Page 39 of You Lied First

M argot stares straight ahead at the seat in front of her, wondering whether it’s an option to hide in the bathroom.

Claim she’s got food poisoning and not leave the toilet till the police are gone.

She’s shaking – not just her hands, but everything.

This is it, she thinks: game over. She wonders if it would be better if they just confess and get it over with.

Would the police be more lenient on them?

She feels Guy squeeze her hand, and she knows it’s meant to be reassuring but all she can think is: this is how it ends.

The feeling of inevitability she has is acute: how did they think they could get away with leaving a dead body buried in the desert? The idea is incomprehensible now.

Around Margot, people are standing up, stretching, rummaging for passports, opening baggage racks and pulling down their bags.

‘Ready?’ Guy pats her knee. ‘Come on, Mar. Time to go.’

He sounds calm, but Margot can see from the tic in his jaw that he’s as tense as she is.

He stands, stretches extravagantly – which is another ‘tell’ to Margot – opens the overhead bin and heaves down their bags.

Margot sees Sara, looking perfectly relaxed, doing the same with hers and Liv’s.

When Margot notices that she’s the only one still seated, she realises she has no choice but to move.

She stands up slowly and puts her hand on her belly, half thinking she might actually make a dash to the toilet, claiming diarrhoea.

Then she realises that they need to stay together and gathers her things then waits in the aisle for the queue to move forward.

‘Odd, isn’t it?’ a woman with wispy grey hair says to a well-dressed man next to her. ‘Passports, now? I’ve never had that before.’

‘It happens,’ the man says. ‘I had it going to London from Hong Kong recently.’

‘What are they looking for?’ the woman asks.

Good question.

He shrugs. ‘Could be anything. Asylum seekers, criminals, drugs. They must have had a tip-off.’

‘Oh, wow,’ she says, looking around the cabin. ‘Imagine you were sitting next to a criminal and didn’t know. Why don’t they just catch them at the boarding gate?’

He shrugs again. ‘Who knows. Anyway, look, we’re moving.’

And so Margot falls into line and moves slowly forward, shuffling with her family like prisoners to their execution. The cabin crew at the exit beam and wish them a safe onward journey. At the plane door are two uniformed policemen.

Sara goes first. She hands the two passports over with a tight smile. One of the policemen flips through them and hands them back.

‘Thank you, madam. Next.’

Guy hands over his and Flynn’s. A quick look at the identity pages and then: ‘Thank you, sir. Next.’

Margot isn’t breathing as she hands over her passport. She doesn’t meet the man’s eyes, just looks at a spot on the floor as he flips the pages and peers at her. I’ll take the rap , she thinks. I’ll go to jail if you spare my son.

‘Thank you. Next,’ he says and Margot practically falls onto Guy.

‘Come on,’ he says as she wobbles up the air bridge on legs shaking with relief. ‘Time to go home.’

Never in her life has Margot been so grateful to arrive back from a holiday; to be in a taxi on the sodding M5.

The things that usually annoy her – the rain, the dreariness, the roadworks, the traffic, the boring monotony of the tarmac – she sucks them in greedily, savouring the fact she’s able to see them once more.

And, as the electric gates to their house slide back, she finally relaxes against the seat.

Home. Margot taps the entry code into the front door and breathes in the familiar smell of their home, and she thinks she’ll never again complain about living in the UK.

Never again will she yearn for the blue sky and sunshine of Oman.

She had more than enough of that relentless sunshine during those desperate hours in the desert when she and Sara had buried a body.

God help them. They’ve buried a body and done a runner. She and Guy are criminals.

Standing in her kitchen, looking around at the familiar gleaming appliances, the glossy island and the huge cooking range she loves so much, she puts her hand over her mouth and shakes her head, her eyes wide.

Everything’s the same but everything’s different.

How can this have happened in her perfect, ordered life?

She has the horrible feeling that she’s sinking.

Or that she’s living in a kind of parallel universe and she needs to snap through some invisible fabric to get back to her real life – her proper life – the one where she’s a model citizen who makes doll’s houses and is interviewed in the local paper.

Margot’s hands work on autopilot as she fills the kettle.

Everything in her kitchen is so mundane: the coffee cups still on the drying rack where she’d put them the day they left; the butter, the eggs, the cheese still in the fridge; the sourdough in the freezer.

They belong to another life. An innocent life.

Guy takes the bags upstairs.

‘Cup of tea, Guy? Flynn?’ Margot calls up the stairs, but Flynn’s door is already closed and he doesn’t reply. ‘Tea?’ she yells again and still gets no response. So she makes one for everyone anyway, because that’s what she does and, right now, she needs to cling on to as much normality as she can.

She carries Flynn’s tea up to his room, perches on the bed by his feet and mimes asking him to please take off his headphones.

‘What?’ he says, pulling only one off an ear.

‘You okay?’ she asks. ‘Glad to be home?’

‘Uh huh,’ he says.

‘Missing Liv?’

‘Uh huh.’

They sit in silence for a few moments. There’s so much Margot wants to say.

She wants to gather her son in her arms and hug him tightly and tell him everything’s going to be all right and that it wasn’t his fault.

But she can’t because he doesn’t know what happened.

He doesn’t know Celine is dead in the desert, and he doesn’t know how close they’ve come to losing everything.

Flynn stretches and runs his hand through his hair and Margot glimpses a mark on his arm. She pushes up the sleeve of his T-shirt to look more closely: four little bruises, like fingerprints. Flynn swipes her hand away.

‘What happened?’ she asks, trying to keep her voice light.

He gives a dismissive shake of his head.

Could it have been Celine? Out of nowhere, a memory surfaces: the slow tick of a tent zip opening in the middle of the night.

Was it real, or is she imagining it? Could Flynn have gone to see Celine in the night?

He’d been uncomfortable with the attention she was giving him – is it possible that Flynn went to have a word with her and they had a tussle?

A brick of dread settles in her stomach. Surely not.

She stands. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ she says, although she can see all he’s doing is scrolling TikTok.

‘’Kay,’ he says, and puts his headphones back on.