They have to figure out what to do.
“He didn’t try to stop you leaving?” Hugh asks.
“He did,” Hannah says. She almost can’t believe it herself. “He—he ran after me. But he tripped over the table. I don’t know what would have happened if he’d caught up with me.”
A picture comes to her. Will’s lean, strong hands wrapped around April’s throat—
The image washes over her with a physical shock like ice water, making her cheeks flare and her breath quicken.
She pushes the thought away. She can’t think about that right now. About the reality of what this means. All she can do is put one foot in front of the other.
“Okay,” Hugh says now. He stands and paces to the end of the living room, to the beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street. He runs his hand through his hair. “Okay. Let’s think. Let’s think about what to do. Did Will know you were coming here?”
Hannah shakes her head.
“No.”
“And what about your phone—is there any way he could be tracking you? You should turn off location services.”
“I can’t.” Hannah digs in her pocket and draws out her cracked and broken phone. The screen is completely dark now, ink-black and unreadable. “I broke it this morning. It’s completely dead. But I don’t think it’s a problem anyway. Will had no—” She swallows, takes a breath, tries again. “He had no reason to—”
She stops again. It’s extraordinarily hard to say what she means: her husband had no reason to spy on her until today.
She cannot believe she and Hugh are having this conversation.
All she wants is to hear Will’s voice, hear his incredulous laugh as he says What? Are you crazy? Of course I didn’t kill April. But instead what she hears is that cold, brutal What do you think?
She puts her head in her hands. November was right. She can’t handle this herself anymore. It has gone too far, become much too dangerous. Whatever the truth, she has to hand her fears over to the authorities. And although the thought of sharing her suspicions makes her feel sick, there’s a kind of relief too, in the idea of passing on this burden to someone else. For more than ten years she has been pushing away these doubts, pushing away the certainty that there was something wrong in what she saw that night. It’s time to confess.
“I think… I think I have to go to the police,” she says. “Can I use your phone, Hugh?”
“Of course,” Hugh says, though he looks as sick as she feels at the thought. “I’ll speak to them too if you want. But, look—if you phone them, they’ll probably want you to come down to the station, make a statement. Do you want to get cleaned up first? You look absolutely all in.”
Hannah looks down at herself—at her crumpled sweats and her bloody feet in Hugh’s borrowed slippers. She wants to phone the police—get this over with. But at the same time she can see that Hugh is right. Once she has started the ball rolling, she can hardly say I’ll be down in a few hours, once I’ve had a shower.
“Okay,” she says now. “Good idea.”
Her stomach growls audibly, and she realizes suddenly that she is almost faint with hunger.
“Actually, before I do that, could I—could I have some toast, Hugh?”
Hugh nods.
“Of course. Come through to the kitchen and I’ll get you set up.”
* * *
IT’S MAYBE HALF AN HOUR later that Hannah walks into Hugh’s palatial marble bathroom to see a steaming bubble bath awaiting her, already run.
The sight makes her do a double take. She had been intending a quick shower and then straight down to speak to the police—it must be already getting on for 10 a.m. But it seems pointless to drain the water in an already-run bath.
Setting the cup of tea to the side, she strips off her sweatpants, T-shirt, and underwear, steps out of Hugh’s borrowed slippers, and climbs gingerly into the warm water.
It’s unbelievably good. The foam is scented with some kind of spicy citrus-smelling perfume; the bubbles are rich and foamy. Even the painful stinging of her feet can’t take away from the fact that this is, undeniably, exactly what she needs. She closes her eyes and feels the tears she has been keeping at bay for the last hour prickle behind her lids. But she cannot—she can’t give way to this. She has to be strong—she has to get to the police and say what she knows, for April and November, who deserve justice after all this time, and for Neville, Ryan, Emily, everyone who has lived with this pall of potential guilt hanging over them.