The wind dragged cold fingers across Amanda’s cheeks. Despite the blue skies, icy air tumbled inland off the waves which continually battered against the rocky face of the cliff. Amanda tasted the salt of the sea, embraced the sharp slap of the wind.
‘Let’s just get this done and get out of here.’ Shane’s focus darted back and forth along the empty road behind them as though he were a spectator at a tennis match. Despite his anxieties no other cars crept along the coastal route as Amanda stood at the cliff’s edge, gun in hand. ‘If we leave now we might get back home before its dark.’
Home.
Amanda’s tears were warm as they tumbled towards her chin. She’d been fighting to save what home meant to her for so long that she’d been left feeling hollow. All of her old wounds throbbed, eagerly reminding her of their presence. Clenching her jaw, she flung the gun free from her grip. It dropped towards the waiting waves like a sinking stone. Her eyes followed it as it fell, a lump forming in her throat.
Not too long ago she had been the one to tumble down into the icy water. She stroked her gloved hand against her left shoulder, remembering all too clearly the pain she’d felt on that traumatic day.
The ground beside her crunched. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Shane standing by her, his vigil of the road abandoned so that he could look out to sea. There were no boats chasing the horizon. They’d specifically chosen a desolate strip of coastline to dispose of their incriminating evidence. The sea was a rippled grey slab which in places reflected the brilliant blue of the sky above it.
‘The gloves too.’ Shane was stoic as he spoke, just as he had been since they’d left the woods. The vice-like pressure of their situation hadn’t broken him. It actually seemed to have made him stronger, more focused.
Amanda looked at her hands. The plastic gloves were spotted with McAllister’s blood – red pinpricks against the blue. She swallowed against the lump in her throat and turned towards Shane, revealing her tarnished palms to him.
‘Fuck.’ He drew his mouth into a tight line when he saw the blood. His green eyes narrowed as they swept over her coat. Amanda lowered her head and saw more red splashes, darkening the design and starting to blacken. In her haste to leave the woods and McAllister she hadn’t noticed the bloodstains upon her person. ‘You’ll need to burn anything with blood on.’
Amanda shrugged off her coat as though it were already on fire. The gloves came next. She tore them off her hands and let them flutter to the ground like tiny brittle flags of blue and red.
‘We’ll find some woods and burn them there. It will draw too much attention to do it now.’
After bundling her soiled items into a plastic bag, Amanda got back into Shane’s car. As they drove away from the cliffside, winding their way along the coastal road, Amanda found her mind taking her back to the woods. She kept wondering if anyone had found McAllister yet. His body would be cold now, starting to stiffen.
‘I should have asked him,’ she gave a regretful sigh and tried to focus on the blurred landscape beyond her window.
‘Asked who what?’
‘McAllister. About Will.’
‘What about Will?’
‘What he…’ she twisted her hands together. ‘What he did with… his body.’
‘Amanda—’
‘I know it’s a terrible thought to entertain. But…’ she swept away the birth of a tear, ‘he’s just gone. Completely. I don’t have part of him to bury, to mourn. I’m just left with this great hole in my life that he used to fill.’
‘You don’t need to visit someone’s bones in order to remember them.’
‘I know that. It’s just,’ she sighed and shook her head, letting her icy blonde hair fall over her shoulders, ‘I wanted something. And one day I fear that Ewan will yearn for something too. I guess its closure. With Will so utterly gone, do I get any?’
‘What would you even put on a gravestone?’
‘I don’t know. Loving husband, father, the usual.’
‘I meant his name.’
Amanda froze. She felt like Shane had just skewered her against the car seat with the piercing arrow he’d thrown. She had to remind herself how to breathe.
‘I wasn’t trying to be a dick,’ he told her softly, glancing over and seeing her muscles stiffen and her cheeks pale. ‘I was just… wondering.’
‘Will Thorn.’ Her response came like a knee-jerk reaction. ‘I’d put Will Thorn.’
‘But that wasn’t his, you know, real name.’ Shane was treading carefully, trying not to crack any of the eggshells beneath his feet.
‘He was Will Thorn to me.’ Amanda didn’t bother to wipe away her new batch of tears. ‘He will always be Will Thorn to me.’
*
It was dark when Shane pulled off the road just east of Bristol at a scrap of woodlands that were bordered on all sides by rolling fields of farmland. Amanda waited in the car while he took the plastic bag of her ruined clothes and doused them in petrol.
Home was so close now. She could almost smell the roses in the garden, feel the refreshing breeze of the southern coast getting tangled up in her hair. No cars had chased them down the motorways. When they stopped at service stations no one stared at Amanda as though they’d just seen her face on the news above the caption most wanted. If Gregg McAllister had been found, and she was certain that he would have been by now, no one had connected her to the crime. To his guards she was nothing more than a ghost. To the rest of the world she was on board a long haul flight coming home from Las Vegas. The only things that could place her at McAllister’s side when he died were the items which were about to go up in flames.
Amanda climbed out of the car and reached Shane just as he dropped a single match into the dampened pile. Flames quickly burst to life, a brilliant flash of amber and orange against the bleak night.
‘We should pretend it’s one of our beach bonfires,’ Shane joked as he placed his arm around Amanda’s waist. She leaned against his side and watched the flames. They tore through her coat and caused the fingers of the plastic gloves to curl and blacken.
‘Do you think it’s really over now?’ The heat from the fire fell against the couple in radiating waves. Amanda peered up at Shane, saw the flames reflected in his green gaze.
He cleared his throat and hugged her tighter. ‘Yeah, of course.’
‘I don’t want someone calling me in four or five years telling me that they know what I’ve done. That they are coming for me.’
‘That won’t happen.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I won’t let it.’
The fire didn’t crackle. It just roared softly as he continued to pillage the piles of clothes offered up to its fury.
‘Do you think that Will thought it was really over for him? That he’d outrun his past?’
Shane considered this for a moment. ‘I think he did, yeah. Else he wouldn’t have planted so many roots. But he did – he got married, he bought a home. He was planning for a future, Amanda.’
‘Do you think he ever intended to return to Evangeline and Ewan?’
‘I can’t answer that.’
‘I used to like that he was this collection of secrets all jumbled together. It made him seem so mysterious,’ a bittersweet smile spread across Amanda’s face.
‘And now?’
‘I like that I know you. I know you almost as well as I know myself. There’s no surprises between us.’
‘You don’t think that will get boring?’ Worry crept into Shane’s voice as he turned to face her, cradling her face with his hands.
‘No,’ she pressed her lips against his. ‘I don’t.’
They kissed as the evidence burned. They lingered in the woods until it was just ash which Shane then scattered to the wind.
‘So, are you ready?’ he was walking back towards the car. The sky was full of a thousand stars and the smell of smoke still lingered in the air.
Amanda felt strangely at peace. As though since Will had left she’d been shackled to his secrets and now those restraints had been removed. ‘Ready?’
‘To go home?’ Shane nodded at his car.
The mileage on the car. Speed cameras. Amanda looked at the vehicle and saw a thousand new ways she could be caught. She felt like she was standing in snow, desperately trying to cover her tracks but in doing so she just created new ones. But she refused to live on a knife edge. If Will had managed to exist beneath the vast shadow of his past and all his previous wrongdoings then so could she.
‘Yeah,’ Amanda smiled and it felt genuine. ‘I’m ready to go home.’