Telling Lies to Alice (22 page)

“Oh, darling . . .” I could feel the edge of the pocket . . . now if I could just get my hand round the gun . . . “Never mind . . .” Two fingers . . .
three
. . .

“I should have died, Alice. Not her. It should have been me. . . . You don’t know what it’s like, just walking down the street, feeling sick . . . worthless. . . . You look around, and you just think, what’s the point? It wasn’t Susie’s fault, it was mine, everything was my fault, and it should have been me. . . .”

“It’s not like that, Jack. We all make mistakes, all of us . . .” Touching the metal . . . just—get my fingers—underneath—Jack moved slightly and my hand slipped, I scrabbled for the gun, but—

“No!” He grabbed my wrist and tugged my hand clear of his pocket.

“Aaaah—Jack, don’t!” I tried to pull away from him but he got behind me and twisted my arm behind my back.

“That
hurts
.”

“Good.” He hitched my arm higher. I jerked forwards and backwards, trying to break his grip, but my hips were right up against the worktop and he was pressing against my back, squashing me, and there was no room to move. I lashed at him with my free arm—useless—tried to kick out—yelled as my knee smacked into the cupboard door—tried again and connected, but not enough. My foot glanced off Jack’s shin and he staggered for a moment, righted himself, then put his other hand on the back of my neck and shoved my head forwards so that my hair was brushing the wooden draining board. The pain was almost unbearable, and struggling was making it worse. I screamed.

“You’re breaking my arm!”

“Serve you right.”

“Stop,” I panted. “Please. Let go.”

“Not”—
jerk
—“bloody”—
jerk
—“likely.”

I tried to make myself go limp—shut my eyes tight and ground my teeth—anything to control the pain but my arm was agony, my shoulder was on fire—“You’re killing me,
please
. . .”

He started to push me towards the back door. He doesn’t care, I thought, he
is
going to kill me, he doesn’t care . . . God, help me, make him let go,
make it stop
—I heard the click of Eustace’s nails on the lino and caught a glimpse of him through my ragged hair, standing like a statue in the hall doorway, confused, one front paw held slightly off the ground, head tilted to one side, and eyes enquiring—
“Help me!”
I braced my legs and flailed at the draining board with my free hand, trying to grab something, anything, to use as a weapon—but there was nothing there and I couldn’t twist round far enough, couldn’t see, couldn’t
think
. Jack’s knee thudded into the backs of my legs. I felt my own knees buckle and I couldn’t straighten them and for a moment my entire body weight was hanging from my shoulder and upper arm and it felt like they’d snap. I screamed again but he didn’t let up, just pushed my head down, this time with more force because he was standing over me, and the pain was even worse and I slumped against the door on my knees and begged him to stop. God knows what I said—it probably didn’t make sense anyway—but he let go in the end.

“Don’t try anything.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t. My right arm was throbbing and useless.

“Get up.”

“Wait . . . My arm . . .”

“Now!” Something cold and hard jabbed the nape of my neck. The gun. I scrambled upright and stood facing him, cradling my right arm. He stared at me and I suddenly thought: He’s got no idea what it’s like to be me. He’s not even seeing me as a human being. The gun was pointing at my chest. I forced myself to look at him, not it. His eyes were expressionless, like brown marbles.

“Jack, it’s me. It’s Alice.”

“I thought I could trust you. Because of Lenny. I thought you’d do it for Lenny.”

“I’m
on your side,
Jack. That’s why I didn’t phone—”

“But you weren’t there for Lenny, either, were you? Not at the end. Not when it mattered. Oh, yeah, all that stuff about your granddad, but where were you when Lenny
really
needed you? Up in London—up to fuck knows what with fuck knows who. Christ knows why I thought you’d help me—you weren’t even listening! You just wanted to get hold of this”—he jerked the gun—“so you could go running off to the police and then I’d be gone and you could carry on playing at being Marie Fucking Antoinette. . . . I’ll bet you’ve never thought about Lenny at all, never mind me. He even wanted to tell you. About Kitty—he wanted you to know. I told him we couldn’t trust you, and I was right, wasn’t I? You treacherous
bitch
!”

He jabbed my chest with the gun, pushing me backwards. His eyes were venomous.

“I—”

“Shut up. Open the door.”

My right shoulder was a fireball of cramp. It felt like I’d never be able to move my arm again. I turned away from Jack and fumbled at the latch with my left hand. The stifling heat hit me as I pulled back the door, and for a moment, the yard was silent, then Eustace suddenly came to life and barged past us, barking and racing around as if he expected a game. Jack ignored him. “Where’s the key for your stables?” I’ve got two loose boxes. One of them’s padlocked. I use it to store hay in the summer because Pablo and Nelson live out.

“In my boot.” I pointed to a pair of wellies standing by the mat.

“Get it.”

I upended the boot with my left hand and picked the key off the floor. “Out,” he said. “Go on.” I walked ahead of him across the yard to the boxes with Eustace, still hopeful, bouncing in front of me. Jack’s going to lock me in, I thought. Just lock me in, not kill me. Then he’ll go. He’ll take my car and he’ll go. And okay, I’ll be locked in, but I’ll be able to escape somehow or someone will come and he’ll be gone so it’ll be all right and then—

“Undo it.”

It was a big padlock with a handle that went through the bolts on both halves of the door. I tried to hold it steady with my right hand, but my shoulder felt like molten lead and my fingers were numb.

“Hurry up.”

“I’m sorry . . . Can you hold it for me?”

Jack moved closer, so that our heads were almost touching. I could feel the gun just under my ribs. He picked up the padlock, waited while I opened it, then stepped back.

“The door.”

I swung the top half open: hay bales, floor to ceiling.

“What’s in the other one?”

“Nothing. It’s empty.”

“Open it.”

He stood behind me while I undid the bolts. Eustace crowded our legs, sniffing the ground. He pushed past me as I pulled back the doors, making me lose my balance. I collided with Jack, felt the gun hard against my spine, and for a moment I thought that was it.
Let him kill me, don’t let me be paralysed, anything but that
—A flash in my mind, my spine snapping in a starburst of knobs of bone and gobs of fluid—and then he pushed me forward into the loose box. I bounced off the wall and swung round—
Got to face him, if he’s going to do it he’s got to see my face, my eyes, got to see—

He was standing on the threshold, his face blank. “Get the dog out.” I got hold of Eustace and tried to haul him to the door. He anchored himself to the ground, groaning and trying to slip out of his collar as I pulled him across the floor. Jack bent forward in the doorway and our hands touched for a second on Eustace’s fur—there was a snarl and a yelp as he grabbed a handful of the dog’s skin and dragged him into the yard, and I lifted my head and caught a blur of frantic brown and white and a last glimpse of the gun before Jack slammed the door and left me in darkness.

I heard him slide the bolts into place and close the padlock, then retreating footsteps as he walked across the yard, to . . . where? The house, he’d have to go back to the house. Yes . . . I heard the back door creak, then shut. I stood in the dark, waiting for my eyes to adjust, straining my ears. . . . Surely Jack would go now? Surely he’d take my car and leave? The keys were easy enough to find—all he’d have to do was look in my bag, and that was on the dresser, easy to spot. . . . Unless . . . what he’d said about Lenny, about me not being there for him, unless he had some warped idea that he was going to punish me for that . . . And where were
you,
Jack? I thought angrily. Where were you when Lenny needed you? You were his best friend. Jack had done exactly the same over Susie, hadn’t he, blamed Val, blamed anyone but himself, and then . . . what he’d said about feeling guilty and worthless . . . he’s trying to do the same to me, I thought, load me with his guilt over Lenny, when God knows I’ve got enough of my own to contend with . . .

I’ve got to get out of here, I thought. Get the police. I racked my brain: I hadn’t shut the door of the other stable—had Jack?
Think
. . . I’d heard three bolts being slid into place, and there were three on each stable, one on the top half-door and two on the bottom. That meant he hadn’t. So that was a way out, but . . .

I looked around. The partition between the two stables stopped a few feet below the roof, and the gap in between was divided into four by wooden uprights. At the moment, though, it wasn’t a gap but a solid wall of hay bales. Denser than straw, heavier and harder to shift. Packed solid, too. Lengthwise, unfortunately, so I couldn’t pull them through whole onto my side . . . But if I broke them into sections? I’d never manage it with the bailer twine holding them together—too tightly packed. I had nothing to cut it with—even teeth were out, supposing that were possible, because I wouldn’t be able to get my head to it. But if I could get my hand between the bales and get hold of the twine, I might be able to tug it off—one string at least, and then it would be easy . . . I’d need something to stand on, though. The water bucket in the corner. Empty it and turn it upside down. I measured the distances with my eye. It might—
just
—make me tall enough. If I went for the bale nearest the door, I could make a space big enough to crawl through, and then I could push the next bale into the yard and jump down after it. Yes. Good plan.

But
—I needed both arms in working order. Concentrate, I told myself. I curled and uncurled the fingers of my right hand, trying to ignore the prickly bursts of pins and needles, then started to swing my arm backwards and forwards. Don’t think about what happens if you can’t get out . . . don’t think about Jack . . . don’t think about anything else
at all
. This is all there is. Nothing else in the whole world but this . . .

No noise from the yard. Jack must still be inside the house. Why doesn’t he
go
? I thought. Packing, that’s it, he’s packing. I’ve got to believe that. Anything else is too . . . No. Don’t think about it. Concentrate. How long have I been in here? Five minutes? Can’t be more. Wish I’d got my watch on. Must have had it this morning when I was doing the animals . . . then I remembered taking it off when I’d washed out Eustace’s bowl for breakfast. That seemed like weeks ago, not hours.

The evening feed. Supposing I couldn’t get out—the animals . . . I imagined them waiting as the dusk turned to darkness, hungry and bewildered, the horses standing patiently in the field, heads down, the guinea pigs on their hind legs at the wire mesh, the hens wandering around the garden, not shut up—foxes—
Eustace
. . . If Jack left without shutting the gate . . . if he wandered off . . . I pictured his body, lifeless and broken, in a ditch at the side of the road, his glossy brown-and-white fur matted with blood. . . .

Stop it, I told myself. Just stop it. That isn’t going to happen. Everything will be all right. You’ve got to believe that. Concentrate—swing your arm. Back and forth. That’s right. That’s good. Getting better all the time. But . . . What if Jack
doesn’t
leave? What if he does decide to come back in here and . . . No, I thought. He’ll calm down. He won’t do that. But he hadn’t
said
anything about leaving, I’d just assumed it . . . If he thought Val would tell the police where he was—I’d told him she wouldn’t because I hadn’t, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but if she’d known about what happened at that party, and she’d gone to Kitty’s flat—didn’t that mean they could charge her with something or other—burglary, or being an accessory? . . . Slow down.
Think.

What would be the
point
of Jack shooting me? What could I tell the police? First off, that Kitty’d been blackmailing Jack and Lenny over that film—which I’d destroyed, anyway . . . I could tell them that the body in the lake was Kitty, which they might know already, by now . . . but if the car—and she—had been underwater for seven years, how could there be any evidence? All right, they’d connected it with Lenny—his car—but how could they prove it
wasn’t
an accident? As for going to the newspapers, same thing. And even if I had anything to tell them, I wouldn’t. All that stuff they’d written about Lenny after he’d died . . . I wouldn’t touch any of them with a bargepole. And in any case, Jack and Lenny weren’t exactly hot news anymore—not front-page stuff, at any rate. I suddenly remembered the cutting in this morning’s post. Jack had come in before I could read it. What had I . . .
Of course.
Stuck it in my pocket. Where it must still be. I breathed in, rummaged for it with my right hand—prickly but functioning, thank God—and pulled it out of my jeans.

The stable was pretty dim, but there was a bit of light showing underneath the bottom half of the door. I took it over there, arranged myself very gingerly on all fours, and flattened it on the concrete floor. By keeping it close to the sliver of dusty daylight, I could just about make out the words.

The man found shot in a Notting Hill Gate bed-sitter last week has been named as Daniel Francis Watts. Watts, 37, is known to have had connections with pornography and prostitution and worked as a camera operator on films such as
How’s Your Father
and
In My Lady’s Chamber,
starring Britain’s self-styled Sex Queen, Candy Knight. Police have begun a murder investigation and the Obscene Publications Squad have been called in to investigate hard-core material found on the premises.