The Accusation: An addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist

by Victoria Jenkins

  How well do you know your wife?

  I opened the second.

  She’s lying to you.

  On the last:

  Ask her about your daughter.

  Fifteen

  Damien looked at me expectantly, waiting for a response. His blue eyes, usually alive with warmth and humour, studied me coldly. His jawline was peppered with days-old stubble, and it made him appear older than his forty-one years. He looked exhausted, all of it my fault.

  ‘I tried to write them off as a prank,’ he said, ‘but then…’

  His sentence was cut short, though I knew it wouldn’t be long before the truth of his feelings spilled from him. Whatever it was he wanted to say, I was unlikely to come out of it looking innocent.

  ‘But then what?’

  He studied my face for a moment, as though expecting to find a silent admission somewhere in my expression. ‘But then you haven’t really been yourself recently. I’ve known something’s going on, I just haven’t known what.’

  I could feel my heart rate quickening, sick at the thought of what the notes might refer to. ‘When did you get these?’ I asked.

  ‘First one came about six weeks ago.’

  I nodded, trying to work out just how long Damien’s increasingly strange and distant behaviour had started. I couldn’t recall exactly, but there seemed more than a chance that it had coincided with the arrival of the first of these notes.

  ‘I was going to tell you.’

  ‘Going to tell me what?’ He was waiting for the worst; it was visible in the tension gathered in his shoulders and the rigid straightness of his back. I pushed a hand through my hair, sweeping it back from my face, and sat down at the table opposite him, still aware of the laptop between us, still wondering what secrets it might hide.

  ‘Don’t be angry with me, please. I didn’t say anything because I thought I could sort it out before it escalated.’

  ‘Sort what out?’ His jaw was tensed with suppressed frustration. I didn’t blame him for being angry. He had been kept in the dark when I should have told him the truth from the beginning. We were a family. We were supposed to face everything together.

  ‘Lily has been involved with someone.’

  It was the only thing the notes could be referring to, or at least the only thing I would allow myself to believe a possibility.

  ‘Someone…’

  I sighed, knowing I couldn’t avoid the facts, no matter how much I might have liked to. ‘An older man.’

  I watched Damien’s jaw move as he bit down on his tongue.

  ‘How much older?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Late twenties… maybe early thirties.’

  His chair scraped noisily across the tiled floor as he pushed it back and stood. He didn’t look at me before going to the kitchen sink, taking a glass from the draining board and filling it with water. His knuckles were white around the glass.

  ‘She’s seventeen, for God’s sake.’

  I said nothing, knowing anything I did say was only likely to make the situation worse.

  ‘How long have you known about this?’

  ‘Not long, I swear.’

  He raised his eyebrows, and the look spoke more loudly than any words were capable of. If the first note had come six weeks ago, I had known about it long enough. He didn’t think I could be trusted. There was a part of me that was beginning to wonder the same.

  ‘How long?’ he asked again.

  I paused. ‘A couple of months.’

  He dropped the glass into the sink. ‘A couple of months. Jesus, Jenna, why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I sorted it out,’ I told him, though the words sounded stupid as they were given air to breathe. I hadn’t sorted anything out. Lily was still seeing him, still sneaking around behind our backs as though Damien and I were a couple of idiots. ‘She promised me she wasn’t involved with him any more.’

  Damien tutted. ‘Oh, right, well that’s okay then. And you just believed her? Because teenagers are known for telling their parents the truth, aren’t they?’ He looked at me as though I was simple.

  ‘Please don’t say anything to her. I’ll speak to her again, I promise.’

  ‘And that’ll achieve what? Do you think she’s going to take anything you say seriously after all this?’

  He had a point, but its delivery left a sour taste in my mouth. Perhaps I deserved his animosity, though for the most part I was left smarting at the injustice of it all.

  ‘Why don’t you want me to talk to her, Jenna? Because I’m not her real father?’

  It was a low blow, and I felt it like a punch to the gut. Yes, I had said it before, twice – on both occasions during the worst of our arguments – and as soon as the words were out, I had felt like the worst kind of person for having spoken them. Damien had always treated Lily as though she was his own daughter, and even when Amelia had arrived in our lives, his love for her hadn’t diminished. He had given her everything, yet with a few spitefully chosen words, I had the power to snatch it all away from him.

  ‘Don’t say things like that. Please.’

  He came over to the table and sat back down opposite me. It felt like some small peace offering, a suggestion that perhaps everything was going to be okay and we would find a way to work through all this.

  ‘I just think she’s more likely to talk to another female,’ I tried to explain.

  ‘What about my mother?’

  ‘God, no.’

  Damien immediately responded defensively to my reaction, his shoulders squaring and his jaw tightening. His mother was too often the cause of friction between us, but he could never see any wrongdoing on her part, only on mine.

  ‘Please don’t tell her about this. She’ll only think the worst, especially of me. Things are bad enough without adding fuel to the fire. I’ll sort it, I promise. Don’t say anything to Lily – if we come on too strong, it might only push her closer to whoever this man is.’

  The truth was, I didn’t trust Nancy with Lily. She didn’t regard her as family, not proper family in the way she saw Amelia, and I didn’t want to offer her further ammunition with which to attack my parenting abilities. In her eyes, Lily’s involvement with an older man would mean I’d failed in every way possible.

  ‘Haven’t you even seen him then?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Name?’

  I raised my hands in an admission of defeat.

  ‘Then how do you know he even exists?’

  I hesitated on the answer, fearing it was likely only to make things worse. ‘Amy saw them together.’

  ‘Oh, so Amy’s known all this time as well? Anyone else you’ve forgotten to mention?’

  An image flashed involuntarily into my brain: Damien and Laura together, their bodies tangled beneath the duvet I shared with him. I pushed the image to one side, chiding myself for lingering over something that should have been of little importance at that moment. Yet the hypocrisy stung. Damien was attacking me for my secrets, but what secrets was he hiding from me? I should have just come out and asked him, but I was too scared of what until then had seemed almost an impossibility.

  ‘She saw them together and she told me about it,’ I said, trying not to snap at him. ‘I spoke to Lily at the time; she told me they weren’t even together, then she promised me there was nothing going on between them. The first I knew of anything different was when you showed me that bracelet.’

  Once again I wondered why we were arguing over Lily when there was a potential charge of attempted murder hanging over me. Damien seemed to care more about that bloody bracelet than he did about me, though I tried to convince myself that it might be a distraction technique, a way of keeping his mind focused on things other than an imminent trial. That, or there was something else he wasn’t telling me. Lily’s words in her bedroom echoed at the back of my brain, refusing to let me forget them. Damien didn’t trust me, but I had reason to doubt whether I could trust him.

 
‘“How well do you know your wife?”’ he said, and I realised that he was quoting one of the notes. ‘Seems a strange thing to say, doesn’t it? I mean, “She’s lying to you” could refer to Lily, but the other one… Something doesn’t seem to add up.’

  ‘Where did you get them?’ I asked. As far as I knew, there were only four people who had been aware of the relationship – if that was even what it was: me, Amy, Lily and the mystery man.

  ‘They came through the door. Amelia picked one of them up, asked me what it was.’

  I wondered why I had never seen them. I was often up before anyone else in the house, though the post nearly always arrived after I’d left for the coffee shop. These hadn’t come in the post, though; they’d been hand-delivered, with only Damien’s first name written on the envelopes. It occurred to me that whoever had sent them had done so when they’d known I wasn’t home.

  ‘It’s not about Amelia?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The last note,’ he said, exasperated. ‘It says I should ask you about my daughter. Could it mean Amelia?’

  ‘Why would it mean Amelia?’ My tone was starting to echo Damien’s.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked at me questioningly as he digested the possibility of some unspoken truth between us.

  ‘Who do you think they’re from?’ he asked, after a lengthy and uncomfortable silence.

  ‘I don’t know. Could be one of Lily’s friends playing what they think is a joke, maybe.’

  He didn’t buy it. He glanced down at the notes again, their implications staring him out as he studied the lettering. ‘Lot of trouble to go to.’

  Reaching across the table, I placed my hand on his. It was the first physical contact we’d had in days, and I realised how much I’d missed him, how much I needed to have him there beside me even when I knew there was nothing he could do to help. ‘You know I’m innocent, don’t you?’

  ‘You mean do I think you’re capable of stabbing someone? Of course I don’t. It’s ridiculous.’

  He pulled his hand away and moved it over mine, squeezing my fingers tightly. I should have taken solace from his faith in me, yet I noticed how cold his hand felt; how it was there but he was not.

  Sixteen

  After spending what little of that Tuesday evening was left having a shower and picking at a meal that I couldn’t face swallowing, I finally climbed into bed. Lily and Amelia were both home and gone to bed, and Damien was already in our room, having gone upstairs before me. The gap between us felt suddenly huge, his back turned to mine as he pretended to be asleep. He had left the notes on the table, and I had cleared them away, hiding them in the washing machine – a place to which neither the girls nor Damien ever ventured – so I could return to them the following morning.

  We went through the motions of Wednesday morning on autopilot, avoiding each other as we made cups of tea and breakfast for the girls, exchanging the minimum of conversation. Lily was quieter than usual, but Amelia was her usual exuberant self, chatting animatedly at the table about some science project her class had almost finished. If Nancy had tried to pour poison into her ear, Amelia had apparently shaken it out.

  Sitting next to one another in what was a rare moment of sisterly calm, the girls couldn’t have appeared more unlike one another. Lily’s dark hair hung straight around her face, framing her sad eyes, while Amelia’s much lighter curls bounced as she rattled away, rehearsing her lines for the assembly she was due to be part of in a few days’ time. Though Amelia was so much younger, it was Lily who worried me. There was a weariness in her expression, something far older than her seventeen years. I blamed myself for it repeatedly, though I wondered sometimes whether her issues were related to something beyond my control.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ I asked, clearing her empty plate and mug from the table.

  ‘Just had an email,’ she said, shoving her mobile away from her and nearly knocking Amelia’s glass of orange juice over in the process. ‘Didn’t get the job. Not enough experience.’

  ‘I’m sorry, love. Keep trying – something will come up.’

  I watched her stand and retrieve her phone before going out into the hallway to get her bag for college, and I wondered whether the email was invented. Lily worked hard for the things she was interested in, but those were few and far between, and again I blamed myself for her attitude. There had been a time when we’d had next to nothing, and when our fortunes had changed, I had sometimes made the mistake of trying to overcompensate, buying her everything she wanted, and allowing myself to get carried away at Christmas and on birthdays. By the time she hit her teenage years, I realised the mistake I had made, but by then the damage was done and she was already far too fond of material things.

  As soon as Lily had left to catch the bus to college and Damien had taken Amelia to school, I retrieved the notes from the washing machine and set about studying them obsessively, as though the straight edge of a d or the curve of a question mark might offer up some clue about who had written them. As I sat there, I realised there were things I hadn’t asked Damien the night before. I hadn’t got close to bringing up Lily’s accusation against him. It hadn’t felt right to question him, not when my own guilt had weighed so heavily in my chest. Had it even been an accusation? I wondered. She had seen him and Laura together; that didn’t mean anything. The two of them could have met up for any number of reasons, though it raised the question of why neither had thought to mention it to me.

  How well do you know your wife?

  She’s lying to you.

  Ask her about your daughter.

  I stared down at the three notes, hating every word of them; hating the fact that I couldn’t be sure what they referred to, despite what I’d said. Who would have gone to the trouble of sending them, and what had they hoped to achieve? Whoever was framing me, it seemed likely that the same person was responsible for sending these messages. I couldn’t shake the thought that all this was somehow connected to Damien, and to whoever it was he was having an affair with. I didn’t want to accept that maybe it was about me, and me alone, so I allowed the fact of an affair to become concrete in my mind, as though all that needed proving was the other woman’s identity.

  The other woman. Laura. The thought wouldn’t go away. She had last been to our home a couple of months earlier, and I fought for the memory of what she had worn that day, convincing myself that she appeared to have made more of an effort than usual, her hair pinned up in an unusually elaborate way and her make-up more appropriate for a night out than a play date with a friend’s daughter.

  I hadn’t heard from her since she had texted me back on Saturday, though there was no reason why I should have. If she had been responsible for the notes, I could see no purpose in them. Perhaps their only object was to create friction between Damien and me, and maybe that was enough.

  I remembered that Damien had never explained himself when I’d asked what he’d been doing going through Lily’s things on the day he’d found that bracelet. Did he think Lily was involved in the notes somehow? It would have explained the friction I’d noticed between them, yet it still didn’t make sense. Causing trouble for Damien meant causing trouble for me, and I didn’t think Lily would be cruel enough to do that.

  I put the notes back in the washing machine before leaving the house, concealing them beneath a tea towel. When I got to the coffee shop, I was grateful that it was quiet. There were only three customers: a middle-aged woman who was talking on her mobile; a man staring into an empty mug; and a young mother, her eyes rimmed with a familiar reddened tiredness, her baby asleep, for that moment at least, in its pram. Ffion was there alone; she emerged from the kitchen as I walked into the shop. She offered me a welcoming smile but couldn’t hide the furtive glance she gave the customers, as though fearful that everyone already knew what had happened there on Monday morning. I had inadvertently involved her, and if it hadn’t happened already, it would only be a matter of time before she came to resent me for it.<
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  ‘Stupid question, I know,’ she said, as I followed her into the kitchen, ‘but are you okay?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  I sighed and leaned against the worktop, wondering where to start. I had been hoping to keep this from as many people as possible, but Ffion had been here when that knife had been found, and I was going to have to explain the situation somehow. For once, the truth seemed the easiest option, and so I told her everything, starting with what had happened in the park, pausing the story whenever someone came to the counter to be served.

  ‘God,’ she said, when I had finished. ‘I’m sorry. I mean… How do you think that knife ended up here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. I didn’t add that I was determined to find out.

  ‘What happens now?’ she asked. ‘With this place, I mean.’

  ‘It’s probably best that I take some time out for a while. I don’t know how long I’ll need, but I’ll make sure you get a bonus, okay?’ I glanced at the mother in the corner, who was watching her sleeping child as though it would disappear if she dared to look away for the briefest of moments. ‘What’s she drinking?’ I asked.

  ‘Cappuccino.’

  ‘Make her another one. No charge. And look, get the girls in for work as and when you need their help – I’ll leave it with you. That sound okay?’

  Ffion nodded, but I could tell from the concern etched on her face that everything was far from okay.

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ I said. ‘The CCTV. Have you got copies of the footage the police took?’

  There was a time when Ffion had always copied the week’s recordings after closing on a Saturday evening. An attempted break-in had made us extra vigilant, and when the police had taken the hard copies to use as evidence, we’d realised it might be handy to keep duplicates. Since then, however, I had let my focus slip and had no idea whether she was still doing so. I felt anticipation rise in my chest, almost thankful now for the tanked-up chancer who had tried to leave with an empty till all those years ago.