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

by Victoria Jenkins

  ‘Thanks,’ I said with a nod. ‘It’s only a car, isn’t it?’

  ‘Terrible business.’ He shook his head. ‘I saw them take it away,’ he added. ‘Lucky you weren’t driving it when it happened.’

  I breathed an inward sigh of relief that he didn’t appear to realise it was arson. It was only a matter of time before the rumour mill caught hold of what was happening to me and my family, and I knew that when it did, I would be powerless to prevent the inevitable repercussions. All I could hope was that the worst of it would land upon me and not on the girls. Whatever my mistakes or my misfortune, neither Lily nor Amelia deserved to suffer as a result.

  ‘Exactly. Things can be replaced, can’t they?’ I smiled, faking a cheery optimism, when inside I wanted to cry. The kindness of people I barely knew felt unmerited, as though this man was offering his platitudes to the wrong person. And then a thought hit me, almost knocking me from my feet. The wrong person. What if that was all this was? What if I was being targeted not because someone meant me harm but because they intended it for someone else? Someone they mistakenly believed to be me.

  I bid the neighbour goodbye and hurried into the house, making sure to double-check the lock on the door behind me. I opened the laptop at the kitchen table and made a cup of tea as I waited for it to load. When I logged into my email account, the attachment from Ffion was at the top of my unread messages, the link to the CCTV footage there as she had promised.

  I was almost afraid to look, as though by doing so I would be exposing myself to something from which there would be no return. I knew there would be no footage from within the coffee shop itself, something I berated myself for before opening the first recording, wishing that the cameras had been better placed. But why would I ever have thought to put one at the kitchen door, where no one other than staff went?

  The task was tiresome, and I sped through much of the footage, pausing on the face of each new person as they entered the building, waiting for someone I recognised. Whoever had taken that knife into the coffee shop had done so with the intention of framing me for the attack on Charlotte Copeland, and why would anyone who barely knew me – why would someone who didn’t know me at all – want to inflict that kind of suffering upon not just me but my family too? Of course, there were plenty of faces I knew, customers we had welcomed to the coffee shop for years and others newer to us, but there was no one who prompted any suspicion. I started to think I was wasting my time. What exactly was I trying to find anyway?

  At just after 2 p.m. I had a text message from Lily telling me she was staying on after college for rehearsals. I believed her on this occasion, knowing that the show was just a couple of weeks away, though I realised that the amount of time the production was taking up had made her lies easier to fabricate, giving her plenty of opportunity to be in places other than where she had claimed to be. I tried to push those thoughts aside, grateful for the extra time to submerge myself in my task, knowing that when Lily arrived home, I would have to pack my laptop away and pretend I had been doing something different.

  I picked up my pace and continued to trawl through the footage captured since Friday night. With each man I watched enter the coffee shop, my thoughts returned to that evening, and the darkened figure I had seen running away from Charlotte Copeland. It occurred to me that this unknown person could be anywhere, anyone, and no one was looking for him. I doubted whether the police even believed he existed, considering him nothing more than a figment of my imagination; a character invented as a way of shifting the blame from myself. It was my word against Charlotte’s, and as she was the one lying injured in a hospital bed, why should anyone believe a word I said?

  I felt my fingers shake on the laptop keys when I saw the figure of my husband appear on the screen. Why had he been at the coffee shop that day? He had known I wasn’t there, that I had booked the weekend off, and he had made no mention of dropping in. I rarely saw him when I was at work. There had been times, years earlier, when he would come to see me, always bringing me something savoury – a distraction from the temptation of cakes and brownies on display at the counter – but those days were behind us and we had settled into our separate day-to-day lives, making time for each other when circumstances allowed.

  With my attention back on the screen, I ran the tape forward, wondering how long Damien had been at the shop. Perhaps he had only popped in for something, though I couldn’t think what that something might have been. I didn’t need to wait long; within minutes, a second familiar face arrived at the door.

  I paused the footage, tasting the sour sting of bile at the back of my throat, then replayed it, watching again as Laura entered the shop. I wound the recording back, checking the times. She had turned up less than eight minutes after Damien, but they had left together just moments later. I paused on a shot of them stepping through the front door, searching for an incriminating touch of a hand or a momentary look stolen as though unseen, but there was nothing. They were just two people leaving a coffee shop together, with the obvious unanswered question of where they were going and why.

  Neither of them looked happy, though at the time the footage had been recorded, Damien wouldn’t have known of my arrest. I felt my face flush with anger at the possibility that while I’d been sitting in that police cell, terrified of what might be about to happen to me, he had been elsewhere, with someone I regarded as a friend. Then I remembered that this was the same day that Lily had seen them together in our home. What the hell was going on?

  There was a knock at the front door. I closed my eyes, already knowing it could only be bad news, and my heart sank further when I opened the door, the sight of DS Maitland enough to obliterate any scrap of positivity I might have had left.

  ‘Mrs Morgan.’

  He didn’t need to speak the words that followed; I had heard them too many times already. This time, I knew there would be no release without charge, no ‘under further investigation’. My fate lay in the hands of someone else – everyone else – and I was incapable of doing anything to stop what might happen to me.

  Twenty-One

  On Friday morning, a week after the assault on Charlotte Copeland, I was charged with wounding with intent. Bail was initially refused, which came as no surprise to me, considering the severity of the attack; Sean had already warned me that this was likely to be the case. He was quick to remind me that it could have been worse – the charge might have been attempted murder – as though this might in some way soften the reality of what I was facing.

  ‘The DNA results on the knife retrieved from the coffee shop have confirmed that the victim’s blood is present,’ he said, studying me as though checking that the information was finally seeping in.

  We had been through all this during my interview with detectives prior to the charge being made, yet I wanted – needed – to hear it again, convinced that somewhere a mistake had been made and all it needed was for someone other than me to recognise it for what it was. I felt as though I was watching myself from outside my own body; as though everything was happening to someone else and I was merely a spectator, a viewer shouting with frustration at a scenario I couldn’t change.

  The news that the blood on the knife was a match with Charlotte Copeland came as no surprise to me. Whoever was trying to ruin my life was unlikely to try to frame me using pig’s blood.

  ‘And there are no other DNA results or fingerprints?’ I asked.

  Hearing it all again felt like confirmation of events, as though through repetition the truth of my situation became less easy to argue against. Sean tapped his pen on the edge of the desk in a way that was both irritating and somehow obnoxious, his silence dragging out my trauma in the way a talent-show presenter lingers on a set of phone-in results, almost enjoying the state of anticipation in which he was keeping me.

  ‘One set of prints lifted. Unidentified.’ He raised the pen to his lips and chewed it. ‘I’m sorry, Jenna. It doesn’t matter how many times we go over it, the facts
aren’t going to change.’

  I lowered my head and squeezed the fingers of my right hand with my left, trying to hold back the anger surging inside me, fighting for release. I knew we were being watched, our conversation listened in on, and the knowledge kept me from screaming with all the fight I had left in me. The most important fact – the only one that should matter to him – was the fact that I was innocent.

  ‘But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ I asked between gritted teeth. ‘It means there’s nothing linking me to the knife. So why have I been charged?’

  Yet again I was asking questions that had already been answered, raising arguments already presented during my interview, yet still I refused to accept what was happening to me. It all seemed so unfair.

  ‘They’ve had the forensic results back a couple of days now,’ he reminded me. I saw him raise his eyes to the ceiling, so close to an eye roll that I felt ready to lunge across the table at him. ‘They’ve applied to the CPS, who have obviously decided that the knife being found on your premises is sufficient to bring forward a charge. This isn’t what either of us wants, Jenna, but we can’t argue with the courts – they get the final say.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  Sean sighed and sat back, smoothing the front of his freshly ironed shirt. Amy’s brother or not – my only lifeline or not – in that moment I hated him.

  ‘Prove your innocence.’

  I looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  ‘I’m working on it,’ he said, reading the look.

  ‘The knife was planted in the shop by someone else,’ I told him, though I’d said it so many times by then that I wondered why I needed to keep repeating it. ‘Surely the forensic results prove that, and surely that’s enough to prove my innocence?’

  ‘It definitely helps,’ Sean admitted, though I could see in his face that he wasn’t wholly convinced. ‘When this goes to trial, the prosecution is going to need more. They already know that.’ He was quiet for a moment, looking at me for the first time not as a client, someone little more than a stranger, but as someone he knew, a woman his sister called a friend and towards whom he had a loyalty, whether he liked it or not. ‘Look,’ he said, his voice softening as he spotted the tears I was failing to hold back. ‘You’re intelligent, Jenna, and there’s no point in sugar-coating it. There’s an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence against you.’

  I hurriedly ran the back of my hand across my face, desperate to hide the signs of what I knew would be perceived as weakness. ‘I thought circumstantial evidence wasn’t enough to take a case to trial?’

  My thoughts drifted back to my accuser, to that woman who seemed by all accounts untraceable. It seemed impossible that anyone could remain anonymous, not with the amount of daily intrusion all our lives were now subject to. And yet Charlotte Copeland remained invisible, or at least when it suited her to do so. I wondered what the police knew of her, and to what extent they had bothered to look. Her status as victim was keeping her protected, while my assumed guilt had left me almost entirely exposed.

  ‘I’m afraid not. Look, there are things I’m looking into. Leave it with me.’ He gave me a knowing look that told me he didn’t want to discuss whatever he was working on while the police were listening in on the conversation. I nodded, acknowledging his intention but wondering whether there was really any substance to what he said, or if it was easier to suggest he was doing something practical to keep me quiet for the time being.

  ‘Nothing’s been said about what happened to my car. Or the graffiti on the shop. It’s like they’re just not listening to me – they don’t want to have to consider the possibility of someone else being responsible for the assault.’

  Sean held my eye, willing me to stop speaking. ‘Leave it with me,’ he said again.

  ‘What happens with the bail refusal?’

  ‘I’ll apply to the crown court. Look, you know I can’t make any promises here, but like I said before, there are certain things that will go in your favour. You’ve got no previous record – that always helps.’ He stood and took his jacket from the back of the chair. ‘The sooner I get on to it, the better your chances. I’ll be in touch, okay? Stay strong.’

  His words remained with me, echoing for the remainder of that day and beyond. To stay strong, I needed to have been strong in the first place, but there was little left in me other than despair.

  For the first twenty-four hours following the charge, I didn’t see anyone other than police officers. On Saturday afternoon, the monotony of my existence in custody was broken by the news that Damien had come to the station to see me. We hadn’t seen each other since Thursday morning, when we had tiptoed around the drama of what had happened to the car and everything that had been said the night before.

  We were permitted to sit together for a short time in one of the interview rooms. Neither of us seemed to know what to say to break the silence, the unfamiliarity of the setting and the unlikelihood of the situation we had found ourselves in rendering us lost for words. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had seen on that CCTV footage just moments before the police had arrived at the house. Too many hours spent alone in a cell had done little to help my suspicion and bitterness, and with Damien in front of me, all I could see was him and Laura together.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ I said, trying to focus on him rather than the images in my mind.

  Damien glanced at the camera in the corner of the room and I knew what he was thinking: that just being here made you feel guilty even when you’d done nothing wrong, in the same way that too much time spent in a hospital waiting room could make a person with a minor ailment convince themselves they were seriously ill.

  ‘How are you keeping?’ He cringed at his own words, hearing the everyday normality of them.

  I shrugged. ‘The room service is terrible.’

  There was no smile; no reaction. His features were taut, as though he was suppressing any emotion that threatened to make itself visible, and I worried for a moment that he might cry again. I didn’t want him to do that here, not while we were being watched, and I didn’t want to be left alone with the thought of what all this was doing to him.

  ‘I’d better get used to it, I suppose,’ I added.

  He shook his head. ‘You mustn’t think like that. Amy reckons the case will collapse unless they can find stronger evidence, so we’ve got to believe she’s right, okay?’

  ‘You’ve seen her?’

  Damien nodded. ‘And Sean. I’m never going to like the bloke,’ he added, reading the look on my face, ‘but I think he’s doing his best by you, even if it’s thanks to his sister.’

  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to pay him,’ I said, my voice cracking at the thought of the bill I would be greeted with when all this was over, whether I ended up a free woman or faced with a custodial sentence. If I was sent to prison, it would be Damien who’d be left with the financial mess.

  ‘Don’t think about that now. We’ll sort it out somehow. You’ve got to focus on getting through this, okay? The girls need you. I need you.’

  ‘How are they?’ A sob caught in the back of my throat at the thought of what all this might be doing to them.

  Damien hesitated as though considering a lie that might soften the truth. ‘They’ve taken it really badly.’

  ‘Has Lily been staying with you at your mother’s?’

  He shook his head. ‘She’s at Maisie’s. I’ve checked with her mum,’ he added, witnessing my reaction.

  ‘We don’t know she’s there now, though, do we?’

  The suggestion sat between us, clear in its meaning. The thought of my daughter being with this mystery man while I was incarcerated here, powerless to do anything to stop what might be happening, made me want to claw at the walls, but I was mindful of what was being seen and heard, aware of the facade of composure I needed to maintain.

  Damien was quiet for a moment. ‘As you’ve said before, she’s not a kid any more. We�
��ve got to trust her to make the right decision.’ His jaw had tightened with the statement, forcing back the words he really wanted to say. He knew as well as I did that though Lily was seventeen, she was far from being mature enough to be considered an adult. The events of the past week had been enough to push her closer to this man, whoever he was, and now all I could think was that the charge brought against me might be the tipping point for every wrong decision she might make. Just as my own parents had done, I had pushed her into the arms of someone I already knew in my heart would be nothing but trouble.

  ‘You hate me, don’t you?’ I asked, letting my resolve slip.

  Damien’s eyes narrowed. ‘Hate you? I hate this, Jenna, but no, I don’t hate you.’

  ‘It’s just, you’ve been so… I don’t know… so off recently.’

  He raised his eyebrows, as though the reason for his aloofness was self-explanatory. ‘There’s been a lot going on.’

  Before all this, I wanted to say. You were acting differently before all this. Our relationship had been subtly sliding into half-spoken sentences and strained silences for a while, though I couldn’t be sure of when the shift had started. I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. It was the wrong time and the wrong place to be airing problems in our marriage. How could I bring up the subject of my fears about him and Laura when doing so would make me look like a paranoid, jealous wife? I needed to appear to the police to be calm and rational, a hard-working mother who had been dragged into a set of circumstances beyond my control.

  We were interrupted by the arrival of a uniformed officer, telling us our time was up. I wanted to reach out to touch Damien, but I knew that any physical contact between us was forbidden.

  ‘Tell the girls I love them,’ I said. ‘I love you too.’

  He gave me a sad smile before following the officer out into the corridor. There was no parting gesture, no words of reassurance; no sign that he loved me back.