attending tap dancing classes and she’d uploaded several videos of a
27
troupe of six all spinning and clacking and moving with frenzied feet as
28
though their limbs were elastic. Her work was perhaps the easiest of all: 29
the previous entries on her website, none of them nearly as tantalizing
30
as the one she’d written about us.
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I didn’t think then to retrace her steps through the previous
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decades— that came later— but I was still astonished by the volume of
02
data available literally at my fingertips, with just a few clicks. It fright-03
ened me to know that I was just as visible, that my life could be so eas-
04
ily penetrated. I watched her in the intervening weeks, as she uploaded
05
images of her whereabouts with the locations tagged and posted about
06
her plans and wrote a roundup of upcoming events in the area.
07
I felt sure that she was watching me, too.
08
Maybe the furor would have quieted if we’d waited a few more
09
weeks. But Marnie didn’t. She couldn’t. The fiction written online was
10
intensifying within her: the murder, the drugs, his death. It seemed
11
more likely every day. She slept with it at night as it staged itself in her 12
dreams. She was by turns listless then restless, only ever sleeping briefly 13
before the nightmare began again. She could remember dropping the
14
tablets into his coffee. She could picture herself standing on her tip-
15
toes, reaching for the packet in the cupboard above the sink and pop-
16
ping the pills from their blister packs and poisoning her husband. And
17
then, when she hadn’t slept in days, she started experiencing strange
18
hallucinations and wondering if maybe she’d pushed him after all. Had
19
she been there all along? Had she stood behind him at the top of the
20
stairs? She could see it: the prints hanging framed on the wall and the
21
carpet beneath her feet and she knew what it felt like to touch him, to
22
run her fingers between his shoulder blades, to lay her palm flat against 23
his spine. She wasn’t eating; although she was drinking. She wasn’t
24
sleeping; she was frantic and feverish. She needed to state the truth as
25
she knew it before the lie consumed her.
26
“It wasn’t for me,” she said afterward. “I didn’t do it for me. I could
27
have lived with it. But Charles? He would never have married the
28
woman they said that I was. They’ve all made him seem so naive and so
29
stupid and he was never those things. I couldn’t let that become the
30
story that defined him.”
31S
And so she met with Valerie just two weeks after that first piece was
32N
published. She exhumed the newspaper from the recycling bin and she
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191
searched for the journalist’s name and she went back to the website and
01
she sent an email. And received an offer of a breakfast the following
02
morning at the café on the ground floor of my building.
03
If I had known, I could have stopped her. But by the time I woke up,
04
her spot beside me was cold.
05
Valerie was, I imagine, rather disappointed by Marnie. I suppose she
06
had been hoping for sordid details and revelations and something that
07
confirmed her version of events. Marnie might have confessed to doling
08
out the tablets that morning, to not checking the instructions quite
09
carefully enough, or perhaps not at all, to being overwrought and over-
10
worked and overestimating the quantities in her haste. But, of course,
11
she didn’t.
12
I can only guess that the story was unexpectedly dull. Marnie would
13
have gone on and on about Charles’s migraines. She would have said—
14
at least twice— that she’d been worried that he might have a brain
15
tumor. But the doctor— and he was a nice man, a good doctor, they
16
trusted him— had always been insistent: just migraines. And when they
17
came they were pretty severe; they always had been. She should have
18
stayed at home. She could have looked after him. She’d have brought
19
him a glass of water, or a sandwich, or whatever it was that he’d wanted.
20
She could have saved him.
21
Valerie would have looked at Marnie— slight and fair, her hair un-
22
brushed, the dark circles pooling beneath her eyes, the almost impercep-
23
tible trembling— and would have known that her piece, as entertaining
24
as it was, simply couldn’t be true. This woman— sniveling into her cof-
25
fee, so bloody frail and broken— was incapable of murder.
26
I wonder if Valerie felt frustrated. She had hoped, I’m sure, for
27
something else. She wanted Part 2 to build on Part 1: more detail and
28
drama and excitement. And instead she had a contradiction, an accusa-
29
tion that wouldn’t survive scrutiny.
30
She must have been livid. But she was also smart. And so she
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worked with what she had. She manipulated their conversation— the
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little revelations, the snippets that she’d wrung from a grieving widow—
02
to expose a more interesting update.
03
Marnie returned to the flat with fresh croissants— they’d been our
04
weekend treat in the Vauxhall flat— and I assumed that this marked a
05
change in her outlook, the beginning again of striving for a new normal.
06
I didn’t suspect anything until the following morning when I received a
07
call from Emma. She had registered for updates from Valerie’s website
08
and had received an email in the early hours informing her that a new
09
post had been uploaded. The email said
that Valerie had revised her
10
earlier piece as a result of some “new evidence.” She had— this time—
11
uncovered the real truth, a much darker truth and one that revealed not
12
only the relationships that these two women had with their late hus-
13
bands, but also more detail about their relationship with each other.
14
I opened the page on my laptop.
15
Valerie had written that I was jealous. She said that Marnie had
16
been happy— unexpectedly so— and that I couldn’t stand to see her so
17
content with somebody else. I had committed a murder for her—
18
apparently— and I was horrified when she then wouldn’t do the same
19
for me. The piece was long and convoluted, and almost all of it was
20
nonsense. But the main point she wanted to make, it seemed, was that
21
the blame rested solely with me. Marnie had been unable to kill Charles,
22
because “perhaps she really loved him,” Valerie had written. And so I
23
had taken the necessary steps to ensure that she couldn’t renege on the
24
original deal. I was the puppeteer of the entire dastardly scheme. I was
25
the true antagonist. I had killed him.
26
And while Marnie Gregory- Smith has an alibi, the same cannot be
27
said for best friend Jane Black. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions,
28
Valerie had written. But it seems to me that the clouds are beginning to
29
part over this mystery.
30
Do you know how it feels to be accused of a murder you’ve commit-
31S
ted? It’s incredibly frightening.
32N
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What?
01
Why are you looking at me like that?
02
Oh, I see. You want me to acknowledge that she’s far closer to the
03
truth than any of the others: the police, the pathologist, our friends and 04
our families. And you’re wondering if she was right. Had she found a
05
small piece of the truth? You want to know if I was jealous of Marnie.
06
No. I can confidently say that I was never jealous, not of her life, not
07
of the trinkets that decorated her day- to- day. I was occasionally envious 08
of her self- confidence, her warmth, her kindness, but those are very
09
different things. Does that answer your question?
10
But the one that you should have been asking is whether I was jeal-
11
ous of Charles. And I suppose that I was. It sounds childish, and per-
12
haps I don’t mean it as it sounds, but he had something that belonged
13
to me, a love that had once been mine, a love that had chosen me.
14
She didn’t specify that she’d spoken to Marnie. But somewhere be-
15
tween the new evidence and her description of a teary widow clasping
16
her cold coffee to her chest and unable to balance her breathing suffi-
17
ciently to actually take a sip, I realized what had happened.
18
I went into the living room and found Marnie sobbing on my sofa,
19
her laptop open in front of her, apologizing in heavy, breathy gasps.
20
“I’ve made it worse,” she said. “I’ve made her turn on you. It’s all my
21
fault. She’s written that you did it. Have you read it? I’m so sorry, Jane.
22
I’m so, so sorry.” She closed the lid of her laptop and lowered it onto the 23
coffee table. “I thought she’d see that I was telling the truth. I wanted 24
her to see that she’d been wrong, and— I’m so bloody stupid— I thought
25
she’d publish a retraction or something and that it would all go away. I
26
didn’t realize that she was recording me.” She dropped her head into
27
her hands. “I thought she might say sorry,” she said, her voice muffled
28
by her palms.
29
“This isn’t your fault,” I replied, although I should admit now— in
30
the spirit of honesty— that I was a little frustrated. I’d told her what we S31
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01
needed to do, and she’d blatantly ignored my instructions. But her in-
02
tentions had been good; she’d thought she could unwind the web. “You
03
weren’t to know,” I said.
04
I tried to stay calm. I looked at her flannel pajamas turned up at the
05
ankles, her legs crossed on the sofa. The buttons of her shirt were un-
06
done at her neck and her chest, and red hives were flourishing across
07
her skin. She needed me to be strong, to look after her.
08
The truth is that I hadn’t expected repercussions. And with the
09
autopsy and the funeral, this assumption had begun to feel more con-
10
crete. The police and the coroner had no reason to look beyond the
11
facts as they first found them. But I knew that there were other pieces
12
of the truth still hidden elsewhere. And this strange woman— who had
13
appeared in our lives unexpectedly— seemed determined to dig and
14
pick and claw until she found something that felt more authentic.
15
I had hoped that Valerie’s version of events would quickly be over-
16
taken by gossip and news and other lies. But after the second article? I
17
couldn’t be so sure. I didn’t know how far she might go in pursuit of
18
the truth.
19
I wanted to send her a message, confronting her, arguing that her
20
behavior was simply unacceptable. But I knew that if I provoked her,
21
there was a reasonable risk that she would grow more determined
22
rather than less.
23
I took a deep breath. I knew what we needed to do. We needed to
24
trust in the absence; to let it widen over the next few weeks, until it was 25
the only thing still standing, until mine was the last possible truth,
26
until an accidental fall down the stairs was the only thing left.
27
And, in that moment, I was so focused on fixing the situation with
28
Valerie that I failed to notice another problem expanding.
29
Marnie has always bee
n one of the brightest, most intelligent, most
30
dynamic people and the tears and the grief and the chaos changed none
31S
of that. She has always had a marvelous ability— it’s something cre-
32N
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a jigsaw from the disconnected pieces. And I could suddenly see that
01
she was doing just that.
02
“I should never have approached her,” Marnie continued, the pitch
03
of her voice shifting with each word. “I should have known that she
04
couldn’t be trusted. I don’t know why I expect better from people.
05
Why is that?”
06
“Stop it,” I said, sitting down beside her and taking her hands in
07
mine. “You’re only making yourself feel worse and it’s done now; there’s
08
no point.”
09
“And it doesn’t even make sense,” Marnie continued. Her cheeks
10
were lined with tears. “How exactly does she propose that you mur-
11
dered Charles? At least her first post was theoretically possible. I could 12
have drugged him. I mean, I didn’t, but I could have. But you weren’t
13
even in the building when he died. You didn’t hear anything. It’s just
14
nonsense.”
15
“Marnie, stop it,” I said. “Let it go.”
16
“What did you do? Push him down the stairs and then go home?
17
And then what? Return to the flat later that evening? You didn’t even
18
know that he was sick. You’d have thought that he was at work.”
19
“Exactly,” I said, although my heart was beginning to beat a little
20
faster and I was finding it difficult to swallow. At the back of my mouth, 21
my tonsils felt swollen and dry; they were obstructing my throat and
22
restricting the air to my chest. I could feel my hands growing clammy
23
around hers.
24
“And why would you bother? I mean, I know you weren’t exactly
25
the best of friends— maybe that’s a slight understatement— and I know
26
that things had been particularly bad— that big misunderstanding—
27
but even so, it’s just not feasible.”
28
Her voice was getting louder, starting to shake and stretching into
29
shrill. Her gestures were manic, her hands waving wildly. Her cheeks
30
were flushed, rosy and enraged.
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