In a Dark, Dark Wood(83)

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.

Clare substituted the live round.

Therefore Clare killed James.

But it makes no sense. Clare has no motive – and she is the only person who could not have faked those texts.

I have to think.

The question I keep coming back to is why; why would Clare kill James on the eve of their own wedding?

And then suddenly, with a coldness that’s totally different to the chill in the air, I remember Matt’s words in the hospital. James and Clare were having problems.

I shake it off almost immediately. This is ridiculous. Yes, Clare’s life has to be perfect; yes she has incredibly high standards, but for God’s sake, she’s been dumped before. She held a massive grudge, I know that, because I sat by while she signed Rick’s email up to every porn site and Viagra newsletter she could find. But she sure as hell didn’t kill the bloke.

But there is one big difference.

When Rick dumped Clare, Flo wasn’t in the picture.

I think of Flo’s words, as she sobbed outside the bathroom on the first night: She’s my rock, and I’d do anything for her. Anything.

Anything?

I remember her reaction to me going to bed – the way she’d exploded, accusing me of sabotage. I’ll kill you if you ruin it, she’d promised. I hadn’t taken her seriously. But maybe I should have.

And that was just a hen. What would she do to the man who was planning to leave her best friend at the altar?

And who better to take the fall than the bad ex-friend who stole Clare’s rightful property and then walked away for ten long years.

But now it has all spiralled out of control.

And then I remember the matching clothes Flo was wearing on that last night – and suddenly I realise: what if it wasn’t Clare’s coat on the rail, but Flo’s, and Clare simply picked it up by mistake?

Flo. Flo was the one who picked up the gun.

Flo was the one who told us it wasn’t loaded.

Flo was the person who set this whole thing up, persuaded me to come, arranged the whole thing.

And Flo could have sent that text.

I feel like a web is closing round me, like the more I fight the more I will be tangled in it.

James is dead.

Clare is dying.

Flo is dying.