The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  ‘It wasn’t Sam who told me. I found out through Eve Elliot. Well, not directly, I mean. It’s a long story. But that’s how I found out you knew.’

  Honor’s eyes slide over to Melody’s. ‘I might have known she’d go nosying around you too,’ she says bitterly. ‘I suppose you know that she’s trying to help David Alden clear his name. But I don’t see how going over all this stuff …’ she flings her hands out in front of her, ‘about who knew what and when can help. What does it matter?’

  Melody is surprised that her old friend can see it so clinically after everything that’s happened. She feels a sudden need to defend Eve. ‘It matters to me. It matters because I felt like I had to bury all the questions I had. It matters because she’s dead and I’m not convinced a man would murder a woman who was trying to clear his name.’ She stops, aware of a shift in Honor’s expression, as if the muscles in her face have collapsed. A thought deposits itself in her head.

  ‘You didn’t know, did you?’

  Honor’s eyes shine with horror.

  ‘Oh Honor,’ Mel says, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Honor extracts the details from Mel: the connections between the two cases, where Eve’s body was found, David Alden’s arrest and release on bail.

  She listens with mounting shock and in silence until she breaks. She screws her eyes tight shut and lets out a sob so raw and fierce it disturbs Melody. It’s like something has physically broken inside her. Melody tries to console her, to no avail. She cannot coax her out of the hole she has tumbled into. It jars. It jars because she can’t shake the sense that Honor is reacting to something more than Eve’s death. She would have expected her to be shocked and saddened. Who wouldn’t be? But what she is witnessing doesn’t tally. Honor only met Eve once, briefly. There is more to it.

  ‘Tell me,’ Melody says.

  Honor gulps and stares at her. Eventually, after an age, the crying subsides.

  ‘It’s not you who should be sorry,’ she says, wiping her smudged face with the back of her hand.

  Dominoes lined up around the room. Melody’s dad’s idea of a wet weekend’s entertainment. He’d spend hours constructing the display and when he was finished he’d count her down: three, two, one. Melody would flick the first one and listen as they all fell down. Clickety-clack.

  The sound that fills the room now.

  ‘I knew,’ Honor says. ‘At least I thought I did. Something about his air, it was more pompous than usual, and the sex was better than it had been for years. Like he was imagining doing it with someone else.’

  Melody flinches. A face and a body plucked from a magazine? A fellow surfer he’s seen on the beach? She knows that feeling.

  ‘It was just a hunch but I asked him anyway. That was a mistake. He said I was mad: how could you even think it?’ She can picture Sam’s injured expression. ‘So I dropped it but I took note of the late nights, the new clothes, the whole cliché of it, and then I brought it up again. He called me a paranoid bitch.’ Honor laughs at the memory now. ‘Why did I let him talk to me like that? I always thought that happened to other women, weaker women. It was only then that I realised I’d let myself become weak. He took up so much room in my head there was nothing left for me. Nothing I did was ever quite right. I hardly went out, my confidence had gone. Maybe I was a paranoid bitch. I stopped sleeping, spent all my spare time in the gym, running on the machine, the belt turning, never taking me anywhere.

  ‘But even people like Sam make mistakes eventually. He was out playing football one evening when I heard a message buzz. It wasn’t my phone so it had to be his. I found it in his jacket, this cheap little handset with a text that read, ‘Where are you? I’m still wearing clothes, I thought you would have them off me by now.’

  Melody’s eyes widen. Heat pricks her face. Her head is firing out messages and images and words that overtake everything else. She can see her fingers composing sleazy texts on a white phone, a phone given to her by Sam after one of their illicit hotel meetings. He’d handed it to her with a smile; just to be on the safe side. She was right. Each of them had two phones to avoid being caught out. Only Sam had denied it when she had questioned him in the hospital. What was it he had said? ‘It’s understandable things are a bit mixed up.’

  Honor continues her story at pace. ‘It all fell into place. He must have bought another phone especially. A private line between him and his lover. He was good like that, well organised.’

  Honor says the idea came the following night, sitting opposite Sam in a restaurant, watching him chew on a steak. A bit of fibre caught between his teeth, suspended, flapping when it caught his breath as he spoke.

  ‘I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It made me feel sick and thankful at the same time. I knew I didn’t want to be with him. He’d made me feel special once. When had that stopped? When had the compliments become veiled criticisms? “Are you having another slice of cake?” “Haven’t you drunk enough wine?” “Is that what you’re wearing?”’

  She said she had conceded every time until concessions were no longer necessary. Her instincts were attuned to give him what he wanted.

  ‘I had to leave him. But first I wanted to know who his next victim was.’

  It was Friday evening. If she was going to catch Sam out she needed to give him some space. ‘I decided to come to the pub to meet you and Patrick but before I left I found his phone in his briefcase and I sent a text. Can you meet me? 11pm at the junction of Larden Road and Uxbridge Road? I’ll pick you up. I can remember the exact words, they’re drilled in my mind. My plan was to drive to the pub then leave around ten thirty and drive back to Larden Road to see who it was Sam was seeing, if they turned up that is. I knew it was a long shot.’

  A thought explodes in Mel’s mind. It can’t be, can it? She goes to stand up but the floor lurches beneath her. She detects Honor’s hand on her arm, its tight grip. ‘It was you.’ The words burn as she utters them. She can’t look at her, doesn’t dare. What will she see if she does? The walls of the living room are closing in on her. She needs to get out of this house. She has to. Run. But she is immobilised. All these years she wanted to find the reason why she was wandering the streets alone at night. And now she finally has it she wants to strip it from her mind again. ‘You.’ She says again. ‘I … I need to leave.’

  ‘Look at me, Melody. Look. At. Me.’ Honor reaches over and with her hand tilts Mel’s face upwards. She flinches at her touch.

  ‘No, don’t do that. Tell me that’s not what you’re thinking. You can’t. Not even for a moment. I would never hurt you. Never. You must know that.’

  She can’t speak. She doesn’t know anything anymore. Deceit has corroded everything. She has no way of telling the truth from the lies.

  ‘You have to hear me out. Just let me finish.’ It sounds like an order. Melody sits upright, nails digging into the skin on her thighs.

  ‘Go on,’ she says.

  ‘I left the pub about twenty minutes after you. I drove down to Larden Road. I remember regretting it even then. What was I doing? What had I been reduced to? Lurking around late at night trying to catch Sam out. Why should I care anyway, I was leaving him, he would be free to do what he pleased.

  ‘Then I turned the corner and saw you’ Honor says, her voice dipped to a whisper. ‘You were swaying, blowing in the wind. The funny thing is, I was about to pull down my window and ask what you were doing there. I almost beeped my horn and offered you a lift.’ She gives a crazy person’s laugh that chills Melody. ‘That’s how stupid I was. And then suddenly it smashed into me. It was you.

  ‘I hated you. I’m not going to deny it. You of all people … how could you do that to me? You’d have thought I would have wanted to slap you and scratch your eyes out, but when I saw you there, late at night, waiting for him, I just pitied you. I knew what you were letting yourself in for. I turned around and drove away.

  ‘I got back and I told Sam you were waiting for him. I showed him the text and told him I was lea
ving him. He called me a bitch then he went out to find you. I threw some things into a bag and drove through the night to Dorset.’

  Bars of sunlight fall through the window on to her face. She keeps her eyes open and stares directly into the light in the hope that it will burn away the images parading in her mind. Honor, in the right place at the right time, with motive. Lying to the police to cover her tracks.

  ‘When Sam called to tell me you had been found unconscious, I … I can’t explain what went through my mind. One stupid text … if I hadn’t sent it, you wouldn’t have been out there that night. I couldn’t think straight. How the fuck was I going to live with myself?

  ‘They would have thought it was me, wouldn’t they? I was the only one who saw you there. I had just found out you were having an affair with my fiancé.’ Honor stops and stares intently at Melody. ‘Or they would have thought it was Sam. I wasn’t his greatest fan but I knew him. He wasn’t capable of that. So we agreed that we’d say we were together all night.’

  Honor gave Sam an alibi and in return he provided one for her.

  The room swims. Nothing is fixed down anymore. The collectibles, the knick-knacks, the essence of Honor are all spinning around Melody’s head. The air in the room is thick and fat. It bears down on her chest. She needs space, oxygen. There isn’t any to breathe in here.

  ‘I have to go,’ she says again. This time her limbs work for her.

  ‘Stay, please,’ she hears Honor say. She has jumped up, pulling on Melody’s arm to stop her leaving but she pushes her away and stumbles into the hallway. Her hand reaches for the door handle, pulls on it hard and she runs out on to the pavement.

  The wind is up. Melody, drunk and woozy, lifts her face to catch the gusts in the hope they will bring her round. Honor’s words ring in her head. I would never hurt you. Just words without any meaning tacked to them. Didn’t she say in the same breath that when she saw Mel standing waiting for Sam she hated her, wanted to scratch her eyes out? Melody can understand that kind of razor sharp betrayal that buries itself under your skin. She knows the extremes to which it could push you. She knows because she had to run out of Honor’s house not just for her own safety but Honor’s too. Rage has possessed her. Given the chance she could have happily torn Honor apart. And Sam? Did he really go out to look for her on the night of her attack? Did he find her? What then? It’s pointless asking him for the truth, she’s done that already, extracted a promise of honesty, even fucked with the lights on afterwards as a sign of renewed trust and now she finds out he was lying all along. There are hundreds of different ways she would like to hurt him. She’d start slowly, sink her nails in to his face and gouge out his skin. She’d ratchet up the pain with each act of violence and she’d savour it. That’s what betrayal can do to you.

  Wading through the streets she locates the black BMW. For now she contents herself with running a key along the perfect paintwork of his car to carve out a sizeable zig zig of silver on each side. She stands back to survey her work. It’s nothing really, not compared with what he’s put her though.

  Soon she’s following the road out of Bridport along the familiar route to her parents’ house. The clouds have closed in. A spot of rain snaps on to the windscreen, followed by another. She casts a look up to the bruised sky covered by a dark sheet of cloud. Could Honor have attacked her? Or Sam? They were both there at the time she went missing. Was it Sam and his twisted mind that orchestrated the campaign against her, the shadows in the garden, the repeated phone calls that went dead when she answered? The knock on the door? Who else would have known she was home alone? That is the ultimate power, worse than murder. If she had died in the attack she would have died once, but she has been dying every day since then, a slow, painful disintegration of her mind.

  She can trace the lies all the way back to one instance in her hospital room a few days after she emerged from the coma. Taking a sip of water to wet her mouth before speaking, she came out with it. ‘It was you I was supposed to be meeting, wasn’t it?’

  He laughed, gazed at her like a child who had said something faintly amusing. ‘Honey,’ he said, ‘I was with Honor all night.’

  A single lie to protect themselves. But lies breed lies, complications, consequences.

  Melody stares at the road ahead. It’s pouring now, rain dancing off the windscreen. It reminds her of something else, she thinks, and stills her thoughts to allow her mind to reel back in time.

  It’s the sound that comes first, the lashing of the rain against her coat. Wet feet. Pools of water amassed at the side of the road, cars whooshing past. She feels spray against her face and her coat, looks down and sees filthy puddle water pouring off her. Her hands ache, the plastic handles of the shopping bags dig into her palms. A calculation: four more streets, then home; and a thought, too: she’s not going to netball tonight. She’s not going out in this again. Then, a horn beeping. She ignores it; there are always horns sounding on Uxbridge Road. But when it beeps again, she looks and sees the green Porsche pulling over. ‘Nice day for it,’ he shouts, opening the passenger door. She jumps in. ‘I was about to get washed away. I think you have just saved my life.’

  She moves a garment from the seat and sits with it in her lap and she runs her hands through her hair. They drive back home, say goodbye, go their separate ways.

  Netball, she thinks. Wednesday-night netball.

  The last time she saw David Alden. Two days before the attack.

  It was his jacket she had in her lap.

  The reason why strands of her hair and fibres from her yellow coat were found on it.

  She drives on through the gloom. She feels the car buffeted by wind as she travels along the coast road. It reminds her of family walks along the beach in winter, the ones her mother forced upon them to blow the cobwebs away: squally showers, black waves breaking on the shore, sand kicking up in her face. Instinctively she blinks to clear her vision.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Eve

  A GRAIN OF sand magnified two hundred and fifty times is a thing of surprising beauty. Under the microscope it can easily be mistaken for a gem, a semi-precious stone translucent in colour with unique patterns and markings.

  It can also tell you a story if you look close enough.

  Dr John Beer knew how to look for stories from grains of soil. He took the samples we’d obtained of Melody Pieterson’s clothing and analysed them. He was an academic at Oxford University who specialised in forensic sedimentology – the use of geologic materials as evidence in criminal cases to you and me. We’d used him once or twice on APPEAL because he was exactly the person you wanted on your side. His evidence had been featured in a series of high-profile murder cases and he always cut to the chase. Conveniently he’d also offered to run the tests free of charge, being less than impressed to hear that the samples had not been tested in the first instance. On the few occasions I’d met him, I got the distinct impression he’d still be looking at soil and sand under a microscope even if he wasn’t paid to do it.

  His results arrived on the first Friday of September, sandwiched in between an email from Groupon for laser hair removal and one from Kira with her weekly travel missive.

  From: Drjohnbeer@ox.cu.uk

  To: eelliot83@gmail.com

  Eve,

  The samples tested show the presence of two quite distinctive soil types. One can be excluded as having derived from the Ham Common area as a result of their different overall grain size, acidity (pH), quartz grain surface analysis of individual sand grains, chemical composition, distinctive mineralogy and micro fossil assemblages.

  There is the presence of a mixture of light-coloured sand/silt soil of alkali pH (8.5). The soils contained much quartz sand material of characteristic beach and river provenance. Interestingly the sand also contained modern-day micro-sized (50–150 micron) foraminifera characteristic of English Channel beach environments. Pollen from winter brassicas and summer cereal grains are evidently grown nearby to the sample
site. An important provenance indicator in the soil is grains of pyrite (fool’s gold) and more specifically marcasite, known as white iron pyrite. Both minerals, but particularly marcasite, are renowned in and about areas of coastal Sussex.

  The second soil type is consistent with that found in Ham Common Woods. It contains fine-grained sand, silt and predominantly clay of high organic content. The quartz grains in these samples are classic River Thames terrace materials with distinctive grain smoothing typical of the proto-Thames sediments. Pollen taken from the soil showed many grasses, thistle, poplar and horse chestnut tree. Soil acidity was neutral and chemical assay of the soil showed high levels of phosphate and nitrate (commercial fertiliser).

  If you need clarification, do give me a call.

  John

  I called him.

  I was no scientist but I could understand the gist of what he was telling me. I just needed to hear it in plain English before I could allow it to sink in.

  ‘Does it mean what I think it means?’ I asked.

  ‘The samples would indicate that she was taken to a near coast environment. I’d say the south coast of England. Sussex if I was to be more exact.’ My head was erupting in song. I paced up and down the room and then I heard the real music in his next sentence. ‘There are no areas like it close to London.’

  ‘Not within half an hour’s drive?’

  ‘Not within an hour’s drive.’

  ‘I love you.’ Because at that time there was no one in the world I loved more than Dr John Beer.

  ‘It’ll pass,’ he said. ‘There’s more, too, but I wanted to get you those results as soon as I could.’

  ‘Now you are spoiling me.’

  ‘There’s the presence of a pollen too. Ever heard of Hibiscus syriacus?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Look it up. It’s a common plant, bright pink in colour. It’s found in many residential gardens. I bet you won’t find it in Ham Common Woods. I’ll send you something over when I get back from holiday. I’m just tying up a few things before I go.’