Escape to the Sun

The woman took a cautious puff of the blunt he offered her, and slowly exhaled.

“Gosh, that is nice,” she said. “I will buy some. Is it legal here?” She took another puff, and went to hand it back. The man gestured for her to keep it.

“Decriminalised, but I really shouldn’t be selling it to tourists. So don’t tell the cops.” He laughed.

When she returned his laugh, he could sense an edge to it that made him curious. “No danger of that, gosh, no,” she said. “Oh marvellous, this is lovely. It’s been a while.” She took a sip of her very fruity cocktail, and wiggled her toes in the sand of the beach. The sun was just setting, and with the hit of the weed this was probably the first time she’d properly relaxed since she arrived here three weeks ago. She grinned up at him appreciatively. “Gosh, this is perfect. Thank you so much.”

“Well gosh,” he said, smiling back. “Looks like you’re the last person on the beach. Do you mind if I sit and rest for a bit before I head back?”

“Of course not,” said the woman. “Do you want a drink?”

The man looked sceptically at her half-drunk cocktail, and she caught the glance. “Oh, gosh, no,” she said, and rummaged in her tote bag, pulling out a half-bottle, which she handed over to him. “It’s some of your delightful local rum.”

The man took the bottle from her. “Thank goodness we don’t have to worry about Covid anymore,” he observed. The woman laughed, “I don’t suppose it would live long in that rum anyway. It’s the cheap stuff.” He took a sip, and agreed.

“So, where are you from?” he asked, by way of making conversation, having already decided she was English, based on her accent and those “goshes”.

“Oh, I’m a Londoner. From Derry originally though, in the north of Ireland. My family moved to England in the 70s when I was a child, for work. And to get away from the Troubles.”

“We’re about the same age, then. You been here long?”

“Three weeks.”

“That’s quite a long holiday – you going home soon?”

“Oh, I’m thinking of staying. I booked a discount all-inclusive for a month just to hide for a bit and see if I could live here. Gosh, I might as well tell you. I’m, um, on the run.”

Presuming, on the basis of her age and being on her own, that she meant from a messy divorce or something like that, he decided to make a little joke. “Did you murder someone?”

The woman paused, half smiling, deciding what to say. Finally, she settled on, “Gosh, no. But hopefully my husband murdered me.”

Still thinking this was going to be a dramatic divorce story – and as a reasonably good-looking dealer of weed to tourists for two decades, he’d heard a few – he asked, “Do you want to talk about it?” Usually the stories were better than reality TV, and he enjoyed telling his wife later.

She thought about it for a moment. She really did want to tell someone.

“Yeah, why not. So. I married young, because I was knocked up and he insisted he wanted to do the right thing. It wasn’t always awful, we were comfortable, but we really shouldn’t have married. He had constant affairs, and thought I didn’t know. Of course I did know. Women do.”

“My wife can surely tell if I so much as glance at another woman.”

She nodded. “I bet she can. So we had two children, much to my mother’s disappointment – I’m one of six, but my husband had a more English approach to these things and I’m glad. So there we are, the boring kids who don’t really like us have grown up and leave home, and he basically says, I want a divorce, you’re a terrible housewife and you’ve got fat and the kids are gone, and I’m marrying my secretary... Classic crappy soap opera stuff.”

“That’s why you’re here?”

“Hah! No. So he leaves me, six weeks later he comes crawling back, saying I’ve made a terrible mistake, I love you, even though you’re a fat slob, please take me back, and so on. So I do. Then I discover through mutual friends that his secretary had dumped him and kicked him out of her flat. She hadn’t wanted him to leave me at all, just liked getting stuff from her sugar daddy. But by then we were locked down.”

The man made sympathetic noises, and they passed the blunt back and forth.

“One thing,” he said, “And I’m sure my wife can sense me paying another woman a compliment and I’m going to get killed myself when I get home but – you’re not at all fat!”

She smiled proudly. “I’m not, now. Once he came back, I told him I’d get fit again. So I did. I lost a lot of weight. It’s been a long year, after all. Plenty of time.”

“You did it for him?”

“Gosh, no. I did it for me. I already was definitely leaving. What that arsehole didn’t know was that while he was off... disillusioning his secretary, I’d won twenty thousand quid on a lottery scratchcard that I impulse bought.” She laughed, remembering. “Not loads of money, but enough to give me my own nest egg for an escape plan. I was just thinking divorce? Even if it does upset my very Catholic granny. Then I discovered that even during lockdown, he’d been taking days off work to meet women for casual sex. Putting us at risk of Covid, never mind chlamydia or whatever it is young people are riddled with these days…”

The man tutted. “I hope you got your divorce quickly.”

“I decided I didn’t want a divorce. Not so much because it would upset my family, who were pretty awful in their own way – I’d have left him in the first year if my mother hadn’t talked me out of it, and she always going on about my weight and saying it was my fault he was straying. That sort of thing. They were very strict growing up. I still struggle to swear, as you may have noticed.”

“Gosh, do you?” They laughed.

“I wanted revenge. I decided to frame him for my murder. I shrewdly invested my twenty K, and by the time I died I had just about enough to fly here and decide if this is the kind of distant, welcoming, hot and ah, low-cost living place I could hide forever in.”

“So… how did he murder you?”

“He hit me on the head with a 5kg dumbbell, then disposed of my body somewhere.”

“And yet here you are, alive and kicking and smoking my weed, for which you have not yet paid.” At this, she laughed, apologised profusely, and reached into her bag to get the money, at the same time showing him a little black notebook. “I’ve been keeping a journal. One day I’ll turn this into a film and no-one will believe it.” She tucked the book back in her tote, and settled her debt.

“Please continue?”

“Well, basically, I just vanished one day, and made it look like he had murdered me.”

“Would the cops assume murder? Surely they’d check your passport and things like that?”

“Did you know that one of the joys of being from the North of Ireland is that you’re entitled to have both Irish and British passports? The husband didn’t know. I doubt he even remembers I have an Irish name too. My British passport, and everything else a person might need to leave a husband, were still where they belonged. I bought nothing except what I was wearing the day he murdered me and brand new travelling stuff…”

She paused for a moment to drink more of her cocktail. “Gosh, dry mouth. Anyway. No more lockdown, time to act. I snooped his phone to find a day he had shenanigans with his current tart planned at her place and had lied to his staff. I got everything in place for me to leave. That morning, I hid his mobile phone. He couldn’t find it anywhere. I helped him look, of course. But in the end he had to go without it. As he left, I was working out with my dumbbells, as I did almost every morning during lockdown. He kissed me goodbye, and I said ‘have a nice day love’ as I always do. Off he went, and off I went. I googled ‘bloodstains’ and ‘murder convictions no body’ on his phone. Next I cleaned parts of the house like they had never been cleaned before. Lots of bleach. But I deliberately missed some important places I’d put tiny amounts of blood for forensics to find... like the bathroom light cord, and the inside of the bath and sink plugs and in the overflows, some other subtle places.”

“Where was the blood from?”

“The blood was easier than I thought, actually. You’d know those diabetic finger pricker things for blood tests? A few goes with that on my thumbs was more than enough to leave discoverable traces. I scrubbed one of the dumbbells, so it would be instantly suspicious. Then I left, taking the back door, down the lane and onto the main road so I don’t think any neighbours saw me leave. Not sure they’d have recognised me, anyway. I’d stayed hidden away during lockdown. I'd left the phone on the coffee table for him to find. I flew here in disguise, spent three weeks sunbathing, and now I’m talking to you.”

“This is really very clever – but why would they think he murdered you in the first place and go ahead and do the forensic things?”

The woman smiled. “Don’t forget, I had been playing a long game here. All the way through Covid. For starters, it’s usually the husband kills the wife, isn’t it? And neither he nor the cops are very smart. He’ll have told the police the truth: he kissed me goodbye that morning during my workout, as every morning, and when he came back the house was mysteriously clean and his wife was gone. Next the police will call my mother, and the first thing she will say is...” Here she switched accents, and sounded shrill, “‘...what? Lifting weights? My wee girl? That’s nonsense, she’s obese and never even lifted a finger to clean her filthy house even when he cheated’.” She laughed, returning to her own voice. “I’m pretty sure that’s enough in itself for a warrant to search the house. In which they will find evidence suggesting that something bloody happened and was cleaned up. I like to imagine the headlines: Clever cops foil husband’s ‘perfect murder’!”

“No-one knew you’d lost weight?”

“Nope. I only really had family on the phone and a couple of friends kept in touch, and when we did video call, I’d just turn the video resolution down and angle the camera unflatteringly on my face. I never bothered with new clothes, they were all elasticated or just baggy anyway. And of course, checking my phone the cops will find nothing about weight loss, but they will find messages with my friends discussing my husband’s repeated infidelity and current shagging of random tarts, and my intent to confront him that day.”

“His alibi…?”

“Some random tart off the internet? Even if she is willing to give evidence, his phone says otherwise. He was home all day.”

“Do you know if your plan worked?”

The woman shrugged. “I have no idea. I imagine so. I’m so determined to stay dead, I didn’t want to google his name or mine.”

The man shook his head, admiringly. “Maybe I can google him for you, if you settle. I think you’ll get on well with my wife.” He lifted the bottle. “Cheers!”

“That would be lovely!” She lifted her glass. “Sláinte!”