‘So… you had both of them on the go,’ she said, channelling Michaels, who would certainly have put it like that. ‘You were getting into a little threesome.’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head and raking his left hand through his hair. ‘No way. I was trying to get out of a threesome. I didn’t want it. I loved them both and I knew this was going to mash up our friendship, but it was already blown apart and I didn’t know how to handle it. I said we all had to talk. The three of us. I wanted to get back to where we used to be. I wanted to stop it all. I just… wanted it to stop.’
Kate’s throat felt like it was filled with concrete. She had heard this so many times. The standard cry of the abusive man in the interview room, while a woman lay cold on the slab in the mortuary. “She screamed and screamed, and I just wanted it to stop.” Or, “She laughed at me and I had to make it stop.” Or, ‘She was leaving me; I had to make it stop.”
She became aware of Sid, spinning below Lucas’s fist. ‘Where… where is Sid taking us?’ she said.
‘Down here, I think,’ said Lucas. He moved on down the narrow path, barely more than an animal track now. Beneath the trees it was muffled and quiet, with moss and lichen covering much of the ground like a green carpet.
Kate followed, her belly set like iron, wondering whether she was actually here. This whole thing was so, so hyperreal, she wouldn’t be even a bit surprised to wake up from it, her body drenched in sweat and tangled in the sheets, panic ebbing as she realised it was just another nightmare.
A fallen oak lay decaying in the lowest part of this sleeve of green. It had to have been there for a decade or two. Lucas moved slowly down the slope towards it, holding Sid out on a steady arm and pausing every few steps to watch the way the pendulum swung. Eventually he dropped to his knees and stared at the underside of the log. His face, when he lifted it to Kate, was blanched and mask-like.
‘There’s something here,’ he said.
37
He was here, on his knees, because of the last silent call. At just after 2am, he had woken to the buzz of the mobile on the bedside table and snatched up the device to see the familiar number withheld notification as it vibrated in his palm.
‘Hello,’ he’d said.
Once again, a long silence, although he could sense the caller on the other end. ‘Speak to me,’ he’d said; a medium channelling a ghost.
Still nothing but a long exhalation. And then, finally, the words, like a sigh of air around a door. ‘Lucas. It’s time to dig me up.’
The call ended before he could respond, but it had done its work. Here he was, a few hours later, kneeling by a fallen oak tree, Sid spinning in his hand and Kate staring at him as if waiting for the jump scare in a particularly disturbing horror flick. She was right to prepare herself. This wasn’t going to be pleasant for her.
Lucas took a moment, knowing his world was about to spin wildly out of control in a matter of minutes. When he revealed what was here, Kate might never look at him the same way again. Because she had begun to look at him the way he knew he was looking at her.
Once or twice in a lifetime, if they were lucky, a person could meet someone who would put a match to the dry kindling in their soul. Someone who would light up their world from within.
As soon as she’d come marching into his old bungalow, waving her ID and demanding his help last year, Lucas had recognised Kate as a match bearer. She certainly had turned the heat up. The physical attraction was palpable, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t a one-way thing. It was doomed, of course. Aren’t the best romances always doomed? In the last few days, though, he’d begun to wonder if, once they’d talked out everything they could, there might be the faintest chance that this could work.
And then the call.
‘It’s time to dig me up…’
Even though he knew it was almost totally hopeless… or maybe because he knew it was almost totally hopeless, he had held her back for just a minute, up on the hillside, before committing to speak his sorry tale. He had pulled her closer, breathed in the scent of her, felt the heartbeat inside her, known that the attraction was mutual, even if she was wrestling with it. Would that be enough to sustain him after today? It was all he had.
He hadn’t needed to bring her here, of course. He didn’t need to tell her everything. He could edit the story for her like he’d edited it for the police when he was fifteen. After all, he hadn’t exactly lied. He’d only not mentioned a few things that they might have found… interesting.
But that call…
‘It’s time to dig me up…’
There was so little chance for him and Kate now. It was a tiny, tiny sliver of chance. But if he didn’t show her what Sid was pointing at now, his own guilt was going to destroy even that chance, so hey. Here they were.
She looked incandescent; her face pale and luminous as if lit from within while her eyes fixed on him, waiting. He could sense the tension in every muscle and sinew of her; her belly was taut and clenched and her limbs were a microsecond’s notice away from leaping into fight or flight. She’d never been more beautiful, and he had never been more wretched before her.
Lucas reached into the damp peat and moss beneath the fallen tree and drove his fingers in deep.
38
Kate was battling with a sense of unreality once more as
