The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  ‘I do … but most of the time you need to go to them with something … you know … some kind of new evidence, a clear argument for taking it on.’

  ‘You mean him saying he didn’t do it isn’t enough?’ She laughed. ‘Sorry, he has all this information and files he’s collected and copies of letters, but he’s lost, he doesn’t know where to go with it. He can’t look at it subjectively.’

  ‘That’s actually why I was calling.’ I paused for a moment. ‘I wondered if you wanted me to have a look.’

  ‘Really?’ I heard her voice rise in excitement. ‘You’d do that?’

  ‘I can’t promise anything. I’m sure you know that. The odds are stacked against you, heavily. But I wouldn’t mind looking at the case, reading the judge’s summing-up …’

  ‘I’ll bring it all over to you tonight,’ she said.

  She appeared just as the credits for Panorama were rolling, carrying a bag. Next to her on the doorstep were two legs and boxes obscuring a face.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ She nodded and her eyes were stretched wide to tell me what she couldn’t say in words. He wanted to come.

  ‘S’fine,’ I said, glad that he couldn’t see my surprise.

  I invited them in and offered them tea, which Annie declined for both of them. ‘Don’t want to keep you.’ she said. I hadn’t given the impression I was in any kind of hurry, so I assumed it was simply a cover and she wanted to leave. ‘Thanks for this. I’ve been telling David about the convictions you got overturned on the programme.’ She turned to glare at David, who had now placed the boxes on the kitchen floor and stood like a surly kid scowling. What was going on between them?

  I smiled, aware of the awkward silence that both Annie and I wanted David to fill. Thank you. I appreciate what you are doing. I am grateful. Something.

  ‘We had the Colin Yates case, that went to a retrial and then he was acquitted. Then there was Maria Baczewski, her conviction for murder …’ I was babbling to fill the space. The more I spoke, the harder he stared.

  It struck me that there might be a good reason for his apathy. It’s easy to protest your innocence; what else are you going to say to your family and friends? But allowing someone to go over the evidence in detail was a different proposition. Was he worried I would expose his lies all over again?

  What was I doing?

  ‘Maybe we can talk again when you know I’m telling the truth,’ he interrupted. I stopped mid flow. A wave of anger quickly gave way to shame.

  It’s about me, not you.

  Not once had I said I believed him.

  Annie texted later that evening to apologise. No need, I replied. As uncomfortable as it was to admit it, he was right. My motivations were selfish. Christ, I had even thought of which newspapers to pitch the story to when I was done.

  I opened up a new file in my laptop. There had to be something tangible to go on. A reason to drive me on. He needed to know I believed him but I needed to be convinced too. I copied the old stories I had found on the internet about the attack and his conviction and pasted them into the file.

  If I was going to do this I would be rigorous, adopt the same approach I always had on APPEAL. Every phone call, chat, every document and scrap of evidence would be noted and saved.

  I stared at Melody’s image. Beneath the make-up and the styled hair I could see we were startlingly similar. If it had been me, I would want to know the truth.

  How was I to know how much it would cost us?

  Chapter Two

  Melody

  MELODY STARES AT the woman wearing a cerise dress and a pink rose in her hair. It takes a few beats for her brain to pin the outfit to a precise time and location. It was her brother Stephen’s wedding. They were posing for photographs in the gardens of a hotel in Sussex. A five-star spa hotel in Turner’s Hill, near Crawley, if her memory serves her correctly, although there was no mention of Crawley on the invitations, not even on the directions. She supposed this was a deliberate omission on the part of her sister-in-law, who wanted her wedding to be elegant and stylish, and found the town itself lacking in that respect. Louisa considered herself an arbiter of good taste, although this had not extended to her choice of bridesmaids’ dresses. Mel had looked like an overgrown fairy. There was no other way of describing it. And no, she couldn’t get over herself, as her mother had suggested. She had waited until the main course was finished to deliberately pour wine down her front. Then she went off to change into the dress she wanted to wear. Only her mother knew she had done it on purpose. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Melody. What a day to do a thing like that.’ She’d opened her mouth to protest but Tess had held her hand up to silence her and walked away with her glass of Martini to chat to Auntie Sheila.

  Was it her mother’s idea of karmic revenge to release that photograph to the press?

  ‘Of all the photographs,’ Mel had complained when she came round in hospital and saw the image of herself in the Evening Standard.

  ‘I gave it to the police,’ her mother said. ‘How was I to know it was going to end up in the papers? Besides, it’s a lovely photograph, and even if it wasn’t, I had other things on my mind when I picked it out.’

  Mel is in the living room, slouched on the modular sofa, which isn’t really designed for slouching, her laptop resting on her legs. Whatever she had hoped for, it wasn’t this. The volume of Eve’s file is daunting. She wasn’t prepared for pages and pages of text, documents scanned and saved, maps plotted with points of movement, CCTV cameras, test results that appear to be written in a language she can’t decipher, and this is only at a glance. She hasn’t even begun to read it properly.

  She had hoped it would be easily digestible, one gulp and the information would be sent directly to her brain for processing. Now she wonders if she will be able to read it at all. She hasn’t read a book in four years, doubts she still has the ability to sit down and concentrate on rows and rows of words and infuse them with meaning. It’s not for want of trying either. She used to devour books, the way she’s seen people devour cakes, savouring each sentence, revelling in the pictures they painted in her mind, before racing on to the next bite. After the attack, when spare time oppressed her and she would have loved nothing more than a retreat to a fictional world, she suddenly found she couldn’t get further than a few paragraphs before the words started to skip and jump in front of her. She persisted at first but the effort of trying to pin them down created a pressure that bored through her temples, drilled down into her teeth. She admitted defeat.

  Next to her own pathetic attempts at reading (never mind writing anything more than a shopping list or an email), the scale of Eve’s effort intimidates her. It’s a sensation not dissimilar to the one she experienced after her fall on the South Bank, looking up to the sky, everyone and everything looming so large, towering above her, and her too insubstantial next to them. She drags the cursor down through the pages. There is no end to them. A large throbbing part of her wishes she hadn’t asked to see the file. Stop now, delete it before it’s too late, a voice tells her. But it is already too late. Having given it the briefest glance, she knows she can’t go back. It has changed irrevocably her view of what Eve was doing. It wasn’t a whim, the meddling of a woman who fell for a lie. There is method here, detail, analysis of the evidence.

  She was attacked. David Alden was convicted. These are points A and B on the map, the only places Melody has ever visited. But Eve’s investigation, she knows, covers a world of nuances, theories and suppositions that fall in between those two points. It’s uncharted territory.

  She leaves the laptop on the sofa, conscious that Sam warns her never to do this. ‘It’ll overheat, ruin the computer.’ Sam isn’t here, though, and she’ll do what she wants.

  Why has she been so hard on him since her interview at the police station? He let her struggle, allowed her mind to fry while he sipped his shit coffee, that’s why. It’s for this reason that she can’t look him in the eye any more or liste
n to what he says, because all the time she is wondering if he is telling the truth or if he is hiding something from her. Not that she can voice her concerns, not unless she wants to be carted off to the loony bin or prescribed more tranquillisers.

  It isn’t true what they said, the headlines in the papers, her friends, her parents. She didn’t survive. She can trace Melody Pieterson back to that night of 17 August, to the moment she turned off the Uxbridge Road, hearing footsteps behind her. At that point the darkness came. And Melody, she admits for the first time, never emerged from it.

  She checks her watch. It’s half past eleven. Too early to make lunch even if she was hungry, which she isn’t. A coffee will do. Yes, another one. Fuck fennel tea. Her footsteps are loud on concrete as she walks through to the kitchen. No matter what she buys to fill the rooms, whatever pieces of furniture she carefully selects (before seeking Sam’s approval), nothing seems to deaden the sound. A footstep, a teaspoon falling to the floor, the bang of a door all reverberate around the house. Even when she’s alone she has the impression that there are two of her here. Herself and her echo, another person who follows in her shadow.

  She goes to make the coffee, deciding that she would like to use the cafetière this time. She spends five minutes searching for it. Sam will have hidden it somewhere, viewing its ongoing use as an affront to the expensive built-in coffee machine he had installed. But she prefers to do it this way, likes scooping out the spoonfuls, boiling the kettle, filling the cafetière, lingering over it, waiting for the final flourish of pushing the plunger down.

  Eventually she locates it at the back of the cupboard where she keeps the plastic food containers. While she waits for the coffee to brew, she checks her phone. Sam hasn’t called. This is no surprise. It’s the weekend. He’s gone to his place in Camber to kite-surf. He’ll have been up watching the sun rise, launching himself into the sea to catch the gusts and squalls. What does that feel like, to sit under the sky, taste the salt on your lips and not have your insides curdle with fear? She can’t remember. But she knows she is jealous of him, of his ability to live. She calls him just to hear his voice on the answerphone: It’s Sam, leave a message and I’ll call back. It’s the same message as always, unnecessarily brusque in her opinion. She hangs up, glances back at the kitchen clock. The coffee will be brewed. She pours it and takes her mug into the living room, to the window, where she stands and looks out. There was a view here once before they erected the fence. When they moved in she could see beyond the drive to the field ahead. She could sit in the living room, not having slept, and wait for the sun to emerge from behind the hills. It was always a relief, catching the first glimpse of it arcing on the horizon. To be pulled out of the endless night-time hours where she chased sleep but only ever found it in short, fitful bursts. She’d draw back the curtains to see the sun dapple the room. Now the fence obscures the view. If she looks up, only a thin strip of sky is visible.

  The image of Eve springs into her mind. Rosy-cheeked, exhilarated, beaming. What would she do if she was here? Melody pictures her gulping in fresh air, lifting her face to the sun and marvelling at the clouds racing across the sky. Would she throw her arms wide open and spin around until she’s dizzy to revel in the miracle that has granted her an extra, glorious moment of life? Would she stretch out that second, squeeze every shred of pleasure from it, knowing as she does that time is finite, that it slips past so quickly and when it’s gone it can’t be repeated?

  Would she look at Melody, a lab rat caged by her own neuroses, and think: what a waste. What a terrible waste of life.

  Would she think: why me? Why not her?

  Melody slams the coffee cup down on the table. She moves at speed, reluctant to allow her thoughts time to sabotage her instincts. Just run, she tells herself. And she does, out into the corridor, to the front door, where she turns the key in the lock. A wave of fresh air hits her face, but she won’t let this stop her. Her feet crunch on the gravel driveway. Keep walking, she tells herself. With this one thought she maintains the forward momentum. Her legs are light, buckling under the weight of her body, but she won’t stop. She is at the gate, refusing to cast a look back to gauge the distance between her and the front door. She presses the button, watches it slide open to reveal the green of the fields rolling out in front on her. She draws her eyes back to the road. On either side are trees, leaves spilling from them and collecting on the ground in piles of orange, gold and red. One of them in front of her, a rich scarlet colour, eddying in the wind. It falls at her feet. A door bangs close by. The sound shoots through her. She looks up to see the woman from the next house down come out on to her driveway. Catching sight of Mel, she smiles, waves. ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’

  Mel raises her hand tentatively and forces herself to wave back. Is it a beautiful day? She supposes it is. The thought causes her to laugh out loud. She can’t quite believe she has done it. It is a beautiful day and she is standing out under the sky breathing it in.

  The first time she has been out alone in four years.

  Is this what she has been scared of? Part of her wants to cry for everything she has lost to fear.

  Her baby.

  She never could explain to Sam why she was so apprehensive about it growing inside her. How could she tell him she was frightened of going out on her own? That with a baby there would be doctor’s appointments and invitations to baby massage classes and trips to the park, and that it was this, not the pain of the birth or the weight of parenthood or the sleepless nights (she didn’t sleep anyway) that terrified her. Was God listening in on her thoughts? She has always assumed the miscarriage was a test he set for her, one she failed. She could have stopped it, couldn’t she, if only …

  No, God must have thought her so ungrateful, so undeserving that he decided to take it away from her and give the life to someone who really wanted it.

  Did Sam know that mixed up with the grief, the deep empty ache inside her, there was also a small sliver of relief that she could never admit to?

  Mel bends down, picks up the leaf at her feet and walks quickly back to the house, trying to keep her breaths regular, calm. She can run miles with Erin, go for a drive with Sam in the car, a day out walking or for lunch, but she hasn’t even been able to stand out in their garden alone. Taking giant strides, she watches as the door gets bigger, closer and closer. She feels like she’s swimming underwater, her lungs screaming for air. All she wants to do is reach the end, know she is safe again so she can breathe. She touches the door, pushes it open and closes it behind her. Her body sinks down against it, cold against her back. Relief flushes through her but there is something else too. An unfamiliar determination. She can do this.

  She will read every word of Eve’s file. There’s a whole world mapped out between A and B that Melody hasn’t explored, and somewhere between those points she lost herself.

  Chapter Three

  DI Rutter

  IT’S BEEN TEN minutes, fifteen at a stretch, of family time. Would you class it good quality? How do you define good quality? What would that child psychologist who’s always on TV say? Dr Tanya Byron, that’s her name. Victoria gives this a moment’s thought. She has no idea what Dr Tanya Byron would say. What does it matter anyway? They haven’t argued, so that’s a start, unusual to say the least. Doug and Bella – both Chelsea fans – have been ribbing Oliver about Man U’s lack of form, or the complete and utter disintegration of the team, as Bella put it somewhat precociously. They’ve eaten breakfast together around the kitchen table, which is supposed to be a good thing to do because you can talk to your kids, engage with them (and also be reminded of their appalling table manners). They’ve eaten pancakes cooked by Doug (hers always stick to the pan) and the air is still thick with the pleasant fug of them. Surely she can draw bonus points from this. Isn’t that what those glossy women in magazines do? The ones with troops of kids, high-flying jobs and – magically – no childcare. Weekends are sacrosanct. We all sit down to eat breakfast tog
ether. It’s a bit of a ritual in our house, good-quality family time.

  ‘How was school this week, any gossip from the badlands of St Raphael’s Primary?’ she asks.

  Her kids shoot her the same look they always do when she asks this question. Stop trying to be cool.

  ‘Jaime got suspended for bringing a baseball bat into the playground and threatening to smash it over Samuel’s head.’

  ‘Really?’ She is genuinely shocked.

  ‘Ha ha, yeah right.’ Oliver rolls his eyes to the ceiling. ‘You’re so gullible, Mum. But he did get caught putting two Mars Bar cakes into his bag at the cake bake when he’d only paid for one. That’s about as bad as this week got.’ He shovels the last bit of pancake doused in maple syrup into his mouth then licks each of his fingers noisily.

  Since when did he use words like ‘gullible’?

  ‘Can I play on the Wii?’ He’s pushing himself out from the table.

  ‘I thought we were talking.’

  ‘We have talked and it was … er … interesting. Now can I play on the Wii?’

  It’s Bella’s turn to pipe up. ‘Can I go round to Antonio’s? He’s got an amazing new Nerf gun, it’s called a Vulcan Blaster. Can I get one?’

  ‘You already have one,’ Doug says.

  ‘Er, no I don’t. I have a Nerf N-Strike, which is totally different to the Vulcan Blaster.’

  Victoria looks at her daughter. She’s wearing jeans that have a hole at the knee and a white T-shirt emblazoned with a Lego Darth Vader. Her thick hair falls about her face. She hasn’t brushed it, reserves that treat for the once-a-week wash, and even then it’s a battle. Still, she thinks, better than having a house dripping in pink tat and princesses.

  ‘You can go to Antonio’s …’ she starts to say and watches Bella’s face break into a smile.

  ‘They have homework, Vic,’ Doug says, giving them both a playful clip over the head. ‘Nice try.’