Rory. He blinked, shook his head. He couldn’t take it in. He hadn’t thought for a moment that she would actually use the knife or he would have snatched it off her. But she’d done it. She’d killed his friend.
Orla was breathing hard. Spattered with blood, she sat down on the bed, staring at the corpse at her feet.
Not a word was spoken for a long, long time. Rufus was shaken and filled with cold horror. He wanted to wring her neck with his bare hands. His eyes kept returning, again and again, to Rory, lying there dead on the floor.
But… but he loved her.
Didn’t he?
Then she looked up at him, and she smiled.
‘You see?’ she said, happy to be vindicated. ‘I told you he was not to be trusted.’
When he could force himself to move, to acknowledge that this nightmare was real, Rufus went down to the barn and fetched a tarpaulin, praying that neither of Orla’s parents would wake up and ask what was going on. Because what could he say? Your daughter has just knifed my best friend? But all was quiet, thank God.
He carried the tarp to the bedroom and was sickened to see that during his absence Orla had reclaimed her knife from Rory’s throat, and was wiping it clean on the front of the dead man’s shirt.
Between them, they wrapped the body and all Rory’s belongings – Rufus kept the Land Rover keys to one side – in the tarp and heaved the bundle down the stairs and outside to the little stand of woodland not too far from the house. Then Rufus fetched a shovel and started digging. He’d go down four feet, he reckoned, that would be deep enough to stop the foxes getting poor Rory out again.
He dug. And he wondered if Don was going to show up at any second, thinking that Rory had duped him – which was the truth – and then the game would be up, he’d be caught.
The way Rufus was feeling tonight, he would be glad of it. He was sickened by what Orla had done, killing a man without a qualm. And he had lost the only true friend he had in the world. So if Don were to show up, yes, Rufus would be relieved. It would mean an end to all this running, all this hiding. He was tired of it. Tired of life. Tired of the whole awful, shitty mess.
He buried Rory, filled in the grave, stood there and mumbled a few words of blessing over the poor bastard. Then he went to Rory’s Land Rover, which was parked up in one of the outside lean-to spaces, and moved it into the far barn, locking the door behind him so that no one could just wander in and see it there.
As he walked back to the house, he wondered what would happen to Rory’s kid.