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“Yes. Don’t you want to know how I did it? How I was in two places at once?”
And suddenly Hannah almost wants to laugh, because this is so Hugh. It’s the Hugh who proudly took her out for a drive in his brand-new BMW two years out of med school. Isn’t she a beauty? It’s the Hugh who drops his Damien Hirst into conversation, the Hugh who wears his old school tie in spite of the fact that only a tiny number of people care or even know what that means, the Hugh who signs his personal emails MD, FRCS, EBOPRAS, and all the other myriad letters he is entitled to, just because he can.
He wants to show off.
Hannah grits her teeth. It’s against every instinct she’s got to indulge him—he killed April. He shouldn’t get to crow about that—even if he’s spent ten years waiting to be able to do it. But her best chance of buying time is making Hugh talk. So she takes a deep breath.
“I know how. I just don’t know why.”
“You know how?” Hugh sounds slightly annoyed. His expression is skeptical. Hannah nods.
“Yes. I know—I know I spent months, years barking up the wrong tree. But I’m pretty sure I know now.”
She thinks back to that moment in the car, the dial of the microscope inching round, the picture suddenly clicking into focus… She’s not pretty sure. She’s certain.
She sees the room again, April sprawled across the rug, her cheeks flushed, her arms flung out—like something in an oil painting, she had thought, even at the time. A set in a stage play. The beautiful girl, the tragic scene. Romeo and Juliet. Othello and Desdemona.
“You do,” Hugh says. He folds his arms. Smiles. “Go on, then.”
“I was half-right, in a way,” she says. “The fact that no one came out of the staircase between John Neville leaving and us arriving, that was a red herring.”
“And yet,” Hugh says gently, “I didn’t shinny down the drainpipe, Hannah. Or have I got it the wrong way around, did I somehow shinny up?”
“No,” she says. Her pulse is steady, her blood pumping inside her. She is suddenly conscious of her whole body doing its best to keep her and her baby alive. She wants to live. “No, I was the one who had it the wrong way round. Because April wasn’t dead, was she, Hugh?”
“What do you mean?” Hugh says, but he’s parrying, she can see it in his eyes. She has scored a hit, and they both know it. “You saw her dead body yourself.”
“But I didn’t, did I? I saw April lying on the floor, playing dead. Just as you and she had devised.”
There is a long, long silence, and then the stillness in the car is broken by a single clap that makes the baby jump inside Hannah’s belly, and then another, and another. Hugh is applauding.
“Bravo, Hannah Jones. So. You finally figured it out. I knew you would eventually.”
Yes. He had known she would get there eventually, if she kept digging and digging. And he had tried to warn her off, persuade her not to keep asking questions, and then when that failed, divert her attention to Will, the one person, as he put it, that she might have unbent from her dogged search for the truth to protect. But she had not. She had refused to turn aside, even for Will. The thought makes her heart hurt.
“It’s been bothering me,” Hannah says, almost to herself, “Why did April never do anything to me that last week? She was punishing everyone. Will for leaving her. Ryan for refusing to dump Emily. Emily for having the temerity to hold on to Ryan. But she never did anything to me. And that made no sense. At first I thought it was because she didn’t know about me and Will—I mean, there was nothing to know, really. We weren’t doing anything behind her back.” Except that kiss, her heart says, but she ignores it and pushes on. “But people had noticed. You said it yourself—you didn’t need to be Freud to see how Will and I felt about each other, and April was very, very good at reading people. She knew. She absolutely knew. So why did she punish everyone but me? And then I realized.”
“Yes?” Hugh says, with his gentle, old-world curiosity and politeness. “Do go on.”
“I realized she did punish me—and that was it. That last night, the night I found her dead in our room, that was my punishment. That was showing me what a bitch I was being. You’ll be sorry when I’m gone—it’s such a teenage reaction, and the people who say it never mean it, least of all April. She would never have killed herself. She valued herself and her life far too much for that. But she wanted me to know what it felt like. She wanted me to feel, even if just for half an hour, twenty minutes, that tearing, unbearable knowledge of what I’d done, and what it had cost me.”
The phone in her pocket is red-hot now. She will have a mark against her leg tomorrow—if she survives tonight. Will, where are you?
“So,” Hugh says. He folds his hands together, for all the world like a tutor, leading her through an argument, testing her case for weaknesses. “So, she waited for you to come up to the room, and played dead. What next?”
“You were in on it,” Hannah says. “You had to be—because she knew that if I got too close I’d be able to tell she wasn’t dead. So she enlisted your help. That was your role, to come rushing up the stairs when I opened the door, then fall to your knees beside her ‘corpse’ and tell me, with all the authority of a first-year medical student, that April was dead. Then send me running out to make a fool of myself by summoning the authorities, at which point April would sit up and claim to have been asleep or something, and I’d look a drunk, hysterical idiot.”
“Very good,” Hugh says. He pushes his spectacles up his nose and blows his fringe out of his eyes. “I’m impressed.”
“But of course what really happened was that as soon as I left the room, you killed her, probably before she could even sit up. Under the cover of the noise I was making, banging on doors, screaming in the stairwell, you strangled her. But a body that’s been strangled doesn’t look like someone lying there playing dead. You had to keep me out of the room when I came back up the stairs with the authorities. I remember you standing there at the top of the stairs, barring the door, saying Nobody must go in, no one should disturb the body, and you know what”—she gives a bitter, hollow laugh—“you know what, I remember being impressed at your forethought, at the way you knew what to do. But it was bullshit. You just didn’t want me seeing the body of my friend, her face swollen and her arms bruised from you kneeling on them, bruises that weren’t there a few minutes ago. The police surgeons didn’t know—how could they? By the time they came to examine the body, they couldn’t possibly tell if she was murdered at 10:59 or 11:05. And with you and I insisting that we both found April dead at 11:03…”
She swallows.
“Poor John Neville. He never had a chance. I made sure of that.”
“Neville was a pest,” Hugh says briskly. He turns off the engine, and Hannah feels a rush of fear. Oh God, oh God, where is Will?
And then, with a horrible lurch, she realizes the phone in her pocket is no longer burning her leg. In fact, it’s cooling rapidly.
