The Night She Died

by Jenny Blackhurst

  The photographs of James I’d seen had shown a confident-looking man adorned in razor-sharp suits, looking more like a Calvin Klein model than a businessman. When I remarked that he looked like he should have been on Made in Chelsea Richard muttered something disparaging about being too busy spending his father’s money. Already I could sense he was not a fan. And why would he be? From what he was about to learn, this was the man who had held Evie’s affections for over a decade and was most likely to be the last person to have seen her alive, the man she was arguing with on the clifftop. The only one who knew the full story. I was curious to know myself how much Evie had told him. Did he know the whole plan? Was I walking into the lion’s den? At this point I was confident that I could handle what was coming. At this point I thought myself invincible.

  Pride comes before a fall.

  ‘I wondered how long it would be,’ James says, standing aside to let us pass through.

  ‘You were expecting us?’ I ask, shooting a glance at Richard. His expression is blank, unreadable. How must this feel for him, coming face to face with a man he had never even known he was in competition with? At least I had known about my competitor, I’d had a fighting chance.

  ‘No,’ he replies, following us through into the apartment. It is a thing of beauty: wide open space, sheer glass front, white leather sofas that gleam in the sun and a long sleek glass coffee table, completely bare and pristine. He may not have been taking care of himself but he – or someone – is taking care of his home at least. There isn’t a speck of dust or a cushion out of place. ‘I was expecting Dominic, but he’s been nowhere to be seen. I assume he sent you instead?’

  Richard and I walk over to the sofa, expecting to be invited to sit down. Instead James shakes his head.

  ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘I can’t . . . I haven’t . . . Come through here.’

  We follow him again, through a corridor and into another room, smaller, darker, and suddenly things make sense.

  This room is no immaculate haven. As soon as we are inside the stench of body odour and old food is overpowering. A bowl of half-eaten soup perches precariously on the flat arm of a grey sofa; some of the soup has dribbled down the side of the bowl and pooled around its base. When James moves the bowl onto the table he doesn’t even seem to notice.

  ‘Have you been sleeping in here?’ I nod towards the pile of blankets and pillows that lie strewn on the floor. ‘Three properties in this country alone and you’re living in a room not much bigger than a prison cell?’

  James raises an eyebrow. His face is devoid of the tan we have seen in the pictures, so pale that his features barely stand out at all – he reminds me of Munch’s Scream face. His hair is unbrushed and he’s wearing a light grey T-shirt and jogging bottoms, stained with dark grey patches. He smells of stale tobacco and old man.

  ‘You’ve done your research.’ He gestures at the sofa and the single chair. Richard sits instantly in the chair, leaving me with the only other option, the sofa next to James. He must sense my hesitation because he pulls up a box and drags one of the blankets over it, sits down on that. I thank him silently. The smell in here is fading as I become accustomed to it, but I’m not sure I can become as nose-blind to the smell of him.

  ‘What did you mean about Dominic sending us?’ Richard asks. ‘Why would he send us here?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have expected him to,’ James replies, picking up a can of Coke from a pack on the floor and offering us each one. ‘But here you are. Maybe I should have, Dominic was never one to do his own dirty work.’

  ‘We’re here because my wife,’ Richard spits the words and James visibly flinches, ‘threw herself off a cliff because she was being blackmailed by your wife. And I want to know why.’

  I go to say something, to try and calm him down, stop him being so angry and combative before James throws us both out, but the fact is he’s got every right to be angry and I’ve got no right to stop him. Here is this man, the man for whom Evie gave her life, even though Richard doesn’t quite know it yet.

  85

  Rebecca

  He tells us everything. Some things I know, and some I don’t. How they met, how their fathers conspired to keep them apart – the only thing they could agree on, according to James. The letter his father forged for Evie to ‘dump’ him, the baby that Evie thought was unwanted, about the party, and the night that Evie was responsible for the death of his father.

  ‘The last time I spoke to her she said she’d found a way for us to leave the past behind us. Camille had been blackmailing her about the fire and the police had been to see her. I said we could just go somewhere people wouldn’t find us but she said she’d thought it through – that the only way to truly be free was if everyone thought she was dead.’

  ‘So you paid someone to say they’d seen her jump.’ I saw hope shine in Richard’s eyes and for the first time I look at him and feel disgust. Doesn’t it matter to him – any of what James has just told him? His wife betrayed him, lied to him about a new job, slept with another man, and still he would welcome her home with open arms. ‘She’s still alive, isn’t she?’

  ‘No,’ James whispered. ‘No, Richard, I’m sorry. I wish she had paid them – that would have been easier, safer. As far as I knew she was only going to pretend to jump from the cliff and disappear for a while. The first time I realised she was actually going to jump was when I followed her that night.’

  Richard frowned. ‘She thought she would survive that?’ he shakes his head. ‘No, she was reckless and impulsive but she wasn’t stupid.’

  James frowns. ‘She knew she could survive it. She was the strongest swimmer I’ve ever seen. Her parents had a swimming pool and when her mother was ill and her father was away and she couldn’t stand being in the house she would swim lengths until late into the night. Once I snuck round to see her. I’d waited until I knew Dominic was away on business and her mother would never answer the door. Yasmin, their housekeeper, she had a soft spot for me and she would sneak me into the house and keep watch until Monsieur Rousseau was asleep so I could slip out. But this time when I went to the door Yasmin told me Evie wasn’t there. She took me by the arm and led me to the pool where Evie was swimming lap after lap, touching the side and kicking off again. ‘How long has she been doing that?’ I asked, because it was late, nine pm at least. ‘Four hours,’ Yasmin replied. ‘Madame Rousseau had one of her outbursts this afternoon.’ When I pulled her out she was wrinkled as a prune and her arms and legs were shaking. She had no idea she had been in there that long – she asked me why it was so dark at seven at night.’

  James gets to his feet and leaves the room. When he returns he is clutching a large storage box.

  ‘Ah! Here,’ he pulls out a small black book, six-by-four photograph size with a tatty, worn cover. When he flicks it open I can see that it’s filled with old photographs, some faded and ripped around the edges, hastily shoved in and well thumbed. James finds the photograph he was looking for and passes it to Richard. I lean over his shoulder for a look.

  It’s her, a close-up of Evie. Except she doesn’t look like our Evie, she looks different. Younger, yes, but something else. Free. Even though I’d been expecting it from the moment James had pulled out the photo album, seeing her there, alive and smiling – no, beaming – is like a punch in the stomach. This is the Evie I loved.

  What have we done?

  She is in the sea, holding onto the edge of a boat, at the foot of some cliffs, craggy rocks in the background, her smile wild and triumphant.

  ‘This wasn’t the first time she jumped from a cliff in front of me,’ James says. ‘She showed me up a treat in front of my mates, then pretended she was drowning so I’d jump in and save her. She had no fear back then.’ He smiles at the memory. ‘This one time,’ he holds up the photo, ‘when she was sixteen she didn’t even tell me she was going to do it – told me to take the boat out and she’d meet me there. Next thing I heard a voice shout my name. I looked up and saw he
r dropping through the air like a stone. I remember screaming as she landed, thinking of all the ways I was going to tell Dominic that he was right, I hadn’t managed to protect his daughter, I’d let her kill herself right under my fucking nose! I searched the sea where she’d broken the surface and was taking off my jacket to jump in when she popped up like a mermaid, gasping for breath but the most elated I’d ever seen her. The look on her face – it was phenomenal. She clung onto the side of the boat to recover, and before I could yell at her I had to take that,’ he gestures to the photo. ‘I had to capture it before I broke her good mood – which I did. I ripped into her, telling her how stupid and reckless and selfish she was, how she hadn’t killed herself was a miracle, blah blah blah. When I was finished she just smiled. Pulled herself into the boat on arms that should have been jelly and told me that she’d been learning to cliff-dive properly since she was twelve and I shouldn’t worry about her.’

  ‘You’re saying she could easily jump from that cliff, but why bother? If Evie wanted to be with you that badly why not just leave me?’ Richard asks. ‘Why this ridiculous charade?’

  ‘Evie’s mother died,’ James replies. ‘And she told Evie the one reason we couldn’t be together. The reason our parents had forbidden us from seeing one another and insisted Evie get rid of our child. James Addlington Sr – my father – was Evie’s father. Evie was my half-sister. And Camille knew.’

  86

  Rebecca

  Richard is broken, and I need to get him home, but before we go we both need him to hear what happened next. Why he has to move on, why James is sitting here now talking to us instead of starting a new life abroad with his half-sister and their bastard child. Because until we both hear the words none of us will ever be sure. I know, I know Evie is gone forever, because there is something else I know. That, although Evie had planned the spot she would jump from to the last inch, on the night she jumped, the rock she had been using to mark her safe spot had been moved. I know this, and yet I need to hear James say the words. Richard is practically catatonic and we both need this to be over.

  ‘If Evie jumped off that cliff expecting to live,’ I say. ‘And her body hasn’t been found . . . if she’s done it before she might be . . .’

  ‘She’s not alive,’ James says. He blinks his eyes as though to push away tears. ‘I know she’s dead.’

  Thank God for that.

  The night of the wedding

  87

  Rebecca

  I checked the time again and glanced around to see where my best friend was. We locked eyes across the grass and she gave a small nod. Yes, the nod said, now is the time.

  She took a surreptitious look around, found where her new husband was standing surrounded by friends and family, unable to wipe the huge grin from his face. Richard looked so happy and I watched as Evie’s expression fell, panic seizing me when I saw the hesitation cross her beautiful face. She was wondering if she should go through with the plan, she was having second thoughts. Not about her safety, which was what she should have been concerned with – no, Evie was too arrogant and sure of herself to imagine that anything might go wrong with the dangerous and near impossible plan I’d concocted – but about leaving the man who had dedicated the last few years to making her happy and breaking his heart. In that moment I almost became convinced that she was finally going to think of someone other than herself and abort the plan completely.

  My face flushed red and my heart pounded a beat in my chest. She couldn’t change her mind now! I began to rise from my seat, ready to go and convince her she was doing the right thing, but it turned out I needn’t have worried. I saw her tear her eyes from her husband and give herself a small nod, yes, she was back to thinking of herself again.

  I can’t tell you the rush of satisfaction it gave me to watch her slip away from the party towards those cliffs. I know that probably makes me sound like a monster, but if I am it is only because that is what she made me. The years of living in her shadow I could have coped with – I gladly gave up Steve, I dedicated my every waking moment just to making her happy. We could have been best friends forever, I was the most loyal and loving friend she could ever have asked for – until she took Richard from me.

  Even that I might have coped with, if she’d genuinely loved him. I wanted them both to be happy, and if that meant being together I would have found a way to be happy for them. But she never wanted Richard, he was a distraction, an easy option to heal her fractured soul. She was prepared to cheat on him, lie to him about the baby – she was going to ruin his life, either by forcing him to live a lie or by breaking his heart when she eventually grew bored of her loveless marriage and returned to her lover. I couldn’t allow it to happen.

  And so I watched her go without a doubt in my heart. So you can imagine the fear that gripped me when I saw who was following her out of the party, when I realised she had betrayed her promise and told someone else about our plan. And if James managed to convince her not to go through with it then everything was ruined.

  88

  Rebecca

  Let me tell you about the first time I heard about the fire that killed James Addlington Sr.

  To say my best friend had changed in the last six years was an understatement, and although now I know that the change in her was ignited by the fire that happened near the end of our first year at uni, at the time it had seemed natural progression. We grew up, we settled down, stopped the partying and concentrated on our degrees. The first year had been pass/fail but the second and third years actually counted towards our final grades. The idea that Freshers was a party year and then we would all knuckle down a bit more wasn’t a new one – it was seen all over the university. Now though, I know that it was more than that for Evie. The fire inside her had begun to flicker and die away, which I suppose is what happens when you believe you have taken a man’s life. How could her work be a commentary on society, how could she ask people to see through her eyes when she was a liar, a fraud, a murderer? The rest of her life would be spent trying to come to terms with the person she was versus the person she wanted to be.

  I don’t know whether she even remembered the night she told me about what she’d done. Richard had been at a conference where he was to be the main speaker, and I was staying at the house so that we could drink and not worry about how I was getting back. The fire-pit in the back patio was roaring – I can remember wanting to suggest so badly that we let it die down a little, that Evie not lean so close to drop in little bits of wood that the flames almost licked the ends of her honey blonde hair, but as usual I said nothing, just pulled the blanket further around me and watched her.

  She looked as beautiful as ever in the firelight, flame and shadow flickering around her like a Shakespearean fury. Fire burn and cauldron bubble. We drank wine until it tasted like juice, talked about current affairs, things we’d seen on the news – there was enough going on in the political world to keep us going for at least until the wine ran out. I’d been telling her about my sister’s friend, whose husband had been accused of rape, when she said it.

  ‘Becky, imagine if you found out one thing about someone you loved, one thing that redefined everything you knew about them. Could you forgive them?’

  It might seem like an innocuous question, given the subject we were discussing, but if you could have seen the look in her eyes – as though my answer meant more than just a throwaway ‘What would you do?’ question.

  ‘It depends what they’d done – if I found out my husband had raped someone? No, I couldn’t forgive that, it would make them a person I couldn’t dream of loving or trusting ever again. There’s no possible excuse that could make that right.’

  We were sitting on a wooden bench, the fire-pit our only light now, both wrapped in thick fleecy blankets, our feet up facing one another.

  Evie nodded thoughtfully. ‘What about murder?’

  I started to say no, I could never forgive someone who had murdered another person, but it was
clear she didn’t want an off-the-cuff response – she wanted me to think about the question.

  ‘Murder’s different,’ I concluded, and seeing that this answer pleased her I continued. ‘Because there are so many different situations where a person might kill another person. There’s self-defence . . .’ I leaned over and filled up our glasses, not too drunk to notice the hungry look in Evie’s eyes. ‘There’s accidental – I mean, if my husband told me he’d been responsible for a car crash that killed someone it’s a bit different than raping a woman, or killing someone because he’s a psychopath. It’s all about the context.’

  ‘So an accident – that would be okay? What if they were a bad person anyway? What if they had done something awful – or they might do something bad in the future? Maybe you’ve done the world a favour.’

  ‘Well, an accident is hardly okay, but maybe more acceptable. I mean, if you’d just been honest, and done your time . . . but you can’t just go ahead and kill someone for being a bad person – otherwise the world’s population would die out overnight. Although isn’t that what God was doing? With that boat?’

  Evie frowned. ‘The Ark?’

  ‘That’s it!’ I grinned. ‘The Ark. But He’s different, I think. I think He’s allowed to make those kind of decisions. And thirdly – you can’t kill someone because . . .’

  ‘Because he might hurt someone in the future,’ Evie murmured, but she suddenly looked like she didn’t want to be part of this conversation any more.

  ‘Like Minority Report,’ I nodded. ‘Yeah, but look what happened there because Tom Cruise changed his future and so, wait, actually – did he?’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t remember but I’m sure the point was that you can’t freeze someone for something they might do in case they don’t do it. Right?’