And while Marnie Gregory-Smith has an alibi, the same cannot be said for best friend Jane Black. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, Valerie had written. But it seems to me that the clouds are beginning to part over this mystery.
Do you know how it feels to be accused of a murder you’ve committed? It’s incredibly frightening.
What?
Why are you looking at me like that?
Oh, I see. You want me to acknowledge that she’s far closer to the truth than any of the others: the police, the pathologist, our friends and families. And you’re wondering if she was right. Had she found a small piece of the truth? You want to know if I was jealous of Marnie.
No. I can confidently say that I was never jealous, not of her life, not of the trinkets that decorated her day-to-day. I was occasionally envious of her self-confidence, her warmth, her kindness, but those are very different things. Does that answer your question?
But the one that you should have been asking is whether I was jealous of Charles. And I suppose that I was. It sounds childish, and perhaps I don’t mean it as it sounds, but he had something that belonged to me, a love that had once been mine, a love that had chosen me.
She didn’t specify that she’d spoken to Marnie. But somewhere between the new evidence and her description of a teary widow clasping her cold coffee to her chest and unable to balance her breathing sufficiently to actually take a sip, I realized what had happened.
I went into the living room and found Marnie sobbing on my sofa, her laptop open in front of her, apologizing in heavy, breathy gasps.
“I’ve made it worse,” she said. “I’ve made her turn on you. It’s all my fault. She’s written that you did it. Have you read it? I’m so sorry, Jane. I’m so, so sorry.” She closed the lid of her laptop and lowered it onto the coffee table. “I thought she’d see that I was telling the truth. I wanted her to see that she’d been wrong, and—I’m so bloody stupid—I thought she’d publish a retraction or something and that it would all go away. She dropped her head into her hands. “I thought she might say sorry,” she said, her voice muffled by her palms.
“This isn’t your fault,” I replied, although I should admit now—in the spirit of honesty—that I was a little frustrated. I’d told her what we needed to do, and she’d blatantly ignored my instructions. But her intentions had been good; she’d thought she could unwind the web. “You weren’t to know,” I said.
I tried to stay calm. I looked at her flannel pajamas turned up at the ankles, her legs crossed on the sofa. The buttons of her shirt were undone at her neck and her chest, and red hives were flourishing across her skin. She needed me to be strong, to look after her.
The truth is that I hadn’t expected repercussions. And with the autopsy and the funeral, this assumption had begun to feel more concrete. The police and the coroner had no reason to look beyond the facts as they first found them. But I knew that there were other pieces of the truth still hidden elsewhere. And this strange woman—who had appeared in our lives unexpectedly—seemed determined to dig and pick and claw until she found something that felt more authentic.
I had hoped that Valerie’s version of events would quickly be overtaken by gossip and news and other lies. But after the second article? I couldn’t be so sure. I didn’t know how far she might go in pursuit of the truth.
I wanted to send her a message, confronting her, arguing that her behavior was simply unacceptable. But I knew that if I provoked her, there was a reasonable risk that she would grow more determined rather than less.
I took a deep breath. I knew what we needed to do. We needed to trust in the absence; to let it widen over the next few weeks, until it was the only thing still standing, until mine was the last possible truth, until an accidental fall down the stairs was the only thing left.
And, in that moment, I was so focused on fixing the situation with Valerie that I failed to notice another problem expanding.
Marnie has always been one of the brightest, most intelligent, most dynamic people, and the tears and the grief and the chaos changed none of that. She has always had a marvelous ability—it’s something creative, I think—to unite vague ideas into something more solid, to build a jigsaw from the disconnected pieces. And I could suddenly see that she was doing just that.
“I should never have approached her,” Marnie continued, the pitch of her voice shifting with each word. “I should have known that she couldn’t be trusted. I don’t know why I expect better from people. Why is that?”
“Stop it,” I said, sitting down beside her and taking her hands in mine. “You’re only making yourself feel worse and it’s done now; there’s no point.”
“And it doesn’t even make sense,” Marnie continued. Her cheeks were lined with tears. “How exactly does she propose that you murdered Charles? At least her first post was theoretically possible. I could have drugged him. I mean, I didn’t, but I could have. But you weren’t even in the building when he died. You didn’t hear anything. It’s just nonsense.”
“Marnie, stop it,” I said. “Let it go.”
“What did you do? Push him down the stairs and then go home? And then what? Return to the flat later that evening? You didn’t even know that he was sick. You’d have thought that he was at work.”
“Exactly,” I said, although my heart was beginning to beat a little faster and I was finding it difficult to swallow. At the back of my mouth, my tonsils felt swollen and dry; they were obstructing my throat and restricting the air to my chest. I could feel my hands growing clammy around hers.
“And why would you bother? I mean, I know you weren’t exactly the best of friends—maybe that’s a slight understatement—and I know that things had been particularly bad—that big misunderstanding—but even so, it’s just not feasible.”
Her voice was getting louder, starting to shake and stretching into shrill. Her gestures were manic, her hands waving wildly. Her cheeks were flushed, rosy and enraged.
“You left him dead in my hallway. Is that what she’s saying? Turned up, killed him, and then left? And then what? Popped back a few hours later just to watch me find him? There is something seriously wrong with that woman.”
She couldn’t stop herself and I couldn’t stop her, either. She went on and on, listing the many ways in which it didn’t make sense, couldn’t be true, was utterly impossible, and I listened as she reeled off examples of how I could have—but also couldn’t have—murdered her husband. The articles had opened these questions within her, and I didn’t know how to close them. I tried to steer her in other directions, but she kept falling back into her interrogation, and I felt as though my ribs were too small for my lungs—the flesh pressing into the bone—and I wondered if I could keep my face static if she reached the right conclusion.
“We were madly in love. That’s what she says, isn’t it? You and me? And so we killed your husband. Of course. Because that makes sense. And then I fell in love with Charles.” A small sob broke through her anger. “And then you killed him so as to keep me for yourself? Is that it? Is that what happened?”
I expected her to keep going, to keep ranting, to continue trying to unravel her confusion aloud. And that would have been alarming enough. But she didn’t. She stopped. She stared at me.
“Is that what happened?” she repeated, her eyes wide and her chin jutted forward, her lips trembling. “That’s what she says, isn’t it?”
I shook my head—feigning bemusement, horror, repugnance—and she stayed quiet and so I reached into the conversation and I tried desperately to end it.
“Imagine,” I said, and I raised my eyebrows and I tried to laugh. “Just imagine.”
I wondered what she could see: if my cheeks were pink, my eyes frightened, my breath frozen; if the truth was written there on my face, as eager as her tears.
“Imagine,” she repeated, quietly.
“I k
now,” I said. “It’s impossible. As if I could do something like that. I would never do something like that.”
That was the fifth lie I told Marnie. I told her that I could never do something that I’d already done. I told her that I could never hurt her when I already had. And as I sat there deceiving her with my entire body, I trusted that she would continue to believe me. And she did. She shook her head slowly and sighed, leaning back against the cushions and scraping her fingers through her hair.
I don’t think that she was really interrogating me. She wasn’t asking a question and expecting an answer. But the sound of her doubt—however vague—was unnerving. I felt the truth like a small bone in my throat, aching to be released. It brought a small part of me to the fore that wanted to be acknowledged, that was tempted to say, Yes. That’s what happened, to say, Yes. And I did it for you.
But I knew, too, that I would lie again and again to protect what we had.
“We need to decide what we’re going to do,” I said eventually.
She wiped beneath her eyes and dried her fingers on her pajamas. Her top had curled around her waist and she pulled it back down. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said, standing and moving into the kitchen, calmer now, contained. “It’s published. And trust me, Jane,” she continued. “You don’t want to have this out with her. She’ll just publish more crap online and we know the truth, and our friends and family do, too, and really, isn’t that what matters most? I’m not saying it’s fair. Because I’m cross, too, Jane. Really, I am. And I hate that she’s going to get away with just saying whatever the hell she wants without a thought for the people at the end of her lies. But I need this to go away.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Then let’s just wait it out.”
The adrenaline slowly started to dissolve, and I finally exhaled in full and I thought I might faint because she’d been—hadn’t she been?—so very, very close.
* * *
Do you want to know something? That fifth lie scared me. I realized then the risk that I’d taken—inadvertently, yes, but taken all the same—and how that decision would affect my life going forward. I needed to be careful, to stay in control.
I read the newspapers in the days that followed. They were full of it again: opinion pieces and pretend news and anonymous sources. But it did ease eventually—another political scandal stole the headlines and rolled on and on into months of coverage.
I kept the pages about us in a shoe box beneath my bed. They reminded me that I wasn’t invincible. They reminded me to keep looking over my shoulder. They reminded me to keep lying.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I think that some women are made for motherhood and others simply aren’t. That’s controversial, I know. And something I probably shouldn’t be saying to you, of all people. But I think it deserves a mention.
I always dreamed of being a mother. As a child, I cradled my plastic dolls and I bathed them, and I pushed them around in a pastel pram with a thin pink fabric seat that turned in on itself like a hammock. And I lined them up in rows and changed their nappies one by one and dressed them in patterned cotton onesies, pinching the snaps between their legs. They were all much the same—hard round bellies and rosy pink paint on their cheeks and bright blue eyes that blinked—but my favorite was Abigail. She was bald and her limbs were fixed. One of her eyes blinked open and closed, but the other was sticky, its plastic lashes glued together. It opened and then refused to shut, staring straight ahead while the other one winked threateningly. I loved her nonetheless.
I eventually grew out of dolls and into babies. I peered into prams as I passed them on the streets, leaning over to look inside in cafés and making the obligatory cooing noises and asking the requisite questions—how sweet and how old and how lovely. I participated in this rhythm of adulthood quite willingly and I saw a version of my life in which I would one day push the pram and another woman’s coos would cascade over me.
And then, at some point—in the aftermath of Jonathan’s death—I began to question that imaginary future. Did I want a pram? Did I want the clucking and questions and judgments and a bit of my heart to forever live outside of my body? To do what parents do and feed and heal and nurture?
No. I didn’t. Not without him.
If you wanted me to, I could write a list of all the women in my life and I could draw a straight line across that piece of paper dividing those who were made for motherhood and those who simply weren’t. Emma and I would be on one side. Marnie would be on the other.
* * *
The promise of peace had a positive impact on Marnie’s overall outlook. She was less angry, less flighty, less afraid of the something and nothing that exists in the aftermath of loss. We found a way to coexist that felt comfortable and peaceful. She cried—often—but she also laughed and cooked and even wrote a few short pieces for her favorite editors. She redirected her mail to my flat, which was oddly comforting; I liked seeing her name beside mine in our postbox every day. And when her main sponsor sent her a pink ceramic gift set, part of their most recent cookware collection, she even managed to film a few videos.
Occasionally she would turn to me—normally over breakfast or while we sat on the sofa in our pajamas late in the evening avoiding sleep—and say:
“Death really lasts a long time, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, yes,” I would say. “The longest.”
“Because it’s been a month”—or six weeks, or two months, she would say—“and I just can’t quite fathom that this is my life now. I can’t bring myself to believe that no matter how many more months I live, no matter how many years, or decades even, he will be dead in every single one.”
I felt like an expert. And for a while my tutelage seemed to be working. It was such a delight to have her back in my life. And we were good together, really good. We knew each other intricately, intimately, all of the history, all of the detail. We bemoaned our parents—who left, and fell sick, and ignored us. We laughed at our siblings—one of whom was entirely dependent and the other entirely absent. We reminisced about the adventures that had defined our teenage years—the firsts, and the lasts, and the never agains. We were two people who had shared so much that we were almost only one again.
I watched as she recovered; not entirely, of course, not at all, but in small, significant ways. It was a thrill to see her cooking again. She painted her nails and complained when they chipped the following morning. She looked at her hair in the mirror one afternoon and lifted some strands in her hands and then frowned. That evening, she returned with the ends neatly trimmed. She listened to music. She watched the news. She cried regularly—all the time—but the moments of overwhelming sadness were set against something better.
And then things changed. Marnie regressed, reverting to the chaos of the very first weeks. She stopped sleeping. She was exhausted. She fell ill. She stopped eating. When she did manage something—even just the smallest of meals; some toast, some fruit—she was overcome by such violent spells of vomiting that I stopped buying food to keep in the flat simply to save us both the horror. The hunger was intense. The fatigue was far worse. And with neither nourishment nor rest, she was entirely unable to shake her strange sickness.
Or so we thought at the time.
It was early in the evening—we’d just opened the blinds again; there were fireworks outside and we wanted to watch them—and Marnie and I were sitting together at the breakfast bar. We were eating plain rice—a sachet of boil in the bag each; quick and easy—and our silence was effortless. We were once again used to dining together, our worlds entwined, no longer intermittent guests in each other’s lives but a curious sort of couple.
“I haven’t had a period,” she said, laying her fork down beside her bowl. “I thought it was just stress, you know, with everything. But it’s been three months.”
“Well, of course it’s the stress,” I said. “And the b
ug. You’re losing weight—look at you—and with all the vomiting— Oh.”
“I need to take a test,” she said.
I cleared my throat, dislodging the clump of grains that had congealed there, and stood up from the table. I went into the hallway and collected my handbag from the peg. I walked from the front door, into the elevator, and out into the street. I walked along the road—cold without my coat—to the corner shop.
I returned with the test less than ten minutes later.
Marnie was sitting exactly as I’d left her, her elbows on either side of her bowl, her head supported between them.
“Here,” I said. “Do it now.”
She silently took it and went into the bathroom, the plastic bag hanging limply from her wrist.
I don’t need to tell you that it was positive.
I got drunk. I drank tequila straight from the bottle and lined up shots of rum from a bottle so old that the liquid inside tasted of nothing but stickiness. Marnie—already a mother in so many ways—poured apple juice into plastic shot glasses and drowned her fear and panic in a more abstemious way. At two in the morning we climbed into the bathtub, wearing our swimsuits in the steaming water in a strange and unnecessary display of modesty. We smeared honey onto toast at three and worked our way through an entire loaf. And then we lost ourselves somewhere between grief and shock and hysteria, and sobbed and laughed until we fell asleep, which didn’t last long, and then we both spent the best part of the following morning with our faces resting against the cool porcelain of a toilet seat.
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