‘Yes, sometimes,’ I admitted. ‘I’d like her to suffer. I’d like her to suffer a lot. But then I remember dignity.’
‘So decide what’s more important – dignity, or revenge?’
I thought about it. ‘Revenge,’ I said, ‘if I could do it well, without trouble. And it needs to be something better than sewing mackerel into the curtains of her bourgeois home.’
‘Have you got her emails?’
‘No. She told me to delete them, so I did.’
‘Were you always on your PC when you read them?’
‘iPad, mostly. And phone. She sent text messages when she asked me to move here.’
‘You can have them retrieved. You’d have to pay for it, but it’s perfectly possible.’
‘And then what? Send them to her husband?’
‘Exactly. And was there anything else she said in that statement that was a definite, absolute lie? Not just a twisting of the truth, but an outright lie?’
‘Five silent phone calls. She said I made five silent calls to her house after I’d seen her in the café with her family. I wanted to get in touch with her husband and get him to say they didn’t happen.’
‘God, Alice. You are so naïve.’
‘What?’
‘Do you think she’d just stick that in there if the phone calls didn’t happen? Of course they happened. She’s a woman who covers all bases. She’d have made them herself.’
The thought of it made me felt sick. That someone could be so calculating and manipulative. Someone like Bo, who’d seemed … I left the thought unfinished. I’d had it so many times.
I said, ‘What can I do?’
‘Have you got her number?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you can have it traced.’
‘How?’
‘You could ask the police, but to be honest, they’re likely to refuse. Accepting a caution is basically admitting you did it, and they’re not going to waste time and resources on it. You could hire a private detective. It would cost you, though.’
Fight back, I thought. Don’t be passive and powerless. Fight back.
I said, ‘Can’t you do it?’
‘I’d lose my job if they found out.’
‘OK. How much do these private detectives cost?’
‘I don’t know exactly. A few hundred pounds, probably, to trace a call.’
‘Shit.’
‘Look at it this way. This madness has already cost you thousands. What’s a few hundred more to straighten it up? Besides, you might get some of it back if you can prove you were framed.’
‘I haven’t got a few hundred pounds.’
‘Have you got a credit card?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then use it. Seriously, you don’t want that caution hanging over you for the rest of your life. It’s not like a conviction, or a criminal record, but it’s not good. Get the bitch found out. Once the detective has the info, send it to me, and I’ll make a case for your local police force to look into it some more.’
‘OK. I’ll do it.’
‘Make sure you do. Start the ball rolling now, as soon as we’ve finished talking. Look up three private detectives online and email three of them for quotes about getting a number traced.’
‘Alright.’
We said goodbye and I immediately did as she suggested.
I’d phoned Anna for advice. She was never rich in sympathy, but she had knowledge of the law and the way the police worked, and they were the things I needed. I’d told her the whole story: moving to Grasmere, the police, the caution, the basket of food on the step. ‘She’s a bitch,’ Anna had pronounced. It was clear and simple the way she said it; there were no subtleties, no shades of grey, nothing that could be excused by psychological frailty or a barbarous past. No. She was evil. The rest of her – the lovely, caring, beauty of her – was a mask, and it had slipped.
‘You should never have accepted the caution,’ Anna had also said. That was probably true, but I hadn’t seen I had any choice. The police said they would arrest me if I didn’t, and all I’d wanted at the time was to get away, for it to be over.
But now, after speaking to Anna, I felt slightly better. Forget Bo Luxton and all her talk of walking in nature and being my own mother. I would heal through revenge and justice.
Lucas Robinson, Private Detective
24b Lancaster Road, Manchester, M1
Dear Alice Dark,
Following our initial conversation on the phone, I am pleased to attach records of traced telephone calls made to 01539 472018, The Riddlepit, Nr Grasmere, Cumbria, between the hours of 8 pm on Saturday, 12th September and 2 am on Sunday, 13th September.
You will see that there is a total number of five calls made, each one traced to a mobile phone registered in the name of Ms Bo Luxton.
If I can be of any further assistance, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Yours,
Lucas Robinson
Private Detective
I put the letter into an A4 envelope – it would have seemed such a shame to fold it up and crease it – along with the copies of all Bo’s emails and text messages that I’d had retrieved. I licked the envelope closed and wrote ‘Mr Augustus Hartley’ on the front. My heart beat loudly. Never in my life had I done anything this deliberately destructive. But Bo deserved it. I felt no guilt.
I wasn’t going to trust the post with this. I waited until I knew Bo would be out collecting the girls from school, then walked up the fellside to her house and dropped it into the mailbox at the end of her drive. To make sure I wouldn’t run into her on the way home, I carried on walking all the way to Glenridding, then caught two buses home to my studio.
I was moving back to Brighton the following week. I’d emailed Jake, a sheepish, embarrassed message, telling him what had happened. ‘And now I’m stuck,’ I said at the end. ‘I’m stuck in Grasmere with no money and all I really want to do now is come home to Brighton, start my MA and pretend it never happened. Is the offer of your floor still open? If so, I would love to take it, just until I’m back on my feet again.’
He’d replied saying yes straight away, as I’d known he would.
Everything was sorted out now, in my head. I would take out a loan for the fees, find a damp, old house to rent with other students and then leave the MA with a book ready to publish.
I’d started it yesterday: Exquisite.
10
Bo
The child was twenty-five years dead. All this time, I’d been following her growth in my mind, picturing her face, imagining her talents, her insecurities, her weaknesses, and yet all the while she’d been lying cold beneath the ground, her small body rotting away.
I was cross with myself for letting it get to me like this. Why should I even care? I hadn’t known the child; I’d barely spent four days with her and all I’d wanted, even then, was for someone to take her away. The dawn of her short life was brutal. I could never have brought her up.
But still, to think about her every day, knowing she was having a good life, in defiance of her violent beginnings, had brought me comfort. The beautiful, fantasy child of my creation. Now and then, I let my mind wander away from the gritty truth that I could never have cared properly for that baby, and imagined instead that I’d kept her. The life I pictured for us was strong and good. I saw myself, aged fifteen, escaping with the baby to a forest somewhere and making us a home. There we lived, just the two of us, surviving only on what the Earth provided. It was a simple life, and poor, but there was love between us and so it didn’t matter. I called the baby Willow and loved her so hard that she stayed with me forever. We were perfect.
But the baby was dead, and the loss of her hurt.
Pain was new to me. New and terrible. This was why I’d locked away that cracked and damaged heart. It was Alice, bloody Alice who’d opened me up and found it again, who’d made me weak and debilitated.
But how I still wanted her. I wanted to knock on her d
oor and tell the whole dreadful story, and for Alice to love me better. Because that’s what Alice would do, I knew that. If I turned up at her flat, apologised, wept and asked forgiveness, Alice would have me back again. I could make promises, wild promises to restore that exquisite love and eternalise it. We’d each write novels about it – poems, diaries. We would go on forever, Alice and me, and our love would be revered everywhere.
God, it could be so profoundly romantic, if we let it.
Alice would let it. I remembered a conversation we’d once had, when Alice had told me she had a terrible history of taking back men who’d hurt her. It made no sense, she said. She was an intelligent woman with a first-class degree, but when it came to life, she was naive. I had said, ‘It’s not stupid. The thing about being hurt badly is that the only person who can make you feel better is the person who hurt you, and so you keep going back and they keep making you better, but then they hurt you again, and so it goes on.’ And Alice had looked at me, wide-eyed with amazement, as though I had just handed her the truth about all the pain in the world.
I thought about that now, and how I longed for Alice to make this new pain stop. Alice. Dear Alice. My darling, lost child.
I came off the M6 and drove on to Windermere, through Ambleside and finally into Grasmere. Tourists were everywhere, even now, this late in the year, flooding the valleys. I thought they were idiots. They spent all their time crowding the villages, gazing at the surrounding fells and saying they were beautiful, but with no idea of what they’d see if they’d only walk a mile upwards.
I slowed down as I approached the bakery above which was Alice’s flat. Once again, there were no signs of life. Perhaps she wasn’t there. Perhaps she’d left after that day in the police station.
I parked the car in the centre of the village, then got out and walked back. I stood outside for ten minutes, staring up at the window. Nothing. I looked at the flight of stone steps that led to the front door. Should I? How would Alice greet me? Would she laugh and smile and hug me? Would she cry and shout hysterically, ‘Look what you have done to me’? Or would she slap my face and tell me to fuck off?
Quite possibly, knowing Alice, she would do all three.
I sighed and walked back to the car. I wasn’t ready to see her; to face all that hot, exhausting emotion.
I drove to the foot of the fell and up the rough dirt track that took me to The Riddlepit and the girls. Home. I was always glad to come home again, where everything was warm and comfortable and calm. Part of the reason for its calmness was that it lacked passion, but I didn’t mind that. Passion was for other people. Passion was for the weak.
But as soon as I opened the door, I sensed it. Something had changed. The atmosphere was thick and bitter, filled with bile.
The girls were fine. They charged downstairs and flung themselves at me in the hallway, barely letting me breathe, asking how Granny was, and what I’d brought them from London.
I reached into my bag and handed them each a book I’d bought from one of the second-hand shops on Charing Cross Road. Carrie’s War for Lola and Amazing Grace for Maggie. They took them and humoured me by turning them over in their hands before abandoning them on the floor and returning to their games. Last week, Maggie had looked me square in the eye and said, ‘Mummy, you might like books and think reading is great, but I don’t.’ And there it was, straight from the horse’s mouth: I might be your child, but don’t ever think you can mould me into a version of you. Still, I kept on trying.
Gus hadn’t come to greet me. I hauled my bag into the kitchen and set it on the table. He was there, in his usual place, in the rocking chair, drinking tea and reading. He didn’t look up as I walked in.
I busied myself putting water in the coffee machine. Still he didn’t look at me. It was deliberate; a hard, definite effort to ignore me. His body was rigid with it.
Eventually, I stood directly in front of him and said, ‘Hello, Gus.’
He raised his head slowly. He didn’t smile. An air of silent fury surrounded him. It silenced me. I returned to the coffee machine, racking my brain for what could be the matter with him.
Then it caught my eye: On the table was a large brown envelope, fat with hundreds of sheets of paper inside, and on the top, as if left there deliberately for me to see, a letter, on headed paper – a private detective.
I picked it up, read it, and a cold knowledge filled me: My life was about to disintegrate.
At last, Gus spoke. ‘Can you explain this to me?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘I have no idea what it is,’ I said.
He stood up, came over to me and pulled the papers out of the envelope. ‘Let me try and jog your memory,’ he said, and started to read. ‘“Gus is going away next Tuesday for three nights. Come and stay. Please. Love you, adore you.”’
He dropped that page and picked up another one. ‘“Goodnight, my sweetheart. I am picturing you lying asleep, hoping your dreams are peaceful. Love you.”’
‘And then the winner, Bo. The one that tops them all. “Darling, gorgeous Alice, I have a suggestion. I know you’ve only just moved, and I know it’s a lot to ask, but … why don’t you let your flat go and come and live in Grasmere? There is plenty of accommodation in the village and I’m sure you could find work to keep you going. I can help you financially if you need help…”’
He looked at me. ‘What is going on?’
I did what I always did on the very rare occasions I felt cornered. I started to cry. I spoke hysterically, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why she would do this. I didn’t send those messages, Gus. I didn’t do it. She’s evil. She’s evil.’
He sat down. ‘Is she as evil as that young man who stalked you five years ago?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘Stop it, Gus!’ I cried. ‘I can’t bear to be reminded of that.’
‘Oh, really? Well, that’s tough, Bo, because I am going to remind you of it.’
I put my hands over my ears, but his words filled the room around me.
‘Don’t you remember Christian, the young man you used to teach, who fell in love with you and wouldn’t leave you alone? Do you remember that? And he pursued you so vigorously that we went to the police and then a day later, he was dead? Do you remember that?’
‘I am asking you to stop.’
‘And I am telling you to listen. Do you remember he killed himself because he thought he was insane? He thought he was insane because you told him he’d imagined an affair with you, because you somehow – using God knows what techniques – made him doubt his own grip on reality? Do you remember that, Bo?’
I said nothing.
‘Because I remember it. I remember it well – how you cried and wailed and said you hadn’t meant for him to kill himself; you’d just wanted him to leave you alone, and everyone – every single person who heard that story – pitied the life out of you. I would like to know what really went on there, Bo. I would like you to tell me what happened.’
‘Nothing! It was as I said. Don’t do this, Gus. You are being unbelievably cruel.’ I cried harder.
Gus went on staring at me, his face taut with disgust. In the end he said, ‘We’re not going to get anywhere, I can see that. You vicious, lying cow.’
‘I am not lying.’
He bellowed. ‘Well, what the hell is all this, then?’
‘I don’t know. It’s Alice. She’s evil. I’m sure she is. She made these up. They’re fake.’
He waved the letter from the detective in front of my face. ‘And what is this, then?’
I cried more and started to breathe more quickly, as though I might hyperventilate because of the terror of it all. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a terrible trick, Gus. She’s playing a terrible trick on me.’
‘Tricks of this nature are vile. No wonder she was so angry with you. No wonder she demanded money from you.’
‘Why won’t you listen to me, Gus? You’re my husband. You’re meant to be on my side.’
‘They know the truth.’
‘I am not continuing this discussion. You are going to do what I have said, or I will do it for you.’
‘You’re blackmailing me. You bastard.’
‘Indeed I am. And I’m leaving you.’
‘What?’
‘You’re a monster, Bo Luxton, and I no longer wish to share my life with you.’
‘But you have to.’
‘No, I don’t. There has been nothing between us for years, and now it’s over. It’s done. I do not wish you to be my wife.’
He walked away.
I stood in the kitchen and wept.
11
Alice
I felt sure Bo was watching me. Three times now, I’d seen her walking around outside the flat. I knew immediately it was Bo, even before I’d seen her face. The shape of her in her duffel coat was enough. I would recognise it anywhere: the exact height of her, the curve of her shoulders, the gentle swell of her hips, the movement of her limbs as she walked. Even now, after everything, the sight of Bo made me catch my breath.
I worked hard at hating her. It should have been easy, but still there were nights when I lay awake in my bed and sobbed for the loss of her. Sometimes, I thought I would do anything it took to have her back again – back as the person I’d known; not this cold, manipulative woman who lied and tricked.
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