“What do you mean, while he still had the chance?” I said. I recalled Michael’s jibe about Adam having to pack in the dangerous sports. “What was the matter with him?”
There was a long pause. Even Jackson, I noticed, seemed to be waiting intently for the answer. Eventually, Izzy was the one who broke the silence. “He only told us a month ago that he’d been diagnosed with MND,” she said. Her leg had just about stopped bleeding, but her face had started to sweat now as the pain and the shock crept in. When I looked blank, it was Paul who continued.
“Motor Neuron Disease,” he said, sounding authoritative. “It’s a progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. In most cases the mind is unaffected, but you gradually lose control of various muscle groups—the arms and legs are usually the first to go. You can never quite tell how far or how fast it will develop because it affects everyone in a different way. Sometimes you lose the ability to speak and swallow. It was such rotten luck! The chances of it happening in someone under forty are so remote, but for it to hit Adam of all people—” He broke off, shook his head, and seemed to remember how none of that mattered anymore. “Poor sod.”
“It was a tragedy,” Izzy said, defiant. “And if I gave him pleasure while he could still take it, what was wrong with that?”
“So,” I murmured, “was this a murder, or a mercy killing?”
Diana made a sort of snuffling noise then, bringing one hand up to her face. For a moment I thought she was fighting back tears, but then she looked up and I saw that it was laughter. And she’d lost the battle.
“Oh for God’s sake, Adam didn’t have Motor Neuron Disease!” she cried, jumping to her feet, hysteria bubbling up through the words. “That was all a lie! He wanted you to think of him as the tragic hero, struck down at the pinnacle of his youth. And you all fell for it. All of you!”
Paul’s face was blank. “So there was nothing wrong with him?” he said faintly. “But he said—”
“Adam was diagnosed HIV positive six months ago,” Diana said flatly. “He had AIDS.”
The dismay rippled through the group like the bore of a changing tide. AIDS. The bogeyman of the modern age. I almost saw them edge away from each other, as though afraid of cross-contamination. No wonder Adam had preferred the pretence of a more user-friendly affliction.
And then it dawned on them, one by one.
Izzy realised it first. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “He never used...” she broke off, lifting her tear-stained face to Michael. “Oh God,” she said again. “I am so sorry.”
Michael caught on then, reeling away to clutch at the bridge parapet as though his legs suddenly wouldn’t support him any longer.
Paul was just standing there, staring at nothing. “Bastard,” he muttered, over and over.
Michael rounded on him in a burst of fury. “It’s all right for you,” he yelled. “You’re probably the only one of us who hasn’t got it!”
“Ah, that’s not quite the case, is it, Paul?” Diana said, her voice like chiselled ice. “Always had a bit of a thing for Adam, didn’t you? But he wasn’t having any of that. Oh, he kept you dangling for years,” she went on, scanning Paul’s stunned face without compassion. “Did you really not wonder at all why he suddenly changed his mind recently?”
She laughed again. A sound like glass breaking, sharp and bitter. “No, I can see you didn’t. You poor fools,” she said, taking in all of their devastated faces, her voice mocking. “There you all were debasing yourselves to please him, hoping to bathe in a last little piece of Adam’s reflected glory, when all the time he was spitting on your graves.”
Michael lunged for her, reaching for her throat. I swept his legs out from under him before he’d taken a stride, then twisted an arm behind his back to hold him down once he was on the floor. Come on, Sam! Where the hell were the police when you needed them?
I looked up at Diana, who'd stood unconcerned during the abortive attack. “Why on earth did you stay with him?” I asked.
She shrugged. “By the time he confessed, it was too late,” she said simply. “There’s no doubt—I’ve had all the tests. Besides, you didn’t know Adam. He was one of those people who was a bright star, for all his faults. I wanted to be with him, and you can’t be infected twice.”
“And what about us?” Paul demanded, sounding close to tears himself. “We were your friends. Why didn’t you tell us the truth?”
“Friends!” Diana scoffed. “What kind of friends would screw my boyfriend—or let their girlfriends screw him—behind my back? Answer me that!”
“You never got anything you didn’t ask for,” Jackson said quietly then, his voice rich with disgust. “The whole lot of you.”
Privately, part of me couldn’t help but agree with the farmer. “The question is,” I said, “which one of you went for revenge?”
And then, across the field, a new-looking Toyota Land Cruiser turned off the road and came bowling across the grass, snaking wildly as it came.
“Oh shit,” Paul muttered, “it’s Adam’s parents. How the hell did they get to hear about it so fast?”
The Land Cruiser didn’t stop by the quad bike, but came thundering straight onto the bridge itself, heedless of the weight-bearing capabilities of the old structure. It braked jerkily to a halt and the middle-aged couple inside flung open the doors and jumped out.
“Where’s Adam?” the man said urgently. He looked as though he’d thrown his clothes on in a great hurry. His shirt was unbuttoned and his hair awry. “Are we in time?”
None of the group spoke. I let go of Michael’s wriggling body and got to my feet. “Mr. Lane?” I said. “I’m terribly sorry to tell you this, but there seems to have been an accident—”
“Accident?” Adam’s mother almost shrieked the word as she came forwards. “Accident? What about this?” and she thrust a crumpled sheet of paper into my hands.
Uncertain what else to do, I unfolded the letter just as the first police Land Rover Discovery began its approach, rather more sedately, across the field.
Adam’s suicide note was brief and to the point. He couldn’t face the prospect of the future, it said. He couldn’t face the dreadful responsibility of what he’d knowingly inflicted on his friends. He was sorry. Goodbye.
He did not, I noticed, express the hope that they would forgive him for what he’d done.
I folded the note up again as the lead Discovery reached us and a uniformed sergeant got out, adjusting his cap. Sam was in the passenger seat.
The sergeant advanced, his experienced gaze taking in the shotgun still leaning against the brickwork, Izzy’s blood-soaked trousers, and the array of staggered faces.
“I understand there’s been a murder committed,” he said, businesslike, glancing round. “Where’s the victim?”
I waved my hand towards the surviving members of the Dangerous Sports Club. “Take your pick,” I said. “And if you want the murderer, well—” I nodded at the parapet where Adam had taken his final dive — “you’ll find him down there.”
© 2007 by Zoë Sharp
No Wick for the Rested
by Monica Quill
Monica Quill is a pseudonym of mystery writer, mainstream novelist, and philosophy professor Ralph McInerny. The author’s varied life is chronicled in his recently published autobiography I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes (University of Notre Dame Press). The Quill pseudonym is reserved for stories featuring Sister Mary Teresa Dempsey, who has not had a novel-length case since 1997.