The Guest List(90)

‘I’m sorry, Aoife, but I really must be getting back to the marquee now.’

‘No,’ she says.

I laugh. ‘What do you mean, no?’ I use my most winning voice. ‘Look. You don’t have any proof of what you’re saying. Because there isn’t any. I’m terribly sorry for your loss. I don’t know what you’re thinking about doing. But whatever it is it wouldn’t do any good. It would be simply your word against mine. I think we know who would be believed. According to all records it was just a tragic accident.’

‘I thought you’d say that,’ she says. ‘I know you won’t admit it. I know that you don’t regret it. I overheard you in the cave, after all. You took everything from me that night. My mother as good as died that night too. We lost my father to a heart attack a few years later, certainly due to the stress of his grief.’

I’m not afraid of her, I remind myself. She has no hold over me. I have slightly bigger fish to fry here, things with real consequences. She’s just a bitter, confused woman—

And then I catch a glimpse of something. A gleam of metal, that is. In her other hand, the one not holding the torch.





Now


JOHNNO


The Best Man


I couldn’t save him.

I shouldn’t have pulled the knife out, I know that now. It would only have increased the bleeding, probably.

I wanted to make them understand, when they found me out in the dark. Femi, Angus, Duncan. But they wouldn’t listen. They had these burning torches that they held out like weapons, like I was a wild animal. They were shouting at me, screaming at me, to drop the knife, to just PUT IT DOWN and there was so much noise in my head. I couldn’t get the words out. So I couldn’t make them see that it wasn’t me. I couldn’t explain.

How I’d been coming down off whatever Pete Ramsay had given me, out there in the storm.

How the lights went out.

How I found Will, out there in the dark. How I bent over him and saw the knife, sticking from his chest like something growing out of him, buried so deep you couldn’t see any of the blade. How I realised, then, that in spite of all of it, I still loved him. How I hugged him to me and cried.

They surrounded me, the other ushers. They held me like an animal until the Gardaí arrived on their boat. I could see it in their eyes, how they feared me. How they knew I had never really been one of them.

The Gardaí are here now. They’ve put me in cuffs. They’ve arrested me. They’ll take me back to the mainland. I’ll be tried back home, for the murder of my best friend.

Yeah, I did think about it, in the cave. Killing Will, I mean. Picking up a rock close to hand. And there was definitely a moment when I really thought about it. When it felt like it would have been the easiest thing. The best thing.

But I didn’t kill him. I know that – even though things did go a bit hazy after I’d had that pill from Pete Ramsay, a couple of slightly blank spots. I mean, I wasn’t even in the tent. How could I have grabbed the knife? But the police don’t seem to think that’s a problem.

I don’t think of myself as a killer, anyway.

Except I am, aren’t I? That kid, all those years ago. I was the one who tied him up, in the end. Will made sure of that, but I still did it. And it’s not really an excuse that will stand up to anything, is it, saying that you were too thick to properly think out the consequences?

Sometimes I think of what I saw the night before the wedding. That thing, that figure, crouched in my room. Obviously there’s no point in telling anyone about that. Imagine it: ‘Oh, it wasn’t me, I think Will might actually have been stabbed with a great fucking cake knife by the ghost of a boy we killed – yeah, I think I saw him in my bedroom the night before the wedding.’ Doesn’t sound all that convincing, does it? Anyway, it’s more than likely that it came from inside my head, what I saw. That would make a kind of sense, because in a way the boy’s been living there for years.

I consider that jail cell waiting for me. But when I think about it, I’ve been in a prison since that morning when the tide came in. And maybe it’s like justice catching up with me, for that terrible thing we did. But I didn’t kill my best friend. Which means someone else did.





AOIFE


The Wedding Planner


I lift up the knife. I told Freddy I only wanted to get Will here to speak to him. Which was true, at least in the beginning. Perhaps it was what I overheard in the cave that changed my mind: the lack of remorse.

Four lives destroyed by that one night. One guilty life in recompense for an innocent: it seems a more than fair trade.

I hope he sees the blade, catching in the torch beam. For a moment I want him – so golden, so untouchable – to feel a tiny fragment of what my little brother might have experienced that night as he lay on the beach, waiting for the sea to come in. The terror of it. I want this man to be more terrified than he has ever been in his life. I keep the torch trained on him, on his widening eyes.

And then, for my little brother, I stab him. In his heart.

I have raised hell.





EPILOGUE





Several hours later


OLIVIA


The Bridesmaid


The wind has stopped, finally. The Irish police have arrived. We’re all gathered in the marquee, because they want us in one place. They’ve explained to us what has happened, what they found. Who they found. We know that someone’s been arrested, but not who, yet.