Mark’s phone rang again.
Gray stopped dead, stepped back from Mark, dragged his fingers through his hair. The concerned wife. He pictured her perched nervously on the edge of a sofa, a wrinkled tissue in her curled-up hands, pressing the call button, obsessively, over and over. She would keep pressing it until Mark’s phone ran out of charge. He leaned down and yanked the phone from Mark’s pocket and then, uttering a deathly, reverberating war cry, he hurled it across the room. It hit the extractor hood with a terrible crack, skidded across the kitchen floor and came to rest in the far corner. The bulb in the extractor hood fizzed and blinked. Then silence fell upon them and Gray felt a wave of relief.
‘Nice one, you twat,’ said Mark. ‘Now she’ll be even more worried. You really are a loser.’
The rage, momentarily quelled, resurfaced, twice as red, twice as strong.
And then Gray finally succumbed to the primal urge that had been haunting him since the first time he’d set eyes on Mark Tate twenty-two years ago and he let his hands lead him to Mark Tate and he watched as they circled together around his neck and he mentally applauded his hands as they worked together to squeeze the breath out of Mark Tate, to squeeze and obstruct and block until finally Mark Tate stopped fighting Gray’s hands, until finally he softened, flopped into himself, stopped breathing, shut the fuck up, for ever.
As they approach Kitty Tate’s house on the cliff, Frank takes Alice’s hand and pulls her urgently towards him.
She turns and looks at him. It strikes him that her face is now more familiar to him than anything else in the world. And then he realises that he may never see this face again after what he is about to tell her.
‘I remembered,’ he says. ‘I strangled him. I strangled him and he’s dead.’
‘Fuck.’ She pauses. ‘Are you sure?’
‘As sure as I can be about anything.’
She puts her hand to the back of his head and strokes his hair. The gesture makes him want to weep.
They exchange a look. Frank nods.
Alice catches up with the others. ‘Frank remembers,’ she says heavily. ‘Mark’s dead. Frank says he killed him.’
There is a sharp and terrible beat of silence before Derry breaks it by saying, ‘Well, high five, Frank. The fucker totally had it coming.’