after five in the morning after being out all night with Tommy looking for Jasmine, their runaway. And failing to find her. Where was she? Picked up by the police and spilling the beans on them all? He was hoping to make a silent re-entry, but the larkish Rhoda was already up.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked.
‘Went for an early-morning walk,’ he bluffed.
‘Walk?’ she said disbelievingly.
‘Yes, walk. I’ve decided to get fit.’
‘You?’
‘Yes, me,’ he said patiently. ‘Wendy’s death’s made me realize how precious life is.’ He could tell that she didn’t buy any of it. He didn’t blame her. And anyway, what was precious about life? It was a throwaway thing, a bit of paper and rags. He thought of Maria, lifeless like a toy, broken beyond repair. Tiny as a bird that had fallen from the nest before its time. His first thought was that she must have overdosed. Or been slapped around too much. ‘Hung herself, the stupid bitch,’ Tommy said.
‘You’re sure you haven’t been out on the boat?’ Rhoda said. ‘You smell … odd.’
I smell of death, Andy thought. And despair. He was feeling sorry for himself.
They hadn’t just been trying to find one girl, they had been trying to lose another. ‘The other one got away,’ Tommy had told him when he’d arrived last night at Silver Birches with the Polish girls and found that Maria had killed herself.
‘Jasmine?’
‘Whatever. We’ve been out looking for her for hours with no joy. You’re going to have to help. And we have to get rid of the dead one.’
‘Maria.’
Andy kept a little boat down in the marina, nothing much, a skip with an outboard motor (the Lottie) that he took out fishing occasionally. Tommy came out sometimes, always wearing a lifejacket because he couldn’t swim. Unmanned him a bit, in Andy’s opinion.
Under cover of darkness they had put Maria in Tommy’s Navara and then transferred her to the Lottie and chugged out into the North Sea. When there was a decent distance between the boat and the shore they picked Maria up – Tommy by the shoulders, Andy by the feet – a sparrow-weight, and swung her overboard. A shimmer of silver in the moonlight, slick as a fish, and she was gone.
Shouldn’t they have weighted her down with something? ‘She’ll just float back up, won’t she?’ Andy said.
‘Probably,’ Tommy said, ‘but who’s going to give a shit? She’ll just be one more Thai druggie whore. Who’s going to care?’
‘She was from the Philippines, not Thailand.’ And her name was Maria. A Catholic, too. Andy had taken the crucifix from around her small neck after he’d unwound what was left of the scarf that she’d hanged herself with. He put it in his pocket. The scarf was a flimsy thing, but it had done the job. Tommy had sawed through it with his Stanley knife, but he’d got to her too late. Andy recognized the scarf as the one she’d bought in Primark in Newcastle yesterday. Seemed like a lifetime ago – certainly was for Maria. He untied the remnant that remained knotted around the window bars, treating it with the tenderness befitting a relic, and reunited it with the other piece in his pocket.
After they’d tipped her into the sea, Andy threw the crucifix in after her and said a silent prayer. For a brief moment he considered pushing Tommy out of the boat too, but the lifejacket would save him. With his luck he would bob around until the lifeboat found him or a stray fishing vessel. Of course, Lottie would do that, that’s what Newfoundlands were built for, paddling their strong legs through the waves to drag things – people, boats – back to shore. Lottie wasn’t here though, only Brutus, Tommy’s dog, asleep in the Navara.
‘Foxy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can you turn this thing around now instead of daydreaming?’
Tommy was mystified as to how the girls had got out of the plastic ties that attached their wrists to the bed. And why did one stay and one go? Andy wondered. Did Jasmine wake up and find that Maria had killed herself and then run, or did Maria kill herself because Jasmine had deserted her? He supposed he would never know.
Jasmine was tougher than she looked, Andy reckoned. Where would she go? What would she do? He remembered the happy expression on the girls’ faces when they were watching Pointless, their squeals of delight in the supermarket. He felt suddenly, violently sick and had to hang on to the edge of