by Tina Seskis
Just as he was holding the knife aloft, ready to plunge it downwards into Christie, into hard bone and soft yielding flesh, the bedroom door swung open and a big, heavy-bellied bald man entered the room.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ he said.
Time passes. Things change. And every now and again something happens that is so seismic in nature the whole world shifts, and nothing will ever be quite the same again. The sky will still be blue. The birds will still call out to each other. It’s just that I won’t see them. Does that make them not real? Or does that make me not real any more? It’s a question that will go on to haunt me. Alex and Piers. Piers and Alex. Neither here nor there. Colliding into oblivion. Leaving wreckages of lives in their paths. Including mine. It is what it is.
And so. Being your mother’s murderer and your father’s nemesis might not be the best start to life, but I never wanted to complain. In fact, I came through, and for a while I was truly proud of myself. But after that it became too easy to manipulate the truth. Too easy to manufacture the world that I’d wanted. One that wanted me.
Yet now that world has crumbled and turned inside out, and it’s all my fault. I became afflicted by madness, and passion, and love and jealousy, and greed, and white-hot hate, and every other last thing that makes us human . . . and although I’m aware it’s no excuse, I guess some of us are weaker than others . . .
I regret it all now, of course I do. I’ve lost everything that was dear to me. I’ve ruined the lives of the people I loved. And so I’m sorry, truly, deeply sorry. For every last bit of it.
92
ALEX
Although Alex wasn’t being held at a police station he knew, it was the same grim set-up in Hertfordshire as in London, the same type of cell into which he’d thrown myriad burglars and robbers and rapists over the years. A single hard bunk with a plastic-covered mattress. A rimless toilet in the corner. A place fit for baddies and losers. Yet now it was him in here, and despite everything he’d done, until the last few days he’d never actually thought of himself as a criminal as such. But he certainly was one now. Fraud. Bigamy. False imprisonment. Attempted murder. It was a pretty damning rap sheet.
Alex looked up at the ceiling, imagined the sun in the sky that he wouldn’t be seeing again for a very long time. He stayed completely and utterly still, ignoring the general cacophony around him, of shouts and wails and slamming steel doors. He’d tried so hard to make something of his life, and yet it had all gone to shit. Perhaps it had been inevitable.
Alex’s brain was stewing. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. His mind was turning tricks, trawling through the past, trying to identify the pivotal points in his story. He knew enough about the bad stuff. But there had been forces for good too, surely. His eventual foster parents who’d taken him in, given him their name, backed him, spotted his potential, had helped him apply to the police at eighteen. His pride at being accepted. The uniform. The feeling of power it had bestowed on him, of being important, for the first time ever . . .
And then there’d been Eleanor, of course. She’d been someone to save, someone to aim for . . . and it seemed his desire to be needed by her had superseded everything. It had made him bolder than he knew possible. Of course, he’d known it was wrong, to start sending her those vile packages, pretending they were from Gavin Hewitson – but if he was going to save her, he’d reckoned, she’d need to be saved. And Gavin Hewitson had never actually been convicted of anything, so Alex hadn’t done anything that bad. Gavin had just been a weird kid who’d mistaken Eleanor’s friendliness for more, and in the process had done Alex a massive favour.
The hatch on the door opened and a microwave meal got shoved through, which Alex took wordlessly, unwilling to engage with anyone. He knew they were all talking about him. A bent copper was always a good story, and his was rip-roaring.
And so. After that the lies had seemed too easy. He’d lied about his supposed promotions, when in fact he’d failed to get position after position, even after Manisha had put in a good word for him. Face-saving, he’d justified it as, especially as Eleanor had always been so proud of him. In the end he’d taken a job in police stores, which was where everyone going nowhere ended up – but on the plus side it had opened up a whole new world of possibilities. The stuff that had passed through his hands, mainly confiscated from criminals, had given him ideas. A fake passport and driving licence had been too easy to organise. Rolls of banknotes and other spoils that financed his plans were simply never logged in to police stores. It had been so simple to invent Piers Romaine, a glamorous-sounding half-Frenchman. Easier still to stake out Christie’s house, watch her get into a taxi with a suitcase – and it had been a genius split-second idea for him to crash into the back of it. She’d been at her most vulnerable. He’d been at his most charming. It had been a walk in the park after that.
Alex lifted his arms in the air, alternately, like pistons. His muscles were tight, wound up, full of energy. There had been no need for them to get ‘married’, of course, but the fact that it was overseas had made it almost fool-proof, despite him having to wear factor 50 at all times to ensure he never got too suntanned. And yet that trip had almost been Alex’s undoing anyway, thanks to an ill-timed terror attack while he’d been asleep on the other side of the world. When Christie had told him about it, he’d had to virtually shove her into the bathroom so he could dig out his other phone to text Eleanor, to let her know he was safe.
Alex knew he’d got too cocky after that. He’d burned through his brother’s inheritance, and when that had run out it had seemed too easy to dip into Christie’s funds to maintain Piers’s supposed lifestyle. He knew she didn’t have a clue about finances, so he was surprised that she’d sussed it. She might never have noticed if her father hadn’t gone and died exactly when he was stuck in France with Eleanor, or if Christie’s crackpot sister hadn’t suspected him. He had to hand it to Christie, though, that she’d had the gumption to hire a private detective. When she’d turned up on his and Eleanor’s doorstep it had totally thrown him. Made him do things he hadn’t thought he was capable of.
And now, without warning, it was over. Just like that. In a way Alex was glad. He felt so tired. Of all the deceit and the lies. Stretched to breaking point. He imagined the news stories, and the anguish he had caused his kids. If only he could stop it, make it not happen, but it was too late.
As Alex let out an involuntary sob, he heard the jeers from the other cells. He ignored them. They could say what they liked, but at least he wasn’t a murderer. He had the neighbours to thank for that – it seemed that Karen Sampford had heard the commotion and had sent her thug of a husband in to find out what was going on, while she called the police. Alex was grateful to the Sampfords though. He hadn’t ever intended to kill Christie. He hadn’t wanted that much revenge. He’d only planned to fuck with her head – but he’d been backed into a corner.
Finally, inevitably, Alex’s thoughts returned to Eleanor. His little Eleanor. He could still picture her face that first day she’d walked through the doors of Finsbury Park police station. There always had been something about her. Brave to the last. Lost to him. As he wondered whether she would go back to her ex-boyfriend, his heart hurt. His thoughts became scrambled. Finally, he turned to the wall and shut his eyes. It was too bad. He’d fucked everything up. It was over.
93
CHRISTIE
The one upside to Christie having married a bigamist and nearly becoming a murder victim was that her kids had come straight home. Both of them. She’d barely even recognised Jake at first – last time she’d seen him his appearance had worried her, but he’d cut his hair, shaved off his beard, and Christie had been so relieved to have her son back it had almost made the whole ordeal worth it. Daisy had seemed better too lately, and it was clear to Christie now how much both her children had detested Piers, but that she’d been too stupid, or love-struck, or bereft, to realise. Yet it seemed that that was partly why Jake had strung
her along, implying he was up to no good in Turkey, when the truth was that his girlfriend had been a tour rep in Istanbul, and that they’d moved back to Manchester anyway. It had been a cheap trick, but an effective one. And although initially Christie had been cross at Daisy for not having told her, apparently Jake had insisted to his sister that if their mother thought so little of him that she believed he might be about to bloody well blow people up, well, then let her. Put like that, Christie had been relieved that Jake had forgiven her. He’d even introduced her to his girlfriend, and she was lovely, and she’d seemed to have tamed Jake, had made him a calmer, more settled person.
And so now that Christie’s kids were on the way to being OK, and ‘Piers’ was in prison, Christie was trying to piece her own life back together. She had made some monumental mistakes, but slowly, over time, as the trauma subsided, she was learning that the only route back to happiness was to forgive herself. But how could she manage it? The longer that time went on, the more she missed Paul, found she longed to speak to him, even if only to have one last conversation, to say sorry. She felt sick about who ‘Piers’ really was, especially as she could see now how alike the two brothers were. And what would Paul have said about her relationship with Piers? It was too grim to contemplate.
But that wasn’t the only source of Christie’s grief. It seemed she’d never stopped blaming herself for Paul’s death – and the inanity of his accident, the waste of his life, tortured her anew. Over and over again, she wished she’d thrown that stupid suitcase away. She’d kept it for nostalgic reasons only, but with its soft-porn contents, how could she possibly have shown Paul? She kept thinking of the photo the police had found next to Paul’s body, and it was black and white, and arty, and Henry’s face had been front of frame, and he and Paul had been so different, not just in looks, but in character too. Henry had shagged everything that moved, as it turned out, while Paul had been utterly faithful. Paul had brought Christie out of herself, had loved her, enabled her to trust again. She would always be grateful to him for that. And maybe that was why it had felt easy to believe Alice, when she swore recently that she’d had a message from Paul from the afterlife, that he hadn’t died angry at Christie. That he’d died happy, safe in the knowledge he and Christie loved each other. Who knew? Christie would never know, and that was the thing she had to accept. Maybe the truths are simply those that you want to believe . . . and yet, thanks to her sister, that was Christie’s truth now, and she found that it helped. She had her job, and her kids, and her memories of Paul, and an unexpected new person in her life, and that was enough for her.
94
ELEANOR
In the immediate aftermath, Brianna and Mason had been Eleanor’s first priorities, as witnessing their father go from hero to zero overnight had been a pretty shattering experience for them. Eleanor still berated herself for failing to protect them, for having been such an idiot. For not having realised. In fact, humiliation felt like a solid part of Eleanor now, one that would need to be melted away over time – even though she knew that it was his fault, not hers. It didn’t help that she had no idea any more what the truth of her marriage was, whether she and Alex had ever been happy, seeing as even their getting together had turned out to be based on a big fat lie. Poor Gavin Hewitson. She was glad to hear via Lizzie, who was still in touch with his parents, that Alex’s framing of him hadn’t ruined Gavin’s life.
The day was calm and silvery, the clouds high and heavenly, but Eleanor didn’t notice. She was too deep in thought as she walked. She kept thinking about her husband, the despicable things he’d done, while trying to convince herself that at least he’d given her two wonderful children, so there must have been some good inside of him. He must have passed on some decent genes. And perhaps, she thought now, there was a finer line between good and evil than anyone can ever imagine.
When Eleanor arrived at the café, it was even more rammed than usual, and it flustered her, made her wish they’d arranged to meet somewhere else. And yet she’d grown to love it here, to fully embrace the kitsch, and at least the atmosphere was so buzzy no one would be able to overhear the extraordinary conversations they were surely destined to have.
Eleanor was early, but her companion was earlier, waiting for her in one of a pair of chintzy old armchairs. She’d grown her hair since the last time they’d met, and it suited her. She stood up and hugged Eleanor, and although physical contact was still a little awkward between the two women, it wasn’t as bad as it used to be. They sat down, and all over again Eleanor reminded herself that they’d been legally married to brothers once, and that that made them bona fide sisters-in-law, and so it was fair enough that she and Christie had become such good friends. It was easier to think of it like that, rather than via their other, far more extraordinary, connection. And anyway, who cared? She and Christie were helping to heal each other, and that was the important thing. Alex of course would be horrified, but why should they even tell him? They owed him nothing.
Eleanor smiled at the waiter as he delivered her latte, and the sun was picking its way through the people now, and she felt a rare happiness at the fact that no matter how bad things might be, somewhere in the world there were people falling in love, or becoming friends, or getting together as a family, and that was enough for now. Maybe love would happen for her again one day and maybe not, and if Rufus wanted to wait for her, well, that was up to him. She couldn’t promise, after what she’d been through, and besides, romantic relationships weren’t everything. Rufus had been sanguine about it, saying that this was their test, and she was content with that. What would be would be. And in the meantime, she had her kids to look out for, and her friendship with Lizzie and the twins, all three of whom had been absolute saviours, and now with Christie too.
Eleanor took a sip of her coffee, and it was warm and had a sprinkling of chocolate on the top. As she looked at Christie, she felt an odd prickling of joy, that she was here, with this woman, that their lives had come to this precise juncture, and that the future was out there, for both of them. Everything would be OK, she was sure of it. They had each other’s backs now. Eleanor swallowed down the sudden lump in her throat and smiled at Christie.
‘So,’ she said, ‘how’s things?’
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank my husband and son, my agent, Jon Elek, my publisher, Laura Deacon, my dear friend Jennifer Brehl and all the other people who have helped me get this book written and to publication. It has been a journey.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo copyright © Layla Hegarty
Tina Seskis grew up in Hampshire, and after graduating from the University of Bath spent over twenty years working in marketing before starting to write. Tina’s novels have been published in eighteen languages in over sixty countries. She lives in North London with her husband and son.