Before I Let You In

by Jenny Blackhurst

  It’s as good a reason as any.

  Surely you could just stop doing the things that would hurt people.

  I never said I was perfect. I’ve never said that.

  77

  Bea

  Bea swilled back the dregs of her wine and reached out for the bottle to pour herself another glass. She knew she should keep a clear head if she was going to call Michael – and she was going to call him. She had so many questions. Her whole life had been blown apart by what had happened to Eleanor. Karen had been taken in for questioning and Bea felt like she had no right to demand answers from anyone. The police had no obligation to tell her anything, and Eleanor’s family were maintaining an icy silence. It hurt, the way she was being frozen out, as though she was a mere acquaintance, as if she hadn’t known Eleanor almost her whole life, but she understood that they had the boys to think about now – and her pain was nothing compared to what they were going through.

  It wasn’t just Eleanor she had lost; it was as though her whole life had been rubbed out by a huge eraser, and there was no rewriting it. It had always been Bea, Eleanor and Karen. Without Eleanor she didn’t even know who she was any more. Now it was as if she and Karen had never been more than passing acquaintances. Okay, so they’d fallen out, but surely something as enormous as this should bring them back together? If not this, then would anything?

  The sound of her phone blaring out Sir Mix-A-Lot was unwelcome and distasteful at a time when smiling was unbearable. The tune meant one person, though; the only person she could tolerate talking to at the moment.

  ‘Fran, hey.’

  ‘Hey. How’re you feeling?’

  ‘Like shit.’ Fran was the only one who asked that question and expected an honest answer rather than an ‘I’m fine.’ Bea didn’t even have to ask how her sister was in return. Fran was a giver, not a taker.

  ‘Of course you are. This whole thing is shit. I’m coming over in half an hour with Fast and Furious and toffee popcorn. Oh, and a vat of wine. I was just calling to see if you needed any shopping. I make a crappy lasagne, but I can fill your freezer with artery-squeezing ready meals.’

  At times like this, too many people asked if there was anything they could do, knowing that the person they were asking would say no out of politeness. Not Fran. If she wanted to help, she’d just do it. Knowing that her big sister had gone out and chosen a film and her favourite pick-me-ups made Bea want to hug her down the phone. She longed to tell Fran that that sounded perfect and spend the evening on the sofa in her comfy grey pyjamas, but she knew she’d just end up wondering what the hell Michael thought he knew, and what he intended to do about it.

  ‘There’s honestly nothing I’d love more, Fran, but I have plans to be a complete moron tonight.’ She sighed and gave her sister an unedited account of her afternoon. ‘You may as well tell me I’m being an idiot and threaten to dob me in to Mum now.’

  ‘I probably should …’ Fran dropped her voice, presumably so Rich didn’t hear her being irresponsible, ‘but I wouldn’t be able to resist finding out either. You don’t think Michael had anything to do with what happened to Els, do you? Hasn’t his wife given him an alibi? The police obviously don’t think he was involved; they’ve got their heads firmly up their arses trying to prove it was Karen.’

  ‘You’re not telling me you think she didn’t do it? I thought you’d be the first with the torch and pitchfork.’

  ‘What, the doc? Come on, Bea, seriously? You’ve known her for years – admittedly not as well as you thought you did, but still, you were all so close.’

  ‘I don’t know her at all, Fran.’ Bea sighed, sadness and exhaustion threatening to take her over completely. ‘Her boyfriend is a married man! I don’t know either of them. She set me up with that creep and she probably emailed all my workmates a sex tape I didn’t even make! And I told you what happened to her sister, right? How do we know she didn’t do that on purpose?’

  She heard Fran take a deep breath. ‘Don’t be a bitch, Bea. You told me she wasn’t to blame for that. She was a kid!’

  Bea sighed. ‘You’re right, that was horrible. I’m just so confused at the moment. Why hasn’t she been in touch? Although you’ve changed your tune. You never got on with Karen. Why the sudden bleeding heart?’

  Fran let out a laugh. ‘I never really disliked her. It was her relationship with you I didn’t like. She was like a big sister to you. I didn’t particularly relish the competition from someone who had never glued your Barbies’ heads together.’

  ‘I knew that was you,’ Bea muttered, tears pricking at her eyelids. ‘You never had any competition, Fran.’

  ‘I know that really. Now go and prove your best friend isn’t a nutcase and I’ll bring Vin Diesel over tomorrow.’

  ‘Love you, Fran.’

  ‘Love you too, Bea Bea.’

  78

  Bea

  ‘Who is this girl then? And what makes you suddenly so sure you know her identity?’

  Bea had called Michael as soon as Fran had left and told him to pick her up immediately, on the condition he didn’t talk about Karen or Eleanor. He’d agreed, and Bea was relieved he’d stuck to his word.

  ‘I would have known all along if Karen had been allowed to tell me her name,’ Michael replied. ‘When I went back to the house to pick up some stuff she wasn’t there and I had to let myself in. There was a file on the table. It didn’t take a genius to work out whose; Karen had been verging on obsessed with this girl for weeks. When I saw the name, I recognised it straight away.’

  ‘Old girlfriend with a grudge?’

  Michael snorted. ‘I almost wish it was. Jessica Hamilton was a friend of my daughter’s at college.’

  ‘Your daughter?’ Bea whistled. ‘Jesus, Michael, were you in college yourself when you had her?’

  Michael sighed and rubbed a hand across his face. ‘I’m forty-five, Bea. Anne is twenty-two now. We adopted her when she was nearly seven. Anne was – is – Emily’s niece. Her sister had a drug problem. We didn’t even realise until social services contacted us to say that Anne would be taken away and placed with a new family if we didn’t take her in. Emily was distraught that she hadn’t seen any signs – her sister lived miles away – but we agreed to take Anne on. She’d been through a lot, seen more than a seven-year-old should see. She was difficult, but not in the normal seven-year-old way. She could be quite sly; she’d lie to me and Emily, play us off against each other. There were incidents, things that put a lot of pressure on our relationship. I wasn’t there enough.’

  Bea could read between the lines as though the words were written across his forehead. Karen wasn’t the first – he’d been cheating on his wife for years.

  ‘And this girl, Jessica, where does she fit in?’

  He shook his head in reply. ‘I honestly don’t know. Like I said, she was a friend of Anne’s at college. Anne didn’t mention her friends much, so when she started talking about Jessica, we were pleased she’d met someone she got on with so well. Then she met someone else, a girl called Ruth Carrington. According to Anne, Jessica didn’t like her having someone else she was close to. She was a jealous girl, possessive. I got the impression she didn’t have many friends herself.’

  ‘You never met her?’

  ‘Like I said, I wasn’t around much.’ The satnav indicated a right turn, and Michael switched lanes. He was silent for a moment while he chose the correct exit at the roundabout, then began to speak again. ‘Anne said Jessica’s family was well off but she was a bit of a loner. I assumed that was the reason they’d connected.’

  Bea could well imagine the awkward young girl, shoved from pillar to post, embarrassed about her past and confused that her new family wasn’t the catalogue picture she’d hoped for.

  ‘When Anne and Ruth started spending more time together, Jessica became hostile towards the other girl. Started sending her nasty text messages warning her to stay away from Anne. When she told us this, I told her to steer clear o
f Jessica, even suggested I go and see the head of the college, but Anne said there was no need. Jessica was harmless. Then one evening Anne came home in a state. I wasn’t there, but Emily told me about it afterwards. Anne said that Jessica had attacked Ruth. She took it badly, as though it was her fault. Emily tried to calm her down, but she locked herself in her room, stayed in there all weekend. Em thought she seemed scared of her so-called friend. I said I’d go to the college that Monday, but something came up, and when I got back, Anne was fine. She said she’d been to college and everything was being dealt with. Ruth switched colleges and Anne never talked about her or Jessica again.’

  ‘It sounds as though this Jessica has some problems.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m worried about,’ Michael replied grimly. ‘I’m concerned that Emily and I only got one side of the story. I called Jessica Hamilton before I spoke to you. The way she tells it, it was Anne who attacked Ruth because she started seeing someone and Anne couldn’t handle the rejection. Jessica Hamilton has been at university the past four years and has never moved back. My daughter, however,’ he grimaced as though it caused him physical pain to say the words, ‘has been living here all along. And from what Jessica told me, if she found out about Karen and me, God knows how she would react.’

  Bea let his words sink in. God knows how she would react.

  ‘When you said you knew her patient’s identity I assumed we were going to see her. If Jessica doesn’t live here any more, then why are we going to her house?’

  ‘We’re not,’ Michael replied. ‘We’re going to find my daughter.’

  79

  Karen

  Released pending further investigation. It was hard not to laugh at that. Everything in her life seemed to be pending further investigation. Her job, her relationship, now her freedom.

  She’d called Michael from the station, unwilling to believe that their argument days ago would stop him from being there for her upon her release. She needed him. She needed him to explain, to tell her that ‘released without charge’ meant that the police believed she’d had nothing to do with Eleanor’s death; or better still that this was all part of Jessica Hamilton’s sick plan and Eleanor wasn’t really dead at all. Above all she just needed him to be there for her as though for that moment there was no wife, no other family, just her.

  The phone had rung and rung, and just when she thought he’d picked up, she heard the familiar voice of the woman from the EE voicemail service. With a sinking feeling in her stomach she had stepped out of the station and on to the main road, on her own. It was obviously how she was going to have to face this now. No Michael, no Bea. No Eleanor.

  The thought of Eleanor brought a black curtain down in front of her eyes and she stumbled, grabbed hold of the chipped blue railing outside the police station and retched into the greenery at its border. To anyone passing she must have looked like another reveller who had spent the night on one of the wooden slats with a sheet that passed for a bed, sleeping off a good time.

  When her throat was sore and her stomach empty she paused for a second, trying desperately to catch her breath and wiping stinging water from her eyes. The town was a twenty-minute walk she knew she wouldn’t be able to make, but not wanting to call a taxi to pick her up from a police station, she forced her shaky legs to take her to the nearest bench.

  The taxi took as long as the walk would have. While she waited, her mind probed cautiously, looking for a reaction that she could analyse. When she thought of Eleanor a screaming pain threatened to escalate into a full-blown migraine, something she couldn’t deal with here and now, but despite her efforts to think of something else, anything else, all she could picture was her best friend’s little boys, motherless children. Noah had been found in his cot upstairs, completely unharmed but in considerable distress. The call had come from one of the neighbours who had seen a woman perfectly fitting her description walking up the path towards the house shortly before the screaming and banging started.

  ‘Bea, it’s Karen. Listen, I don’t know what you’ve heard about anything …’ She hesitated. The last thing she wanted to do was talk to Bea about what had happened to Eleanor in a voicemail. ‘Look, call me please, it’s urgent. I’m sorry.’

  She didn’t bother going inside her house, instead getting straight into her car. There wasn’t anything there for her, and the emptiness would be too much to bear. She didn’t care about how she looked or smelled after seventeen hours in a police station. She’d told them about Jessica Hamilton but they hadn’t seemed particularly interested, concentrating more on her.

  There was only one way to find out. She had known as soon as she’d taken it from the office that it was going to end this way. She’d told herself when she’d written it down that to go there would be career suicide. But now it seemed she had no career, so she had nothing left to lose.

  She took the slip of paper out of her bag and laid it on the steering wheel in front of her.

  Jessica Hamilton’s home address.

  Karen turned the radio up so she didn’t have to think about the dozens of police officers who were working on the evidence that would lead them to Eleanor’s killer. It was only a matter of time before she was dragged back in for questioning again, and this time she might not be coming out. Not unless she could prove that Jessica Hamilton at least existed, then maybe she wouldn’t be the sole focus of their investigation. Jessica might be twisted, she might be smart, but Karen doubted she was an evil genius. It happened all the time on TV, killers being so clever that they took care of all the evidence, led the police round in circles until the very end, but the truth was that in real life it was unlikely that she’d erased all the fingerprints she’d made in Eleanor’s life. All the police needed was someone to match them to, and while Jessica remained a ghost, Karen’s was the only direction they were looking in. Hers and perhaps Adam’s.

  Her phone buzzed inside her handbag and she fumbled for it, trying to keep control of the wheel with one hand and rooting around inside with the other. When she had no luck, she upended the bag, tipping the entire contents on to the passenger seat, and grabbed the phone, which promptly stopped ringing. Shit! Number unknown. She waited to see if an answerphone message appeared, but nothing. To be honest, it was for the best. If it had been Michael or Bea, she would have had to tell them where she was going and they would only try and stop her. She’d made up her mind and had no intention of being swayed by reason or logic. She felt like she’d been possessed by an impulsive, reckless spirit and she was going to embrace the feeling for as long as it took her to get there, like a drunk determined to dance until she was sober. She’d never acted without consultation with her senses before; everything she did in her life was carefully measured and considered. Even the casual sex had had none of the reckless abandon of a normal one-night stand, each episode planned methodically and executed for the exact purpose of convincing herself she was in control of the situation with Michael. He went home to his wife; she went and screwed a nameless stranger. Tit for tat to prove to herself that she couldn’t be in too deep – not if she could cheat on him so easily and without the slightest bit of guilt. Well, until the last time.

  The houses on Jessica’s street were of the detached, three-storey, bay-windowed variety. They all had names rather than numbers, ‘Tontine’ and ‘Valley House’. The one she was looking for was ‘Underwood’, and she found it at the end of the street, facing out on to the others as though it was at the head of the table. She didn’t feel nervous despite the fact that she believed she was about to come face to face with the person who was responsible for her best friend’s death. She supposed that part of her expected Jessica wouldn’t be there; that she would have gathered her belongings and fled the country like the ghost she had come to be. So she was surprised to see lights on, a car on the drive.

  Ringing the doorbell, she felt a lump form in her throat that threatened to choke her. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to speak if the door even opened. B
ut it did open, and instead of mousy Jessica Hamilton, she was confronted by a face she knew very well.

  She stood dumbly, the ability to voice her intentions lost. The woman in the doorway smiled nervously. Everything about her was miniature; she was thin enough to knock sideways with a deep breath, and so pale. She gripped the frame with her tiny hands as though to steady herself, and Karen wondered if she’d had a drink.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘I’m … I’m looking for Jessica Hamilton.’

  A flicker of recognition crossed the woman’s face with a frown, as though she knew the name but couldn’t quite place it. Instead of turning Karen away, however, she studied her intently, as though her face was the one she was trying to identify. And then a hand shot to her mouth.

  ‘You’re her, aren’t you?’ She stepped back as though to close the door on her, but Karen lurched forward in desperation.

  ‘Please, wait! I need to find Jessica. It’s very important for all of us. You recognise the name, I know you do. Can you help me?’

  The woman took several deep, slow breaths, the kind a therapist would teach you to take when your feelings were overwhelming you.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for this, you know. I suppose you’d better come in.’

  And with that Michael’s wife stepped to one side and Karen entered the house.

  80

  Karen

  ‘I’ve waited for this for ten years,’ Emily repeated, leading Karen from the hallway into a front room the size of her entire house.

  ‘Ten years?’ Karen replied without thinking. ‘But Michael and I have only been together two.’

  Emily recoiled at the sound of his name coming from Karen’s lips, and instantly she regretted her lack of tact. She was so used to Michael being fully hers when they were together that it was hard to make herself believe that he was actually married to someone else.