Chapter Forty-Four

Sunday 10th December 2023

Georgie

The roads are quiet and Georgie drives instinctively, almost blindly, somehow gliding over potholes and patches of ice. She feels sick and she thinks, irrationally, that she can still smell Alice’s vomit from that day in the pub, as if it’s clinging to her skin. The craggy hills on either side of the road feel nearer than usual. These Dales, which she’s driven through so many times, seemingly closing in on her flimsy city car.

What has she done? What has she done?

She is so far from her original plan that nothing makes sense. She sees Robbie’s and Leo’s initials carved into every tree she whizzes past. Sees ravens up in the branches, leering down at her. Closing in. Pushing. Isn’t that what she was trying to do, with the initials, the pub sign, all of it? Push Alice enough that she’d break under pressure and give herself away. Take Chrissy with her. And anyone else with a guilty conscience. Right now, though, as she yells at the trees and the birds to be quiet, to let her think, she fears the only person she’s pushed to their limit is herself.

She is so overwhelmed she almost misses her turn-off. She brakes and screeches up a narrow B-road, her little BMW groaning and wheel-spinning as she urges it up the hill. Lola would be horrified at what she’s putting it through. Lola would be horrified by what she’s done. She gasps out a panicked sob as she reaches the car park and steps into the force of the wind.

His grave is right on the edge, in an exposed, even windier spot. She runs towards it, weaving between the other graves, doing her usual checks to see if anybody else is here. Her fear, always, was that she’d run into Chrissy, her cover blown. But she realises, now, that she needn’t have worried. Chrissy never visits him. The fact that he’s buried all the way out here says it all.

She drops to her knees in front of his headstone. The cold seeps through her laddered tights and bites at her skin. A steep valley falls away to her right, and on its far side a tall viaduct rises into the sky, the focal point her gaze is always drawn to.

‘Help me,’ she begs him. ‘Tell me what to do.’

But she can’t feel him as strongly as she usually does. It’s as if Ben has taken that from her, too. She touches his engraved name, trying to reconnect. I don’t believe anything he said, my love. Of course I don’t.

She had to shut him up, didn’t she? Couldn’t let him keep saying those things, spreading that poison. She thrusts away the image of him thudding to the floor, eyes rolling in shock.

Then she notices something. Little spots of red on the pale grey headstone. At first she thinks she’s hallucinating, haunted by the spattering on her white carpet, the memory of trying to clean it up, wash it away, closing her eyes to the much bigger problem lying motionless beside her. She leans in closer. She isn’t hallucinating. It is blood. There is blood on Ethan’s grave.