by Emma Rowley
“They can’t have found what they wanted in your house today,” she told me. She looked as tired as I felt.
Our journey back to Annersley was not reassuring. It seemed that after raising his concerns about Nicky’s disappearance, Joe Crompton had been very cooperative with officers—until he realized they were regarding him with some interest: this oddball new friend of Nicky’s . . .
He panicked, and shut down. But, when they arrested him—on suspicion of kidnapping, putting on the pressure, said Nadia—he started to talk again. That’s when he revealed what he had found in his junk folder. If they had handled him better, they would have had their hands on the document sooner, she reflected. Still, they didn’t have enough to arrest me over anything else . . . anything historic. Yet I finished silently.
“Don’t say any more, to anyone,” she added, as she dropped me off. “Don’t do anything stupid. Get some sleep. We’ll speak tomorrow. We’ve a lot to talk about.”
* * *
At least I was home, I could regroup, think . . .
But as the security lights switched on, spotlighting me as I walked up to the smooth white facade of my house, it felt less a refuge than a trap. I wasn’t safe here, either. If news of my arrest wasn’t yet out, it would be soon. People would be talking about me. Josh . . . Sabrina . . . she wouldn’t keep this secret. It would mean reporters arriving, like the last time.
The place was silent when I let myself in. On the kitchen table was a hurried note in Annie’s rounded hand: she didn’t know when the police would allow her back in, she said, so she was staying at her friend’s in the village. She’d be back in the morning to see what was happening. It was too late to use the house phone to call her, I decided, or Lucy to check on Bea. I wasn’t going to try to track down Josh.
Instead, I looked around the house, uneasy at the thought of people going through it while I wasn’t there; anonymous figures in white suits and hairnets, moving slowly through the rooms . . .
Everything seemed fine, but things were subtly different, untidy: heavy chairs and beds returned to their places a few inches off; an odd dirtiness to the surfaces which confused me until I realized they’d been dusted with fingerprint powder. My computer was missing from my study, which was what prompted me to check out of the window and confirm what, in my daze, I had failed to register as I had arrived: my car was gone, too. This search had been far more thorough than before.
For some reason, I ended up in Nicky’s guest room last, maybe reluctant to go back in there. It had already been emptied of her suitcase, but I went into the en suite bathroom, and switched the light on. It was as if she’d never been there, either.
I looked in the mirror at my reflection, colorless with weariness against the gray of my cheap tracksuit. They hadn’t given me my own clothes back.
How had it all gone so wrong? I should have realized the danger I was in far earlier, should have guessed days ago when the police didn’t do the big media appeal for a missing person, trying to shake out an answer from strangers. They didn’t need to: they already had a main suspect in their sights....
But I should have realized before that. That very first interview, when Nicky realized that I didn’t give my real age—I should have called an end to it all, there and then. Or I should have been nicer to her, kept her on my side. Even that tennis match—I couldn’t lash out at Sabrina, so I let my frustrations out on Nicky. And I should have brushed off her question about shooting, not given in to a panicked impulse and lied . . .
There was no point to doing this. I just had to decide to take the next, necessary step. Like I always did.
* * *
Staring ahead unseeing, I considered what I knew. What about the gun? After all these years in the water, what would they find if they tested it? Surely nothing. And any other evidence from that night was long since destroyed in the fire.
And the stuff from today—the document Nicky sent to Joe? I had not attempted to backtrack and deny it came from her, although perhaps a better lawyer might suggest that . . . Yes, that was worth considering.
Still, I couldn’t just focus on the detail: I needed to change tack. What did that detective say, about me not knowing what had happened to Nicky? “. . . you’ve never seemed to wonder where she is. Is there any reason for that?” I hadn’t been reacting in quite the right way.
Well, it wasn’t a crime not to care. You could go crazy wondering why one person’s life went one way, and someone else’s another. You had to face things as they were. But I needed to act more like everyone else, as if it was an enormous shock that bad things happened, and spend time wondering why. Be more like Nicky, in a funny way. Because she was always curious. Just take her conviction there was a mystery here that she needed to solve, even when everyone else had settled it in their minds long ago . . .
Focus. What I needed now was to give them a satisfying reason for her disappearance, something solid, and nothing to do with me at all. What could I tell them? Where could she have plausibly gone? What else could have been going on with her?
Nothing came to mind. I wasn’t really used to considering other people’s inner motivations, wants. Selfish, some might say. Tunnel vision, I called it. And I was so tired. I examined my reflection, letting myself be distracted. I needed a Botox top-up.
The thought occurred to me, idly, that Nicky would have looked in this mirror, too. What did she see? She was somehow hard to picture. Ungroomed, badly dressed, her whole presentation just . . . nondescript. Could be pretty if she made an effort, I had thought. What would other people make of her?
A memory rose to the surface: opening the back door to Joe Crompton in the darkness on Saturday night. “Nicky!” he said, relieved, taking me for her in the dark, before he’d realized his mistake.
It wasn’t the most flattering comparison. I turned my head in the mirror, unsmiling, looking at the familiar slopes and angles of my face dispassionately. Yes, I suppose, in the dark, give or take twenty pounds, I could see why you might think . . .
I froze, seeing alarm in my eyes. I had just remembered something else, as clear as if I could see our reflections before me now: Nicky next to me in my dressing room mirror, our hair pulled back, faces side by side, before she ducked away . . .
It was creepy really, like she didn’t want me looking too closely. But don’t think about that now, think about something to tell the police. Who was she?
Another person entirely. The thought repeated in my mind. And then it was somehow hard to formulate another, the mirror memory dislodging something in my brain, and now all I could see was Nicky, my mind intent on showing me images from the week, like skimming through an Instagram feed.
Nicky on that first night she turned up, disheveled and apologetic. Nicky heading into the library before me on the house tour, making my anger spike—too at home, I’d thought. Nicky in Bea’s room that same day, exclaiming at the jungle mural—like she knew that wasn’t how it should look in there, I thought now. Nicky twisting her hair around a finger, betraying her nerves—and now touching a chord of memory . . .
“No,” I said, “No . . .” I breathed, even as I felt my mind start to fragment; more snippets of the last few days rushing back, swirling together.
Nicky losing her temper in my car, going too far: “But you do realize, Olivia, you can’t just erase the past . . .” “Olivia,” my husband’s voice sounded in my mind. “What have you done?” And then me to the police: “Ask her friends, her family!” “We’ve spoken to her friends.” But what about her family? Hadn’t they found anyone?
It couldn’t be, it couldn’t . . . but as my pulse started to thunder in my ears and dark spots danced before my eyes, I thought again of Nicky’s absolute conviction that there was a story here, something to be discovered, how she was so sure . . .
Then all I could see was my family as we once were, captured in that photo that I burned in the ashes. There was my father, my mother; he handsome, she beautiful. There was me st
anding between them, blond and neat. And last of all, before the flames dissolved our whole family, looking up at me, with those messy brown curls, small and plump and adoring, was little Alex . . .
Suddenly I bent over, my stomach cramping painfully, as the full weight of realization hit me, like a car slamming into a wall in slow motion. Who was she?
She was Nicky and she wasn’t.
She had come out of the past, a ghost made flesh again.
Nicky—for Nicola, I remembered now.
And a Wilson. Because Elsa remarried, I did hear that.
But once she was a Vane, like me.
“Alex Vane. Alexandra Nicola Vane.”
As if saying it aloud was what finally made me understand, as I forced the words past the sob in my throat.
Could it be?
Yes.
“It was her. It was Lexy. My sister.”
Chapter 61
I don’t know how long I was there, curled on the bathroom floor. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move, could barely breathe, my mind wiped clean of thought by the tidal wave overwhelming me: grief, sorrow, anger, guilt, and a pain too raw to touch.
After a while I realized I could hear someone whimpering, and knew it was me. When that passed, I lay there a while longer, my body shaking so hard that my teeth chattered; my ears filled with the sound of my raw tearing breaths.
I had tried so hard, for so many years, to keep the walls up around me, and now they were all falling down. It was what I’d always dreaded: total emotional breakdown.
* * *
When I sat up finally, the tears still drying on my cheeks, I took a long shuddering breath. Then I got to my feet slowly, feeling dizzy.
At the sink, I filled a glass with water and drank it down, then washed my face and dried my hands, noticing they still trembled a little.
The bathroom around me was just as it had been: the tiles bright and white, the towels fluffy, the tub gleaming. And yet if someone had told me I had never been in there before I might have believed them.
Everything looked different now; the familiar strange again—now I knew who had been here.
My sister, Alexandra. Our father had hoped for a boy; when another girl arrived he must have decided it was time to pass his name on, anyway. But it was a big name for such a little girl, and so she was Alex to everyone. But Lexy, to me.
I had so many questions . . .
Just as she had, of course. I knew now that that was what must have drawn her to this house. To me.
I wondered how much she had even remembered. Very little, it seemed, from the fact of her coming here at all. She had been so young at the time of the fire, just seven to my thirteen. I hadn’t seen her since we left Annersley, she going with our mother, I to my new school in London and my grandmother’s.
Until she had come back, to find the answers she was looking for.
To blame me. To punish me. Even now.
* * *
Eventually I walked through the house, down the stairs. I unlocked the front door and went out into the night.
I felt a little calmer, on the surface at least, as I headed to the garage. I had decided some things, over the last few hours. I left the garage doors open, moths fluttering in from the night to dance around the lightbulb overhead, and started to root through the junk stored at the back.
I didn’t have my cell phone, or my computer. The police had even taken the iPad that controlled the home entertainment system. But I needed to do something, and I didn’t want to wait until the daytime.
Finally I found it, covered in dust: my old university laptop. Either the police didn’t go through these boxes or decided the thing was too ancient to bother with.
Back in the kitchen, I plugged it in and fetched the scrap of paper where I keep the Wi-Fi password for guests. The computer took a while to flicker and whir back to life, as I thought over the course of action I had settled on.
Because one thing was clear to me: I couldn’t tell them. I couldn’t tell the police who Nicky really was.
Even if they believed me, it would raise more questions than answers. It would make her disappearance look even stranger. And it could only make the incriminating things she wrote appear more credible. They wouldn’t believe any story I could offer them now.
No, there was nothing that I could say about who she was that couldn’t endanger me further, entrenching what they thought: that I had reason to want to get rid of her.
So let them ask me as many more questions as they liked, about what had happened here—I was not going to help them. It wouldn’t help me.
And I couldn’t talk to the only person I wanted to talk to. I couldn’t undo what had happened, or what I had done.
Still. There are two sides to every story, everyone knows that.
* * *
It took me a while to find it on my blog, the picture that I wanted to repost: the one that started my whole career off, the photo of my house. I’m not good with words, I never have been. So I kept my final message short.
This is a strange post to be writing.
You might be learning a lot of things about me that you don’t like.
Things that might surprise you about my life—about my past.
You might be wondering what the truth is.
The truth can be hard to face. Maybe we want to lock it away in a box, hide it in the darkness, and forget. But eventually, maybe we have to look inside.
And the truth is, despite what my life may seem—it’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. I’ve done a lot of things wrong.
But please believe me, that I am sorry.
I am so sorry.
Always your
Livvy
I checked it over, wondering how it would be read by my followers—by anyone and everyone who might see it. Then I pressed “publish” and waited for the sky to lighten.
* * *
They didn’t hang around this time. When Thursday morning arrived, the police picked me up, took me to the station, and charged me straight away.
Of course, I should never have taken the painting with me, all those years ago. But it had been so long since the night of the fire, it didn’t really occur to me what story it could still tell.
Some bright spark had turned it over during that last house search and read the date and inscription on the back. Later, they realized it shouldn’t have survived the blaze without a mark.
It was the last piece of evidence they needed to build a solid case against me, amid what they termed a complete disruption to Nicky’s usual patterns, her inactive social media accounts, her failure to access any banking services, the fact that no one she would normally have been in touch with had heard from her at all. So my lawyer said it was already out of my hands: my final Instagram post was just the final straw.
In the end though, I suppose it’s the same whichever way you look at it—Josh was right, when he told the police what he feared might happen.
My past has caught up with me.
Chapter 62
And so this is where I am now: under a regulation blanket on a vinyl-cushioned bench. I have been here at the police station since yesterday morning, when they charged me. That makes today Friday, by my reckoning.
I have slept—a little. I have not showered. To fill the rest of the hours in my cell, I have let myself relive the events of the last fortnight, from the moment Nicky arrived at my door to the moment I knew who she really was. I have thought it all through, from start to finish. I needed to: to finally make it real.
Now though, they have brought me a hot breakfast in a tinfoil tray, and I know it must be time to face the day ahead. To distract myself, I try to imagine it as an Instagram post: how to dress for a court appearance? Follow my formula: floral collared dress; low-heeled pumps. Leave all your big-label bags at home, pick something stealthily expensive, so as not to alienate the courtroom . . .
As it is, I am back in another gray tracksuit. Still, now that the worst has happened,
it is a relief—almost. I’ve just got to get through today.
* * *
And I do. I watch what unfolds, as if it is happening to someone else; that is the only way I can do it.
The magistrates’ court in Mansford is an ornate redbrick building, which reminds me vaguely of my old school. Inside, I am put in another cell, in the basement, as I wait for my turn in front of the judge. My lawyer, Nadia, speaks to me through the door, telling me what to expect. She hadn’t been able to get us a room to talk in.
I will not be first up, she says, I will have to wait for them to get through dozens of other cases. There is an air of suppressed excitement about her, despite her solemnity. This is a big thing for her.
But finally, it is my turn, and I am led up a narrow spiral staircase that leads directly into the courtroom from the cells. The Victorians designed these places to intimidate, I reflect; the courtroom feels taller than it is wide, all dark wooden paneling fencing everyone off from each other. And it is full of people, their faces turned toward me.
Nadia had expected interest, and explained who would be where, to prepare me: the lawyers ranged on the benches at the front; seats for the press at the side; more for members of the public at the back of the court—anyone who feels like it can wander in to watch, she told me—and the district judge, a gray man in a gray suit, overlooking us all. Off to one side is the small wooden box of the dock holding me.
I am not handcuffed. I sit down on the chair, automatically, but the custody officer who has led me in jerks her head: get up.
A tall man in glasses, sitting under the district judge on his high bench, addresses me now. The court clerk, I tell myself, checking him off. It’s helping me to pretend that I am just an observer, not intimately involved.
“Can you give the court your full name, please.”
I do, then confirm my address. My voice doesn’t wobble, I am relieved to note.
“Please sit down.”
I don’t have to enter a plea today. Today’s hearing will be just a matter of minutes, Nadia assured me—or maybe warned me. On a charge of this seriousness, my case must be sent straight to the crown court.