“In a legal sense, you mean?” he said to Holly. “Not a lot. A slap on the wrist all round. Mason—he’s the one at the back. He’s in the most serious trouble. Potentially. But there are mitigating circumstances. He’ll be OK. I hope.” Fleet queried himself, and found that he genuinely did.
“And the boy? The one you fished from the river?” Holly laid a hand on Fleet’s knee then, squeezing it gently. Fleet turned and Holly looked down awkwardly, returning her hand to her lap.
“Luke’s still in hospital. He’ll be there for a few days yet. It was touch-and-go for a while. Nicky saved his life on the riverbank, you know. Administered CPR. And she’d already called for an ambulance.”
“I know,” said Holly. “I heard.”
“You did?”
“Word travels quickly in this town. That’s what I’ve gathered, anyway, from the little I’ve experienced of the place so far.”
Fleet didn’t know why he was surprised. The whole story was probably out by now. It wouldn’t have taken long for the news to go around, not after the police were seen heading to the woods again, and reports had begun to emerge that they’d discovered Sadie’s body.
“Do you know they changed their stories?” said Fleet, nodding toward Sadie’s friends. “When we told them what Luke told us . . . when they heard that he’d confessed to holding the knife . . . from saying they couldn’t remember what happened, every single one of them claimed they were the one holding the knife when Dylan died. Independently. Luke came back to protect them, and they decided to return the favor.”
Holly joined him in watching the kids heading off in the direction of the harbor. Cora had an arm around Abi’s shoulders, a sight Fleet would never have expected to see four days ago. Although when the lies had finally been stripped away, he’d been astonished by how much each and every one of the kids had changed. Even Mason. Particularly Mason. From a brash teenager, he’d morphed in Fleet’s eyes into a terrified little kid. Telling him that Sadie was really dead was one of the hardest things Fleet had ever had to do. At first Mason had said nothing. Moments later, Fleet hadn’t been sure the boy would ever be able to stop crying.
As he watched the kids comfort each other now, he marveled at how quickly indiscretions at that age were forgiven. He pictured them gathering on the quay one coming evening, passing around a bottle of cider and sharing stories about Sadie. Their friend. A girl they had loved in spite of their betrayals, and whose memory would haunt them for the rest of their lives. And afterward—after that final ceremony to say good-bye—it was likely their friendship would begin to crumble. Abi and Cora. Mason and Fash. Yes, indiscretions could be forgiven, but some could never be forgotten, and after Sadie things would never be the same. And of course there was Dylan—another ghost that would haunt them. This town was full of them, it turned out. Life was.
“So who was holding it?” said Holly, pulling Fleet from his thoughts. “The knife,” she clarified. “Out there in the woods.”
Fleet shook his head. “Who knows? To be honest, I’m not sure it even matters. Maybe to some people, but whoever it was, they didn’t mean for it to happen. Officially, what happened to Dylan will go down as an accident.”
“And Luke?” said Holly, hesitantly. “Will he be charged? I mean, is it true that he killed Sadie? That’s what everyone seems to be saying.”
Fleet gave in. He lit the cigarette. The smoke was fire in his throat, and he sucked it greedily down into his battered lungs. “It wasn’t Luke,” he told Holly. “It was Dylan.”
“Dylan?”
Fleet left time for the sound of the name to settle. He knew he was breaking every rule in the book by confiding in his wife, but it would all come out soon enough anyway. Fleet would make sure of that. He knew Luke wanted nothing more than to protect his brother—even now, even after his death—but Fleet couldn’t simply stand by and watch Luke throw away what was left of his life.
“Sadie was pregnant,” he said. “I mean, that’s not confirmed yet, but those tests . . . the ones you can buy? They’re never wrong, are they?”
Slowly, Holly shook her head. “You can get a false negative if you take the test too early. It’s rare to get a false positive.”
“So Sadie ran away. We haven’t worked out yet where she was going. Maybe she didn’t even know herself. I suspect she had a plan of some sort, depending on what she intended to do about the baby. But ultimately it hardly matters, because when she left her house in the middle of the night, her little brother heard her go. We’ve yet to get the full story from Luke about how it played out after that, but . . . Well. I doubt there will be any surprises.”
In fact, Fleet thought he knew exactly how it had all played out. When Luke had got up to check on Dylan, just as he’d described, it was Dylan’s door he’d found open, and his brother who’d been missing from his bed. Sadie would have made sure she’d closed her bedroom door behind her. A girl who went to such lengths to cover her tracks—with her bag, her bank records—wouldn’t have taken the chance that one of her family would so easily discover she’d sneaked out in the middle of the night. And perhaps when Luke had crept downstairs in search of his little brother, Dylan had already returned. Either that or Luke had ventured farther, and when he’d found Dylan, his little brother had confessed what he’d done.
He’d heard Sadie leave, perhaps after waking from one of his nightmares, and he’d followed her into the woods, in precisely the manner Luke had told Fleet he’d followed Sadie himself. And
