His foot squelched in something — mud, please God, not dog’s mess. Yech. Why was she putting him through this? He didn’t really give a monkey’s about the view, he’d not come all this way to look at that. The only view he wanted was Rebecca’s gorgeous face, while he held her body in his arms.
Honestly, he sighed to himself, striding on towards her, feeling excited and annoyed in almost equal measures. ‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘Hey, gorgeous! This view had better be worth it!’
She didn’t react. She just continued facing out to sea.
Was it the view that was distracting her? he wondered.
When he was just a few feet from her, about to put his arms around her, she turned sharply to face him, brandishing the umbrella like a weapon.
And he froze.
108
In the camper van, binoculars glued to his eyes, Roy Grace shouted, ‘Shit! That’s not Rebecca Watkins!’
‘It’s Eden,’ Branson said. ‘Jesus, what’s going on?’
‘We’re about to find out,’ Grace replied.
‘Nice to see you, Niall,’ Eden said. ‘But not that nice.’
He opened his mouth, too astonished for a moment to speak. Before he could get a word out, Eden, holding the point of the umbrella out in front of her, said, ‘Shut up a minute, just wait.’
‘What the hell is this about? What bloody game are you playing, Eden? Do you have any idea of the shit I’ve been through? Do you have any fucking idea?’
‘Whatever it is, it’s not enough for all the crap you’ve put me through.’
Despite shaking with nerves, she managed a smile, managed to keep the tremble out of her voice. That gulp of whisky she’d taken before leaving the car was helping, a lot. She gave him another very sweet smile. ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me? You don’t look very happy that I’m still alive.’
‘Very funny.’ He grimaced, his mind a furnace of fury. ‘Don’t push your luck, baby. This is just you and me. I could shove you over the edge right now, after you’ve set your disappearance up so cleverly. They’ll find your body in a few days and mark you down as a suicide. I’d have just left you dead. Have you thought about that? How it would look to anyone? You tried to frame your husband and, when that didn’t work, you decided to end it all?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve thought about it, Niall,’ Eden replied, speaking verbatim from the script Rebecca had written for her. ‘Which is why I’m wearing a wire, with every word you or I say being transmitted to a recording device at the Police HQ in Lewes. I saw the texts to your lover, whoever she is, where you talked about your plans to “get rid of” me.’
She saw the hesitation in his face and knew her words had struck home — enough to sow doubt about whether she was telling the truth or not. ‘Still going to shove me over the edge?’
‘Look, we need to talk,’ he said. ‘Like, those texts — they were just a joke, you know.’
‘Great joke, so funny, they had me in hysterics. Can’t remember when I laughed so much, Niall. Especially the bit about my will, thinking you would inherit everything when I was gone. And you and your lover had a plan. You told her you knew exactly how to kill me and dispose of my body so it would never be found. I particularly liked that bit where you told her that if the police couldn’t find a body, it made a prosecution very hard. A “no body” murder, I think you called it, right?’
He stared at her in numb silence.
‘So, I thought I would turn the tables. You deserve it. You killed our unborn baby and ruined my life, you evil bastard. Can a dead person commit a murder, Niall?’
‘There’s one flaw in that, Eden,’ he said, more calmly now. ‘The police don’t believe you’re dead.’
‘Obviously not if they’ve wired me with a mic.’ She smiled. ‘Do you want to hear what your lover told me, while we were in bed together?’
‘What?’ Now he stared at her both confused and dumbstruck.
Rebecca had told her exactly the words to say and the moves to make. Keep taunting him, ramping it up, and up again, until he lunged at her, and as he did so to instantly hit the ground. He would trip over her and be gone, over the edge.
But she couldn’t do it. She knew the words, what she had to say. The taunt about his manhood. The first time he’d ever hit her was when she had done that, and totally unintentionally then.
The script was so clear in her head now. She just had to say the words and he would lunge, he was that livid.
She also told me you couldn’t satisfy her.
But the words lodged in her throat. She couldn’t get them out.
Instead, she stared at him, at her husband, at the man she hated so much, on the edge of a 500-foot drop, knowing just how easily he could kill her, and that he could do it without any sense of remorse. But she was unable to spit out the words that would trigger him.
‘You don’t have a wiretap, Eden. You and I have watched enough police documentaries to know that. Police never put a key witness in danger like this. You’re lying. Bullshit. This is just you and me. No one’s listening. No one’s coming to save you. You’re lying about the police and Rebecca. Whatever your crazy plan is, your stupid ploy, you’ve actually just made it very easy for me.’
She froze. Her eyes adjusting more and more to the darkness. Staring at him, at the anger in his face.
And suddenly, now, she was scared. Really scared.
‘Like I said, Eden, you’re a very stupid woman with your hare-brained plan to try to frame me. All you’ve actually done is set me up with the perfect alibi. I don’t need a “no body” murder any more. You see, it’s not possible to murder a dead person.’
He took a step towards her. ‘Too bad you didn’t work that one out, but then you never were as smart as you thought at chess.’ He took another step towards her, remembering the words of the tall, burly copper who’d first come to the house to interview him. ‘Our unfinished game, Eden. You thought you were beating me, but you’d made a fatal error with that one. A move you hadn’t spotted. Black Queen’s Knight to King’s Pawn three, eh? Shall we call this my last checkmate?’
‘Shit! Something’s going to happen here,’ Roy Grace yelled, dropping his glasses and frantically looking for the door handle. ‘GO, GO, GO!’
He clambered down from the camper and, closely followed by Branson, sprinted across the car park towards the road, radioing Taylor for backup as he did.
Suddenly, all Eden’s confidence had drained away. Niall was just inches away from her and the cliff edge was just two feet behind her. She stared at him, trembling in terror. There wasn’t enough room between them now for her to drop to the ground, as Rebecca had instructed her. Her brain raced desperately, thinking of what to do, what to say.
Then a tornado erupted from a bush a few feet behind Niall. It slammed into him, propelling him sideways. Then forward. Then forward again.
Eden heard a thud. Another thud. A grunt.
Then, suddenly, he was gone.
Vanished.
A faint, terrible, piercing scream that faded away.
Followed by complete silence.
109
‘Bex!’ Eden screamed at the figure in the hoodie and baseball cap, and lunged at her in blind, shocked fury. Rebecca stepped back, then back again, parrying her flailing arms.
‘Bex — what... what have you done?’ she screamed again.