“Because he was the only person I thought you might care about enough to protect,” Hugh snaps suddenly. “You were clearly happy to throw anyone else to the wolves.” The car jolts through another pothole, making Hannah’s teeth crack together so hard that her skull hurts. The baby inside her kicks violently, as if in protest at the jolt, and she shifts uneasily in her seat, trying to take the pressure off her bump. The rain has slowed to a drizzle, but she can see nothing at all outside the car, no lights, no houses. No Will. They are very far down a long farm track; even if he’s heard all her messages, even if he’s followed the trail of clues she’s tried to leave him, the chances of him picking this tiny obscure road out of all the others is so impossibly remote…
“Where are we?” she says again, her teeth gritted. “Where are we, Hugh? You owe me that—you owe me the truth about one thing at least.”
Hugh laughs.
“Don’t you recognize it? Some wife you are.”
“What?” She frowns, puzzled. And then she realizes.
It’s the beach. It’s the beach where Will took her, that first week he came to Edinburgh. The beach where they swam and lay together on the sand, and where Hannah finally admitted to herself that she was going to love this man for the rest of her life.
The phone in her pocket is so hot now that she can no longer grip it. She can feel it burning her thigh through the thin layers of material. It’s almost painful, but she doesn’t move it away, because the heat is the one thing she has to hold on to. The one scrap of hope that tells her Will is there. He is listening. And perhaps, if she can keep Hugh talking for long enough, he is coming. If only she can manage to tell him.
“It’s our beach,” she manages now. “The one where we—near Tantallon Castle. But how—” she tries, and then swallows and tries again. “How did you know?”
“Because he asked me where to take you,” Hugh says. He looks… he looks weary, Hannah thinks. And perhaps he is. He has been carrying his secrets for more than ten years. It must, in a strange way, be a relief to set that burden down at last. “I’d just finished a summer work experience placement here, do you remember? He said he wanted to take you out somewhere, but it needed to be cheap; a cheap, romantic place that you could get to by train.”
“And why—” Hannah swallows again. She puts her hand on her bump, where the baby is quivering nervously, as though it can feel her unease. “Why here? Why now?”
Hugh’s face twists with some very strong emotion. Hannah can’t tell what it is. Disgust? Remorse? Pity? Maybe all three.
“Because it felt right,” he says at last. The car has stopped. Its lights are shining out over the headland. Far below, Hannah can hear the crash of waves beating against the rocks. It is high tide.
Right for what? she wants to ask, but in her heart she knows. And it is right. Because Hugh knows her almost as well as Will does, almost as well as she knows herself.
It is where she would come if she were going to kill herself.
The thought—the realization—should make her panic, but instead it is as if the opposite happens. Her pulse seems to slow down. Her head feels clearer than at any time since she drank that fucking tea—clearer than it has for weeks, in fact. Everything seems to shiver into focus, like a hand turning the dial on a microscope infinitely slowly, until suddenly the picture is crisp and unforgiving.
Hugh is going to kill her. He is going to make it look like suicide. And it makes a certain horrible sense—Hannah, running out of the house, distraught, after accusing her husband of killing her best friend. She jumps into a taxi. She takes off—to where? No one knows. She didn’t tell Will. She didn’t tell her mother. She could be anywhere.
The phone burns in her pocket, hotter than hot, but she knows she doesn’t have much time now. She has to stall Hugh for as long as she can—but if Will can’t find her, if Will can’t make it in time…
“Take off your shoes,” Hugh says gently, and she knows why. She can’t wear anything that would tie her to him. She nods and bends down, past her bump, wriggling her feet out of the borrowed shoes. There is no point in resisting. She is better off trying to delay for as long as possible.
“Isn’t it going to look strange?” she says as she inches one foot out of the plastic. “A corpse with no shoes? Will they really believe I came all this way on the train, with no shoes on?”
Hugh shakes his head.