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

by Victoria Jenkins

  I pressed it another three times, but she refused to answer. Did she think I was in some way connected to Charlotte, that the past was catching up with her, ready to repeat itself? Whatever her fears, it was clear she didn’t want to return to the subject of what had happened at Oakfield Manor, and I had no choice but to respect her wishes. I had her address; I would write to her. Maybe in words, without my presence, I could make her understand just how much her help was needed.

  Or perhaps her help wasn’t needed, I thought as I walked back to the car, an air of defeat slowing my step. There was one person I had yet to talk to; one person, it seemed, who might know Charlotte better than anyone else. All I had to do was find him.

  Thirty-One

  When I got home that evening, music was drifting down the stairs and into the hallway. It was coming from Lily’s room. I couldn’t believe she was there when she had promised me she would stay with Maisie. My thoughts had taken a nightmarish turn, darkened by the long, tedious drive and the new-found knowledge that had accompanied me on my journey home. As I climbed the staircase, two steps at a time, a series of awful images filtered through my brain, visions that both frightened and disturbed me, and by the time I opened the bedroom door, I was breathless with anxiety.

  ‘Bloody hell, Mum,’ Lily said, a hand flying to her chest. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack.’

  She was sitting on her bed, her laptop at her side and an array of opened notebooks spread out on the duvet around her. She was wearing pyjamas – soft velour trousers and a T-shirt printed with the words I woke up like this, although I hoped for her sake that she hadn’t; her eyes were red-rimmed with tears, and there was mascara smudged beneath them.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘College work,’ she said, gesturing at the notebooks as though the answer was obvious.

  ‘No, I mean why aren’t you at Maisie’s like we agreed?’

  ‘Fuck Maisie,’ she muttered beneath her breath.

  I sat down on the bed, managing to find a corner that wasn’t covered in stationery. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  I raised an eyebrow; we were long past the stage of not talking.

  ‘She said a couple of things, that’s all.’

  ‘Things about…?’

  Lily hesitated. ‘About you.’

  I nodded. I had known it was going to happen; it had only been a matter of time.

  ‘Don’t make me repeat them.’

  I shook my head. Though I wanted to know what Maisie had said, a greater part of me knew that ignoring it was the better option, for Lily and for me. We both had enough to deal with.

  ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’

  She smiled, and I rubbed her arm, trying to offer a reassurance that I still didn’t quite believe in myself.

  When I went back downstairs, it struck me how unnaturally quiet the house was without Damien and Amelia there. The pain of missing them was like a piercing through my heart; everywhere I looked there were reminders of the life we had lived and were at risk of losing. Amelia’s paint set was still open at the end of the kitchen table, her attempts at abstract art dried on the paper. One of Damien’s many pairs of trainers were still at the back door, their soles caked in mud that had flaked onto the tiles.

  There were dirty dishes stacked in cold murky water in the sink, and a pile of ironing far taller than the basket it was in waited near the door of the utility room. There were so many things I might have occupied myself with to try to keep my mind from what had happened that day, but I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about getting any of them done. All I wanted to do was sleep; sleep, and have my family back, their noise and colours and love surrounding me with the warm reassurance that had been missing from my life for what seemed like an age.

  I made tea and took it up to Lily. I put the mug on her bedside table and glanced at her laptop; she closed it hastily but wasn’t quick enough for me to miss what she’d been looking at: a news report relating to the attack on Charlotte Copeland.

  ‘Stop torturing yourself,’ I told her.

  ‘People shouldn’t be allowed to comment.’

  I sighed with the realisation of what Lily had been doing. MC2020… Matthew Cartwright? I doubted ‘Matthew’ himself would have stood up for me, and could therefore only assume that the person behind the words had been Lily.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’ she said, looking up from the screen.

  ‘Defending me online. But I don’t want you to fight my battles for me, okay?’

  I took my own drink to my bedroom, trying not to let my eyes linger on the wardrobe, its half-open door offering a glimpse of the bare space that had once housed Damien’s clothes. I put the mug on the bedside table and took my phone from my pocket to check the time, then I drew the curtains and lay on the bed, shutting my eyes and trying to clear my mind of thoughts.

  My phone began to ring. Nancy’s name flashed up at me from the screen. ‘Jenna,’ she said, not waiting for me to speak. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At home. What’s happened?’

  The flurry of her words had sent me into a panic, and thoughts of Amelia crashed into my head. Something had happened: she was unwell; she had been hurt.

  ‘It’s Damien,’ she said, her voice now lowered to a whisper. ‘I don’t know what to do, Jenna, this isn’t like him at all. He’s come home covered in blood.’

  I entered Nancy’s house through the back door, which I knew she would have left open for me. She was in the kitchen, standing near the kettle, two cups of tea that had been left to brew until the water had turned nearly black left forgotten on the worktop in front of her. Her grey bob was pinned back from her face, and when she turned to me, I noticed the swelling around her knuckles, brought on by the intermittent arthritis that had plagued her for years.

  ‘Amelia in bed?’ I asked.

  She nodded. ‘He’s through there,’ she said, gesturing to the closed door of the living room. ‘He won’t speak to me – I thought maybe you could get some sense out of him.’

  I didn’t know why she thought Damien would want to confide in me, not when he had chosen to move himself and our daughter out of our home, as far away from me as he could reasonably take himself. Whatever had happened, I assumed it was serious; Nancy would never usually ask for my help with anything, and would have struggled in silence rather than admit that I might be able to succeed where she had failed.

  ‘Is he hurt?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to be. Looks as though whoever he fought with came off worse.’

  ‘Shall I take one of those through for him?’

  Nancy went to the fridge to get milk. ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  She pulled a tea bag from one of the mugs before adding milk and passing me the drink. I carried it into the living room, bracing myself for whatever might await me there.

  Damien was sitting on the sofa with his back to me, his attention focused on the television even though the sound was muted. On the screen, a plastic surgeon was using a black pen to draw lines beneath a woman’s eyes.

  ‘Didn’t think this would be your cup of tea,’ I said, stepping forward and holding out the mug. ‘No pun intended.’

  The attempt at light-heartedness given everything that had happened was enough to make me cringe as soon as I’d spoken. Beside me, I was sure I saw Damien flinch. As he took the tea from me, I noticed the blood that stained his T-shirt in thick flecks. Nancy had exaggerated on the phone when she had said he’d come home covered, though it was more than enough to justify concern. The side of his face was scratched, as though someone had tried to fight him off in self-defence.

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘If you’d put an end to it like you said you had, I wouldn’t have needed to do it.’

  I closed my eyes and tilted my face to the ceiling, feeling a swirl of headache behind my eyes. Lily’s boyfrien
d – or not, as she had so frequently claimed. How the hell had Damien managed to find him?

  ‘It was already over,’ I said, trying to calm the anger that was growing inside me. What if Damien was arrested for assault? What would happen to Amelia then, with both parents facing trial for violent offences? I had no control over what was happening to me, but Damien had made a choice. For once, it was the wrong one.

  ‘How did you find him?’

  He still hadn’t looked up at me, his eyes fixed to the muted television screen. ‘I followed Lily. Wasn’t that difficult really – I don’t know what the hell you and Detective Amy were playing at.’

  I could hear the slur in his voice; he had been drinking again. I felt my anger evaporate into something else, something more akin to confusion. Had he followed Lily before or after she had seen ‘Matthew’ with another woman? Surely she wasn’t still chasing him after knowing he’d been lying to her, though nothing seemed impossible any more.

  ‘Who the fuck is Maria?’

  My heart stuttered in my chest, my breath failing me for a moment. ‘What?’

  ‘Maria. The little prick said he’d never touched Maria, something like that. Then he backtracked, saying Lily, he’d never touched Lily, like he’d forgotten what her name was. Makes you wonder how many other girls he’s been messing about with, the pervert.’

  I felt bile rise in the back of my throat, tasting its acidic tang as it spread to my tongue. Trying to distract myself from my thoughts, my eyes found the framed photographs on the mantelpiece, lingering on the large school portrait of Amelia that had been taken at the end of the previous spring term, then on the smaller image of Lily just behind it, partially out of view. Nancy had never made a secret of the fact that she didn’t consider Lily family in the way Amelia was, and I had been expected to accept her favouritism, as well as the difficult questions from the girls that inevitably followed her every careless comment and intentional rejection.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, trying to swallow back the sick feeling. ‘It does, doesn’t it.’ I glanced around the room, hoping to see Damien’s phone lying around somewhere. I was in luck; he had left it on the dining room table, on top of a pile of unopened post.

  ‘I don’t think they’ve slept together,’ I told him, and this time I definitely saw him flinch.

  ‘Like you’d know anything,’ he replied bitterly. ‘If you’d managed to do something before now, it wouldn’t have come to this, would it?’

  His attention was back on the TV as I moved to the table and slipped his phone into my jacket pocket. He didn’t turn as I left the room and went upstairs to the bathroom.

  With the door shut firmly behind me, I unlocked the phone. Once in, I went to maps and clicked on the search bar, waiting for a list of previously searched locations. The last was a local postcode, which I copied on to my own phone.

  Thirty-Two

  It took me less than an hour to find Jacob Perry. I had known what to expect of the street when I got there – I’d searched for it online – but what I hadn’t been expecting was the calmness that had fallen over me when I eventually found out which number he lived at, any fears for my own safety replaced by a single-minded determination to uncover the truth. The third person I asked was able to tell me where he lived, though she hadn’t recognised the name and I’d had to show her a photograph of Jacob before she realised who I was looking for. It seemed he had kept a low profile since moving there, and I knew exactly why that was. Without meaning to, Damien had told me far more than any of my previous attempts at investigation had revealed.

  When Jacob opened the door and saw me there, he tried to close it quickly. I shoved a foot in the way and slammed my body against the wood, using everything I had to let him know I wasn’t going anywhere. His face was bruised, his right eye blackened with a dark circle that might from a distance have made him look as though he was wearing a patch over it. I had never known Damien to be aggressive towards anyone, and the level of violence he was capable of came as a surprise. He had always treated Lily as though she was his own, but the extent of that love had perhaps sometimes escaped me.

  I wondered whether Jacob had already been to the police, and whether he planned to press charges against Damien. While I’d been sitting in the car considering the possibility, another thought had occurred to me. Perhaps he wouldn’t. Jacob Perry didn’t like to press charges, or he hadn’t against Charlotte, at least. Just what hold did this woman have over him?

  He was wearing dark tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt that looked as though it had never encountered an iron. He gave the impression that my knocking at the door had forced him to get out of bed, and as the thought crossed my mind, I felt grateful that I was sure of Lily’s whereabouts. He knew who I was as soon as he laid eyes on me, and I recognised him too. I hadn’t been mistaken about the fact that I had seen him at the coffee shop before, not just on the night that he had gone there with Lily. I could recall serving him maybe a month or two earlier, making small talk while he waited for his coffee; he had given me a smile as though he was just any other customer passing through the place on his way to somewhere else, and yet the whole time he must have been watching me, and I had been oblivious to it.

  ‘I know you planted that knife in my shop,’ I said, fixing my eyes on his face. ‘I could have the police here within minutes.’

  I was bluffing, of course – the police were as likely to take notice of me at this stage as they had at any other – but the threat seemed to work. He eased his hold on the door and I pulled my foot away. ‘Is Charlotte here?’

  He shook his head, though I didn’t believe him. I knew that by entering that house I could be walking into a trap, but I had no other way of finding out the truth. Above all else, this was the only way of making sure he stayed away from my daughter. I thought about the knife I had slipped into my pocket before I left home, feeling reassured by its presence. If I was forced to, I believed I would use it without a second thought.

  The house wasn’t what I’d been expecting. It was neat and tidy, well furnished, and I wondered how long he had been staying there. I had no idea where he came from and could only guess that he had followed Charlotte here, blindly accepting her every word as it seemed he might always have done. He was younger than her, my guess was by about five years, and I was beginning to suspect a relationship based on something very different to what usually brought partners together.

  My suspicions that he wasn’t living there alone were confirmed when I followed him into the living room. There was a pair of glasses on the mantelpiece, red-framed, and by the door to the kitchen a pair of women’s shoes. A bag was sitting on the floor near the end of the sofa, and his eyes followed mine as they lingered on it.

  ‘I thought you said she wasn’t here?’

  ‘She isn’t.’

  ‘She lives here with you, though?’

  Jacob said nothing. He shifted from one foot to the other anxiously, his manner twitchy, his eyes darting between me and the floor as though he was waiting for an opportunity to make a bid for escape.

  ‘Does she know you’ve been messing with a seventeen-year-old girl?’ I gestured to the bruising around his right eye. ‘I suppose she does now, anyway.’

  I was skirting around the truth of what I already knew, wanting him to offer it to me first. Of course Charlotte knew what he’d been doing. She was the one who’d put him up to it.

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘What’s not like that?’

  I sat down on the sofa, feeling an unexpected confidence. Jacob was like a nervous little boy who’d been summoned to the head teacher’s office about a playground scrap; any fears I’d had about being under threat in the presence of this man had gone. I wondered just how easy it had been for a woman like Charlotte to manipulate him.

  ‘Charlotte… I mean, Lily… None of it. It’s not like that.’

  ‘Not. Like. What?’

  He shook his head with frustration, then sat in the chair op
posite me. He squeezed his hands together, still twitchy, and I wondered just how deep his problems ran. Was he under the influence of some sort of drug? I couldn’t bring myself to care too much; all I wanted was for him and Charlotte to stay as far away from my family as I could get them.

  ‘I never touched her. I told your husband that.’

  ‘And I should just believe you?’

  ‘You can believe what you want. It’s the truth.’

  ‘So if it’s not “like that”, then what were you doing hanging around a teenage girl? You gave her that bracelet, didn’t you? What do you expect us to think?’

  He was still twisting his hands in his lap, his foot now tapping to the beat of some imaginary sound. What had Lily seen in this man beyond the first glance? I had thought her too smart to fall for a good-looking face, though why I’d assumed that, I didn’t know. I reminded myself that I had done just the same once, when I was older than her – old enough perhaps to have known better. I could remember only too well that feeling of wanting to help someone, of thinking that if I could be the one to save him, I would be rewarded with someone who loved me as much as I loved him.

  I watched Jacob squirm under my scrutiny, confident that his declaration was likely to be true, though it might be the only thing that was. This wasn’t about sex, not when Charlotte had orchestrated the whole thing. She had sent him to get close to Lily in a bid to draw her away from her family. To draw her away from me.

  ‘Charlotte put you up to this, didn’t she? I know who she is, Jacob.’ I tried to still the shaking in my hands, hoping the lie wouldn’t make itself visible.

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ he said, finally looking up from his hands.

  ‘So tell me.’

  I could see him glancing at the door that led through to the kitchen, and I wondered whether he was going to attempt to flee. How things had turned, I thought; this man who had helped terrorise me and my family was now sitting here in front of me, apparently uneasy at the power I might hold over him. What did he think I knew? Whatever he suspected of me, I was mostly in the dark, but he didn’t need to know that.