Blood.
A body on the ground.
Screaming.
Louisa’s breaths were suddenly rapid, her lungs burning as she struggled to get enough air into them. Pins and needles spread down her arms. Her legs.
She’d killed someone.
Everything fell into place; her visions, the flashes of memory – they were from back then. Not from her party. Not Melissa. Louisa’s mind wrestled with this new information, partly relieved it was nothing to do with Melissa, but horrified at the thought she’d been responsible for someone’s death.
‘How? Why?’ She swallowed the rising bile.
‘I’ll get you some water, then we’ll talk.’ Oliver got up and disappeared into the kitchen. Louisa’s world tipped on its axis. A lightness filled her head, then darkness filtered in, slowly at first, then swooping.
‘Are you okay?’ Oliver’s hands were back on her. ‘You feeling faint?’
His words fragmented in her ears. She felt as though she were floating. Above herself. Above Oliver. Away from the reality of the situation. His hands, grasping hers, tethered her, kept her on the ground. The darkness passed.
‘Take big, slow breaths. Come on, keep it together. Breathe.’
She did as he told her. She mirrored his breathing, and with his help, she calmed down.
It was several minutes before she could speak. She wished now that she hadn’t pushed Oliver into telling her. Living with strange visions, the knowledge she had gaps in her memory, was far preferable than this. The truth.
She’d never be able to live with this.
‘How did it happen?’ As much as she wanted to put it back in the box she’d obviously been keeping it in all these years, Louisa knew she couldn’t now. She needed to know all the details, however awful they were.
Oliver sat back on the sofa, fluffing the cushions and getting comfortable. Louisa slumped in her own chair. He was making it seem like it was going to be a long story.
‘The secrets we bury have a way of clawing back to the surface, don’t they?’ He sighed; shook his head. Then he looked directly at Louisa. ‘You’d been to a house party. I hadn’t gone with you, mainly because I knew what kind of party it was likely to be. It was the end of term. You’d told me you deserved to let your hair down, seeing as you’d worked so hard and your parents were away for a long weekend in Brighton, so you wouldn’t have to answer to anyone. You were mad at me for not going – it was one of our first arguments. I just wanted us to stay at yours, make the most of being able to spend time with you alone. Do you remember that?’
‘No. Oliver, look – assume I know nothing, and just tell the whole story.’ Her impatience for him to get to the point was overwhelming her.
‘Fine. Sorry. So, you drove there. You didn’t tell me you were going to drive. You’d not long passed your test and I knew there’d be drink, even drugs, readily available there. It was the Lakes’ house. They were always smoking weed, drinking cider whenever I saw them out of college. Sometimes even in college.’ He took a breath. ‘Anyway, I got a call. It was two in the morning and immediately I knew something had happened. Something bad.’
Louisa placed her elbows on her lap, and cupped her chin in her hands, trying to steady the shakes.
‘You didn’t make any sense on the phone. You were half-crying, half-screaming. I panicked. Said I’d come over to you. I was there in ten minutes flat.’ He smiled. ‘I drove like a maniac, which is ironic, really, considering.’
‘Considering what?’
‘That the reason you were in such a state was because you’d been driving too fast – or erratically, anyway. Zipping through the lanes like you owned them. You’d felt more confident driving the narrow lanes than the main roads; loved the twistiness, how your little Mini seemed like it was doing eighty miles an hour, even though it struggled to hit fifty. But, fifty miles an hour in winding narrow lanes, well, that can be lethal if someone was to get in the way.’
‘Stop. Stop a minute,’ Louisa gasped. The blood. The body in the road. Her screaming. That had been because she’d hit someone. Speeding through the lanes. And Oliver was right, she did remember loving the feel of the twisting lanes, the fact they were always so quiet giving her the impression she was the only one ever to drive them. It made her feel as though she were free. But if she’d hit someone, why didn’t either of them report it? Phone for an ambulance?
‘I’m sorry. This must be an awful shock for you. If you’ve blocked these memories for so long, this must be like living it for the first time.’
It took a moment for Louisa to realise she was crying. ‘Part of me is refusing to believe what you’re saying. The part that thinks I’m a good person who would never intentionally hurt someone else and would never lie about it if I had. Not about something so huge. The other part of me knows you must be right. I did that. I ki—’ Louisa couldn’t say the word. She looked up at Oliver. She needed him close to her, wanted his arms around her, comforting her, making her feel safe. A small sob burst out of her. ‘What happened, when you got to me, what happened next?’
‘You were in pieces, so distraught that it took me an age to coax out of you what had happened. I thought it was something at the party, that someone had hurt you. I never imagined …’ Oliver stopped, perhaps noticing that she’d lowered her head in shame, and he patted the sofa. ‘Come and sit here, Lou-Lou.’
She got up and, her legs still numb, slowly moved to sit with him, thankful for his kindness. Glad that he still wanted to be near her. He put his arm around her and she rested her head on his shoulder. Tears immediately dampened his shirt.
‘I was in shock when you told me about the accident. That your car had hit and knocked down a woman.’
‘It was a woman?’
‘A young woman, yes.’
‘Oh my God.’ She was going to be sick. She put her hand to her mouth, swallowing again and again in an attempt to keep her stomach contents in.
‘You kept repeating over and over – she’s not moving, she’s not moving. After about ten minutes of your hysterics, the only thing I thought I could do to calm you down was to say I’d go and look. So I took my car and I drove the route you said you’d taken.’
Louisa prayed Oliver was about to say, ‘But there was no one there when I got to where you said it’d happened.’ But he didn’t.
‘She was dead, Lou-Lou. I checked for her pulse, but I could tell just looking at her, her staring eyes, her limbs at awkward angles. Her head split open like a melon—’
‘Oliver! Please, no more.’ She didn’t need to know the gruesome bits. That wasn’t going to help at all. ‘What did you do?’
‘All I could think of doing in that situation. I had to protect you, Lou. Like you knew I would. That’s why you called me – to clear up your mess, help you.’
‘No, surely I was just in shock. Distraught, like you said. I wanted you because you were my boyfriend. I wanted comfort.’
‘No, Lou. You wanted me to make it go away. You’d been drinking. You’d been taking drugs. You were a mess. And you’d have been done for murder.’
A silence fell between them. Louisa contemplated what he’d said, wrestled with the notion of her wanting Oliver to help her cover up what she’d done. What kind of person did that make her? She swallowed hard to fight against the rising bile, dreading the answer to her next question.
‘So you somehow got rid of the body?’
‘Yes, that’s all I could think of doing. It wasn’t as if I had many options open to me. I’m not going to tell you where – I always swore I wouldn’t. Just in case. You can always plead ignorance then, if it ever comes to it. Although it seems that’s what you’ve been doing all this time anyway. It’s been me who’s been living with the truth all these years. The crushing guilt.’
‘I’m so sorry, Oliver. I can’t take this in. I don’t know what to do.’
‘You do nothing, Lou-Lou. No good can come to anyone if it comes out now.’
&nb
sp; ‘I think her family would disagree, Oliver. How on earth did we get away with it, anyway?’
‘Her body has never been found. I think the police had given up looking for her a long time ago.’
‘You knew who it was?’
‘Yes, I do now. I found the missing person stories in the newspaper a few years ago. Though it had all died out quite quickly at the time, I never stopped thinking about it. I had to find out more.’
‘I don’t understand – why did it die out so quickly?’
‘Because the missing person reports had been for a year prior to the accident. She’d been a runaway. When you … when she’d been in the lane that night, I think it was because she was living rough in one of the disused barns along the back road to Torquay. No one knew where she was, her family had all but given up on finding her – no one missed her after I’d done the … the deed.’
‘God. The poor woman, her family. They will still be wondering what happened to her, Oliver – still holding out hope that she’s alive somewhere.’
‘I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve suffered flashbacks, insomnia, huge guilt over covering it up – especially once I saw the aftermath: the articles and desperate pleas from her family members, all the while knowing their attempts to find her alive would prove futile. But I loved you.’ He manoeuvred Louisa so that she was facing him. ‘I still do.’
Louisa lowered her gaze from his. Doing something so terrible in the name of love was astounding, and she couldn’t help but question if she would have done the same for him. She had been besotted by Oliver; always thought of him as her one true love. Maybe she would’ve done. But now they were adults. Louisa had two beautiful children. If someone hit and killed Emily, if she disappeared and never returned, she knew she’d never cope. She owed it to this woman’s family to tell them what happened to their daughter.
‘We have to tell the police, Oliver.’
‘What? No! Don’t be stupid, Lou.’ Oliver propelled himself off the sofa. ‘You’d lose everything. I would too. And how would it look now, with Melissa missing?’
‘What was her name? You said you knew who it was.’
‘No.’ Oliver shook his head fervently. ‘It won’t do you any good knowing. Really, trust me. It messes with your head and you’ll never stop thinking about it, or her. I shouldn’t have told you.’
Cries erupted from Noah’s pram. Louisa stumbled from the lounge to get him.
‘He needs a bottle,’ she said, handing Noah to Oliver before going to the kitchen.
For the moment, she didn’t want to look at Oliver – at the man who’d just destroyed her life in a matter of minutes.
This morning her main worry had been what Oliver was doing at Tiff’s. The worst of her worries was what had happened to Melissa, and whether she herself had something to do with her disappearance.
This afternoon, she’d become a murderer and a liar.
30
THE SEARCH
Tuesday a.m. – Day 11 post-party
Louisa watched the screen of her mobile and silenced the alarm as soon as it began. She’d set it for 5.30 a.m. so she could be up half an hour before Brian, but she needn’t have bothered. She hadn’t slept at all. She’d lain awake, her head swimming with Oliver’s words, his story about what she’d done. What he’d done. The secret they’d buried. How was she ever going to rectify it? There was only one way – she had to tell the police. Get Oliver to tell them where the poor woman’s body was.
Although they’d carried on talking until Emily came home, Oliver had still not disclosed anything more about the victim. The woman Louisa had hit. The young woman Louisa had killed. She’d tried to act as usual when Emily had burst through the door, but she was sure it must be written all over her face. The horror. The shock. Guilt. All there, plain to see. But Emily had focused on Oliver. With a furrowed brow, she’d slumped down on the sofa, the opposite end to where Oliver was sitting, and stayed there, keeping an eye on him. Louisa had got the distinct impression that after their chat, Emily, despite liking Oliver, had come to mistrust why he was there. Louisa had similar concerns.
Oliver claimed he’d gone away for Louisa. He’d told her yesterday that after the accident, she’d shut down, become uncommunicative, withdrawn. At the time he was afraid that, with the constant reminder of what had happened, she would cave in and tell the police. It would ruin both their lives. He’d decided to leave. He wanted to go to uni anyway, so a move would’ve been inevitable, he’d said. Oliver told her that she’d broken down, begged him to stay with her. Said she’d never get through it without him. The part about Oliver leaving her was the one thing she’d held in her memory. Not for the reason she’d believed all these years, but because he thought it was the only way for them both to cope with the aftermath.
The constant references from Oliver about how Louisa owed him now made sense.
He’d done what he’d done for love. She’d done what she’d done for self-preservation.
The therapist had been right – Louisa had blocked the memories because, for her own survival, she’d had to. The accident had been the traumatic event Louisa had kept hidden from herself for the last twenty years.
And now she’d give anything to bury it again.
For hours during the night, she’d watched Brian as he slept. Turned on her side, tears soaking her pillow, she’d studied his sleeping face remembering how, when she’d first met him, she’d thought him to be quite boring. Now she recalled why she’d been drawn to him as he stood on the outskirts of a group of people at the Millennium party, looking lost. It was because he wasn’t confident, wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous. He was ‘normal’. As different from Oliver as she could get. She’d felt uncomfortable being at the party – she hated them. And even though she hadn’t been fully aware of why back then, now she knew.
Brian was safe.
Oliver was dangerous.
Or was he? Maybe she was the dangerous one in all this. After all, he’d saved her, prevented her from ruining her life. It appeared she’d been the dangerous one.
Oliver’s words came to her: Why ruin our lives too, Lou-Lou? Louisa cringed at the thought she’d agreed to keep quiet. Selfish cow. Evil. That’s the only explanation for covering something like that up.
She and Oliver were both evil.
Louisa threw back the duvet and swung her legs out of bed. A dizziness stopped her from standing; she stayed sitting on the edge of the mattress. She felt sick with tiredness. Typical – Noah had had the best night’s sleep ever, and Louisa had just had the worst. All the years her mind had been protecting her, and now the truth had come out, it was going to make her suffer.
But that’s what she deserved.
She turned to look at Brian. He deserved better than her. She wondered if he would stand by her if he found out, whether he’d still love her if he knew what kind of person she really was.
She also wondered if he would have made the same sacrifice as Oliver had for her.
Come on, Lou. Get up.
She took some steadying breaths, then slowly made her way into the nursery. A gentle cooing greeted her. Noah’s legs pumped as she peered into his cot. Soon he’d be turning over and then the fun would start. Louisa had forgotten most of the developmental milestones and had to google almost everything now. She’d mostly had books back when Emily had been born, but was thankful for how different things were now with the internet so easily accessible on various devices. She lifted him from the cot and made her way downstairs. After feeding him, then getting Emily up and chivvying her along, Louisa was going to do some internet searches of a different kind.
Searching Missing persons in Devon from 1995 on Google, Louisa felt nauseous. She closed her eyes as she hit the return button, bracing herself for the results.
The first article that came up was about the missing schoolgirl Genette Tate. That was back in 1978, nowhere near the time she’d put in the search bar. But nonetheless it made her shudder. She remembered her own
parents, their friends, teachers, villagers – all talking about this case when she was growing up – it’d happened a year before Louisa’s birth. Louisa recalled how she’d been out riding her bike with a few of her friends when she was ten, and her mum had given her the usual warning: don’t stop and talk to anyone you don’t know, stick together with the other girls, don’t cycle off ahead, or let them leave you behind. You know what happened to Genette Tate. Yes, she did. It was ingrained in her mind. The girl had been thirteen years old, and had gone missing during her paper round. Scattered newspapers had been found alongside her abandoned bike in the quiet country lane near her village in East Devon.
Louisa’s mind now conjured the image of the country lane she’d been driving down, of the body in the middle of it. Lying still, broken, bloodied. She wondered if something similar had happened to Genette. If someone like Louisa had hit her, killed her, then covered it up. Before yesterday Louisa would’ve never imagined any scenario where she could’ve done such a thing. But from one day to the next, she was realising that she wasn’t the person she thought she was.
Clicking off the article, Louisa scrolled down the search results. UK Missing Persons Unit was at the bottom of the first page. Louisa tried searching, but the pages were mainly to do with unidentified case searches – for bodies of people who’d been found but were yet to be identified. She cursed herself for feeling relief when there were no unidentified females found in Devon that could relate to her woman in the lane.
Nevertheless, Louisa couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling. It wasn’t just that she’d found out what she’d done, what the traumatic experience that had clouded her adult life was, it was why. Why had she allowed Oliver to cover it up? And why was Oliver back?
He had a hidden agenda. He must have.
Louisa thought about his marriage to Melissa – it was new, but was it happy? Perhaps marrying her triggered something in him. Maybe Emily was right, and he’d come back to Devon for Louisa.
It was possible that the lie he’d lived with was too much to bear on his own, and it wasn’t exactly something he could tell his new bride. Guilt could eat away at you. Destroy you. Keeping such a huge secret would certainly not be the basis of a good marriage.
The Missing Wife Page 14