* * *
The great gulf of darkness opened up again like a silent roar, wrapping its weight around me and crushing my breath as I went under.
2
Jess
“Mr. King, we’re going to need to talk with you in more detail about your first wife, Avril King. We have good reason to believe that you’ve lied about the circumstances of her death.”
Is DCI Jacobs accusing James of killing his wife? I think this is what she’s saying, and by the look on Emily’s face, so does she. How much—or how little—does Emily even know about James, I wonder? How much do any of us know about each other? Is this just a precursor to accusing him of taking Daisy? Or worse? They couldn’t be thinking that, could they? James still hasn’t spoken a word, and it doesn’t look good for him. It doesn’t look good at all.
The detective stands at the foot of the stairs with her back to the door, facing the shocked gaggle of Emily, James, Chloe, and me, and it feels as though the air has been sucked from the room. How much more can this family take? Just minutes earlier, Marcus had been standing on the front drive, frantically running his hands through his hair as he confessed that he’d had sex with his best friend’s wife—with Emily—on the night that Daisy disappeared. That they may even have been doing it at the very moment Daisy was being snatched, that he was the reason Emily was late getting home—that he’s barely had a wink of sleep since he realized his part in the whole awful affair. The police had been on the phone to him yesterday evening, questioning him yet again about James and Emily’s movements when they left his party on New Year’s Eve, and something inside him had folded, he said. If it hadn’t been for Daisy, he told James, he would never have said a word—would never have hurt James by letting him know the truth. It wasn’t as if it was something they would ever repeat; it was a one-off, a slip-up, a lapse in judgment.
“A lapse in fucking judgment?” James spat. I’d never seen him this way, his face distorted with the hurt and fury that rushed into his features. “A slip-up? You arrogant shit—”
I’d thought he was going to go for Marcus, who by this point was so gray that he looked as if he might vomit on the doorstep. But instead, James took a backward step and shook his head. “You’re welcome to her,” he said, and Marcus had no choice but to return to his car and drive away.
And then, there was Emily arriving on the scene, and while no real words have been spoken since she arrived home just minutes ago, the knowledge of her betrayal hangs between them like red mist beneath the clouds of DCI Jacobs’s newest revelation.
“What do you mean, he lied?” asks Emily. Her face is pale, her voice small.
DCI Jacobs looks at each one of us, her focus lingering longest on Chloe, poor bloody Chloe, who only woke at the sound of the inspector running across the drive and now stands on the bottom stair tread, looking expectant and scared.
“Yes, what do you mean?” Chloe demands, her voice rising as she pushes through to stand between James and Emily.
The inspector looks directly at James. “Would you like to explain, James?”
* * *
When I arrived here last autumn, I thought it strange that Emily and James had never married. I suppose I assumed he had never quite got over the loss of his first wife, Avril. As children, Emily was always more girly than me, her games often consisting of make-believe situations such as mummies-and-daddies or mummies-and-babies, or her favorite of all, fairytale weddings. In these games, I always took the support role, and so as chief bridesmaid in Emily’s marriage fantasy, I was nothing if not aware of her child’s-eye view of the “perfect” wedding. There would be an enormous white cake, a horse-drawn carriage, a dress more beautiful than the town had ever seen—and confetti! So much white confetti that they’d think it was snowing in July! And as we grew older, into our teens, getting married and settling down was something that Emily talked about in so casual a way that I understood it to be an event that would simply happen for her. Strange, as at that age it was never a future I could visualize for myself—the idea of giving myself over to one person so completely that they became my world, my new family. In childhood, all I could really imagine was staying with the family I already had. But then Emily always did live with one eye on the new, happy to drop everything—and everyone—for something shinier or more fun.
It seems inconceivable to me that James is capable of—of what? What exactly are the police suggesting he’s capable of? Right up until this moment, I’d have said he’s one of the most honest men I’ve ever met. But then I think of him all those months back, when I came upon him sitting alone on the stone wall overlooking Freshwater Bay as I walked along the water’s edge. I had only arrived a fortnight earlier, and I’d spotted him in the distance. It was unusual to see him out on the beach on his own. He was so engrossed, reading what looked like a letter, that I was right beside him before he even noticed me.
“Jess!” he said, looking up, wide-eyed and fumbling, as he shoved the soft floral notepaper into his jacket pocket. I was sure I saw alarm in his expression, but that thought quickly disappeared when he dropped down off the wall and fell in step with me to walk over the stones below. “So what have you done with Daisy?” He smiled.
It was a Saturday, and Chloe was babysitting her little sister while Emily drove over to Newport to spend a couple of hours at the gym. “Oh, I left her home alone,” I replied, adopting a serious tone. “She’s what—eleven months old now? More than grown-up enough!”
James nodded approvingly, zipping the neck of his jacket beneath his chin. I like him, I remember thinking at the time, the emotion instinctively uncomplicated. He understood my humor and always went along with it. Not like Emily, who hated it when I made silly jokes, just not getting it, not understanding why I’d say something so stupid and untrue.
“Yeah,” he agreed, a small laugh in his voice. “We’ll have to start thinking about sending her out to work soon. Get the little layabout to pay her own way.”
Already the midafternoon sun was casting long shadows of the corroded groyne posts that stuck up through the sand like sentries. I thought how much I loved this time of day in clear weather, when the light was low and bright, everything rendered more sharply and deeply—the colors, the shapes, the coast-crisp sounds of the seafront.
“What brings you down here?” I asked. “You looked deep in thought.” I couldn’t help glancing toward his jacket pocket.
“Oh, that,” he replied. “Just an old friend. Haven’t heard from them in years.”
The tide lapped at my boots, gulping its way farther up the sand and stones as the tide drew in. “I miss real letters,” I said. “Somehow an e-mail or a text message just isn’t the same. Me and Ems used to write letters to each other all the time.”
“When you were traveling?” he asked.
I laughed, though I didn’t know why. “No! When we were little. We used to write secret letters and hide them beneath each other’s pillows.” I felt a powerful surge of nostalgia at the sudden memory, and I wanted to cry. Emily had been more generous, more honest, more affectionate in those letters than she ever was in real life. Sometimes she was even funny. “I loved it. It’s one of the things I most missed about her, when I left home.”
“I can’t imagine Emily doing something like that,” James said, and he sounded so young and pensive that I had to stop myself from reaching out to touch his face. “There’s so much I don’t know about her, I suppose. But maybe she’d say the same about me.”
We continued along the water’s edge in companionable silence, until we reached the stone staircase at the foot of the seawall, where James held out his hand to help me leap over the tide that was now swelling at the bottom steps. At the top railings, we paused together to look out across the darkening horizon, where the sun was now no more than a wisp of orange watercolor in the sky.
“That letter—” James started, but I shook my head and stopped him from saying the words. In my brief glimpse of it, I had seen
it was a handwritten letter on pastel flowery paper, distinctly feminine, its contents clearly significant enough to make him secretive. I liked James very much already, and I didn’t need to know anything that would change my opinion of him.
“I could murder a cup of tea,” I said instead, and he smiled, relief rippling across his features like a wave.
In the late autumn dusk of October, we walked together along the leaf-strewn streets of Freshwater, until we reached our street, and I realized I felt entirely at home for the first time in years. Part of the world again. Part of Emily’s world again. Part of the family.
* * *
DCI Jacobs indicates the dining room table, and wordlessly we all move toward it, pulling out chairs, sitting so that we can now plainly see each other’s expressions. It’s horrible.
“James?” Emily whispers, but he just sits there with his face in his hands. She turns to look at the inspector, desperation pouring from her. “Please. Just tell me what’s going on here!”
Jacobs fixes her gaze on James, who seems incapable of movement. “Well, she’s not dead, James, is she?”
At this, he drops his hands from his face and tilts his head, never raising his eyes from the tabletop. “No,” he says, but it’s barely audible.
This was the last thing I expected to hear—the last thing any of us expected to hear. Avril? James’s first wife, Avril? Alive? How was it possible to conceal a detail so fundamental from the people you love? A whole other story, a whole other life.
DCI Jacobs places her hands flat on the tabletop. “Make us a pot of tea, DC Piper?” she says, and the officer disappears through the archway into the kitchen.
“Now, you’re not denying it, James,” she continues, “so I’m assuming this isn’t news to you. You already know that Avril is alive and well?”
All at once, Emily and Chloe snap out of their shocked silence, demanding answers, shrieking, crying, pushing back from their seats.
“What the hell is this?” Emily cries, standing, taking a backward step, as though the distance might help her to process the information. Her dark bob hangs in lifeless strands; I’ve never seen her so desperately unkempt. “How could you keep something like this from me, James? How could you lie about something so huge?”
James raises his eyes in a scowl that demands How can you ask me about lying? Emily sits again, her furious eyes downcast, her lower lip pinched between her front teeth.
DCI Jacobs reaches out a hand to soothe Chloe, letting it rest a moment on her forearm. “This must be a shock to you, Chloe. We will get to all your questions in a moment, but for now”—she runs her gaze over every one of us—“for now, I want to talk to James directly. Without interruptions. OK?”Around the table, we all nod our agreement, Chloe’s arms folding about her in a self-hugging pose, Emily’s hand covering her own mouth in censorship. I’m so stunned by this latest revelation that there’s no danger of interruption from me.
“James?”
James fiddles with the front of his hair, his focus indistinct, and for a moment I think he won’t speak at all. But then he does, directing his words toward Chloe. “She was very ill, mentally—emotionally—and when she was first institutionalized, I really had intended to stand by her. To be there for her until she was better. Even when it became clear she wasn’t getting better, I had wanted to stay nearby.” He now looks at the detective. “So that Chloe could have some kind of a relationship with her mother.”
“Institutionalized?” Chloe whispers. Her pallor appears translucent; her fingers dig into the flesh of her upper arms as she holds herself in.
James nods. “She had become very, very ill, Chlo. I didn’t know it when I met her—and we really were very much in love—but she’d suffered with mental illness since she was young. She’d been diagnosed with a personality disorder and had been successfully managing it with medication for over ten years—but when she became pregnant with Chloe—well, she had to tell me then, the midwife was quite insistent, and together they broke the news to me at the twelve-week scan.” He looks at his daughter, stalling while he finds the right words. “She was scared the pills would damage the baby. She wasn’t just taking medication for the condition; there were all sorts of other drugs for the side effects of that medication, and as soon as she realized she was expecting—she just stopped taking them all. No weaning off gradually or planning—she just stopped taking them overnight.”
DCI Jacobs nods at him to continue.
“It was devastating,” James says. “It was nothing short of hell. Avril changed so dramatically, I barely recognized her. She was a danger to herself, sometimes disappearing for days on end, turning up halfway across the country, unable to say where she’d been or what she’d been doing. Right before the birth, my mother moved in with us to help out—but really, I don’t know if that didn’t just make matters worse. She tried her best, but Avril rejected every gesture of help she offered. And even after the birth, she wouldn’t resume her medication, because she wanted to breastfeed. She couldn’t see what we all could: that she was disappearing before our eyes—that everything could return to normal if she just put the baby onto bottles and started taking the damn pills again. She wasn’t in her right mind, and yet she wanted to do everything right for her baby. She adored you, Chloe.”
“But why did she have to go into an institution? Couldn’t you have made her take the medicine?” There are tears rolling down Chloe’s face, and her breathing comes in short, shallow gasps. I worry that if she doesn’t loosen the grip on her arms soon, her fingers will puncture the material of her shirt, puncture her skin. I bump her knee with mine, offer her a hand beneath the table.
Across from us Emily’s face is unreadable—is she angry? Afraid? Guilty? It’s impossible to tell.
“In the end, we had no choice, Chlo. After a few months, she did agree to start taking her medication again, and it was such a relief because I really thought we were getting the old Avril back. She’d had a few a blips, but mostly she was doing fine. On that last evening, I went out to a drinks party with my mother, and we left you in Avril’s care for the first time in months. We thought it would be OK. We thought she’d cope.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“She cut her wrist. Luckily, we arrived home just in time—found her in the kitchen, bleeding profusely, and Chloe fine, but sitting up in her high chair covered in blood. And then it all happened so quickly—she was rushed to hospital, and by the end of the week she’d been comitted and moved to a secure unit where they could take proper care of her. Later, when I came back home, I searched her bedside cabinet and found all the tablets I thought she’d been taking, dozens of them stuffed into the back of the drawer. There must have been a couple of months’ worth. I knew then that they were right to send her to that hospital, that it was the safest place for her.”
“And she’s been there ever since?” DCI Jacobs asks.
James stiffens visibly. “I don’t think she’s there now.”
“Do you know where she is now, Mr. King? Has she made contact with you—or Chloe—at all over the years?”
I think we’re all expecting James to say no, but now there’s a weighted silence in the room as he hesitates, balling a fist against his chin, gathering up the words. With a lurch of suppressed horror, I remember that floral notepaper—the letter that Emily had been searching for all those months ago. Not a letter from a lover, but from a dead wife.
“She wrote. A few months ago. I don’t know how she got our address, but I saw from hers that she’d moved—” And then the realization hits him, and he turns to the detective with an expression of disbelief and says, “You’re not thinking about Daisy’s disappearance? You think it could be Avril?”
Little Sister Page 16