August
Eight Months After Bonfire Night
Chapter 88
Anna
This modem’s connection is painfully slow. We’ve both forgotten how long it took us to get online before the advent of cable and Wi-Fi. And we’d rather be in the air-conditioned place we now call home than here in this stiflingly hot internet café. But I won’t risk going online at the house. You can never be sure who is monitoring you.
I sense Margot looking over my shoulder as a BBC News page loads on the screen. A trial date has been set for Drew’s murder, and it’s eight months from now. The accused remain on remand in prisons in Derbyshire and Surrey.
‘I must admit, I didn’t think it would get this far,’ Margot begins. ‘I assumed the Crown Prosecution Service would’ve thrown the case out by now.’
‘There’s still a lot of evidence mounted against them,’ I reply.
‘There’s also a lot of assumptions and holes.’
‘That’s for the jury to decide.’
‘It won’t get that far. Trust me, neither of them will make it to trial. Especially now your name has been brought into the equation.’
I don’t respond. Instead, we scan the photographs illustrating the story. Every time a news outlet runs an update, they choose an image to suit their house style. And they’re spoiled for choice, as there are a lot of them floating about the internet.
Because Liv and Brandon are a very photogenic couple.
BBC News has lifted a flattering shot of husband and wife from the opening night party of Liv’s now defunct yoga studio. ButThe SunandDaily Starare using images I took from Margot’s phone, clips of Liv and Brandon’s OnlyFans dominatrix videos. The day after Drew’s body was discovered, I leaked the story, Liv and Brandon’s names and the pictures to an old contact on the news desk. ‘Cops question kinky couple’ was the headline. Once they were charged with his murder, reporting restrictions came into force. But as social media cares little for legalities, it didn’t stop the full-length videos from circulating wildly.
I take a moment to stretch my arms and rub my sore eyes. It’s not even 11 a.m. and the thermometer on the café wall says it’s already thirty-five degrees.
‘A Pakistani summer is like no other,’ my aunt warned me over breakfast when I mentioned I was going out. It’s hard to disagree.
Closing the page, I pat my forehead with a tissue I keep under the sleeve of my kameez, the long tunic I wear paired with my loose-fitting shalwar trousers. I gaze upward at the ceiling fan and the gentle rotation of its blades. They offer about as much relief as a butterfly’s wings. I slip several rupees into a vending machine and a bottle of Coke appears in a hatch. I’m about to ask Margot if she wants one but stop myself. I run the ice-cold glass bottle across my face and along the top of my chest before twisting open the top to drink.
I check my phone but neither my uncle nor my aunt have messaged me, so I assume all must be well. Margot is more anxious to return to their place than I am.
‘Can we go now?’ she asks.
‘Not yet,’ I say and she tuts.
Returning to the computer, I pay a website $20 from an anonymous balance transfer card to load an image of the cul-de-sac she and I once called home. The dragging modem means it takes an eternity, but I wait patiently until an overhead view of Liv’s garden appears. It was taken twenty-four hours ago and it’s surprisingly detailed. Rubble sits in a pile outside what’s left of her orangery, the remains of police-excavated concrete flooring that once concealed my brother’s body.
I buried him there days after Liv first showed me the video footage of Margot looming over her injured body the day of the hit-and-run. It wasn’t easy, either physically or mentally. I waited until the family had travelled to Cornwall to visit Brandon’s parents before I dug up a section of their orangery floor that had yet to be concreted. Then, as evening fell, I tipped a wheelie bin on its side and, using the strength of two people, pushed my brother’s body inside – still wrapped in its tarpaulin – and dragged it through a side gate and into their garden without being seen. I tipped him out and buried him a metre below the surface. I must have been running on pure, double adrenaline because by the time I finished, every muscle in my exhausted body was shredded. Before I left, I made sure there was not a surface stone out of place to rouse the builders’ suspicions. Two days later, and with my tendons and tissue still burning and aching, I had a ringside seat from Drew’s old bedroom as I watched the mixer pour hundreds of cubic metres of liquid concrete on to the space above him.
It was a risky, yet ultimately fortuitous plan. Because just a few weeks later, Liv believed she was giving Margot and me no choice but to invest in her cash-strapped business to keep ourselves out of trouble. Margot hinted that I could make this problem go away. And I did, just not in the way she was suggesting.
Of course, framing Liv and Brandon for Drew’s murder wasn’t as simple as leaving his body under their flooring. First, Margot and I approached Liv separately, explaining how it would take time to get the money together that she wanted. Margot blamed a late payment for her television work and I said my delays were down to inheritance investment penalties. Liv proposed a six-week timeframe. And she always spoke around her blackmail as if she feared we were recording her.
‘Did you know you can schedule an email to be sent at a certain time and on a certain date?’ she mentioned. ‘So, hypothetically speaking, if, out of the blue, something happened to me, that email could still arrive in the inbox of somebody important. You can even attach photos and videos. Useful, isn’t it?’
I also guessed the reason she insisted we pay her through bank transfers was to establish a paper trail of transactions between us. Should anything happen ‘out of the blue’, investigators might ask why we’d given her two large sums of money.
But Liv isn’t as smart as she thinks. I made an excuse to visit her studio and the space she’d suggested I could use as a workshop. It was wholly unsuitable and she knew it. It would be a power play to have me under her supervision. A constant reminder of her dominance.
I waited for her to teach a yoga class before I placed Drew’s bloodied wedding ring and the secret SIM card Margot had used to message him inside an empty changing room locker. I read through every message first to ensure Drew had never used Margot’s name, then slipped the key inside Liv’s desk drawer. I accessed her laptop and erased the CamMe footage of Margot from Liv’s cloud and remotely wiped the device wherever she’d hidden it. I located the incriminating email she’d set up to go to Brandon, the police and theGuardiannews desk, and deleted all of its contents, leaving it blank. I also located photos she’d taken of Drew’s body in the chest freezer in my garage. I deleted them, too, and the following day,cleaned the freezer thoroughly and paid cash for a man with a van to take it away and dump it.
In the meantime, Margot waited until Brandon had left his car unlocked one night to stash in the boot the pipe wrench I’d used to kill my brother. It still contained traces of his blood and hair.
Finally, Margot and I were ready.
