Theo winced. “There was something about a foot?” he ventured, his face flushing.
Miriam nodded. “Some kids playing on a beach near Hastings found a human foot a few weeks after Jeremy went missing. It was the right size and the right color, it had the right blood type. This was all pre-DNA, so there was no way of checking for sure, but it was assumed that it was him. They thought maybe he’d been dashed against the rocks somewhere, or caught up in a boat propeller. That was the end of it, in any case. They stopped looking.”
“But . . .” Theo was shaking his head. “Think about it. If somehow he’d got away, faked his own death, changed his identity, there would have been others, wouldn’t there? Other girls, I mean, other women. A man like that, a man capable of doing what he did to you, to your friend, he doesn’t just do it once and then stop, does he?
“Maybe he does,” Miriam said. “Where is it written that they all get a taste for it? Maybe he tried it and he didn’t really like it. Maybe it frightened him. Maybe it didn’t satisfy him in the way he thought it would. Or maybe . . .” The boat rocked in some other vehicle’s wake, and Miriam opened her eyes to focus on the ceiling once more. “Maybe he didn’t do it just once. Maybe he did it again and again, and people just didn’t make the connections. It was easier, back then, wasn’t it, for men like him to just keep going, to move around, to exist on the margins, to drift, to carry on for years? He could have gone abroad, he could have changed his name, he could be”—her voice faltered—“anywhere.”
Myerson shuffled along the bed so that he was no longer sitting next to her feet but at her side. He reached over and—she could scarcely believe this—took her hand. “I have his email address,” he said. “The police will be able to trace him using that. I can give them the letters, I can explain, we can explain—we can explain everything.” His eyes met hers. “Everything.”
Miriam withdrew her hand. Everything? He was offering, Miriam understood, an apology. An acknowledgment. If they went to the police with these letters, they would have to explain how it was that Theo came to be their recipient, how it was that the two of them deduced that only one man on earth could know about that song, about its significance, and in doing so, Theo would have to unmask himself; he would have to acknowledge Miriam as the inspiration for his story. She would get everything she wanted.
She blinked slowly, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No, that won’t do.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. She propped herself up on her elbows. “You won’t contact the police, you’ll contact him. Respond to his questions. Some of his questions, in any case.” She paused for a moment to think things through. “Yes, you will get in touch with him, apologize to him for neglecting his letters. Arrange a meeting.”
Theo nodded, his lips pursed, rubbing his head. “I could do that. I could ask him to meet me, to talk about his questions. And when he comes, the police will be there, they’ll be waiting.”
“No,” Miriam said firmly. “No, the police won’t be waiting.”
For a long moment, Theo held her gaze. Then he turned away. “All right,” he said.
THIRTY-NINE
There she was, in the back bedroom of Irene’s house, looking at the neatly made single bed, a bright yellow towel folded neatly at its foot. There was a wardrobe and a bookcase and a bedside table on which Laura had placed the defaced photograph of herself with her parents. She looked at it a moment before turning their faces to the wall.
From downstairs, she could hear Irene’s surprisingly girlish laughter. She was listening to something on the radio, a program where people had to talk for as long as they could without repeating themselves or hesitating. Laura found it mystifying but it cracked Irene up, which was in itself hilarious.
Once Laura had finally finished unpacking her things—she didn’t own much, but she was doing everything one-handed—she sat down on the bed, propping herself up against the wall. Picking idly at the cast around her wrist, the edge of which was starting to fray, she listened to people moving about on the other side of the wall, their voices a low murmur. The house—Angela’s house—was up for sale, and there was a constant stream of viewers, none of whom had yet made an offer. Or so the agent had told her. “Rubberneckers,” he’d complained to her when she met him outside in the lane, smoking furiously, “collecting material for their poxy true crime podcasts.”
A few of them had knocked on Irene’s door, but Laura had seen them off. They’d had real reporters coming too, but Irene wasn’t talking to anyone. She’d done her talking, to the police. She’d done the listening too, and the recording—Laura was insanely, stupidly proud of her; she felt prouder of her than she’d ever felt of a member of her own family. Laura had even started calling her Miss Marple, although Irene had put a quick and surprisingly irritable stop to that.
Now, in between listening to things on the radio and reading her books and helping Laura deal with all the legal stuff she had to do, her personal injury compensation claim and her forthcoming court appearance and all that, she talked about the two of them taking a trip. She’d always wanted to go to a place called Positano, apparently, which is where they set that film about Hannibal Lecter. Or something like that.
Laura said she couldn’t afford to go on holiday, or not until she got her compensation money anyway, but Irene said it wasn’t a problem. “We had savings, William and I,” she said, and when Laura said they couldn’t spend that, Irene just tutted.
“Why ever not? You can’t take it with you.”
Laura had to sit down for a moment; she felt quite light-headed. Low blood sugar, maybe, or perhaps it was the dizzying effect of watching her horizons, narrowed for so long, expanding once again.
* * *
They weren’t going anywhere just yet. Laura was still recovering from a concussion and a cracked rib and a seriously mashed-up left hand. That girl, the big one with the nose ring, she’d stuck her great big size-ten foot on it and stamped away. “Twenty-seven bones in the hand,” her doctor had told her, pointing to the image on the screen to show her the extent of the damage, “and you’ve broken fifteen. You’re very lucky—”
“I certainly feel lucky,” Laura said.
The doctor smiled at her indulgently. “You’re lucky that the breaks were clean. With the right physical therapy, you should get back your full range of motion.”
Back in physical therapy. Just like old times.
“It feels like we’ve come full circle,” Laura’s mother said. She’d been keeping up a histrionic weeping at Laura’s bedside for what was probably just a few minutes but felt like days. “I can’t believe we’re back here again, you gravely hurt, in hospital. . . .”
“Still, at least this time it’s not because your bit on the side ran me over with his car and drove off, is it?”
Her mother didn’t stay long. Her father didn’t either, because Deidre was in the car outside, parked on a double red line. “With any luck, they’ll tow her away!” he said with a nervous laugh, glancing over his shoulder as though worried she might overhear. He squeezed Laura’s good hand and kissed her on the forehead, promising to visit again soon.
“Perhaps when you’re better,” he said as he paused in the doorway on his way out, “we could spend a bit more time together. We might even get a place together, what about that, chicken?”
Laura shook her head. “Dad, I can’t, we tried that. Me and Deidre, it’s never going to work.”
“Oh, I know,” he said, nodding vigorously. “I know that. I know you couldn’t live with her again. I was thinking a bit further down the road, you know. After I’ve left her.” Laura smiled at him reassuringly. She wasn’t going to hold her breath.
* * *
Egg had come to see her too. Detective Barker, his name was; she’d finally got it into her head, though in her heart, he would always be Egg. He came to say how sorry he was that she’d been hurt, and als
o to say that Miriam from the canal had withdrawn her complaint about Laura. “She admitted having your key,” Egg told her. “We’ve had to talk to her about a number of statements she made during the investigation which turned out to be not quite accurate.”
“I’m shocked,” Laura said, smiling at him. “Truly shocked.”
He raised an eyebrow. “She had quite the story. She claimed to be trying to help you, who she believed to be guilty, while also trying to incriminate Carla Myerson, who she believed to be innocent but who was, in fact, guilty.”
“You really couldn’t make this shit up,” Laura said.
He smiled at her then. “You’ll be hearing from us, Laura,” he said on his way out. “There’s still the matter of this stolen bag, with the knife and the jewelry.”
“Don’t forget the thing with the fork,” Laura reminded him.
“Yes, of course. The fork.”
* * *
At night, lying in her single bed, threadbare sheets tucked tight around her body, Laura lay with her good palm pressed against the wall, on the other side of which was Daniel’s room. There was something uncannily circular about all this, how it started out with her in Daniel’s bed and finished with her separated from his bedroom by just a few inches of Victorian brick.
She returned often, in her mind, to the night on his boat, to the morning dawning, and the strange thing was that what tormented her was not him, not the sudden change in his behavior, the flick of a switch from charm to cruelty, it wasn’t the look on his face when she lunged at him, teeth bared.
No, the thing that she could not get out of her head was the moment she left the boat, the moment she stepped from the back deck to dry land and glanced up to her right, the moment she saw, in that gray dawn half-light, a woman up on the bridge looking down at her. The thing that tormented her now was that she could not if her life depended on it conjure up that woman’s expression; she could not say whether she looked sad or angry, broken or resolute.
EPILOGUE
A man has been found dead on a houseboat on the canal.
Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.
Carla heard the rumors, the silly jokes from the other women, at lunchtime. He another one of yours, Cazza? Been a busy girl, incha? She went to the library that afternoon; she wasn’t permitted to read news stories about crimes on the internet, but she persuaded one of the guards (a “Myerson megafan!”) to print the story off for her at home and bring it in.
SUSPECTED KILLER FOUND MURDERED
The partially decomposed body of 58-year-old Jeremy O’Brien, who was also known as Henry Carter and JH Bryant, was found on a partially submerged boat on the Regent’s Canal. O’Brien, who was wanted in connection with the 1983 murder of teenager Lorraine Reid, had previously been assumed to have taken his own life after he disappeared within days of the Reid killing.
Police say it appears O’Brien had been living with his stepbrother in Spain since the 1980s, where he went by the name James Henry Bryant. O’Brien was badly injured in a car accident in 1988 where he suffered spinal damage; he used a wheelchair. Police say they believe he returned to England last year after the death of his stepbrother and has been living in sheltered accommodation in north London under the name Henry Carter.
Despite some similarities between the O’Brien murder and that of Daniel Sutherland, 23, six months ago—both bodies were discovered in boats on the canal and both died as a result of stab wounds to the chest and neck—police say they are not connecting the killings, pointing out that the woman convicted of murdering Daniel Sutherland, Carla Myerson, who has been imprisoned at HMP Bronzefield since July, pleaded guilty to the crime and made a full confession.
Carla stopped reading, folded up the piece of paper, and handed it back to the guard. “Thank you,” she said. “Theo’s said he’ll put a signed copy of his latest book in the post.”
* * *
A few days later, Carla received a letter from a criminologist, asking if she might visit her to talk about her case. Carla had no particular desire to talk to anyone about her case, but she did crave conversation with someone educated. She said yes.
The criminologist, a bright-eyed, freshly scrubbed, impossibly young woman who turned out to be a student with hopes of getting a first (and possibly even a book deal!) on the back of her thesis, of which she was hoping to make Carla the focus. There had already been one false confession in this case—was it possible that there had been two? Could Carla be a (self-harming) victim of a miscarriage of justice? Was there a serial killer targeting men living on or near the Regent’s Canal? Was there a serial killer targeting other killers?
The poor thing was so painfully earnest, Carla felt quite bad about bursting her speculative bubble. There was no miscarriage of justice, she told the young woman calmly. There is no serial killer operating on the canal. The one case has nothing to do with the other.
“But your husband, he thought—”
“Oh.” Carla smiled at her apologetically. “You’ve been talking to Theo. You need to take him with more than a pinch of salt, I’m afraid. He’s a dreamer; he lives in his own world.”
“So it was definitely . . . you definitely did it?” the young woman prompted, disappointment written all over her pretty face.
Carla nodded. “I did, yes.”
“Well . . . why? Could we talk about why?”
Carla shook her head. “I did say in my email that I wasn’t prepared to talk about the background in detail, I’m sorry.”
“Oh, really? But you’re so atypical—you’re middle class, you’re educated, you’re unmarried. . . .”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Carla asked. “My marital status, I mean.”
“Oh, well, female killers tend to conform to traditional gender roles, they’re usually married with kids, that sort of thing. You don’t really fit the mold.”
“I was married with a child once,” Carla said sadly.
“Yes, but . . . okay. Okay.” She was stumped. She looked unhappily but hopefully about the room, like someone stuck with a bore at a party casting about for someone more interesting to speak to. “Well,” she said at last. “Could you at least tell me this: Do you regret it?”
* * *
When Carla made her confession to Irene—not the one she made to the police, which wasn’t anywhere near full, it was barely a half confession, they got the bare bones, she refused to elaborate on the meat—she had dismissed the idea that what Daniel had done had been a childish mistake. She’d talked of torture and manipulation, and she had meant it.
Now, though, when she allowed her mind to wander—and it had little else to do—it went to places she would really rather it wouldn’t.
It wondered whether perhaps what she had read in that first flush of fury as manipulation might in fact have been something else. What if Daniel’s flirtatiousness wasn’t calculated? What if that was just the way he loved? What if he didn’t know any better? Maybe the story she’d told herself was no truer than the myth Daniel had made for himself.
It was a dark road to start down, and it became darker still as she realized that it was one-way: once started along, there was no exit, and no way back.
These days, when Carla thought about what she’d done, she saw her actions in a different light. No longer anesthetized by fear, by exhilaration (and yes, it had been exhilarating, in the feverish moment), now she saw what she’d done. Blood, so much of it! The noise he made, the sickening gurgle in his throat, the wild whiteness of his eyes, the smell of iron, the smell of urine, the scent of his agony, his terror.
She must have been mad. Could she tell herself that story? Could she convince herself that she’d been delirious with pain, with grief, that she’d acted unthinkingly?
Sitting in the visitor’s room of the largest women’s prison in Europe, sharing space with the bewildered, the sa
d, and the deprived, as well, of course, as the very worst that British womanhood had to offer, she asked herself, did she belong?
What, after all, might she have done differently, had she not been mad? Had she been sane, could she have let it be? Could she have chosen to go on living her life, taken the knowledge of what Daniel had done and chosen to lock it away somewhere? Only, how could she possibly have sanely chosen that? How could she have chosen to live in a world in which Daniel was still alive, in which she might see him, breathe the same air that he breathed? A world in which there existed the possibility that she might still feel something for him, some tenderness, something like love.
That possibility she had to kill.
* * *
“Mrs. Myerson? Do you regret it?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Sarah Adams and Sarah McGrath for their incisive edits and apparently limitless patience.
Thanks to Lizzy Kremer and Simon Lipskar, the best agents on both sides of the Atlantic, for their brilliant advice and unfailing support.
Thank you to Caroline MacFarlane, winner of the CLIC Sargent charity auction, for the use of her name.
Thanks to early readers Petina Gappah, Frankie Gray, and Alison Fairbrother.
And thank you to Simon Davis, because God knows the past three years can’t have been easy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paula Hawkins is the author of the #1 New York Times–bestselling novels Into the Water and The Girl on the Train. An international #1 bestseller, The Girl on the Train has sold 23 million copies worldwide and has been adapted into a major motion picture. Hawkins was born in Zimbabwe and now lives in London.
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