Lasting Damage

by Sophie Hannah

  17 Pardoner Lane, 17 Pardoner Lane, Cambridge.

  But that was wrong, surely. It must have been 18 Pardoner Lane, 18 Pardoner Lane, Cambridge.

  ‘The headmistress lived at number 18,’ Simon was saying. ‘Short commute to work for her – just next door. Then, in 2003, the school got into financial trouble and they sold number 18 to raise capital. The headmistress now lives in a rented flat on the next street along.’

  ‘Mrs Talker told you that?’ said Charlie.

  ‘She and the headmistress belong to the same book group. I asked her if she knew who the house had sold to. She did: a family called the Gilpatricks. She also knew which estate agent had sold it, both in 2003 and last year, when it came up again, because she and her husband nearly put in an offer. Both times, the house was sold by Cambridge Property Shop. Estate agents’ offices are open on Saturdays, so they were my next port of call.’ Simon’s eyes had taken on the glassy, possessed look that Charlie and Sam knew so well. ‘Guess who worked for Cambridge Property Shop in 2003? And in 2009 – she only left to go to a new job in February this year.’

  ‘Lorraine Turner?’ said Charlie.

  ‘No,’ Sam said. He normally sounded tentative when he made a suggestion, but not now. ‘It was Jackie Napier, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Simon asked. Charlie sighed. She was obviously wrong, if he was asking Sam to explain his thinking and not her.

  ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about her,’ said Sam. He turned to Charlie. ‘That’s why I wanted to talk to you today.’ He had the grace to look contrite, at least. ‘Sorry, I should have told you in the car.’ All the way from Spilling to Cambridge, Charlie had tried to persuade him to tell her what had been so important that it couldn’t wait; Sam had refused to be drawn, claimed he’d misinterpreted something, that it was nothing, really. ‘I figured Simon knew what was going on and he’d tell us when we got here. If it was nothing to do with Jackie Napier, then my hunch was wrong – I suppose I wanted to hold off on bad-mouthing her. I’ve got no proof of anything.’

  ‘Let’s hear the hunch,’ said Simon.

  Sam looked cornered. He sighed. ‘I didn’t like her at all. She seemed . . . This is going to sound unforgivably snobbish.’

  ‘I forgive you,’ Charlie told him. ‘Embrace your inner snob – I did, a long time ago.’

  ‘She seemed stupid. Ignorant, but thinking she knew it all – that was how she came across for most of the interview. The sort of woman who imagines she’s making a brilliant impression when actually everyone listening to her thinks she’s a bigoted idiot. She came out with some classic self-righteous lines: “I live in the real world, not fantasy land”, “No one pays me to worry about murders” – that sort of thing. Quoted herself a lot, too: “I always say”, followed by some pearl of non-wisdom or other.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘God, Sam, you’re such a bitch!’

  Sam’s face coloured. ‘I’m not enjoying this,’ he said.

  ‘Go on,’ said Simon.

  ‘She had fixed ideas about herself, kept telling me what sort of person she was. “Two things about me,” she said, and then she listed them. The first was loyalty – if she was on your side, then she was on your side for ever.’

  ‘How tedious,’ said Charlie. ‘The people who bang on about their own loyalty are always the first to turn vicious if you send them a birthday card late.’

  ‘She told me she wasn’t “an imagination sort of person”,’ said Sam. ‘Seemed proud of it, too. She’d just got back from staying with her sister in New Zealand. From what she said, it was clear she’d spent her time there criticising her sister’s life choices and flaunting the superiority of her own – completely insensitive. But then there were times when she seemed to know exactly what I was thinking – sensitive to the point of tele-pathy. She was inconsistent.’

  ‘Some people are,’ Charlie felt obliged to point out.

  ‘I know,’ said Sam. ‘That’s what I told myself. But then she said something else, about Selina Gane’s passport photo, something that struck me as . . . wrong. Gut instinct, before I’d had a chance to think about it, even. I knew I’d heard something that jarred as soon as she said it, but I couldn’t work out what it was, not for ages. Then last night it came to me. She was talking about the woman who pretended to be Selina Gane and tried to put 11 Bentley Grove up for sale. “She was clever,” she said. “She knew all she had to do was talk about people not looking like they do in their passports. If she made me think about all those other people, she wouldn’t have to convince me – I’d do all the work myself.” ’

  ‘So?’ said Charlie. ‘What’s the problem there?’

  Simon was nodding, infuriating know-all that he was. He couldn’t possibly understand what Sam was getting at. Could he?

  ‘Maybe no problem.’ Sam sighed. ‘That’s why I kept quiet about it.’

  ‘What might or might not be the problem?’ Charlie rephrased her question, rolling her eyes at his annoying humility. ‘I’m not asking you to commit to its problematicness – just tell me what it is.’

  ‘What do you think Jackie meant when she said that the woman knew she’d do all the work herself?’ Sam asked.

  ‘She knew Jackie would immediately think of all the friends’ passport photos she’s seen that have looked nothing like them,’ said Simon. ‘All the times she’s asked, “Is that really you?” ’

  Sam was nodding vigorously.

  ‘The weight of your own experience always feels like solid proof.’ Simon directed the comment at Charlie. Did he think she was lagging behind? ‘Jackie’s subconscious reminds her that in all the cases she, personally, has come across, without exception, the implausible photographs were of the people in question, however unlike them they looked.’

  ‘That’s exactly right.’ Sam sounded relieved. ‘Whoever she was, this woman didn’t so much lie to Jackie as invite her to lie to herself: to think beyond the specific issue of the picture in Selina Gane’s passport to what she knew to be the norm in the generic situation: that no one looks much like their passport photo, and yet that never means it’s not a photo of them. It means it’s a bad likeness, that’s all.’

  Charlie thought she’d grasped it. ‘So you’re saying this woman deliberately invoked one of Jackie’s firmly ingrained assumptions . . .’

  ‘One of her firmly ingrained personal-experience-based assumptions,’ Simon amended. ‘Those are always more powerful: I once met a gay man who had a high-pitched voice, therefore all men with high voices are gay. A group of Asian teenagers once stole my handbag, therefore all Asian teenagers I meet from now on must be criminals. Our minds are reassured by patterns that repeat and repeat: whenever X is the case, that means Y is also the case. That’s what Jackie Napier meant: that the woman was banking on her mind, all on its own, finding that familiar groove and slotting into it – no passport photos look like their subjects, yet all passport photos are, nonetheless, of their subjects.’

  ‘So Jackie was right,’ Charlie concluded. ‘Liar Woman was clever.’

  ‘She might or might not have been, but that’s not what matters.’ Sam looked worried again. ‘It’s Jackie’s cleverness I’m concerned with. When she told me, in passing, that this woman knew she would do all the work herself, she was making a point that was quite profound, quite subtle – a point we’ve just taken several minutes to unpack, and we’re three pretty intelligent people. Sorry.’ Sam blushed as he apologised for having awarded himself praise he perhaps didn’t deserve. ‘She was demonstrating that she understood and could sum up, far more succinctly than we just have, exactly why the deception had worked so well. That level of instinctive understanding of something so complex would be way beyond a hell of a lot of people. It’d be way beyond someone with the – sorry, this is going to sound terrible – with the hackneyed, below-average mindset she seemed to have the rest of the time.’

  Simon downed the dregs of his pint, slammed the glass down on the table. ‘There’s no
doubt that Jackie Napier’s clever,’ he said. ‘She’s also an expert liar. If you’re bright, it’s almost impossible to present yourself as the opposite – much harder than for an evil person to present himself as good. It’s not only the attitudes you express that are different, it’s the speech patterns, the sentence structure, vocabulary, everything. But she very nearly pulled it off. If she hadn’t said that one thing, you’d have been convinced.’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘You were privileged,’ Simon told him. ‘She must have thought highly of you. For you, she pulled out all the stops and produced the biggest lie she’s ever told or is likely to tell. She told you she wasn’t an imagination sort of person. Wrong – that’s precisely what she is. She’s an imagination person, but with no conscience, no empathy, very little fear, hardly any awareness of her own limitations.’

  Charlie felt a shiver pass through her. The description was too familiar; other names sprang to mind. Names of monsters.

  ‘Jackie Napier’s the sort of person you wish had no imagination at all,’ said Simon.

  Chapter 23

  Saturday 24 July 2010

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ I gasp. Kit’s pressing the knife too hard against my throat. ‘You’re suffocating me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispers. He’s buried his face in my hair. I can feel his tears wetting my neck. He takes the knife away, holds it in front of my face. It shakes in his hand. His other arm is round my waist, holding me in place, pinning my arms to my sides. No way I can get away from him; I’m not strong enough.

  The knife’s serrated blade gleams silver.

  Images flash through my mind: a teapot, chocolate cake, a plastic beaker with a lid, the blue and pink hourglass dress.

  It’s our knife, from Melrose Cottage. I last saw it on a wooden tray, beside my birthday cake.

  Why didn’t I think that Kit might be here already? How can I have been so stupid? New tears prick my eyelids. I blink, try to hold them back. Try to think. I can’t die now, can’t let Kit kill me. Can’t let my own recklessness turn me into a news headline. People will hear the story of what happened to me and say, ‘It was her own stupid fault’.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ Kit says. ‘I’m coming with you. Do you really think I’d make you go alone?’

  Go. He’s talking about dying.

  ‘We’ll go together, when we’re ready,’ he says. ‘We’re in the right place, at least.’

  When we’re ready. That means not yet. He’s not ready yet, not ready to kill us both – I cling to this shred of hope.

  ‘Who was the dead woman I saw on the virtual tour?’ I make a vow to myself: I might not live through this, but I won’t die until I know. I won’t die in ignorance.

  ‘Jackie Napier,’ says Kit.

  No. That’s not right. Jackie was alive on Tuesday. She walked into the room Kit and I were in. Said to Grint, I don’t know where you got her from, but you can put her back. I’ve never seen her before in my life.

  ‘It wasn’t Jackie . . .’ I start to say.

  ‘It was,’ says Kit. ‘She wasn’t dead, but it was her.’

  She wasn’t dead, but it was her. She wasn’t dead, but it was her. Horror prickles my skin, like the thin legs of a thousand tiny spiders, all over me. I can’t make myself ask if the blood was real. Don’t need to. I know the answer.

  I think of Mum asking what woman in her right mind would ruin a lovely dress by lying in red paint. Jackie Napier’s mind must have gone badly wrong.

  ‘She was lying in blood that didn’t belong to her,’ says Kit.

  She still is. If you strangle someone to death, they don’t bleed. ‘Whose blood?’ I gasp, bile rising in my throat. I can smell Kit’s sweat, his desperation – a hard, rotten smell. As if his body’s accepted that it will die soon and is making preparations.

  ‘You have no idea how much I hate her,’ he says. ‘And I hate myself for hating her.’

  But not for killing her. ‘Jackie?’ I say

  ‘She’d have done anything for me . . .’ The rest of his sentence loses itself as loud sobs shake his body.

  When he’s quiet again I ask, ‘Why did you kill her?’

  ‘Because I. Had to.’ His breathing is uneven. ‘There was no happy ever after for me and her. There’s no happy ever after for me and you, not now that everything’s happened the way it has. It’s left us no way out. We have to be brave, Con. You said all you wanted was to know, and I want to tell you. I’m sick of the loneliness of knowing and not being able to tell you.’

  Terror twists my heart. I don’t want him to tell me, not yet, not if killing me’s what comes afterwards.

  I stare at the shaking knife. Even if I could concentrate on it hard enough to make it fall out of his hand, I still wouldn’t be able to struggle free. I try to make myself believe that DS Laskey will come in time. I told her the address, told her there was a dead woman here. She might have her doubts about my story, but she’ll come anyway. She’ll want to check.

  One dead woman. Not two. Please not two.

  ‘I’ll look after you, Con,’ Kit says. ‘Jackie said she’d take care of you, but she didn’t mean look after. She meant “take care of” in the other way. There’s something wrong with that, don’t you think? That the same words can mean both?’

  Words. I hear them, but they don’t seem to work. They don’t translate. What’s he saying?

  I can smell death. Decay, decomposition. How is that possible? How long ago did Kit kill Jackie Napier? How long before a dead body starts to smell? She was still warm . . .

  ‘What did she say about me?’ I ask.

  ‘She was going to kill you, Con.’ Kit weeps into my hair. ‘I couldn’t have stopped her, not without . . . doing what I did.’ He kisses the back of my neck. I clamp my mouth shut to keep in the scream that’s ringing in my head.

  ‘I killed her to save you,’ Kit says.

  Chapter 24

  24/7/2010

  Charlie had finished her pint and needed another one, but she knew that if she went to the bar, she’d miss too much and struggle to catch up; that was her – what had Simon called it? – her firmly ingrained personal-experience-based assumption. The other two seemed to have forgotten that there were thirsty bodies attached to their brains; Charlie tried to do the same.

  ‘Remember your point about simple solutions, in Spain?’ Simon said. ‘When there’s an unknown, a puzzle, the simplest answer’s usually the right one?’

  ‘You disagreed with me,’ said Charlie. ‘We managed to pack some interesting arguments into our half-hour honeymoon,’ she told Sam.

  ‘Jackie Napier was banking on Ian Grint subscribing to your way of thinking, not mine,’ said Simon. ‘Like a lot of highly imaginative people, she assumes most people she comes into contact with have more straightforward, prosaic minds than she does, and she’s right. Grint finds that someone’s hacked into Lancing Damisz’s computer network – who’s the obvious non-suspect? Jackie Napier. Why would she need to hack in when she works there and can access the system legitimately whenever she wants? If a woman might or might not have been murdered at 11 Bentley Grove, who’s the obvious non-suspect? Jackie Napier again – she drew herself to the police’s attention, saying she’d seen the body, supporting Connie Bowskill’s story, a story no one would have wasted five minutes on if Jackie hadn’t come forward – Connie would have been dismissed as a delusional neurotic. It was thanks to Jackie that Grint moved on the possible murder, did the whole forensic bit, found out about the computer hacking. Simplistic assumption? That Jackie can’t have been responsible for any of it. The possibility that she might be wouldn’t occur to Grint or to anyone – no one draws their own crimes to the police’s attention, crimes they would otherwise get away with.’

  ‘But . . . you’re saying Jackie did?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I think so, yeah,’ said Simon. ‘I’m not sure why, though.’ He looked angry. ‘I might be an imagination person, but I’m nowhere near her level.’
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  ‘You’re talking as if you know for a fact that Jackie’s a liar,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I do. If you’d come with me to Lancing Damisz and the Cambridge Property Shop today, you’d know it too.’

  Charlie didn’t point out that he had neither told her where he was going nor invited her to join him.

  ‘For starters, Jackie hasn’t been to New Zealand any time recently, and she hasn’t got a sister,’ said Simon. ‘The holiday part was true. She took her disabled mother to a B&B in Weston-super-Mare. She does it every summer, apparently.’

  Weston-super-Mare. New Zealand. The distance between the lie and the truth was enough to make anyone feel jet-lagged.

  ‘Jackie sold 18 Pardoner Lane to the Gilpatrick family in 2003,’ said Simon. ‘In 2009, they decided they wanted to move again. Jackie, still working for Cambridge Property Shop, sold them another house: the one opposite Professor Sir Basil Lambert-Wall’s. She bought their old house herself.’

  ‘What?’ Charlie wasn’t sure she’d heard right.

  ‘Jackie Napier bought 18 Pardoner Lane, in March last year,’ said Simon. ‘She was the agent handling the sale, she put the house on the market – and then bought it herself.’

  ‘So . . . why bother putting it on the market?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Did she have to pay herself commission?’ said Charlie.

  ‘No idea.’ Simon looked away; he hated not knowing. ‘But that’s where Jackie now lives – in the house Kit Bowskill was gagging to buy in 2003, the house he wanted so much that he allowed his proud mask to slip and begged his folks for fifty grand.’

  Charlie looked to Sam for help, saw her confusion mirrored in his face.

  ‘In February this year, Jackie switched jobs – she moved to Lancing Damisz,’ said Simon. ‘I spoke to Hugh Jepps, one of Cambridge Property Shop’s senior partners. He’s felt guilty ever since about the glowing reference he wrote her, and was only too willing to let me hear his confession. The reference was only glowing because he was keen to get rid of Jackie – he’d have sacked her, except that then the story of what she’d been up to might have come out. Jepps wasn’t sure the firm could weather the bad publicity. He also couldn’t have proved anything against her, though he knew exactly what was going on.’