by Katie Lowe
Fifteen thousand pounds. A token amount.
I think of the seven, hard-won, in the savings account I made for Evie, ten years ago, and wonder where in the world I could possibly find another eight. I’d left Graham’s parents to sell the house – it belonged to them, anyway; and the small sum I’d received from his life insurance had paid for the deposit on the cottage. There was likely more money in savings, somewhere – he’d looked after our finances, our shared accounts – but the few times I’d been tempted to ask our solicitor, his parents had been in the room, or nearby, listening. It would only have been taken as a sign of my guilt.
So we’d started again, without. That pride again: the insistence that I’d provide for my daughter alone. It’s meant a tightened belt ever since.
But now: a partnership? It’s far more than I was expecting. More than I could ever realistically expect, given my background and experience.
It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
‘That’s … That’s really generous, Darcy. But I couldn’t possibly – what about all the …’ I gesture, uselessly, in the air. ‘You know.’
‘Oh, come on. That’ll blow over, eventually. You’ll probably make millions out of a defamation case against those bastards and turn me down – that’s worst-case scenario, as far as I’m concerned. But you’d be such an asset, and honestly, it’d mean so much to have you on board … I couldn’t imagine anyone better suited for it, truly.’ She looks at me, eyes wide, hopeful. ‘Please, Hannah. Don’t turn me down. I couldn’t bear it.’
I feel the dull ache in my chest: the shame of it.
I should tell her I don’t have it. I almost certainly could, and she’d counter – reduce the figure, but keep her offer the same. Because my investment is a token thing, really – fifteen thousand settled upon almost with a finger raised to the wind, an amount that seems, to her, small enough for anyone to afford, yet grand enough not to be shameful.
‘It’s really a lovely offer,’ I say, finally. ‘You give me far too much credit, really. But I ought to—’
‘Please, Hannah. You’re an incredible doctor. I’d be so grateful to have you on board.’
I sip my wine. It’s lukewarm.
I close my eyes, for a moment, and will myself to do the right thing. To say no.
But I want it.
I want it more than anything.
‘Look. Before you offer me this, I … I want to be honest with you.’ Her brow crinkles in confusion. I go on, before I can stop. ‘The hospital I’m working for at the moment, they’re concerned about what this podcast—’ My voice turns bitter; I don’t try to hold it back. ‘What employing an “accused murderer” could mean for their reputation.’
She opens her mouth, and closes it again. She’s trying to work out how to respond.
‘And … there’s something else,’ I say, before she can answer. I said I’d be honest. For once. I might as well go all the way.
‘OK,’ she says, slowly. She’s nervous, now. I can feel it.
‘My grandmother. The one who was a patient here. She …’ She tried to murder her family, I almost say. But at the last moment, I pull back. ‘I mean, obviously she was here for a reason. You need to think about how that’s going to look, if it gets out.’
She grimaces. ‘Well, that’s a slight PR issue, but … is there any reason that would get out? I mean, you have the archives, and you said you couldn’t find any evidence of them elsewhere, before – right?’
I consider it. I wonder if it’s possible the Peaks Gazette piece exists online, somewhere, still – the one I stumbled over, all those years ago. But even then, the search results for ‘McLelland’ are likely so saturated with my name, at this point …
‘I doubt it,’ I say, willing reason silent.
‘And I’m assuming you’re being coy yourself, not mentioning that sparkler on your hand, but … you’ll be working here with a brand-new name, anyway, right?’
I blush. ‘Oh, God. I forgot. Is that awful?’
Her laugh echoes through the room. ‘And they say romance is dead.’
‘Alive and well here, apparently.’
‘Well, look – the renovation is going to take six months, maybe nine. We’ll need to work together on programmes, hiring a team, all the rest … But by the time we’re actually involving press, this whole thing around Conviction will be over, and you’ll be Hannah … what?’
‘Hannah Bryant.’
It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. The first time it’s occurred to me to take his name; to disappear into him. To let him make me someone else. The thought makes me shudder. Turn cold.
‘I like it. So, we’ll let whoever’s doing our PR know about it, but … I don’t think it’ll be an issue. Unless it’s an issue for you.’ She leans forward. I feel the concern in her eyes, and I look away. ‘Have you let all this get into your head?’
‘What do you mean?’
I know exactly what she means, of course. I’m just buying time.
‘Please tell me you haven’t managed to convince yourself they’ve actually got a case against you with all this.’
I look up. Of course they have a case against me.
‘Oh, come on, Hannah. You’re letting them win, if you do this.’ There’s a flinty coldness in her voice as she speaks. ‘It’s like some kind of sick experiment. You couldn’t come up with something better if you tried.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s just like gaslighting, taken to an awful extreme. You said yourself your memory is hazy, presumably because you were suffering from a pretty nasty concussion, from what I’ve read, and what you’ve told me. So, you’re not sure what happened, but the police give you a reasonable version of events, and they tell you they’ve got proof, and you accept it. You move on with your life, and you leave it behind you.
‘But then, ten years later, some completely unqualified stranger comes along – with a pitchfork-waving mob behind her – and says, actually, everything you know about that night is wrong. Everything you’ve been told, and everything you’ve allowed yourself to believe – because it made sense, according to all the people you had around you at the time – is false.
‘And in place of that, they’re giving you a new version of events that puts you at the centre of it. And because (a) you didn’t remember it in the first place, and (b) you’ve consigned it all to the past – not to mention the fact it’s an awful trauma you went through, so your mind’s probably done a whole world of work to let some, if not all of that go – you’re left with questions over everything. Your whole understanding of what’s real is unsettled. They’re creating a set of circumstances that would make you believe you did it. And apparently it’s working.’
I stare at her. She raises a hand to her mouth. ‘I just went way overboard on the analysis there, didn’t I? I’m so sorry. That was rude.’
I hear myself laugh, though I feel exposed. I feel raw. ‘You’re actually … spot on. I feel very … seen.’
‘This is why I have no friends. Chronic nosiness, combined with an inability to think before I speak … Not a great combination, honestly.’
‘It’s fine, really,’ I say. And I mean it. Because it makes sense. It’s a normal reaction. I’m not losing my mind. Only responding to a thing that has happened to me; to a situation beyond my control. All the things I’ve felt and thought; all the things I’ve read about myself cease to feel quite as real as they did before. ‘You know, I actually feel better for hearing it. I think I might’ve just had a breakthrough.’
Her eyes widen. ‘No.’ She fixes me with a smile. ‘Tell me.’
‘Oh, not … Nothing more than you said, really. It just … It makes a lot of sense.’
‘Look, I might be wrong about everything. You absolutely could be a murderer, for all I know. But I am a pretty good doctor, or I was until I decided to become an idiot property developer. If you are a psychopath, I’d be proud to have been duped by you.’
She says it with a grin; it’s an attempt to lighten the mood. It doesn’t quite land, and she sees it. But she’s deft in conversation: she doesn’t address it, as I would. She simply moves on. ‘So what do you think – about this partnership? I don’t expect you to decide now, but …’
I take a breath. I look around, imagining it: a stake in Hawkwood House.
‘I do need to talk to Dan about it before I give you an absolute yes. If you don’t mind? But … yes. Provisionally. Yes.’
She claps her hands in delight and raises her glass. ‘I will happily take that. Let’s drink to it.’
As I sip, I catch it: the tapping sound I’d heard, that first day. I swallow the wine, and I’m home, for a moment, the same tart taste on my tongue.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
‘Is there someone else here?’
She looks up. ‘I don’t think so. Did you hear something?’
I shake my head. ‘Just a draught, I think.’
‘OK. So, I’ll sort out the paperwork, and you can give your notice – and then we’ll go from there. Sound good?’
And it does. It dawns on me, now, that I can rearrange the narrative a little to save Dan the worry: to make it look as though I’m leaving the hospital by choice.
‘Great,’ I say, smiling. ‘Can we … Would you mind if we had a wander around? I’d love to get the measure of it again.’
She winces. ‘I’d love to say yes, but it’s a hard-hat zone now, and my insurance won’t cover it if we’re not in full safety gear. Maybe one day when the contractors are in? They’ll be thrilled to skive off for an hour while you look around.’
I feel a prickle of disappointment. Still, I brush it off. ‘Of course. No rush.’
She reaches for the bottle and tops up each of our glasses. ‘To delayed gratification.’
My phone vibrates on my lap. Conviction, Episode Four: The Wife is now available.
I turn it face down, and raise my glass. ‘To whatever happens next.’
I’m a little tipsy as I wave goodbye – not drunk, only pleasantly giddy, with a warmth to my skin that doesn’t match the cool evening breeze.
I feel as though I’ve exorcized at least one of my ghosts over the course of the afternoon. Talking to Darcy – opening up to her, about Graham, about Margot (almost), about so many previously unspeakable things – has made me walk away lighter, my feet seeming a little above the ground. I feel wiped clean, renewed.
She’s good at what she does – I can see this now; saw it, too, in the way she opened up silences, steered me into realizations I’d known, deep down, but hadn’t quite found it within myself to articulate. The thought of us, working together … I feel a bright, intellectual thrill at it; a door opening to ideas and treatments and therapies I’d long considered beyond my reach.
I unlock the car and sit, wondering – briefly – if I ought to be driving.
But it’s fine. Home is five minutes away. And I’m only tipsy. A couple of glasses, on a low tolerance. That’s all.
I put the keys in the ignition, and the car purrs to life.
‘Pairing,’ the speaker announces in a monotone. I reach into my back pocket for my phone. I know what’s happening, and I need to make it stop.
‘It’s 1991,’ Anna Byers says, her voice cool. In the background, I hear my own voice singing Sweet Child O’Mine. I can picture the night in question; I can see the hand-held camcorder’s red-dot flash.
‘Hannah McLelland and Graham Catton have been dating for six months. Everyone agrees they’re the perfect couple. She’s an outgoing party girl. He’s a quietly charismatic nice guy. Bookishly handsome to her nineties heroin chic thinness, made all the more apparent by her wild mass of curly hair, which makes her easy to spot when she’s not on his arm.’
I press the stop button on my phone. It blinks, but does nothing. Anna Byers’s voice goes on. I feel a sense of pressure rising, like a drumbeat; the skin on my arms prickles with some unspeakable threat.
‘He carries her books when he walks her to the classes she’d otherwise be too hungover to attend. She drags him from the library to loosen up when he’d otherwise study through the night. They’re gorgeous together, and passionately in love, in the way you are, at that age – as though you’re the only two people to exist in the world. It’s before mobile phones became commonplace, so whenever they see each other, it’s as though they’ve been apart for a month. He picks her up and spins her around, and they hold each other’s hands all night long.’
I open the car door, and step away, instinctively, as though backing away from a beast about to snap.
‘And nobody minds it – the way they’re like this, a little self-absorbed, a bit wrapped up in each other – because they’re just so lovely together. Living proof of the idea that it is possible to meet the love of your life over a game of beer pong. That you’ll lock eyes once and live happily ever after.’
I trip back, into Graham’s waiting arms, the press of his breath in my hair, and I turn cold.
I loved you, he says, his voice vibrating through me. And look what you did.
I spin around, a scream in my throat.
But there’s nobody there.
‘That you’ll be together, forever,’ Anna Byers goes on. ‘No matter what. ’Til death do you part.’
35
The cottage is empty, the windows dark. I let myself in and slam the door; I slide the deadbolt across, something we never do. Something I know won’t help, anyway. I press my back against it and let myself slide down. Tears gather in my throat, but I choke them back.
I won’t let him see me cry. He – my husband – who’s dead. Who absolutely is not there, though it felt that way as I drove home, Conviction continuing on, filling the space. I hadn’t planned to listen to it all; hadn’t really wanted to. But a grim, destructive curiosity – an impulse I’d take pleasure in picking apart, if it weren’t my own – made me listen to the words of the people come to damn me.
A roster of friends I’d forgotten – his friends, always, never mine – from the carousel of networking events we went to, for a while, and then he went to alone; and Darren, of course, again.
And my mother-in-law, Marianne, whose arm I’d held on to, at trial, to keep her from falling.
‘She’s taken everything away from us. Everything,’ she’d told Anna Byers, a crack splitting her voice. ‘Our son loved her so much – so, so much. And we loved her, too, because we wanted to see what he saw in her – we had faith in what he saw. And for … for Evelyn. Children need their mothers, don’t they?’
As I drove, I thought of the birthday cards I’d torn open over the years. The money I’d put in Evie’s savings account, the unread well-wishes thrown away. The fact is, I’ve never wanted my daughter to have anything to do with Graham’s father, Eric. Maybe if Marianne had shown any interest in me or my daughter while Graham was alive, I might have thought twice.
But she didn’t. She did nothing to deserve my daughter’s affection, and she certainly never did anything to deserve mine.
Still, she went on. ‘So after the murder, we believed what she said. We knew they’d had problems. But who doesn’t? They were a young couple trying to make it on their own – partly an issue of their own making, because she was too proud to ever really accept our help, but … well, we respected that. You have to, don’t you?
‘But never – not in a million years – did it cross my mind that she’d have had something to do with it. I thought the evidence told the story the prosecution said it did. I believed it, completely. Until …’
Byers had cut in here. ‘This part is a little hard to listen to – but we wanted to do Marianne’s story justice. She’s a woman grieving, as you can tell – someone who may never quite understand the awful tragedy that’s befallen her, and her family.’
My family, I’d thought, with a viciousness that surprised me.
Mine, Graham had corrected me.
Marianne’s voice had resumed, lo
w and weary. ‘After the trial ended, on the last day, we … we thought she’d gone back to the hotel. Which seemed impossible, because of the press, and the people in the court, and outside, but … we assumed she must’ve just slipped out. Maybe one of the bailiffs had taken her out the back way, or something. So we left, thinking we’d find them back at the room we’d been paying for, until she could get back on her feet.
‘But we got to the hotel, and she wasn’t there. She didn’t answer the phone, or the door, and … we thought something terrible must’ve happened. I mean, we were assuming the worst, with the things they’d said about Mr Philips and his family … God, your mind just goes everywhere. That’s the thing about living through something like this. You never get that sense of security – innocence, I suppose – you never get it back.
‘Eventually, one of the maids let us in – and the room was empty. Like they’d never been there at all. We called the only number we had for her, over and over, until it just … cut off. And we never heard from her again.
‘We tried to get legal advice, but …’
But grandparents don’t have the automatic right to see their grandchildren in the UK. I’d made sure of that, before I left. I wanted to disappear from their lives. To never see either of them again.
I think now of Eric’s hand on my arm; of the boned corset squeezing at my ribs. The dress holding me in place, the wet press of his lips against mine.
I drag myself up. I’m all energy, electric with anger and disgust. I can’t leave, but I can’t keep still.
‘I suppose we wanted to see the best in her, for Graham,’ Marianne had said. ‘But when she did that … I just started to wonder what else she might be capable of. Because even up to the day of sentencing, she’d looked me in the eye, living in a hotel we’d paid for, and thanked me for what I’d – what we’d – done for her. She was wholly, utterly convincing.