Dead Simple

1
    So far, apart from just a couple of hitches, Plan A was working out fine. Which was fortunate, since they didn’t really have a Plan B.
    At 8.30 on a late May evening, they’d banked on having some daylight. There had been plenty of the stuff this time yesterday, when four of them had made the same journey, taking with them an empty coffin and four shovels. But now, as the green Transit van sped along the Sussex country road, misty rain was falling from a sky the colour of a fogged negative.
    ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ said Josh in the back, mimicking a child.
    ‘The great Um Ga says, “Wherever I go there I am,”’ responded Robbo, who was driving, and was slightly less drunk than the rest of them. With three pubs notched up already in the past hour and a half, and four more on the itinerary, he was sticking to shandy. At least, that had been his intention; but he’d managed to slip down a couple of pints of pure Harvey’s bitter – to clear his head for the task of driving, he’d said.
    ‘So we are there!’ said Josh.
    ‘Always have been.’
    A deer warning sign flitted from the darkness then was gone, as the headlights skimmed glossy black-top macadam stretching ahead into the forested distance. Then they passed a small white cottage.
    Michael, lolling on a tartan rug on the floor in the back of the van, head wedged between the arms of a wheel-wrench for a pillow, was feeling very pleasantly woozy. ‘I sh’ink I need another a drink,’ he slurred.
    If he’d had his wits about him, he might have sensed, from the expressions of his friends, that something was not quite right. Never usually much of a heavy drinker, tonight he’d parked his brains in the dregs of more empty pint glasses and vodka chasers than he could remember downing, in more pubs than had been sensible to visit.
    Of the six of them who had been muckers together since way back into their early teens, Michael Harrison had always been the natural leader. If, as they say, the secret of life is to choose your parents wisely, Michael had ticked plenty of the right boxes. He had inherited his mother’s fair good looks and his father’s charm and entrepreneurial spirit, but without any of the self-destruct genes that had eventually ruined the man.
    From the age of twelve, when Tom Harrison had gassed himself in the garage of the family home, leaving behind a trail of debtors, Michael had grown up fast, helping his mother make ends meet by doing a paper round, then when he was older by taking labouring jobs in his holidays. He grew up with an appreciation of how hard it was to make money – and how easy to fritter it.
    Now, at twenty-eight, he was smart, a decent human being, and a natural leader of the pack. If he had flaws, they were that he was too trusting and on occasions, too much of a prankster. And tonight that latter chicken was coming home to roost. Big time.
    But at this moment he had no idea of that.
    He drifted back again into a blissful stupor, thinking only happy thoughts, mostly about his fiancée, Ashley. Life was good. His mother was dating a nice guy, his kid brother had just got into university, his kid sister Carly was backpacking in Australia on a gap year, and his business was going incredibly well. But best of all, in three days time he was going to be marrying the woman he loved. And adored. His soul mate.
    Ashley.
    He hadn’t noticed the shovel that rattled on every bump in the road, as the wheels drummed below on the sodden tarmac, and the rain pattered down above him on the roof. And he didn’t clock a thing in the expressions of his two friends riding along with him in the back, who were swaying and singing tunelessly to an oldie, Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’, on the crackly radio up front. A leaky fuel can filled the van with the stench of petrol.
    ‘I love her,’ Michael slurred. ‘I sh’love Ashley.’
    ‘She’s a great lady,’ Robbo said, turning his head from the wheel, sucking up to him as he always did. That was in his nature. Awkward with women, a bit clumsy, a florid face, lank hair, beer belly straining the weave of his T-shirt, Robbo hung to the coat tails of this bunch by always trying to make himself needed. And tonight, for a change, he actually was needed.
    ‘She is.’
    ‘Coming up,’ warned Luke.
    Robbo braked as they approached the turn-off and winked in the darkness of the cab at Luke seated next to him. The wipers clumped steadily, smearing the rain across the