The Last Party (DC Morgan #1)(115)

She couldn’t.

Could she?

Clemmie’s wetsuit is hanging over a chair outside her lodge. She skulks in the shadows, her breath catching when she sees Caleb and the twins inside. The table’s littered with bottles of beer and wine, and the mother in Clemmie wants to rap on the window and lecture them. Instead, she grabs her swimming things and returns to the pontoon.

She’s swum at night before, a torch in her tow-float like a firefly on the water, but never alone, never with her blood fizzing with alcohol and fear. Her breathing’s already too fast, too shallow, and when she slips silently into the water it abandons her entirely. She keeps moving, trusting her body, fighting the side of her brain which tells her she’s drowning. She surfaces, and slowly her lungs expand, and she can breathe again.

Clemmie swims breaststroke so she can better keep watch, although she knows she’s hidden in the darkness. The water is inky black, its choppy surface accustomed to hiding what lies beneath. Ahead of her, the mast on Angharad’s boat glints in the moonlight. The water plays tricks on her sense of distance. The boat seems to stay out of reach until suddenly it’s just thirty metres away, and then twenty . . . ten.

Clemmie hauls herself up, her limbs like jelly. She’s praying there’s fuel in the outboard motor, because in spite of the lessons Angharad gave her and Caleb, she isn’t capable of sailing – especially not in the dark. She remembers to push the centreboard down through the slot in the bottom of the boat, locking it into place, then she releases the hinge on the motor and drops it into the water. She turns it on, grips the starter rope and tugs it hard.

There’s a splutter and a cough, then silence.

‘Oh, come on, come on . . .’ Clemmie tries again, and again. Tears of frustration spring to her eyes, her teeth chattering as the cold seeps into her bones. She pulls again, and the splutter becomes a roar. She fiddles with the choke, finds the tiller, and points the boat towards The Shore.

As Clemmie draws near to the lodges she kills the engine, slotting the oars into their housings and rowing silently through the water towards the pontoons. She makes out the lumpen outline of Rhys’s body and for a second she thinks he’s alone. She curses Glynis, but then she realises there are two shapes, one cradling the other. Clemmie is at once torn apart by Glynis’s grief, and terrified Rhys has made a recovery – is, even now, telling his mother what Clemmie has done. But as she brings the boat inexpertly alongside the pontoon she sees that he’s in the same position she left him in, his mouth open and blood obscuring his features. Foam flecks his mouth. She reaches for his wrist, ostensibly to pull him closer to the boat, but really to see if—

Clemmie lets out a breath. He’s dead. And she can’t let herself wonder whether she killed him, or Glynis did, and, now that it’s done, does it even matter? Rhys is dead.

‘Help me get him in the boat,’ Clemmie says. ‘I can’t manage on my own.’ She’s struggling to make her limbs comply, the cold enveloping her so completely she can’t remember what it is to feel warm. Together, the two women heave Rhys into the hull of the boat.

As they leave The Shore behind, Clemmie rummages in the locker beside her and throws a lifejacket to Glynis. ‘Put that on.’ She doesn’t know if Glynis can swim, and she can’t risk the woman falling in. There’s a short length of rope in the locker, and she throws that too. ‘Tie the trophy to his ankle.’

‘This is wrong. We have to go to the police. I’ll explain—’

‘They’ll put you in prison, Glynis!’ Clemmie shouts, the wind whipping the words from her mouth. She holds Glynis’s gaze until the older woman looks away, defeated, and begins knotting the rope.

If there’s no body, thinks Clemmie, trying to still her whirring mind, there’s no evidence. She doesn’t know how much they’ve already left – fingerprints, fibres, DNA – and how much of that will be washed away, and she’s panicking, now, about what they’ve left at the Lloyds’ lodge. Has Glynis done enough? Did Clemmie leave anything incriminating at the scene, anything which can’t be explained away?

‘It’s done.’ Glynis’s voice breaks. She cradles her son’s head against her chest.

Clemmie kills the engine. She nods. Moves to Rhys’s body and grips both his wrists. ‘Take his feet.’

Glynis looks at her, her eyes pleading.

‘Prison,’ Clemmie says. ‘A life sentence – you’ll die behind bars. Is that what you want?’

‘I could explain, tell them it was an accident.’

‘And what about me? I didn’t ask to be dragged into this – I’m here to protect you.’

‘I know and I’m grateful, I really am, but—’

‘What will happen to Caleb, when they lock me up? I got him back on the right side of the tracks, but do you think he’ll stay there, with a mother in prison? If you won’t do this for me, do it for Caleb.’

The clouds shift and, for a second, moonlight illuminates the boat. Glynis looks at Rhys’s corpse. She takes his legs. Clemmie has a sudden, incongruous memory of giving Caleb the bumps at a birthday party, flinging him into the air once for each year he’d been alive. Three, four, five.

‘After three,’ Clemmie says. ‘One, two, three—’

Above the village, the sky lights up in reds and blues, electric rain pouring down on to the water. A rocket shoots for the moon, exploding in a cascade of silver.