The Sick Rose (38 page)

‘We need to get him up there somehow,’ she said. She spoke about it in brisk tones that left no room for doubt on his part, and went some way to help her get into the part too. ‘If we do it anywhere else we’ll have to roll his body or drag it up to the car park. It’ll take hours and we’ll leave a big drag mark in the snow.’ Paul winced. ‘The only way we can overpower him is if we sneak up on him. I’ll come up from behind and hit him with a spade or something. I only need to knock him off his feet the first time.’

She looked to him for feedback but got only a slow nod. While she externalised every thought, he seemed to have a running interior monologue that she could only guess at. It had been one of the things that had drawn her to him in the first place, this stillness, but now she wished that he was more direct. They could no longer afford to attempt to interpret each other’s moods. She tried not to let the frustration show in her voice. ‘I’m really worried about leaving traces,’ she went on. ‘We’ve only got the weekend to make it like it never happened. Everyone will be back on Monday morning. Ideally we need loads of snow or a complete thaw so they can’t see where we’ve been.’

Paul closed his eyes and went silent. For a few, seconds Louisa thought that he was losing his nerve and her guts churned in panic, but when he opened them she saw that he had only been thinking.

‘I don’t think we need to worry about that,’ he eventually replied. ‘People only notice what they’re looking for. Do you ever see a bit of disrupted earth and think, I bet there’s a body under that? They’ll just think there was a car parked there or something.’

‘I suppose so. And it is only Nathaniel. He hasn’t exactly got the most questing mind.’

‘Poor old Nathaniel,’ said Paul, swilling the foamy remains of his pint around the bottom of the glass and motioning to the barmaid for two more of the same. ‘What did he ever do to deserve getting mixed up in all this?’

‘Nathaniel isn’t mixed up in anything. He’ll pour the gravel over the car park and no one will be any the wiser. It’s not like we have a
choice
, Paul.’

‘I know.’

On the Thursday, they went to Kelstice to rehearse. The car inched querulously over ice both white and black. A couple of times Paul nearly lost control of the vehicle; his ungloved hands were sweating. Louisa too was clammy with nerves as they made their way down the ride but there was no sign that Scatlock had been there in their absence; the only tyre tracks were their own and the ones he had left after his first visit. His three-point turn had made swooping arcs and loops in the slush.

The tool room was a windowless chamber, corrugated steel painted the same dull green inside and out and lit only by a fluorescent bulb that took a few seconds to flicker into life. By its harsh glare they surveyed the implements neatly arrayed before them, rakes and hoes hanging by the necks from wall racks. Louisa caught her and Paul’s reflection in the shiny surface of a spade. Side by side, fingers linked, they looked like any normal couple kitting out their garden at a suburban DIY store on a Sunday afternoon. She let the fingers of her free hand trace the handles of the tools she handled daily, expertly, wondering which she would select to change from tool to weapon. Her hands hovered over thick green twine that might double as a garrotte. That rake could blind him. She discounted a huge pickaxe, the size and shape of a liner’s anchor: it would be too much for her to handle with precision and everything would depend on the accuracy of her blow. She picked up a small pruning knife.

‘Not a blade,’ he insisted. ‘Anything but a blade.’

Her hand closed over a large blunt shovel, heavy at the spade but with a handle made of light, hollow steel. Its wide, blunt surface would give her a greater margin of error than any other tool. She met Paul’s eye. He looked like he was going to be sick, but he nodded. Under his supervision she practised wielding the spade time and time again, like a golfer working on her swing. The difficulty was not in mustering enough force – she was fortified with nervous energy – but in raising the spade high enough to strike the back of Scatlock’s head. They went into the trees where there was a limitless supply of wooden targets. After a couple of hours she could land the back of the spade on any given knot at a second’s notice. Focusing on the mechanics of the task blinkered her to the horror of it. She was aiming in the first instance to incapacitate him; the second or the third strike would be the one that killed. Somehow she already knew that raising her weapon for the second time would be the difficult part; the challenge would be not the felling of the man but the finishing of him.

They called it a day at four o’clock, when hunger and fatigue and fading light forced them back to the hotel. Paul drove while she tried to massage her neck and shoulders. Her upper body was achy and tender, as though someone had inserted a wooden coathanger into the yoke of her shirt that she could not remove. She took comfort from the knowledge that the death would be at her hands. Paul would be her accomplice and that was all. No matter what he thought, she had crossed that line when she was eighteen. She gave Paul every chance to back out of it. She knew he understood that killing Scatlock was necessary – there was no other way to ensure what she had done to Adam remained a secret, and it was the only way that Paul would ever be free to testify against Daniel – but his reluctance was so obvious that it forced her to hide her own. She had not had time to adjust to or enjoy the liberation that should have followed Paul’s disclosure that Adam was still alive, and now her murderer’s mantle was heavy on her shoulders again.

‘I don’t mind doing it on my own,’ she said as he followed her through the revolving door of the Motel Inn, although she was calling his bluff; she knew she couldn’t go through with it without Paul’s strength or sanction. ‘You don’t have to be a part of this. I won’t blame you, I’ll understand.’

‘Even if you could do it on your own I wouldn’t let you,’ he said. ‘I’m the reason he came here in the first place, and I’m the one he really wants. You’re just . . . the icing on the cake.’

The gruesome task on the near horizon took away some of her appetites – food, sleep – and redoubled others – drink, sex. She was surprised, unsettled, to learn that the prospect of death was the strongest aphrodisiac she had ever known. Paul felt it too; he was unusually taciturn everywhere but in bed, the only place the tensions of the week were released. If only it were possible to capture the feeling without taking a life. There was a doomed perfection about those four days in the Leamington Business Park Motel Inn. Nasty wine, cheap bedlinen and a television that didn’t work properly took on the qualities of champagne, silk sheets and a virtuoso violinist under the balcony playing their song.

On the Saturday morning they woke up at six and ate a tense, wordless breakfast of boxed cereals and yesterday’s croissants; the kitchen did not open till seven. Paul’s nervousness had infected her during the night like a virus. Killing Carl Scatlock still seemed necessary but it no longer seemed sexy or easy. The last few days of plotting and practising felt like a game. They weren’t Bonnie and Clyde. They were a gardener approaching middle age and a teenage boy barely out of school, taking on an ex-soldier with a vendetta.

They checked out in silence. She couldn’t help think that their departure should have contained an element of ceremony; as it was, Paul paid the bill in seconds, using the credit card he had been forced to provide as a condition of the hotel accepting his booking. Their light luggage was thrown into the car. She looked back at the exterior of the building, knowing that within minutes of their leaving she would forget what it looked like. They were the only people in the vast car park. It was still dark, but that peculiar kind of snow-darkness that she had grown used to over the past couple of weeks. The peach-coloured glow of the streetlamps remodelled the landscape. Even shadow and light could no longer be trusted.

She kept the car in second gear, glad that the drive required all her concentration. It took a full five minutes to negotiate the roundabout that linked the business park to the bypass road. The only other vehicle was a supermarket lorry, its cargo snaking crazily behind the cabin, which she hung back to avoid.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Paul once they were on the Kelstice road.

He had, in fact, interrupted a terrifying idea that Scatlock might not be alone. She wondered why, when they had gone to such trouble to plot the steps he would take and where he would park his car, they had not factored this in. It was because he had seemed such a solitary man, but he would have cronies, of course he would. She only hoped that her instincts were right, and that a man of such arrogance – and, yes, greed – would go it alone. She knew if she voiced this creeping doubt he would lose his nerve altogether, so she tried to make light of the situation.

‘I just can’t stop thinking what a waste of fertiliser it’s going to be, burying him in the car park. It seems such a shame to compact him down under layers of clay and gravel where nothing’s ever going to grow. It would have been the only decent thing he ever did.’

It worked: Paul started to chuckle. ‘See what I mean about him being a bastard?’ he said. ‘He won’t even get himself murdered in the spring when the ground’s nice and soft and we’d be planting.’

Their respite from anxiety was brief; laughter was snuffed by shock as they rounded the bend near Kelstice Bridge. A line of cars stretched back from the crossing. This was an arresting sight in itself; congestion on the Kelstice road happened occasionally during the rush hour but this early on a Saturday it was unusual even to pass another car. But that was not what made her mouth go dry. It was the sign that sat in the middle of the left lane, white on blue, declaring
Police Roadblock Do Not Cross
.

She managed to put the car into neutral and found that her fingers drummed rapidly on the steering wheel until Paul put a hand over hers to still her and left it there. She could feel his pulse, hot and fast, in the pad of his thumb.

He said weakly, ‘He
wouldn’t
.’

An officer in a fluorescent yellow jacket, who looked barely out of his teens but who must have been older than Paul, was inexpertly getting the line of cars on the other side of the bridge to back up so that a bus, just shy of the brow of the hill, could turn around. While he was waiting for the cars to accommodate his manoeuvre, the bus driver was shivering, smoking and pacing up and down the queue. Louisa wound down the window.

‘What’s the problem?’ she said.

The driver nodded hello to Paul, who was hunched down in the passenger seat, and lowered his brow fractionally in reply.

‘Some poor bastard’s gone into the bridge.’

‘Oh dear, I hope no one was hurt,’ said Louisa automatically.

‘I’d say he’s got a couple of cuts and grazes, yeah,’ the driver sniffed. ‘No, he’s dead, love. No way you could survive that. The car’s all scrunched up. I’ve got to go all round the houses now. This is a fucking nightmare, excuse my French.’

Louisa tried to compose her features into an expression of sympathy, but he was already gone, delivering his bad tidings to the driver behind them.

They had a brief, fragmented conversation.

‘Jesus, I thought . . .’

‘Me too.’

‘I’m not happy about the police being . . .’

‘No, I know.’

‘But at least it’s not . . .’

‘Yeah.’

‘Are we still going to . . . ?’

‘Of course.’

It was an age before they were allowed to turn their car around. In that time, a low silvery sun had risen and one of the Kelstice landowners, although not the farmer she leased her plot from, had walked into the village and told the police he was happy to let smaller vehicles access the village via a dirt track that cut across one of his fields. Louisa’s little car slipped its way along the snow-rutted lane, almost giving up when it had to cross another low stone bridge over the Kelstice brook. It would have been quicker to walk. It would have been quicker to
hop
. The drive took half an hour but they emerged only yards from their point of departure, on the other side of Kelstice Bridge. There was the same Warwickshire Constabulary police car they had seen before, the officer-youth now shouting unintelligibly into a radio pinned to his chest. She proceeded slowly, not just because of the dangerous roads but to see what had happened; her experience with Adam had not cured her rubbernecker’s instincts when it came to car smashes. From this angle, the ghastly extent of the damage was visible. The ancient bridge remained intact – not a single stone had been dislodged from its walls – which was a miracle when you saw what had happened to the vehicle. Traffic cones bordered the police-designated accident scene: its circumference was vast, stretching from the bridge itself up to the village green. Tyre tracks criss-crossed confusingly so it was impossible even to tell in which direction the car had been travelling. Louisa could see a single twisted arc of black metal – a bumper? A wheel guard? A window frame? – lying in the middle of the road. Crystals of shattered windscreen glittered rainbow in the sun. Paul too, despite his professed distaste for the gruesome, was twisting in his seat to get a better look. Something he saw made him draw his breath in sharply.

‘Stop the car,’ he said.

His tone forbade her from asking him why. She pulled up parallel to a carefully swept pavement. Before she had even put the handbrake on, he was out of the car and running not towards the police tape but up the little mound to the Kelstice Arms. He slipped once, toeing a slice of green in the white, and then, when he reached the top, fell on his backside like a novice skier. When he got to his feet, he peeped through his fingers like a child watching a scary film. He kept them there until she was almost at the top of the hill, and dropped his hands only to catch her own and pull her up to where he stood.