Why Don’t You Come for Me (39 page)

Authors: Diane Janes

BOOK: Why Don’t You Come for Me

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The knife – she must not forget the knife. She had put it on the table in the living room, when she first attempted to move the body. It must not be left there for Becky to find when she came back from playing in the snow. Gilda carried it into the kitchen and rinsed it under the tap, before dropping it into the drawer where she kept her own kitchen utensils. As she passed through the living room on her way back to the car, she stopped to retrieve Timmy from where she had dropped him, after striking the blow which had ended the contest. He bore no visible sign of his involvement in the fray, but his stone eyes followed her accusingly to the door.

No one was around to see the car creep into the icy lane. The state of the roads was inconvenient, but at least it reduced the likelihood of witnesses. The car slid badly on the descent towards the bridge, and Gilda had to coax it up the incline on the other side, almost by sheer strength of will. She had embarked on the journey with no clear plan in mind, focusing only on the fact that she must get Jo as far away from the house as possible. She wasn’t absolutely sure whether Jo was alive or not – she thought not – but she needed to be sure. It was hard to think at all when she had to concentrate on keeping the car moving along the parallel tyre tracks left by earlier vehicles, but now she considered two possibilities. First, that she could dump Jo just as she was, somewhere well out of the way – or as far out of the way as she could manage, given the state of the roads. The sky was pregnant with the promise of more snow, and a fresh fall would obscure any tracks and hasten death by hypothermia – assuming that she wasn’t already dead. Jo’s head injury might even look like an accident. She was given to wandering off by herself, and probably reckoned daft enough to do it in these conditions. But suppose someone found her, and she
was
still alive? Hill walkers, shepherds, random motorists stopping for a pee. There was always that chance.

On the other hand – Gilda gulped and recovered her steering as the car skidded on a bend – if she made sure of it by hitting Jo with something else, or maybe strangling her, then it would obviously be a case of murder and there would be a big investigation, starting in Easter Bridge where Jo had last been seen alive and where her car was still parked at the front of her house. The police would inevitably take an interest in everyone else in the hamlet. Her own past connections with Jo were common knowledge. Jo had been in her house, and would surely have left some forensic evidence behind – and all of this would have to be explained.

Then she heard a sound from the back of the car. Lower than a moan, but a sound of life. She glanced in the rear-view mirror, but Jo was completely hidden below the level of the front seats. Panic travelled up Gilda’s spine, settling in the roots of her hair and radiating down her arms until it tingled in her fingertips. She should have made sure. If Jo came round, she could pull herself into a sitting position and attack from behind. She could signal from the windows to attract attention – even open the door and throw herself out – God knows, they were travelling slowly enough to facilitate it. If they stayed on the main road, it meant driving through Penny Bridge and Greenodd, where there might easily be someone to see.

The fingerpost at the next junction was obscured by snow, but Gilda knew where the lane went and it appeared to be just about passable. She eased the Volvo into the turning. Very few vehicles had attempted to come this way, but if she could just force the car up one more incline, after that it was downhill all the way to the main A590. Once she got that far, the road would be well traversed and gritted. She could get up enough speed to preclude any escape attempts. If she drove to the place where the road ran alongside the estuary, there was a lay-by which was all but invisible from the road once you had pulled into it, with only a low barrier between the verge and the water’s edge. She would drown the bitch if necessary.

Another low animal noise came from the back seat as the car crested the hill. She hit a patch of ice at the crest and the car almost spun full circle, before coming to a standstill with its front bumper inches away from a catastrophic encounter with a ditch. Gilda revved the engine desperately, edging the vehicle forward and back to get it going in the right direction again, all the time glancing in the mirror, expecting to see a head or hand emerging into view. As she righted the car and continued down the lane, she became aware that she had made a bad mistake. It was steeper than she had remembered, and the lane was like a sheet of ice. Even in first gear the car was gathering speed. She would have to brake, otherwise their own momentum would take them straight out into the main carriageway, but if she applied the brakes she was sure to skid.

She sensed the movement behind her before she saw the face in the rear-view mirror. Even as she tried to focus on the road, she was mesmerized by the look in Jo’s eyes. The end of the lane came into view below them, and she could see the vehicles flashing by at normal speed, sending up showers of dirty brown slush. The ‘give way’ sign was partly obscured by dimpled snow. She pressed the brakes and nothing happened. She put her foot down harder just as Jo reached for her. The car skidded sideways into the path of the tanker and the noise of metal on metal obscured her screams.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Shelley answered a knock at the door to find Maisie waiting on the front steps of Ingledene.

‘I was thinking’, the older woman said without any preamble, ‘that perhaps we ought to do something in the way of flowers – now that the dates for the funerals have been set.’

‘Yes,’ said Shelley. ‘Yes, of course. Come in while I get my purse … although on second thoughts, I think it will have to be a cheque – will that be all right?’

Maisie acquiesced to the cheque, while following Shelley into the hall and wondering how on earth anyone could live amid such confusion. All those piles of books and papers on the stairs, for example. Hardly enough room to walk up and down.

‘We hadn’t really got to know Gilda,’ Maisie said. ‘She was here less than a year, poor thing, but as I said to Fred, I don’t feel that you can do something for one and not the other – and naturally we should make some sort of gesture for Marcus’s sake. Poor man, it must have been a terrible shock for him.’

‘From what little I’ve seen of him, Marcus seems to be coping remarkably well,’ Shelley said. ‘Of course, having Melissa has been a great support.’

‘And an awful thing for young Sean, too,’ Maisie went on, either failing to catch Shelley’s meaning, or choosing not to pursue it. ‘An accident out of the blue like that. I understand he’s going back south to live with his mother.’

‘So I’ve heard. Do you know what’s going to happen to Gilda’s daughter?’ (If anyone knew, Shelley thought, it would be Maisie.)

‘She’s going to live with a cousin of Gilda’s. I met her, in fact – the cousin, I mean. She seems a very nice woman. I happened to be passing the house when she came to collect some of Rebecca’s things.’ Shelley had to turn away so that Maisie did not catch the expression on her face. ‘Rebecca calls her Aunty, apparently, and it seems they’ve always been close, so hopefully it will all work out. Such a terrible shock for everyone,’ she repeated. ‘And as Fred keeps saying, it was an avoidable tragedy. So silly to risk a shortcut like that, with the roads so bad.’

‘Marcus said he couldn’t understand what they were doing together in the car at all. They weren’t exactly good friends, and he’s never known the two of them to go anywhere before. In fact, Marcus told me that Jo must have gone out in a hurry, because she hadn’t taken her purse or her credit cards or even locked the front door, although she was very scatty about things like that.’

‘Perhaps Jo had hurt herself, or been taken poorly, and Gilda offered to run her to a doctor,’ Maisie suggested. ‘There would have been no way of knowing, afterwards, because I heard the bodies were almost unrecognizable.’

‘It was probably something quite mundane,’ mused Shelley. ‘But I suppose none of us will ever know now.’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to record my thanks to all those who have helped and encouraged me as I wrote this book, in particular Erica Woolley, Emma Dickens, Jane Conway-Gordon, Krystyna Green and all at Constable & Robinson. Last but not least I want to thank my husband Bill for his unfailing love and support … and the real Timmy for keeping my feet firmly on the ground.

Also by Diane Janes

The Pull of the Moon

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2011

First US edition published by SohoConstable, an imprint of Soho Press, 2011

Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
www.sohopress.com

Copyright © Diane Janes 2011

The right of Diane Janes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.