He couldn’t truthfully say he’d forgotten all about it, but these days he never thought about the incident, as he’d come to name it. He accepted that it had happened; he had moved on. The repercussions had been manageable. (Useful, even, at times.) It had proved to be a turning point of sorts. He was a better person than the boy who had run away crying from the corpse in the swimming pool. If it wasn’t tasteless to say this about murder, it had been the making of him.
Now he had the uneasy feeling it might be the unmaking of him. It had seeped out of his past like some horrific virus released from the melting Arctic permafrost to taint his future with long-forgotten malignancy. That was unacceptable. He had been promised there would be no trouble.
Promised.
But when it came down to it, you couldn’t trust anyone to look out for your interests, no matter how they swore they would, no matter how often they promised to say nothing at all. Well, if it was to be every man for himself, he’d have to take matters into his own hands, because he couldn’t be absolutely sure that people had listened to him and heeded his warnings. They’d have to understand there were consequences to insisting on knowing the truth. It was human nature to put yourself first. He knew it, and they knew it, and it was only a question of which of them decided to do that first. He would take the guesswork out of it and take control. That was what he was good at, after all.
Every question the police asked told him they were closing in on the truth, even if they didn’t know it yet. Sooner or later they would find out enough to terrify people into speaking up, to defend themselves, and what they knew was enough to get him locked up for a very long time.
He stared at himself in the mirror, his jaw tight, his face drained of colour. Maybe he didn’t remember exactly what had happened the first time, but he had done this before. He could do it again.
He had to.
It was the only way he could be sure he was safe.