That afternoon was the worst time of any of their lives. Nothing else was ever going to come close. They tried to come up with a plan. They stared at the body. The whole house seemed to smell of burnt brownies. They were paralysed. Alex drove Rachel to the outskirts of Penzance, dropped her off, and came home. Jenna was catatonic. Felicity tried to make plans, but they were stupid plans, and she felt herself spiralling, a whirlwind inside her.
Too much time had passed; if they called the police now, they’d have to explain why they hadn’t done it straight away.
They swung between the two paths: confess and lose everything, be arrested and let Jenna go to prison; or they could clean the floor, find some way of getting rid of the body and, for cover, use the fact that no one except them – and Rachel – had known he was here.
They wrapped the body in the rug from Alex’s bedroom, basing their actions on things they’d seen in movies. Touching him had made Felicity run to the sink to vomit. He was lying there, his lower legs and feet sticking out of the rug, and they were all trying to find the strength to do the next part, which was to move the body while they worked on a longer-term plan.
They opened the cellar door and got ready to carry him down, but he fell down the steps, out of the rug, over and over, thudding as he went, and they closed the door and left him there.
Late at night the three of them put the body in a wheelbarrow, took it to the edge of the cliff and tipped it over. It landed with a thud. They stared down.
‘We’d better check,’ said Felicity. They went down to the beach with a torch and looked at him.
This was no good at all. He was lying on his back, and, as Alex had predicted, there was no way the sharp dent on his head could have been made by a rock.
Jenna’s voice was quiet. ‘Put him in the sea?’
They all got soaked, and they couldn’t get the body far enough out. Some days there was a rip current, but not tonight. They didn’t have a boat, and there wasn’t one they could borrow. The nearest harbour was miles away.
They fetched the wheelbarrow again and hauled him back up to the garden, using a gap in the hedge to stay away from the road.
It was one in the morning, and they were standing there, hopeless, when car headlights appeared.
Grandma was home twelve hours early.
There was no chance they’d get away with this. Even if they could get him back into the cellar before Grandma arrived, she’d see in an instant that something enormous had happened.
‘Park it here,’ said Alex.
They pushed the wheelbarrow behind a tree and ran to the house. Felicity looked at Jenna. She looked at Alex. Their auras were the same. Panicky, electric. They tried to appear normal. They ran into the sitting room, threw themselves on the sofa, put the TV on.
Grandma walked in through the front door. She stood in the sitting-room doorway and stared at them.
‘Children,’ she said, ‘what’s going on?’
They all looked over at her, and whatever she saw on their faces made her rush over to them. ‘I knew there was something wrong from your message, Felicity. I know you, my darling, and I know that you wouldn’t call at midnight to say that everything’s fine. It was playing on my mind all day, and in the end I came back early. What’s happened?’
They tried not to tell her, but the fact was there was a corpse in a wheelbarrow in the garden. And the moment it got light Grandma would find it. Alex and Felicity told her, while Jenna became hysterical. Grandma shifted over to put an arm round her. Grandma’s aura sparked with electricity. There was an adult here, someone who was going to sort things out.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to call the authorities. We have to. You’ll be OK, Jenna, because you didn’t mean to kill him.’
The last two words sent Jenna into uncontrollable screaming.
‘No one knows he’s here,’ said Alex.
‘We can’t let Jenna go through this,’ said Felicity.
Grandma listened. They talked. Her face changed. She looked at Jenna. She looked out of the window. Felicity could see her thinking.
‘Do you trust Rachel Thomas?’
‘Yes!’ They all said it at once, even Jenna.
‘She’s never coming back,’ said Alex. ‘She told me her plans in the car. We won’t hear from her again. She hates her dad. He hits her. She’s gone.’
In the end, Grandma said, ‘I may regret this in the morning, but perhaps we can take care of this without it ruining your lives. The man was no angel, by the sound of it. This doesn’t have to destroy you too. Never, ever tell anyone, but there’s already a burial place in this garden. Over there, in the corner, where the camellia grows.’ She checked the time. ‘Alex, you go and start digging. Right beside the plant. We can add another camellia before your parents get back and say we were doing some gardening.’
So that was what they did.
The flower bed was sheltered, tucked away in a corner. People rarely bothered to come this far down the garden. Grandma had stopped Dad putting a shed here, Felicity remembered, a few years ago. ‘Let some of it stay wild, Leon,’ she’d said. ‘Violet loved this corner. Just let it be. Let it be Violet and Aubrey’s place. The memory garden.’
Now this made sense. Was there really someone else buried there? Felicity found she didn’t even care right now: she had no headspace for it. This was the best place to bury a body. And they confirmed, when they’d dug down far enough, that they weren’t the only people to think so.
Grandma was right. There were already bones in there.
Grandma bowed her head. ‘Good evening, Aubrey,’ she said. ‘We’ve brought you some company. Apologies for the fact that he’s a scumbag.’
‘We can tell people it’s an old burial ground,’ said Alex. ‘I mean, it is, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not, but I’ve been saying it is for years,’ said Grandma.
Felicity knew she would never look at her grandmother in the same light again. She knew who Aubrey was, but she’d always been told he went to that hospital in Scotland. She decided not to ask, but Grandma felt the question in the air and said, ‘He jumped out of the window, darling. Never recovered after the war. They were different times. There was a stigma about suicide, and a legal implication too. Violet wanted it kept quiet, so that’s what we did.’
They calmed down separately, without looking at each other, without touching. Grandma was in charge now. She had made them take the clothes off the body, almost all of them. Then they put the new corpse on top of the old bones and shovelled the earth back on top. They didn’t stop until it was done, and as soon as they’d finished Felicity was sick again. All three of them were sobbing, and they were trying not to make eye contact.
‘There we are,’ said Grandma. ‘It’s done now. You’re going to be all right. We’ll get rid of his clothes. I’ll put them in the bin in the village, and they’ll be gone tomorrow. And, kids, we need a drink.’
Jenna spoke up suddenly. ‘We have to tell the police. I’m going to go to them and confess what I did. I am.’ Her voice rose. ‘I am. I’m going to do it now.’
‘You’re not.’ Alex put a hand on her shoulder, took it off, and put it on again. ‘It’s over, Jen. Yeah, we should have called the police. But we’d be in so much trouble if we did that now. Honestly, we would. We can’t call them and tell them we buried the body in the garden. And Grandma would get in the most trouble of all. Remember, no one knows he was here.’
‘No!’ Jenna’s voice was higher. ‘No! No, I’m going. I’m going to call 999. We can dig him up again and put him on the floor. I’ll say it only just happened. We can’t do this! What about Angie? She needs to know!’
Jenna turned and started walking, then running towards the house. Grandma and Alex went after her. They grabbed her, and all three of them ended up on the ground. The fight went out of Jenna.
‘Stop it, Jenna,’ said Grandma. ‘We’re going to protect you. I’m always going to look out for you. Always. Understand?’
Felicity walked over to them and spoke through her tears. ‘He was going to go to Thailand with Rachel. Maybe he won’t be missed. Can we just make it look as if he’s gone away, so no one looks for him?’
‘I took everything out of his pockets,’ said Alex. ‘I’ve got a piece of his handwriting. Maybe we could, like, write a note from him saying he’s going to Thailand. Or something.’ His voice shook. ‘Isn’t that better? For his family to think he’s gone away …’
‘Yes,’ said Grandma. ‘We can send him to Thailand. Stop this in its tracks. Bring it all down to me first thing tomorrow.’ She paused. ‘I think this is what Violet would have done, and she’s always my compass. This would ruin your lives, and I can’t allow it. I just couldn’t bear it. The trial, the scandal at the big house. It’s going to be difficult, but this way is better than that.’
She looked at them. ‘And you need to keep an eye out for Rachel Thomas. Is she running away from that fucking vicar? I never trusted him an inch. If you hear one word from her, come straight to me. Now: brandy.’
In the morning, Alex drove to the garden centre and bought the most expensive camellia bush he could find. They planted it in that flower bed and tended both plants carefully. Felicity took control of them and banned anyone else from doing anything else with the flower bed ever. Her parents indulged her. The bushes grew well. Very well indeed.
Grandma concocted a trip to Thailand for Andy Teague. They had his handwriting and a little bit of information from the things Alex had taken from his pockets. Grandma found, in the classified ads at the back of her Private Eye, a company that, for a fee, would post things to get a postmark from anywhere in the world. Felicity practised his writing and found that, if she filled her head with the way the man had made her feel, she could do it. An envelope stuffed with postcards of Bangkok arrived at Grandma’s cottage. They weren’t sure it would work, but they assumed it did, and kept up an annual card from Andy Teague in Bangkok to his sister in Pentrellis. It was an awful thing to be doing, and it weighed heavily on all of them.
Rachel was reported missing. Posters were put up, and her parents went on television and to the papers to plead with her to come home. They did a great job of pretending to be doting parents worried about their little girl, but the fact was she had been seventeen, and she’d run away for a good reason, and she never came back.
When Rachel had been gone for a year, Felicity received a Christmas card, postmarked from London, that said: Merry Christmas, Lissy. All fine xx
And that was all she ever heard.