by Lisa Jewell
AR: [pauses]
DM: It’s OK. Carry on.
AR: I know I shouldn’t have. But I wanted to protect Scarlett from whatever it was she’d done the night before. And I knew the ring was evidence—of something. Of some kind. I… I’m really, really sorry. I should have handed it to the police. I should have told them what I heard her saying in the kitchen. I know I should. It’s so bad that I didn’t. I know that. I really do know that.
DM: So what happened after you picked up the ring?
AR: I left. I walked down the driveway and my mum picked me up from the gates and drove me home. And that was that.
DM: Did you hear from Scarlett again? After you left her house?
AR: Yeah. She called about lunchtime, said she’d just woken up, asked where I was. I told her I was at home. Then she called again a few minutes later and said that Tallulah’s mum wanted to talk to me because Tallulah hadn’t come home. She gave me her number and asked me to call her. And I… I didn’t ask Scarlett the right question. I didn’t ask any questions. I just said yes. She said, Are you OK? And I said I was just tired. And that was that. That was basically the only conversation Scar and me ever had about it. About any of it. I didn’t talk to her again really after that. I went to London to live with my dad for the summer. And by the time I got back to Manton that September, Scarlett and her family were gone.
DM: So you didn’t talk to Scarlett at all over the whole of that summer?
AR: No. Not once. She didn’t call me. I didn’t call her.
DM: And what about the rest of your friendship group?
AR: Yeah, I mean, we messaged and stuff, but never about that night. We never talked about that night. Which is kind of weird, when you think about it.
DM: So, Mimi, earlier you told us that you gave the ring to Lexie a few weeks ago. Could you tell us about that please?
AR: Yes. Sure. So… I had the ring all this time and I’ve wanted to do something about it since forever. I’ve wanted to come forward and tell someone what I heard. Or what I thought I heard. Because, you know, I’d been drinking that night. I’d been taking drugs. What I saw, what I heard, it was all so fleeting. Just a glimmer of a thing. But I just kept thinking that the police would find some kind of evidence of whatever the hell happened that night, or that Scarlett would come back or Tallulah would come back, or even that Zach would come back… like, maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. I just thought the whole thing would sort itself out without me having to do anything or get involved, but then months and months and months went by and nothing happened and then the girl’s mum did that candlelit vigil for the year anniversary and still nobody knew anything and I saw her mum once, in Manton, pushing Tallulah’s baby in a pram, and she looked so sad and so broken and I felt so bad. And I’ve been… I’ve been in hell. In actual hell. So last month I went to see Lexie and I finally told her what I saw through the door of the snug that night, Zach and Tallulah fighting, Zach throwing the ring box at her. And then I told her what I heard afterward, Tallulah shouting what have you done. And Scarlett shouting but you said you wanted him to disappear. And then Lexie told me
AR: [pauses]
DM: Take your time. It’s OK.
AR: [crying]
AR: Lexie told me… she told me that she’d heard from Scarlett, that Scarlett was on a boat, with her mum and her brother. She said that Scarlett’s mum was making them go on a round-the-world trip for a year and that she wanted complete anonymity. Something to do with the father. Apparently, he’d been violent. I don’t know. It didn’t sound right to me. I mean, the father was never even with them. And they were still missing. Zach and Tallulah. And there was just this huge gaping hole in everything. And so I gave Lexie the ring last month, just before she went to Florida, and she said, I’ll sort this out. OK. I’ll sort this out.
62
JUNE 2017
Tallulah awakes from a sleep so deep that she can remember nothing about it. She awakes and there is light shining through the skin of her eyelids. She awakes and she is on a soft surface. She awakes to the sound of a gentle panting and a kind of lip-smacking noise and she slowly opens her eyes and she sees Toby’s face. He is staring at her placidly. He licks his lips again and then pants some more. As her eyes grow accustomed to the light, she sees she is in the snug in Scarlett’s house. The door is open just a crack and she can hear voices beyond. Gentle laughter.
She tries to sit up but stops when she realizes that she is tied down somehow. She glances at her feet—they are tied together with a plastic cord. Her hands are tied at the wrists.
“Hello!” she calls out, her voice a croak.
She hears it go quiet in the kitchen.
“Hello!”
She hears footsteps across the stone floor in the kitchen and then there is Scarlett. She’s wearing black joggers and an oversize Levi’s T-shirt.
“Oh,” she says. “You’re awake. Mum!” she calls out behind her. “Tallulah’s awake.”
She walks toward her and sits perched on the edge of the sofa between Toby and Tallulah’s head. She puts out a hand to her face and strokes her cheek. “How are you doing?” she says.
“What’s happening? Why am I tied up?”
“To keep you safe,” says Scarlett’s mother, appearing in the doorway. She’s clutching a black mug, dressed in a jade-green cotton dress, which ties at the waist. Her hair is pulled back hard from her face.
“Safe from what?”
Scarlett’s mother sighs. “We need to get you away from here. The police have gone for now. But they’ll be back. They think you and Zach have both disappeared, together, and that’s how it needs to stay.”
“But…” Tallulah feels a kind of thrum pass through her head and her vision go gray around the edges. “No,” she says. “I have to go home. I have to see my baby.”
“Tallulah,” says Scarlett, “if you go home now, you will never see your baby again. Do you understand? If you go home now, the police will ask you a million questions about Zach and you will somehow have to explain what happened to him. And what would you say?”
“I’d say that he… I’d say…” She stops, tries to pull the threads of her thoughts together and feels them unravel again almost immediately. “I’d say he left.”
“Yes. And that would be an obvious lie. Do you want to lie to the police?”
“Yes. No. I don’t care. I just want to go home.”
“No,” says Scarlett’s mum. “I’m afraid that’s not an option. A terrible thing happened here on Friday night. A really terrible thing. And I know you only acted out of passion, out of fear. I understand that mother’s instinct. But the fact of the matter is that Zach is dead. And you killed him.”
“No. No, I didn’t. I—” Tallulah’s mind fusses for a while over the detail of that moment as it has done nonstop for the past however many days it’s been. And each time she sees it differently. But every time she sees it, she feels it, in her bile, in her gut, in her very essence, the knowledge that it wasn’t her, that she didn’t do it.
But how can she prove that to anybody?
“I didn’t kill him,” she says. “I didn’t do it.”
“Well, the whole thing was rather confused. Nobody was sober. Nobody was in a clear state of mind. But your fingerprints are on the sculpture. And clearly you were the only one with the motive to have wanted him dead. So, I think, or at least let’s assume, that you are the prime suspect and that the safest place for you to be right now is far, far away from here.”
“But for how long?” Tallulah asks.
“Well, until the police have come up with another theory about Zach’s disappearance, I suppose.”
“But what if they never do?”
“They will. Of course they will. We just need to get you away from here. Just for a while. So, the car is ready, Rex is waiting at the airfield for us with Martin’s plane, and we are all off to Guernsey. But, Tallulah, we need you to be ever so careful. OK? You are flying as Rex’s
girlfriend, Seraphina. You look enough alike. Just play the role, play the part. We’ll have you back here before you know it.”
63
SEPTEMBER 2018
POLICE TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH LIAM JOHN BAILEY
8 September 2018
Manton Police Station
In attendance:
DI Dominic McCoy
DCI Aisha Butt
DI McCoy: Thank you, Liam, for agreeing to talk to us again. I realize you probably think there can’t be anything left to talk about. But there’s been a considerable development today. Very considerable. And we think it would be good just to go over a few details again.
Liam Bailey: OK.
DM: So, your relationship with Scarlett, that was over by the time of the pool party on 16 June 2017.
LB: Yes, we were just friends.
DM: But you have lived at the Jacques residence on occasion over the past few years?
LB: Yes. The last time I lived there was February last year, just for a few weeks.
DM: And that was the time you were meant to be going home, back to your family?
LB: Yes. I was meant to be doing an A-level retake that summer but I changed my mind, decided to drop it and go home. And that was when Scarlett asked me to come to see her. She was having a kind of nervous breakdown and she needed my support. I ended up living there with her. And shortly afterward Jacinta Croft, the previous head teacher, told me about a job going at the school and I thought, well, maybe it’d be good for me to stick around a bit longer, for Scarlett’s sake. So I took the job and moved back to the school.
DM: And when did Scarlett give you the painting, Liam?
LB: Which painting?
DM: Well, there was the self-portrait, I believe?
LB: Yeah, she gave me that when I moved into my room at Maypole House.
DM: And then there was one of a spiral staircase?
LB: Yup. She gave me that around the same time. They were housewarming gifts.
DM: And what did you know about the painting of the staircase?
LB: Nothing. It was just her favorite part of the house. She loved the sense of history there.
DM: And this—for the recording, I am showing Liam Bailey a detail of the painting in question—this item here in the painting. Do you know what it is?
LB: That metal thing?
DM: Yes.
LB: It’s a knife, isn’t it? Or, like, a cake slice?
DM: So you’ve never seen it in real life? At the Jacques residence?
LB: No. Never.
DM: For the sake of the recording I am now showing Liam Bailey item number DP7694, the metal lever found buried in the flower bed at Maypole House. Liam, have you ever seen this object before?
LB: No.
DM: Do you have any idea what it might be used for?
LB: None whatsoever.
DM: Thank you, Liam, that’ll be all for now.
64
AUTUMN 2017
The house in Guernsey is like the house in Surrey. Tasteful. Pale. Comfortable. Elegant. More interesting lumps of sculpted metal arranged around piles of magazines on more low tables. More bronze sculptures on Perspex pedestals. More abstract art. More oversize chandeliers and light fittings. The main difference is the views from the windows: water, ink blue mostly, sometimes pastel aqua, sometimes topped with frothy peaks, sometimes still and flat as marble. Tallulah’s room has walls painted with tumbling cherry blossom and shell-pink curtains lined with thick padding, a dressing table with a stool upholstered in baby pink astrakhan. Her room has its own bathroom, with a large slab-like basin that has a wide brass tap out of which water falls in a wide sheet from a slot. It has a tear-shaped bath with another flat-mouthed brass tap positioned above it and a large walk-in shower with golden mosaic tiles and a rainforest shower head. She is brought soft towels and organic food and glasses of champagne and bottles of water with orchids printed on the fronts. From the window she can see that this house is not near any other houses. They are on a cliff. Miles and miles and miles from anywhere.
* * *
Scarlett brings her nice things: products to make her hair and her skin feel nice, a cheese platter, a soft toy. She brings Toby in for cuddle time. She brings in her phone and they watch funny videos together on TikTok. She keeps promising Tallulah that she will buy her her own phone, but she never does.
Scarlett tells her things from the outside world. The police are hunting for Tallulah, apparently. They have found Zach’s body and they have found her fingerprints on the statue and they have a witness, Mimi, who saw her doing it. Scarlett tells her that her father, Martin Jacques, is putting together a team of legal experts to try to counter the evidence. He knows people, says Scarlett, powerful people, who can tamper with police evidence, who can accidentally lose things. “Just give him a few more weeks, Lules,” says Scarlett. “A few more weeks and we’ll be able to go home. Just let us look after you for now. Just let us keep you safe.”
After a few weeks the news from home dries up and Tallulah tells Scarlett that she doesn’t care about the police, that she will face the music, go to court, go to prison, that she doesn’t care anymore about whether she’s guilty or not, she just wants to go home and see her baby. She tries to leave the house, and from nowhere, Joss and Rex appear and bundle her back to her room.
Tallulah has not left this room for days now, maybe longer. The edges of Tallulah’s days feel ragged and unformed. Scarlett still comes and goes with food and drinks and treats but Tallulah no longer asks her about the outside world because she no longer cares, all she cares about is sleep. Scarlett holds her and tells her that she loves her and Tallulah squirms from her embrace, the way she once squirmed from Zach’s. She has a foul taste in her mouth all the time. She can feel the roots of her hair wriggle and itch even though her hair is clean. She has scaly skin on her arms that she scratches at constantly. She sleeps most of the time, and when she’s not sleeping, she’s in a kind of netherworld where things happen but she forgets them almost immediately, her brain desperately trying to keep hold of the ends of them, drag them back, keep them, but it’s always too late, they’re always gone. Sometimes she sees the cherry blossom on the walls twist and twirl.
In lucid moments, Tallulah replays the moments before the black square in her head that still obscures Zach’s death, and she feels her own culpability in all of this. She had so many opportunities to do things differently. From the moment she had sex with Zach on New Year’s Eve to the moment he landed facedown on Scarlett’s kitchen floor, she had had opportunity after opportunity to do things differently, to make a good life for herself and for Noah, and she has blown each and every one of them.
And now she is here, in this pink room, with its cherry-blossom walls and its locked windows, and she knows that she is somehow being diminished, that the care she is being shown by Scarlett is warped and wrong, that Scarlett has been taught how to love by people who don’t know how to love and that everything she thinks is good is actually bad, and Tallulah knows that she needs to keep just enough of herself floating across the top of the big black pool of weirdness, just enough to keep on breathing, just enough to bring her back to her mother and to her baby boy. Just enough.
65
SEPTEMBER 2018
POLICE TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDRA ROSE MULLIGAN
8 September 2018
Manton Police Station
In attendance:
DI Dominic McCoy
DCI Aisha Butt
DI McCoy: Good afternoon, Lexie.
Lexie Mulligan: Good afternoon.
DM: So, we’ve just spoken with Mimi Rhodes and we’re aware that Scarlett Jacques is currently, apparently, on a boat somewhere, with her mother.
LM: Yes. At least as far as I know. From what she’s told me.
DM: And you were told to keep the details of this trip quiet because her mother was trying to escape from an abusive relationship with her husband?
LM:
Yeah. That’s what she told me. She gave me her secret Instagram account and I’d check in every now and then to see if she’d posted anything. But there was never much info. Never anything to show where they were. Just pictures of the sea, really, with little captions about her mood. And then, a few weeks ago, Mimi came over. She was really upset, really stressed. And she told me about what she heard at Scarlett’s house, about Zach and Tallulah having a huge row, about Tallulah telling Zach she was in love with Scarlett and Zach losing the plot and throwing the ring at her.
DM: And what else did she tell you about that night?
LM: Nothing. Just that.
DM: She didn’t tell you about what she heard through the kitchen door? What she heard Scarlett saying to Tallulah?
LM: [pauses]
LM: Well, yeah. Yes. She told me. Yes.
DM: And what did that make you think?
LM: It made me think that maybe Scarlett was involved somehow with what happened to those kids. To Zach and Tallulah. It made me think she was lying to me about them being on the boat to escape her father. And I know I should have brought the ring in to the police and told you what Mimi had told me. But I just… I had this big trip coming up to Florida, it was all booked and paid for and really complicated, five different hotels and all that, and I didn’t want to risk getting involved in a police investigation and having to cancel it. I thought about giving the ring to my mum and asking her to bring it in after I’d gone. But I just thought it might have repercussions for her job? I didn’t want to involve her; her job is her life, her world. But then I didn’t want to wait until I got back, I wanted someone to work it all out without anyone ever having to tell anyone. And my mum had told me that the new head teacher’s wife was a detective writer and I’m a big reader so I ordered one of her books, just out of curiosity, and there was this bit in it where someone hides a clue in a flower bed with a cardboard sign next to it saying “Dig Here.” And I just thought, you know, that might work. So I took the ring the night before I flew to Florida, to bury it in the garden in the cottage, in a flower bed, like the clue had been buried in her book, but the back gate was padlocked, so I buried it just by the back gate, where I knew she would find it.