“Yes?” Hugh says, with his gentle, old-world curiosity and politeness. “Do go on.”
“I realized she did punish me—and that was it. That last night, the night I found her dead in our room, that was my punishment. That was showing me what a bitch I was being. You’ll be sorry when I’m gone—it’s such a teenage reaction, and the people who say it never mean it, least of all April. She would never have killed herself. She valued herself and her life far too much for that. But she wanted me to know what it felt like. She wanted me to feel, even if just for half an hour, twenty minutes, that tearing, unbearable knowledge of what I’d done, and what it had cost me.”
The phone in her pocket is red-hot now. She will have a mark against her leg tomorrow—if she survives tonight. Will, where are you?
“So,” Hugh says. He folds his hands together, for all the world like a tutor, leading her through an argument, testing her case for weaknesses. “So, she waited for you to come up to the room, and played dead. What next?”
“You were in on it,” Hannah says. “You had to be—because she knew that if I got too close I’d be able to tell she wasn’t dead. So she enlisted your help. That was your role, to come rushing up the stairs when I opened the door, then fall to your knees beside her ‘corpse’ and tell me, with all the authority of a first-year medical student, that April was dead. Then send me running out to make a fool of myself by summoning the authorities, at which point April would sit up and claim to have been asleep or something, and I’d look a drunk, hysterical idiot.”
“Very good,” Hugh says. He pushes his spectacles up his nose and blows his fringe out of his eyes. “I’m impressed.”
“But of course what really happened was that as soon as I left the room, you killed her, probably before she could even sit up. Under the cover of the noise I was making, banging on doors, screaming in the stairwell, you strangled her. But a body that’s been strangled doesn’t look like someone lying there playing dead. You had to keep me out of the room when I came back up the stairs with the authorities. I remember you standing there at the top of the stairs, barring the door, saying Nobody must go in, no one should disturb the body, and you know what”—she gives a bitter, hollow laugh—“you know what, I remember being impressed at your forethought, at the way you knew what to do. But it was bullshit. You just didn’t want me seeing the body of my friend, her face swollen and her arms bruised from you kneeling on them, bruises that weren’t there a few minutes ago. The police surgeons didn’t know—how could they? By the time they came to examine the body, they couldn’t possibly tell if she was murdered at 10:59 or 11:05. And with you and I insisting that we both found April dead at 11:03…”
She swallows.
“Poor John Neville. He never had a chance. I made sure of that.”
“Neville was a pest,” Hugh says briskly. He turns off the engine, and Hannah feels a rush of fear. Oh God, oh God, where is Will?
And then, with a horrible lurch, she realizes the phone in her pocket is no longer burning her leg. In fact, it’s cooling rapidly.
Either Will has hung up or—and the realization comes to her with a sickening certainty, as she remembers the battery bar hovering at the 50 percent mark before she dropped the phone—the battery has died. She is screwed. She staked everything on Will getting here in time, and she has lost, and now she cannot even dial 999.
Just in case, hoping against hope, she presses the power button and the side button together, bracing herself for the siren, but it doesn’t come. She tries the side button and the volume button. Nothing again.
So. This is it. She is alone. It’s just her and Hugh.
But then the baby inside her kicks, and she realizes she is not alone.
And she is not going to die.
“It’s time,” Hugh says.
“But what about why,” Hannah parries desperately. “I told you I knew how, but why, Hugh? Why April?”
But Hugh only turns and looks at her, and then he shakes his head, as if he’s pitying her foolishness.
“I’m not going to tell you that, Hannah. This isn’t a James Bond movie. I’m not going to lecture you for forty-five minutes about my motives. They’re none of your business. Get out of the car.”
“Hugh, no.” She puts her hands over her stomach. “Please. You don’t have to do this. I’m pregnant, doesn’t that mean anything to you? It’s not just me, it’s my baby. You’d be killing my baby, Will’s baby.”