In a Dark, Dark Wood

No. The balcony is not going to work.

At last, almost without hope, I try the back door.

And it swings open.

I feel something prickle across the back of my neck: shock, disbelief, a kind of fierce elation. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe the police didn’t lock it. Can it really be this easy, after everything else has been so hard?

There’s police tape across the opening, but I duck under it and half-walk, half-crawl inside. I straighten up, almost expecting sirens to go off, or a policeman to stand up from a seat in the corner. But the house is dark and quiet, the only movement a few flakes of snow scudding across the slate floor.

I put my hand out to swing the door shut, but it doesn’t close properly. It hits the frame, but bounces back open. I grab it, to try again, and as I do I notice something. There’s a piece of tape across the tongue of the latch, preventing it from shutting completely.

Suddenly I understand why the door kept swinging open that night – why, even after we locked it, it was never secure. The lock is the kind that just immobilises the door handle, stops it from turning the latch. But if the latch itself is pushed back, the handle is useless. It feels stiff when you rattle it, but there’s nothing holding the door shut but its own inertia.

For a second I think about ripping the tape off – but then I realise how stupid that would be. This – finally – is proof. In front of me, hidden innocently within the door frame, is cast-iron proof that someone set James up to die, and whoever placed the tape was that person. Carefully, without disturbing it, I push the door shut and then I drag a chair across the kitchen to rest against the inside of the glass.

Then, for the first time, I look around.

The kitchen looks strangely undisturbed. I don’t know what I was expecting: fingerprint dust, perhaps, that strange silver sheen on every surface. But as soon as I think about this, I realise how pointless it would be. None of us ever denied being in the house. Our prints would be all over the place, and what would that prove?

I want more than anything to crawl upstairs to one of the beds, and sleep. But I can’t. I may not have much time. By now they’ve probably discovered my room is empty. They’ll know I can’t have gone far under my own steam – not without money, shoes and a coat. It won’t take them long to find the taxi driver. And when they do …

I walk through the kitchen, my footsteps loud in the echoing silence, take a deep breath, and then open the door to the hallway.

They’ve cleared up, to some extent anyway. Much of the blood has gone, along with most of the glass, although I can feel the occasional tiny sliver crunch under my plastic soles. In its place there are markings on the floor, on the walls, bits of tape with notations I can’t read in the darkness. I don’t dare switch on a light. There are no curtains to draw and my presence would be visible from right across the valley.

But there are specks left here and there, dark rust splashes of something that used to be James – and now is not.

It’s the strangest thing – he is gone, and his heart’s blood is still here. I kneel on the soft wooden parquet, pitted with chunks of glass ground in by our shoes and marked by the soaking blood, and I touch my fingers to the stained grooves of the wood, and I think This was James. A couple of days ago, this was inside him, keeping him alive, making his skin flush and his heart beat. And now it’s gone – it’s lying here, wasted, and yet it’s all that’s left of him. Somewhere his body is being post-mortem’ed. And then he’ll be buried, or cremated. But a part of him will be here, in this house.

I get up, forcing my cold, tired legs to work. Then I go to the living room and grab one of the throws off the sofa. There are dirty wine glasses still on the table, from our last night. Fag butts are stubbed out in the dregs of wine, Nina’s roll-ups bloated into soggy white worms. But the planchette has been packed away, and the paper has gone. I cannot suppress a shiver at the thought of the police reading those deranged scrawlings. What did it mean, that long, looping murderer? Did someone write it deliberately? Or did it simply float up from the group subconscious, like a sea monster surfacing from someone’s inner-most fears, and then sinking back down?

The throw smells of stale cigarette smoke, but I hug it round my shoulders as I glance up at the empty pegs above the fireplace, and away. I can’t really bear to think of what I’m about to do. But I must do it. It’s my only chance to get to what really happened.

I start at the top of the stairs, standing where we all stood that night in a little huddle. Flo was to my right, and I remember putting out my hand to the gun. Clare and Nina were on the other side, Tom behind us.

The scene, with the quiet and the darkness and my own thudding heart, is so close to that night that for a moment I feel almost faint, and I have to stand and breathe through my nose, and remember that it is done, James is not coming up those stairs. We killed him – between us, with our drunken hysterical fear. We all held that gun.

I have to force myself to retrace what happened next, James’s body tumbling down the stairs, Nina and I stumbling after. This time I walk down slowly, holding the bannister. There is still glass on the stairs from the broken window, and I don’t trust my flip-flops in the darkness, not with the skidding shards underfoot.

Here was where Nina tried to resuscitate James.

Here was where I knelt in his blood, and he tried to speak.

I feel tears, wet on my face, but I scrub them away. There is no time for grief. The hours are ticking down until dawn, until they come and get me.

What happened next?

The living-room door is still off its hinges from when Tom took it down and we struggled with it out through the front door to where Clare was waiting in the car.

The front door is not deadlocked, and I open it from the inside without difficulty. When I do, the force of the wind nearly bangs the steel door into my face, and the snow rushes inside like a living thing, trying to get in, trying to force what little warmth is left in the house back out.

I screw up my eyes and, holding the throw hard around my shoulders, I step out into the white blizzard. I stand on the porch, where I stood that night waiting for Nina. I remember Tom calling out something to Clare, and Clare gunning the engine.

And then I remember noticing that her coat was lying over the porch rail.

I put out my hand, pretend to pick it up.

I’m shivering, but I’m trying as hard as I can to remember back to that night, to the shape of something small and round in the pocket.

I hold out my hand, my eyes watering with the hard pellets of driving snow.

And suddenly I can remember. I can remember what I was holding in my hand.

And I know why it set me running.

It was a shell. A shotgun shell. It was the missing blank.

Standing here, in my own footsteps, the thoughts shoot across my brain just as they did that night, and I can remember them: it’s like watching the snow melt, and the familiar landscape emerge from beneath.

It could have been there from the clay-pigeon shoot earlier. But I know enough now, from our shoot, to tell the difference between a live round and a blank. Live shotgun rounds are solid in your hand, packed with pellets that make them feel heavier than their compact shape suggests. What I held that night was light as plastic with no shot at all. It was a blank. The blank. The blank that was supposed to have been in the shotgun.

Clare had been the one to substitute the live round for the blank.

And now she’d just driven off into the night with James dying in the back of the car.

Why? Why?

It made no sense then, and it still makes no sense to me now, but then I had no time to consider. I had only one option: to catch them up, and confront Clare.

Now, I have time. I turn slowly and walk back into the house, and I shut and lock the door behind me. Then I go into the living room and sit, my head in my hands, trying to figure it out.

I cannot leave here until dawn – unless, that is … I get up, stiff with cold, and pick up the phone.

No, it’s still dead, the line simply hissing and crackling quietly. I am stuck then, stuck until daylight, unless I want to stagger back down that icy, rutted lane in the darkness once more, and I’m not sure I’d even make it.

I go back to the sofa and huddle deeper into the throw, trying vainly to get some warmth back into my limbs. My God, I’m so tired – but I cannot sleep. I must figure this out.