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