She had kept her face straight and denied all knowledge. She knows that this is what Kas will expect of her, and she is determined to do what he wants. She regrets the silly things she said to Rachel, when she was overwrought and stressed. Of course he isn’t going to kill her. He will know that what happened to Melanie was an accident. And even if he doesn’t, some small secret part of her thinks, he isn’t like other men. He respects people who go all out to get what they want. He likes people with no boundaries. That’s her. These thoughts flood her head and on one level she knows she’s being crazy, but she can’t slow herself down, can’t get back to normality now, and so she just keeps repeating these things to herself and she keeps walking, resting her hand lightly on her stomach where her baby is slowly, slowly growing.
By the time she’s finally reached Covent Garden, and the building where she and Rachel live is looming in front of her, she’s talked and walked herself into a kind of brittle exhilaration. Somehow, this is all going to work out. There’ll be a way forward, because there always is. She shoves the key into the lock and stumbles through the door, catching sight of herself in the hallway mirror. Her hair is sexily tousled around her face, her tight red T-shirt smoothly hugging her curves. She stares at herself and half smiles. “I’m baaaack,” she croons up the stairs, raising her voice. There’s no response, so she hurries upstairs and finds Rachel in the bedroom, sitting on the bed hugging her knees to her chest.
Her sister looks washed out, the light cutting through the window and highlighting the sallow pallor of her skin. She carefully picks up a mug of tea beside her and sips it. “You were a long time. What did they say to you?”
“What didn’t they say to me?” Sadie fires back, coming forward into the room and throwing herself down on the bed, pillowing her hands behind her head. “God, it was boring as shit. Going over the same thing again and again.” She hasn’t realized until this moment that she’s going to play it this way; this kind of hard levity is guaranteed to rub Rachel the wrong way, but somehow it seems the only thing to do.
Rachel watches her, narrowing her eyes. “What did you tell them?” she asks.
Sadie shrugs and exhales. “The truth. I think it’ll be OK. Obviously they’ll have to investigate it all a bit more, but I’m pretty sure they believed me. I told them that I’d started the fight with Melanie, but that that’s all it was, a fight. If it had happened in the middle of the street rather than . . . where it did, that would have been the end of it. It wouldn’t even have been on their radar. But she slipped and fell. Boom.” She stops momentarily and frowns, the ripple of an unpleasant thought running through her. “I mean, that’s what you told them, too, right?” She props herself up on the bed and looks straight at her sister. It’s a question, and a challenge.
Slowly, Rachel nods. “Pretty much. It’s what I saw. What I think I saw.”
That one lingers between them for a few moments. Sadie wonders if it’s as straightforward as it sounds. If she should make something of it, or move on. At last she shrugs again, nodding mildly. “It was a shit thing to happen,” she says, “but, well, I know this sounds bad but it might not be so terrible, all things considered. He didn’t love her, you know. He loves me. And when the dust settles he’ll realize that what with the baby and all . . .” She can’t resist but spill out a little of what’s been passing through her head, but as soon as she does so she knows that it’s pointless. Rachel’s face twists with incredulity and horror, and she shakes her head.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she says bluntly, “and even if it did, why on earth would you want it to? After what you told me?”
Sadie sits up fully now. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” Rachel says. “What you told me, on the platform at the station.”
She feels a fleeting cloud of panic, but it’s gone as fast as it appears. They were just words, that’s all. She can’t be held to them. “I don’t remember,” she says. “Whatever I said, it didn’t mean anything.”
Rachel looks as if she might press the point, but she shuts her mouth again abruptly, and her eyes flick back and forth, as if she’s thinking. “Did they say anything to you?” she asks at last. “The police. Did they say anything to you about Kas?”
Sadie stays quiet, weighing up possible answers. The chemical ebullience that she felt when she came into the room is gone; everything feels slowed down, and very still. When at last she speaks her voice sounds different to her own ears; there’s a kind of world-weariness in it that she doesn’t think she’s ever used before. “Someone like Kas is always under suspicion for something or other,” she says. “No one understands people like him. He’s successful, different. It’s natural for people to want to bring him down.”
“So you didn’t tell them anything,” Rachel says. It isn’t really a question, but it seems to demand an answer.
Sadie stands up, wrapping her thin arms around herself. She raises her chin slightly, and she catches sight of herself again, in the little mirror that hangs by Rachel’s dressing table. The light that filters softly through the half-open curtains settles lovingly on the beautiful planes of her face, making her look like a film star. And she sees Rachel watching her, sees something unmistakable in her look, even now: something like love, something like awe.
“There’s nothing to tell,” she says clearly. “There will never be anything to tell.”
She leaves the room then, closing the door very quietly behind her. The catch clicks softly as she pulls it shut. She walks into her own bedroom, pulls a blanket over herself, and hugs a cushion to her chest, listening. There’s no sound except for the infrequent passing of cars below. She doesn’t think she will sleep, but her body takes over and before she knows it she’s wrenching her eyes open in bright winter sunlight and glancing over at the clock to find that over six hours have passed.
Gingerly, she gets to her feet and moves softly out down the corridor toward Rachel’s bedroom, pushing the door open to peer inside. Rachel is sleeping, lying motionless with her face pressed into the pillow. She tiptoes back to her own room and pulls the large suitcase from underneath the bed, starts to pile possessions in it almost at random. Clothes and jewelry and bottles of nail polish. She isn’t exactly sure why she is doing this, but after the conversation in the living room earlier, she knows she can’t stay here. The battle lines have been drawn. No matter what she might say, her sister obviously isn’t on her side. And now that she’s sober and her head is clear, she’s starting to wonder about what exactly Rachel said to the police, in her own interview room. She thinks again of the way the sergeant’s attitude toward her changed. She can’t quite link the two together yet, but she has an instinct, a queasy tug of foreboding.
As she scoops up a bundle of clothes from the floor of the wardrobe, she notices the thin folder of photographs at the back. She had them printed a couple of months ago, she remembers, after one of her and Rachel’s earliest visits to the club. The pretense was that she wanted some shots of the two of them there, but of course, the person she really wanted photos of was Kas. She flicks through them slowly, staring at his face. He treats the camera the same way he treats most people; surveying it coolly, dead-on, with little expression. As ever, he’s giving nothing away.
She gathers the photos together and stuffs them into the case, then picks a few out again. She’ll leave them outside Rachel’s room. She’s not entirely sure why she’s doing it, but the motive doesn’t feel innocent. Ultimately, she thinks, perhaps it’s just a reminder that her sister was there, too. She might want to believe that her hands are clean, but she’s been part of this, in her own way.
She steps back, surveying the near-empty room, then she crosses to the table and tears a piece of paper from the notepad, scribbles a message.
Think it’s best if I stay elsewhere for a while. Didn’t want to wake you to say good-bye.
She pauses,
pen in hand. Is there anything else to say? She thinks for a while, but nothing comes, and in the end she just scrawls her name at the bottom of the page, the lettering large and dark. She goes out into the corridor, dragging the case behind her, and she thinks about propping the note carefully against Rachel’s door, but it seems more fitting just to toss it on to the floor along with the photographs, and so she leaves it there behind her, exiting the apartment without looking back.
* * *
• • •
SHE DOESN’T KNOW where she’s going at first, but she gets on the train and heads north. As it rattles along the track, she gets out her phone and scrolls through her contacts. There are a few names there she could target, people who would probably let her crash on their couches for a night or two if she just turned up and presented it as a fait accompli. Or she could call one of the men she used to see, even though it feels like a long time ago since she did that casual dating thing; she knows there are plenty of guys who would put her up for a while in exchange for sex on tap. But something about the idea feels grubby and sad, and she doesn’t want to sleep with anyone. It feels like betraying Kas.
It’s this thought that decides her. She’ll go to his house. She’ll find him and warn him about what the police have been saying to her. By now they’ll have contacted him about Melanie. They’ll have told him she was involved. But he’ll still want to know that they’ve been talking to her about George and Felix. That, surely, trumps everything else. And when he realizes that she’s on his side, he’ll look after her.
She gets off at Camden Town and trudges toward Fraser Street, pulling the case behind her. She’s glad she brought her winter coat, because the air is even icier than it was yesterday and her breath is coming in clouds around her face. She can’t wait to be inside, but when she reaches the street she’s shaken by the way it looks in daylight. Half the houses are derelict, with broken windows and sprayed graffiti covering the walls. Even those that look more lived-in are run down and unwelcoming. Number 17, the house where she knows Kas lives, is no different from the rest. There’s a small pile of rubble and rubbish stacked against the front wall, and the door is covered with cracks and scratches, as if it’s been smashed and badly repaired. It isn’t the sort of place she imagined him in. She thinks of his gleaming, polished appearance and the care with which he’s sculpted his body. But of course that’s what matters to him: himself. He doesn’t care about the stuff around him; it’s incidental, irrelevant.
She raises her hand and knocks on the door hard, three times in quick succession. She presses the doorbell, too, even though it doesn’t look as though it’s worked in years. Silence, and stillness. She tips her head up and peers at the darkened windows. There’s no hint of life behind them. The whole place looks abandoned. Dead.
Of course, he could just be out. Gone to visit family, or Dominic, or another associate. But something tells her that’s not it. The police have come for him already. They’ve taken him away and he’s not coming back.
She takes out her phone and scrolls to his messages. Kas, she types. I know what’s happened. I . . . She hesitates. I believe in you? I’ll stand by you? It feels too schoolgirlish, too melodramatic for him. I love you, she types in the end. She’s never said this to him before, and she’s wanted to for such a long time that it brings a kind of release, even if she knows he’ll probably never reply. He’s unlikely to even get this message, if he’s already been arrested. But there’s still a sort of satisfaction in the words. If you love someone, you’re loyal to them. You give them everything.
One final knock, and then she turns and leaves, the case rattling behind her on the uneven stones. She thinks, for a few moments, about disappearing. Getting on a train and going into the middle of nowhere, relying on her wits and her charm to survive . . . but it feels like a lot of effort, and at the end of the day she doesn’t really believe she can do it. They’d find her in the end, and what point is there in running from something that’s always going to find you?
There’s a fine mist carried on the rising wind, settling coldly onto her hair and the nape of her neck. Ahead of her the horizon stretches, curling in a gray mass of cloud. Cars are screeching down the main road, horns blaring, and there’s an unruly blast of reggae music spilling out from a shop doorway. On the doorstep sits an elderly Jamaican man, smoking a spliff, raising it to her in greeting. The smell hits the back of her throat as she breathes in cold air. She’ll remember this, she thinks, this strange harsh morning that has the quality of a lucid dream.
She turns her footsteps toward the police station. There’s something fatalistic in this, walking into the hands of people who have the power to change your life for better or worse. She’s tired of her hands being on the wheel. She wants to take them off, hand over the controls, and close her eyes and never wake up. There’s an ache in her stomach, spreading dully downwards, but she ignores it and keeps walking, driving herself forward.
RACHEL
FEBRUARY 2000
When she looks back on the weeks that have passed, Rachel finds it hard to put the memories in order. Hours at the police station, filled with soft, insistent questioning about Kas, the people he spends his time with, the patterns of his behavior, her impression of his character, her feelings toward him. They treat her nicely: solicitously offering drinks and snacks, asking her if she has been experiencing any difficulties.
She knows that Kas and Sadie have been charged, and that they will remain in custody until the trial. It has taken some time for her to realize fully what she has done—that by telling them what Sadie had told her she has exposed her sister’s part in a murder. I saw it, I saw it with my own eyes, Sadie had whispered, and at the time Rachel had not interrogated this, not traced the thread through to its conclusion. She had not realized that this effectively made her sister an accessory after the fact, perhaps even a conspirator to murder. And she hadn’t realized either that Sadie was already on the police’s radar, already woven into the case they were trying to build.
At times she feels guilty—so much so that the crushing weight of it makes it hard for her to breathe. And yet when she thinks about the reality of these charges, she is reminded more forcibly than ever before that her sister is damaged, broken. Dangerous, even. She was always going to have to crash. She wonders, often, what Sadie is doing now. Where she is living, how she is feeling toward her, how much she knows about what Rachel has said—and the thought of her sister’s fury and betrayal is frightening, but she forces herself to block it out.
They ask her at the station several times if there is any possibility she would be willing to bear witness against Sadie as well as Kas, but every time she dries up, deflects the question. To her, the trial is an amorphous concept, barely even real. In the unfriendly dark of her apartment, barred against the outside world, she has a hazy, queasy realization that she has little or no idea what is happening around her, to her. It is too late. The wheels that have been set in motion are far bigger than she is.
She keeps herself to herself. She finds herself staying out late less, taking the most direct route back from the office to the apartment, and seeing fewer people than she used to. She spends a lot of time curled up in front of the television, staring unseeingly at the flickering screen. On some level, she thinks, she’s detaching. Just in case. She hasn’t forgotten what they said to her, about the witness protection program. But as the weeks go on her life is rolling on just as it always has, and now that Sadie isn’t in it, it’s staggeringly uneventful.
And then one Sunday afternoon, two weeks in, she’s walking to the corner shop in the rain without an umbrella, her hair plastered wetly to her scalp as water runs in tiny rivulets down the back of her neck. She hasn’t planned to go out, but she’s hungry and there’s not much in the apartment. She’s waiting at the traffic lights when she sees the man. He’s there diagonally across the street, leaning back against a wall, his arms folded across his
chest, and he’s staring directly at her.
She doesn’t recognize him at first, so out of context—just feels a breath of unease at the way he’s looking, then a little tug of familiarity that she can’t quite place when she sees his white-blond cropped hair and the heavy set of his shoulders. Moments later she realizes that it is Dominic Westwood.
The lights are flashing green, but her legs feel like they’re giving way and it takes every ounce of her strength to force herself to cross the street and keep on walking. In the shop, she fumbles for a bag of cookies, a carton of orange juice, keeping her head down and whispering a few pointless words of reassurance to herself. The air inside is warm and fusty, reminding her of a children’s nursery. She pushes the money at the shopkeeper and goes back to the doorway, looking out onto the street.
He’s still there. She sees him instantly, out of the corner of her eye, but she keeps her head straight ahead and starts walking fast, away from him. Behind her, she hears him say her name. She starts to run, her heartbeat thudding through her body, and she doesn’t stop until she is home. Jamming her key in the lock, she whips her head round, and she sees that the road outside is empty. He hasn’t followed her, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. If anything, it feels even more threatening.
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