scene: that she was fully dressed and unmoving, and that there was a plastic petrol can next to her. And then he heard the sound of oncoming sirens.
32
Jojo
Saturday, July 23, 1983, 7:00 A.M.
She wasn’t exactly quick that morning. It was an obvious idea to solve a very big problem. But at least she’d got there.
“Where are you going?” Brett was calling after her. “It’s this way.”
“You can start hiding the stash, but making sure it’s not visible isn’t going to be enough,” Jojo called back. She paced forward, scanning the ground. It had been somewhere here.
She smelled it before she saw it. A pungent, sweet-sour reek. Even this early in the morning it was humming.
She followed the stench off the path and tried not to retch. Closer to, the stoat’s remains were almost unbearably foul.
She put her left shoulder across her nose and mouth and crouched down to grab at its hind legs, which were relatively whole. She got quickly to her feet, keeping it as far away from her body as she could.
She half jogged toward the river. Brett was waiting for her outside the shade of the tree, clearly not having taken the initiative to start without her.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked as she drew closer.
The smell must have hit him hard. He’d turned an awful color. He moved away from her, down the bank, but Jojo jumped down too until she was right next to the water. She lowered the stoat until its bloated head and half-rotted back were on the ground, and then she dragged it, swiftly, toward the tree with the stash in it.
Behind her, Brett made a gagging sound, and then full-on vomited into the river. It was a revolting sound, though she had to admit that she felt for him. The stoat reeked.
She kept moving until she had ducked under the tree and gone just past it, and then let go of the stoat with her lips and nose curling up involuntarily. Brett stopped being sick and came toward her, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot and watery.
“Why the hell…?”
“It’s for the dogs,” she said. “Because if they don’t find her, there are going to be dogs, and we need a reason for them to be interested in this area, and something for them to fixate on that isn’t the stash.”
Brett pulled his T-shirt up to cover his nose.
“You could have waited till we’d hidden the fucking stuff,” he said. “If I vomit into the hole, it’s not going to make anyone look good.”
Jojo ignored him and climbed up one of the roots until she was crouched above the hole, with banked-up loose earth below her. The entrance to the cache was invisible from up here. All she could see was the top of the sapling that had grown up out of the beech’s roots. Soon, she thought, it was going to be invisible from everywhere.
She kicked at the earth below her. It was dry, and it started to crumble and then to fall in layers.
Brett was below her, near the entrance, still trying to cover his face from the stench.
“Come on,” Jojo said. “You need to kick it over the hole or they’re going to see it.”
He was still protesting as he moved the sapling aside. He pulled some of the earth down with his hands, and then shuffled his feet and stamped earth down below her.
“That was in my fucking face!”
“Is that enough?” she asked. “Is it covered?”
“Yeah,” he said, stepping back and letting the sapling move back into place. “I don’t think anyone’s going to see it.”
Jojo jumped down and peered critically at where the entrance had once been. They were lucky that it had been hidden well to begin with, behind the sapling. And lucky, too, that the hole was low down and easy to press earth over.
Looking hard at it, she could tell that the soil had been recently moved, even through the leaves of the sapling. Parts of it were darker, less dry. But it was already hot, and the rest of it would have time to dry out before anyone else arrived.
“OK,” she said. “That’s going to have to do.”
Brett nodded, and finally pulled his T-shirt back down from his mouth. He still looked green. Jojo might have felt like mocking him in other circumstances. He’d been pretty confident he could drink more than she could.
“Thanks for…for sorting it,” he said after a minute.