by Nora Valters
“Is there anything left?” I mutter.
She shakes her head sadly. “The firefighters have said it’s gutted in there. Not much survived on the ground floor. I’m sorry.”
She catches me as I stumble, and holds me upright with an impossibly firm grip for a nearly eighty-year-old. I slump against her. I have this urge to cry, but nothing comes. As if the fire has sucked out all the moisture from my eyes too. My eyelids scratch as I blink.
All I can think of is my mum’s precious photos. Boxes and boxes of them. She’d sorted through them all when she was nearing the end. I picture them in her lounge, exactly where she left them, and imagine fire eating at the edges and licking up the sides and then consuming them in one big whoomph of flame.
I choke out a dry sob, which turns into a wail that goes on for a long time.
Mrs Simpson pats my hand in sympathy. When my wail abruptly ends, as if I’m completely spent and have absolutely nothing left in me, she says, “This is Fire Officer Amy Wilson. She’s in charge here.”
I look up to see a firefighter and a police officer.
The firefighter nods at me. “Ms Cohen, this must be a shock. But I need to ask you some questions. Mrs Simpson confirmed that there was no one in the building when we arrived, and there hadn’t been anyone in the ground-floor flat for weeks and the upstairs flat for nine days, so there was little chance something had been left on like a cooker, hob or washing machine. Is that correct?”
“Yes. Everything was switched off.”
“We thought as much. The fire is out, and we’re just turning everything over and dampening down. We’ve had a fire investigator in there. He’s almost certain that the fire was started deliberately, but will need to do some additional analysis in the daylight.”
“Huh?”
“It was likely set on purpose about two hours ago, not long before Mrs Simpson called us. There’s a broken pane in a back window, which someone possibly used to get in the house. It looks as if the batteries were taken out of the fire alarm, as no one heard the alarm going off. There were dining chairs and what looks like an armchair pushed into the corners of the bedroom, lounge and kitchen with piles of stuff on top of each. An accelerant was used, probably petrol, to set these chairs on fire. Because the positioning against the walls created chimneys, as such, the fire took hold quickly and spread. These three separate seat fires indicate this was a deliberate act rather than the fire starting in one place and travelling.”
My mum’s favourite armchair… up in flames.
“For that reason, we’re pretty sure it was arson,” Fire Officer Wilson continues. “We’ve briefed the police, who will be involved from herein.” She indicates the police officer, who nods. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my team.”
I say thanks as Fire Officer Wilson walks off.
The police officer turns to me. “Lauren, I’m PC Timothy Sarpong.”
“Hi,” I reply weakly.
“It was possibly kids,” PC Sarpong says. “But who can say why they’d target this place specifically? Perhaps they noticed that it had been empty for a while. Mrs Simpson said Mrs Cohen had been in hospital for weeks before she passed away.”
“Kids,” I repeat.
He nods. “Nothing appears to have been stolen. All the high-value goods, like the flat-screen television, were still in there. So it doesn’t look like a robbery gone wrong, or a thief covering their tracks.”
He pauses, and I force my scratchy eyeballs to blink at him. The smell of smoke filters through my nostrils and gets in my mouth. I swallow and it seeps down my throat. I cough. It’s as if the lingering smoke in the air is permeating through my skin and getting into my body through every pore. It’s like the ash of my mum’s burnt possessions wants to cling on to me. I begin to tremble. PC Sarpong notices. He steps away, finds a foil emergency thermal blanket from somewhere and puts it around my shoulders.
He continues, “I’m sorry, but I need to ask you this. Did your mother have anyone who might have wanted to damage her property like this? I know your mother recently died, so could this person or persons be targeting you or someone else close to Judy?”
I stare at him as this sinks in. “You think the arsonist might have been targeting me?”
“Potentially. Do you know anyone who might’ve done this?”
Yes, I almost scream, the same person who’s fucked up everything else for me: IMANI! IMANI! IMANI! But I don’t. The timeline is off. What did the fire officer say? That the fire had been started about two hours ago?
Imani wasn’t anywhere near this place two hours ago. I know because I was following her.
But I can’t exactly say that, can I?
All the stuff happening to me is linked, and this was very deliberately done to hurt me, like all the rest. It’s obvious. But how can I tell PC Sarpong that I think it was Imani when I know she has a watertight alibi? She was at the cinema with her mates, then popped home and then went to the house of her boyfriend, or whoever he is.
Could she have paid someone else to do it? If I try to explain all that, will he think I’m mad?
Because I take so long to answer, PC Sarpong says, “You have a think about it. Now, I think it’s best if you head home. The fire department will conduct a thorough investigation of the place, and we’ll take some statements from the neighbours in the morning. Someone might remember seeing something.”
I shake my head. How can I leave? It would be like turning my back on a friend in need.
But PC Sarpong is adamant. “There’s nothing you can do here. You can’t go inside, as the structural integrity of the building needs to be assessed. It’s past midnight. We’ll be round at some point in the next day or two once we get the fire service’s report.”
“Okay…” I reply.
“Come on, Lauren,” Mrs Simpson says, leading me to my car, trailed by PC Sarpong. Someone’s turned the engine off, but the door is still wide open. She helps me in and steps back.
When I don’t make any move, PC Sarpong frowns. “Will you be okay to drive? I can give you a lift home, and you could leave your car here? Or do you have someone who can come and get you?”
“I’ll be fine,” I say and force a smile at him. “I just need a moment.”
“Sure,” he replies and steps back so I can close my door.
I sit and gawp at the firefighters traipsing in and out of my mum’s now-open front door. PC Sarpong watches me for a moment and then walks back to talk to the other police officers. I hold a hand up to Mrs Simpson, and she acknowledges it and then hurries back to her house. A few moments later I see her next to Mr Simpson at the window.
But I don’t move for hours. It takes all my effort just to breathe, just to blink. Neighbours drift back into their homes. One police car leaves. The firefighters pack up their equipment and engines and drive away. The second police car goes. Eventually it’s just me left on the street.
When the horrific reality of my mum’s torched home and belongings finally registers and I know this isn’t a nightmare I’m about to wake up from, I drive back home.
21
I get home around 4 a.m. and go straight up to bed, not bothering to undress, not bothering to get under the covers. I just sprawl face first on top, the smoke still in my nostrils, the loss aching in my chest. They were just things, I tell myself soothingly over and over. I still have all my memories of Mum.
But it doesn’t help, and I can’t sleep.
I reach out a hand to where Akshay should be, and the emptiness cuts open that wound again. No more fiancé. The love of my life gone. I don’t blame him for doubting me – that video looked so real, so definitive. How can you argue with video ‘proof’ like that? If the shoe were on the other foot, I would’ve believed it too. Such a clever, awful thing to do.
I attempt to empty my mind and lull it to sleep, but there’s a doubt niggling that won’t go away. It’s migrated up from my gut, a feeling, a knowing, that I just can’t ignore. This
doubt pinballs around every corner, bouncing off the sides until it settles and reveals itself.
And this is it: is Imani really responsible? Have I got it all wrong?
Imani is the laziest person I’ve ever come across. Would she really go to the effort to engineer all of this? She’s hostile and entitled, but is she really that cruel and petty? And yes, she has a certain amount of protection from Madeline, but I just can’t believe she would push it this far.
I groan. Madeline. Imani is sure to tell her about my accusatory phone call. I’m already slipping down my boss’ good books, one step away from plummeting over the cliff.
My eyes ping open, and I stare at the ceiling, playing back the phone conversation. Imani was so disinterested. It could’ve all been an act, of course, but I know she spoke her truth. She always speaks her truth. She’s selfish and only cares about herself and her own pleasure. I’m such an insignificant part of her life, why would she invest any energy bothering to ruin me when she has herself to focus on?
Yes, she doesn’t really want the job. She’s only there because her ex-footballer-now-property-mogul daddy told her she needed to work and earn some money and couldn’t just live off him. Although she once boasted that her annual allowance from Daddy was more than her salary. And also that her plan was to work outside his business for a while, to gain ‘experience’, before she went into his business. She’d begged her bestie, Amelia, to persuade her mum, Madeline, to get her a job. And that’s exactly what had happened, because Madeline and Imani’s daddy run in the same affluent circles in Cheshire, and Madeline wants to keep him on side.
And would Imani really go to all the trouble of finding someone willing to commit arson? That’s a dangerous, illegal act with some serious consequences and not something to casually ask a mate. And as far as I know, there aren’t freelancers lining up to take on that kind of job either. I know she didn’t torch my mum’s apartment because she was nowhere near it. She has a rock-solid alibi.
It’s been such a traumatic whirlwind these past few days that I latched onto the only person I could think of who would do this – Imani – but perhaps I’m missing something or someone. The more I reflect, the more I think I’ve made a mistake. I had tunnel vision and need to cast my net wider, broaden my investigation. Maybe it’s not even someone I know. Perhaps it’s a nutter who has targeted a random stranger for a sick thrill.
I decide to apologise to Imani for the phone call, to nip this in the bud before she blabs to Madeline, if she hasn’t already. I flip onto my back, grab my phone off the nightstand and open my work emails. I haven’t looked at them since I was sent home mid-morning by Madeline and have hundreds. I ignore them for now and, holding the phone above my head, type a short, polite but professional email to Imani that doesn’t give too much away:
Imani, my apologies for the phone call earlier. I made a mistake. I hope you had a good time at the cinema. I’m resting up. See you next week.
I deliberate for a moment but then press send. Hopefully she hasn’t already mentioned anything to Madeline and reads this email when she first gets into work tomorrow and decides to keep schtum.
Mindlessly scrolling through the other unread emails, a name pops out at me in the subject line: Jenna Robinson. That’s Toby’s ex-girlfriend’s name. Surely it can’t be the same Jenna Robinson?
I open the email. It’s from a North-West PR industry body that runs a website and newsletter and puts on events and networking opportunities for PR professionals. I’ve been to a few, and they are always excellent. This is an event they are putting on with a Jenna Robinson as the guest speaker. I scroll down the email and see Jenna’s heavily made-up face smiling at me.
WTF. The phone slips through my fingers and bops me on the forehead. Wide awake, I scrabble in the sheets to find it.
I read the event’s blurb. Jenna is speaking about being a beauty influencer; the importance of being able to create and edit video content; how she taught herself and how you can too. And how she now regularly gets hundreds of thousands of views on her YouTube beauty videos.
Hundreds of thousands of views? Huh.
I click on the link that takes me to Jenna’s YouTube channel and sit upright in bed. I shuffle back to sit against the headboard and switch on the bedside lamp. Jenna has hundreds of videos, all with huge numbers of views. I click on one at random, and it’s super slick, with Jenna demonstrating how she achieves such thick, bushy, perfectly shaped eyebrows. It really has been edited to perfection. I find myself mesmerised, and I couldn’t care less about my eyebrows.
I follow Jenna on Instagram, as a favour to Toby when she’d first set up her channel and needed numbers, but don’t pay much attention, always scrolling quickly past when I see her posts. I click onto her Instagram profile and see she now has almost eight hundred thousand followers. Her latest post is a video. The caption tells me it’s an ad from an up-and-coming make-up brand, and I wonder how much she got paid for that one sponsored post. It has to be hundreds of pounds, maybe even in the thousands.
I massively underestimated her. I didn’t think she was this bright. She’d always tried to get Toby to be her Instagram boyfriend, following her around and taking photos of her, but he point-blank refused – and moaned to me about it. So she must’ve learnt to do it herself and gone into videos.
A memory plays in my head of Jenna drunkenly shouting, “I’m going to ruin you!”
Maybe she really meant it. Maybe I discounted her too quickly.
Perhaps she does have the skills to edit my face onto that clip of another couple having sex. And the intelligence to plan and execute this attack on me. I didn’t initially suspect her, I immediately wrote her off as a ditzy, harmless idiot, but I was wrong. She’s business savvy and switched on. I was so fixated on Imani that I didn’t see it.
Jenna was in my house at the funeral reception. In my garden. She could’ve planted the letters and USB then. So many people were milling about and coming in and out of the house that she could’ve easily gone unnoticed.
But what about all the work emails, social media hacking, and bank account issues? I realise my laptop was in the front room during the funeral reception. It was on, and it was open – I never lock it when I’m at home; it just goes to a bubbles screensaver rather than a lock screen if I don’t use it for a while. I’d checked my work emails first thing before the funeral, the CozMoz Paints presentation was open, as it was the last thing I was working on after the pitch on Friday, so she could’ve planted the porn link then, and my PW-Protekt app would’ve been open. I mentally trawl through our past conversations. Did I recommend it to her? Highly probable. I recommended it to everyone. So maybe she found out how to use it?
Just as she could have planted the letters and USB in the garden, she could’ve easily snuck into that room unnoticed. She said she’d been in the house for a while before she made herself known to us, claiming she’d been talking to my cousins who’d recognised her from YouTube.
And my car. She could’ve keyed it when Toby booted her out of my house, but I only saw it the following day.
She also knows exactly where Mum lived, as she’d been round to her apartment for Sunday roast with Toby on a few occasions when Akshay and I were there too.
Jenna knows everything about me. She knows my address and phone number to have been able to send those dirty texts and post the lingerie and sex toy.
All the pieces of the puzzle slot into place, and I berate myself for not seeing it earlier.
But why? What motivation does she have? I think back, and it’s obvious. Jenna shouted, “You ruined our relationship, Lauren!” She wanted to split up Akshay and me as punishment for me splitting up her and Toby. She blames me for encouraging Toby to dump her and has a gigantic grudge. Perhaps she knows I told him to dump her when he called me on Friday.
She said she’d ruin me – and she has. She’s chewed up my life and spat it out; found every way to publicly humiliate me and privately torture me and gone
after everything I hold dear.
Jenna’s threats at the funeral weren’t empty. She meant every word.
I’ve been such a fool to discount her on the false belief that she’s stupid. I look at the time: 4.45 a.m.
Sod it.
I find Jenna’s mobile number and dial it. It rings and rings. Do I really think she’ll pick up at this time? I always turn my phone to silent at night, but I know a lot of people who don’t in case of emergencies.
But she doesn’t answer, and it goes to voicemail. I leave a message:
“Jenna, it’s Lauren. I know what you’ve done, and you need to put things right immediately! Call me back ASAP.”
I also send a text message saying the same thing.
Twiddling my thumbs impatiently, I know it’s unlikely she’ll reply until she’s awake in a few hours. More damn waiting for someone to get back to me.
I switch off the lamp and wriggle down in my bed. But every time I close my eyelids, they slide open again, as if the close function is faulty and will never work again. I refuse to wait for her to reply – what happens if she never does?
My need to be in control of a situation kicks in.
What do I know about Jenna? I’ve never been to her apartment and don’t know her address – and the one person who does, Toby, isn’t speaking to me right now.
Think.
OMG. That’s it. Dredged up from the depths: on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays she works at a beauty counter in the beauty hall of a department store in town.
And today is Thursday.
I check the time: 5.05 a.m. In a few hours she’ll be there. And in a few hours, I’ll be there too.
22
At 9.02 a.m., after zero sleep and zero response from Jenna, I call the department store and am directed through to the beauty hall.