Bill shook his head. Tears fell on to the legs of his trousers, stained the light-grey fabric a darker colour. He sniffed. The car was in too high a gear. The engine complained. He pulled a sour face, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened that morning. From the corner of my eye, I saw Blue bounding down the lane after the car. He must have thought this was some kind of game.
‘She sat in the kitchen, on a stool. She was drinking coffee and she was serious,’ he said. ‘Claudia had taken the girls to school. She was due back any minute, so I suggested we went for a walk. I had to get her out of there. I never thought she’d agree to go with me, but she did. She said we’d walk down to the old quarry together and then I could wait for her there while she talked to Claudia. She knew I wouldn’t let her do that! What was she thinking?’
‘She was exhausted,’ I said. ‘Her nerves were shot. She believed you were going to Sicily. She’d been carrying the dream inside her for months.’
‘Yes, yes, but that’s exactly it – it was a dream! It was never real. It was all in her mind.’
‘You played along, Bill.’
‘She knew the rules.’
He slowed down as the wheels lost traction on a patch of mud. I felt closed in by the steep hedges on either side of the lane.
When Bill spoke next there was frustration in his voice. ‘Gen thought she could make me do anything she wanted if she pushed hard enough …’ He shook his head and then suddenly, abruptly, swung the car right, between a small gap in the hedgerow, so small I’d never noticed it before. Twigs scraped and scratched at the car and we were plunged into darkness as we drove through brambles. The vehicle lurched from side to side as we bumped over ruts and pits. I banged my head on the window and Bill turned and asked: ‘Are you all right?’ I almost laughed.
‘People have forgotten this track,’ Bill said. ‘The quarrymen built it as a cut-through to cart stone up to the top of the hill when they were building Eleonora House.’
Even then the history teacher in him came to the surface.
The car swerved and rocked. The track between the trees and the undergrowth was so narrow that there was no room to open a door and the world had turned very dark.
‘Nearly there,’ he said, as if I were a child who had whinged.
‘Bill, please,’ I said, trying to hold on to my breath. ‘If you push me off the cliff, they’ll know. It can’t have been Alexander and …’
‘Maybe you won’t be found,’ he said. ‘I thought somebody would find Genevieve straight away. It wasn’t as if I did anything to hide her. People are supposed to keep out of here, but occasionally they come in – walking their dogs, picking mushrooms, having sex, swimming even. I saw them. I’ve watched them. They’ve been coming all year, and nobody found Genevieve.’
‘But if they do find me …’
‘Then they do. Alexander is going to be locked up for life. People will say you were bound to be upset. Everyone knows you’ve been obsessed with Genevieve – wanting to be Genevieve, wanting her house, her husband, her child. Your family knows. The doctor knows. The police know. Our solicitor knows. And now those things have all been taken away from you, and you’ll never get them back. Especially Jamie. You wanted him more than anything, didn’t you? You wanted him so badly you were prepared to abduct him, but now you know he’s out of reach and that we’ll all be telling him stories about you. About how you tried to take him away from his family.’
‘No!’ I cried.
‘Nobody will be surprised you jumped. People will see the symmetry in your actions, the poetry, the fatal emulation of the woman you could never be. Do you know what people will say, Sarah? They’ll say they saw it coming. They’ll say it was a way for you to get your picture in the papers right next to Genevieve’s.’
He turned to me and smiled. His tears were gone. He may have wept when he killed Genevieve, but I meant nothing to him.
‘I’ll be on the CCTV,’ I said. ‘There’ll be evidence of me coming to the Barn this morning, and of us leaving together. If you hurt me, everyone will know it was you.’
‘No, they won’t,’ said Bill. ‘I turned the camera off before you came. I didn’t want Claudia to know you’d been back.’
I caught my breath and tried to stay calm.
Ahead, I could see the cut-through opening up. I could see the green of holly bushes amongst the winter trees, their finger-pointing branches. We must be at the top of the quarry. I had seen aerial photographs in the newspapers and on the internet. I knew how land overgrown with brambles and shrubs suddenly gave out to a sheer stone cliff, and that sixty feet below was the flooded pool, edged with abandoned and fallen rocks, the rocks that had caught Genevieve’s body, and broken it so thoroughly as she fell to the water; the same rocks that had hidden her from view for so many months.
Bill stopped the car. The passenger window was parallel with the cliff edge. It was only a couple of feet away. The drop made my stomach turn.
I tried to move my wrists, but I couldn’t. My hands were pressed too far back, my fingers couldn’t reach the fabric of the scarf.
Bill didn’t look at me.
‘You should have stayed away,’ he said.
‘Please don’t do it,’ I said. ‘Please, Bill. Let me go.’
He shook his head.
‘I have to look after Claudia,’ he said. ‘That’s what I must do. That’s my job.’
‘Oh Bill, please!’ My voice was breaking now. I began to cry; there were no tears, it was a terrified, dry cry. I tried to find the words to convince him not to hurt me, but when I looked in his face it was obvious that his mind was made up.
Bill reached out his hand and moved my hair out of my eyes. I recoiled at his touch. His skin was cool and soft, office skin, and I thought of Alexander’s rough, warm hands and felt the tears then rush to my eyes. They spilled down my cheeks and down my chin.
I sat stiff as Bill cupped my cheeks and my chin with his hand. I could feel his thumb against my neck. I could feel my own blood pulsing against his thumbprint.
‘Sarah,’ he said. ‘You stupid little headcase.’
I was desperate. I swallowed and said softly, ‘I always liked you, Bill.’
He laughed. ‘Oh lord! You girls, you think sex is the answer to everything. Genevieve was the same! You think it makes you powerful. It doesn’t.’
‘Please …’ I murmured.
‘Oh, stop it. Stop it!’
He slapped my face, hard. I was shocked. My cheek stung. Tears rolled down my face. My nose was running. I snivelled like a baby.
Bill rubbed the palm he’d used to hit me on the thigh of his trousers.
‘Jesus,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whimpered.
He opened his door.
I shook my head, I sobbed out loud.
‘Please, Bill, please let me go. I don’t want to end up here, like this …’
He shut the door and came round the back of the car. I saw a little robin fly past. It looked so sweet, all bright-eyed innocence. It was my tiny witness. Nobody else would know.
Bill opened the passenger door and crouched down beside me.
‘Oh Bill, please, please …’ I cried. ‘I’ll do anything, anything …’
‘It’s ironic, isn’t it,’ he said, ‘how you came along and followed in Genevieve’s footsteps all the way? Right here to the very edge of the cliff. You wanted to be her so badly, didn’t you?’
‘I never wanted to be Genevieve,’ I wept. ‘I just wanted to be with Alexander.’
‘But if you’re honest, Sarah, you were glad she was out of the way, weren’t you? You didn’t really care, did you, what had happened to her?’
‘I didn’t want her to be dead!’
‘Are you sure?’
I sobbed again. Bill pushed me forward so he could untie my wrists.
‘As it is, it’s all worked out neatly,’ he said. ‘Jamie can come and live with me …’
‘You’re not hi
s father,’ I said. ‘You’ll never be his father. Alexander is his father and Jamie knows that.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ said Bill. He was struggling with the knot.
I thought: This is it, I have just a few more seconds of being alive. In that instant, I realized how I loved life. My heart was pounding so hard and I liked the feeling of being in my body. Just a few more seconds and feeling and thinking and being would all be over. I could see no way out of the situation. My life did not flash before my eyes but I saw snapshots of people and places and they were all dear to me and I was so glad they had been in my life. I felt a rush of pure, exquisite love and I thought that I’d been lucky.
I smelled the rain in the air above the stink of my own fear. Bill took hold of my elbow and pulled. I tried to fight him off but he was strong and determined and I knew I did not have a chance.
I saw a snapshot of my baby. I remembered how peaceful he was in death, his cheek against my breast, and I thought if he who had never had the opportunity to run through grass or taste a strawberry or hold a lover in his arms or even to feel air in his lungs; if he who had so much less than I could be dignified, then so could I. I thought of my boy’s perfect little face and I held on to the thought, because that was the thought with which I would die.
I calmed down in a heartbeat and, as Bill leaned over to heave me out of the car, I gazed up through the gap between the car door and its frame, I gazed up into the sky where white clouds chased across a darkening grey sky. I decided then that I would not look down into the quarry. I did not want to see the jagged rocks or my own reflection hurtling towards me. I would look up to the sky as I fell and I’d die thinking of my baby boy.
I felt the blood rush into my fingers as the scarf was finally loosened and the silky material slipped past my wrist.
‘It’s nearly over,’ said Bill.
He was holding my left hand tightly, twisting my arm across the back of my body. It was pointless, but still I resisted.
And then something happened. One moment Bill was pulling so hard that I thought my shoulder would dislocate, and then he let go of my hand.
He disappeared.
The door swung back against me, trapping my left leg, and I felt intense pain in my ankle, which took the force of the slam. Instinctively, I pulled my leg back into the footwell, pulled the door shut and pressed down the central-locking button. I expected to see Bill’s face, any moment, at the window. I buried my face in my arms and braced myself for the onslaught. I expected him to try to open the door. I was waiting to hear the smash of glass, or even to feel the car moving – if he couldn’t get me out, maybe he’d push the car over the edge of the cliff – but nothing happened.
Nothing happened for moments. After a long time, when it dawned on me that maybe Bill was not coming back, I reached across and pressed my elbow on to the steering wheel, blasting the horn out across the quarry, and I stayed there, weeping, with my arm on the horn, until they came to find me.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
IT WAS BLUE who saved me.
This is how I believe it happened.
He had mustered the courage to come through the gap in the gates and followed us down the lane, along the cut-through, into the quarry. He chased ahead, with Bonnie following behind.
Blue didn’t wait for Bonnie. Once he’d started following the car, he began to enjoy himself, panting with excitement and wagging his thick tail low, his paws skittering on the icy patches. He probably thought he was clever and brave. He probably thought he was supposed to follow Bill’s car. He struggled to keep up as the car went downhill but tracked us through the hidden gap in the hedge following the fumy trail along the old quarrymen’s path. Blue, arriving at the end of the track just as Bill tossed the scarf on to the grass and reached over to pull me out of the car, bounded forward to greet his master.
Claudia never had got round to training Blue not to jump up. He threw his considerable large dog’s weight against Bill, planting his paws on Bill’s chest with his customary exuberance, and Bill, surprised and wrong-footed and not expecting eleven stone of dog to hurl itself into him, went over the cliff. Blue went too.
I don’t know how long it took Bonnie to reach the car but, when she did, finding the door shut, the horn blaring and no sign of Blue or Bill, she sighed and turned a few circles and then lay down beside the car, and that’s where she was found, whimpering and distressed, guarding me.
It was Blue who saved me, and Virginia, out feeding her horses, heard the car horn and came to find me. I was so terrified of the cliff that I refused to open the door when she rapped on the window with her knuckles and shouted at me through the glass. She didn’t realize what had happened. She thought I’d had a breakdown and stolen the car. She assumed, as Bill had predicted, that I was planning suicide. She called the police and they came at once. DI Twyford, who looked over the cliff edge and saw what Virginia hadn’t, persuaded me to unlock the doors. He climbed into the driver’s seat, released the handbrake and rolled the vehicle carefully back into the undergrowth, talking to me all the time in a reassuring voice. Then he carried me to safety in his arms.
An ambulance came to take me to hospital. The paramedics were kind and jolly. They wrapped me in a blanket and gave me something that went into my veins like alcohol and soothed me. They didn’t want to know about the voice in my mind telling me not to close the gates, although I kept trying to tell them. It was a miracle. If I hadn’t obeyed the command, I’d have been dead. It would have been Genevieve first and me next, exactly as she’d said. I’d asked her to help me and she’d told me what to do. I kept telling them but they didn’t care. They were more interested in my ankle. They gave me oxygen and put my legs up and my head down and told me, Shh, not to worry, I was in shock.
At the hospital, due to my status as a victim of serious crime, I skipped the queues and went straight into a cubicle in A & E. The doctor, who was young, Asian and tiny, nodded when I told her about the miracle of the gates and said: ‘Oh yes, dear?’ in a disinterested voice, and then a nurse put a mask over my mouth and nose and I could not talk any more.
I spent a nice quiet day in hospital, comfortably numbed by various anaesthetics and tranquillizers. When I woke from the operation to fix my ankle, May was there, sitting in a plastic armchair at the side of the bed reading a well-thumbed New Year’s edition of the Radio Times. I tried to talk to her about the warning I’d heard in my mind, about how it had saved my life, and she said: ‘Honey, sweetheart, you’ve had a terrible shock. Just rest. You’re safe now.’ My leg was encased in plaster, right up to above the knee, and it was suspended above the bed like a broken leg in a Carry On film. I couldn’t sit up.
Some time during the day, Genevieve walked past the open door to my room. She was smiling and holding on to Blue’s collar. He was looking up at her, his tongue lolling, his tail wagging. Or maybe I imagined that.
The police came to interview me, two women; I didn’t recognize either of them. They didn’t want to hear about the voice and the gates either. They smiled and said: ‘Yes, but …’ and steered me back to their original questions whenever I diverted. I told them about the laptop in the sealed-off well because now I was certain that was a message from Genevieve too. I saw one of them roll her eyes up towards the ceiling and the other struggled to hide her grin and I wished they would listen to me.
Because I knew.
Later, May fed me a cheese salad sandwich, bit by bit, and helped me drink orange squash through a straw. Then she left and I lay, as I had to, on my back, staring at the pattern made by light reflecting on tinsel on the ceiling of my room and I thought of Genevieve and, in my heart and my mind, I thanked her.
*
May drove me back to Manchester the next morning.
‘Promise me one thing,’ she asked as we drove up the M5 with my plastered foot on the dashboard, swollen toes sticking out of the blue sock.
‘What?’
‘Don’t ever go back there.’
&
nbsp; ‘I won’t,’ I said.
A week went by and then another. We went to Mum and Dad’s tiny terraced house for Mum’s birthday on 18 January, and we had a riotous time. Well, everyone else did. I pretended to be enjoying myself as much as they were, for their sake, but inside I was lonely as the moon. Mum kept putting her arms around me and kissing my cheek and telling me how much she loved me, and every time Dad looked at me his eyes filled with tears.
‘When I think of what could have happened …’ he kept saying, wiping his nose.
‘But it didn’t!’ I replied each time, with a big smile on my face.
I heard them saying quietly, when they thought I wasn’t listening: ‘Hasn’t she done well! Hasn’t she been brave! She seems almost back to her old self. Who’d have thought she’d cope with something like this?’
By then, I’d learned to stop talking about Genevieve, and how she’d saved my life, but I never stopped thinking about her.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
TWO FEET OF snow fell on Manchester on the first day of February and all but the main roads were impassable.
The boiler in May and Neil’s flat developed a leak and we had to shower at the sports centre. I looked at myself in the mirror and did not recognize myself. May said: ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, stop posing. We can all see how skinny you are.’
The foetus inside her wasn’t even as big as the top half of her thumb, but he or she had a beating heart and May had put on weight. In the sports-centre changing rooms I turned to hug her and she said: ‘And please stop these spontaneous displays of affection, Sarah. They’re freaking me out.’
It was 17 February before the snow went, and then Alexander and Jamie came to Manchester.
This time it was me waiting on the platform to meet them. Their train rolled into Piccadilly station bang on time. There weren’t many people on board, and we found one another straight away. I held up my hand and waved, and they came towards me, slowly at first, hesitantly, and then Jamie broke into a run and he threw himself at me, almost knocking me over. I wasn’t using crutches any longer but my leg was still weak.
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