‘I’ll take you to get a hire car if that’s what you want.’
‘No, honestly. No point putting temptation in my way, is there?’
Amy nodded and gave me a sad smile. ‘We’ll sort this out, I promise.’
I was desperate to believe that she was right, but I just didn’t trust anyone else to find out why this was happening to me. If I wanted to get to the truth, I was going to have to do it myself.
Twenty-Four
Amy dropped me off at Nancy’s house; I couldn’t wait to see my daughters and try to salvage what little respect they might have left for me. Damien wasn’t there, but Amelia was already back from school, and I was faced with the heartbreaking task of having to explain my absence from her life for the past five days. Nancy decided not to allow us any privacy, instead lurking at the doorway as she watched me squirm and apologise, no doubt getting some warped satisfaction from witnessing me fail as a mother and a human being. Had we been in our own home I could have asked her to leave, but within her domain, I was bound to accept her stifling presence, as I had been expected to for so many years.
Amelia was doing a jigsaw puzzle on the living room floor.
‘Daddy told me where you’ve been,’ she said.
I wondered exactly what Daddy had told her, and how much had been added to the story courtesy of Granny.
‘You know I haven’t done anything wrong, don’t you, sweetheart?’
Amelia nodded, and I was grateful for the lack of hesitancy. If my own children didn’t believe in me, I might have given up trying to prove my innocence.
‘Adults get things wrong sometimes. Even the police. They think I hurt someone, but they’ve made a mistake. It wasn’t me.’
‘Who was it?’ She was bending a jigsaw piece, pressing it back until the cardboard threatened to snap. I put a hand on hers to stop her.
‘I don’t know. And the police don’t know yet either, but once they find the person, they’ll leave us alone and everything will go back to normal.’
‘It isn’t fair,’ she said quietly, and the words broke my heart into pieces. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close to my chest, resting my cheek against her hair as I smoothed her bare arm. ‘I know. None of it is fair. But sometimes in life bad things happen, and when they do, you’ve got to be strong, okay? You’ve got to keep telling yourself that one day things will be better. And they will, I promise.’
I heard the words I had spoken to Amy, that she shouldn’t be making promises she might not be able to keep. I was doing the same, and yet it felt like the kindest thing in the circumstances.
I turned and looked at Nancy, who was still standing in the doorway. ‘Shall I ask Granny if she’ll make you one of her special hot chocolates?’
Amelia smiled and nodded. Nancy smiled back at her, but the look she gave me couldn’t have been in starker contrast, laced with a contempt she was making no attempt to conceal. As much as I wanted to think I was being unreasonable and that all Nancy really wanted was to see me, Damien and the girls reunited as a family, I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that was the case. She was enjoying having Damien and Amelia with her, and had no doubt begun to plan a future in which her son and granddaughter – her only grandchild, as she so often managed to say without breathing a word – lived with her on a permanent basis. Amelia’s shoes were lined up by the back door; her coat and school bag were hanging from one of the hooks in the hallway. Damien’s laptop was sitting on the dining room table, and in the far corner, next to the sofa, his phone charger was plugged into the wall. All these small, inconsequential things added up to a life; a life that had once been mine but now existed in this other woman’s home. I didn’t want to feel the burning resentment that flamed inside me, but it was spreading with increasing pace, suffocating me with its heat.
I asked Amelia to finish her jigsaw so I could see what it looked like completed, then Nancy and I went into the kitchen. The fact that my daughter hadn’t hugged me back when I had held her – had made no physical contact other than that I had forced upon her – smarted like a slap.
‘Is she okay?’ I asked, my thoughts coming to life. ‘She doesn’t seem herself at all.’
‘You’ve been in police custody for five nights,’ Nancy said snidely, as though I needed reminding of the ordeal I had endured.
‘Yes,’ I replied through clenched teeth. ‘Unjustly. And when the truth comes out, everyone will realise what a massive mistake all this has been.’
She eyed me with a silent scepticism, her look managing to scorch my skin with its searing heat. ‘Really? And what truth would that be, Jenna?’
I hated her. In that moment, I felt more venom towards Nancy than I had felt towards anyone, though my life had delivered a conveyor belt of candidates worthy of my contempt. I didn’t want to feel the level of animosity that consumed me – I was too tired to be filled with such overwhelming bitterness – yet I needed to feel anger, to feel something, and it was unfortunate that Nancy was the recipient of my hostility. I knew we were not too dissimilar and that she, as I had always done, was just trying to protect her family, to keep the people she loved sheltered from things that might cause them harm, yet still the overriding wave of resentment was enough to smother any rational thought. I wasn’t the thing that might cause them harm, and this was my family, not hers.
‘I haven’t done anything wrong, Nancy.’
‘Who are you, Jenna?’
The question threw me, powerful and unexpected enough to nearly knock me from my feet.
‘You know who I am. I’m just a mother trying to do her best – you get that, don’t you? I haven’t asked for any of this. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and now I’m suffering the consequences.’
She studied me as I spoke, impassive. ‘That’s all it is? That simple?’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I don’t think anyone knows who you are, Jenna, not really. Not even Damien.’
Twenty-Five
Despite her vitriol towards me, Nancy was gracious enough to let me read with Amelia upstairs before she went to bed, without lingering at the doorway like some harbinger of doom. Once Amelia was asleep, I left and walked home. On the way, I tried Lily’s mobile again, but it went straight to voicemail. Damien hadn’t got back to me either. I wondered where he was that evening, who he was with, and tried not to let my jealousy distract me from the things I needed to do.
Back at home, I turned on the laptop and loaded the CCTV footage from the coffee shop. It had been paused in the spot where I had watched it last, and I let it run, keeping an eye on the screen as I tried Lily’s phone yet again, exasperated when I was greeted once more by the voice of the answerphone. I hung up without leaving a message and called Maisie’s mother, who answered after a few rings.
‘Louise,’ I said, ‘it’s Jenna.’
‘Oh. Right… okay.’
She had no idea what to say to me, and why should she? What exactly did you say to someone who’d just been released from police custody having been charged with wounding with intent?
‘Look,’ I said, equally unsure how the conversation should go. ‘Thanks for having Lily to stay. I don’t know how much you know, but things have been complicated here and… well, thank you. Is she with you now? Her phone’s off.’
‘She isn’t here. She didn’t come back after college – Maisie said she waited for her at the bus stop, but she never showed up and her phone went straight to voicemail.’
‘And you didn’t think to call me?’
‘I didn’t know you were out,’ she retorted, mirroring my tone, and her words filled me with instant shame. ‘I tried Damien, but his phone’s off as well.’
I bit my bottom lip and swallowed down my frustration with my husband, wondering again where the hell he was.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. I’m just worried about her. How has she seemed to you?’
‘Quiet. She hasn’t really said much. She and Maisie have
been upstairs most of the time they’ve been here – I’m just the chef and the maid.’
‘I know that feeling.’
‘Let me know when you hear from her, okay?’
Louise ended the call and I wondered whether I should phone the police. They were unlikely to do anything; Lily wasn’t missing – she had been at college that afternoon – and with everything that was going on in her life, no one would consider it suspicious her disappearing for a few hours to get a bit of time to herself.
I was working my way through the contact numbers I had for her friends’ parents when I heard the front door slam. I hurried out into the hallway to find Damien already halfway up the stairs. I followed him up to Amelia’s room, where he began opening and closing drawers, looking for something.
‘What are you doing?’
‘They let you out then?’
‘It would appear so. I thought you might have visited again.’
‘I’ve been a bit busy, you know, trying to keep what’s left of our family together.’
Except I knew that wasn’t what he’d been doing at all. From the slur in his voice, it was obvious how he’d spent most of the past five days, letting his mother care for Amelia while Lily lived with people who were little more than strangers to us.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Amelia’s medical record book. She needs it for school tomorrow, apparently – they’re having a vaccine or something.’
‘It’s not in here. It’s in our room.’
Damien followed me into our bedroom, and I opened the wardrobe, reaching up to the top shelf for one of the shoeboxes lined up there. I opened it, found the book and handed it to him.
‘Where have you been this evening?’ I asked.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Why?’
He wasn’t the same person who had sat in that interview room at the police station with me at the weekend. Something in him had changed, and I knew it wasn’t just the effects of the alcohol. For a moment, I saw in him someone else, someone I tried daily to push to the back of my mind.
‘I just thought the girls might have been your priority, that’s all. Rather than the pub.’
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans, his eyes not leaving mine as he thrust a folded piece of paper in front of me.
‘What does it say?’ I asked, not wanting to take it from him.
‘“Your marriage is a lie.”’
He threw it on the bed between us, but I didn’t need to see it to feel its repercussions.
‘Do you believe that?’
‘What?’
‘That our marriage is a lie,’ I said. ‘Is there someone else?’
Once I’d spoken the words, it felt as though a valve had been released, the pressure draining from me, making me instantly lighter. I was fearful of the answer, but I needed to know the truth. I was facing a trial, a possible custodial sentence; I couldn’t afford to waste any of my precious freedom on a man who would rather be elsewhere.
‘What?’
His face contorted, his expression one I hated. It had made an appearance only a few times, during our worst arguments, and there was something obnoxious about it, something that made me want to walk away from any further discussion.
‘You and Laura. Is there something going on between the two of you?’
He sighed and closed his eyes, leaning against the door frame as though propping himself up. When he opened his eyes with a shake of his head, he looked at me as though I was stupid.
‘Me and Laura?’
‘Ffion told me she saw you together.’
He studied my face. He knew I was lying. He and Laura had been in the coffee shop together for only a minute or two; why would Ffion bother to tell me something so inconsequential? I wasn’t even sure that Ffion knew Laura, or was aware that she was my friend. I couldn’t tell Damien that I had seen them together without admitting that I had been scouring the CCTV footage from the shop, and doing that meant an indirect confession that I was suspicious of everyone; even, it seemed, my own husband. I didn’t know who I could trust, and the feeling was more isolating than being alone.
I replayed the footage like a silent film reel in my head. What had I seen, really? Damien going into the coffee shop. Laura arriving minutes later. The two of them leaving together. That was it. Yet I knew they had been at the house together that same day, unless Lily had been lying to me. I wanted someone else to confirm that I wasn’t being paranoid, but the only other person I would have trusted with my neurotic thoughts was Amy, and where this was concerned I didn’t want her to know where my mind had taken me. There was nothing going on, I told myself. I was being ridiculous.
Damien hadn’t said anything, and I could feel the silence between us starting to feel stagnant.
‘You’re being serious, aren’t you?’ he said eventually.
‘You haven’t answered the question.’
‘There’s nothing to answer.’
‘I know you were at the coffee shop together,’ I said, letting my suspicions spill from me. ‘And I know you were both here the same day – the day the accusation against me was made. I couldn’t get hold of you, could I? Where were you, Damien? Were you with her?’
He held my gaze, defiant. ‘Yes, I was with her.’
I tried not to let the reaction that pulsed in my chest show on my face, though I knew it must have been visible. I sat down on the edge of the bed, defeated.
‘What’s the date, Jenna?’
‘What?’ I didn’t know what the date was; I was only just aware that it was a Tuesday. Being kept at the station for five days had disorientated me; my only concept of time had been waiting for the arrival of a familiar face, someone who might help me out of that place.
‘It’s the twenty-second. October,’ he added, in case I needed a reminder of what month it was.
‘And?’ I was unable to hold back my frustration. The more he talked, the more slurred his voice became, and his eyes were bleary, ringed with red circles from late nights and insufficient sleep. I knew it was my fault, all of it, but I needed him to handle this better, if only for the sake of the girls.
He shook his head and laughed; a sharp snap of a sound that was gone as soon as it appeared.
‘You forgot all about it, didn’t you?’
And then realisation crashed down on me, and my body slumped forward, elbows resting on my knees. ‘I’m sorry, Damien. I really am. With everything that’s been going on…’
The nineteenth of October was our wedding anniversary. We had been married ten years. It occurred to me then that while Damien had been sitting with me in that interview room on Saturday, he had been waiting for me to acknowledge the occasion in some way, if only with the mere mention of it.
‘I was organising a surprise party for you, for the weekend. I didn’t tell the girls – I thought it’d be a nice surprise for them too. Laura’s been helping me. It would have been on Saturday night, but you were otherwise engaged.’
His words cut through me as I realised how much I had let slip from me. I hadn’t given our anniversary a single thought, not when there were so many other things keeping my mind occupied. The truth was, I had been so eaten up with concern about Lily’s secret relationship and Damien’s increasingly distant behaviour that I had forgotten about it even before the night of the attack on Charlotte Copeland.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I suspected there was something going on and I just put two and two together.’
‘You really thought I was capable of that? An affair with one of your friends?’
‘You have been acting differently, though, Damien. And I don’t just mean since the night at the park. I mean before then – things haven’t been right between us for ages.’
His jaw had tightened at my attempt to pass the buck. ‘Yeah, my mind has been somewhere else for a while,’ he said bitterly. ‘I kept getting these strange notes, you see, things like “How well do you know your wife?” Yet I’m the
one under suspicion.’
I stood up. ‘You should have told me about them sooner, then we could have sorted it all out.’
‘And you’d have told me about this mystery bloke of Lily’s, would you? If that’s what these notes are about, you could have just spoken to me when you found out about him and saved us all the secrecy.’
‘What do you mean, “if”?’
‘You tell me, Jenna.’
Beneath my clothes, I could feel the heat of my skin. My hair was sticking to the back of my neck, slick with a sheen of sweat.
‘What were you doing in Lily’s room?’
‘What?’ His single-word response was laced with indignation.
‘When you found that bracelet. You said it was in one of her drawers. I asked you at the time what you’d been doing in her room, but you never answered.’
‘Because I wasn’t ready to mention the notes,’ he snapped. The tips of his ears had reddened. Damien rarely got angry, but when he did, this was one of the signs.
‘You thought Lily was responsible for sending them?’ I asked, hearing my voice waver on the question.
‘I didn’t know what to think, did I? But she was being secretive about something. I know why now.’
He turned and headed back downstairs, and I hurried after him, panicked that he might see the footage on my laptop. As he put on his shoes by the front door, I made no attempt to stop him from leaving the house. As on so many other occasions, he was right and I was wrong. I didn’t blame him for suspecting Lily of some involvement, not when the same idea had flitted through my own brain. When had we both grown so suspicious, and how had I become so consumed with negativity that I had forgotten our wedding anniversary? Despite all the destruction descending upon our lives, I should have clung to the good we still had. Instead, I had begun to believe Damien an unfaithful husband – a good father still, but a man whose loyalties had been swayed by another – when all that time I was the neglectful spouse.
The Accusation: An addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist Page 15