She nodded. ‘Shall I email them over to you?’
I could have kissed her. Instead, I asked her to do it as soon as she got the chance. I needed to see who had been at the shop; who was so determined to ruin my life.
Her thoughts were transparent, and I couldn’t blame her for feeling as she did, not after what she’d seen. Any previous opinions she might have had of me had been shaken by the presence of the police and the sight of that knife, bloodied and incriminating. I could tell she didn’t feel safe there any more, and neither did I.
Seventeen
Despite promising myself I wouldn’t look, I searched for my name online. I didn’t find myself mentioned in anything other than a few articles related to the opening of the coffee shop, which I had tried at the time to keep to a minimum. Reports on the assault referenced the fact that a female had been arrested and released under investigation. I was grateful I hadn’t been named, though it was of small comfort. I knew what the phrase meant, and knowing I was a suspect felt as incriminating as having already been charged.
People had already started to speculate in the comments section, and I was aware that a trial by media would follow, regardless of my innocence.
This is sick… my kids play in that park.
Why has this woman been given bail? Probably turned on the waterworks – if she was a man, she’d be locked up till they had proof.
Anyone know how the victim is? The article doesn’t say.
Never think things like this will happen on your doorstep.
I scrolled through the comments as they slid from curiosity to vitriol, devouring the words as though feeding on their intensity before stopping at one that read differently to the others.
I know her. This is bullshit. She didn’t do it.
I looked for the commenter’s name, wondering whether I really did know this person. I must have done; there were only a handful of people who knew that I had been arrested in relation to the incident. I was grateful for his or her defence, though in a sea of blame that rendered me guilty until proven otherwise, it would be washed away by a tide of venom. If it was a member of my family, I didn’t want them getting involved. The username MC2020 told me nothing about the person behind the words. Still, it was one voice of support, albeit solitary and silent.
I flipped the lid of the laptop closed when I heard Lily come through the front door. Damien and Amelia were still not home; I had tried his mobile, but there was no answer and I could only assume he had decided to take her over to his mother’s for tea again. Anything, it would seem, to delay having to come home and face me again.
Lily slammed the front door shut behind her and headed straight upstairs. I was in our bedroom, sitting on the bed with the laptop on the duvet in front of me, and I listened to her go to the bathroom first before heading to her room. When I got up and went out onto the landing, I could hear her crying. They were angry, raw tears, the kind that can’t help but produce noise, and when I pushed the door open she did nothing to try to stop the flow of frustrated sadness that I imagined she had been holding back all afternoon.
I braced myself for a verbal onslaught. It never came. Instead, she kept her head lowered, her face shielded by the hair that fell like a curtain in front of her.
‘What’s happened, love?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, too quickly. The opposite was clearly true. It was something to do with him, of that I was certain; though she had cried tears over my predicament, these were different somehow, angrier and more personal. I wanted to ask her, but I was fearful of her reaction, knowing that the further I pushed her, the harder it would be to pull her back.
I sat on the bed next to her, careful not to make physical contact. When she wanted me closer, she’d let me know. Slow and steady had always been the best approach in dealing with Lily’s moods.
‘Why the fuck is this happening to us?’ she said, her words an echo of Damien’s. I decided to ignore the language. It wasn’t really the time or place to reprimand her for coarseness. On more than one occasion I had pictured myself standing at the top of Caerphilly mountain, the town’s lights stretched out in front of me like a blanket of glittering diamonds, screaming the same word until my lungs were raw and empty of air and the sky could carry away all the toxic energy that had been poisoning me from the inside out.
‘I don’t know. I wish I did. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
Lily couldn’t bring herself to look at me, and I feared for a moment it was because she suspected I was guilty. ‘Why do they think you’re involved?’
For so long she had demanded to be treated like an adult, quick to chide Damien and me when she believed we were talking down to her or not respecting her maturity. So now I gave her everything she had wanted, making sure not to gloss over the details as I might once have done in an attempt to protect her.
The only thing I didn’t mention was the knife. I waited for her to bring it up, but when she didn’t, I assumed she hadn’t heard about it. A part of me had wondered whether Damien might have told her, but since I’d got home the previous evening, he had barely seen her. I hoped that if he had told his mother, she would be sensitive enough to keep the information to herself; Lily didn’t need to know, not when it might come to nothing. I would wait for the forensic results to come back before deciding what to do next. Surely there would be nothing on the knife linking me to the crime, and therefore I hoped its existence was one detail Lily could be spared.
‘They must know you didn’t hurt anyone,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘I know it doesn’t. All I tried to do was help that woman. You believe me, don’t you?’
She looked at me then, her eyes wet with tears, and when she nodded, I felt my heart heave with relief at her faith in me.
‘The truth will come out,’ I told her.
She rested her head on my shoulder, and I was taken back to another time and place, her small, warm body tucked close against mine in the flat we shared, just her and me.
‘Lily,’ I said, putting my hand over hers. ‘We need to talk about this man.’
She pulled her hand away and sat up, removing all contact between us. ‘Really? Now, after all this, you think that’s the most important thing?’ She was glaring at me, her eyes filled with a deep resentment.
‘Something’s upsetting you,’ I said, ‘and I know it isn’t just about me and the arrest. I’m right, aren’t I?’
I watched as a tear slipped from her right eye, but it was one of anger rather than sadness. It was easy to assume the anger was directed at me when I felt so deserving of it.
‘What do you care?’ she said, stifling a sob. ‘You don’t give a shit about me – you’re too wrapped up in yourself and Damien.’
I didn’t know what to say. I had avoided the truth of it, but the fact was, she was right. For weeks I had been worrying about Damien, aware that he was drifting from me; fearing the worst of whatever it was that was going on inside his head. I had become distracted and insecure, but I had never considered myself negligent. Had Lily grown closer to this man through a desire for attention? She had never told me exactly how long she had known him, and I had no way of knowing just how involved they were. Had I been so consumed with my relationship with my husband that I had taken my eye off the one I shared with my daughter?
‘I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel that way, Lily. I never meant to.’
My relationship with my own parents had come to an end when I was not much older than Lily. They had got what they had wanted, their only daughter accepted on to a medical degree, her whole future mapped out with a plan they had carefully drawn up together, regardless of my wishes. When I had suggested that what I wanted was perhaps different to what they hoped for me, it was regarded as defiance. I was ungrateful and disobedient, too immature to make such important decisions for myself. Neither of my parents was ever violent towards me, but I came to fear their disappointment as I might have any blow, doin
g everything I could to please them and to keep life as quiet as it could be. Revision became a form of escape, and I used it to run from everything that had happened, hoping that one day they would become more lenient, more understanding, and would start to see things from my point of view.
The day my A-level results came out, my parents insisted on accompanying me to the school to collect them. I remember the embarrassment I felt at having them there, lurking behind me like a double shadow, when the rest of my year group were in their friendship cliques, their parents having done the normal thing of waiting at home for a phone call. I was ashamed to admit it, but I had always been a bit embarrassed by my parents. They were older than everyone else’s – in their early forties when a longed-for but unexpected pregnancy made a surprise appearance – and their views were old-fashioned, their ways out of touch.
I opened the envelope with a feeling of dread embedded in the pit of my stomach. I wasn’t sure why I was so nervous; I had been predicted strong grades and my coursework marks had all been good, but still I felt the unrelenting pressure of having to prove myself. When I looked at the results, a wave of relief flooded over me. Three As and a B. Enough to secure me a place on the course they had chosen for me.
My mother eyed me expectantly, and I smiled as I handed her the sheet of paper. My father was at her shoulder, but when he glanced down and scanned the short list of grades, his face darkened as though a thunderstorm had just passed above us. I waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t speak, I turned my focus on my mother. As though sensing his mood, she too remained silent. My father turned and walked away, my mother offering a small smile of apology, as though she recognised the unfairness of it all but wouldn’t bring herself to admit it.
‘Jenna.’ I heard my biology teacher speak my name and turned to show her my results. She beamed at me, placing a hand on my shoulder as she told me how brilliantly I had done and how proud she was of me. It didn’t matter; none of it mattered. All I could think in that moment was how much I hated my parents and how much I wished I had never put myself to such trouble to prove that I was worthy of their approval.
I never wanted my children to feel the way I’d felt that day, least of all to be the one responsible for inflicting such a sense of failure on them. As Lily and I sat together in silence, I worried that the damage was already done. Perhaps I wasn’t as far from my own parents as I had hoped and planned to be. I had always based my parenting on being nothing like them. I would never burden my children with impossible expectations; I would never enforce a path purely designed to please myself. I would be understanding, patient, kind, the type of mother with whom a daughter could share her darkest fears and her closest secrets.
‘Has he done something to you?’ I asked eventually. ‘You’re still seeing him, aren’t you?’
She looked at me, her jaw tensed, her mouth set firm in a defiant grimace. ‘No, he hasn’t. And no, I’m not.’
She couldn’t tell me what was distressing her so much. I’d allowed a gulf to develop between us because of all I’d done, because of my worries about Damien. And as I sat in Lily’s bedroom, listening to her lie to me again, I knew that I had failed both of us.
Eighteen
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I was too hot, too cold, too uncomfortable; there were too many thoughts intent on keeping me from finding any kind of peace, and it felt wrong to even seek it, as though there was something I should be doing, something that might help me pull myself from the mess I had unwittingly been dragged into. Of course, there was nothing productive I could do at 2 a.m., and so I gave in to the urge to climb into bed beside Amelia, wrapping an arm around her sleeping body and breathing in the soft scent of her hair.
Before long, I was crying, my tears hot against the cool skin of her cheek. Everything seemed worse in the darkness, my blackest fears and biggest secrets gathering at the bedside to loom over me. The police were going to charge me with attempted murder. They would take me away from Amelia. She would grow up with a mother behind bars, the stigma of my conviction attaching itself to her with the permanence of a chain for which the key had been misplaced. She would spend a lifetime dragging my guilt around with her, every opportunity weighted with my crime.
I feared for Lily too. She was on the brink of adulthood; about to move on, to shed her old life and start anew, and I knew from experience that the transition from one life to another was anything but easy. She might well move on, but the past had a way of lingering and was always close at hand, waiting somewhere nearby in the shadows.
In the darkness, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and kissed Amelia on the forehead. She stirred slightly, but my presence wasn’t enough to wake her. I wished I could explain all this to her while she was safe in slumber; that my words would enter her sleeping ear and stay there until morning, held in her subconscious and carried with her through all of her tomorrows, making every day a little easier, a little more manageable. But of course, I couldn’t, not when I was unable to explain it to myself.
Holding that thought with me, I eased myself from beneath the duvet and crept from the room, pulling the door shut quietly behind me. I had left my laptop in our bedroom, so I tiptoed back in to retrieve it. Damien was sleeping on his front, the side of his face crushed into the pillow. I wanted to touch him, to wake him so that we could talk, but instead I watched him for a moment, not wanting to disturb his peace.
Downstairs, I sat at the kitchen table. As I waited for the laptop to load, I went to the sink to get myself a glass of water, mentally prioritising the things I needed to do. The things I needed to know.
I still didn’t know the name of the man my daughter had been involved with, but even had I known it, there was another name repeating itself in my head until its presence dominated every other thought. Charlotte Copeland had become an obsession, a woman I thought about while I lay in bed at night; a person whose existence had come to shape my own, every move I made and word I spoke moulded by the effect she had had upon my life.
I had already searched for her online, trawling through the social media accounts of people with the same name, but I had found no profile that matched the woman I’d encountered in the park. It seemed impossible to me that a person of her age – late thirties, early forties at most – could have left no trail on the internet, and yet it appeared that she was invisible, or had at least chosen to keep herself that way.
As I sat down again at the table, I heard a bang. It came from outside, as sharp and sudden as a gunshot, and I jumped up and hurried out into the hallway. Through the frosted glass of the front door, I could see a burst of orange glowing in the darkness of the night. I opened the door and stepped outside, the concrete sending a chill through my bare feet; the heat of the flames rising in clouds from the burning car.
‘Jesus, Jenna, get away from there!’
I heard footsteps thudding down the staircase behind me, then Damien’s hands were on my shoulders as he pulled me back inside the house. Within moments he had called 999. When I turned, Lily was halfway down the stairs, her hair dishevelled and her eyes bleary with sleep.
‘What’s going on?’
Her question was cut short by a second explosion, which filled the air outside the opened front door with a blaze of fire and smoke. Lily screamed. Whether it was the explosion or the scream that woke Amelia, I wasn’t sure, but soon we were all there, the four of us gathered in the hallway, Amelia crying tiredly in her sister’s arms as we waited for the fire service to arrive.
I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the sight of my Peugeot 5008, its white frame encased in a blaze of orange heat. I had only had it a couple of years – I had bought it second-hand as a gift to myself once I felt certain the café was secure enough to afford such an indulgence – and seeing it burn felt like witnessing the demise of everything I had worked so hard for. I glanced at Damien, who was watching helplessly as the fire engine drew up, blue lights flashing. I knew exactly
what he was thinking: that once upon a time, before the accident that had changed everything, he would have been one of those firefighters, actively doing something to stop the blaze from spreading. Now he was dependent on the help of others. His pride was burning with that car, his sense of purpose going up in smoke into the night air. Yet again I wanted to reach out to touch him, but I knew the contact would be interpreted as a gesture of pity and would be rejected.
Unable to watch any longer, I ushered the girls into the kitchen.
‘What’s happened to the car?’ Amelia asked, using the sleeve of her pyjamas to wipe her nose.
‘There must have been an electrical fault,’ I told her, and glanced at Lily, shooting her a look that pleaded with her not to contradict me. We both knew that the fire was arson, but what Amelia was unaware of wouldn’t be capable of scaring her. ‘When the fire’s out, they’ll be able to have a look at it.’
Thankfully, the blaze was extinguished quickly. I put Mary Poppins on in the back room and was grateful when Lily didn’t make a fuss about sitting with Amelia to watch it. With a hot chocolate each and a packet of biscuits on the sofa between them, I was able to go out to the front of the house and hear what the fire crew had to say about the incident. One of them was speaking to Damien when I got to the front door.
‘Arson?’ I asked when he turned to greet me.
The fireman looked at me apologetically. ‘Know anyone who might be responsible? Could be a random attack, but seems unlikely, to be honest.’
I nodded, reluctant to make the admission. This was no random attack. Somebody was sending a message, and I was hearing it loud and clear. My family had been inside the house, my daughters sleeping in their beds. What next?
The Accusation: An addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist Page 11