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

by Victoria Jenkins

  She was beautiful, he told me. But she had this dark side. It was as though a cloud rested over her, and it darkened everything. When Maria was born, things quickly got worse. She was diagnosed with post-natal depression. Her mother had suffered with it too. She killed herself when Rebecca was thirteen.

  Rebecca’s struggles had been documented in the media reports of her death, which made no secret of her mother’s suicide, nor of Rebecca’s own battle with post-natal depression. Doctors’ reports showed that she had attended the surgery seeking help with her sleeplessness and anxiety, and the more I heard of her tragic story, the greater my sympathy for Nikolas became.

  I already knew how she had died. I had read a news report about her suicide, which had detailed how she had jumped from the balcony of the fifth-floor apartment she shared with her husband Nikolas in Larnaca, having moved her life there to be with him.

  Charlotte’s right hand was clasped around the steering wheel, her left still holding the knife. She kept meeting my eye in the mirror, waiting for me to speak.

  ‘I know,’ I said quietly, giving her what she wanted to hear. ‘And yes, I knew what he’d done. But only when it was too late.’

  Thirty-Nine

  On the night he died, Nikolas had been out drinking. He was supposed to be looking after Maria while I worked; as with so many other things, I found out too late that his word meant nothing, and that more often than not he left her with a friend, one of the many women it seemed he was able to manipulate to his advantage. I was working as a waitress in a Bristol restaurant three nights a week, with a second job at weekends, trying to earn enough money to cover the rent on the damp-riddled bedsit we reluctantly referred to as home, but we were never going to do any better while Nikolas was busy drinking away the little that was left over. He had persisted in nagging me to contact my parents to ask for money, but my relationship with them had died the day I had married him – in what I realised later was an impulsive act of defiance and rebellion – and I would rather have worked myself into the ground than crawled back to them begging them to rescue me from the mess I had got myself into.

  When I returned to the bedsit after work, Nikolas was shoving clothes into an opened suitcase that lay on the bed. The place was a mess, toys and dirty washing strewn over any available surface, and the cold air carried the stale smell of whisky I had come to loathe.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘We’re leaving.’

  This wasn’t the first time it had happened. We had already fled from two other addresses, and I was starting to wonder if this would be my life now.

  ‘Why?’

  He didn’t answer me.

  ‘It feels as though we’re on the run all the time.’

  ‘There’s nothing here for us. All you’ve done since we got here is complain, and now you’re making a fuss about moving somewhere new. There’s no pleasing you, is there?’

  ‘I just don’t understand why we have to go now, right this minute. What’s the hurry?’

  He grabbed me by my top, yanking me towards him. His face was just inches from mine, and it was then that I smelled alcohol on his breath, sharp and sour. ‘Just for once, do as you’re fucking told, okay?’

  I was scared, and he knew it. There was something sinister in the way he looked at me then, some smug satisfaction that seemed to come with the knowledge that I would do anything he told me to because I was too fearful of the consequences if I didn’t. Standing in the bedsit that evening, watching Nikolas prepare to upend our lives yet again, I realised how isolated from everyone else I was, and that it was entirely my own doing. I had cut myself off from my parents, severing our relationship in a bid to escape the authority they had exerted over me, and yet I had fallen into the control of someone else, moving from a stifling situation to one that was potentially dangerous. I had been so desperate to prove my independence, to assert myself as a grown-up who could make her own decisions, yet I had fallen into a trap from which I couldn’t see a way out.

  Nikolas never admitted why he was so desperate to leave that night, just as he had always avoided addressing the reasons for our previous moves. I could only assume later that he had heard from Charlotte and that she had found out where we were. I knew that Maria’s mother had a sister; Nikolas had told me that she and her father lived in France, where he had moved with his job after the girls’ mother had committed suicide. It was where Rebecca had been living when she had gone on holiday with her sister to Cyprus – the holiday that would change the course of her life – and as such, I believed it was where her remaining family had stayed.

  Charlotte was never going to stop looking for Maria, but running from her wasn’t about protecting his child; it was about protecting himself, something else I didn’t learn until it was too late. She knew what he was and what he had done; she just needed an opportunity to prove it.

  I snapped myself from memories of the past and focused on the darkened blurs that passed outside the window of Charlotte’s car, trying to work out where we were and where she might be taking me. I had the same feeling then as I’d had all those years ago with Nikolas behind the wheel, and though I tried to remain in the present, I was flung back to that night once again.

  ‘Slow down, Nikolas, please.’

  ‘Are you scared?’ His voice was soft and taunting, his face lit with his pleasure at finding amusement in my fear.

  ‘I just want us to get to Maria safely.’

  ‘One dead mother, two dead mothers… what’s the difference?’

  I remember the feeling that engulfed me then. When I looked at Nikolas, I saw nothing of the man I had met in that café almost two years earlier. The truth was, the memory of that person had already faded, replaced by the man he had become following our wedding day – a controlling, coercive husband who had tried to convince me that I couldn’t survive without him. I imagined he had done the same to Rebecca.

  ‘Don’t say stupid things like that.’

  His hand flew to my neck and the car swerved towards the pavement. I had lost all sense of where we were; I barely knew Bristol, and I had no idea where Maria had been taken.

  ‘That bitch had it coming, the same as you.’

  I don’t remember what I felt in those moments that followed. I might describe numbness, or a taste of bile or sickness rising in a swell from my stomach, but the truth is my mind went blank, as though every thought and every feeling was momentarily erased, and I was capable of nothing. I had married a murderer. Rebecca hadn’t jumped from that balcony. Nikolas had pushed her.

  My thoughts collided, everything I had thought I’d known changing shape and texture in front of my eyes, which were swimming with the darkness of the night and the shadows that raced past the car as Nikolas’s driving became faster and more erratic. I was living the wrong life. I should never have been there. There was a little girl who needed me; her mother dead, her father the killer.

  He had confessed his crime to me, which I realised meant only one thing: he wanted the same for me. When I grabbed that wheel, I did so knowing it was me or him.

  Forty

  ‘He told me that she had killed herself.’

  Charlotte shook her head. ‘That’s what he told everyone.’

  ‘And everyone else believed it too.’ I had run internet searches on Rebecca, as anyone else in my position might have done, and hadn’t thought to question what I read there, not until the night I saw him for what he really was. I had swallowed his lies without question, never wanting to see anything but a good man caring alone for a vulnerable child whose life had faced the most tragic of beginnings – an unlikely duo who needed me as much as I needed them. I fell in love with Maria, with the softness of her skin and the smell of her fine dark hair; she was everything my own child might have been had I been given the chance to meet her.

  Within weeks of our wedding day, however, it started to become apparent that Nikolas didn’t love his daughter as much as I did, nor as much as he had seemed t
o when we had first met. He barely spent any time with her, and I quickly came to realise that I was little more than a glorified babysitter, and that he had chosen me with this very role in mind. I didn’t care; in fact, it seemed that the more he pushed Maria away, the closer she grew to me, and I soon loved her far more than I had ever loved anyone.

  ‘Please, Charlotte, you must believe me. It’s the truth. He told me that your sister had suffered from depression, and that after Lily arrived, she couldn’t cope. I pitied him. He was charming and convincing, and all the other things Rebecca must have fallen for too. He preyed on both of us.’

  ‘Her name is not Lily,’ Charlotte said through gritted teeth. Her hands tightened around the wheel, and when I glanced at the speedometer, I saw that it was pushing eighty. We were nearing Brecon now, the road narrowing and growing darker as the trees on either side became taller. ‘Her name is Maria. She was named after our mother. And don’t even try to suggest that you are anything like my sister. She would never have stolen another woman’s child.’

  I felt sick at the sound of her words, and at their echo in my brain. Try as I might, I could not avoid the truth. I had stolen a child. Everything I had tried to run from over the past fifteen years was there with me in that car, my guilt surrounding me, inescapable.

  ‘I didn’t steal her,’ I said, though even to my own ears the words sounded pathetic. ‘Nikolas and I were married – we’d done everything legally. Both Lily’s parents… both Maria’s parents were dead. I was the only mother she’d known, and I did what I could to protect her. I’ve only ever tried to give her as normal a life as possible. I know what Nikolas did to your sister, Charlotte – I saw what he was really like, once it was too late to do anything about it. She was a victim, but so was I; you’ve got to see that.’

  I feared that no matter how I worded it – no matter how many different ways I tried to make her see the similarities between Rebecca and me – I would remain nothing but the evil stepmother, the woman who had torn her niece from her remaining biological family.

  ‘You are nothing. Rebecca should be here now. You should be dead.’

  ‘I love Lily,’ I said, desperately trying to find some common ground with which I might be able to reason with her. I knew in my heart that I was fighting a lost cause – that Charlotte was too intent on revenge to even consider my circumstances – but somehow I had to try to save myself from whatever she had planned for me. ‘Maria,’ I corrected myself again, not wanting to anger her further. ‘I have always loved her like my own; I’ve only ever tried to do what was best for her.’

  ‘But you knew I existed, didn’t you? You knew she had family, yet you chose to take her away from me.’

  ‘Do you think you could have done any better? I know about you, Charlotte. I know about the Oakfield Manor Clinic.’

  The car swerved towards a tree as her head turned sharply, her eyes blazing like wildfire. She had already decided that tonight was the night all this would come to an end. There was no explaining why I’d done what I’d done; no convincing her that I had tried to do what was best for Lily.

  ‘That’s where you met Jacob, isn’t it?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You used him, didn’t you? You both knew what it was like to lose a sister – you used his grief to form a bond with him. I know about the fire that killed his sister. I know he started it.’ Charlotte’s head whipped towards me again. No one else had ever been trusted with Jacob’s darkest secret; no one other than Charlotte. She had never believed he would tell another person, least of all me.

  I remembered him sitting in that chair at their house, his admission falling from his lips as though finally being able to confess to another human being had come as a relief to him. He had been six years old, his sister just three. He had been playing with a lighter his uncle had left lying around, trying to set fire to the stubbed-out cigarette ends in the glass ashtray by the side of the bed in his parents’ spare bedroom. His sister had been taking a nap in the bedroom next door, and when the blaze spread, no one had been able to reach her.

  ‘You’ve exploited him, haven’t you? What did you do – tell him he needed to follow your every instruction or you’d go to the police? Is that why you accused him of rape, just to prove the power you had over him?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘You want the truth?’ I goaded. ‘Yes, I knew you existed, and yes, I knew you were looking for Lily. But I knew she was better off with me – she was safer with me than she ever would be with you. And I was right, wasn’t I? You’re unwell, Charlotte. You need help. Who would stab themselves like you did – do you think that’s a normal thing to do?’

  She had started to shake now, her anger rising to her cheeks in a burst of colour. I edged forward on the back seat. Up ahead, the trees that lined the roadside were thinning out, making a clearing before the reservoir that lay ahead.

  ‘You were going to stab me, weren’t you? What made you change your mind?’

  ‘I thought death was too good for you,’ she spat. ‘I wanted to make you suffer, really suffer, like Rebecca had. But I was wrong. You deserve to die.’

  Just as I had done once before, I grabbed for the steering wheel. That time, I had reacted in fear, some survival-mode instinct telling me that I wasn’t going to die in that car. I killed Nikolas, but I did it to save Lily from him, and to protect myself. If I hadn’t, I had no doubt he would have killed me.

  Now, the same impulse took hold. If I was going to die, it would be by my own hand, not this woman’s. I felt pain sear through my arm as Charlotte lashed out with the knife, but it was in the wrong hand – she was right-handed rather than left – and her wrist flailed at an awkward angle as she tried to find me in the darkness while attempting to keep the car on the road.

  I leaned forward and drew my right arm to my face before jabbing my elbow at the side of her head. Her neck snapped to the right and the car veered left as I reached again for the wheel. As it left the road and plunged into the reservoir, I was thrown forward into the front seat. The knife had dropped somewhere between us, but Charlotte was distracted now with grappling for the door handle as the car filled with water. The rush of cold stole my breath, and I pushed myself away from her, trying the passenger door, desperately yanking at the handle. I heard a click as it opened.

  Charlotte grabbed at the back of my neck as I tried to get out of the car, and when I swung to fight her off me, I realised she was trapped, her belt locked tightly around her, pinning her to the seat. The water was up to her chest now, rising faster with every passing minute. She released her grip on me and plunged her left hand into the freezing water, grappling with the belt lock, looking up at me desperately.

  ‘Help me.’

  Her voice was pinched with shock. I hesitated, faced with a decision that would ruin either her life or mine. She had called for my help once before, and I had gone running to her. It had broken my family and it had broken me. Our eyes met, and she knew what I was thinking. The water was nearing her face now, lapping against her chin, and I reached down below the surface to find the seat belt. I yanked at it, trying to loosen it, but it held fast. There was a muted gurgle as the lower half of Charlotte’s face disappeared, and I plunged my head underwater, my eyes burning as they fought to focus. I pushed the red button that held the seat belt locked, and on the second attempt, it released. I resurfaced, and she pushed herself up, gasping for air, but the car was nearly submerged, and we needed to get out.

  I flailed for the open door, gripping its metal frame as I pushed myself out of the car. My clothes were weighing me down, and I fought to untangle myself from them as I turned in the water.

  Charlotte wasn’t there. I twisted from side to side, but I still couldn’t see her, and the breath I had been holding was running out fast. I rose to the surface and gulped a lungful of cold air before submerging myself again. The car was completely under now, and when I grabbed for the door to drag myself down, I saw Charlotte’s hand push
ed flat on the passenger seat. As I lowered my head to see into the car, she turned to look at me, her eyes too wide and too bright, glimmering in the murky darkness of the water. Her right hand was gripping the steering wheel, keeping herself anchored inside the car.

  I stretched an arm out, urging her to take hold of my hand. Her face was expressionless and unresponsive. I imagined later that her eyes tried to communicate something to me, some parting message that she was unable to verbalise and might not have been able to bring herself to speak even had she been capable. Whatever it was, she had obviously made the decision to stay, and with an instinct to survive that seemed to take hold of my entire body, I heaved myself away from the door and rose to the surface.

  Forty-One

  ‘Tell us what happened.’

  I sit up against the flat hospital pillow and try not to focus on the throbbing inside my head. I should feel worse than I do, but I can’t allow myself to be injured. I am needed too much.

  Two pairs of eyes watch me expectantly, waiting for me to fill in the missing details of last night’s events. I have been here before, years ago. It should all feel easier now, but it doesn’t.

  ‘Where’s…’ I begin, but the question is strangled on my tongue as it was all that time ago, lost to a solitary tear that slips from my left eye and slides onto my cold cheek. I picture Amelia fading into the darkness, disappearing as the car speeds away from her, and I want to reach for her as though she is here in front of me.

  ‘She’s fine,’ the female police officer reassures me. ‘She’s safe.’

  I breathe a sigh of relief, and when I close my eyes I see Charlotte’s face in front of me, vivid at first then distorted as she sinks deeper into the water that surrounds us. She fades then disappears, and I am taken back to another time, another accident. I see the tree the car collided with; I hear the screech of the brakes and the crunch of metal as the bonnet crumples against the trunk of the oak, folding in on itself like an accordion. A rush of darkness floods me, greens and browns muted by the night, and I remember the last thought that crept from my mind as my eyes fell shut and consciousness escaped me, that just a split second could change everything, and that nothing was ever going to be the same again.