She narrows her eyes. ‘You’d do that for me? Why?’
‘I did something awful to you. I drugged you. You could have died in that fire. I took your identity, I lied about my qualifications, I should never have done it. I deserve everything that’s happened to me, Beth. I just want to move forward now. Try and salvage things with Jamie. Second chances.’
She looks sceptical. ‘I stole from you.’
‘Well, that makes two of us,’ I say wryly. ‘Let’s call it quits.’
We stand and stare at each other. Then suddenly she takes me by surprise by giving me a brief, awkward hug.
I walk slowly out of Evelyn’s flat. I can feel Beth watching me from the window as I descend the steps into my own flat. I wonder what she will do now. Will she return to wherever she was living? I hope she’ll be happy. We’ve both wronged each other. I just want to put this whole nightmare behind us.
Because really, I owe her everything.
41
Beth
I watch her leave, all my resentment and bitterness and anger dissipating. Let her live her life as Libby Elliot if that’s what she wants. Because I need to live mine as Elizabeth Perez, Matteo’s wife. I need to go back to him. If he’ll have me.
When Matteo asked me to marry him three years ago I told him I couldn’t find Sean to get a divorce, but we moved in together anyway and lived as husband and wife. At last I’d found someone who loved me, who didn’t want to abuse me, mentally or physically, like my parents, or Sean. A good man. I began to heal. And things would never have taken such a downward turn if it hadn’t been for Lilianna.
When the midwife broke the news to me that awful day in hospital, that Lilianna had died in the womb, it felt as though all those prophecies my dad had flung at me while I was growing up, about being a bad person and having the devil in me, were true. Lilianna was taken from me because I was evil. She didn’t deserve to have a mother like me.
When Lilianna died, my hopes and dreams died with her; of being a mother, of taking her home to the nursery we’d painted bumblebee yellow, to the little white cot that Matteo had spent all afternoon putting together, the soft toys that awaited her, the babygros and vests, nappies and little socks neatly folded in her wardrobe. I’d never watch her take her first steps, or say her first words. I’d never see her ride a bike, or start school, or fall in love for the first time, or get married. It had all been snatched away and I yearned for her and the life she could have had.
Seeing Karen again, confronting her, talking to her, has been a therapy of sorts. A kind of closure. I’m not proud of my behaviour in Thailand, or what I’ve done to Karen since being back in England. But I have to forgive myself as well as her.
She drugged me so that I wouldn’t follow her. She hated me that much. And I deserved it.
As darkness falls I sit in Evelyn’s chair by the window and ring Matteo. Tears spring to my eyes when I hear his warm, sexy accent and I’m transported there, to our home near the beach with the veranda and the wooden floors, with our washing line full of colourful towels flapping in the sea breeze, and I suddenly want to be with him so much it hurts. ‘Beth. Oh Beth, thank God you’re all right. I’ve been out of my mind with worry,’ he cries as soon as he answers the phone.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, my throat constricted by tears. ‘I’m so sorry for running away. I just feel so sad. I miss her so much …’
‘I know, baby, I know, please come home. I need you too.’
‘I can’t believe you still want me back. After everything I’ve put you through.’
‘Of course I do, hermosa chica.’ Beautiful girl. My heart takes flight and soars. ‘I love you. If you need money I’ll put some in your bank account, but please … please come home …’
And then I’m laughing through my tears as I tell him that I’ll be home the next day, that I love him too. That I’m sorry.
He’s waiting for me as I walk through the airport less than twenty-four hours later. He’s grown a beard in the months I’ve been away and his dark eyes are wet when he sees me. I rush towards him and he picks me up, swinging me around, joy in his face as he plants kisses on my lips, my eyelids. He runs a finger along my cheekbone as if trying to heal the bruise and I feel real joy, so sudden and pure that it makes me catch my breath. Sean’s gone. I never have to be scared of him again. I’m free to be happy, with Matteo.
I cling to him and cry and laugh, and then he leads me out of the automatic doors, his arms wrapped protectively around me as though worried I’ll disappear again. At last I can stop running. I’m finally safe. I’m finally home.
42
Libby
I sit and wait for Jamie as the light is sucked from the day and dusk comes. Yet he still doesn’t arrive.
I need to confront him about this card. I try to ring him but his phone goes straight to voicemail.
He’s probably at his mum’s. With Hannah.
I need to fight for my husband. For our relationship. Otherwise all of this has been for nothing. I ring for a taxi and ten minutes later I’m walking up Sylvia’s path.
Her eyes are round with surprise as she opens the door to me. ‘What are you doing here?’ she says as I storm past her.
‘Where are they?’ I cry.
‘Libby,’ she says, her voice cutting. ‘What’s all this about?’ She closes the front door calmly.
‘Where’s Jamie?’
She folds her arms across her ample chest. ‘In the dining room … what’s going on …?’ But I’ve already stomped off.
They are all there in Sylvia’s elegant dining room, with the duck-egg-blue walls and the chintzy curtains that frame the French doors to the garden, sitting around the oval table. Katie and Gerard, Hannah and Jamie.
Jamie’s face when I walk in is such a picture of horror that I almost want to giggle. The rest all look up at me with expectant faces. Katie smirks. Hannah blushes, a forkful of pasta near her mouth.
‘Ah, there you are, Jamie. Planning to come home tonight?’
His knife and fork clatter onto the plate and he stands up, pushing his chair away. ‘Libby, why are you here?’ He frowns. ‘And what’s happened to your face? Your cheek – it’s all red.’
I put my hand to my face; my cheek feels hot to the touch. And in that moment I consider walking away from all this. From Jamie. Starting again. I’ve done it before. I reach inside my jacket for the card and slap it onto the table. ‘I found this,’ I say.
Hannah also puts down her fork and eyes me with dislike. Katie and Gerard continue to stare at me too, but there is excitement in their eyes. As though they’re about to watch a good show.
‘Where … where did you get that?’ she asks.
Jamie reaches for it and picks it up. ‘Wait a minute … this is …’ He turns to Hannah, his face pinched. ‘What are you doing with this?’
She shuffles in her seat, looking uncomfortable. She can’t meet his gaze. She bites her lip and looks as though she’s going to cry. I wonder, briefly, where her son is. Katie and Gerard continue to stare at us openly. I can tell they are enjoying this.
Despite everything I feel sorry for Hannah sitting there while we all gawp at her. Judging her. ‘Jamie. Hannah. Why don’t we go into the living room and talk about this?’ I suggest. But Hannah pushes her chair back so violently that it falls to the floor.
‘Don’t do me any favours,’ she snaps. Sylvia, who is standing in the doorway, is visibly shocked.
‘You really want to do this here?’ says Jamie. Over her head his eyes find mine and an understanding flickers between us. I know, in that instant, that Jamie definitely didn’t write that card.
‘You sent those cards to our neighbour Anya, didn’t you? You wanted me to believe that Jamie was having an affair,’ I say.
She rounds on me, her eyes flashing. ‘You don’t deserve him,’ she laughs cruelly. ‘He should have married me. Not some scrawny jumped-up little scrubber like you.’
‘That’s enough,
Hannah,’ says Sylvia, her voice hard.
‘And all the other stuff?’ says Jamie.
I could speak up. About it being Beth who sent the leaflets, and backpack, who emptied our account. But I don’t. I wait. The air in the room is thick with tension. And then Jamie looks furious. ‘And Ziggy …?’
She hangs her head. ‘I didn’t mean for him to die. I just wanted to drive a wedge between the two of you. I thought then you’d come back –’ she turns to him and reaches for his hand but he brushes her off ‘– you’d come back to me.’
‘Hannah, that’s never going to happen,’ Jamie says, his expression stony. I know it must be taking all his strength not to scream at her for what she’s done to Ziggy. ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you but it’s Libby I love. It’s Libby I want to be with. Me and you – that’s in the past.’
For a brief, horrifying moment I wonder if she’s going to lunge for him, or me. But instead she walks silently past us and out of the room. A few seconds later we hear the front door banging behind her.
43
I’ve taken a part-time job in the local café, cash in hand, no questions asked. No charges have been brought against me yet. Melanie thinks there will be something but she’s hoping, if I plead guilty, that the worst I’ll get is community service. I miss teaching and the future seems so uncertain that it scares me. But at least I still have Jamie and the baby, and for that I’m so grateful. We’ve put the flat on the market and are hopeful of a quick sale. A new start.
After Hannah admitted to writing the letters and hurting Ziggy, Sylvia told her she needed to move out of the coach house. That she needed to stay away from Jamie. I was impressed by how Sylvia handled the situation. We’ve grown closer as the weeks have progressed. I feel, at last, that she sees me as her rightful daughter-in-law.
Jamie and I have had long discussions about our relationship. All we seem to do at the moment is talk, our innermost thoughts spewing out of us, each of us desperate to purge ourselves. ‘I didn’t realise that by spending time with Hannah I was giving her false hope,’ he admits one night as we lie in bed. ‘It still shocks me to think she’d be capable of something like that. Poisoning Ziggy, the letters, the fraud. And did she send those things from the catalogues too? She’s not admitted to that but … it’s the sort of thing she’d do.’
I haven’t told him the truth; to do so would mean telling him about Beth. And I want to keep that between us.
‘I’ve known Hannah for years,’ he continues. ‘Since we were eighteen. How can we really tell what goes on in people’s heads? It makes me not want to trust anyone.’
I snuggle up to him and try to reassure him. ‘You know me, Jay. I know you. You can trust me. I promise. We have to look to the future now. To us. To Peanut. Put the past behind us.’
He turns his face towards mine. ‘No more lies?’
I smile in response and reach up to kiss him. ‘No more lies.’
I think it is possible to know someone, to know what’s truly in their hearts. I’ve never trusted Hannah, I knew she was jealous; I’d seen how her eyes followed Jamie, I could tell she disliked me just because I’d married him. We go through our lives doing the best we can, we make mistakes, we inadvertently – and sometimes deliberately – piss people off. But how are we to know if people will retaliate? How can we tell how much, or for how long, someone will hold a grudge?
I watch as Jamie sleeps, his arm slung over his eyes so that I can only see his full lips, his chiselled chin, the hollow where his throat meets his collarbones. I know he loves me but how can I be sure he didn’t encourage Hannah in his own way? That some of this wasn’t his fault, even if he wasn’t fully aware of it? How accountable are we?
Lies. There will always be lies. The little white lies we can’t bring ourselves to tell our spouses, our friends. Sometimes it’s to protect them and sometimes it’s to protect ourselves.
I know I promised to tell Jamie everything, to confide in him, warts and all, to stop trying to make out that I’m perfect. But I can’t tell him about Beth. And I can’t tell him that I have forgiven her. Because I’m partly to blame.
After I found the drugs that Beth had used to spike my drink, anger and resentment grew inside me like a weed, entangling itself around my insides so that I was consumed by it. It was her fault I’d lost Harry; she’d manipulated us both. I took the drugs and poured them into my can of Coke while she was in the loo. Then, when she returned, I pretended to be asleep. It didn’t take long before she was out of it. I waited until I was sure she was in a deep slumber, before grabbing what I thought was my backpack, heaving it onto my shoulders and creeping out of the dark room. And then I started the fire in the women’s loos, just around the corner from our bedroom. I lit one of Beth’s matches and threw it into the wastepaper basket full of paper towels. It was supposed to be a small fire. Just enough to cause a distraction if Beth woke up. I assumed when the smoke alarms went off the hostel would be evacuated and the authorities would question her, as well as everyone else. That it would give me enough time to get as far away from her as possible. How was I to know the fire alarms at the hostel were faulty, that the fire would get out of control? That people would die? I’ve spent my life trying to atone for it. Trying to be a good person, a good teacher. And I’ll be a good mother.
It wasn’t until I was on the pavement outside that I saw the thick black smoke emanating from one of the windows on the second floor and realised my mistake. The fire took hold much quicker than I’d anticipated. I ran into a nearby hotel, screamed at them to call the fire brigade and could only watch in despair as the fire engines turned up, thinking of Beth in her drug-induced sleep, unable to escape.
The reason I’d been so sure that Beth was dead all these years was because I thought I’d killed her. It’s my fault that people died that night. And I’ll never forgive myself for that.
Consequences. We can’t escape them.
Jamie turns over in his sleep with a soft grunt, flinging his arm across my chest. I snuggle into him, cradling my stomach, thinking of the new life growing inside me. We are safe, the three of us. This is my second chance and I’ll do anything not to mess it up.
Epilogue
The flat was only on the market for a week before we had an offer. We’ve found a lovely little house not far away, in Saltford, near the river. It has a garden and when we move we’re thinking of buying a puppy so that we can start training it before the baby arrives. Jamie’s business has gone from strength to strength and I’ve had my twenty-week scan. We’re having a boy. My T-shirts are now tight over my bump. I’ll have to start buying maternity clothes soon. I feel excitement at my new life ahead. It’s not what I thought it would be, I’ll always miss teaching, but I’m looking forward to being a mum.
It’s a warm summer’s day, the sky a hazy blue, gossamer clouds hovering. I’m sorting out our paperwork so that we’re more organised for when the moving date comes through. I’m sitting in the middle of the dining room with papers strewn around me.
Jamie wanders through, holding an empty mug. He has that tired, slightly distracted air about him that he always has when he’s in the middle of working, as though he can’t tear his mind away from figures and code and goodness knows what else he has to think about. He switches the kettle on. ‘Coffee?’
‘Decaf, remember,’ I say, stroking my bump.
‘I know.’ He laughs because we have this conversation every time he offers to make me a drink.
When the knock on the door comes, it’s so unexpected that Jamie and I exchange puzzled glances. Nobody usually calls around in the middle of the day. Not even Sylvia. She often waits until we visit her, not wanting to ‘intrude’.
I go to answer the door and am surprised to see DI Hartley standing there. My heart jumps. I haven’t heard anything more about charges I might face. Melanie Finch hasn’t been in touch for weeks.
‘Elizabeth Elliot,’ he begins, holding up his police identification unnecessarily, as I know
exactly who he is.
‘It’s Elizabeth Hall …’
‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Sean Elliot. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
‘What?’ I splutter, staring at him incredulously. ‘You can’t do this. You’ve already arrested me for this once before and let me go. I thought you’d charged someone else … I thought …’ My voice rises in hysteria. Jamie comes rushing into the hallway, his face draining of colour when he sees the detective on the other side of the threshold.
‘Why are you here again?’
‘We have new evidence to suggest that your wife is responsible for Sean Elliot’s death, Mr Hall. Now, Mrs Elliot, you can either come quietly or …’
I shake my head. ‘It’s fine. It will be OK. I know I’ve done nothing wrong. Please let me put my shoes on.’ I slip my feet into ballet pumps and follow DI Hartley to the waiting police car.
‘Libs, I’ll call Melanie Finch. We’ll meet you at the station,’ cries Jamie, dashing out after me. He’s standing on the pavement in his socks. I can only nod, a knot forming in my stomach as I’m helped into the back of the police car.
I can’t stop the tears from flowing as Melanie Finch fills me in on what’s been happening. We’re sitting in an interview room in the police station. It’s a different room to last time, smaller, windowless, the air stale. She sits across from me, her expression serious behind her glasses.
‘They are in possession of an ornament from your property that they believe is the murder weapon,’ she says. Her lipstick is too red and bright for her face so that her mouth looks almost cartoonish. I can’t stop staring at it as she speaks.
‘An ornament?’
‘A Buddha.’ She pushes a photograph across the table. ‘Does this belong to you?’
Last Seen Alive Page 26