Colin was a big man when alive, and stretched out on the floor like this he is a landscape from the cupboards to the doorway. He is face down, with one arm thrown above his head and the other pinned underneath his torso, and at first she thinks this is why he seems to be propped up a little on one side. She gets right down on the floor – not too close, because what if he turns his dead head and snarls or lashes out at her? – and peers into the gap underneath him, and she sees the knife handle jutting out of his chest. There is much less blood than she would have expected.
She crawls away from the body and holds Sarah again, the pair of them shaking.
‘Where’s Josh?’ Dennie asks.
‘He woke up with all the shouting,’ Sarah replies in a lifeless voice. ‘After I—’ She stops, swallows, and tries again. ‘After it happened I found him at the top of the stairs, crying.’
‘Oh my God, did he see it?’
Sarah shakes her head against Dennie’s shoulder. ‘I don’t think so. You can’t see into the kitchen from there. I mean he might have, I don’t know. I took him straight around to Michelle’s.’ Michelle was Sarah’s older sister, who lived in Tamworth.
‘At this time in the morning?’
Sarah’s laugh is a small, broken thing. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time. I thought I’d just stay there and call the police, but then I thought, what if they take Josh away from me? Colin would love that; he always had to have the last word. So I thought, fuck him, and came back here to sort it out myself, but he’s just too heavy. So, I called you. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have dragged you into this. Oh God, Dennie, I’ve fucked up, haven’t I? I’ve really fucked up this time.’ She clings to Dennie like a shipwreck victim, shuddering.
There really is only one thing Dennie can say. ‘We have to call the police.’
This rouses Sarah. ‘No!’
‘Sarah, look at him! Look at what you did!’
‘They’ll arrest me and put me in a cell, and I can’t face that, Dennie. I can’t!’
Dennie doesn’t know too much about Sarah’s childhood, other than that it was bad and involved her being beaten and locked for hours in a cupboard for whatever crimes she was deemed to have been guilty of. She has learned this from helping Sarah on her allotment, seeing the way she wouldn’t spend any longer than absolutely necessary in her own tool shed, and one incident when the wind blew the door shut so hard that it jammed while she was inside and she had begun to scream – the high-pitched animal wailing of absolute terror – and Dennie had opened it again to find Sarah curled up in a corner, sucking her thumb and sobbing. Dennie cannot understand why it is that some people, damaged for no fault of their own, will seek out relationships with people who damage them even more, but it’s not her place to make other people’s decisions for them, just to help them clear up the mess afterwards.
So she agrees to help Sarah clear up the mess.
She’s not stupid. She knows this is a serious crime – almost as serious as the murder itself. After all, Sarah could reasonably claim to have acted in self-defence and got a relatively light sentence, whereas helping to destroy evidence of a crime and prevent the proper burial of a body is a conscious and deliberate act, but Dennie has a cunning plan.
Dennie goes back to her allotment and returns with two pairs of gardening gloves and a large sheet of thick plastic that she would ordinarily use to protect her planting beds from the winter frosts, and they use it to carry Colin out to her car. The simplest thing would be to drive him out into the countryside and bury him, but then there would be no way to prevent his body’s accidental discovery by a farmer or a rambler. So they take him to the allotments instead.
It is nearly four in the morning and there is precious little chance of them being disturbed. In Sarah’s shed they cut his clothes off (Dennie will burn these in her garden incinerator later, along with her gloves, her clothes and Sarah’s pyjamas) and Dennie pulls the knife from his chest, and then the blood comes. His heart has stopped so it doesn’t come pumping and spurting like in horror movies – it sort of oozes out of the two-inch slit, and it does this for quite a while, but they are able to catch it in the plastic sheeting and take it outside and pour it into the soil. Sarah whispers to Dennie: ‘He gave me fuck-all but bruises when he was alive, he can at least give me some decent strawberries now he’s dead.’
However, what autumn gives them in terms of more darkness, it takes away by forcing them to tackle the frosty ground, and Dennie quickly realises that they are never going to be able to dig a hole large and deep enough to bury the corpse in one piece.
She comes back with another knife and a pruning saw – the kind with the slightly curved blade and heavily serrated teeth designed to cut through small branches. She offers to do the job herself, but Sarah insists, so Dennie hands the tools over and goes out to hack at the ground while Sarah takes Colin apart at the joints. Years later, on the rare occasion when she is feeling strong enough to treat Viggo to a bone, she always feeds him outside because she cannot bear to hear the scraping and crunching sounds, and the smell of raw flesh turns her stomach. She is surprised at how calmly Sarah works at her grim task – she doesn’t break down or betray
