The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  ‘Melody.’ She hears Nat’s voice call out to her, turns to find him waving. He’s wearing turned-up jeans and desert boots, Ray-Ban Wayfarers over his eyes, a leather satchel slung across his body.

  He links his arm into hers. ‘Come on, let’s get breakfast. I could eat a scabby horse,’ he says and they head towards the Royal Festival Hall.

  ‘Jeez,’ he says when Melody has finished telling him about Sam and Honor, their lies. ‘When you said you had news, I didn’t expect that kind of news.’ They’re in Canteen, in a window seat, waiting for their breakfast to arrive. Nat tilts his face up to the ceiling and strokes what looks like the beginnings of a beard. ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘I’m going home to pack after I leave you. I can’t stay with him. And then I’m going to contact the police. Beyond that, I haven’t got a clue.’

  ‘You think they could have …?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think anymore but I don’t trust either of them. How can I when they’ve been lying to me and the police all along?’

  ‘Does Sam know you went to see Honor?’

  Melody shakes her head. ‘Not unless Honor contacted him after I’d left, but that’s unlikely. He’ll be more worried about his precious car.’

  ‘His car?

  ‘I took it yesterday without his permission.’

  ‘You twocked his car? Nice work.’ She screws her eyes up in confusion. ‘Taking without owner’s consent,’ Nat says, ‘or twocking as it was known where I grew up. There was a lot of it about. Where is it now?’

  ‘At Guildford station without a ticket. With any luck it’ll be clamped by the time he finds it. It was the least I could do.’

  His eyes assess her, the beginning of a smile appears on his face.

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘You look like you need to pass wind.’

  ‘Just you, I underestimated you. I was worried I’d done the wrong thing giving you Eve’s file. When we first met I thought … well I thought you were a bit feeble. I worried reading it would be the end of you. But the opposite has happened. If anything, it’s woken you up.’

  ‘You’re kidding, it’s ruined my life,’ she says, mocking him before her face softens. ‘It’s just made me realise I didn’t want that life anyway. It wasn’t really mine. I feel a massive sense of relief. Is that weird?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so. Where is your life then?’ he asks.

  ‘Somewhere out there,’ she says, pointing out of the window. ‘Not stuck in an echoey house all day buying tat on the shopping channel. I keep thinking of Eve … about how none of us know how long we’ve got left. I’ve wasted time. I don’t want to waste any more.’

  The waitress arrives and places two English breakfasts in front of them. ‘Thank God for that,’ Nat says. ‘I’m welling up.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Eve

  HE WAS CRYING. Fat tears he made no attempt to hide. ‘I don’t know what to say Eve …’

  The three of us were together in his garden, Annie and I tucked under the shade of the apple tree, ducking when we heard the rustle of an apple falling to the ground. Soft, overripe fruit oozed on to the patio attracting a haze of fruit flies. Summer hadn’t been this loyal in years. It was September now and still its heat clung. We were getting cocky, imagining it would never end.

  The table was laid with fresh bread, ham, cheese, a bowl of salad, lettuce rescued from his vegetable patch, to make us feel virtuous. None of us was eating. None of us wanted to do anything other than bask in the moment, terrified that if we let it pass it would cease to be real.

  I pulled at the fabric of my T-shirt to let the air circulate. I’d run to David’s from my flat, rucksack and laptop on my back, partly out of a desire to keep up my training, partly because I couldn’t wait to tell him the news. Parking was a nightmare on his street.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything. It’s a start, it doesn’t mean …’ but I stopped. Why detract from the achievement? Allow him this without caveats and warnings.

  ‘I know it’s not the end, Eve … but I’ve not even come close to seeing the end before. This …’ he waved the email I had printed out, ‘you are sure about all this?’

  I smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I thought I’d get my facts straight before I told you. I spoke to Dr Beer to check. It’s all there. The nearest beach is over an hour away. There is no way you could have got there and back. And you have an alibi for the rest of the weekend.’

  ‘You are a fucking marvel, Eve. I honestly don’t know how to thank you.’

  Annie, who had been unusually quiet, grabbed me and hugged me. ‘And there was me thinking it was all too much for you …’ she joked.

  ‘Glad I inspired so much confidence,’ I said.

  David’s head fell into his hands. Annie knelt down beside him, her long brown hair forming a cloak of privacy. His shoulders shook gently.

  I had spent months pulling apart individual statements, pieces of evidence, analysing them in microscopic detail to the point where I thought my head would explode. Out of necessity I had become obsessed with the tiny minutiae of the case and forgotten the narrative that arced around it.

  Six years of suspicion is a heavy load to carry. I sat in the heat of the day watching it lift from his shoulders.

  ‘I do all this and no one has even offered me a beer yet?’ I said.

  David got up, dipped into the kitchen and fetched them from the fridge, handing one to each of us.

  ‘To the future,’ Annie said, chinking her bottle against David’s then mine.

  ‘To Eve,’ David said. ‘Where would we be without you?’

  Better off, I thought, in the weeks after my death. When the police were gunning for him I wished we hadn’t met. I cursed the spilt strawberry daiquiri and Kira for dragging me out that night. I blamed the boiler, my laziness for not having it serviced. But slowly, I watched the picture change. DI Rutter was a pedant like me. She liked to be thorough. She wanted to understand the case where her predecessor had just wanted it off his hands. She’d come round to my way of thinking; she wanted to find my killer and she knew it wasn’t David. For the first time I felt the tide turning.

  Now when I conjured David and Annie from my memories of that late summer day, the precise moment in his garden when I told them about the evidence, it was no longer infested with regret. The nauseating sense of what if … had passed. All I saw were their megawatt smiles beaming out relief and elation.

  Then there was Melody, defying all my expectations. When I first saw her cleaning and cooking and behaving all Stepford Wives, I thought there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d delve into her past and unpick the scabs to get to the truth. Turns out I was wrong on that count too. That manic, crazy woman who seemed so brittle I thought she might break wasn’t Melody at all. That was only a front. She was strong, ironclad. Once she remembered who she was, deep down at her core, the truth didn’t scare her. She was charging head first towards it, gaining speed all the time. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was edging closer to me. That was when the revelation hit, vivid, intense, terrifying. I knew exactly why I had been left behind.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Melody

  MELODY TELLS HERSELF that Eve is standing next to her. She’d rather not be alone in the house, so she deduces that Eve’s imaginary presence might help steady her nerves. She is in their bedroom. His bedroom now. It won’t be hers any more. Gathering up clothes and shoving them into the suitcase. It’s not her normal packing style; she has dispensed with her folding and rolling crease-prevention technique. There is no room in her head to accommodate the micro-details that usually preoccupy her. For once they have been eclipsed by the bigger picture: grabbing what she can, getting out as soon as she can.

  Her body has gone into survival mode. It is straining to flee the house. Her heart rate is up, the beats reverberating in her throat. She has to be disciplined, concentrate, and then she will leave. Easier said than done. A few weeks ago
her panic was induced by going out alone. Now it is the reverse. Being here, with the prospect of Sam returning, threatens to overwhelm her.

  She has already called Patrick, pre-empted his interrogation with an ‘I’ll explain later’. He has been sworn to secrecy: no sneaky calls to Sam to alert him. She has already worked out where the division of friendship lies. Patrick, she concluded, was her friend first, Sam’s by association.

  She can stay with him; it’s ‘cool’, apparently. He’s on a day off. All she has to do is call when she’s on her way. Predictably Lottie is already off the scene, another blonde fading into his past, so there will be no problem on that front. Nor did he ask her how long she needed to stay, not in the course of their hurried phone conversation. Maybe he will tonight. What will she tell him? She has money. Not a lot, but a decent sum from the compensation from her attack. She could rent a flat, get a job. Her mind whirs with the possibilities and logistics. Then it stops.

  It stops to consider the footfall on the stairs.

  The air in the room thins. In her hand is a pair of knickers in cream silk with black lace trim. She stares at them, expensive ones she doesn’t care for. On the rare occasions she’s worn them, they’ve ridden up her bum, cut her in two. There’s a bra to match buried at the back of her drawer, which is where she would return the knickers if it didn’t mean she’d have to turn around. And she can’t do that because she knows he is standing there, waiting for her to face him. She looks down to her chest, heaving in and out. Blood rushes to her head.

  His words, when they come, cause an involuntary twitch in her body, like an electric shock. ‘You’re leaving, then?’ he asks. His tone is even but she knows it has required a monumental effort for him to stay calm. She remains still, her gaze fixed on the knickers as if they are some kind of wonder. She eyes the label. They’re an eight, a size too small for her. A present from Sam. Now she sees hidden messages everywhere she looks. Lose weight and they won’t ride up your arse, bitch.

  ‘So that’s it, six years and you were going to piss off without even telling me? Were you going to leave a note? Or just send me a text? Maybe you wanted me to figure it out by myself.’ His footsteps travel across the room. He’s close to her now. She hears the flow of his breath, fast like he’s been running. When she slides her eyes to her right she can see the hairs on his muscular arms, the veins that ripple as he clenches his hand into a fist.

  ‘What the fuck is going on, Mel? We’re supposed to be getting married in two months … Do I not deserve a fucking explanation?’

  Deserve. Even in her heightened state the word amuses her. She can think of a lot of things Sam deserves but an explanation is not one of them. With the knickers still in her hand, she turns to go back to the wardrobe, takes one step before she feels his grip on her arm.

  ‘Do you have anything to say?’ She drops her gaze to his hand, which is still gripping her arm. It’s too tight, like a Chinese burn pinching the skin. She stares at it and feels him loosen his hold. She has lots to say, which is ironic given that she has struggled with conversation for years. What should they talk about? She’d rehearse topics before he came home. It wasn’t like her days were filled with excitement, incidents and outrages that could be embellished and relayed over dinner. Her days were filled with nothing. She didn’t watch the news. Nor did she have any knowledge of Sam’s job. She had no interests of her own beyond cooking and running. Where was she supposed to harvest the anecdotes to pepper her conversation? She wanted to talk but had nothing to say. And now she has so much to say but won’t talk. She’s damned if she’s going to put him out of his misery just like that, not when he’s spent years smothering her in lies.

  ‘Take your hand off me,’ she says. She would try to remove it herself but he’s stronger than her and she’d rather not highlight her weaknesses.

  ‘Tell me what’s going on.’ With his free hand he tilts her chin upwards so she has no choice but to look at his face. It’s red and blotchy. His eyes black like ink. Were they always this dark? She thought they were brown. Couldn’t she see every curve and line, from the scar above his lip where he burst it open as a kid trying to shave to the bump on his nose sustained playing rugby? Hadn’t she prided herself on seeing him without even looking? Why didn’t she look at him, scrutinise that face? Maybe she would have seen its slow transformation into the person in front of her. Because she knows that the figure towering over her now is not the man who persuaded her to swim at night, whose touch she couldn’t resist on the cold sand. He is not the person for whom she betrayed her friend. Not just any friend, her best friend. That man was worth crossing lines for. She would have done anything for him. She did. Though for the life of her she can’t remember why.

  Was it the sex?

  Is that it? Was theirs simply a passion that flared and burnt out? A chemical attraction, the indulgence of two people who weren’t strong enough to say no? And all the while they’ve been kidding themselves that this thing was profound, that it had grown roots deep enough to sustain and support a relationship, a marriage even. No wonder she’s felt untethered, as if her world has been floating around her. There was nothing to hold her down.

  Who is this man? Where do his lies end? She looks at him and thinks he would be capable of anything. Of course it was him. He went out to find her and she disappeared. And all this time she has trusted him. She deserves to die for being so stupid.

  A minute ago her body was warm. Ripping around, gathering what she needed, she’d removed her cardigan to cool herself down. Now she stands in a sleeveless top and a skirt. The heat has been sucked from the room, from her. A draught brushes her skin. She shivers. Her vision is disturbed; Sam’s features shift and change in front of her eyes. He is her boyfriend, was soon to be her husband, he is a hospital consultant who people trust with their limbs if not their lives.

  She hears his breath hiss. ‘I’m asking you to tell me, Mel.’ He tugs on her arm for emphasis.

  No, she thinks, you’re not. He hasn’t said please. She’s willing to bet he won’t thank her when she tells him. He has his hand on her arm and is wrenching it so hard she fears it will slip out of joint. Not asking, but trying to extract information under duress.

  She is trapped with him in this house with its impenetrable walls. The walls that were supposed to keep the world at bay, stop danger intruding into her life. How was she to know the danger was inside them all the time?

  Fear makes her light, like her body is blurring at the edges.

  ‘Sit down, Mel.’ She feels herself pushed on to the bed. ‘I’m going to ask you one more time, what the fuck is going on?’

  Her eyes lock on to his. ‘It was you,’ she says. ‘It was always you.’ She speaks with the abandon of someone with nothing to lose. ‘I went to see Honor yesterday,’ she continues, annoyed by the weakness in her voice, the way it betrays her fear. ‘She told me about the night I was attacked.’ Confusion clouds his face. He’s wrong-footed for a moment, the air of arrogance slips, replaced by surprise then horror. ‘So it’s out now, your secret … shame, since you’ve gone to such lengths to conceal it.’

  ‘Mel, I …’ He tries to cut across her, releases her arm from his grasp.

  ‘There is nothing you can say … nothing. I knew, that’s the thing that gets me most. I knew but I didn’t trust myself and you took advantage of it. I was going to meet you that night and I didn’t come back. That’s what I remember and it is the truth. You left Honor to find me and you didn’t come back. Where did you go, Sam … I deserve to know that at least … was it you? You and Honor were the only people who knew where I was that night and you’ve lied about it ever since.’

  She is still sitting on the bed; he has crouched down next to her, searching for eye contact. ‘You think I did it?’ He prods his chest with his finger for emphasis. ‘Me? Are you completely insane?’ He laughs, nervously. ‘Mel, why would I do that?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Well I can’t because I di
dn’t … I didn’t attack you … I’d never touch you.’ Her eyes shift down to her arm, red where he held her only a minute before. ‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘Don’t do that. You think because I stopped you leaving I’m capable of trying to kill you?’ He springs up, paces across the bedroom. She watches his feet, black socks marching three steps to her right then turning to come back towards her.

  ‘I love you. You can’t think like that. I won’t let you.’ His hands are on his head, tugging at his hair as he walks. ‘All right, I lied. I’m sorry. But … we had no choice. You must see that … Mel … please … we were having an affair, my fiancée didn’t know, she was your best friend. I went out to find you and you’d gone. I mean come on … who’s going to believe that?’

  He says this without a trace of irony.

  ‘I would have been arrested. Honor would have been arrested, is that what you wanted?’ He stops pacing and has knelt down close to her again, taking her by the shoulders. ‘I couldn’t tell you, not in the hospital. You weren’t with it, there were police swarming about the place waiting to question you. How was I to know you wouldn’t blurt it out? It was one lie, Mel. One lie … and it didn’t seem to …’

  She pushes him off her. She knows what’s coming next.

  ‘Matter? That’s what you were going to say, it didn’t seem to matter?’ Rage pulses through her, takes hold of her body, whirls and spins it across the room. He might be twice the size of her but right now the force that surges through her is limitless. It would be no match for him. ‘MATTER. Have you any idea …’ She stops herself. At that precise moment she can’t tell which is the greater crime: a) he attacked her, or b) he didn’t attack her but is arrogant enough to believe his lie has had no lasting effects. Has he paid her so little attention that he hasn’t seen the consequences unfolding? The lie has flourished and grown, gained a pulse that has emasculated her own. It has consumed her.