Chapter 10: Power

“Let me look,” Rosie was the next to move - trying to get Nancy to show her the cut at the top of her arm, which was dribbling blood quite fast.

Jade stepped over the dead bodies to be with her big sister who, having saved her, was looking distinctly groggy now. The left side of her face was swelling. They sat down on the bench together.

I realised my forearm was bleeding, and put my thumb on the wound. The knife hadn’t gone right through at least. I could still move my fingers. Sarah was coming over to the terrace, none too steadily, with her right eye beginning to swell, closing. Kayleigh was going over to her.

I tried to get my mind working. We had to move the car they’d come in, before too many people noticed it - it would be in the drive presumably. Without leaving fibres or DNA in it. Or, we had to take it somewhere and burn it, without passing any cameras. We had to get rid of the bodies: with no bodies there couldn’t be a murder, so there couldn’t be a murder investigation.

Nancy would be questioned. She was linked to me already, through being stopped in the car ... though the longer it took to get to that stage, the less senior the interviewer would be. Or, would that incident even have been recorded, bearing in mind how it had ended? Should she report him missing? Would someone report the heavy missing? Perhaps, perhaps not.

“We need bandages?” Rosie was holding Nancy’s arm, pressing the wound together. “Wound closure, strip and tissue adhesive. From a chemist. Gloves, and alcohol.”

Could we claim self-defence? If we were going to do that, we had to call police and ambulance straight away. As a way out, it was fraught with difficulties: the story would go global in an hour, with naked girls impaling a would-be rapist and all the rest of it. Though of course nobody actually needed to be told about the nudity, or the illegal sex. The prosecution would argue a threat with a sword would have been sufficient. Although on the other hand, there was the knife and Nancy’s wound, and we could control the narrative, up to a point. Thea’s criminal history would be brought into it. By the time it came to court, the media could have painted it as an orgy gone wrong ... a man reclaiming his wife...

And ultimately, Thea had killed Nancy’s father, not her sister’s abductor. She’d wanted him dead, for Nancy and Rosie. Kayleigh had done what Thea said, as a plan; as a gang decision. Because this was Thea and Nancy’s gang, and they all refer to each other for right and wrong. Even now, none of them was shocked at the dead bodies - the gang was better off, that was what mattered. In court, that could be presented as the men being the victims.

All this had flitted through my mind in an instant. Nancy could drive her father’s car - her hair in it wouldn’t be a problem.

Right. Sequence - as Rosie said: chemist’s. Fix Nancy up, with these modern plasters Rosemary seemed to know about. Hopefully they’d be up to that severity of wound. Then, hopefully she can move the car. At least the bodies were out of sight from the road, behind the house.

“Rosie,” I asked, “do you know about bandaging?”

“I was training to be a nurse,” she nodded.

“But Dad stopped it,” Nancy added, looking with disdain at his dead body. “He was jealous, of all the doctors being after her.”

“One of them,” Rosie acknowledged, “gave me a lift home, after I had to stay late, with an emergency, and he saw.”

“He knew you were a million times too good for him,” Thea added from the bench. “Too generally beautiful, so he was always afraid of someone coming along and taking you away.”

Somehow, we managed to get through the immediate steps we needed to keep Thea and Kayleigh out of jail - for the time being anyway; and their accomplices for that matter, which included a certain former Justice of the Peace!

Nobody was badly hurt at least, just variously dazed, bruised and bandaged. We got dressed. Rosie patched me up enough to drive to the chemists’, so she could go in and get everything she needed for Nancy, after I’d added some money to her overdrawn bank account.

There was a small van in the drive, which was - or had been - the heavy’s, because Nancy’s dad didn’t in fact have a car.

“Jades, take it to Don’s yard,” Thea instructed.

So Jade drove it, in big sunglasses and floppy hat, and I suspended my disbelief and followed her, to a dusty track almost in the countryside. Some way down there was a decrepit sign saying Scrapyard. She signalled me to wait, unscrewed the number plates and drove the van down the lane.

I couldn’t help beginning to worry about her - a slim and very attractive young girl going into a scrapyard on her own, in her thin, skin tight shorts - as she stopped the van near a big metal gate and got out. Perhaps I should walk down, just in case ... an Alsatian appeared! It rushed towards her, without a sound, like a wolf.

Jade crouched down, hands out, saying something I couldn’t make out, and the dog came into her arms, licking her face, wagging its tail. She stroked it for several seconds, before standing up and running fluidly back to me and sliding into the passenger seat.

“They’ll crush it for scrap,” she grinned. “They’re okay actually, and now it’s like that they just found it, with no plates. They’ll do the VIN and engine number. We can burn the plates on a bonfire.”

“Great,” I smiled, setting off without delay, on the fringes of a petty criminal underworld with this ‘connected’ adolescent girl - if accessory to murder could be called ‘petty’!

“How do you know them?” I had to ask.

“Oh, lads we used to hang out with a bit, me and Thee and Nance, “but they were getting into stuff like cats and all that, I mean catalytic converters you know. And getting a bit keen. We haven’t seen them in a while.”

No wonder the traffic cops knew them! I took extra care not to speed or break any traffic laws on the way back.

At home, with gangland efficiency the girls had extracted the swords from the bodies, cleaned them with the pressure washer from the garage, dried them, and hung them back on the wall. They’d retrieved the men’s phones. I was trying to avoid the dead bodies - either looking at them or being near them - but the girls didn’t care. The slaying was a victory: over a domestic abuser and a would-be rapist.

The bodies - we needed to do something with them. But what?

“We need to eat,” Rosie pleaded. To me it didn’t seem like the priority of the moment, but it was half way through the afternoon already. So I drove her and Nancy to Sainsbury’s. They did a big shop, then when we got back we all sat down to a huge veggie pizza, trying to think what to do.

“If we had a digger,” said Nancy, “we could just bury them.”

“The business has an excavator,” I remembered, “that’ll dig down to four metres, which will hide them from sniffer dogs. I’ve still got keys to the site, but I’d need an excuse, to have it. And the ground will look dug for a while. It’s at the yard.”

“So we can’t do it here, you mean, as it’d be totally obvious,” Thea’s brain was still working.

“How do you take it places?” asked Jade.

“On a big, low loader trailer,” I explained, “that we tow with a tractor, or an HGV tractor unit. It’s all quite noisy.”

“Can we make it look like they killed each other or something?” Kayleigh suggested.

“Good idea, but the injuries will be quite distinctive,” Rosie replied helpfully. “A clean cut, no crushing, just one and in a line. The path of the blade will be clear from the organ damage - stomach, diaphragm, heart, a lung ... liver perhaps too - you both went up so centrally, and that’s why they just died, on their feet, like a light. So they couldn’t have done that to each other, realistically: the first one to be impaled wouldn’t have been able to exert that force, upwards, on the other.”

“They should just disappear,” Nancy pronounced, not finding that detail at all gruesome apparently. “That’s what should happen, with no funeral or anything, just poof! not here any more. And only a missing persons case. We could dump their clothes on the beach.”

“The clothes all have blood on them though,” Sarah pointed out.

“What about your farm machinery site?” Jade asked me. “Is it big?”

“It’s a big yard, the local one,” I considered the idea, “but there are people there every day.”

“What’s it called?” Thea was on her phone. I told her, and in a moment they all had Google Maps open and were looking at it.

“That little wood,” said Sarah.

“Perfect,” Nancy was liking it.

“Street view Col,” Thea told me.

I got my phone out so I could see what they were talking about.

There indeed is a neglected copse, in the corner of the field opposite the yard, just across the road. I’d barely noticed it before. The yard is one of seven the company owns, and as usual it’s in a wide expanse of arable farmland. It’s an old farm, bought out long since and its fields merged, into the size which they need our machines to manage effectively. The corners of fields sometimes get missed, since nobody really wants to stop a big machine, and they grow over into small parcels of woodland, of perhaps a hundred square metres like this one. But that was all we needed.

“How long does it take, to dig a hole?” Nancy wanted to know.

“Not long, if you’re not taking the earth away,” I explained. “We can just pile it up on either side, then to backfill you sweep it in with the side of the bucket. Full depth takes longer, but otherwise it’s not a big hole. With a slick operator it would be a few minutes.”

“I always wanted to drive a digger,” she said, looking at her phone.