Before I Let You In

by Jenny Blackhurst

‘Chinese – I got some vouchers for House of Wok after Lewis found a Coke can ring pull in his rice last time we went.’

  ‘Jesus, Fran, probably best if you don’t try to sell it to Mum like that. And yeah, I’ll be there. Make sure you tell her I’m coming after the gym. Say that bit about the gym twice if she isn’t paying attention.’

  ‘Great. Not sure I could put up with her excellent parenting tips without you there to make faces behind her. And Sam is bringing his new girlfriend. Gemma something. Sarah something? Oh God, what was the last one called?’

  ‘Becky? Lydia? God knows. I wouldn’t worry, there’ll be a new name to remember next week. How’re the kids?’ Bea’s mobile let out a long continuous buzz indicating the arrival of an email. She flicked her finger across the screen to unlock it and pressed the Outlook icon.

  ‘Don’t ask. Same as ever. We had parents’ evening last night. Maisy talks too much, and the other day Lewis told his teacher to chuck it in the fuck-it bucket. Obviously I’m in hot water now because there’s no way anyone in Rich’s family would have taught our six-year-old son the F word.’

  The email was from an address Bea didn’t recognise. Probably spam. She needed to tighten up her filters.

  Subject: Recognise anyone?

  She scrolled down, struggling to see the text on her tiny screen. There was a video attached to the message, and she tapped on the black box to play, wondering if Eleanor had been filming Noah allegedly laughing again. It didn’t matter how many different angles she recorded it from, the kid had gas.

  The circle on the video stopped turning and the screen filled with the image of a dark room, a bed in one corner. Bea hoped she wasn’t about to witness some dodgy porn movie. She couldn’t afford a new phone if this one got some kind of virus. Clicking desperately on the screen, she attempted to cancel the video. Fran was still talking.

  ‘Whoever it was, Lewis is protecting them. I asked him who he heard it from and he said Mr Tumble. I even told him I was going to complain to CBeebies and Mr Tumble would be fired, but he’s sticking to his story. I heard him telling Maisy this morning that she’d better find a new favourite programme in case Mr Tumble fell out of a tree and died.’

  The silence told Bea that her sister had finished her story, but she couldn’t string together a sentence to reply. Despite her attempts to stop it, the video had started playing and the door to the room had opened. A woman had stumbled in, unsteady on her feet – obviously drunk – followed by a guy, who sat next to her on the bed. Within seconds they were kissing frantically, then he was pulling at her dress, lifting it higher until finally she broke away from the kiss to let him pull it over her head.

  ‘Fran, I’ll have to call you back.’ She hung up without waiting for her sister’s response or tearing her eyes from the video.

  The girl had only a tiny thong on now and was lying back on the bed as the man pulled at the buckle of his belt and pushed his trousers down around his thighs. Bea knew what was going to happen next. Of course, it was obvious. But it wasn’t because she’d seen too many dodgy movies that she knew. She knew because the girl on the bed was her.

  67

  Why did you install spyware on your friend’s computer?

  I’m not going into this again. I told them, the police, that I didn’t do that.

  It wasn’t to keep an eye on her? Keep her safe?

  If it was me, then how did Jessica get hold of the video and email it to everyone Bea knew? What reason would I have to do that to my best friend? Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said? If you don’t believe me, there’s not much point in us doing this at all, is there?

  Oh, I see, the silence again.

  Does silence bother you?

  It does when I’m trying to have a conversation with someone.

  Why did you get so upset just now?

  You’d be upset too if everyone was treating you like a liar and a murderer. I’m a professional. I have a doctorate, for God’s sake – a month ago I was sitting where you are now. Surely that counts for something?

  Understandably you’re proud of what you’ve achieved, and of course it counts. I’m sorry to have upset you; it’s important that I ask these questions to try and understand what life has been like for you and your friends these last few months. And I want to help you to come to terms with what’s happened and to help you understand.

  I already understand. I understand that they didn’t believe me when I said they were in danger; just like you don’t believe me now. I understand that none of this would have happened if I was just doing my job properly. I understand that this is my fault. I let this happen. I let it happen again.

  Do you want to talk about Amy yet?

  No.

  68

  Eleanor

  Eleanor fingered the soft hair on the right side of her head, where it still grew long and unmutilated. She avoided looking at the left side, where the patches made her look like she was suffering from some kind of disease. Tears pricked at her eyes but didn’t spill down on to her cheeks – maybe they were drying up once and for all.

  Adam had treated her as though she was made of glass ever since the horrific incident with her hair. At first she’d tried desperately to convince him it really was an accident, but he’d refused to listen, talking instead about doctor’s appointments and asking Karen for recommendations. Karen. Whenever he mentioned her name these days, Eleanor found herself prickling and she had no idea why. She’d never noticed before how he spoke about her as if she was a higher class of person than them, as if she was a messiah rather than a psychiatrist. She’d found herself snapping at him, ‘She’s not even a real doctor; it’s not as if she’s ever saved anyone’s life.’ Adam had smiled, seeming not to notice the sting in her voice, and replied, ‘We don’t know that.’

  She knew it was just a reaction to the news about Karen and Michael’s relationship. It had made her paranoid about every time her best friend and her husband had been in a room together.

  She thought back to the day of the hair incident. Karen had left their house before Bea to get back to the office – just as Adam was going to his meeting and she’d heard her tell Adam that if he needed to talk about anything he should call her. The way she’d said anything, so loaded … Eleanor hadn’t stopped thinking about it ever since.

  ‘Did Toby leave his PE kit in your car?’ she shouted through to Adam, who was miraculously cooking dinner. Guilty conscience?

  ‘Don’t think so,’ he called back.

  ‘I’m just going to check,’ she said, slightly quieter than before and hoping he wouldn’t hear over the noise of the cooker fan. He didn’t object, so she lifted his keys off the hook and slipped out of the front door, closing it quietly rather than letting it slam.

  The car was the junk tip she was expecting, crisp packets shoved in the door pockets and an empty McDonald’s cup in the cup holder. She worked fast, opening the glove box and rifling through the contents. Nothing out of the ordinary: cables to charge a mobile phone, the satnav, a black leather wallet with the car’s service history. She checked the boot – a pair of her old shoes, three of Toby’s woolly hats and a car cleaning kit. She gave up, the chant of crazy, crazy, crazy reverberating in her ears as she went round to the driver’s side to lock the door.

  That was when she spotted it, just a tiny glint of gold on the passenger side, hooked over the side of the door pocket and nearly covered by rubbish. It was probably foil from a sweet wrapper, she told herself as she opened the door and climbed over. A ring pull. A pen. She was still going through the list of things it was going to be as she picked up the delicate gold bracelet and lifted it to the light. It wasn’t one of hers, but it was familiar. Her mind couldn’t process where she’d seen it before; it was too busy reeling from the realisation that Karen had been right. Her husband was having an affair.

  69

  Bea

  The laptop seemed to take forever to boot up, and the minute it did, Bea clicked on her em
ail app so many times the screen froze.

  Who the hell had sent her that video? Where had they even got it? Had he filmed it … Paul? He’d been one of her few attempts at a relationship in years, and if he had filmed it he certainly hadn’t … her mind searched for the words as she slammed her fingers on ctrl alt delete … he hadn’t obtained her consent. The mobile phone tucked under her chin rang and rang, then switched over to Orange answerphone once more.

  ‘Eleanor. Ring me.’

  She didn’t even want to think it, but she couldn’t help herself. Had Karen sent her this? Karen had tried calling her a couple of times since her ‘date’ with her fake work colleague, but Bea had had nothing to say to her so-called best friend. She would confront her, but in her own time and her own way. She’d had a lucky escape the other night, and every time she thought about it bile rose in her throat and hot, angry tears spiked her eyes. She needed to be calm and detached from the recent trauma before she faced her.

  Obviously Karen was going to be mad that Bea had told Eleanor about Michael, but would she really do something like this to get back at her? Anyway, Bea’s relationship with Paul had been way before that, so how would she even have this video?

  The Outlook app launched and Bea felt bile rise in her throat when she saw the email sitting there with the subject line ‘Recognise anyone?’ It sounded more like a threat the second time she read it – Karen’s way of making sure she didn’t tell anyone else about Michael’s wife? It hurt Bea to think that her friend would have to stoop that low. Karen should know she’d never do anything to hurt her, even if she didn’t agree with her decisions.

  She double-clicked on the email, not wanting to see the images on a larger screen but hoping there would be something here she’d missed on the smaller screen of her phone.

  There was.

  The email had been sent to her personal inbox, where she was viewing it now. But that wasn’t it.

  Fear rose in Bea’s chest, hammering at her ribcage as she scrolled down the list of names in the cc box. Some of them she recognised – Fran, her brother Sam, Eleanor, one, two, three girls from work, two of her friends from Slimming World … how had anyone even got hold of these addresses?

  Panic rose in her chest. How many of these people had already seen the video? Her phone hadn’t rung yet, so she suspected very few. She needed help to sort this out fast. Tomorrow was Monday, so there was a chance that some or all of them – especially her work colleagues – would see it then, perhaps while she was sitting in the office next to them. She imagined dozens of people around her all pressing play at the same time, the office filled with the sounds of her and Paul moaning and grunting. This was no perfectly choreographed sex tape, all soft lighting and flattering angles recorded and leaked by a failing celebrity to revive a flagging career. This was sex in its true and highly unflattering glory, spare tyres and legs akimbo.

  Fran. The one person she could count on to keep a cool head and help her work this out. She grabbed her phone and dialled her sister’s number, praying she wasn’t bathing the children or reading bedtime stories.

  Fran answered on the third ring.

  ‘Bea, what the hell was all that about? Are you okay?’

  ‘Not really, but I don’t have much time to explain. Do you have your computer on?’

  ‘Yeees,’ Fran replied slowly, obviously dying to ask more questions but too concerned by the desperation in Bea’s voice. ‘Lewis is just finishing his homework.’

  ‘Right, can you kick him off a minute? Right out of the room, though, and log on to your emails.’

  ‘Bea, what’s this a—’

  ‘Please, Fran?’

  Fran paused. Bea knew she must be worrying no end, but she didn’t have time to worry about that. She needed Fran to see exactly what they were dealing with. Of course she’d rather it wasn’t necessary, but she needed help more than she needed her dignity right now. She heard Fran speaking to her son in low, urgent tones and Lewis protesting loudly.

  ‘Okay, what do I do now?’ Fran asked eventually.

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes. Bea, what exactly am I going to be looking at?’

  ‘Log into your email.’

  Bea waited in silence while Fran did as she was told.

  ‘I’ve got to say, this is all very cloak-and-dagger. I’m a bit … Okay, I’m in. What now?’

  ‘Okay, find an email with the subject “Recognise anyone?” Don’t open it yet.’

  ‘I can’t … Wait, there, got it.’

  ‘Right.’ Bea took a deep breath. ‘You need to open it. I’m sorry for what you’re about to see, Fran but you’ll realise in a minute why I’m asking for your help. I don’t need you to yell at me, or judge, I just need you to be a big sister and help me.’

  ‘Jesus, Bea, you’re scaring me. Do I need to call a lawyer?’

  ‘Just open the email.’

  She waited in silence, imagining her big sister double-clicking the email, pressing play on the video and watching her baby sister doing things no one should ever have to imagine, let alone see. She closed her eyes, as if scrunching them up tightly could guard against the burning humiliation.

  ‘What the fuck, Bea?’ Fran’s voice was hoarse. ‘I’m on my way round.’

  It took Fran just under fifteen minutes to make the twenty-five-minute journey, and when she arrived, she threw her arms around Bea and held her tightly. For the first time since she’d first seen the email – she could barely believe it had been less than forty minutes since her phone had beeped with the message that had blown her nice normal evening apart – tears sprang to Bea’s eyes.

  ‘How much did you see?’ she asked when Fran finally let her go.

  ‘Enough to need a lot of alcohol to erase it from my memory,’ Fran replied. ‘Why couldn’t you just have told me what it was?’

  Bea threw herself down on the sofa, the laptop still in the middle of the floor. ‘I didn’t want to spend half an hour listening to you tell me it couldn’t be that bad and it probably wasn’t even me and you probably couldn’t see that much anyway. I wanted you to know how bad this was, exactly what all the other people on the list are going to see if they open that email.’

  Fran nodded. ‘And who was the guy?’

  Bea closed her eyes in humiliation at the memory. ‘Did I ever tell you about Paul? He was friends with a girl at work. We went on a few dates and I decided to try taking it further. I had a few too many drinks beforehand, as you can see.’ She couldn’t bring herself to tell Fran why she’d had to get so drunk before she had sex with Paul. Despite her bravado and the front she put on to her friends to make them think she was fine, she’d barely slept with anyone since university, and any relationship usually ended soon after she realised that the idea of sex made her skin crawl.

  ‘Had he been at yours often?’

  ‘No, we usually went out on dates. I don’t think he’d been there before that night.’

  ‘So it couldn’t have been him who filmed you.’

  Bea’s eyes snapped open. ‘It must have been. Who else could it have been?’

  ‘Come on, Bea, I know you’ve had a shock, but you have to be a bit smarter than that. That video started before the pair of you came into the room. Unless he had already been into your bedroom and set up a camera, there’s no way it could have been him.’

  Bea let this sink in. She was right, of course she was. Paul hadn’t been in the flat five minutes before she’d suggested going to the bedroom to get it over with, although she hadn’t put it quite like that.

  But if he hadn’t filmed them, who had? The video had been close up; the camera must have been on her desk, probably right next to her …

  She shot upright. ‘The laptop.’

  Fran looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  Bea crossed the room and stepped around her laptop gingerly, as though it was a bomb waiting to explode. Standing behind it, she bent down and lifted it slowly, carried it in her outstretche
d hands into her bedroom and left it on the bed, closing the door on it softly.

  ‘The fucking laptop,’ she announced, marching back into the front room. ‘That’s how it was filmed. On my own laptop. It must be bugged.’

  Fran’s eyes widened. ‘Do you have any idea how mental you sound?’

  ‘I know, Fran, but it’s the only way! Like you said, that guy hadn’t been anywhere near the bedroom before we went in together, and we were already being filmed. I sure as hell didn’t set up a camera, and if there had been a tripod in front of my bed, I probably would have noticed.’

  ‘I don’t know, the amount of alcohol you looked to have had, David Attenborough could have been sitting at the end of the bed narrating the session and you wouldn’t have noticed.’

  ‘Thanks, Fran, that’s exactly what I need right now, your goddam humour. I’m telling you, it could only be the laptop.‘

  Fran shook her head. ‘It just sounds so Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Why would someone bug your computer? It’s not like you’re hiding government secrets. And who exactly? Who would have access to your laptop to do something like that?’

  ‘I hate to even think this, let alone say it, but …’ Bea closed her eyes as though just the thought caused her physical pain. ‘I think it might be Karen. She had access to my computer whenever she wanted. I think she’s having some sort of breakdown. She’s obsessed with this patient of hers … She sent me on a date the other night and …’ She covered her face with her hands, feeling her cheeks heat up with the shame of what her best friend had said about her to this random stranger.

  ‘Clearly there’s a lot you’re not telling me about what’s going on with you and Karen, and as soon as we’ve sorted this, I want to know everything. But for now we need to deal with this. I was having a think on the way here, and there’s one thing we can try.’

  ‘What, what can we do? Please tell me you can hack into people’s accounts and delete the email.’