Page 62 of Watching You
But if it was ever found, there would be no question about what had happened to him. No grey area. It could only have been a murder.
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, her father whispered from some dim place inside her subconscious.
‘Ah yes,’ Beth said, as if she’d misplaced her car keys and just remembered she’d left them in the ignition. ‘Silly me.’ She walked around Karl Smith’s body and picked up the log he’d dropped. ‘It needs to look like you fell onto this, not that someone hit you with it.’
Beth put down the knife, used Karl Smith’s hair to lift his head, and whacked the front of his skull on his forehead hard enough to sound like someone had just hit a six at The Oval. She laid his head back down carefully onto the gravel and waited for the inevitable.
Karl’s body convulsed, then lay still again. His breathing grew ragged then shallowed. She made herself wait a full ten minutes before taking his pulse. It was weak, thready and uneven.
‘Time to get moving,’ she muttered.
She tucked the knife into the waistband of her leggings, rolled Karl onto his back, arms up over his head, and took one hand in each of hers behind her back. Dragging him was slow going and even harder once she reached the trees. Twice she had to stop and hump him up and over fallen branches. Twenty minuteslater, she found what she’d been looking for: another drop-off with a ditch below it, and by then the last dribble of bloody light had slithered from the horizon. No phone, no torch, in agony and desperate, Beth hauled him to the edge of the ditch until his jeans got caught on a branch.
She pulled too hard, and she knew it as she was doing it. The pop of her arm from its socket was the last straw in a day that she’d believed for a while would be her last. Even then she couldn’t scream and risk some dog walker or camper hearing and calling the police.
The pain was a firework set off inside her body.
‘Fuck,’ she growled, ripping at the stuck jeans with her good hand and feeling for his neck in the pitch black. No pulse. No breaking sounds. All good. He was done.
Finally, with a last push of her foot, he rolled down into the ditch that would be his resting place. Beth kicked some leaves down after him. It wouldn’t do to make it look as if he’d been buried. That, too, would arouse suspicion. But just maybe, if he ever was found there in the middle of the forest, it might be that he’d been hiking, lost his footing, hit his head, and died there in that nowhere, that last ditch.
She said a short prayer for her own soul but did not pray for his. Why should she? He’d brought it all on himself.
It took her forty-five minutes to get back to the cabin in the dark, and more than once she felt that the woods simply did not want to let her go. But she made it, threw her belongings back into her bag, left the cabin exactly as it had been when she’d arrived, and climbed into her car. She paused only to message the letting agent to say there had been a change of plan, that she was stuck in Edinburgh and would not be able to get away for her break after all but understood that she wouldn’t be eligible for a refund.
Then she drove back to Edinburgh one-handed, fiercely grateful for having an automatic car, and took herself straight to the hospital. It was a risk, and one she felt bad about. Several times she thought the pain might make her pass out, but she couldn’t be found in her car away from the city. Her face in the rearview mirror belonged to a ghost more than a living person. But it was only fair that she suffered, she realised. It was the price she had to pay.
Karl Smith had finally been reunited with his mother. It was a fitting end for him, lying with the skittering, slithering things that he’d driven her beautiful daughter to paint over and over again until madness had taken her.
Beth parked at the hospital, staggered in through the doors and collapsed on the mat before anyone could reach her.
It was another twelve hours before she would open her eyes and know that she’d survived the night.
And another four hours after that, Karl Smith would – unbeknown to her – do the same.
Chapter 41
Ten and a Half Months Earlier
By the time Beth was not only conscious but sufficiently drug-free to really understand what was going on, the first thing she asked for was a newspaper.
‘As soon as we’ve checked you out properly,’ the doctor overseeing her treatment promised. ‘You’ve had antibiotics and saline, and your tetanus was nearly out of date so we did that too. Can I ask how the arm is feeling today? It was dislocated. You’ll need to keep it in that sling for about a month, and you’ll need physiotherapy before you can safely hold a scalpel again. You had a rib fracture too but it wasn’t displaced and it should heal nicely, and a dentist is coming in this morning to take a look at your chipped tooth.’
‘None of it matters. Given the damage to my career, I’ll never hold a scalpel again anyway,’ she said. ‘Did anyone find my phone? There are some people I need to call.’
‘I gather the only thing in your hand when you passed out in A&E was your car keys, but one of your colleagues checked your car, found your handbag in there, and anything of value hasbeen placed in your office and locked up. Can you tell me how you dislocated your shoulder? You have a number of cuts and grazes too. We were concerned that we should call the police.’
‘No,’ Beth said quietly. ‘It was my own fault. I was upset about being suspended from my job, so I went for a run and ended up falling down a slope. I tried to grab a bush to stop myself and dislocated the shoulder.’ She tried to sit up and failed. Her shoulder was only mildly uncomfortable. What really hurt was her head. ‘Could I get some more pain relief? My head’s thumping.’
‘I bet. That was a nasty blow to the temple. We’ve done a CT scan though, and you were watched closely for concussion, but you’re out of danger now. The neurologist said there was nothing of concern in the scan.’
Beth rubbed her forehead with her free hand and groaned. ‘Yes, sorry. I remember the scan now. Everything was fuzzy for a while.’
‘You were given strong painkillers when we found you. I’m not surprised your memory is blurry, but it’ll all come back.’
The door opened.
‘Knock-knock,’ the visitor said. ‘Is this a bad time?’
