‘Shhh.’ Karina puts a hand on my arm. ‘What was that?’
We are silent, but all I can hear, apart from the crackle of the flames on the other side of the door, is the faint sound of traffic from the main road. We start to shout again, but the smoke is getting thicker, making our eyes smart and our voices hoarse, and it’s becoming even harder to make ourselves heard.
Out of nowhere, a face looms up at the window. For a second I think it’s Nicholas and I jump back, a scream shredding my throat, but it’s Daniel, staring horrified through the broken pane at Karina and me, wild-eyed and dishevelled, and Olivia, catatonic and masked at the table.
‘Oh my God, Daniel,’ I pant. ‘You have to get us out of here. Nicholas has pushed the bookcase in front of the door and set the house on fire. We’re trapped.’
‘Fuck.’ He’s standing there, staring at us. We have all played a part in the car crash that has been his life up to this point, and I know he’s thinking he could walk away. I may not have lied, like Sasha and Karina, like Olivia, but the defence barrister was right. I couldn’t hear who was in Daniel’s room with Karina that day, and it’s perfectly clear now that it was Nicholas. Did it give him a thrill, taking her into his despised brother’s room?
‘Please,’ I say, holding his gaze. ‘Please, Daniel. We’re going to die in here. We’ll do whatever you want. Please help us.’
He doesn’t speak, just turns his back and walks away. I sink to the floor and let my head fall to my knees. It’s over. Karina is crying uncontrollably and coughing beside me. I close my eyes against the sting of the smoke. My chest is burning and I try to take shallow breaths because it hurts less. My head is spinning now and everything is blurry.
There’s a thwack, then the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood. Tiny shards of glass rain down on my head. I put my hand to my hair and brush some of them off. They stick in my fingers, beads of blood blooming from them.
‘Get out of the way,’ shouts Daniel from outside.
I crawl across the floor, just in time for another assault against the window. More glass flies into the room and I can see that he has an axe. I remember it. Tony used to buy logs from a local supplier and chop them himself for the wood burner. Daniel hacks and hacks, and finally the window splits from the frame and swings inwards, years and layers of paint sprinkling in fragments across the floor.
‘Olivia,’ I say. She is slumped down on the table, her head at an awkward angle, arms hanging by her side. ‘Shit. Karina, help me.’
Karina coughs and crawls towards us. She tries to haul herself up using the table, but collapses to the floor, barely able to breathe. I look towards the window and Daniel’s already on his way in. He grabs Olivia under the arms and starts pulling her across the room. I take her feet and help as much as I can. When he reaches the window, he props her up and climbs out, gesturing to me to lift her up to him. Somehow, between us, we manage to haul her out. Daniel drags her away from the house and lays her on the grass. Karina is crawling towards the window now. She’s nearly here and Daniel is on his way back.
‘Get out, Ellen,’ he shouts. ‘I’ll help Karina.’
I hover in an agony of indecision. Of course he rescued Olivia: she’s his mother. But Karina? The girl who has lied and lied again, ruining any chance of a normal life for him?
‘Get out,’ he shouts again. ‘Fuck’s sake, I’m not going to let her die.’
He helps me out of the window and springs easily in for Karina. I stand outside the window, waiting, and help him to get her over the sill and on to the grass. We pull her down the garden to where Olivia lies slumped under the mulberry tree.
A moment later, there’s a crash from the kitchen and a tongue of fire leaps from the window we have just escaped from, licking the wall outside. As Daniel calls the fire brigade, the three of us stare in dazed horror as the corner house is engulfed in flames.
Ellen
September 2017
Leo wanted to come to the flat, but something in me didn’t want to be alone with him in a confined space. We’ve arranged to meet at a coffee shop near my parents’ house. Near the Monktons’. I haven’t seen the corner house since we were driven away in an ambulance a week ago, smoke in our lungs, exhausted, numb. He is there before me, sitting at a corner table, a barely touched coffee in front of him. He jumps up when I come in and goes to hug me. I stand unresponsive in his arms and he steps back.
‘I heard what happened,’ he says. ‘Are you OK?’
I sit down, and he retakes his seat opposite me.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘I’ve been through this massive, traumatic thing, which should have been the end, but I’m no closer to knowing what’s happened to Sasha. Nicholas swears he doesn’t know where she is, hasn’t seen her for years, and I think he might be telling the truth. It’s Daniel he’s obsessed with really, more than Sasha. Thank God Olivia texted Daniel when she found Nicholas’s stuff in the loft, otherwise we never would have made it out alive. Nicholas was just sitting there, you know. In his flat. He’d gone back there after starting the fire and waited for the police. Didn’t even put up a struggle.’
‘I can’t believe it, Ellen. Nicholas and I were friends. We were pretty close back then. How could I not have seen what was going on?’
‘Nobody did. Even Daniel had no idea. Nicholas was always competitive with him, used to make snide comments about his musical talent, but as far as Daniel was concerned, it was normal sibling rivalry stuff. He didn’t have a clue what was really going on in Nicholas’s head. He was horrified when Olivia told him the whole story.’
‘I knew they had a bit of a difficult relationship, but I had no idea Nicholas was so jealous of Daniel, so angry. As for Karina, what she did…’ He shakes his head in disgust.
‘You don’t know…’ There’s so much I want to say, but it’s not my story to tell. It’s an age-old story, one of a little girl whose father did things no father should do; a little girl who sometimes, secretly, wished her father would die, and then one day he did and she thought it was her fault. A girl who was so ripe for exploitation, for ill-treatment, that Nicholas didn’t even have to try that hard.
‘And Sasha, she must have lied at the trial. She can’t have seen them together that day, can she? If it was Nicholas that Karina was seeing, not Daniel?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose she did. She was…’ I hesitate. This is not my story to tell either, but now I realise how little I know Sasha, it hardly seems to matter. Daniel matters, but I don’t think he’ll mind what I say as long as it’s the truth. ‘Daniel and Sasha were in love. They’d split up the day of the New Year’s Eve party. Olivia didn’t want them to be together, so she lied to them. She told them Sasha was Tony’s daughter, that they were half-brother and sister.’
‘Jesus! That’s so messed up. Do you think Sasha believed that Daniel raped Karina, and was lying to support her?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’ God, I wish I did. If she genuinely believed Daniel had raped Karina, maybe her lie was understandable, if not forgivable. Although if she believed that, then did she also believe that Daniel had been cheating on her with Karina for three months? In which case, was this her twisted way of taking revenge? Or if she didn’t believe that Daniel raped Karina, was her lie to punish him for sleeping with Karina the day she split up with him? Either way, she’s a monster.’
‘What about you, Ellen? You lied too, didn’t you?’
‘No!’ An elderly woman at the next table looks round in alarm. ‘No,’ I say again in a low voice. ‘I heard them. I heard Karina. They were in Daniel’s room.’
‘But it wasn’t Daniel.’
‘No, but I swear to God I thought it was. If I’d had any doubt, if I’d thought for a second it could have been Nicholas, I would never have testified.’
‘So what exactly did Karina tell Sasha when they met in the bar that day?’
‘Karina saw Daniel in the street and panicked. She was terrified that he was back
to take his revenge on her for lying. She knew Sasha had lied at the trial too, so she was the only person Karina felt she could talk to about it. She looked Sasha up online, found out where she worked and waited for her outside. Karina told her Daniel was back, and she also confessed that she had lied at the trial. She didn’t tell her about Nicholas, though. She was still too frightened of what he might do.’
‘I just can’t reconcile the Nicholas I knew with what he’s done,’ says Leo.
I shudder. ‘I can. You should have seen him. And the stuff Olivia found in the attic… He’d taken naked photos of Sasha when she was asleep, he’d taken her knickers from her room. It must have been him that moved stuff around in her room as well. I guess he took the money from Olivia’s bag, hoping Daniel would get the blame, or Sasha, maybe.’
‘It’s so twisted,’ Leo says. ‘You must have been terrified.’
‘Mmm.’ I can’t talk about the fire, not yet. ‘He broke in to my flat, too, last week. The police said he admitted it. He must have taken the key when he was there the first time, and come back in the night looking for some clue as to where Sasha had gone. He thought Karina had told her the whole truth. He thought she knew what he’d done; he was desperate to find her.’ There must have been a part of him, too, that wanted to frighten me, to stop me dragging the past into the light. I’m silent, my mind a jumble of past and present. ‘I’ve got to go, Leo. I’m meeting Daniel at the corner house. He’s staying there to look after the place for a while, until it’s properly secured and the renovation work has started. Olivia and Tony are staying with friends. I can’t blame them.’
‘Before you go, Ellen…’ He stops, smoothing one finger up and down the handle of his cup. I wait.
‘I’m sorry, about sleeping with Sasha.’
Oh, that. ‘It hardly matters now. I’m honestly not bothered. You were right, I had no business having a go at you about it.’
‘I know, but still… She probably knew it would upset you. I think… that’s partly why she did it, in her own twisted way.’
‘What do you mean?’ I’m genuinely curious, no longer burning with indignation every time somebody says something bad about her.
‘She’s jealous of you. Always has been.’
‘Why on earth would she be jealous of me?’ She was the one with all the admirers, all the hangers-on. The life and soul of the party.
‘You had the real relationships, Ellen. She might have had the glamour, the surface popularity, but you had proper, strong bonds – with Karina, with me, with your own family. Even Olivia was closer to you than she was to Sasha. She needed you more than you realise.’
I think of the way she played Karina and me off against each other, and more recently, Rachel and me, each taking it in turns to be her confidante, her special one.
‘Maybe,’ I say. But if that’s true, then where is she now?
We leave the café together and I watch him walk off in the other direction. He’s just gone round the corner out of sight, when something strikes me, and I get a wave of goosebumps down my neck. How does Leo know that Karina and Sasha met in the bar? I didn’t tell him. Has he seen Sasha more than he let on? In which case, why is he lying to me?
I stare after him with a growing sense of unease. I still don’t have the answers I want. I’m still facing the prospect of returning to an empty flat after I’ve got this meeting with Daniel out of the way. I take a deep breath. I have to deal with Daniel first. We didn’t really speak after the fire – it was a blur of fire engines and police cars and hospitals – but I can’t avoid him any longer. I need to apologise, even if it doesn’t – can’t – make any difference.
The front door is ajar, as it was a week ago. I stand outside once again, suddenly apprehensive. Nicholas is in police custody; he can’t hurt me. And yet I linger on the threshold, unable to go into the house that was once the epicentre of my hopes and dreams. The front left-hand side of the house, with the piano room, is largely, miraculously undamaged, but on the right it is ruined – blackened and ghostly.
Footsteps crunch on glass inside, the door is pulled open, and there is Daniel. It’s odd to see him and not feel afraid. He’s been a sort of bogeyman in my head for all these years, and it’s hard to rid myself of that mindset.
‘Come in,’ he says. ‘Careful of the glass. I’m leaving the front door ajar to try and get rid of the smell. Is that OK?’
I nod.
‘We’ll go in here.’ He indicates the piano room on my left. ‘There’s no damage.’
I go ahead of him. The piano is still there, the sofas are the same old blue velvet, there are books everywhere. It’s like stepping back in time, if it wasn’t for the acrid stench of smoke. He sits on the armchair and I take my place opposite him on the sofa.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, before he has a chance to say anything. ‘I know it doesn’t change anything, maybe it doesn’t even mean anything, but it’s true. If I had thought for a second that Karina was lying, I would never… I could have sworn it was you in your bedroom with her that day before Christmas. I was so sure.’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I believe you were telling the truth as you thought it was. I believe you thought you were doing the right thing. I don’t know why Nicholas took her into my room that day. I guess it was part of his weird… I don’t know.’ He looks down. ‘I still can’t believe what he did to me. I can’t believe I couldn’t see it, how jealous he was of me. He must have hated me so much, to do that to me. What did I do to him?’
‘Nothing!’ I say. ‘You can’t blame yourself, Daniel.’
Still looking down, he says in a rush, ‘Ellen, do you know where she is?’
‘No! I want to know as much as you do. I just met Leo, actually.’
‘Leo Smith?’ He looks up.
‘Yeah. He met up with Sasha recently. They… well, they slept together.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘I know. I got the feeling today that… maybe he knows something, but I’m not sure any more. I don’t trust my feelings. I don’t trust anyone.’
‘Join the club,’ he says grimly.
We hear the click of the gate outside. ‘Oh, that’ll be Karina,’ I say. ‘I hope you don’t mind. She wanted to see you too, to apologise, and to thank you for what you did, in the fire.’
He stands up and strides towards the door, and I’m scared I’ve made a huge mistake. I didn’t lie and he knows that, but Karina did. I take a step after him and go to take another, but I don’t take it, because she’s there in the room, smiling at me. My knees buckle. I reach out to grab onto something but there’s nothing there, and I am falling, the world going black around me like instant night, and the last thing I see is the face that looms over me, golden strands of hair hanging down around it.
Sasha’s face.
Ellen
September 2017
When I come round, I am lying on the sofa. Something spiky pokes through the soft material into the back of my legs, and the smell of smoke is more overpowering than ever. I sit up abruptly, the room spinning around me.
‘Hey, take it easy,’ says Sasha. ‘Are you OK?’
Am I OK? The hideous inappropriateness of the question stuns me as much as the fact of her, sitting next to me as if nothing has happened. Daniel comes in.
‘Are you OK?’ he says in an unconscious echo.
‘No.’ It’s all I can manage as I stare at her in horror.
‘I got you some water.’ Daniel proffers a water glass, cloudy with smudged fingerprints. I shake my head and he sits down awkwardly, placing the glass on the floor beside him.
‘Look, I realise this is a shock,’ Sasha says, putting a tentative hand on my arm. I shake it off.
‘A shock? That’s what you think this is? A shock? A shock is… I don’t know, when your cat brings in a half-dead bird first thing in the morning; a shock is putting your hand under what you think is a cold tap and finding it’s scalding hot. This is not a shock. This is…’ I have ab
solutely no idea what this is.
‘I’m so sorry, Ellen. This was the one part about all of it that I hated: lying to you. I know it’s going to be hard for you to believe me, but I swear it’s true.’
She is close enough to touch. She even smells the same, a mix of coconut shampoo and cigarettes and something else indefinably Sasha. Tears well in my eyes and I feel myself weaken. I thought I’d never see her again, but she is here, right here with me. Do I want to waste that by being angry with her? There were so many times when she was missing that I thought I’d do anything to have her back safe. Is this the price I am going to pay? Am I going to forgive her for whatever it is she’s done?
Three Little Lies Page 28