“You look where you’re going!” He tells me. “Nearly ran into me!”
I mumble an apology. Eventually he grudgingly accepts.
“Over there. Carefully.” He points to where he wants me to park the car. I nod, and roll the window back up. When I get there I sit still for a few moments, my stomach is cold as a block of ice. I realize I’ve just accepted something. Something awful. And something obvious, I suppose. Something you’ve probably already worked out, but I haven’t, not till this moment.
James and Oscar are dead. They must be. They would have realized they couldn’t escape in the car, because the keys got blown up with me – or that’s what they thought. And they couldn’t stay, because the police would have caught them, so they tried to get away on foot, on a freezing night. But they weren’t dressed for it. They had no equipment. They would have got colder and colder, probably they would have thought they could flag down a car, or find an outbuilding to shelter in, but there’s nothing, up there in the north of Lornea. No one goes there, there’s nothing.
I think of how cold I was, driving back, even with the heater on full. We were out in the cold for ages. It wouldn’t have taken long for the cold to get to them. They’d have got disorientated. Hypothermic. I’ve seen what it does to people, we learned about it in the Surf Lifesaving club. How it makes people go mad, they think they’re hot, they take off their clothes, and that just kills them faster.
No. That’s crazy. I’m just over-tired and stressed. They’ll be here. On the boat. Somehow, they’ll have found their way, and they’ll be on this ferry. Suddenly I’m in a hurry. I grab my things, and get out the car, and hurry onto the passenger deck of the boat. I take a seat in the café, by the window, so I can watch the foot passengers come aboard. I’m just in time, because they haven’t let them on yet, so I can see them lining up and then boarding. There’s only a few people. The same ones I saw before.
None of them are James and Oscar.
And then my eyes turn, as if pulled by an invisible wire, to the TV screen, playing in the corner of the café. I hadn’t paid it any notice before, but now I can’t ignore it. Because it’s got my face playing on it. The volume is down but it has subtitles on, delayed from the pictures a bit.
Island police hunt Billy Wheatley over murder of Fonchem Security Guard
I feel my heart rate scream upwards. I feel everyone in the café suddenly staring at me, making the connection. They don’t, they ignore me, but I stumble up anyway, knocking over my chair in my rush to get out of there. I don’t know where to go, I push open the heavy sea-door, out onto the deck. My mouth’s hanging open, my eyes filling with tears at the biting cold wind. They think I’m a murderer. But I’m not. I had nothing to do with the explosion. I didn’t kill that man.
But… I watch below me, as the last the of the foot passengers climb on, and the ferry workers take the passenger gangway down. I feel the deep throated judder of the ship’s huge engines. I look down, at the black, freezing water, where I could hide away from this, where no one would find me. Where this wouldn’t be real.
Because I didn’t kill that man… but I did kill James and Oscar.
Part II
Chapter Forty-Nine
There was no clear moment when Amber Atherton knew that Billy had died, no before and after, only a growing sense of awareness and understanding of what was known, and what was not. But if there was one point that served as a divide between the two realities, it was when Billy’s father, Sam Wheatley, phoned to invite her to the memorial service.
“I was thinking you might like to,” Sam’s voice was low as he spoke, he sounded broken, exhausted. “Maybe say a few words. You knew him better than anyone.”
Amber clutched the phone tightly in her hand, the only thing she could do to reduce the feeling of vertigo. It was as if just below her there was a spinning black vortex that threatened to swallow her up. This couldn’t be real. And yet it was.
“I don’t get it,” Amber replied. “This still doesn’t make sense.”
On the other end of the line, Sam was silent for a long while. Then he began again, explaining how every other possibility was now exhausted.
“He’s gone Amber. I know it’s hard. The police know he got on the ferry that afternoon, and he didn’t get off. It only leaves one option.” His voice was firmer now, but still filled with pain. Pain that he would live with for the rest of his life. They both would.
“I still don’t understand.”
“They think he saw the TV news on the boat. They’d issued the appeal for information by then, and there were pictures of him all over it. He’d have known the police were on to him. They believe he thought it was his only way out.” Sam continued.
Amber was silent. Feeling the frustration bubble back to the surface.
“But out of what? What did he do? You’re not telling me you believe he killed that guy?”
There was another silence, a long one, before Sam spoke again.
“They have his fingerprints on the bomb parts, Amber. I don’t think they’d lie about it. I don’t think they can.”
Amber felt the vertigo again. She remembered the story Billy had told her about when he was a baby, and Sam had been falsely accused of drowning his sister. The police, together with Billy’s mother’s wealthy family, had joined forces to protect her, the real
