Left You Dead

78

Ten minutes later, Eden was driving along the A27 with Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ blasting through the car’s speakers. It was one of the songs that Niall hated. Just like most of the tracks on the playlist — her Freedom Playlist — that she’d secretly put together these past few weeks. Singing aloud to the track, she was heading north-east to Lewes, and then would take the Crowborough road towards Ashdown Forest.

Finally, she slowed, approaching the turn-off into the same car park into which she had driven the BMW last Thursday night. It was after Niall had fallen deep asleep — with a little help from the sleeping pills she’d popped into the whisky she gave him after the barbecue. She was hopeful the police would find this turn-off from interrogating the BMW’s computer and his phone, which she had also taken with her, leaving hers behind.

As she pulled in, onto the sandy surface, she was relieved that no other cars were here, no one to witness her. Pulling on rubber gloves and locking the car, checking around warily for any cyclists or dog walkers, she carried the plastic bag off into the woods. Who was it who said, If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans?

Well, God wasn’t laughing today, but she was pretty sure he was smiling.

Just as she smiled as she removed the spade — the one she’d bought at a garden centre a while back — from the thick gorse bush where she’d concealed it. Then she began to scrape out the soil of the shallow grave she had dug in the early hours of Friday morning. Next, she unwrapped the cling film from around the bloodstained kitchen knife, put the wrapping carefully into the bag and dropped the knife into the soil.

Forty minutes later, when she had finished interring the clothes she had brought and covering them sparsely with earth, ensuring some were showing on the surface, scratching the ground to make it look like it had been disturbed by an animal, she returned to her car, placed the spade and the bag — the sole contents of which was now the cellophane in which the knife had been wrapped — in the boot and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Before driving off, she keyed a text and sent it.

Moments after starting the engine, a reply pinged back.