An Accusation: A Novel

by Wendy James

  “Do I really need one? That seems a bit drastic. Surely this will all be cleared up? It won’t go to . . . court or anything?”

  Hal looked worried. “They’ve obviously got something. More than something. They must have serious evidence. As I said, judges don’t give out warrants without good cause.”

  “But this is insane. As if I’d—”

  He held up his hand. “I’d rather wait until we hear what the police have to say before you tell me anything more.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re a wanker, Hal.” Chip rolled his eyes. “It’s not like Suzannah’s some bloody druggo.” He reached an arm around my shoulders, gave me a steadying squeeze. “You don’t really have to bung on all this lawyer crap, you know.”

  For the first time, Hal looked faintly amused. “If I’m going to be her lawyer, I have to, ah, behave like a lawyer.”

  “Yeah. Well, this is bullshit. I’ll tell them tomorrow that I’ve been living here for the last couple of months.”

  “Chip, no. You can’t,” I said. “I’m really grateful for the offer. But you weren’t here all the time. Not really.” I smiled to take away the sting, but he glared at me.

  “How’re they going to know that?”

  “You’d better make sure of the dates before you go making any statements.” Hal kept his voice light, but he was serious.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re not going to take your word for it. You need to make sure you weren’t elsewhere at some crucial time.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  His brother sighed. “You can’t lie, Chip. You’ll get caught. This is bloody serious. I don’t suppose you have a convenient alibi, Suzannah?”

  “Alibi?” The word came out as a frightened squeak. “What do you mean, an alibi?”

  “I don’t suppose you went away for a holiday? If you can prove you were away during the period in question, it would help.”

  “No. We’ve had no holidays. I’m pretty much always here with Mary when I’m not at work. Oh, I took a day trip to Sydney to see a play at the beginning of the school holidays.”

  “Have you had people over to stay?”

  “Well, there’s Chip. But there’s been no one else.” I could feel myself blush, but Hal didn’t seem to notice.

  “People for dinner?” He sounded apologetic. “Other than Chip, I mean.”

  “There’s Honor Fielding. She’s been over a couple of times for dinner. I’m not sure about the exact dates, though.”

  “Does anyone else come to the house regularly? A gardener? A cleaner?”

  “Yes! There’s a woman who comes in three days a week, to watch Mary. Sally O’Halloran. The nursing home recommended her. And I’ve used her as a babysitter, too, when I’ve gone out at night. And a couple of times on the weekend.”

  Hal brightened. “She might be useful.” I gave him her contact numbers.

  “So, is there anyone else? No old friends have called in on their way through? No other family?”

  The nonexistence of my social and family life was suddenly crushingly obvious. “We haven’t been here that long.”

  Chip cut in, his tone decisive. “You honestly don’t have to worry, Suze—I can be your alibi. I’ll just say I was here that whole time. That girl couldn’t have been here. No one’s going to say otherwise.”

  Hal shook his head, exasperated now. “How many times do I have to tell you that you can’t say that? You’d be up for perjury at the very least. And look—even if you were here, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the girl couldn’t have been here, too. Wasn’t she kept drugged in the basement? Suze could have kept her hidden from you.”

  “I can say I’ve been down there. That there was no girl.”

  I took his hand. “Hal’s right. You can’t lie. You could actually go to jail. And what good would that do?” My voice shook.

  “I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal, Chip,” his brother added. “But you don’t want to start lying to the cops. And, mate, I don’t know how it hasn’t occurred to you, but there is another scenario. An even more serious one.”

  “What sort of scenario?” Chip looked puzzled, but I knew what his brother was about to say.

  “They could suggest you were in on it.”

  “That never even occurred to me,” he said.

  “So you’re better out of it. But I’m sure there are other things you can do if you want to help. Maybe you could . . .” Hal paused and looked around the kitchen as if searching for chores for his brother to do.

  Chip’s expression brightened almost instantly. “How about I do actually move in now? That way I can protect you.”

  I had to try not to laugh. “Protect me? How?”

  “Oh, come on, Suzannah.” Chip grabbed my hand. Hal cleared his throat and walked out of earshot. “I know it’s a bit old-fashioned, but I want to do all the things blokes normally do for the woman who’s having their baby.”

  It was old-fashioned—also endearing. “What sort of things?”

  “It’s probably not much, but I could . . .” He paused, scratched his head. “Bring you tea. Or make sure you don’t have to . . . climb ladders. Make sure you eat properly. Send you to bed at a decent hour. Make sure you have a bucket handy.”

  “But I don’t need—”

  He interrupted. “And I can help entertain Mary. You know she likes me.”

  He had a point.

  “Okay. Whatever. You can stay.”

  “No. Not you can stay. It should be, I want you to stay, Chip, my darling.”

  “Okay. Yes, I do.”

  “No. I need you to say it.”

  “I want you to stay, Chip, my darling.” I somehow managed to keep a straight face.

  He moved closer, whispered, “I want you to stay, Chip, my darling, because I want to fuck you silly every night of the week—”

  “Chip. Come on.”

  “You need to take this seriously. You can think of it as a sort of nontraditional betrothal. Repeat after me: I want you to stay, Chip, my darling . . .”

  “. . . because I want to fuck you—oh, this is ridiculous. You know I don’t want to fuck you silly every night of the week. I don’t want to fuck you at all. I just want to sleep. And when I don’t want to sleep, I want to throw up. This baby . . .”

  “What baby? Are you having a baby?”

  None of us had seen Mary standing quietly in the doorway. “What the hell are you going to do with a baby, oh, Suzannah? That sounds like a very bad idea. You killed the last one, didn’t you?”

  Chip waited until Hal had gone and Mary was safely back in bed before asking, “What was Mary talking about? That stuff about you killing a baby?”

  “Oh. That.” I’d been dreading this moment. I had known it would be this that Chip would want to talk about, that it would cast an even darker shadow over all the crazy stuff that had gone on this evening.

  “Is there something you haven’t told me? Something you maybe should have told me?” It was hard to read his expression, whether he was angry, upset, concerned, curious.

  I gave him the facts—bare, blunt, and with no unnecessary details. It was still the only way I could discuss it.

  “Stephen and I—we had a child. A daughter. Stella. She died when she was nine months old. Sixteen years ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “SIDS. Cot death.” It never seemed to get any easier.

  “I’m sorry.” He looked as if he wanted to say more but didn’t. I was the one who finally broke the silence.

  “I’m sorry that you found out about it that way. I didn’t even realize Mary knew. The story was in a few papers, mostly gossip magazines, when it happened. I was surprised it was mentioned at all. I was pretty much a has-been by then. She must have taken more of an interest in me than I knew.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me about it before? Something so huge?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just, it’s hard to talk about. And I didn’t want it to c
hange things.”

  “Change things?”

  “Between us.”

  It was impossible to explain how your child’s death changed the way other people, especially other parents, related to you, the way they avoided contact—as if tragedy were contagious.

  Impossible to explain how eventually I had stopped telling people, had tried hard not to be Suzannah-whose-baby-died-poor-thing, to pretend that I was someone else. Here, in Enfield Wash, nobody knew that part of my history. I might have been an ex-celebrity, but to most I was just a hardworking teacher, a dutiful daughter—a simple, almost two-dimensional character with all her baggage on display. I knew that this role play would never work entirely, that it couldn’t, but some days the transformation felt possible. Fake it till you make it, as the psychologists advised.

  “But we’re having a child together,” said Chip. “I’d have thought you’d want me to know.” He looked downcast, uncertain, vulnerable. “I’m not just anyone.”

  “I know you’re not. And I was going to tell you. I was working up to it. Truly. But then . . . then I was pregnant. And suddenly there was an us. I didn’t want to spoil things.”

  He was beside me then, his arms around me.

  “I know it all seems unlikely. You and me, I mean. A sexy soapie star and a rough-as-bags farmer who’s barely left the paddock? Seriously, we must have rocks in our heads. Who’d have thunk it?”

  Suddenly we were both laughing.

  “But I reckon”—he took a breath—“I reckon we can make this thing work, don’t you?”

  I answered as honestly as I could. “I actually don’t know. Everything’s so . . . up in the air.” It was a massive understatement. “But I really, really want it to.”

  He nodded. “Well, I guess maybe it’s as good as it’s going to get right now. But no more secrets. I don’t care what happened in your past. You can tell me everything, Suze. You can tell me anything.”

  ABDUCTED: THE ELLIE CANNING STORY

  A documentary by HeldHostage Productions © 2019

  ELLIE CANNING: TRANSCRIPT #9

  And then there was the other woman. She was the younger one’s mother, I found out later. She came in some days, but not all the time. She was always dressed in this crazy stuff.

  Nothing ever matched. At first I thought she was ancient—with all that silver hair—but then I worked out she wasn’t, like, in her nineties or anything. But she was still old.

  The other woman, the younger one, she was never hostile, but this one was. I mean, she never touched me or anything, but sometimes she’d sort of hiss at me. And the stuff she said. OMG. It was mad. Like, once she came in and shouted that I needed to leave him alone, that he was hers, not mine, and I better watch out, she wasn’t going to let a little slut like me screw up her life . . . And this other time she came and told me that her voice was better than mine, that I was singing flat or off-key or something, and that I’d only got the job because I was fucking the drummer. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so scary.

  It was almost scarier when she wasn’t nuts. A couple of times she came in and sat beside me and held my hand, and sang to me. All this old stuff from the eighties. And a few times she came in and wanted me to play Trouble with her—you know, that dumb game with the clicker in the middle? Mostly when we played I just drifted off and that was fine, but then she’d lose it completely when I took one of her pieces. I tried not to, but it wasn’t that easy to let her win. You know—it’s one of those games where it’s just dumb luck. Anyway, a couple of times she upended the whole thing and left. Oh, and sometimes she brought me these bowls of Froot Loops to eat.

  Just dry Froot Loops. I had to pretend to like them, but they were always a bit stale, and it was hard not to gag.

  The two women never came in together. In fact I got the feeling that the older one wasn’t really meant to be there.

  She would only come in during the daytime. Maybe when the other woman was away? And I never mentioned the mother to the other one. I don’t know why, but it seemed important to keep it a secret.

  SUZANNAH: AUGUST 2018

  “Suzannah Wells, you are under arrest for the abduction and imprisonment of Eleesha Britney Canning. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish, as anything you say will be given in evidence . . .”

  It was like one of those nightmares, where on some level you’re fully aware that you’re caught in a dream and that what’s happening is completely ludicrous, but you can’t work out how to stop it, how to wake yourself up.

  Parts of it were bizarrely familiar: the phrase itself—“you are under arrest”; the modulations of the detective’s voice; the way the world wobbled around me, contracting, expanding, contracting again as I tried to make some sense of what was happening. All this, every word, every action, felt as if I were inside a living cliché. Those moments were just as I would have imagined them, had I been playing the scene in a film, acting the part of a woman unfairly accused.

  But other moments were closer to high farce. There I was, trying hard to appear calm but worrying about packing an overnight bag, as if I were going on a holiday, before being bowled over by a wave of nausea and running off to vomit.

  There was the panicked discussion about what to do about Mary, the two brothers arguing about whether Chip should come with me to the station or stay home with her, to give me one less thing to worry about. Then there was Mary herself, who decided that Hal was actually an old boyfriend from her LA days and that he owed her forty dollars for some gear he stole and was only appeased when Chip promised her an ice cream cone. (“Sprinkles, too?”)

  The police observed all this patiently and politely and then informed us that although they weren’t arresting her, they did want Mary to come in for questioning. Then Hal was arguing angrily about the legality of interviewing someone who was so obviously psychologically impaired.

  And then we were back to the crime-show clichés again: the slow walk across the icy gravel to the police car (unhandcuffed, thank God); Constable Moorhouse standing too close, her gloved fingers clamped on my elbow, her hand pressing gently on the top of my head as she guided me into the back seat, leaning over me, buckling me in as carefully as she would a small child.

  There was the recorded interview in the dingy room, the revelatory production of all the impossible, crazily damning evidence. Hal sitting beside me, interjecting periodically. This scene felt entirely scripted, even more so when I realized there was a camera, that a transcript of the conversation would be typed up and that eventually the entire performance would be made available, part of the public record, evidence to be presented in court.

  Like all theater, it was an ensemble effort, but individual performances varied. Inspector Stratford’s delivery was rather wooden, as if he’d learned his lines but hadn’t been able to inject any feeling.

  My own act left a great deal to be desired. My emotional range was limited—there was very little nuance in my approach. If I’d had more time to prepare, perhaps there’d have been greater tonal variation, but as it was, I was invariably shrill, barely managing to keep the panic under control. The one saving grace was that later, I would only have to read through the transcript and not watch a rerun, for without a doubt, this was the worst performance of my career.

  Only Hal’s execution was halfway decent. He gave a fabulous impression of a quick-witted if somewhat cynical defense lawyer, and his dramatic timing was spot-on: he never hesitated, didn’t overdo the emotion; there were even moments of sly humor.

  “Before you go any further,” he began, his expression severe, his voice perhaps a little too loud, forceful without being aggressive, “I’d like to make it clear that my client, Ms. Wells, denies all the charges that have been made against her, and that, furthermore, she finds these allegations ludicrous.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Gascoyne.” Stratford’s manner was deliberately calm. “Your comments have been noted. Now, Ms. Wells, you have told us that you’ve never met the vi
ctim?”

  Hal interrupted before I had an opportunity to speak.

  “As far as she knows, Inspector. As we’ve already pointed out, Ellie Canning grew up in an area close to where Ms. Wells herself lived only a few years ago, so it’s entirely possible that Ms. Wells has had some kind of contact with Miss Canning previously, without any recollection of having done so.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Gascoyne. If I can continue? Ms. Wells, you have told us that you’ve never met Miss Canning, and that the first time you heard anything of her situation was through news reports approximately a week ago?”

  I glanced at Hal. He nodded. “That’s—” I faltered, cleared my throat. “Yes, that’s right. I can’t be a hundred percent, but as far as I know, I’ve never met her. Her name wasn’t at all familiar.”

  “So you’re certain she’s never, to your knowledge, been in your house, or on your Wash Road property during the time you’ve lived there?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know for certain. It’s possible she could have been on my property at some point without my knowing about it, I guess.”

  “But you yourself have no knowledge of her having been there?”

  “No, of course I don’t.”

  Stratford paused for a moment, looked through his papers. “Did you make a trip to Sydney on Saturday, July 7, Ms. Wells?”

  I thought back. “If that was the first day of the school holidays, then yes.”

  “Can I ask what the purpose of that visit was?”

  “I went down for the matinee of a play I’ve been wanting to see. I was meant to meet up with an old teaching friend, Laura Huber. It’s a tradition. We’ve been going to the theater at the end of each school term for years, and we’d decided to keep doing it even though I’d moved. We met up after first term, in the April holidays, but this time she was sick and couldn’t go. I’d paid for the tickets, and I was really looking forward to it, so I decided to go down anyway. I’m sure I still have the tickets in an email if you want to see them.”