Page 44 of You Lied First
Margot’s mind is racing.
‘Think about it,’ she says. ‘If we bury her and, somehow, she’s found, the police will realise that someone somewhere knows what happened. Because someone will have to have buried her. But, like I said earlier, if we just leave her, fully clothed, in the sand, it’ll look as if she was out here on her own. Maybe she wandered away from someone’s camp looking for the perfect photo, or got separated from a desert safari trip …’ she trails off.
‘And just collapsed here on her own?’
Margot nods. ‘Exactly.’
Sara rakes her sweaty hair off her face. ‘But Guy said we should bury her. The point is we don’t want her to be found by random campers. We stand a much bigger chance of not being discovered if her body is hidden. Underground.’
Margot looks at the desert around them. ‘There’s nothing here. Who’s going to come to this exact spot and find her?’
‘We’re notthatfar from the track,’ Sara says, and Margot remembers bumping along it before they let down the tyres and headed into the deep sand. The two women stare at each other, lost in the horrors of their thoughts. Then Sara speaks.
‘We made an agreement with Guy. We agreed to bury her. Like he said, we can’t just leave her here to be torn apart by falcons and eaten by desert foxes. Come on. The least we can do is give her some dignity in death. She deserves a burial. Let’s at least be human about it.’
She turns back to the tent, takes a deep breath and crawls in. There, she wraps Celine’s sheet around her body, then Margot drags her feetfirst out of the tent. They try to lift up an end of the sheet each but Celine’s too heavy for them. Neither wants to carry her with a fireman’s lift so they’re forced to drag Celine over to the hole. By the time they get there, Margot is drenched in sweat and panting. She’s got black floaters circling in front of her eyes and a headache. She knows she’s dehydrated and remembers that Guy took all the water in his car.
‘We can brush over the tracks later,’ Sara says, wiping her brow with the back of her hand but then she stops and stares into the distance. ‘What is that?’
Margot shields her eyes from the sun and squints towards the horizon. There’s dust rising into the blue of the sky.
‘Cars, maybe? I can’t tell if they’re coming this way. We need to hurry up.’
Somehow, Margot finds strength and endurance that surprise her. The hole isn’t as deep as she’d have liked it to be, but it’ll have to do. She and Sara roll Celine’s body into the makeshift grave as gently as they can but, even so, the body hits the hard sand at the bottom with a muffled crunch that Margot knows will haunt her dreams.
Sara looks sadly into the hole. ‘You want to say anything? Any final words?’
Goodandriddancecome to mind, but Margot shakes her head.
‘Okay. Well, RIP, Celine,’ Sara says. ‘You were, um – it was nice getting to know you. Uh, fly high with the, uh, angels.’
I wouldn’t count on it,thinks Margot.
One of Celine’s hands has come out of the sheet.
‘Should we try to get that back in?’ Sara asks, but Margot’s had a realisation that’s turned her insides to ice.
‘We don’t have time,’ she says. ‘I’ve just realised what those cars are. They’re the Jeep Jamboree. I saw fliers for it. There are hundreds of them on a desert drive today. We need to get out of here!’ She grabs the spade. ‘Come on!’
They shovel, scrape and kick the sand onto Celine as fast as they can, while also glancing over their shoulders at the advancing plume of dust.
‘They’re coming this way,’ Sara says and Margot looks up. Now it’s possible to make out the line of vehicles, the sun glinting off bonnets and windscreens.
‘Oh my God. Right, you collapse her tent and get it in the car and I’ll finish up here.’
Margot smooths over the top of the grave and the surrounding footprints with the side of a piece of wood, then she stands back and tries to look critically at her handiwork. The area clearly has been disturbed, the damp sand from underneath is darker in colour, but the sun’s hot – it’ll dry out in minutes. She just hopes that the Jeep Jamboree doesn’t pass this way.
She hurries over to the car and swings herself in – every overused muscle in her legs, back and arms sore and protesting. Sara’s already seated. She’s holding an iPhone.
‘We forgot her phone,’ she says. ‘What the hell do we do with it?’
‘Is it off? Turn it off. We’ll chuck it out of the window or something. We need to go.’
She guns the engine and doesn’t look back.
36
SARA
