Better Left Buried (20 page)

The thought of sleeping in the same room as him makes me feel almost feverish with discomfort. I toy with the idea of going upstairs and seeing if I can find a reclining chair to spend the night in.

Sod it. I'm too tired. I flop onto the bottom bunk, pull my music out of my rucksack and put in my earphones. Try to do some practice. The walls are thin, so all I can do is hum through the pieces, checking my timing, trying to get the right emphasis on each note. It's better than nothing, but I know I should be exercising my voice, strengthening it in time for the audition.

It'll have to wait, I think, unwrapping the bread roll and chewing it slowly. I'll have to find another opportunity. At least I've got some time on my own. Time to sort things out a bit in my head.

But my mind keeps conjuring up Jack's face as we went through customs. The twitch in his eye that gave him away – at least to me.

Jack has something to hide, I'm certain. And you don't need to be a genius to work out what.

The boat begins to pitch and sway as soon as we leave the shelter of the harbour, until my head and stomach are filled with a terrible draggy feeling. I'm glad of the crisps. I prop myself up with the pillow and nibble at them one by one, the saltiness making me feel a little better.

Nearly an hour after we set sail my phone rings. I grab it out my pocket and look at the screen. Caller number unknown.

I accept the call.

“Sarah?” The voice sounds distant and crackly, but I recognize it immediately.

“Lizzie…is that you?”

A blast of static. I check the signal strength on my mobile – only one bar. Damn. We must be getting too far from land.

“I got your text. Sarah, listen, there's some stuff I've really got to tell you. I'm so sorry, I should have said something before but…” Her voice fades for a few seconds, and I'm not sure whether it's her or the connection.

“Lizzie, look I know about—”

“…there's things I have to tell you, about the party, and that man who…”

“I know,” I say quickly. “I know all about it. And Rob too. That you're with him. It's a bit late, though, isn't it, Lizzie?” My voice starting to rise. “Why didn't you tell me before? Warn me about all the shit we were in?”

I can't hide the hurt, the sense of betrayal. “I mean, what the hell, Lizzie? What were you thinking?”

A silence at the other end of the line. For a moment I think she's rung off. Then a strangled, anguished sound. I can tell she's crying.

“I'm so, so sorry,” she sobs. “You're right, of course you're right. I didn't tell you about Rob cos…well…I wasn't sure how you'd react and I didn't even know there was anything real there and then when I did…well…”

“It happened,” I fill in. “With Max's girlfriend.”

Lizzie sniffs. “I wanted to talk to you, Sarah. Really. Every day I thought about telling you. Every single day, but…” Her voice chokes. Stops.

“It's all right,” I say, my anger dying away as suddenly as it arose. “I understand. I understand why you couldn't tell me that about Max.”

It's true. I know Lizzie couldn't face telling me about Max any more than I can face telling Mum or Dad what's going on. Or Lizzie's mum, for that matter.

And even if she had, even if Lizzie had found the courage to let me know my brother made a drug that killed a girl, would I even have believed her?

“I thought if I went away, it would take the heat off,” Lizzie explains, her voice mournful. “Maybe they'd come looking for me. Leave you alone.”

I don't know what to say to that. Clearly that wasn't much of a plan. Another few seconds of silence, then I hear Lizzie draw in a breath. “Look, I'll talk to Rob. I'll persuade him to come back with me and go to the poli…just don't…” She dissolves into crackle.

“Lizzie?”

“Sarah…Sarah? I can't hear…” Her voice cuts in, then breaks up into syllables. I can't understand anything she's saying.

“Lizzie, I'll call you when I get there, when I've got a better signal.”

“Get where? Sarah, where exactly are you going?” Her words are clear again for a few seconds, the alarm in them unmistakable.

“I'm going to Sweden, Lizzie. I'm going to try and sort all this out.”

More crackling, then Lizzie again, fainter now. “…shit…I can't hear…” I can't make out the words, only the desperation in her tone. “…Sarah, you need to go home. You don't under…just stay away from Ja…”

“What? Lizzie? What did you say?”

The line goes dead. I'm talking to myself.

I look at my phone. The screen is blank again. Hell. I scrabble for my charger in my bag and plug it in. Press the power button and wait for it to fire up. But nothing happens. I wait a couple more seconds then press it again. This time the screen lights up briefly, before reverting to a lifeless black.

Great. I fling it onto the end of the bed and lie back, closing my eyes in a bid to quell my rising sense of anxiety. What was Lizzie trying to say?

I steady my breathing and make myself think calmly. Lizzie warned me away from Jack before. She met him at that party and she clearly thinks he's dangerous. Maybe I should have told her he left that gang. Put her mind at ease.

The moment I consider it I know what she'd say. Or rather what she'd ask:
How can you be sure?

And she'd be right. I mean, what do I really know about him besides what he's told me? I only have his word for any of it.

My mind goes back again to the scene at customs. Why was he so nervous? What had he got to hide?

The answer is obvious. Okay, the dog didn't pick up anything, but that's hardly surprising. After all, Jack's a drug dealer. He knows what he's doing, how to conceal things properly.

Outside the cabin the brief sound of a voice, then someone knocks loudly on the door. I freeze. For a second I think it must be him, before remembering Jack has another key card.

I lie still, holding my breath, feeling like something trapped, caught in a lair.

A minute later the knock comes again. Harder, this time, more insistent.

I don't move. I don't breathe. I just wait.

Finally, after what feels like an age, I hear the sound of footsteps retreating along the corridor.

I need him, I remind myself. Jack. He may be bad, he may be the last person on earth I should trust, he may be hiding something dodgy, but right now he's the only option I've got.

I wake up fully clothed, my mouth tasting furry and stale from falling asleep without cleaning my teeth. I stumble out of bed, glancing up at the top bunk. There's no sign of it having been slept in, the thin blue duvet still smooth and taut, and the pillow lying perfectly square at the end.

I forage in my bag for my toothbrush and go into the bathroom, careful to lock the door. I brush my teeth and strip off, setting the shower to hot. Stand there for five minutes, letting the water scald me clean, then dress quickly, worried Jack might turn up at any moment.

In the end I have to go and look for him. I find him in the cafe, reading a paper over a cup of coffee. He looks awful, his eyes ringed with the colour of a fresh bruise and his hair sticking up at an angle.

He lifts an eyebrow as I approach. “Sleep okay?”

I nod, but it isn't true. I tossed and turned with each pitch and roll of the boat, churning over Lizzie's words. Waiting for the sound of Jack's key card in the door.

And trying to work out how I'd actually feel if I heard it.

“What happened to you?” I ask, sitting in the chair opposite. I eye the coffee. It looks as thick and dark as treacle, but all the same I'm tempted.

Jack squints at me.

“You didn't come back to the room,” I say.

He grimaces. “No.”

“Why not?”

I'm not sure why I'm asking. I'm not sure why I even want to know.

He shrugs. “Small cabins. I don't like confined spaces.”

“You're claustrophobic?”

“Not exactly.”

“What then?”

“Jesus, Sarah, what's this about?” His mouth narrows in annoyance. “Miss me that much, did you?”

I feel my cheeks flush and I look away.

“Okay,” Jack sighs, a few moments later. “If you really want to know, I did time. You know, prison. Those little cabins, they remind me of cells.”

That shuts me up. I stare out the window at the horizon for a full five minutes. We're still out in open water, the waves sloshing and churning as far as I can see.

I turn back to him. “What was it like?”

“What?”

“Prison.”

Jack picks up his coffee and downs it in one gulp. “Believe me, Chicory, you really don't want to know.”

It takes us half an hour to disembark at Esjberg, which sounds like “iceberg” when they announce our arrival in Danish. This time customs is no more than a quick flick through our passports. Jack hands both ours over with an easy smile.

“Where are you heading?” the man asks in nearly accentless English.

“Norway.” Jack doesn't even blink as he says it.

The customs man waves us through and we head into the town, which from the outskirts doesn't look much different from the back end of anywhere at home. But as we pull out into the countryside Denmark reveals itself as a flat sort of place, endless fields of grass and naked earth surrounded by long, grey expanses of horizon.

The largest things on the landscape are the pylons and the wind turbines. There are lots of windmills, tall and graceful. Three ahead of us seem almost to hover over the road, blades rotating in unison. I can't tear my eyes from them; there's something mesmeric in their slow rhythm, like a silent metronome.

A few drops of rain spatter on the windscreen. Jack swears as someone cuts him up on the motorway – a big black BMW with a couple of kayaks on top. Going on holiday, I think enviously, unable now to imagine ever being that carefree. Having a life where enjoying yourself is even an option.

I rest my head on the side window, letting the scenery blur into streaks of green and grey. Wasn't that TV show set in Denmark? The one I watched with Mum a couple of years ago, where the girl vanishes and they find her body in the boot of a car. I shiver as I remember it. She can't have been much older than me.

Pull yourself together,
I think, lifting my head and focusing on a group of squat little houses huddling between the fields. This doesn't seem the kind of place girls get themselves murdered.

Another hour passes. Jack drives at a steady seventy-five, never exceeding the speed limit. I keep my gaze fixed outside, trying to remember if I've ever travelled this particular route before. Maybe when I was little. But I haven't been to the summer house since I was twelve, and that time we flew straight into Gothenburg.

A dark green car edges past us in the left-hand lane, with a dog and two small kids in the back. I glance at the number plate. British. A pang of homesickness ripples through me, and I keep my head turned away so Jack can't see my face.

“You okay?” he asks, after ten more minutes of flat landscape.

“Just tired,” I say, and he nods.

Up ahead I spot a little picture of an aeroplane and the word
Bilund
underneath, though I'm not sure if that's a name or Danish for airport. Did Max read this too, I wonder, cross these same miles of tarmac on his way north?

I doubt it. Max couldn't drive, and he didn't like planes, so he probably took the train. It's one of those details that got lost in the aftermath, along with what he was doing at the summer house in the first place. We assumed he'd gone there to recover from his finals. To get away from it all.

Though not in the sense I now know to be true.

Now I understand what was really going on with him, I find myself imagining every mile of that long journey north and my heart aches with a fierce, sharp kind of pain. Did Max know it might well be his last trip? Did he have any idea that he'd never come home again?

Or was he, like me, simply hoping everything would somehow work out all right in the end?

Jack pulls off into a service station. Slams the car door and trudges into the shop. Several minutes later he's back, tossing me an unappetizing wedge of cheese and tomatoes sandwiched between slices of dark, almost black bread. I accept it graciously, but the whole thing tastes more of salt than anything else. It's a struggle to force half of it down.

“All I could find,” Jack says, not even bothering to check out my expression. “Unless you're going to become a carnivore.”

He finishes his sandwich in a few mouthfuls and sets off. The clouds are lower now, and Jack mutters as the rain intensifies, his face pale and tired. He pumps up the wiper speed, but doesn't slow down.

Kobenhavn
says the sign overhead.
Copenhagen,
I translate in my mind, and soon a wide expanse of water opens up on my left, clutches of wind turbines visible on the other side of the bay. Ten minutes later we're on the Øresund Bridge that stretches between Denmark and Sweden, an endless, elegant sweep of road suspended just above the sea.

A line from
The Great Gatsby
pops into my mind, back from when we were studying it in Year Ten.
Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge. Anything at all.
A feeling of foreboding, deep inside, as I wonder if this is some kind of omen.

“Five miles long,” Jack says as we head towards the enormous central pillars, and though I'm amazed he knows that, I don't say so. Just keep my eyes fixed on the giant metal sails topped with flashing lights that mark the mid-point of the bridge.

Sverige
announces a blue sign. Sweden.

A few minutes later we're approaching Malmö, and Jack shoves a handful of notes at me when we reach the toll. I wind down the window and hand them to the man in the booth, who smiles and gives half of them back, along with a receipt.