by Lisa Jewell
‘None,’ she said. ‘None whatsoever.’
‘No,’ says Rose, leaving the photograph in the centre of the table. ‘No, that’s fair enough. Right.’ She grips the table and turns to Philip. ‘I think that’s about it for now? Unless there’s anything you wanted to ask, Philip?’
Philip breathes in and runs his fingers down the length of his navy tie. ‘Well, there is just one thing, Mrs Mullen, just quickly before we go.’ He puts on his reading glasses and consults his notebook, slightly vaguely, just as they’d discussed in the car on the way here. ‘Erm, do you happen to know a Mrs Frances Tripp?’
‘Never heard of her.’
‘She lives over there in the village. I believe you’ve had an encounter or two with her. She’s the lady who thinks she’s being persecuted.’
‘No. I don’t know who you mean.’
‘Here, this lady.’ He slides a photo of Mrs Tripp towards her.
‘Oh, yes,’ she says, ‘yes. I think I’ve seen her around. She’s a bit …’
‘Delusional. Yes. Mr Fitzwilliam’s son has a photo, in fact, of the two of you chatting on the street, just a few days ago.’
‘Yes. Yes, I do recall that.’
‘What were you talking about?’
‘She was just talking about all her crazy stuff, you know. All the people who were stalking her. That kind of thing. I was kind of trapped. Couldn’t get away.’
‘So,’ says Philip, removing his glasses and then spreading his fingertips out across the tabletop, ‘here’s a thing. Mrs Tripp received a message from someone on her chat room at about six o’clock yesterday informing her that Tom Fitzwilliam would be having a big meeting of all her stalkers at his house tonight, telling her to come along and take some photos. The woman claimed to be living in Mold, but we’ve traced the IP address and in fact the message was sent from the Melville area.’
Rose sensed a muscle in Rebecca’s jaw clench slightly.
‘And it was convenient, I suppose, that Mrs Tripp was there last night as she was able to clarify that you were in your office all night. She claims to have seen you there. Sitting in your bay window. Except of course your desk isn’t in your bay window, is it? It’s against the wall? And didn’t your sister-in-law claim to have seen a cardboard cut-out in your bay when she passed by your office at around eight o’clock?
‘And this.’ He taps the photograph of the figure on the back path. ‘This could well be you, if you hadn’t in fact been sitting at your desk in your office as you claimed to be. The button on the coat sits quite high up when you wear it over your bump. As does this button on this coat.’ He taps it again; then he breathes out and leans back into his chair. ‘Mrs Mullen, is there anything you’d like to tell us about your movements last night? Anything you haven’t already told us? Anything that might be helpful?’
The following moment is entirely silent.
Jack looks at Rebecca. ‘Bex,’ he urges gently. ‘Bex?’
Rebecca stares pointedly to the right.
‘Mrs Mullen?’ says Philip.
Finally she turns to face Rose and Philip. Her gaze is black and determined. ‘Why on earth’, she says slowly, crisply, ‘would I want to kill Nicola Fitzwilliam?’
Rose inhales sharply. There it is. The crux of it. Why would a heavily pregnant woman go into a neighbour’s kitchen in the dark of night and stab her to death? With or without a twenty-year-long grudge against her husband? It was the question that had been perplexing her ever since Jenna and Frances Tripp had walked into the station this morning with their big bag of curveballs. She’d spent two hours going through everything she had at her disposal, trying to find the thing that would answer the conundrum. And then about an hour ago it had hit her, hard.
Jenna Tripp had told them that Nicola Fitzwilliam had also been a student at Tom Fitzwilliam’s school back in the nineties, although they’d not got together until a few years later. So Rose had read and reread the pages from Genevieve Hart’s diary, and again and again in the sections outlining the terrible bullying campaign she’d been subjected to, the same name kept coming up.
Nikki Lee had been the ringleader and also the puppet master; she stood to one side and let her minions administer the worst of the abuse. Nikki Lee smelled of cigarettes and boys’ aftershave. She bleached her hair and wore it tight off her face revealing cheekbones like razor blades, plucked eyebrows that never moved, eyes like chips of dirty blue ice. She kept her hands in her pockets even when she was kicking Genevieve in the back. She told Genevieve she smelled of teachers’ cum. She spat in her hair and rubbed it in with the ball of her foot. She spread a rumour that Genevieve had chlamydia. She spread another rumour that Genevieve’s cold sore had been caught from a teacher’s cock. She got her acolytes to tear up Genevieve’s art homework – on one occasion a watercolour of her mother’s hair that she’d been working on for a month. She sat on the wall opposite Genevieve’s house at night with her hands in her pockets watching and smoking, her presence sometimes only described by the small burning circle of red growing bigger and smaller. She told Genevieve that if she told anyone about what was happening to her she would kill her pet dog by pushing a piece of scaffolding up its arse until it came out if its mouth. Genevieve described how Nikki Lee watched her what felt like every minute of every day; wherever Viva went, there she was. Waiting, watching, insulting, pinching, spitting, hitting, following, hating, lying, kicking, hurting. For a whole terrible, painful, unthinkable year.
Rose had called the school, asked them to email over the yearbook for Genevieve’s year. They’d obliged within minutes. Rose had sat breathlessly waiting for the attachment to download. And there it was. In her hands. She and Philip had set off for the Mullens’ house thirty seconds later.
Now Rose looks at Rebecca, her heart aching with the awfulness of it all, and she sighs and puts her hand into her bag, one last time, and pulls out one last photo.
‘Here,’ she says. ‘Look at this photo for me, will you?’ She watches Rebecca’s face, waiting for her reaction. ‘Can you tell me who this is?’
‘Yes,’ whispers Rebecca, ‘it’s Nikki Lee.’
‘That’s right. Nikki Lee. Your sister’s bully. The girl who drove her to kill herself. And you know who else this is, don’t you?’
Rebecca’s eyes have filled with tears. She makes a loud noise in the back of her throat trying to pull them back into herself. She nods.
Rose hears Jack murmuring ‘Oh my God’ in the background.
‘It’s Nicola Fitzwilliam,’ says Rebecca.
‘Oh Christ,’ says Jack Mullen. ‘Oh Jesus.’
‘That’s right,’ says Rose gently. ‘That’s right. And now, would you like to tell us, Rebecca? Tell us exactly what happened last night?’
Rebecca Mullen nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’
IV
67
26 August
Dear Mr Fitzwilliam,
I got my GCSE results yesterday and I just wanted you to know that I got eight GCSEs! Level 7 in English Lit and Language and a level 6 in Maths. And a B in Spanish! And I just wanted to say thank you, for everything. For looking out for me. Even when I probably didn’t deserve to have you looking out for me. For sorting it all out with the social services. For sorting it out with Bess and her mum. It was a bit squashed living there those few months but I’ve moved back with Dad for the summer and I’ve got my own big room down here so it’s been really nice. Mum’s doing OK. She’s in a hospital in Weston-super-Mare and me and Dad and Ethan go and visit her every other day. I don’t know what will happen after the summer. I’ve got the grades for the sixth-form place I wanted but I’m not sure now if I’ll go back to Melville. I’m going to think about it.
Anyway, I hope you’re OK. It’s terrible what happened to you and Freddie. I think about you both a lot. If you’re ever down in Weston-super-Mare, come and say hello. It would be great to see you.
Lots of love,
Jenna Tripp
&nbs
p; 68
The baby kicks her feet. Joey picks them up, brings them to her mouth and blows on to them. This delights the baby, who kicks her feet even harder and beams at Joey in stupefaction.
Joey slides the nappy under the baby’s bottom and pulls the fasteners together across her distended belly. Then she pulls the baby’s arms and legs into a soft yellow babygro and expertly pops together all the popper buttons. The balled-up nappy she tucks into a scented plastic bag.
‘There,’ she says to the baby. ‘All done.’
The baby smiles at her again and she scoops her off the changing mat and carries her downstairs.
The baby is called Eloise. She is Jack’s daughter, Joey’s niece. She arrived ten days early and is now four months and six days old. She has dark hair like her mum and green eyes like Joey. She is perfect.
Jack gets home from work an hour later. She sees his face change, as it does every day when he returns and his eyes find his daughter, from haunted awe to tired joy.
‘There she is,’ says Joey, passing the soft body to her brother. ‘There’s your girl.’
Jack had brought the baby back from the hospital when she was two days old. There was no space on the nearest mother-and-baby unit and Rebecca had let the baby go without shedding a tear. ‘I want Joey to take care of her,’ she’d said, folding babygros and nappies into a bag. ‘Not a nanny. Joey.’
Those first weeks had been a huge shock. Alfie had moved out shortly after Rebecca’s arrest. After being held for questioning by the police for the best part of a day, Joey had had no choice but to tell him about her ridiculous infatuation with Tom Fitzwilliam and he in turn had told her about all the girls he’d kissed at work since he’d realised that she didn’t really love him. Alfie had cried; Joey had breathed a sigh of relief.
And so she finds herself alone now for long, quiet days. Just her and Eloise in this big house that had once felt like a slightly unwelcoming hotel and now feels simply like the place where she lives with Jack and Eloise. Some days she feels lonely, some days she feels numb, some days she feels like escaping to an Ibizan beach bar and drinking herself into oblivion. But no longer does she feel useless. She had not wanted a baby of her own; even less had she wanted another person’s baby. But now that baby is here and she loves her with a primal ache.
Rebecca asked them not to bring the baby to visit. She’s on remand at Easthill Park. She hasn’t been granted bail and is due to be sentenced on 3 September. She will never be coming home to raise her baby. Joey had never told Jack what Rebecca had once said to her about not wanting a baby, about getting pregnant to make him happy. She didn’t want anything else to cast darkness across what should have been the happiest moments of his life.
She’d asked him, a couple of weeks ago, when they were both drinking whisky at the kitchen table at three in the morning; she’d said, ‘Why her, Jack? Why Rebecca? Even without the murder thing, I always wondered why you chose her?’
And he’d smiled sadly and said, ‘I didn’t choose her. She chose me.’
She’d started at that. So similar to what Tom had said about Nicola. She wondered if that was how it worked, that while most women spent their lives searching for the perfect man, men sat around waiting to be chosen and then made the best of it.
‘But you loved her, right?’
‘Of course. And I still do. But it’s terrifying to think that I never knew her at all. Not even a tiny bit.’
Joey had seen Tom in town the week before. He’d been dressed down in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. He was wearing sunglasses and carrying a shopping bag from Russell & Bromley. She’d watched him from the bus stop where she sat with Eloise by her side in her pram. He still had presence, she’d observed detachedly, he still occupied space with a certain swagger, a certain élan. For a brief moment she’d remembered herself in the dark shadows of Melville Heights, his hands pulling her body towards his, everything so hard and desperate and frantic. A brief flicker of something passed through her. Something bright and urgent.
But then she pictured his sad, heavy face in the Bristol Harbour Hotel, the slump of his shoulders, the defeated rolls of his stomach, the pale sheen of his scalp through the thinning spot on the crown of his head. She remembered the terrible marks on his body, as though he’d lain down and allowed himself to be savaged by an animal. The thickness of his breath. The smallness of him as he headed from the hotel room.
She had no idea what she’d been thinking. None at all.
The next day Joey takes Eloise to visit her mother. Or Nana Sarah as she and Jack have decided that Eloise should refer to her once she is old enough to refer to things. The sky is heavy with summer storm clouds and she doesn’t have an umbrella and should be heading home, but something brought her here today. Some sense of life moving on. Babies did that to you: they pinned you down in the moment at precisely the same time as hurtling you into the future and hitching you back to the past.
There’s a small bunch of tulips on Mum’s grave, growing gnarled and papery in the August heat. She lays her dust-pink summer roses next to them and sits on her bottom, one hand on the frame of the buggy, jiggling it gently to keep Eloise asleep.
‘Hi, Mum,’ she says. ‘It’s me. I’ve brought Eloise to see you. But she’s sleeping so you won’t get much out of her today. Things are settling down at home. But Jack is so, so sad. It kills me to see him like this. I’m so used to him being the one jollying everything along, jollying me along. It’s weird how we’ve swapped roles. But it’s good. I needed to stop playing the helpless child and having a brother like Jack made that so easy to do. I know I keep coming here and telling you that I’m growing up, but before I used to think that being grown-up meant doing grown-up things. Now I know that’s not true, that being a grown-up is not about getting married, about smart flats and reading groups, it’s about taking responsibility for your own actions and the consequences of those actions. So yes, I’m getting there, Mum. I’m definitely getting there, I—’
She stops then at the sound of a presence behind her. She catches her breath and turns. It’s a man, a middle-aged man in a Stone Roses T-shirt and combat shorts, grey hair cut shaggy around a craggy face, a bunch of red 99p Asda tulips in his hand. ‘Hi, babe,’ he says.
‘Dad,’ says Joey.
‘Brought Mum some flowers,’ he says, tapping them against his other hand.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Me too.’
His eyes go to the buggy. She sees them fill with tears. ‘Is this …?’
‘Yes. It’s Eloise.’
He nods and suck the tears back. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Wow.’
‘She’s sleeping.’
He nods again. ‘Don’t wake her.’
They fall silent for a moment.
A raindrop lands between them, fat and heavy. Then another. They both look upwards and then at each other.
‘Shall we?’ says Joey.
‘A drink, maybe?’ says her dad.
‘Yes,’ says Joey. ‘That would be nice.’
69
20 April 2018
Dearest Eloise,
Happy birthday to you! You are one year old today which means that it has been 363 days since I last saw you.
Your daddy tells me everything about you, your daddy and your aunty Joey of course. They show me photos and films of you and tell me what you’re learning to do. But I have asked them not to bring you here. I don’t want you to think of me as That Strange Woman in the Scary Place Where I Have To Go When I’d Rather Be Doing Fun Stuff at Home. I don’t want you to think of me at all. I just want you to enjoy being a child, enjoy having the loveliest daddy in the world, enjoy spending time with your aunt Joey who is about a hundred times more fun than I am. And then hopefully, one day, they’ll let me come home and then I can be a cool new person in your life. Or not. Whatever you want. You’re in charge of you and me. You get to decide all that.
But before that day comes, I thought it would be really important for you to understan
d why I did this to us, why I hurt someone so much that it meant that I would be taken away from you and from Daddy. So I’m writing this to you now and will let Daddy decide when you’re old enough to read it. And I’d love to be able to tell you it was an accident, that I didn’t mean it to happen. I’d love to say it wasn’t my fault, that it was somebody else’s fault, that I’d never have done something like that knowing the price I might have to pay. But that’s not true, and I’m sure, by the time you’re old enough to read this letter, you’ll know it’s not true too.
I went to that woman’s house with the intention of hurting her. And I went there knowing that there was a chance – a slim chance, I thought – but a chance that I would be caught and then I would have to go away for years and years and miss out on all the good things I should have been sharing with you and Daddy. I hoped I wouldn’t be caught. I hoped the police would think it was her husband and that he would go to prison – but that didn’t happen. And now I’m in here and you’re out there and I have to accept that it is entirely my fault, mine and nobody else’s.
Daddy will have told you about my little sister Viva and what happened to her. But I really want you to hear it from me, because the answers to all your questions are contained in the way I felt about her, and that’s not something anyone but me can really express.
I was two when Viva was born. I was furious about it. Absolutely furious. I was cross for years that my mum and dad hadn’t thought I was enough for them. I was livid that I had to share them with someone else, and not just anyone else, but with this little butterball girl with dimples and shining eyes, this child who beguiled every adult who came across her. She was always in a good mood, always ready to play, always hugging everyone and kissing everyone. When she started school, everyone wanted to be friends with her. She was so different to me; it took me years to make friends at school, and even then I kept them at arms’ length. I never wanted them to come home after school, to encroach on my space. I was an introvert. Viva was an extrovert. I adored her. I hated her. But by the time I was a teenager we’d found a way to coexist. She looked up to me because I was clever and self-contained. I admired her because she was gregarious and sweet. She was my favourite person in the world.