Beach Bodies: Part Three - Ross Armstrong

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do want to hurt you. But they won’t be allowed to. For now.’

      Simon avoids Lance’s malevolent gaze as his mind rattles through the chain of events that led him here. ‘It’s not supposed to go like this,’ Simon whispers.

      Liv, in particular, is disturbed by these words, her mind spinning off down a host of avenues in search of possible meanings.

      ‘Don’t play punch-drunk,’ says Lance. ‘I only gave you a tap. If I’d really wanted to hit you, you would’ve known about it.’

      ‘Please – I don’t know what’s going on,’ says Simon.

      ‘Don’t worry, we’ve pieced it together for you, mate,’ says Roberto. ‘We just need you to fill in the last couple of blanks. If you do that for us, we won’t hurt you. We’ll hand you over to the police once that boat comes, and you can deal with—’

      ‘We don’t even know if he called anyone. If there even is a boat coming,’ Summer says.

      ‘There is a boat coming. It’ll be with us at… 5 a.m.,’ says Simon, struggling to check his little round watch on his bound wrist. ‘That’s less than seven hours.’

      ‘Lie,’ says Lance. ‘That’s his first lie.’

      ‘How do you know?’ says Tabs.

      ‘I can tell. When you’ve worked the doors, you can tell a lie: I found the pills on the floor, I was just brushing up against her, this ain’t my Bowie knife. Trust me, I can sniff this shit out.’

      ‘I’m not lying,’ says Simon. ‘If you believe nothing else, hang on to this. I really don’t know how this is going to go. But if I don’t make it, remember, you just have to make it to 5 a.m.’

      The group want to be buoyed by this, but any glimmer they’ve had in the past few hours has been quickly snuffed out.

      ‘Okay, mate, here’s the meat of it,’ says Roberto. ‘We know you locked Dawn inside that office with you, and when she tried to escape you killed her with the shutter.’ Simon’s eyes look like they’re doing long division. ‘Then we figure you made your way upstairs without anyone noticing, saw Sly was apart from the group, you slit his throat and pushed him through the window. But how did you get the knife back into the kitchen without any of us noticing?’

      Simon lowers his head. They can’t see his eyes – he could be laughing or crying. ‘No, no, no,’ he says. ‘Dawn’s dead?’

      He moans, heaving large sighs.

      ‘Oh, give the man an Oscar,’ shouts Lance. ‘It’s you that ended her!’

      ‘Can’t be dead. Not her,’ he mutters.

      ‘Don’t act like you care!’ Lance shouts, Tabs holding on to him as he leans in further. ‘What d’you care?’

      Then Simon pushes his face towards Lance, their heads almost touching.

      ‘Because I lo…’ In the briefest fraction of a second Simon gives a rueful smile, then shakes his head again. ‘Because… she was a sweet and beautiful person. And this isn’t what was supposed to happen. It’s not…’

      Lance sits down, a look of triumph on his face. ‘I know you wanted to finish your plan, you probably had some order you wanted to pick us off in. But we got to you first.’

      ‘Someone’s making you look like fools. Someone here. But it isn’t me,’ says Simon.

      Uncomfortable glances get passed around as Simon spits, his mouth filled with blood, his chest with grief.

      ‘Dawn and I were locked safe in the office,’ says Simon. ‘I thought for a moment we could stay there together. Until the boat came. But I knew the one person who didn’t do this was her, which meant we were leaving all of you in the dark with a murderer. She said we had to do something. The least I could do was get those lights back on using the back-up generator.’

      ‘A real heart of gold, eh?’ says Lance.

      But he’s soon met with shushes, from the others.

      ‘So I opened up the shutter, climbed out the window into the rain, and told Dawn to wait for me and that she should pull down the shutter immediately if anyone else came. I found the generator and got everything working again. You didn’t think about how those lights came back on?’

      ‘But then you came back into the living room. You didn’t go straight back to Dawn, where it was safe. Why?’ says Tabs.

      ‘Conscience got the better of me,’ he says. ‘I brought you all here, and I know each and every one of you, maybe… better than you know yourselves.’ This isn’t a sentiment that sits well with any of them. ‘I am responsible for you. I decided I couldn’t very well leave you to fend for yourselves. I had to come back. But Dawn was safe and that was enough.’

      ‘Only she wasn’t, was she?’ Roberto scoffs, his tone getting him cold looks. He remembers it’s best not to stick your head above the parapet. Heads on display in this place have had a habit of being detached from their owners.

      Liv recalls a phrase she once heard: ‘The weak speak too much.’ Or perhaps it wasn’t a phrase, perhaps it was something her dad once said. But it was still true.

      ‘So,’ says Justine, picking up the pieces. ‘Tell us how a woman gets killed, when she’s all alone in a locked room.’

      And all eyes stay on Simon.

      The phone rings and Mr Knight picks up immediately.

      Check the temperature, he’s told. Never done that before but he knows where the meter is and is thrilled to be asked.

      All controlled remotely of course, what happens in there, but you need to have someone look over the hard copies. Cos although everything can be everywhere, everything is really only somewhere. And these things are here. The hard copies.

      As he taps the readout – tactile, real, a nice feeling – Mr Knight notices the darkness in the cold storage room. So little light in a place of such importance. His eyes wander, picking out the interruptions to the dark. Shelves, lit by neon, a line of small drawers, almost like the ones Mr Knight remembers as a kid, that held index cards or public records, before all of that really was placed elsewhere and the real things destroyed. Because you don’t need hard copies of everything. Only some things.

      The only other light in there seems to be coming from a screen. He cranes his neck to see. It’s a smaller one that he’s used to seeing, that reminds him of old times. And there are old illusions flickering away on it.

      Mr Knight remembers they’ll be waiting for the okay at headquarters. One of the oldest and best tech companies around. He stretches his arms, his back, gives his neck a crack as his feet tap on the gleaming floor, the noises echoing around, his lonely reflection staring back at him in the glass as he walks. And past the glass, the river, chopping away in the dark and overflowing as it often does this time of year.

      ‘Fine and checked,’ he says into the phone and the voice repeats back some kind words for his efforts.

      He sits back in his chair and feels the pleasure of being active in the working world. Half an hour later he spins around on it. He has tap danced alone in this place. How he remembers tap dancing went anyway. He has wandered the corridors in the dead of night. He has rested his tired body on the gleaming floor at 4 a.m. He used to wear a suit.

      His mind wanders, and he observes the movement of his thoughts. He thinks of his mother in an old hospital bed. She was in a coma, but he still spoke to her. Left the radio on the whole time she was in there. Just in case.

      Mr Knight gets up and runs a hand through his wave of salt-and-pepper hair. He glances at the extravagant

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