I pulled the knife from my pocket. ‘It was a bit like this one, wasn’t it? Did you do it – did you stab her? Or did she do it to herself? She’s tried to kill herself before, hasn’t she?’
Jacob’s face paled. I couldn’t be sure whether it was at the sight of the knife or because he realised now that I was prepared to force the truth from him if necessary. And that I wasn’t going anywhere until I did.
‘Did you befriend Lily to get access to the coffee shop?’ I asked, knowing what the answer to the question was. Charlotte had planned this, all of it; she didn’t care about using Lily or Jacob as collateral, only about getting to me. ‘It was you in the park with her that night, wasn’t it? I saw you running away.’
The more time I’d had to think, the more complicated things were becoming. Charlotte was mentally unstable, with a history of self-harm. She had a history of hurting others, too. Had she gone to the park that night with the intention of stabbing me, only to change her mind and turn the knife on herself?
‘I went there to try to change her mind,’ he said, his voice weak. ‘I swear… I had no idea she’d do what she did.’
‘But you followed her instructions anyway, like a good little pet.’
I made no effort to keep the resentment from my voice. Between them, Charlotte and Jacob had attempted to ruin my life – the lives of my family – and whether he had been coerced by her or not seemed irrelevant.
‘Did you set fire to my car?’
He looked up sharply, meeting my eye. ‘What? No.’
I already believed him. Something in his face had altered; there was outrage – fear, even – at the suggestion that he might be involved. I wasn’t sure he was even aware of the incident.
‘Someone came to my house, smashed my car window, poured petrol in and set it on fire,’ I told him bluntly, gauging his reaction. He was shaking his head as I spoke, but there was no need for his protest. Charlotte was the dangerous one.
‘I had nothing to do with that. I would never––’ He cut himself short. ‘I just wouldn’t,’ he added. His expression had changed, morphing from panic to anger.
I stood and stepped closer to him, holding the knife in front of me. I saw his eyes widen with fear, and though to him it must have seemed as though I was capable of anything, I could feel my heart thumping in my chest, my brain questioning what I was doing. I was terrified, but I couldn’t allow this man to see it.
‘She made a rape accusation against you, didn’t she?’
‘How do you know about that?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Why did you let her get away with it?’
Jacob opened his mouth to say something, but stopped himself before he spoke. Watching the fear play out in his eyes, I realised I wasn’t scared of this man. I was terrified of what Charlotte was capable of, but Jacob was little more than her puppet. I stepped closer still.
‘I’ve been charged with wounding with intent. My family has moved out of our home because it isn’t safe. I’m facing prison for something I didn’t do, and it seems to me that Charlotte is responsible for all of it, so you’re going to tell me why you’re doing what she tells you to, and you’re going to do it now.’
I jabbed the knife at him, too close to his face for his liking. He raised his hands in self-defence. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said desperately, holding his palms outstretched in an act of surrender. ‘Don’t, okay?’
‘Tell me.’
‘You don’t know anything about Charlotte,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘Not like I do. She’s…’ He stopped, his eyes boring into mine, pleading with me. He was desperate and pathetic.
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What hold has she got over you, Jacob? What does she know?’
I stood there as he told me, his eyes resting on the knife in my hand. As his story was laid out before me, his tragic childhood and his disrupted adult life, I wondered if I should be feeling some pity for him, but there was nothing other than the contempt I felt towards Charlotte. She was a parasite, a woman who preyed on the weak and clung to every vulnerability she could find in order to exploit it.
‘She’s the closest thing to family I’ve got,’ he said, once his admission had reached its conclusion.
My grip around the knife had turned my knuckles white. ‘I think you’d be better off alone then, don’t you?’
Silence fell over us for a moment before he spoke again, this time in more measured tones, as if unburdening himself of his sad life’s story had unshackled him.
‘She might have a hold over me, but she’s got one over you as well, hasn’t she, Jenna? She knows my secret, but she knows yours too.’
Thirty-Three
When I got home, Lily was in the kitchen. She was talking on her mobile phone and I stood quietly in the hall for a moment, trying to catch snippets of the conversation. I grasped little, though it was easy enough to hear how upset she was. I was caught by surprise when she opened the kitchen door to find me standing there, and she ended the call quickly, telling whoever she’d been speaking to that she had to go.
Her face was unusually pale, and her dark hair hung limply about her face. She looked ghostly in the half-light of the hallway, something other-worldly about her, and for a moment it felt as though I didn’t know her at all. That I had never known her.
‘You knew what he’d done, didn’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Damien!’
I was painfully aware of the knife resting in my pocket, the bulk of my thickest winter coat keeping it concealed while it waited to be returned to the block on the kitchen worktop. I’d had no intention of using it when I’d taken it from the kitchen, though the things I’d heard that afternoon might have been enough to make me resort to behaviour I once thought myself incapable of. I wondered whether Lily knew. Had she spoken to Jacob, or had she seen him? Did she know his real name yet? Did she know that I had been to see him?
‘I only knew after it had happened.’
She screamed with frustration, the sound piercing enough to hurt my ears. ‘I’m seventeen,’ she reminded me, the words spat through gritted teeth. ‘I can sort my own problems out, okay?’
‘I didn’t know he was going there. The first I heard of it was when Nancy called me, telling me he’d come home with blood on him. I’m not responsible for what he does, all right?’
Lily winced at the mention of blood, and I realised that whatever she suspected him of and whatever he had done to her, she still harboured feelings for Jacob. I shouldn’t have been surprised by it, not when I remembered my own feelings towards her father. For months I had clung to the hope that he would change, that the version of him that became apparent once we were married wasn’t really who he’d always been beneath the charming exterior and the seductive smile. I convinced myself that he needed me, and that I was the only one who could restore him to the man I had fallen in love with. But then I had been forced to admit that that man had never existed.
‘Damien loves you,’ I said, keeping my voice calm, trying to defuse the situation. ‘I’m not justifying what he’s done, but he’s been worried about you. Whatever’s happened, all he wants is to keep you safe.’
‘Matthew doesn’t want anything to do with me any more,’ she said, brushing past me as she headed for the front door, her phone still clutched in her hand. ‘So you’ve both got what you wanted.’
She grabbed her jacket and I followed her outside into the evening air, calling after her as she hurried away from me. Nothing could have been further from the truth. None of this was what I had wanted.
I watched her turn the corner at the end of the street before going back into the house. In the kitchen, I took the knife from my pocket, putting it on the worktop in front of me. I wondered again whether Charlotte had always planned to stab herself. Why hurt me physically, a wound that might heal given time, when she had the potential to cause much greater and longer-term suffering? Jacob had fled knowing he couldn’t change her mind, perhaps by then realising that w
hatever disturbance resided in Charlotte was fixed there with a permanence that neither he nor anyone else could alter.
‘What the fuck is this, Jenna?’
I had been so lost in my own thoughts that I hadn’t heard the front door, nor had I heard Damien come into the kitchen. My hand flew to the knife still sitting on the worktop in front of me, and I spun around, the tip of its blade hovering just inches from his chest. His eyes widened as he looked down at the glint of steel between us.
‘Shit,’ I said, lowering my hand and leaning back against the worktop. ‘You scared the life out of me.’
Damien’s gaze rested on the knife until I had returned it to the block behind me. When I turned back to him, he thrust a photograph into my hand. Tinged brown around the edges, as though it had been damaged by time, it showed a young woman sitting on a sofa holding a baby wrapped in a light blanket, wisps of dark hair escaping from the edges of a knitted hat, its eyes shut in peaceful sleep. The woman was smiling, but there was an emptiness behind her eyes that belied the tilt of her mouth, something more than just the usual exhaustion of those early days of motherhood. I knew her face – I had seen her photograph used in news reports – and I had been expecting to see what I was confronted with then. I should have seen it earlier, but I had been blind to what was right in front of me.
‘Turn it over,’ he instructed.
On the back were the words Rebecca and Maria, March 2002.
‘You need to tell me what’s going on,’ Damien said. ‘And don’t try and bullshit me any more, Jenna. I’m sick of all these lies.’
I stepped past him and dropped onto one of the chairs at the kitchen table, feeling my life crumble around me, bracing my shoulders as though the ceiling might collapse and leave me crushed beneath it. A part of me wished it would. Anything would have been less painful than what I was about to have to do. I had known this moment was coming, but I had wanted it to come from me, in my own time, in my own way. Not like this. Not forced by her.
I could hear the blood pounding in my ears, as though I was swimming in it. Though I had tried to convince myself that those notes Damien had shown me referred to Lily’s mystery boyfriend, there was a part of me – a part I had attempted to suppress for so long – that knew the past was going to catch up with me and that the truth couldn’t be kept hidden forever.
‘I’ll tell you everything,’ I said, my voice faltering, ‘but you need to hear the whole story. Please promise me you’ll hear me out.’
He couldn’t promise me anything, not when he had no idea what the story might entail. Perhaps he didn’t want to hear the whole of it, and I couldn’t blame him.
I took a deep breath, wondering whether he would just walk away, whether these would be the last words he would ever hear from me.
‘Maria is Lily. She’s not my daughter.’
Thirty-Four
When I was fifteen and midway through my GCSE studies, I got pregnant by the first boy I ever had sex with. I hadn’t been particularly attracted to him – I didn’t even like him very much – but he had shown me attention and I had clung to it, desperate to feel an affection that had been lacking elsewhere in my life. There wasn’t much about sex that I understood at the time, but just knowing that my parents would have been appalled by what I was doing was enough to make me want to do it again and again, which we did every Tuesday and Thursday for the duration of the summer holidays, when my parents thought I was at a science camp.
It took me a long time even after that to learn that sex and love were two very different things, and that the attention I had craved from my parents could never be replaced by a quick fumble that inevitably led to nothing but disappointment and, quite often, an unshakeable sense of shame. In those years that followed, I moved from boy to boy, from man to man, never looking for anything more than a momentary respite from the demons that plagued me and the self-loathing I carried inside me like an extra lung. I didn’t care about my reputation; I didn’t care too much about myself. I was consumed with thoughts of what had been lost, and the unpredictable void that had become my future; a future that had been designed by my parents but contained nothing I wanted.
We were only a few weeks into the new school year after the summer I lost my virginity when I realised my period was late. They had started eighteen months earlier, and during that time had been so predictable that I was able to forecast the date I would begin my next, never missing an opportunity to use it as an excuse to get out of PE lessons or mixed swimming with the boys. I skipped lunch for a few days until I had saved enough money to buy a cheap kit from a pharmacy in the next town – I couldn’t get one closer to home for fear of being seen by someone who knew me, or worse, knew my parents – and the following day I sat on one of the toilets in the science block, knickers around my ankles and head in my hands as I waited for the stick that was resting on top of my rucksack to determine my fate.
My first thought was my parents. Whatever else happened, they were going to kill me, and this thought took hold so firmly that I began to picture my father gripping my throat and squeezing the life out of me until both I and the foetus that was going to demolish my future life’s plans were removed from the equation and could no longer cause them the unspeakable shame that would be brought about by a pregnant teenage daughter. I couldn’t tell them, and yet there was no one I felt close enough to confide in – no teacher I could speak to or friend I could share my secret with, and the boy who’d got me pregnant had already moved on to someone else. In those weeks that followed, I had never felt more isolated. I went to school, I went home; I stayed upstairs in my room using the excuse of revision for barely showing my face elsewhere in the house. And then came the day when – despite my best efforts to keep it hidden from her – my mother caught me being sick, and everything was thrown out into the open.
She made me promise I wouldn’t tell my father, which I’d had no intention of doing anyway. Then she booked an appointment at an abortion clinic. There was no conversation about it – no question of what I wanted to do or consideration of alternatives; with one phone call, my mother made a decision that would come to shape the rest of my life. By the day of the first appointment, something inside me had already died. The pre-tests came and went with little interruption to my life, nothing that might draw attention to me or arouse the suspicion of my father. The procedure was uncomfortable, but there was no pain afterwards, other than that which grew in my head and my chest and came to reside there like dormant tumours.
Years later, and with a teenage daughter of my own, I understood why my mother hadn’t wanted me to go through with the pregnancy. I was able to see things from her perspective: I was so young, had barely started my own life, and the prospect of a baby was overwhelming and scary and – yes, for her – shameful. Had Lily come home one day and told me she was pregnant, I might have experienced many of the fears my own mother had had for me, and yet there was one thing I was certain of: I would never have shunned her in the way my mother shunned me. I would never have made her feel the way my mother made me feel.
And yet in some ways, at least, I must have. I had inadvertently pushed her into the arms of Jacob Perry, with Lily clinging to his attention in the same way I had done to that boy at fifteen, and then again almost seven years later to Nikolas Lanza.
I had met Nikolas in January 2003, while working in a café close to the student house in which I lived. I was in the fourth year of a medical degree, and my parents hadn’t wanted me to work, adamant that it would only prove an unwelcome distraction from my studies. Money had never been an issue for them – my mother was a consultant anaesthetist and my father was a GP – but although both were successful professionals, it always seemed that neither was fully satisfied; that their perceived failings were something that my own career should go on to correct. They made it clear they would continue to support me financially as long as I followed their wishes, but I worked regardless, needing the break from studies and an outlet through whic
h I could engage with people other than those I lived with.
I was taken in by Nikolas the moment I met him, by the beautiful face and the beautiful accent, but even during that very first encounter it was Lily – Maria – that I was most enchanted by. Her dark curls strayed from the top of the bobble hat she was wearing, and when I passed her the beaker she had dropped from her pram, her chubby little hands reached out to me as though it was me she wanted. To Nikolas, it must have seemed obvious early on that I would be easy prey. I hated the course I was on, I disliked the people I lived with and the house we shared; I wore my misery like an accessory, and it made luring me into his web of lies all the easier. The truth was, I wanted to be taken away from my life. For years, I had craved the possibility of a future that had been stolen from me by my parents, and Nikolas offered me the very thing that had been lost. I would have done it all again without changing a thing if it had meant keeping Lily.
Thirty-Five
The silence that lay between us was deafening, and in the noise of it I could hear the life we had built together crumbling to ruin. There was blood rushing in my ears, the sound of my own pulse thudding like a drumbeat at my temples, and I felt sick at the thought of everything that was about to disintegrate in front of me.
At first, Damien’s reaction was to absent himself, as though he hadn’t heard what I’d said. He didn’t move; his expression showed no sign of changing.
‘Say something. Please.’
He sat down at the table opposite me. ‘I’m just waiting for the punchline.’
The Accusation: An addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist Page 20