In the dark, the pale trunks of the apple trees all around were ghostly. Somewhere in the branches over Annie’s head a pigeon was cooing to itself, brrrrp brrrrp.
Tell me Keith hasn’t bottled it, she thought to herself. Tell me Keith Little isn’t about to start bleating on about his conscience too.
Having finally rounded the corner and found the door in the wall, Keith staggered through.
‘Over here,’ she hissed, under her breath. The shape stopped, turned in her direction.
‘Annie?’
‘Keith?’
‘My God, Annie, my fucking God.’
‘What happened?’
With her free hand, Annie reached her phone out of her pocket, switched the torch on, held it up so Keith could see where he was stepping.
‘What happened?’ she asked again.
In answer, he held up his hands, and in the stark light of the phone she could see his torn palms, the deep bloody tracks in his hands, the paths the cord tie of his cloak had worn in his flesh. His skin was strangely greenish in the light, like the skin of a man at the bottom of the sea, the blood absolutely black.
‘You did it,’ she said.
His face looked not just haggard but hollow, great dark shadows in the indentations of his cheeks. He stared at her.
‘He’s dead?’ she prompted.
He continued to stare at her. Had she detected just the slightest hint of a nod, or was that just the hand that was holding the torch quivering? The blood was literally dripping from Keith’s hands, trickling stickily down to the ends of his fingers. He barely seemed even to notice.
‘You did it,’ she prompted again. ‘Keith?’
She was tempted to click her fingers in his face, clap her hands, slap him. Something, anything, to break this stare, snap him back to reality.
‘It wasn’t him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It wasn’t Ned. I don’t know what happened. We followed him, like you told us. Jackson Crane had been shouting his name, for fuck’s sake, in the ballroom. And then from the back, when I went into the room upstairs after Jackson stormed out, he was slumped on the armchair and from behind it could only have been Ned, his silhouette, his back and neck and shoulders. But it wasn’t Ned.’
‘It wasn’t Ned.’
‘It was Adam. You made me strangle Adam Groom. And because that spineless fuck Freddie ran off down the corridor like a little girl, I had to hide the body myself.’ Keith looked at his hands as if they had somehow done all this independently of his brain.
Oh fuck, she thought, the pieces of her mental chess game scattering, the whole board cartwheeling through the air. Oh fuck, she thought, as Keith stepped forwards and began shaking her by the elbows and asking her what the fuck he should do, what the fuck was he going to do. I don’t know, she thought. Why do people always think I’m going to sort out their messes? I didn’t tell you to kill the wrong person, did I? Get as far the fuck away from here as possible, was her advice, probably.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘let’s just slow down and take this step by step. Let’s not do anything else at all until we’ve thought it through carefully.’
Adam, dead? Adam, dead. Then where the fuck was Ned?
Where the fuck had Freddie gone running off to, for that matter? Jesus. What if he spoke to someone? Told them what she’d asked him to do?
‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ Keith announced, belatedly, the penny finally dropping as he glanced down at himself, looked at his hands as if he was finally seeing the state of them. ‘I’ve got to get off this fucking island.’