I am startled to see that there is a crack-sized opening in the sliding glass doors that lead out of the kitchen and into this sloping garden. I’m certain they were completely shut when I studied them from the top of the wall. There is no way to hide if I want to approach the house. My best option is to veer away from the wall and walk straight up to the doors. So this is what I do. When I reach them, I peer in.
Standing by the island where I sat with Eliza on Friday morning is a man. His hair is military short and white-grey, and he is wearing jeans and a charcoal shirt, untucked. His arms are crossed and the small of his back is resting against the countertop.
‘Hello, Holly,’ he says.
There is only a metre and a half between us. The pose is cool, but his face is flushed.
‘The cameras picked you up. I’d have buzzed you in from the front but I knew you’d flee if I spoke to you on the intercom.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’d have tried to persuade you, but I’ve been waiting for the police. They’ll be banging on the door soon. It was hard, watching you leave. But here you are, anyway.’
I’d forgotten the impact of that eye of his. The blue half over the brown half is like the sky over the earth. It goes right through me.
‘I heard the message you left for Eliza. Even with the false name, I’d know your voice anywhere.’
I am trembling so violently the room seems to be shaking.
‘I knew you weren’t dead. I always knew. I never stopped looking.’ He is staring at my knee. ‘You’re bleeding.’
I stare with him. It is badly scraped from when I dropped from the top of the wall, and dripping blood.
‘Let me get something to clean it.’
I open my mouth to say No, but nothing comes out.
‘Come in, Holly. I mean – please come in.’
I glance quickly behind me, into the garden. There is no tree near the wall on this side, no chink in the bricks to get a foot up, no way of gaining the height I need to scale the wall and get away from him. Even if there were, I couldn’t do it at speed, and he would catch me. I stifle a sob.
‘I’m not going to harm you or trap you. You can come through the house and leave through the front door any time you want. But it would help us both to talk and there isn’t a lot of time – the police will be here in a few minutes.’
He is the same medium height and trim build, but he looks so different with hair. You’d barely notice the white forelock, because it blends with the grey-white everywhere else, but it’s there if you look carefully. He doesn’t have even a tiny speck of scalp showing. Whenever I looked over my shoulder it was for a bald man – I didn’t factor in the possibility that he would have changed his appearance just as I had.
‘What have you done to Eliza and Alice?’ These are my first words to him in nearly two years. My voice is so tiny. My mouth is so dry.
‘That’s what made you power forward, isn’t it? I guessed as much. They’re in Yorkshire.’
I have to reach for the bottle of water in my bag and take several sips before I can get any words out. ‘You wouldn’t allow them to go.’
‘Not as I was with you, no. But Eliza’s had the address and key from the start. I don’t imagine she’ll stay long, once she sees what it’s like there – I tried to warn her.’
‘Everything you say is a lie.’ My chest is so tight. ‘Why are they in Yorkshire?’
‘Look, please come in and sit down – you’re not looking well.’ He is backing away from me, towards the centre of the room.
My breathing is so fast it is hard to talk. ‘Because you fucking terrify me.’ I am tapping my fingers in the air, which makes me catch sight of my wrist. It is blotchy red and bumped with hives.
‘You don’t need to be terrified any more. Listen to me, Holly. Open the sliding glass wider – make your potential exit bigger.’ He places an ancient, iron key on the marble floor, then kicks it so it lands at the edge of the room. ‘This opens a door in the wall you jumped. It’s camouflaged by the jasmine, quite near to where you went over. I use it all the time – the police still haven’t figured out it’s there.’
He moves to a small screen attached to the wall, presses a button, and I see the live video image of the front of the house, with the iron gates opening. ‘So you can get out that way too, if you choose.’ He returns to the table, hooks out a stool, sits down. ‘There’ll be three metres of breakfast bar between us. If I even breathe wrong, if I look as though I’m even thinking about standing, you can run. I won’t come after you.’
‘So you say.’
‘I mean it.’
Slowly, I pass the threshold from outside to in, bending to scoop up the key as I move but not taking my eyes from him. I am a metre away from the open door. His expensive cabinetry is between us, as if we were at opposite ends of a long boardroom table.
‘Why did you stop shaving your head?’
‘For Alice. I’m trying to be the best father I can. I wanted her to have someone around who looks like her.’
You will never be that pretty, I think. But I don’t say this. The idea of the two of us bonding over her makes me sick. ‘You have Waardenburg syndrome too.’
‘Yes. All that time I was shaving so nobody would notice. I thought the white streak was too much of a giveaway on top of my eye.’ He shrugs at the irony. ‘When I finally wanted the forelock to show, I found every hair on my head had turned white.’
‘Tell me why they aren’t here,’ I say.
‘Because yesterday I told Eliza about Jane’s death, and that I slept with her. She was going to find out anyway, and I wanted her to hear it from me.’
He waits for me to react, but gives up when I don’t.
‘She was upset, to put it mildly. And angry. She didn’t even pack. She grabbed Alice and left.’
‘You made it that easy?’
‘I know you have good reason to find that amazing, but yes, that’s exactly what I did. I’m in enough trouble without dragging them into it any further than I already have.’
‘You never told me about the women you slept with, Eliza included. Don’t say you’re a changed man.’
‘What I’m going to say is that the police will find my semen in Jane’s body and my saliva on the mug I used while I was in her house.’
‘You raped her.’
‘I didn’t. What happened to you – I mean, what I did to you – it wasn’t true of Jane.’
‘Yes it was. I know what happened in that hotel in Ireland.’
‘Ah – my good friend Al, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘He told me the two of you spoke. What happened in that hotel was a performance. The show was for Al too, so I could tell him about it.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Al explained to you about Jane’s US taxes. It was hopeless for her. She was trapped and they were threatening to charge her with financial crimes she hadn’t even known she was committing. She wanted me free of it. We needed them to think we’d broken up irretrievably, that there was no link between us. Our life together had been ruined.’
I shake my head. ‘No. You’re lying. You hurt her. When you – my keys – when I bumped the table.’ It is so hard even now to say the words. ‘You called me Jane that night. You were crying. You said you’d sworn never to let anything like that happen again. It wasn’t a show.’
‘Holly. The night before she was born. In the sitting room. I know what I did to you. I’m so sorry. I wish I could undo it.’
My hand flies up to stop him talking. My head is vibrating from side to side, not in my control. Nobody knows. I have told no one. I do not like to hear it or think about it or say it. I press my palms hard against my temples then backwards across my scalp.
He waits a minute. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ His voice is quiet. ‘I promise you. Nothing like that ever happened with Jane. She and I planned it, we staged it as I said. The fight we had, we wanted it to be heard – we waited for the couple in the room nex
t door to come back before we started. We were deliberate about the things we said. But I still did those things to her – we had to make it convincing. What happened with you, when you fell against the table that night, it triggered memories of—’
‘No. You’re lying. You always lie.’
He moves towards me and I let out a cry. He freezes and swallows hard. ‘I never hurt Jane.’
‘No more of this. No more.’
‘Okay.’
I rest my hands on my knees and lean over, as if I have been running hard and can finally stop to catch my breath.
‘Listen,’ he says, when he sees I am calmer. ‘I could have whistle-blown on Jane and got a reward from the IRS – a big cut on whatever they recovered. Believe me, they made that clear. They have laws that allow and encourage that. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t.’
‘So you know where her money is, from the other accounts.’
‘Whatever I did or didn’t know, I didn’t share it, despite Al recommending strongly that I should.’
Something new occurs to me about the IRS’s involvement. One of the aims of this must also have been to drive a wedge between Zac and Jane, to give him an incentive to betray her, and in doing so, to betray Frederick too.
‘Look, Holly. My fingerprints are all over the house Jane was renting. I’m guessing the only reason I’m still here is that they’ve been waiting for the forensic results. They want to make sure they have all their ducks lined up before they arrest me and the twenty-four-hour custody clock starts to tick. That will happen any minute. I wanted to spare Alice and Eliza seeing them come for me.’
‘If you wanted to spare them, you might have refrained from sleeping with your ex-wife behind your new wife’s back. For starters.’
‘I’ve been in counselling, since you left. Since before you left. I check in weekly with a specialist service for men who want to stop their abusive behaviour. I didn’t hurt Jane, despite the evidence. I’m sad to say you’re the only one I did that to. You paid the price for what happened before we ever met.’
‘No. No, no, no, no, no. You’ve been bullying and controlling Eliza, the same way you did to me. You have her too scared to make friends.’
He looks so puzzled and hurt I’d be tempted to believe him if I didn’t already know what a good actor he was. ‘No, Holly. I haven’t been. As I said, I did do that to you, but not to Eliza.’
‘That’s what you’d have said if anyone confronted you about me.’
‘Yes. I would have then. And I’d have believed my own lies. I wouldn’t now.’
‘I suppose you’d say you weren’t abusing Eliza in other ways, too.’
‘I haven’t abused her. I regret what I did to you. I understand now how important it is for you to be believed. I also understand it might not be something you want to talk about with anyone.’
I can’t look at him. I can’t speak for a minute, and he can’t either. At last I say, ‘Eliza and I were pregnant at the same time. When did you learn about Alice?’
‘Eliza turned up with Alice when she was four months old. That was the first time I ever saw her. I didn’t know she was mine until then.’
This isn’t how Eliza described it. Zac didn’t tell me until I was pretty far along that he was with someone else. Isn’t that what she said? The implication was that Zac knew about the baby during Eliza’s pregnancy, and it was only the existence of his previous girlfriend – me – who stopped their being together. ‘She says you did know.’
He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t.’
‘One of you is lying, unless you decided together you’d tell different stories about this. Why did you wait another eight months to get married? Eliza said Alice was a year old when you finally did.’
‘Because of you. Because I couldn’t move on without you. I only ever wanted to marry you, after Jane. I didn’t want to marry Eliza, but I wanted to try to support her. Mostly I wanted to give Alice the closest thing to a real family I could.’
‘You’re playing mind games. With me and with Eliza. It’s what you do.’
‘I’m not. I don’t do that any more.’
‘Does Eliza know who I am?’
‘She didn’t until yesterday. I told her as she was leaving.’
‘Why was Jane in Bath?’
He closes his eyes, takes what seems a long time to open them again. Is he thinking about how to answer? ‘Because of me. She was still – powerful to me. As you are.’ He shakes his head, slowly. ‘It’s upsetting to Eliza, but I never lied to her about my feelings.’
‘Jane was here because of you, and you, because of me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why couldn’t you just leave me alone?’
‘Because I needed to know you were okay. Deep down, I’d always known that no matter how desolate you were, you’d never kill yourself – your impulse to live is too strong. But I needed it confirmed. I needed to tell you how sorry I was, though I worried that if you found out I was in Bath you’d disappear again. That’s why I hesitated – I didn’t want to lose the chance to be near you, to watch over you like a guardian angel. God, Holly – don’t look at me that way. I thought, maybe someday, circumstances would let me be with you again.’
I shake my head. ‘How can you imagine even for a moment that would be possible?’
‘I’m trying to be a better man.’
‘Was it the photograph of my grandmother with Princess Anne that led you here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You visited her care home. You frightened her.’
He nods. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I left quickly. I was glad to learn she wasn’t dead, incidentally.’
‘By the river on Saturday night – you could have killed the man I was with.’
‘I was upset when I saw you with him. I didn’t mean to hit him, I was just trying to shock you apart.’
‘You were a bowler, Zac. You knew exactly what you were doing.’
‘All right, yes. I lost control. Is he your boyfriend?’
‘None of your business. It’s attempted murder. To add to the actual murder. Great way to demonstrate how much you’ve changed. Was the robin meant to do that, too?’
‘What robin?’
‘The dead one you left on my doorstep on Thursday.’
‘I didn’t do that. I’m concerned to know who did.’
‘I don’t need or want your concern. And I don’t believe you. I don’t believe anything you say. It was creepy as fuck.’
There is the hint of his familiar ironic smile. ‘Since when do you swear so much, Holly?’
‘Since you. If I tell the police you were responsible for George’s head injury—’
‘George?’ Clearly he is the same obsessive, controlling, jealous Zac I remember. ‘His name is George?’
‘It doesn’t matter what his name is. It matters that you assaulted him. Will you deny it?’
‘No. I’ll plead guilty to that or anything relating to you that you want to report.’
‘Even though it may mean you losing Alice? When you admit to your history of abusive behaviour?’
I watch his face tighten. ‘I can’t lose Alice.’ He works his jaw back and forth. He shakes his head, as if to shake himself out of it.
‘See. Easy for you to say. Your words are empty.’
He says, ‘You know, Holly, when people change, they don’t change perfectly. They have setbacks. They still make mistakes. Throwing that rock was one. And watching you that night by the river.’
‘Some mistakes are bigger than others – some are too big to forgive.’
‘Yes. They are, though I wish that weren’t true.’
I am so close to asking him about Frederick Veliko and his own involvement in that, but I stop myself. Even now, I never want Zac to guess at the kind of help I’ve had, the kind of people I know, the kind of searches I did when we were together, and might still do. He has never imagined any of this about me. Not my failed attempt to join Maxine, and not my
pale imitation of work for her at the edges as a lowly informant.
‘Oh, Holly,’ he starts to say, ‘you’ll never—’
There is the sound of a firm knock on the front door. ‘Zac.’ It is a male voice, loud and insistent, and very, very serious.
The two of us turn to the screen, but it has gone blank.
The voice comes again, preceded by another batch of knocks, then followed by several more. ‘It’s the police, Zac. We need to talk to you.’
Zac crosses to the screen, taps in various codes, presses buttons, but the screen remains blank. They have somehow deactivated it.
‘We’ve run out of time.’ He smiles that sad smile again. ‘So little, after so long. There are a few things I wanted to give you, but I guess that will have to wait. At least I’ve been able to tell you I’m sorry. And that I still love you. There hasn’t been anybody like you for me.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Zac,’ the voice says again. ‘We need you to open the door.’
He nods slowly and walks out of the room. He climbs the criss-cross of stairs that go every which way, moving towards the front door. ‘Coming,’ he says.
‘Good man,’ the police officer says.
I am behind Zac, keeping enough distance between us to shoot out of his reach if he suddenly lurches at me.
He turns and catches my eye. ‘I’d rather you didn’t see this. No reason why you should give me that, but still …’
So I pass him. For a second the distance between us narrows to half a metre. He could grab me if he chose to, but he doesn’t. I keep going. I think – but can’t be sure – that there is the lightest touch of his fingers through my ponytail as I fly by. My trainers squeak the way they did the last time I took these stairs, up to Eliza’s room on the first floor, where I have been before.
Below, I can hear the police officer’s voice. ‘Hiya.’
Hiya, I think. Who says Hiya in these circumstances? Clearly, this police officer, who continues to speak. ‘Zac Hunter, the time is 09.27 and I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Jane Miller. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention …’
I Spy Page 27