-year-old girls wearing too much makeup.’ His voice was scornful as only a just-eighteen-year-old voice can be.

‘It’s a wedding, that’s all. I don’t even know how many people will be there. And it’s not your kind of music, Joakim. It’s more country and blues.’

‘I love country music,’ he said. ‘It’s authentic. Lucinda Williams. Steve Earle. Teddy Thompson. Who else is in the band?’

‘So far, there’s you on violin, a man called Neal Fenton who was in the original band for a bit – he’s the bass guitarist – and Sonia Hurst is the singer. Well, you know her, of course.’

‘Sonia Hurst?’

‘Yes.’

‘The chemistry teacher?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Singing in your band?’

‘Yup.’

‘Weird,’ said Joakim. ‘Me playing a gig with Miss Hurst and Miss Graham.’

‘You’ve left school now. You’d better call us Bonnie and Sonia.’

‘What’ll you play? Piano?’

‘Probably I’ll just fill in the gaps. It depends on who else we get.’

Until June, when he had taken his music A level, Joakim had been my student. I had first met him when he was fifteen, small for his age with cropped hair and the aggressive posture of someone who wants to be older, taller and cooler. Over the summer between GCSEs and sixth form, he had grown six inches and looked pale, malnourished and ungainly, with puny tufts of beard on his chin and spots on his forehead. But then, six months later, he had filled out and let his dark blond hair grow long, had taken to smoking roll-ups and wearing skinny black jeans. Suddenly he was a young man, languid and determinedly casual, damping down his natural intensity under his laid-back manner, his style a mixture of the romantic and the world-weary. I had witnessed all of his rapid incarnations and it was hard for me not to catch glimpses of the young Joakim, so anxious to belong, so cockily insecure. I had also witnessed his progress as a musician. It seemed to me – perhaps because it was true for myself as well – that it was in playing music he felt least self-conscious and most at home with himself. I spend a lot of my time in a cacophony of sound, screeching and puffing and banging, but Joakim could really play: the flute well, the electric guitar loudly, the violin with outstanding intonation and feeling.

It was this that made me ask him to join us – and that I’d known he was at a loose end this summer, waiting for his exam results and for the next stage of his life to begin, pretending not to care, biting his nails. He touched me, I suppose, and I wanted him to be all right.

The wedding was weeks away, it was a beautiful summer’s day and I was on holiday. I knew I should make a start on my flat, which even on a day like today felt dark, almost subterranean, but not right now. Instead I called Sally and asked her if she fancied a picnic.

‘That would be completely and utterly fantastic,’ she said, with a fervour that took me by surprise. ‘I’m going stir-crazy with Lola.’

Sally was my oldest friend. We had known each other since we were seven, and sometimes I was surprised we had managed to stay in touch over the years. We were almost like sisters. We squabbled and fell out, occasionally took each other for granted and every so often resented each other (me, that she was so settled, and her, that I was so free), but we were inextricably bound together. Lola was her eighteen-month-old daughter: a tiny, plump, fierce child with dimpled knees, hair like sticky candy floss, a voice like an electric drill and a will of iron that often reduced Sally to tears of powerless frustration. I noticed that she had stopped saying she and Richard wanted four children in quick succession.

‘You bring Lola and some bread for the ducks. I’ll buy us a ready-made picnic. We can meet in Regent’s Park.’

*

We sat on the already-bleached grass and ate cheese rolls while Lola ran around, tripped over, yelled loudly and unconvincingly, her mouth seeming to take up her entire face, followed a squirrel, calling to it to stop and eat her bread, then abruptly crawled onto Sally’s lap and fell asleep, her thumb thrust into her mouth and her four fingers spread over her smeared face. Sally gave a sigh of relief and lay back on the grass as well, Lola across her.

‘I’m exhausted after an hour,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how you manage.’

‘ “Manage” is the wrong word,’ she said. ‘ “Manage” sounds neat and organized. Look at me – do I look neat and organized?’

‘You look great.’

‘I look tired, I look frazzled, I look fat, I look like my hair needs cutting and my legs need waxing and my nails need painting.’

‘You’ve been reading too many glossy magazines,’ I said. ‘The ones that tell you how to be a size eight three days after giving birth.’

‘You know, one of the books I read before having Lola had a section on what you need to take with you into hospital – things like a rubber ring to sit on in case you have to have stitches, and a spray bottle for your partner to squirt into your face when you’re in labour, though if Richard had done that to me I would have punched him. And one of the essential items was your makeup bag so you could make yourself look fresh and attractive for your husband.’

‘That’s awful.’

‘No – what’s awful is that I did. I took in my makeup and even put on some bloody mascara before I had visitors. Can you imagine? You’ve just brought a whole new life into the world, this miracle, and you have to think about how you look. You wouldn’t do that, though.’

‘Only because I don’t usually wear makeup much anyway.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘Where?’

‘I dunno, really.’ She yawned. I could see down her pink throat. She looked like a cat – a large, tired, slightly shabby cat.

‘We should go away somewhere for a weekend,’ I said.

‘Bliss. But what would I do with Lola?’

‘We’d take her.’

‘No, we would not. If we went away together, I want to drink and I want to sleep. Two things I can’t really do with her around.’

‘Leave her with Richard, then.’

She snorted. ‘As if. Tell me something about the big wide world.’

‘I’m getting a band together.’

‘What?’ She hooted with laughter and Lola shifted on her lap.

‘Hang on, it’s not as if I’ve never played an instrument before.’

‘How come I didn’t know about this?’

‘Well, it’s only been a couple of days. I haven’t seen you.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘I’m telling you now.’

‘Yeah. Sorry. I think I kind of rely on you to give me some vicarious excitement. What kind of band?’

‘A folksy, bluegrassy, this-and-that, amateur and not-very-good kind of band that can play at a friend’s wedding in the middle of September and then not be a band any longer.’

‘Disband the band.’

‘Right.’

‘Maybe you’ll be spotted, be offered a record deal.’

‘Hardly. We’ll get together for rehearsals once or twice a week, play three or four numbers that no one will pay any attention to and that will be the end of that.’

‘Maybe I could join.’ She sounded wistful.

‘Do you play anything?’ I knew she didn’t, of course – we’d been in a recorder class together when we were eleven, but that was about it.

‘I could shake a tambourine.’

‘No tambourines, no triangles, no maracas.’

‘Who’s in it?’

‘Me, Sonia, a pupil – or, rather, an ex-pupil – called Joakim, and this guy who was in our original uni band.’

‘Which one?’

‘His name’s Neal. I’m not sure you actually met him. I didn’t know him that well. Dark hair, quite good-looking, a bit shy.’

‘He sounds nice.’

‘And I was wondering if I should invite Amos.’

‘Amos!’

‘You think I shouldn’t?’

‘Well. I mean, why would you?’

‘I don’t know. He’d be offended if I didn’t.’

‘So what? Amos being offended is no longer your worry, is it?’

‘I guess not. And, anyway, maybe it’s too soon. I know it was mutual, sort of, but we were together for ages.’

Sally shifted her position on the grass and gave a great yawn. ‘Sorry. I
am
interested. It’s just this time of day.’

‘Amos thinks we should stay good friends, but it isn’t that simple. You can’t just go from being lovers who think they might be together for ever to being on civilized good terms. Or I can’t, at least. I think it’s different for him. Maybe Sonia’s right and that’s because it didn’t mean so much to him, but I think it did. Or maybe I just want to think it did. All that time has to have meant something.’ I paused. ‘Sally?’

A tiny snore bubbled from her lips. She was asleep. I looked at her, lying flung out on the grass, one arm over her face and the other on Lola’s bunched-up body. Her chestnut hair needed washing; there were stains on her dress, purple smudges under her eyes. I put the remains of our picnic into the bag and stood up to drop it into the rubbish bin.