What Alice Knew

by T. A. Cotterell

  ‘Oh my God, Ed! You … Did you …?’

  His mouth was churning, his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously.

  ‘No! Alice! I can’t believe you could even—’

  He swiped the beads of perspiration from his forehead.

  ‘Ed?’

  ‘No!’

  But I knew. It was in his face, the tilt of his jaw, his frightened eyes, in the pinkness of his skin as he squeezed the arm of his chair. It was in his guilty glance ceiling-wards. It was in the tiny squeak of his chair on the wooden floor as it moved involuntarily back.

  ‘Oh my God! Ed!’

  He stared at me for a moment, but as I felt a tiny spasm of fear, his shoulders slumped, the arc of his certainty collapsed and his iron self-control drained away. The silence was biblical.

  ‘It was an accident, I promise, I swear it was.’

  His voice was cracking like an actor. I was shaking, all my uncertainty tumbling into terror. My voice wouldn’t work. I tried to speak but nothing came out and then, in a rush,

  ‘You – you killed her?’

  He nodded, his face contorted by fear, and when he spoke his voice was pleading.

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I swear. She fell.’

  ‘She fell?’ Words were building, clamouring, tumbling over the horror as they tripped out of my mouth. ‘Why did she fall?’

  ‘She fell because she was attacking me and she slipped. When I said there was no prospect of us having a relationship she went completely mad and started swearing and punching and hitting me. I pushed her away, not even hard – one hand, just in self-defence – but she slipped and hit her head on the marble mantelpiece and a spike on the fender. I could see straight away it was serious. Blood was coming out of her ear. I did absolutely everything I could – mouth-to-mouth, heart, aorta, everything – but I knew there was nothing I could do from the moment she hit the spike. I swear that’s the truth. Cross my heart. I was fucking desperate. I tried everything, absolutely everything. It was so … I can’t tell you … You know I would never hit a woman, don’t you?’

  I did know that. It’s not in his nature. Ed gives gifts to women, the best they will ever receive. I stared at him across the silence, my mind’s eye in Stokes Croft: angry words, a shriek and a shove, a defensive push, a lamp knocked to the floor. Her body prostrate by the fender, blonde hair clogging her mouth, the bruise swelling, black blood behind the ear, his hands pumping her heart, desperately grabbing a tea towel, a cushion, sobbing at the unfairness of it, anything soft to stem the flow, that rich dark familiar colour fanning out around her head.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  Ed covered his face with his hands for a moment, before pulling them down as if fighting extreme exhaustion.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ He paused, control returning alongside the need for a rational response. ‘I’m going to do nothing.’ I stayed quiet. My husband the celebrated obstetrician was now my husband the killer. The sheer horror of it made me feel physically sick. When darkness descends it obliterates everything. If there hadn’t been an open window and the neighbours having a cheery barbecue, I would have screamed. He gathered himself and spoke louder, as if he was trying to convince himself as much as me. ‘I’m going to do nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘I’ve decided not to tell the police. After it happened, I was going to go straight there. But although I knew it was an accident, I also knew they might not see it like that. Then I realized I owed it to you to tell you everything, to try to explain what had happened, before I went to them. It would have been completely unfair – I mean, wrong for you to hear from anyone else. It was the least I could do.’ He gave a sour laugh, brimming with self-disgust. ‘The very least. Also I wanted to apologize to you for everything, for it happening, for fucking us up, our lives, the children, everything. You know, I still can’t believe it happened …’

  He tailed off. The tears were running down his cheeks. There was no self-pity and nothing left to confess. Only I wasn’t ready to stop listening.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So … I came home but you were at book club. And Arthur told me he’d been in trouble at school. Apparently he’d pushed Alfie Warburton into the pond. It was almost certainly no more than that little horror deserved. As Arthur told it, Alfie attacked Arthur and when he pushed him away Alfie fell into the pond and Arthur was the one who was punished because Alfie had got wet, which he felt was unfair as he’d only pushed him away in self-defence.’

  ‘And it rang a bell.’

  ‘It rang a bell. He also told me he’d been to Richie Railton’s party at the climbing wall, which for some reason I didn’t quite get was extra fun because Richie’s dad had climbed with them. He made me promise that not only could he have his next birthday party there but that I would definitely climb with him and his friends too. And you know what? Looking at that trusting little man, I knew I couldn’t let him down. Maybe, even more, I shouldn’t let him down, that it was his future at stake as much as mine. And that’s when I decided to wing it.’

  ‘Which is why he said you cried when you said goodnight?’

  Ed nodded. A single tear on his cheek caught the light. I pictured him with the children when they were little, three in a bed, completely exhausted but insisting on reading stories about princesses and woodcutters, dark forests, brave children, cats that talked. They couldn’t have asked for more love or time from a father and they loved him more than any father I had ever known. In fact, it had occurred to me once that if they ever had to lose one parent … My hand instinctively reached out but stopped short of him. I had to see it through.

  ‘So I went downstairs and thought about what I’d done and what I should do and the odds and everything, and I decided I would go for it. Even though it was an accident, I would probably be charged with murder rather than manslaughter. After all, it’s only my word about what really happened in the flat that night and, well, I guess after Saturday night and all the texts and so on I had a motive – or at least they could claim I did. It’s not easy to prove a negative.’ He leant back in his chair as if gathering strength. ‘That was why I cried that night when I was saying goodnight to Arthur. Because I was so scared and ashamed of what I had done to you all, and everything I had risked. I know what I’ve done – what I’m doing – is wrong but it was an accident, I promise; it wasn’t my fault. And yet it could ruin your and the children’s lives, and you and they have done nothing to deserve that.’ He was rocking trance-like on his chair. Ed had never believed in God, only in individual goodness on this earth. ‘I’ve thought about it long and hard. Please, Alice, you’ve got to believe me. I know it sounds self-serving, but I decided the future of my family is more important than the accidental death of some nutcase I never even knew who tried to ruin my life and my family’s lives and who no one can do anything to help now anyway.’

  I was shaking my head. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. But even as I tried to process the enormity of what he was saying, Ed was continuing:

  ‘I’ve chosen my family and my children’s future over some legal or moral concept of justice. I can repay the debt I owe to Araminta and society far better by carrying on working at St Anthony’s than I ever could in jail.’

  I didn’t reply. What could I say? What I wanted to do was to scream so loud they could hear my pain in Hawaii. But I didn’t. I couldn’t even do that. Silence rose like smoke. In the end, I said again, ‘So what are you going to do?’

  He fixed on me, his cheeks as grey as a Van Goyen seascape, and whispered,

  ‘I’ve chosen.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Ed put his hands back on the table. I watched his energy leak out of them into the wood. His face was sapped of colour. What must it have been like to carry this secret alone? What would it do to you to be waiting for the dawn rap on the door, the humiliation, the transformation, the end of everything?

  ‘It means I’ve chosen. It’s your choice now.
’

  I was at school with Marnie Latham. It was one of those God-less girls’ boarding schools that relieved parents of large amounts of money in return for a couple of O levels and an address book stuffed with the names of ‘suitable’ boys. Marnie was a scholarship girl from Manchester who joined in the lower sixth, her fees paid in full by a bursary. She was clever, hard-working, high-achieving, a sensitive sculptor, non-sporty and unpopular because she didn’t smoke or take drugs. She was never so bored on a Sunday afternoon that she thought ‘Mushroom Roulette’, a game in which everyone ate a random wild mushroom from Becker’s Woods and waited to see who was hospitalized, was a good idea. She had long dark hair, lightning-blue eyes, trout-lips, spoke with a northern accent, laughed like applause and swore with the venom of a Marseillaise whore. She didn’t have a pony or live in a large house nestled in a sylvan Hampshire valley. She lived with her typing-pool mum and her mum’s boyfriends, who stacked up like dishes. Her dad, tattooist by day, knock-off merchant by night, had skedaddled to the Costa when she was five. She kept a photo of him in her wallet: a lazy-eyed man in a brown leather jacket with a stretchy waist and dagger-collared cheesecloth shirt. After five years of Eton-boyfriend talk and hair-flicking, she blew into my life like a gunslinger, just as Ed did a few years later. I sloughed off my friends like a snake shedding skin. I’d never really been one of them anyway. I hated the pettiness and bitchiness, the one-upmanship over clothes, gigs, holidays, boyfriends, jewellery, drugs, houses. Marnie was different. She had never developed the hard protective shell essential for anyone sent away to board before the age of ten. Marnie dreamt. She was real.

  For two and a half terms we did everything together. I knew my old ‘friends’ were making fun of me behind my back, but I didn’t care. I was liberated. I had someone to talk to about the big things in life – art, literature, ideas – and her views led me into a land I never knew existed. She was as hungry as a cougar for the world.

  One afternoon I cut my knee playing rounders and came back from games early and who should I find in the dormitory kneeling down by Annabel Trim’s open bedside drawer holding a ten-pound note?

  Although I wanted to believe it wasn’t what it seemed, the evidence was overwhelming – Marnie’s flushed face turning, the gaping drawer, the note in her hand. To her credit, when she realized I’d seen everything she didn’t try to deceive me. She just stood up slowly and stared at me, as if willing me to let it pass by sheer force of personality. She was my best friend. She was different and to my mind greater than the rest of us, who were only there through an accident of birth, following our father’s sister or our mother, preceding our daughters. But theft is theft. And in that moment I wondered whether I understood her at all. Where were those lofty ideals now? Where was the sense of eternal quest we had spoken about so often? Was that all it amounted to: stealing money from someone’s locker? Had it just been talk? Underneath was she really no better than the Costa-based father who peered out beadily from the photo in her wallet?

  ‘Alice, it’s not what you think. Really. I—’

  Before she could continue or I could say anything the door was flung open and five girls burst in. They screeched to a halt when they saw us, instantly sensing the tension in the air. Jenny Raygard spoke first.

  ‘What’s going on? Alice?’

  I looked at Marnie. She stared back at me, her neck flushed. The fact Jenny had asked me, not her, spoke volumes. My choice was clear. My best friend – someone I loved – or some abstract notion of justice? My throat was tinder-dry. I looked from Marnie to the five girls and back again. Marnie seemed to be holding her breath. I swallowed hard. I had to jump one way or the other.

  ‘Marnie’s been stealing money out of the lockers.’

  They all turned noisily on Marnie. It was the sound of the shires: guns firing, whisky flasks opening, hounds catching foxes. Marnie shot me a viperous look. There was nothing for it. Hooting at the confirmation of their prejudices, the vigilantes hauled her away to the lantern-jawed headmistress. As the commotion disappeared down the polished wooden stairs I was left sitting on the bed, busted by the end of a friendship that seemed the end of everything.

  She left the same day, my best friend, a scholarship girl I had cut off forever from opportunity and her route to a better life. She was a girl who had a hunger and determination you’d rarely find in an old rectory and, despite what had happened, a fierce integrity only I would ever fully know.

  After a sleepless night I called her at home to beg for forgiveness. While the phone was ringing I thought about the line in Gatsby, which we’d just studied, about Tom and Daisy wrecking people’s lives and retreating ‘back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together’. Her mum answered. She sounded warm and friendly but when she told Marnie who was calling my ex-best friend wouldn’t come to the phone.

  Two days later I received a letter postmarked Stretford and addressed in Marnie’s loopy scrawl. I tore it open. There was a sheet of cheap A4 paper with a single sentence: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ E. M. Forster. There was a single X. It wasn’t a kiss but a cross to bear.

  When, as someone who has always obeyed the law – the odd university joint or no bike lights aside – you step outside it, you enter the unknown, a place with thinner air, taller shadows, weaker sun. Life doesn’t just ‘go on’ as the cliché has it. The clocks are reset, relationships recalibrated.

  Once I have engaged, whether it’s with a portrait or a marriage, or a portrait of a marriage, I have engaged, and I will see it through. So my job from the beginning was to nail our story to the floor.

  The first thing to do was to work out what the police might know and what they clearly couldn’t know, because if they did they would have knocked on the door already. I had to take control. I could tell from the desperate never-let-me-go hug Ed gave me when I said – after much exploration of the likely outcome if he went to the police, and not without some misgiving – I would support him that he was emotionally exhausted. It was hardly a surprise. He must have taken a psychological beating since he slept with that woman. Since he killed that woman. Now his secret was out, now he had someone to lean on, there was nothing left in his tank. Over to Lady Macbeth, which was not a role I had ever wanted or expected to play.

  I made a pot of strong coffee. When it was ready we returned to the table with big mugs and hot milk, ready for a long night. Ed’s head lolled on his shoulders. There had never been a time when he was not in control of his life. I sipped my coffee, saying nothing, covering the angles, letting the bitter taste sharpen my mind. Ed waited. He had a fawn-like desire to please, to take instructions about how to escape his fate. I hadn’t had this much power since the moment before I said ‘yes’ to his marriage proposal on the slippery wooden steps at Tintagel, the sea slapping the rocks below.

  To start, he told me everything. What her flat was like, the colour of her dress, the name of the book she was reading. Ed’s memory was forensic. Next, we focused on the game-over clues: CCTV and her mobile. I couldn’t bring myself to call her Araminta, much less ‘Minta’, or even Ms Lyall. Her name left a taste in my mouth like burnt spinach. She was ‘that woman’, someone I had never met but who had changed my life. So: CCTV? Clearly the Carriage Works didn’t have CCTV. If it did, the police would have been here already. Her mobile? All those calls and texts she’d sent waiting to be read? Ed leant forward. He was a man who dealt in cause and effect, which art could never offer.

  ‘Actually, that is maybe one stroke of luck. I took her mobile when I left the flat.’

  ‘You took it? I thought you were planning to give yourself up?’

  ‘I was. It was a mistake.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s true. I’d left mine at work again. So I picked up hers to ring the police. It didn’t really seem to matter which phone I used by then, I was g
iving myself up anyway. Then when I decided to come home to tell you first I must have just slipped it into my pocket out of habit.’

  ‘How convenient.’

  He looked at me sharply, trying to discern the shape of my sarcasm. I stared blankly across the table. It wasn’t up to me to make this easier for him.

  ‘So where is it now?’

  ‘In the river. Without its sim card. Which is also in the river.’

  ‘Don’t the phone companies have records?’

  ‘Pay as you go.’

  ‘And if they do?’

  ‘The police would be here by now. She must have had a second phone.’

  So we set to it, proper criminals casing every minute and movement and possibility of the hours between the Sunday morning Ed left that woman’s flat after Pete’s party sleepover and the Wednesday night he arrived home after she died. Every gesture was accounted for, every blink. Our alibi was forged in steel.

  Ed asked,

  ‘What about the flowers?’

  ‘She delivered them herself. No one will know what she did with them.’

  ‘The messages at work?’

  ‘You fixed her plumbing before you left on the Sunday morning. She rang to thank you.’

  And so it went on through a long night.

  I asked,

  ‘What about Karen?’

  ‘Told her I was leaving early to go and see my solicitor.’

  ‘What about your solicitor?’

  ‘I forgot to book it.’

  ‘What about Neil?’

  ‘Neil?’

  ‘From my book club. Who said he saw you on Stokes Croft early on Wednesday evening. You were on your way to that woman, weren’t you?’

  Ed swallowed.

  ‘No reason he would put two and two together. I could have been going anywhere.’

  ‘Visiting a recent mum?’