The Accident (32 page)

‘No.’ He shakes his head, his cheeks colouring slightly. ‘It was cool.’

He’s halfway out of his seat and I realise I’m about to lose him. How long did I expect my daughter’s ex-boyfriend to talk to me about sex for? Even Ella, across the table from me, is staring at the cocktail menu like it’s the most fascinating thing she’s ever read.

‘Then why would Mike blackmail Charlotte?’

‘What?’ He looks down at me, his forehead creased.

‘Keisha told me Mike was blackmailing Charlotte about something. Do you know what?’

‘No.’ He shakes his head, his expression incredulous. ‘She never said anything about …’ He looks at Ella. ‘Did you know about this?’

She raises her eyes from the menu. ‘Nope.’

‘She didn’t give you any clue?’ I look from one to the other. ‘Nothing at all?’

Two blank expressions meet my question.

‘So if I were to tell you that she wrote
“keeping this secret is killing me”
in her diary you wouldn’t know what she was talking about?’

They look shocked but shake their heads.

‘Liam,’ I stand up too, ‘one more thing before you go back to your band.’

He shrugs. ‘Sure. What?’

‘Show me where Mike lives.’

Chapter 29

Liam and I are alone in the car. Ella received a phone call from her mum while we were leaving the pub asking where the hell her fags were so I dropped her home. I wasn’t just returning her home because her mum was suspicious, I wanted her safe and, now we’re outside number 117 Highgate Road, I need to make sure Liam is too.

‘This is definitely the house?’ I ask.

‘Yeah.’ He nods at me from the passenger seat. ‘I’d know it anywhere.’

‘Thank you, Liam.’ I look in the rear-view mirror and flick the indicator, ‘I’ll take you back to The Gladstone now.’

‘Nah.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m staying here. If you’re going to confront that mincing fucker I’m coming too. I’ll punch his fucking lights out.’

That’s a lot of bravado for a seventeen-year-old but it doesn’t raise a smile. Liam has no idea how much danger he’d be in if he so much as looked at James the wrong way.

‘No, you won’t.’ I pull out into the road, ignoring his protestations, ‘we don’t want two people in the hospital.’

Liam laughs, flattered I’d think him capable of hospitalizing a grown man. I don’t bother to correct him.

Fifteen minutes later and I’m back outside the flat. It looks innocuous enough – marine-blue front door, brass knocker, bay windows with curtains ever so slightly open – but I’m having a hard time opening the car door. My brain is urging me on, telling me to get out, knock on the door and confront the man who’s been terrorizing my nightmares for the last twenty years, but my body is holding fast, refusing to move. I look down at my right hand, at the diamond band Brian bought me during a ‘make up’ holiday in Rhodes after the affair. I refused to wear it – his guilt gift – for a long, long time and then suddenly it was our fifteen-year anniversary and the affair was a distant memory and the ring felt like a symbol of positivity, of a fresh start, so I started wearing it. I try and will the hand to move from the steering wheel to the door handle.

The hand refuses to move.

I look back at the house.

Maybe confronting James is more than foolhardy or idiotic, it’s downright dangerous. What if I’ve made the same mistake again – what if ‘rich gay guy Mike’ really is a rich gay guy? What if I ring Brian, or the police, or whoever and tell them that my psycho ex-boyfriend has tracked me down to Brighton, falsely befriended my daughter and then blackmailed her and I’m wrong? How many times can you cry wolf before the men in white coats come out with a nice white coat of your own to wear? Ella described someone who could be James twenty years down the line but I thought the description of Jamie Evans the school teacher matched him too. I’ve been wrong once, I could be wrong again. I need proof. Concrete proof.

The fingers of my right hand twitch on the steering wheel and the next thing I know the driver side door is opening.

Somehow I make it from the road to the pavement and from the pavement to the gate. I keep looking from the front door to the windows to check for signs of life, for danger, for a sign that I should RUN, but when my shoes hit the pathway and I try and walk towards the house it’s as though I’ve stepped into a magnetic field. My body lunges forward but something pushes it back. Go back. Go back. The air is thick, charged, protecting the house, urging me away. Go back. Go back. I take another step forward, my car keys clutched tightly in my hand. I just want to peer through the small gap in the curtains. Just one small look. I take another step, starting when a gull squawks overhead. There are no lights on in the living room, no warm flicker from a television set. I make a deal with God. When I peer through the gap in the curtains, I pray, don’t let James peer back.

I take another step forward, then another. I’m so close now I only need to move a couple of centimetres to my left to see through the gap in the curtains. I exhale as quietly as I can. The street is silent now. There are no gulls, no cars, no children screaming or playing, just me, this house and the thud, thud, thud of my heart.

I hold myself very still and slowly, slowly, tilt my head to the left, towards the gap in the curtains, towards the window into James’s life.

I don’t know what I expect to see – an exact replica of his room twenty years ago perhaps – but I don’t expect the characterless room behind the curtains. A single armchair – black leather with a matching footstool, a leather sofa – same fabric, a pine side table, a beige carpet, stained with what looks like coffee by the fireplace, an entertainment unit holding nothing apart from a large flat screen television and a DVD player. And that’s it. No books, no scripts, no coffee cups, no shoes, no ornaments, no photographs. This could be a show home, a flat designed to appeal to the modern bachelor, devoid of character, colour and warmth and yet … I press a hand to my heart as it lurches in my chest … there is something that stops this room from being completely bland.

A batik wall hanging over the fire.

Chapter 30

My hands shake as I pull my handbag off the passenger seat and onto my lap. I was right all along. I didn’t imagine the cards and parcels that were left at our house and I wasn’t chased down the street by a shadow in London. James Evans was responsible for Charlotte’s accident. I was right all along.

I check that all the doors are still locked and the street is still empty then I delve into my bag. I find my purse, my address book, my make-up bag and a handful of till receipts but not my phone. I tip the handbag upside down. The contents spill onto my lap and my hairbrush hits the keys, dangling from the ignition, as it tumbles. I stare at them as they swing backwards and forwards. Maybe it’s a sign. I should just go. Ring Brian when I’m somewhere safe. Yes, that’s what I’ll do – my fingers make contact with something smooth and buttoned as I sweep the debris from my lap.

My phone.

I scoop it up and press the on button.

Nothing happens.

I sweep my finger down the screen. Jab at the buttons. Press the on button again.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

I shake it, bash it on the steering wheel and press the on button again but nothing works. It’s out of battery.

Please, I pray as I turn the keys in the ignition. Please let Brian be home.

Never have I been so relieved to see my husband’s car in the driveway. I sound the horn as I pull up next to it and glance at the house for signs of life.

There aren’t any lights on in the kitchen or upstairs landing. Brian’s probably in his study.

Milly launches herself at me the second I’m through the porch door. She frantically licks my face, her thick tail pounding the air.

‘Hey girl,’ I rub her head then gently push her down. ‘Sorry, got to find Daddy.’

I ignore her whined protestations and go into the kitchen, shutting her in the porch behind me.

‘Brian!’ I call as I glance around the living-room door. It’s empty, exactly as I left it.

‘Brian?’ I call again as I run up the stairs, cross the landing and push open the door to the study. ‘Brian, we need to call the police.’

The room is empty, the laptop lid closed, the chair pushed into the desk, the paperwork piled up neatly in three piles beside the phone.

I head for the bedroom. Maybe he decided to have a nap. ‘Brian, are you—’

But the bedroom is empty too.

It doesn’t make sense. How can Brian’s car be in the drive but he isn’t? His car’s in the drive so where is he?

I run from room to room to room, scanning the floors, the walls and ceilings for signs of a struggle, for – my stomach constricts so powerfully I think I might be sick – evidence of an attack, but everything is in order. There are no smashed ornaments, no overturned furniture, no broken glass and no blood.

I drift out of the living room and into the kitchen, my terror replaced by confusion. There’s no scribbled note on the pine table, no scrawled ‘gone to the pub’ on the whiteboard above the microwave. Maybe Brian texted my phone and I didn’t get it because it’s out of charge. I head towards the charger, plugged in by the kettle, when a scratching sound makes me jump and I’m knocked to the floor.

‘Milly!’ She nudges me with her nose then licks my face. I gently push her away and glance at the porch door. It’s wide open. I mustn’t have shut it properly.

I scrabble to my feet and cross the kitchen. I’m about to pull the porch door closed when I spot the white padded envelope in the cage below the letterbox. I fish it out. My name and address are written in a fine cursive handwriting I haven’t seen in over twenty years.

‘Milly, quick!’ I grab her by the collar, yank open the front door and stumble across the driveway.

Ten minutes later we’re parked up by the Marina. It’s late and the seafront is empty and silent. The only sound is the rage of the black sea crashing against the pebbles over and over again. A streetlight casts an eerie glow into the car, turning the white parcel in my hands blood-orange red. I shouldn’t open it. I should take it straight to the police and tell them what I know about James Evans, but I can’t. I can’t risk this being some kind of sick joke, a kitchen implement, cuddly toy or something equally innocuous that would get me laughed right out of the station.

I fish a tissue out of the small pack in the glove compartment and cover my fingers with it then pick at the envelope’s seal. If James’s fingerprints are on it I don’t want to smudge them. It’s fiddly and takes forever for me to peel back the flap but I get the parcel open and peer inside. It’s too dark to make out the contents and I don’t want to reach inside so I manoeuver Milly onto the backseat and upend the package on the passenger seat.

Two exquisite baby’s booties tumble out. Knitted from the finest yarn in tiny delicate stitches, overlaid with lace and tied with ribbon around the ankle they’re exactly the kind of expensive, impractical footwear I coveted for Charlotte when she was a baby. I reach for one, overcome by memories and bring it closer to my face. I’m not sure what happens next – whether the smell of iron hits the back of my throat or the thick viscous liquid rolls down the side of my hand and curls around my forearm – but I scream and toss it away. It smacks against the windscreen and drops into the passenger seat footwell.

Even under the burnt amber glow of the streetlight I know that’s what it is, clinging to my fingers, smudged on the windscreen, soaked into the fine ivory wool of the booties. Blood.

A cold calm descends on me. James knows. He knows the secret I took with me twenty years ago. I can stop being afraid now. He knows. I can stop.

I reach for the card that’s lying beside the remaining bootie and wipe it with the tissue, smearing away the blood so I can read the message written on it in the same neat handwriting as the envelope.

‘Life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth’

DEUTERONOMY 19:21

I turn the card over,

A life for a coma? That doesn’t sound right.

We have some unfinished business, Charlotte and I.

The card falls from my fingers in slow motion, arcing backward and forward until it flutters to a stop by my foot.

I have to get to the hospital before James does.

Chapter 31

I run from the car park to the double doors at the entrance of the hospital but I don’t feel the wind on my face. I don’t hear the mechanical voice tell me the doors are opening as I step into the lift or smell the sharp sting of antiseptic as I squirt sanitiser onto my hands at the entrance to the ward. I don’t see, hear, feel, touch or taste anything. I am in limbo, I am running through a nightmare, chasing the spectre of my sleeping child. She hovers in front of me, so close my fingertips are millimeters away and then – gone – she darts away before I can touch her.

She will die unless I get to her. I know it with a certainty that runs deeper than bones, flesh or thought. I would stake my own life on it. Give my own life. James will not take her. He can have me. I will make him have me. I will give him no choice.

I can see the door of her room, further down the corridor. It is ajar, light spilling through the gap. Someone is in there with her. I run but now I’m wading through mud, each footstep sinking lower than the next and I move slower, slower.

I took James’s baby from him because I knew that I would never be able to escape if I gave birth to his child. And it wouldn’t have been a child – it would have been a leash around my neck, a choke collar to be jerked whenever he wanted to control me, whenever he needed to abuse me, whenever he had to punish me.

I was dry-eyed and resolute when I walked into the clinic. I took the tablet without a moment’s hesitation, lay down on the bed without a second thought and gripped my stomach stoically, silently when the cramps came. I didn’t even cry when blood trickled down my leg and I hurried to the toilet and felt life slip out of me and into the pan. But half an hour later, as I lay curled up on the bed and a nurse put a hand on my head and said, ‘You’re a strong one, aren’t you? You haven’t had so much as a paracetamol for the pain,’ I sobbed like the world was about to end.