Page 110

Joseph glances at the crossbow. He can’t remember, now, how many arrows were in the magazine. ‘I need to check on Max.’
Tilly blinks. Her trigger finger twitches. Then she lowers the crossbow and turns towards her mother.
SIXTY-ONE
It’s a family meeting like no other. They hold it outside, as the red sky fades to black, as more stars appear above them. Joseph knows they don’t have long to create a story. The challenge is that it needs to be watertight.
Tilly refuses to let anyone come near her. Despite her difficulty forming words, she does manage to make herself understood. The first person she wants to hear from is Joseph – exactly what he knows, and how he came to be at Thornecroft with Erin.
In his response, Joseph holds little back. Whatever he might think of his stepdaughter, however deep his horror, he realizes he needs her onside to stand any chance of surviving this.
He explains how he buried Angus at Black Down and is surprised to learn that she already knows. She obviously hadn’t known about Enoch, but she displays very little emotion when he tells her – unlike Max, who seems broken by the news.
He describes how he’d found blood in the upstairs hall, how he’d gone across the road and watched Ralph Erikson’s footage before deleting it. He doesn’t tell Tilly he’d thought the blood was hers and had cleaned it up so that Erin wouldn’t see.
Fortunately, Erin doesn’t volunteer that either. Initially, she says very little, unable to tear her eyes off the nightmare of her daughter’s face, but she takes over once Joseph’s finished speaking.
She focuses on their digital footprints first, making each of them narrate in detail where they’ve taken their phones, these last five days, and what the geolocation data might show. Afterwards, she progresses to email, social media, texts. Any story they concoct will have to fit the evidence perfectly.
Tilly had switched off GPS and activated airplane mode before taking her phone into the woods, Thursday night – a revelation that makes Joseph wonder if the possibility of violence had been in her head all along. That night, she’d instructed Drew to leave her contract mobile at home. She’s incensed to learn that Drew had taken the burner phone to the woods instead, covertly filming what happened. She does confirm that Drew hadn’t taken either phone to the bungalow the night she died. Tilly also admits that she has Angus’s phone, which has been switched off since she killed him – although she won’t say where it’s hidden.
Joseph had taken Claire’s iPhone on his two trips to Black Down, fitted with the SIM he bought in Crompton. Enoch had arrived at the Carvers’ with the burner phone Drew used to contact Angus, but not his own.
There are multiple calls between Angus and Erin, but their work relationship can explain those. Hopefully, Erin’s phone records won’t be checked anyway, meaning her call to Gabriel at Thornecroft will remain undiscovered.
They carry the dining chairs from the garden into the house, along with the sack truck Gabriel used to transport Max. Afterwards, they collect up the lengths of rope and put those inside too. They leave the crossbow on the grass where Tilly abandoned it. Joseph is as confident as he canbe that it won’t be traced back to him. He takes out Angus Roth’s wallet, cleans it thoroughly, and switches it for the one in Gabriel’s pocket.
Erin moves Enoch’s van on to Thornecroft’s drive. Then comes the task that Joseph and Max perform alone. Opening the Honda’s boot, they lift out Drew’s body as carefully as they can. They carry her into Thornecroft’s dining room and lay her on the table. Only once Max has left the room does Joseph free Drew from the plastic.
Facing her again – twenty-four hours after he last saw her – is even more difficult than he’d imagined. It forces him to confront, once more, the appalling travesty of her death, this time with the knowledge that he killed her father.
Outside, Erin has retrieved the tomahawk that Joseph abandoned in the woods, along with the birdwatching scope, the sports holdall and his baseball bat. She stows everything in the car and closes the boot.
Finally, they lift Enoch out of the van and carry him into Angus’s office. Standing on Thornecroft’s front steps, Joseph turns to his stepdaughter. ‘You’re clear on everything?’
She nods, grunting something unintelligible.
He climbs into the Honda with his wife and son. Glancing in his rear-view mirror as he pulls on to the road, he watches Tilly go back inside the house.
SIXTY-TWO
Tuesday night, at the Tamarind Hotel and Spa, Teri Platini eats a late room service dinner alone. Afterwards, she channel-surfs for a while, glancing periodically at her phone.
At ten p.m., she turns off the TV and climbs into bed. She thinks about texting Brittany, decides it’s too late. She thinks about calling Barbie Girl’s number again. Decides against that, too.
Dousing the bedside light, she lies there in darkness, her mind on Thornecroft. And on Gabriel Roth. Her face throbs, the skin raw. Her lips sting when she licks them.
An hour later, she’s still no closer to sleep. Throwing on jeans and a hoody, she grabs her keys and rides the lift down to the lobby. It’s a ten-minute drive home from the hotel. On Hocombe Hill, the only vehicle she meets is a small hatchback that blasts past in the opposite direction.
Teri parks on a grass verge a few hundred metres from Thornecroft and heads back along the lane on foot. When she reaches the driveway she pauses and studies the house.
Its two entrance doors are gaping open, the lights in the ground-floor rooms all burning. Outside, she doesn’t see Gabriel’s Mercedes, but Angus’s Lexus and his tarp-covered Morgan are there – plus a dirty panel van she doesn’t recognize.
Teri checks her watch, waits. Two minutes later, she’s spied no movement. She edges down the drive towards the house, using the panel van to screen her final approach. Pausing at the passenger-side window, she peers inside. All sorts of junk has been stuffed between the dashboard and windscreen; fast food bags, crushed coffee cups, crumpled flyers. She wonders who drove it here, and where they are now.
Climbing the porch steps, she peeks inside the entrance hall.
Since her last visit, someone has removed the wrecked console table and fragments of broken vase. Gabriel, most likely; Angus hadn’t employed a cleaner, insisting that was her job.