What You Did

by Claire McGowan

  I felt sick. And Callum, my old friend Callum, was sitting across the room from me, his face puffy and red, the skin dry and cracking, and I had to decide now what to do. There was Jodi in the hospital, having her baby, all alone.

  I stood up, feeling my legs like jelly beneath me. What could I do? Throw Callum under a bus? Call the police down in Bishopsdean right now? They’d hardly arrest him, all the way up here. Would they send local officers? He’d been walking around for weeks now, free. I could tell Jake, but he was in prison, precisely to stop him attacking the man who he thought had hurt his mother. I realised there was one person who had the right to adjudicate over what happened next.

  I spoke quietly. ‘Cal, let me get you some water, OK? I know this is hard.’

  He nodded, rubbing a hand over his face. He looked awful. Twenty years older than he was. Slowly, I inched past him to the door, then out into the kitchen. My sandals clattered on the floor tiles, the ones I’d envied just a few weeks before. My bag was on the kitchen island, and in it my phone. I held my breath – no sound from Callum in the other room. I turned on the tap to run, then took the phone out and started dialling Karen’s number. I was just listening to the ring when a clammy hand closed over my mouth.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I struggled away from him, repulsed by the meaty tang of his skin. His wedding ring knocked against my teeth. ‘Cal – what the hell!’

  He moved his hand from my mouth to my arm. I could feel the fingers digging in. ‘Ali, you can’t. Can’t tell anyone. S’over now. S’done.’

  ‘It’s not over! Mike might go to prison and . . .’

  ‘I’m not going to prison. You hear me! I’m not.’ It was absurd. Here I was with my friend and he had wedged his body behind me, pressing me against the kitchen island. I’d never realised how powerful he was, the stockiness of his short body. He gripped the phone, squeezing it from my hand, smearing it with his prints.

  ‘Let me go! Fucking hell, what are you doing?’ I pushed back hard against him, and understood, with horror, that I could not move. I couldn’t stop him from doing whatever he was going to do.

  I think that was the moment I fully believed it. Callum had raped Karen. In my garden. It had really happened, and it had started as this did – a woman slowly realising that her supposed friend had her trapped, and she could do nothing about it. He had raped Karen and he had murdered Martha, all those years ago. And Mike had borne the blame for both.

  I lowered my voice, tried to sound friendly. ‘Cal, come on. It’s me, Ali. I wouldn’t call the police on you! I just wanted to check on Jodi.’

  ‘Jodi.’ The pressure released a little. He was hurting my hand, so I let him take the phone. For a moment I thought he was going to smash it on the tiles, but he laid it on the counter. ‘Having the baby.’

  ‘That’s right. So why don’t we go and see her, OK?’ If I could get out of this house, get him to the hospital, well, they had security guards. Other people around. ‘We can call a cab, what do you say?’

  He considered it for a moment, made slow and clumsy by drink. ‘You told the police on Mikey. Didn’t you? Told them he admitted it. You lied, didn’t you?’ How did he even know that? The lines that ran between us all, from Karen to Jodi to Callum?

  ‘I – I had no choice. I needed Jake to help Mike, donate his liver.’

  Callum was shaking his head. The pressure on my body was back, his hips and chest against mine. ‘You’ve no loyalty, Ali. I don’t trust you. Mikey gets in trouble and what do you do? You turn your back. Shack up with ol’ Bill five minutes later.’

  ‘I . . .’ It was true. I didn’t know how to justify myself. ‘Please, you’re hurting me. Let me go.’

  ‘Oh Ali!’ He made a noise like a sigh and sob. ‘What am I going to do?’ His clumsy hand pushed the hair back from my face. Somewhere between a slap and a caress. I hadn’t been this close to him for so long and it felt all wrong. My blood was roaring in my ears, all my senses on fire. Get out. Get out. This isn’t safe. I raced through scenarios of what to do, all the while holding on to how crazy it was. He was my friend. I’d trusted him. He pulled my face around to look at him, twisting my neck. ‘How come never me, eh? You had a go on Mikey and Billy-boy. Why not me?’ His plaintive tone made me want to vomit.

  ‘You were with Jodi.’ I tried to sound light but my voice sounded scared and strangled. I hated that.

  ‘No. You never wanted me.’ I could feel his boozy breath on my face, and his rubbery wet mouth coming at me. A shot of pure panic went through me. He wouldn’t. It was madness! After everything? But my body didn’t understand it was impossible, and I whimpered in fear.

  ‘Don’t hurt me, Callum, stop it. Stop it!’

  I was fixated on his face, his body against mine, one hand in my hair and one trapping my waist, but then I was aware of movement in the room, and the sudden crack of something like pottery. A look of confusion crossed his face, and I saw red blood trickle down over his eye.

  Then I saw Karen standing there, the remains of a pot plant in her hand, trailing soil and blood all over the floor, and on her face the grimmest expression I’d ever seen.

  ‘How did you know to come?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. When you told me that – that he can’t finish – I just – it was like something went off in my head. He said it that night. The man who – hurt me. He said, Sorry, I can’t. I was just so – I didn’t understand, couldn’t take it in. But when you told me, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was in the cab to the hospital and I sent it to their house instead.’

  ‘Thank God you did.’

  She nodded, unreadable. Despite the context, I was glad we were having this conversation in the police station. It felt neutral, bright lights blasting everything and laying it bare. Neither of us would make a scene here. She sat opposite me in the waiting room, the lights of cars passing outside in the road. They’d left us there, I think unsure what to do with two nice middle-aged women, covered in a man’s blood, who’d rung them so calmly and told them what had happened. I remembered Karen’s tight voice as she spoke to them. A man was attacking my friend, so I hit him with a plant pot. He’s bleeding.

  She’d called me her friend.

  Callum was in hospital with a head injury. The same hospital as Jodi, and what did that mean? I didn’t know. The facts seemed to elude me, like flies buzzing round my head. How would we tell Jodi what we knew now about her husband? Her son was only hours old and his father was a killer and rapist. What would it be like to find that out, when you’d just brought a child into the world?

  Karen said, ‘Tell me again what he said.’

  I had told her already, what I knew, and watched it seep through her like water into rock. Her face didn’t move as I repeated it. ‘He said . . . he’d seen you outside on the lawn and thought you . . . he thought you’d been flirting with him. It was rambling. But he more or less – he did it, Kar.’

  Her jaw set. ‘Him.’

  Timidly, I said: ‘Do you . . . is that something you think might have happened?’ I meant, was it Callum who had sex with you on the lawn, not Mike? Had sex with. That was not the right phrase, but I still didn’t know how to say it. ‘Did he – attack you?’

  Karen thought about it. ‘I wasn’t lying. The aftershave, the jumper. They were Mike’s.’

  ‘The jumper was in the rubbish pile.’ I explained that Benji found it, shoved right to the bottom.

  ‘So someone wanted to destroy it? Wanted it burned?’

  ‘I guess so. Mike had taken it off, before dinner. It was so hot during the day, remember. It was lying on the decking. I was cross because he never put things away.’ Using the past tense to speak of him, my husband. Because I was afraid he would die, or because I knew things would never be the same again?

  Karen’s mouth was pursed. She was hunched over, and the hands that held an empty paper cup were shaking. ‘He put it on. So I’d think it was Mike.’

  ‘Maybe he
was just cold or . . .’ I stopped. I didn’t know why I was defending Callum. Why I was still, after all this time, trying to ease the brutal facts of what had happened. Trying to spare myself, when it was Karen who’d had this done to her, to her body and her mind.

  ‘He knew. About me and Mike. Mike said he thought Callum suspected.’

  Me and Mike. It was a knife in me, but I was so numb I couldn’t feel it now. Later, sometime, all these wounds would make themselves felt, I was sure of it. ‘He did, yeah.’ Would Callum ever have told me? Did all our friends know, everyone except me?

  ‘He knew I’d think he was Mike, and I’d want to . . . that I’d not put my guard up. I was drunk. I was really really drunk. You don’t know what that feels like, when it’s being done to you, and you can’t get away, you can’t even move . . . he was kneeling on me, Al. On my . . . my legs. My back. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see him. It was so dark. All I could see was the jumper, and there was the smell too. The aftershave.’

  It was all making sense to me now, so much so that I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it before. Blind, distracted, dazzled as I had been all the way through. Looking at the wrong thing all this time. Mike had doused himself in aftershave that night. Of course – he’d wanted to shower before dinner, and I’d nagged him not to, because there wasn’t time, not knowing he’d been with Karen just minutes before I got back. He’d been trying to cover up the smell of her, of sex. His jumper would have reeked of aftershave, obliterating any other smell. And it had been sitting there, conveniently, on the decking, in a discarded heap.

  ‘What now?’ I risked. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to be with her.

  She shook herself all over. ‘I feel like I’m going mad. I was so sure. So sure it was Mike.’

  I had felt that way too at times. ‘I’m sorry.’ My voice cracked under the weight of it, how inadequate those syllables were for everything I had to say sorry for. ‘I should never have said those things. I should have believed you.’

  She lifted her chin slightly. ‘But it wasn’t true, Ali. What I said. Was it?’

  I swallowed. ‘Maybe not. But you didn’t . . . you thought it was him.’

  ‘I did. I hope you understand that.’

  ‘Of course. I should have – well, it was unforgivable, what I did. I’m fired, basically. My career’s over.’

  ‘What a mess.’ Karen was strangely detached. ‘What a bloody mess, eh. What will I do?’

  ‘We should tell the police everything. Callum confessed to me, I don’t think he’ll fight it. Tell them you remembered the truth, and then they can drop the charges against Mike.’

  ‘But Mike’s sick. Right?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s very sick.’

  ‘And Jake is the only donor.’ She sounded like she was puzzling it all out in her head. ‘OK.’ She pushed her hands off her thighs lightly, as if getting organised. ‘I’m going to tell them. That it wasn’t Mike, it was – him. Then you and I are going to see Jodi. She’s all by herself, and you shouldn’t be alone when you’ve had a baby. We just aren’t meant to do it.’ Maybe that was a dig about all those years ago, the day Jake was born, when I’d dragged Mike away from the hospital to immediately have sex and try to get my own baby. Had I known, on some level, that Jake was his? Or was I just so selfish I didn’t care? I’d never know. What a store of hurts we had from each other, Karen and me. Like a set of scales that were balanced with stones.

  Karen stood up. ‘Will you come with me?’ she said. ‘Will you help?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. And I stood up too, and we walked to the door, shoulder to shoulder.

  Epilogue

  The For Sale sign swung in the breeze that had picked up round the house. The summer was on its way out – in a week or two Benji would start school, and Cassie sixth-form college. Neither of them in Bishopsdean, however. We were leaving the town behind, and hopefully, with the proceeds from the house, we’d be able to buy a more modest flat or terrace before Christmas. For now we were moving into a rented flat in London, not far from the one Cassie had been born in. Benji had grumbled about leaving his friends, but he understood, I think, the need to get away. For Cassie it would be life or death. A chance to start again, to outrun that picture and the pills she’d swallowed. A place where no one knew what kind of family we were.

  She came up behind me as I stared out the kitchen door at the sign, past the spot where Karen had been assaulted. ‘Are you sad we’re selling?’

  ‘Not really. I don’t see how we can live here now.’ My dream house – a pipe dream, one I never truly thought I deserved – was tainted for ever by what happened to Karen here. And Cassie, swallowing those pills. By everything.

  I had given up my dreams of Aaron ever being punished for spreading the picture. I knew he wouldn’t have thought he even did anything wrong, and lots of people would agree. Even Cassie wasn’t convinced the whole thing hadn’t been her fault – she’d sent it in the first place, after all. At least if we left town I wouldn’t have to bump into him and his awful mother in Waitrose. The more I thought about it, the more I marvelled that I’d ever lived in a place like this.

  Cassie nodded, and let me slip my arm around her shoulders without pulling away. ‘Will Granny come and stay when we move?’

  My mother had stayed for a month in the end, and although it was too simplistic to say we’d put the past behind us, she’d grown close to Cassie and Benji, and seemed able to show them affection in a way she never had with me. Guilt, maybe, had shadowed all of our encounters. I didn’t forgive her entirely for never standing up to Dad. But I would try to understand, now I had faced the lengths a person would go to so they could hang on to their life.

  Mike had already moved back to London. After the transplant, he’d made a good recovery, and woken up the next day lucid and remorseful, but we’d agreed our marriage was one more thing that could not be saved. Like with the house, there was no way back from everything that had happened. He was living in a flat not far from where we’d be, back at his old job. His boss seemed rather embarrassed that they’d ever doubted him. Karen and Jake were back in Birmingham and I didn’t know when I’d see them next. I’d heard Jake wasn’t getting over the transplant so well, that he’d been in and out of hospital a few times. He was on bail now until his trial, and I hoped his sentence would be light, given what he’d done for us. I tried not to feel guilty.

  As for Callum, his trial was coming up in the autumn, not just for the rape of Karen, but for killing Martha too. Since it was a murder charge, he hadn’t got bail and was currently on remand in a London prison. I’d have to see him, and Karen, in court, and I was steeling myself for that. I’d been lucky not to face charges myself, although DC Devine had made it clear he knew I’d deceived him with my ever-changing story.

  Jodi had named her son Eric – a Teutonic name – and cut herself off from all of us. My baby gift had come back return to sender. I wasn’t sure if I would ever see her again. I wanted to tell her I didn’t blame her, that none of us had seen what Callum was. But I wasn’t sure she’d listen.

  I gave Cassie a squeeze. ‘Have you started packing? The van will be here soon.’

  She gave a small eye-roll, and I was happy to see it, a trace of her old self. ‘We’ve ages yet.’

  ‘Not really, it’ll take hours to sort this place.’ There was a crunch of gravel in the drive, and I looked up to see the large moving van manoeuvring in, and beside the driver, waving to us, was Bill. ‘He’s here,’ I said to Cassie. ‘Come on, let’s get ready.’

  Jodi

  ‘Shh, shh, baby. It’s OK. Mummy’s here.’

  It was early – before 5 a.m. still. Time had lost meaning now it was just her and the baby in the house. Her son. Finally, after so many years. At the sound of his snuffling cries, she eased him from his crib, so close to her own bed she could feel his breath on her outstretched hand, and put him to her breast. A smile broke over her face as he tugged, and latched. Her baby
. Fifteen years after she’d expected him, here he was.

  As she touched his downy cheek in the grey morning light, she found herself wondering once again had she done the right thing. If she could go back to that night, the night of the party, and make a different choice, was there a way to change the outcome? Maybe not. She lay back against her pillows and let herself remember what she’d been suppressing ever since it happened.

  Something had woken her. It happened all the time since she’d got pregnant, shooting awake in the middle of the night, every hair on her body standing on end, her heart trying to pound right out of her chest. And there was always nothing. A shadow across the bed, maybe, or a car passing in the street outside. Her body was on red alert for any danger to the child in her belly. Now, disorientated, she took a few minutes to understand where she was. Ali’s spare room. The unfamiliar smell of her washing powder. The silence of the country, the dust under the bed where it wasn’t vacuumed properly. Except it wasn’t silent. There’d been a noise. Her ears might not have known but the nerves in her spine were sure. She got up, lumbering to the window that looked over the vast, dark garden. It wasn’t fair. Her own London house had only a small patio area, despite costing close to a million pounds. Anxiety pounded through her as she passed a hand over her stomach. To soothe the baby, or soothe herself, she wasn’t sure. It would all be OK. Cal had escaped all that nasty business at work, the girl had been paid off, and he’d promised Jodi it would be fine. Jodi wanted to give this child everything, and that included a mother who didn’t work. Ali hadn’t worked. She could do the same.

  The lawn was illuminated by a ghostly half-light from the kitchen, and she thought again how dark it was. In London, a street light outside made their house as bright as noon sometimes. Here there were shadows deep as ink, and she could hardly make out the figure on the lawn. A flash of bare leg told her – Karen. Jodi made an audible tut with her tongue. Karen had been ridiculous this evening, in a dress that would have been too short for Cassie, throwing her legs up on Bill’s knees. Poor man. Anyone could see he’d never been interested in Karen. Bill wasn’t like that. He was quiet, kind. He’d offered Jodi his arm to cross the lawn to the table they’d eaten at, made sure she was OK.