The It Girl(131)

They sit in silence for a moment, Hannah trying to come to terms with all of this. She imagines November, huddled in a cafe with Geraint, trying to put into words feelings for which there are no words, feelings which she herself has spent almost every waking hour since Hugh’s confession trying to figure out.

Because how do you come to terms with such a thing? How can Will live with such a betrayal by his best friend? And how can she live her life knowing that she condemned John Neville to a lonely, ignominious death?

“Hey.” She hears Will’s voice, feels his lips on her hair before she understands what is happening, realizes that there are tears running down her face. “Hey, Hannah, no. Listen to me. No more crying—do you understand? This wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was,” she says. “It was, Will. I condemned him for being old, and weird and awkward—and that’s on me, don’t you understand? That will forever be on me.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Will says, more urgently. “Hugh fooled you—but not just you, he fooled all of us. You, me, the police, the college authorities. Even April. Everyone. He was—” His voice cracks, and she remembers again his helpless crying in the days and weeks after the shooting. “He was my best friend, for Christ’s sake. I loved him. And I introduced him to you, to April. Doesn’t that make me just as culpable?”

Hannah lies back on Will’s pillows, and she takes a deep breath, trying to quell her own tears. She knows Will is right. This is on Hugh—and only Hugh. And yet, she is right too. They all believed Hugh not because of what he was, but because of what he seemed—charming, gentle, harmless, handsome. All the things that John Neville was not. And that is on them. And it will be, forever. She will have to learn to live with that knowledge—for the rest of her life.

“I tell you what ticks me off,” Will is saying now, bitterly. He wipes his eyes with an angry swipe of his free hand. “It’s that line evidence recently uncovered, like Thames Valley Police were the ones who dug all this up. Evidence handed to us on a fucking plate by a bunch of civilians at risk to their lives would be nearer the mark.”

Hannah nods. She and Will have talked about this—about that nightmarish night, about Will’s long, terrified motorbike journey through the darkness with Hannah’s voice whispering in his ear beneath his helmet as she drew Hugh inexorably through his confession. He has told her how it felt, that growing sick certainty as he sped around bend after bend, raced through tunnels, bumped over cattle grids, and he realized not just that Hannah was in trouble, but how and why.

It was his recording of that conversation that clinched everything with the police, and even now Hannah goes cold with a mixture of relief and fear when she thinks of that split-second choice, of what might have happened if Will hadn’t made the decision to record her call. She could have ended up in jail herself—or Will could have. Because when the police had finally arrived, to find Hannah hysterical, Hugh dead, and Will shot through the side and bleeding out into the sandy soil of the clifftop, they had been inclined to treat Hannah as the potential killer, cuffing her and bundling her into a separate ambulance as Will was blue-lighted away into the distance.

Her story, after all, was almost too fanciful to be believable—a decade-old murder, her own growing doubts, and Hugh’s actions—the kidnapping, the struggle, the shooting, first Will, and then himself, through the heart. Had his gun simply gone off as he and Will struggled back and forth with the barrel between them? Or maybe… Hannah thinks of his weariness in the car, the weight that seemed to be pressing down upon him as they drove deeper into the night. Maybe he had finally grown sick of the toll, of everything he had sacrificed to protect his own secret.

They will never know the truth about those final moments. Not even Will knows—the dark nightmarish struggle is as unclear to him as it is to Hannah, and all he remembers is his own pain, the shocking realization that he had been shot and was bleeding out, great gouts of spreading warmth. But it was Will’s phone in Hannah’s hand, sticky and red, the phone she had passed across to police, unlocked with shaking bloodied fingers, that spelled out everything else, Hugh backing up Hannah’s story in his own words. Bravo, Hannah Jones. So. You finally figured it out. I knew you would eventually.

But she hasn’t figured it out. Or not completely.

Because she still doesn’t know why he did it. No one does.



* * *



IN THE TAXI ON THE way back from the hospital she calls November on her new replacement phone, fills her in on the funeral, on how Will is doing.

“He might be out tomorrow,” she says, and just saying the words sets up a little thrill inside her—the thought of having Will back home. Battered and bruised, to be sure, with a hole in his side the size of a fist, and black and yellow hemorrhaging that’s spread across most of his torso, but home. It has been lonely these last couple of weeks, just her and the baby. Lonely, waking in the night gasping from nightmares that she is still there, still in that car driving to an unknown destination, with a man she knows to be a killer. Lonely, knowing that if something happens, if she goes into early labor or begins to bleed, it will be just her in the cab to the hospital, waiting for the doctors, trying to plead her case. The bruise where Hugh hit her has gone from blue-black to a sickly yellow-green, but she can still feel it sometimes in the night when she turns awkwardly, her whale-like belly dragging the blankets with her. It twinges, the torn muscles aching deep inside.