The Guilty Party: A new gripping thriller from the 2018 bestselling author Mel McGrath

At the station, a fellow passenger helps me lift my case from the carriage onto the platform. It was cold and drizzly when I left London and it’s more or less the same now, only colder, and naturally, me being me, I’m wearing the wrong jumper for it, but never mind. I’ll find something warmer in the case when I reach the cottage. The bag is heavy with new clothes, new shoes, the results of a rare online spending spree. This weekend I’m intending to dress to impress. If anyone asks where I got the money (and they will) I’ll say I got promoted at the school, something more of a hope than a reality.

The driver slings my bag into the boot of the taxi while I let myself inside. A taxi is fine.

‘You been to the island before?’ the taxi driver says, when I show him the text containing the address.

‘No. Is it nice?’

‘If prisons and quarries are nice,’ he responds, drily.

‘We’re celebrating my friend Bo’s birthday. He used to come here with his dad to collect fossils. It’s his shout.’ Jonathan Bowman was a City lawyer with a passion for palaeontology and a rocky heart that gave out at fifty-six. None of us thought the fact that Bo went on to study the subject at uni was anything but the prince looking for the king’s approval. I have wondered more than once whether this trip is an act of reconciliation, a reckoning of the past as well as a means of reinventing it. Not that Bo, who has never been one for introspection, would ever put it that way.

‘If you ask me, you’d be better off in Weymouth. We got a TGI Fridays,’ the taxi driver says, pulling from the station drop-off into the traffic.

As the taxi makes its way through the scrappy splendour of central Weymouth into nondescript suburbs I’m caught up in the anticipation of it all. Four days. No partners or babies or distractions. It’ll be just like old times. After all that happened at the Wapping Festival, this is what we need.

The road narrows onto Chesil Spit. To our right stretches the long, thin finger of Chesil Beach, empty now save for a few gulls, to the left is a huddle of industrial-looking buildings set on an expanse of what looks like wasteland. The driver explains this was the old naval base where the 2012 Olympic water sports were staged. Then, all of a sudden, we are on the Isle of Portland.

‘Why do they call it an island?’

The taxi driver’s eyes flit to the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ve never asked.’

We sail past an old boozer, an ad outside reading, ‘Wanted: New Customers’, over a mini-roundabout and left up a steep hill on the top of which perches what looks like an ancient fort.

‘The Citadel,’ volunteers the driver, observing my gaze. ‘It was originally a prison for convicts waiting to be transported to Australia. It’s a detention centre for refugees now. Nothing’s changed.’ He lets out a grim laugh. ‘There’s another prison in the middle of the island. Young offenders mostly, that one. I get a lot of business from that prison. Mums visiting, that kind of thing. There’s a bus from the mainland but it doesn’t drop off or pick up at visiting hours. Crazy, innit, but that’s Portland. Nothing here makes much sense.’

Above the roof line, beside a ragged buff, a fistful of raptors swoops and hovers in a beautiful, sinister choreography. The taxi driver says he has no idea what they are. Hawks? Kestrels?

‘They do that when they’re hunting.’

He turns off the main road onto a tiny unpaved lane. We climb steeply through low, wind-burned shrubs in silence, wrapped in our own worlds. Halfway up the hill the driver makes a sharp right into a driveway surrounded by wind-breaking hedges and suddenly, as if rising from the murk, a large cottage of ancient brick with a mossy slate roof appears and a voice on the GPS announces that we have reached our destination.

The driver pulls up behind a silver BMW and a midnight blue Audi coupé and I use the time it takes for him to go round to the boot to fetch my bag to take in the scene. The air is clean and carries a tang of seaweed and moss and even now, before sunset, it’s cold and raw in the way London never is. The cottage itself is Georgian or maybe early Victorian, built for a time long gone when keeping out the elements was more important than bringing in the light. A creeper whose leaves are already turning curls around tiny, squinting windows untroubled by the sun and gives the place a forlorn and slightly malevolent air. It’s beautiful in the way that dying and melancholy things are beautiful.

‘Right then,’ says the driver, depositing my bag on the gravel drive. He mentions the fare, a sum that only a month or so ago would have sent me into a spin but now feels perfectly manageable. I reach for my bag and pull out my purse. How lovely to be able to be so casual about money. This must be how the others feel all the time.

At that moment the front door swings open and Anna appears and comes towards me, arms outstretched. ‘Darling. Look at you!’ she says, flashing her wide, breezy, Julia Roberts smile and wrapping me in a hug before pulling away to pluck at the collar of my cherry-red blouse. ‘Such a good colour on you. But then you’ve always been so brilliant at picking out the charity shop bargains.’

Anna herself looks radiant. Anna is always radiant. And thin. And secretly unhappy. She checks my bag. ‘Such a practical bag. I’ve brought all the wrong things. Of course. I’m so sorry we couldn’t pick you up. Bo’s new car.’ She waves in the direction of the Audi. ‘Some enginey widget went wrong and we had to sit in the garage until the mechanic had fixed it. Bo’s being a bit boring about it, tbh, but it’s his birthday weekend so we all have to find something nice to say.’

Beside us, the taxi driver hovers for his money. A mariner’s lamp flickers on in the porch and Bo appears, dressed in smart casuals draped expensively over a treadmill-lean body.

As I open my purse Anna reaches out a staying hand.

‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Bo will sort it out.’ Anna turns her head and flashes Bo a smile. ‘You’ll bring in Cassie’s bag and deal with the fare, won’t you, darling?’

‘Of course.’ Bo slings an arm around my shoulder and drops a kiss on my head. ‘Welcome to Fossil Cottage, Casspot.’

‘Top wheels.’

Bo eye-rolls. ‘I know you couldn’t care less, but sweet of you to play along. I’m trying not to go on about her but first flush of love and all that. Once we’ve had a few bevs, and I’m wanking on about the multi-collision brake assist function, which I guarantee you I will be, please feel free to tell me to shut the fuck up.’

‘You never bore us, Bo darling, does he, Cassie?’ Anna says, looking to me for confirmation.

‘There’s always a first time.’

Bo laughs and tips me a wink. Anna and I move across the mossy gravel drive towards the front porch leaving Bo to sort out the taxi driver and my bag.

‘Isn’t this heavenly?’ Anna says, meaning the cottage. ‘As soon as I saw it on the website I thought: yes. It’s got a kind of Rebecca meets Wuthering Heights with a Paranormal Activity vibe, don’t you think? Wait till you see inside. You’re going to love it. We’ve given you the bedroom at the top of the house.’

‘The mad woman in the attic spot.’

Anna’s left eye flickers and for a moment she searches my face. ‘Oh I see, yes. Funny you!’ We’re almost at the front porch now. ‘So listen, Dex is in the kitchen sorting out supper. We’re having roast chicken.’

‘My favourite.’

Later, Anna will push whatever Dex cooks around on a plate before hiding it under her cutlery. But for now, she steps jauntily around a large stone carving of what appears to be a cockerel with the tail of a fish.

‘Some Portland thing called a Mer-chicken, Bo says. But maybe he was joking. It’s not always obvious with Bo, is it? Don’t worry, it won’t bite.’ Her voice softens to a whisper. ‘Gav’s here, though, and he might. He gave Dex a lift and they must have had a row on the way because he’s in a terrible grump. Thank heaven he’s not staying, but he wanted to say hello to you before driving on to Exeter to have dinner with his sister.’ She holds the door and waves me through a hallway lined with worn stone flags smelling of new paint in a Farrow and Ball drab.

‘Seems ages since we last did something like this,’ Anna says, directing me to a row of Shaker style coat pegs.

‘Wapping Festival was only a month ago.’ From the corner of my eye I see Anna stiffen.

‘I meant the last time we were together for a whole weekend. Bestival, wasn’t it? Do you remember that Bo threw a strop because that glamping yurt cost him a fortune and it was bloody freezing.’

As I recall it was Anna who threw the strop, but Anna has a habit of reinventing things.

‘I remember the rain and that amazing fluorescent candy floss.’

‘Oh yes, yum,’ says Anna.

We enter the hallway and move into a large kitchen done out boho country style, where Gav is sitting in a bentwood chair at an enormous old pine kitchen table, dressed in the full upper middle class fifty-something Londoner’s idea of country garb, cords and an Aran with a jaunty silk neckerchief tucked beneath to signal both his class and sexual preference, and fiddling with his phone. An expensive-looking wax jacket hangs over the chair. Behind him Dex is smearing butter over a large prepared chicken. A whisky bottle sits on the table and the room smells warm and peaty but there’s a palpable tension in the air.

‘No bloody signal!’ Gav looks up, sees me and manages a smile. ‘Oh, hello there, dear Cassie. Give this old man a hug and he’ll be on his way.’

Gav has always been a huge, beary barrel of a man but the weight loss in the six months since I last saw him is shocking and not altogether flattering. It makes him seem much older and a bit clapped out.

Dex turns and holding two buttery hands in the air, whoops a greeting, then Bo appears carrying a rolled-up newspaper.

‘I’ve put your bag in the hallway, Casspot. The driver said you left this?’ He slaps a copy of the Evening Standard on the table.

‘Not mine, but never mind.’

‘Why don’t I show you to your room?’ Dex says. The chicken has gone in the oven and he’s now washing his hands in the kitchen sink.

We clamber up a steep flight of stone steps with a grab rope on one side onto the first-floor landing off which come three bedrooms and a bathroom. Above each room hangs a fossil, or, more likely, a reproduction of a fossil.

‘Anna allocated the rooms. She thought it would be funny to give everyone the room with the fossil that was most like them, so that one’s Bo’s.’ Dex points to a panelled door at the end of the corridor above which sits what looks like a large elongated snail. ‘Guess.’

‘I don’t know. Leaves a trail of slime behind him?’

Dex’s eyes crease with mirth. ‘That’s what I said too. Wrong though. Apparently it’s called a Portland Screw.’

‘Boom tish.’

‘You have to admit it’s good though. Bo once told me that sex was the only contact sport where he’d played all the known positions.’

‘Funny man. What’s yours?’

‘Oh, my room is named after some kind of fossil oyster called a Devil’s Toenail,’ Dex says, gesturing at a closed door beside the bathroom. ‘Anna thought that was hilaire. Her room is the one at the end. That thing with all the arms is called a Brittle Star.’ He turns and smiles. ‘No one can accuse Anna of not being able to take the piss out of herself.’

And with that we proceed up another, even narrower and more steeply inclined staircase, onto a small landing.

‘Yours is the Urchin room. Tiny, but so are you. You’re the only one with a direct view over Chesil Beach and you’ve got a shower to yourself so we thought you wouldn’t mind.’ Dex opens the door with a flourish. ‘Ta da.’

The room is just large enough to hold a double mattress and a few stylish cushions. A stool doubles up as a bedside table. Through a small window comes the thick smell of brine and the sound of the waves on the shingle. The lights of Fortuneswell wink.

‘It’s brilliant.’

‘Oh good, well, I’ll let you settle in.’ Dex turns to walk away but hesitates by the door, waiting for me to address the elephant in the room. Though there are two, really: Gav’s weight loss and what happened a month ago at the festival.

‘Is Gav OK?’

‘He’s in a sulk, is all. He’s got it into his head that someone took some money from the house. It’s bullshit. He’s just forgotten where he left it.’

‘I meant his weight.’

Dex is hovering with one foot outside the door. He doesn’t like talking about difficult stuff. Never has. When we split up, all those years ago, he took me out for a drink in a very noisy bar, waited until Michael Jackson was working his way through the first chorus of ‘Billie Jean’ on the PA system, and, evidently imagining his moment had come, blurted, ‘I seem to have fallen in love with a man,’ and that was that. Four years as a couple. Game over.

Back then he screwed his eyes tight so as not to witness my distress and he’s doing the same now. He says, ‘Gav’s got pancreatic cancer. It’s pretty advanced. We got confirmation a couple of weeks ago and a couple of days later he was having his first chemo. That’s why he’s going to see his sister, break the news. He’s bloody angry about it.’

‘Is it . . .’

‘Terminal?’

‘I wasn’t going to say that.’

‘But you were thinking it, weren’t you?’ There’s an accusatory note in his voice. ‘Yes, probably.’

When I make a move towards him he backs off a little, unable to be comforted.

‘I’m sorry.’ I really am. Even though he stole Dex from me, I don’t wish anything nearly as final as death on Gav. A little bad luck, maybe, but this, no. Way too much.

‘To be honest, I just want to be able to forget about real life for a couple of days and try to enjoy the break. Have you seen much of the island yet? Not the most obvious spot for a birthday weekend, but at least it’s not dull.’ He softens the corners of his mouth. ‘I should go down and see Gav off, get back to the cooking.’

I wait for him to disappear before drawing the curtains and taking a quick shower, then sit for a moment trying to absorb the news about Gav. If there was a time to bring up what happened in Wapping, this isn’t it. Then putting on my game face, I make my way to the ground floor.

At some point, the owners of the cottage have knocked down a few walls to create a semi open-plan living room cum kitchen. Anna has the oven door open and is peering at the chicken, Bo is setting a fire in the grate in the living room. A bottle of red stands aerating on the kitchen table beside Dex who is sitting at the table with his chin in his one hand, looking pensive. Gav appears to have left.

‘Oh, darling, did you like your room?’ Anna says, swivelling to look at me.

‘Is Gav gone?’

‘Only just. You’ll catch him if you’re quick,’ she adds, with a tilt of the head and a press of the lips to let me know that she too has heard the news.

I run outside, crunching across the gravel and waving madly. Gav is sitting in the BMW adjusting the heating and looking very old and very, very alone. The driver’s side window whines open and before I’ve opened my mouth he cuts me off with, ‘No outpourings, please. It is what it is.’

‘Can I at least say I’m sorry?’ He pauses, as if considering this. To my surprise, because Gav is nothing if not old school, his eyes go filmy. ‘What you can do is be good to Dex. I’m scared I won’t be around for him.’

‘Done.’

‘Another thing. That festival business, with the woman?’ His rheumy eyes fix on mine. ‘I think I should tell you that he is in a lot of trouble about what happened. He thinks he isn’t, but he is.’

I feel myself slump back. What trouble could he possibly be in?

‘I see he hasn’t spoken to you,’ Gav says, drily, registering the shock on my face. ‘Well, since you’re probably closer to Dex than anyone other than me I should probably tell you: the police came round.’

I nod calmly, but my mind is racing. There was that scrap Dex got into at the festival . . . Anna said it started over some drunk accusing him of looking at his girlfriend, but it didn’t amount to anything. Surely the police wouldn’t come round for that?

‘Don’t tell him I let the cat out of the bag, please, or mention it to the others. He’d kill me. Solemn promise?’

‘Yup.’

‘In the scheme of things, really . . .’

‘I understand.’

Gav blinks a thank you and the car window begins to whir to the vertical. He waves and turns the steering wheel and the BMW crunches across the gravel and disappears from view.

3

Anna

7 a.m., Sunday 14 August, Royal London Hospital

When Dex finally emerges from the cubicle in Minors, Anna has been calming herself with some mindful belly breathing exercises for over half an hour and is able to greet him with what she hopes is her normal face.

Since the events of earlier – she’ll say events because it makes what they saw seem less real – she’s been a bit of a mess. Can’t get her mind to engage. Something inside her head is making a sound like a slipped gearbox. The whole evening feels like an odd dream, although she is wide awake and as sober as a judge now. She’ll wake up tomorrow hung-over and wonder if any of it really happened.

Dex is still drunk. She can tell by the way he’s walking towards her. That’s good too. The more everyone’s mind is scrambled the easier it will be for all of them to get through this. Dex is unlikely to remember many of the details. Bo might but he’s less easily shaken than the others. Cassie will do whatever Dex does. Anyway, the worst has been averted. She rises from the plastic chair in the waiting area and spots on the seat beside her a small still wet nugget of gum. Shaking off her disgust, she sets her mouth into a smile and waits, arms outstretched, for Dex to approach.

‘Dex, darling, ouch, oh poor you.’ A bandage is wound over the right fist, a plaster on the right cheek, right eye as burst as a stewed plum. She leans up and plants a kiss on his lips. He gives her his forlorn look. A bit little boy lost.

‘You should see the other guy,’ he says, playing hanging tough. He means the guy at the festival, of course. Some arsehole over by the beer tent, apparently. You looking at my girlfriend? As if. Anna had noticed his war wounds as soon as Dex had got back to the main stage earlier but, honestly, it hadn’t looked particularly bad. Now it’s been a few hours and the injury has had time to swell and fester.

‘Is Bo still in there?’ she asks.

‘I guess so. He got called just before me, but maybe he’s had to have an x-ray or something.’

‘He’s not badly hurt, is he?’ Not long after what happened in the alley Anna had received a message from Dex to say that Bo, too, had got into a skirmish – this time with a couple of guys, something to do with a spilt beer, and they were going to A&E to get him sorted.

‘He’ll live. Where’s Cass? I thought she’d be with you.’ Dex checks his phone and runs a hand over bedraggled hair.

‘We got separated in the churchyard. My phone’s croaked. She’s probably back home by now though. What a horrid birthday celebration it’s turned out to be, poor darling.’

Dex cocks his head, presses his lips together and nods at the truth of this. He’s so easily placated, so much less demanding than Bo. She watches him frown then peer at her neck.

‘That looks like a nasty bruise.’

Anna taps the dark spot then dismisses it with a wave of her left hand. ‘Oh, it’s nothing, darling, I got shoved in that scrum. To be honest I’m more pissed off about my jumpsuit.’ She points to the tears in the fabric, pre-empting any awkward questions. ‘Speaking of, what happened in the churchyard?’

Dex closes his eyes, trying to summon a memory, opens them again and blinks. ‘Oh, you mean that couple?’

‘Is that what they were?’

‘What I saw, a couple of randos having a quickie.’ He seems anxious to change the subject. Good, thinks Anna. In that case, he’ll be cooperative. ‘I thought that arsehole was about to come at me so I decided to take off.’

This is not how Anna remembers it. What Anna recalls is that Dex switched off his phone light and ran away into the night, leaving the woman in the alleyway to her fate. Lowering her voice, Anna says, ‘I honestly don’t think we should talk about it any more, darling. Why get involved? God, it’s a madhouse in here. Let’s find somewhere else to sit.’ She picks up the Diet Coke she left as a placeholder and holds it out to Dex. There’s nothing she wants more than to put this whole awful night to bed. ‘You want some?’

‘Thanks.’

While Dex drains the can, Anna scouts for a more genial spot to wait, not easy in a London A&E during the early hours of a Sunday morning. The place is a heaving mosh pit of drunks and wasters, most, by the looks of them, walking wounded from the fight that kicked off after the festival. A name is called and one of the anxious parents stands up and offers a hand to his son, leaving a couple of plastic chairs empty near the triage station. Anna points and lets Dex lead.

A nurse glides by, smiling, followed by two policemen. All three disappear through swing doors into another part of the hospital. Anna jams her hands in her lap and watches them go with mounting relief. They’ll have other things on their minds. ‘Want another Coke, darling?’

‘Not really.’

The guy opposite is doing his best to remove an Egg McMuffin from its paper bag with one hand. A sickening, sulphurous smell drifts over. Anna flaps her hand and wrinkles her nose. The Egg McMuffin guy gets up and obligingly moves off. A moment later the swing doors part and the two coppers reappear. Anna sits on her hands while they go past. A nurse walks by. A man’s name is called. The Egg McMuffin guy sinks into a more distant chair.

‘When did you get here?’ Anna says. She needs to be careful about the timeline. Doesn’t want to get caught out.

Dex checks his watch. ‘Ages ago. Not sure, to be honest. They kept me waiting in the cubicle for what seemed like forever. Man, I’m wrecked.’

At that moment a figure emerges from behind the swing doors, eyes unfocused, a bit staggery, evidently still high, a couple of nasty-looking abrasions on his face and a puffy nose. Anna feels herself stiffen then soften then stiffen and then, putting her feelings aside, rises up and goes towards him, with Dex following on behind.

‘That looks sore.’ In the circumstances, it hurts her to have to take him in her arms and give him a hug but it’s necessary. Men have to be managed. His body is electric and uncoordinated, like a cheap firework display. He doesn’t notice the bruise on her neck.

‘I’m fine,’ he says, shrugging her off. His pupils are a single grain of lumpfish roe floating on a tissue of blood. What the hell has he taken this time? Whatever it is, the nurse has discharged him so it’s clearly not life-threatening, thank God. ‘Nurse said some bastard must have gone at me with their house keys. I don’t know about you lot, but I need a fry-up.’

‘You need to go home, like now,’ Anna says. She throws him a steady look which he returns, very briefly, the only focus he can manage right now. He’s understood her, though. He’s picked up something serious in the tone. ‘Make sure he gets to bed, Dex, won’t you? I have to get back for Ralphie,’ Anna says.

Slowly, they lead Bo through the corridor towards the exit. As they pass the lifts, the doors open and the two coppers appear from within, solemn-faced, as if they’ve just come from dealing with some hard business. Anna looks away. Thank God they’re about to be rid of the stale air, the smell of vomit and egg and antiseptic, the tang of fear and adrenaline. What an unspeakably difficult night. She’s within whispering distance of being able to put it all behind her. This night, at least. There might be repercussions, though, God knows. But she’ll think about that later. She’s exhausted, at breaking point. If only she could just run home to her parents. If only she had the kind of parents you could run home to. Hers would only make everything worse. Mummy would find a way to make it all about her and Daddy would dump her off on her stepmother.