‘She told me to piss off,’ Lewis says. ‘And it was always best to do what she said.’
‘I went outside for some fresh air and she was leaning against the wall. She was waiting for you but she decided I was good enough. She asked me back to hers and we opened a bottle of her mum’s wine. She didn’t say much so I did most of the talking. I told her it was a blessing in disguise; we’d be better off earning a living rather than racking up student debts. I don’t think Meg heard a word I said.’
‘And then what?’ asks Lewis.
Charlie keeps his head down. ‘You know what happened.’
‘I don’t,’ I tell him.
Charlie can’t look at either of us as he continues. ‘Meg came over to sit on my lap. I think she kissed me just to shut me up but eventually she said we should go upstairs. She took me into her parents’ room and I should have got out then. Her phone had been ringing – it was Geoff wanting to know her results – and I was scared him or Ruth were about to show up,’ he says. Remembering who he’s talking to, he adds, ‘And I didn’t want to hurt you, Jen, but we were never meant to be a permanent thing back then.’
‘Funny how I don’t remember it like that,’ I answer.
‘It was hard to say no to Meg,’ he continues. ‘I told her it wasn’t a good idea but she insisted.’
‘Like she insisted you strangle her?’ Lewis asks.
‘It wasn’t my idea,’ he whispers, leaning over until he’s talking to the floor. ‘She disappeared to get something from her bedroom. I didn’t know what was going on. When she came back, it was like the light in her eyes had gone out and she couldn’t see or feel anything. She didn’t tell me straight away what she wanted me to do.’ He pauses and rakes his hands through his hair. ‘I was eighteen years old for Christ’s sake, I didn’t know how I was meant to react. I thought she’d laugh at me if I refused to go along with her. She wanted me on top and when she tied the scarf around her neck, she asked me to pull it tight. She kept saying, “Tighter, tighter,” until she couldn’t speak. It happened so fast and when I saw her face turn this horrible shade of puce, I jumped off the bed. She was furious with me. It was like she actually wanted me to kill her.’
‘No, that came later,’ Lewis says as he backs away and turns to me. ‘I’d left loads of messages for Meg. I was worried about her, but it was days later when she eventually got in touch and we met. She told me what she’d done and I’ll admit, I hated her for it, but I hated him more.’ He aims an accusing finger at Charlie without looking back. ‘Tell Jen what you called her.’
‘I didn’t mean it, I was in shock, confused,’ he moans.
‘Answer the question!’ I bark at him.
His sobbing erupts again. ‘I – I said she was sick in the head.’
‘You called her a fucking nutter too,’ Lewis says. To me, he adds, ‘He made her feel like a piece of dirt. Fair enough, she was mortified that she’d cheated on me and hurt you too, but Charlie humiliated her and there was no coming back from that. I broke up with her, but only because she was going to do it anyway. And then I went to find Charlie so I could knock seven kinds of shite out of that bastard.’
I don’t recognise the man dripping bloodied snot onto the linoleum but I have a sick feeling that Ellie would. Whatever had started with Meg has continued with Ellie and I need him to confess all. ‘That’s only half the story,’ I say. ‘You’re going to have to tell me everything, Charlie, because if you don’t, I’ll push you over that fucking railing myself.’
Charlie sobs harder than before. ‘I was so scared,’ he says. ‘I knew Meg had told Lewis and it was only a matter of time before you found out. I waited it out for over a week, I didn’t want to see Meg again but I’d left my glasses at her house and I needed them.’
I want to stop Charlie there, and explain I was asking about Ellie, but Lewis’s mouth falls open and fresh horror dawns on us both.
‘I went back to get them, and to talk to her. She’d left the front door open. The note was in the hallway, pinned under some vase. I didn’t think … I never thought …’
Charlie’s words become incoherent but I’m not sure how much I would be able to hear above the thumping of my heart. My stomach heaves and as I gulp back air, I hear the final words of his confession.
‘I found her.’
42
Jen
I ignore the collection of bloodied tissues lying on the kitchen counter as I pour myself a drink of water. The glass knocks painfully against my teeth as I take a sip.
‘Do I need to check what he’s doing?’ asks Lewis, tipping his head towards the door to the second bedroom.
We can hear Charlie moving around and there’s the sound of tape being pulled off one of the many boxes stored in there. I’d assumed it was all business stock, but there’s something far more valuable he’s been hiding in our apartment.
Before I can reply, Charlie opens the door and emerges with an innocuous looking brown envelope. He offers it to me but I back away.
‘I’ll take it,’ Lewis says, after an awkward pause.
The envelope is torn open and discarded, leaving Lewis with a folded sheet of yellow lined paper. When he begins to unfold it, I glimpse a torn edge that will be the perfect match for the remnant of the note Charlie left for Meg’s grieving parents.
‘Meg wasn’t the one who should have been ashamed,’ Charlie says, quoting the part of her note we’re all familiar with. ‘I humiliated her, I said she was sick.’
‘Shut up, Charlie,’ I say. ‘I don’t care about what you said. I want to hear Meg.’
Lewis scans the page, takes a breath and begins. ‘This isn’t the letter I want to write but I have no choice. Even now, I can’t face the shame. I don’t want anyone to know what we did. It dies with me because I’m the problem. I’m the one who’s SICK. I disgust myself and all I want is for it to go away and take me with it. And as for YOU. You get to live with the guilt for the rest of your life and I hope it eats you up. And if you ever think about treating someone the way you treated me, remember what you did to me.
I hate this person I’ve become and I hate the rest of you too. Mum, Sean, Jen, Lewis. I hate you all. You should be glad I’m gone. You’re better off without me.’
There’s a pause as I wait for Lewis to continue but that’s it. Meg didn’t leave us with answers, just more questions. ‘She was talking about you?’ I ask Charlie.
‘That’s why I couldn’t leave the note,’ he says. ‘I panicked, Jen. I was sure it was going to come out that Meg and I had slept together and I didn’t want everyone knowing she’d killed herself because of me. Look at the list of names. My name isn’t there.’
‘Why would it be?’ asks Lewis incredulously. ‘You were nothing to her, you never were.’ He shakes his head. ‘I thought everyone was mad to think there was another part to the note, but it was you who took it and you let me take the blame.’
‘Why, Charlie?’ I ask. ‘Was it really worth putting Ruth and Geoff through ten years of torment?’
Charlie sniffs but his nose is blocked and crusted with blood. He looks like he might start crying again. ‘It was a spur of the moment decision and once it was done, it couldn’t be undone. I convinced myself you were all better off not knowing what it said. Look at that last line, Jen. What parent wants to read that they were hated?’
Lewis’s face twists in disgust. ‘So it wasn’t your own back you were covering? You were doing it for the greater good?’
‘I don’t know what I thought. There wasn’t time to think.’
‘But there was,’ I correct him as I picture the scene. It’s one I’ve imagined before but it’s the first time that I’ve had to place Charlie there. ‘You read the note and you took great care tearing it into two neat parts. And all the time, Meg’s body was hanging in the garage and you did nothing for her. How could you do that, Charlie? How could you live with yourself?’
‘I couldn’t. That’s why I went away, why I left Liverpool.
Meg was right. The guilt was eating away at me. I only came back for you, Jen,’ he whimpers. ‘Our time apart made me realise how much you meant to me. It was wrong what I did, all of it, but I thought, if I could make you happy again, it would make things right somehow.’
‘By living a lie?’ I ask. ‘At least now I know why you reacted so badly when I told you about Ellie.’
‘It was because he’d been caught,’ Lewis adds.
‘No, because I realised that Meg hadn’t been experimenting, she’d been experimented on,’ Charlie counters as he pulls back his shoulders. ‘I might have been the one to tell Meg that what she wanted me to do was sick, but that sickness came from you. It’s why you’re still doing it to this poor Ellie.’
Lewis hisses under his breath and shakes his head in response.
‘According to Lewis, he’s never met her,’ I explain, trying to put the image of Charlie with Meg, or worse still, Charlie with Meg’s dead body, out of my mind.
‘And you believe him?’
Of the two men, I find myself trusting the word of my old adversary more than I do Charlie, but I need to be sure. I look from Lewis to Charlie. ‘Did you know I kissed Lewis?’
‘Wh— What?’ Charlie’s jaw drops. ‘When? Why?’
‘Ages ago. Before Meg died, long before. All this time I thought you knew. I was wrong, but I’ve been wrong about so many things, haven’t I? I don’t know who you are any more.’
‘I do,’ Lewis chips in. ‘Someone damaged Meg long before I met her, and whoever messed her up was the kind of person who’d be callous enough to leave a seventeen-year-old girl swinging from a noose.’
Charlie flinches at the image. ‘Meg told me what she wanted. I assumed it was something you were both into until I read that thing she wrote about the space girl. Have you read it?’
‘Yeah, and the finger points right at you.’
‘Stop it!’ I cry out. ‘For one minute, will you both shut the fuck up!’ I take a deep breath. Sometimes the truth isn’t what we hear, it’s what we feel in our hearts. ‘I don’t think it is Charlie who’s hurting Ellie. He doesn’t have the stomach for it.’
‘You’ve just said you don’t know him any more,’ Lewis reminds me.
‘Maybe not,’ I admit. ‘But when he helped me search for Iona, he thought we were going to find Ellie too.’
‘So you’re back to blaming me?’ Lewis asks as he thrusts Meg’s note into my hand.
I suspect he’s about to storm out so I choose my words carefully. ‘I keep going back to who knew Ellie was phoning the helpline. Did you tell anyone else after Geoff had a go at you?’
‘I told you before, I haven’t seen Geoff.’
‘But he went to your flat.’
‘For a start, I live in a house,’ Lewis corrects me.
I could be wrong but I thought Geoff said he went to a flat. I rub my forehead but it doesn’t help. ‘Geoff went there … he told you about Ellie.’
Lewis looks blank. ‘No, Iona told me about Ellie,’ he says slowly as if I’m hard of hearing.
‘But that would have been after Ellie was attacked for speaking to me. Why would Geoff lie about knowing where you live? Why would he say he told you, if he didn’t?’ I ask, but I’m dragging my words through quicksand and they disappear.
‘To blame me, obviously.’
‘But why?’ I ask one last time as I pick up the threads of Ellie’s life and attempt to weave them into a new story. I look down at the note Meg left. I read the names of the people she claimed to hate. There’s one notable omission on the list, and it’s not Charlie. My sob is a precursor to the conclusion I don’t want to reach.
Charlie gets there at the same time and takes a stumbling step back. ‘Shit. SHIT. Are we saying he was covering for himself?’ he asks. Shaking his head, he adds, ‘No, that can’t be right. What Ellie described … he would have had to be doing the same thing to his own daughter. It can’t be Geoff. We’ve got it wrong.’
‘No,’ Lewis says slowly. ‘No, we haven’t. It was Geoff. He was the one doing those disgusting things to Meg and now he’s doing the same to someone else. I’m going to kill the sick fucking bastard.’
43
Ruth
Sitting on the sofa in the darkened kitchen with my arms wrapped around my body, I rock myself slowly. I listen out for a sign, any sign, that I’m not alone, and recall how often I’d heard our cleaner moving around upstairs and pretended it was Meg. It helped that Helena looked like my daughter, or at least how Meg might have looked if she’d reached her twenties. I shouldn’t have let Helena go. Another regret to add to my tally.
Shaking my head to loosen my thoughts, I concentrate on what I do know, and what assumptions I need to dismiss. Ellie is being abused. She hasn’t named her abuser. Her abuser hurts her in the same way he hurt Meg. He knows the family, and through him, Ellie has come to know us. She’s Romanian. So is Helena. Their voices sound exactly the same.
They are the same.
Which leads me to the questions I’ve yet to answer. Would it be too much of a coincidence that a young woman who is employed by Charlie, and has worked for me and Geoff, could also cross paths with Lewis? It’s not implausible but it is unlikely. And if Helena doesn’t know Lewis, then he’s not the one abusing her, which means he’s not the one who abused Meg.
My thoughts wrap around me like silken strands of a spider’s web, making it impossible to separate the truth from lies. What if Jen was wrong and Meg had been dating Lewis earlier than she thought? Were there other lies my niece had failed to detect? Could Ellie have pulled off the greatest deceit? She’s been in my house and had time to learn about Meg. Is Geoff right to accuse her of spinning stories? Or what if Charlie lied about … about everything? What if I’m lying to myself?
I reach for the tumbler balanced on the armrest but the alcohol doesn’t thaw me in the way it had earlier and I can’t finish it. Fear has frozen me but when the doorbell rings, I jump up. It has to be Helena.
The half measure of whiskey churning my stomach isn’t enough to have made me drunk but I’m unsteady as I cross the kitchen and abandon my drink on the breakfast bar. I flick on a light switch and as my eyes adjust to the spotlights above me, my mobile starts to ring. When I realise it’s Jen, I’m tempted to ignore the call. My head hurts and I don’t want to speak to her until I know what to say, and perhaps not even then. But Jen of all people needs to know the truth if my worst fears are about to realised and Helena has come to tell me how Charlie is as cruel as he is duplicitous.
When I accept the call, there’s the drone of a car engine in the background. ‘You’re not leaving the office this late, are you?’ I ask as I move towards the door.
‘No, I left a while ago,’ Jen says. She’s breathless and her voice shakes.
The hallway is washed in the sickly, yellow light of the streetlamps outside and I hesitate before stepping over the threshold. ‘Is Charlie with you?’
‘Yes, and we’re on our way over to you.’
Before I can ask why, the doorbell chimes again and this time the caller shows their impatience by ringing several times in quick succession. I’ve revealed someone is home by switching on the kitchen lights.
‘Don’t answer the door, Ruth!’ yelps Jen.
‘Why not? What’s going on, Jen?’ I ask as I stare at the silhouette framed in the front door.
‘I don’t want you to be alarmed but it’ll be Lewis. I’ll explain when I get there. We’re ten minutes away at the mo—’ Her words are cut off by a car horn blaring. ‘Maybe less than ten, the way Charlie’s driving.’
I rest my hand on my chest to feel my heart punching hard against my ribcage. I don’t know what terrifies me more; the urgency and fear in Jen’s voice; the possibility that the man who hurt my daughter is sitting next to her in the car; the news that I might be confronted by Lewis very soon; the familiar frame of the young woman standing on my doorstep; or the way the spider’s silk tightens around me, bringing every
thing together.
‘Please, Ruth,’ Jen says when the next round of door-chimes fades away. ‘Is Geoff with you?’
‘No.’
‘OK, good. We’ll be with you in a minute. Don’t do anything till we get there.’
I slip my mobile into the pocket of my trousers without taking my eyes from the ghostly form of the woman who’s come to pay me a visit. I don’t fool myself that it’s Meg but it is someone who can bring me closer to my daughter. My palm is clammy but my grip is fierce as I pull the door open wide.
‘Mrs McCoy,’ Helena says. ‘I do not know if you remember—’
‘I know who you are,’ I tell her. The muscles on my face work hard to form a smile while dread pulls down the corners of my mouth. ‘You’d better come in.’
‘You are alone?’ she asks, her eyes darting to the empty space on the drive where Geoff normally parks his car.
‘Yes.’
Helena follows me into the kitchen but comes to a stumbling stop when she sees the whiskey glass. Her fear is palpable. ‘I promise you, we’re alone,’ I say. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Some water, please.’
I pour two glasses. Neither of us sit but we find comfortable stances on opposite sides of the breakfast bar. I sip my water before I speak. ‘We spoke earlier this evening, didn’t we?’
‘Yes,’ she replies, her grey eyes wide. Her hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail and shines gold beneath the spotlights. Her face is rounder than Meg’s, her nose not quite as narrow but still …
As tears blur their differences, my longing for Meg is all-consuming and I’m tempted to draw Helena into a hug. I want to remember what it felt like to hold my child but that’s why I’ve kept the counter as a barrier between us. I need to hear what she has to say first.
‘Did you phone Jen back after I’d left?’ I ask as I try to make sense of my niece’s desperate race to get here. Is it a good sign that she’s bringing Charlie with her? Is Lewis on his way to see me, or is he hunting down Helena? As much as that last thought terrifies me, I want to believe it’s true. So why don’t I?
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