Only We Know (20 page)

‘So I cut him down.’

The words sound hollow and forlorn and, for
a moment, they sit there between us.

‘I took him down and laid him on the
floor, then covered him up with my jacket.’

‘Christ.’

‘Lauren was there. At first, she stood
back and watched as I laid him down. But then she knelt next to him and very gently,
very tenderly, as if he were just asleep and she didn’t want to wake him, she
started straightening his limbs, like she was trying to make him more comfortable or
something, brushing the hair off his face, holding his hand. I stood there watching her
do this and it occurred to me that she had never met Luke before, that this was the
first and only time she would see him, and when I looked at his ruined face, swollen and
distorted – gruesome, even – all the life and the charm and the humour fled from it, I
felt this surge of anger rise up in me, this fury at
her
, at Lauren, my wife,
for handling him in this delicate, intimate way, like she had known him for ever when
really he was a stranger to her, and always would be, so I said something to her,
something terrible. I said … I said …’

‘Don’t, Nick. Please
don’t.’ I’m shocked at all this talk gushing out of him and swirling
around us, and even though I’m glad he can confide in me, I don’t want to
hear the thing he said to his wife. But he says it anyway.

‘I said: “Take your fucking
hands off him, Lauren.”’

It sits there
pulsing between us – the wrongness of it, the violence of that word, spoken in that
space, the room that held the recent dead as well as the ghosts of the others. My
thoughts go to that girl in the airport lounge with her straw-coloured hair and her
carefree manner. He might as well have slapped her face.

We sit in silence for what seems a long
time. I close my eyes, listen to the hum of the city outside, hear it breathe in and out
like a living being.

Nick says, ‘I had the stupidest
thought on the way here.’

‘What?’

‘That if either of the Yates brothers
was going to take their lives, it should have been me.’

I sit up. ‘Nick, you shouldn’t
say that.’

He sits across from me, briefly returning my
gaze, and I can feel the heat in it. He reaches for the bottle, his hand shaking.
Catching me watching, he lowers his hand to his lap, stares at it, as if it’s a
foreign object. But then his face seems to warm a little and he holds up his hand to me,
shows me his palm.

‘Remember, Kay?’

The scar there – a white ridge of hard skin
among the map of lines. I feel my answering smile and hold up my hand. ‘I
remember,’ I say.

We regard each other fondly, and the old
twinge comes back, the twinge that suggests what might have been but never was.

His mood shifts again, another thought
coming at him, nudging away the momentary peace. ‘Something else I can’t get
out of my head. It was something the guards wanted to know, or one particular detective.
There, after
they’d arrived and
I’d made a formal identification of the body, he asked me who had cut the
knot.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ and it seems he is
quoting from memory, ‘because if you cut a victim down, you’re supposed to
cut
above
the knot. That’s what he told me.’

‘And they told you this at the house …
right after?’

‘Right there and then. It preserves
the rope for Forensics if you cut above the knot, you see. Cutting below ruins it. This
guy – the detective – he said if the marks around the neck, the bruising, if they follow
the same pattern as the ridges in the rope, well and good. I asked what’s good
about that, Kay. You know what he said?’

‘No.’

‘He said, “Then we know it was
suicide, plain and simple.”’

‘Plain and simple, huh?’

For a moment, his face remains the same –
eyes a little too bright, though his gaze is fixed and inward-looking. Then his
expression begins to change. The slow understanding of how passionate he had become, how
wild his words had been, breaks through into his consciousness. He gives me a look that
seems half apologetic, half resentful. Before my eyes, he is closing in on himself.

‘Can I ask you something?’ I say
to him. ‘Julia. Do you think she knows?’

His expression changes, becomes quizzical.
‘About the three of us? About what we did?’ He stares down at his hands.
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Do you think Luke told
her?’

He shrugs, mumbles: ‘She was his wife.
He could have.’

‘Have you
told Lauren?’

His eyes flash in a way that tells me
I’ve overstepped the mark.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to
–’

‘That’s okay.’

A prickly silence sits between us, and
instinct tells me to let it be, but curiosity wins out.

‘What about Murphy? Do you think he
knows? He was close to your mum. Perhaps she –’

‘Jesus, Katie! Nobody knows but us –
okay? Remember the rule?
Not a soul. You can’t tell anyone.
Right?’

‘Okay,’ I say gently, reaching
forward to touch his arm, and he exhales deeply, rocking forward on the bed.

‘Sorry. It’s just … I’m so
tired,’ he says, even though I know there is much more to it than that.

My phone rings, interrupting the silence. He
glances at it with irritation but tells me I should answer it. Then, catching himself,
he explains: ‘It’s my tinnitus,’ he explains. ‘Noises –
electronic noises – make it worse.’ His eyes are full of injury and apology and I
feel a pang of sympathy for him.

‘I’ll take it
outside.’

In the corridor, I speak to Reilly in hushed
tones. I fill him in as best I can, pitching my voice at an approximation of calm and
restraint so that he won’t worry about me. I almost tell him about the envelope,
about the picture of Cora, but somehow telling him seems too hard, complicated and
somehow forbidden – like breaking the rule that was made so many years ago.
You
can’t tell anyone.
Still, before he rings off, he tells me he’ll
call again tomorrow, and I find myself smiling at his thoughtfulness, his concern.

When I push the door
open, I can hear the regular sound of Nick’s breathing. He’s lying on his
side, his head on the pillow. I stand for a moment, watching him sleep. Then I put my
phone back on the nightstand and go to the window where I draw the heavy curtains,
blocking out the evening sun so that only the gentle burr of light from the bathroom
falls onto the bedroom floor.

I turn off the air-conditioning, the silence
in the room like a sudden intrusion. But then I lie down next to him, turning so that my
back is to his, close enough to feel his body warmth, my legs curled up and my hands
beneath the pillow, the way I used to lie when I was a little girl. And for the first
time in such a long time, I feel a kind of peace. The fear inside me leaves – like a
moth drawn to a light in another room – as we lie there in the shadows, Nick and I. For
a while, I listen to the steady rise and fall of his breathing. Then I close my eyes and
sleep.

We meet in the dark, load the truck and set
off without a word. It’s going to be a long trek to the Masai Mara. Karl’s
driving. I’ve got the passenger seat. Lauren has the back to herself. She stares
out of the window watching the light begin to break on the horizon.

Karl hums to himself, hands me a flask and
says: ‘Open that for me, will you?’

I unscrew the top and the smell of hot
coffee wafts through the truck.

‘Help yourself,’ Karl says.

‘Lauren?’ I say, turning to
her.

‘No, thanks,’ she says without
looking at me.

Soon, we are out of the city and onto the
wide roads where the tar is chipped and uneven, no markings visible.

The truck hits a rock on the road.
‘Christ,’ Karl says. ‘I hope this pile of junk makes it.’

The vehicle is battered. The springs poke
through the seats. The steel is rusting, the joints creaking. It is, as my dad would
have said, ‘banjaxed’, creaking like it might fall apart at any minute. But
the truth is that, despite the vehicle, there’s no one I’d rather travel
alongside on this difficult journey than Karl.

‘Thanks for doing this,’ I tell
him, and he grins at me before turning his attention back to the road. He drives hunched
forward, leaning on the steering-wheel,
occasionally tapping out whatever rhythm is travelling
through his head.

‘Couldn’t have you two doing
this on your own, could I?’ he says.

I stare at the road in front of me, think
about where I’m going back to, and hear it begin, the distant whining deep within
my inner ear.

We drive for long stretches without talking.
Much of the land is arid scrub, a harsh frontier where people eke out a living. The
poverty of Kenya is immense, its scale almost supernatural, but now as light touches it
and the truck trundles along, I find that there is something calming about the
terrain’s roughness, the lack of refinement and the heady soundscape it holds. As
Nairobi disappears behind us and we go deeper into the country, I settle back in the
seat and allow my mind to slip into a sort of numbness, giving myself over to the
journey ahead of us.

I can see Lauren’s reflection in the
side-mirror. She seems distant, as if she is mulling something over in her mind, her
eyes fixed on the passing landscape. Her quiet determination reminds me of a time some
months ago, before we were married, when she travelled to Mara on a field trip of sorts,
but when she came back, she seemed subdued, troubled for days, but wouldn’t tell
me why. She got over it, and I forgot about it, but now she has the same air of
disaffection, the same sullen inwardness.

She looks tired. I want to tell her to close
her eyes and rest, but I don’t. I’m afraid if I say anything to her it will
only end in an argument and I’m not sure I can cope with that right now.
Everything seems shaky today, so I bide my time.

I had left
Katie’s room before dawn broke, sneaking out of her hotel like a thief in the
night. Outside, the streets were eerily quiet, the weather uncertain and cool; even in
the darkness, I could see large clouds grouping on the horizon. A stray dog nosing its
way through a bag of rubbish looked up at me warily before returning to its pitiful
business. As I walked home in the pre-dawn darkness, a melody entered my head: Dexter
Gordon playing ‘Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry’. It
has been
turning in my mind ever since, and with it the words:
who cut the knot? Who cut the
knot?

As the truck judders and bumps along a
particularly battered stretch of road, I feel my head emptying of everything except
those words, going around and around in my head like they would on a scratched
record.

Hours pass, the sun rising high above us.
Karl decides to stop for lunch at a place he knows.

‘The food’s not great,’ he
says, ‘but it’ll do.’

The place he brings us to – a long flat
building with large windows, blue paint peeling off the walls, concrete floors giving it
an industrial feel – is more like a school canteen than a restaurant. The three of us
queue at a counter, then take our trays and sit at one of the long trestle tables that
stretch out across the room. The place is already filling up – the faces here
predominantly white and Asian, tourists heading west to go on safari. The food – a stew
with a gristly meat that we guess is goat, served in mismatched bowls – is better than I
expected. Lauren dips bread into the gravy, but doesn’t touch the meat. She drinks
her Coke and hardly says a word.

When she goes to use the bathroom, Karl
says: ‘Everything okay between you guys?’

‘I’m
not sure,’ I say.

‘She was worried about you. You should
have called her,’ he says.

‘I did call her. She knew where I
was.’

A call to tell her that I had gone to Katie
to talk because I’d felt I had to. A call in which I had said to my wife:
You
do trust me, don’t you?
She had said yes, and I had told her I loved her.
But now, I can’t help but feel naïve and stupid, even a little reckless.

He raises an eyebrow. ‘Maybe
that’s the problem. Maybe you shouldn’t have told her where you
were.’

We climb back into the truck, a little
weary, but eager to be on our way.

‘How long to go until we’re
there?’ I ask.

‘A few more hours,’ Karl says,
letting the handbrake down with some effort.

The roads are bad. So bad in places, we have
to take the hard shoulder. Nairobi is already a distant memory. The landscape ahead of
us rolls on and on. Shanty towns – anonymous, without a name or a mark on any map –
appear out of nowhere. They seem makeshift, fragile, prone to quick evacuation. The
truck rattles and shakes. It hits one pothole after another. Farmers and animals watch
us pass with a lazy indifference.

Lauren shifts in her seat, but remains
awake. Her anger has a slow-burning flame.

‘Why were you gone so long?’ she
had asked, when I finally got back this morning.

A whispered conversation in our bedroom,
Karl waiting in the living room, sipping coffee on the sofa.

‘I’m sorry, Lauren. We talked
and then I fell asleep.’

‘You fell
asleep?’ Disbelief in her voice.

‘Nothing happened … You believe me,
don’t you? We just talked, that’s all.’

She held my gaze, her eye fixed on me with
suspicion, and then, in a quiet voice, she said: ‘If you say so.’ Turning
away, she reached for her holdall and stuffed the last of her clothes into it. There was
something savage about her movements, something that seemed completely alien to her
usual grace and self-possession, and I could see how rattled she was. I searched for
something to say to her – something to dispel her suspicion.

‘Katie and I are old friends, Lauren.
We go way back,’ I began.

Lauren didn’t answer. Behind her, the
bed sheets were tousled, but I could tell she hadn’t slept. Her face was drawn and
worried. She didn’t ask any other questions. There was no interrogation. Just a
steely, implacable silence.