by Jess Ryder
Alice’s thin heels clip the slate flooring as she walks down the hall. ‘Isobel? Where are you? Isobel?’ She flings the door open and marches in – then stops. Her bag falls to the floor as she brings her hand to her open mouth, making a statue of surprise.
‘Run!’ I scream. ‘Run!’
But Alice hesitates, and at that moment Jay springs out from behind the door, grabbing her from behind and holding the knife against her throat. She starts to pant, her eyes alight with fear.
‘Don’t move, or I’ll slice you to ribbons.’
‘Okay, okay…’
He nods at me. ‘You – sit back down. Hands in the air, where I can see them.’ He jerks Alice’s arm up behind her back until she squeals, pushing her into the centre of the room.
I lower myself gently onto the seat, my mind racing with possibilities. I’m not tied up. Could I leap forward and jump on him from here? There’s two of us; we could wrestle him to the floor. But he has a knife. What if we fail? What if he goes mad and attacks us? We could all end up hurt. And Isobel is vulnerable; she can’t escape. But we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to try. Timing is everything. I try to signal to Alice with my eyes, begging for her support, but she’s staring at Isobel, her expression a mixture of terror and fury.
‘Please, Jay, please don’t harm Alice,’ says Isobel. ‘This has nothing to do with her, it’s between you and me. Let her go. Let them both go. We’ll sort this out, just the two of us.’
‘Shut up! I’m warning you, bitch, one more word out of you and lover girl…’ He hisses in Alice’s ear. ‘You’ve come just at the right time. Your darling wife’s on trial for murder and we’re about to hear the verdict.’ He flicks his eyes towards me. ‘You. Becca’s girl. Say it. Now.’
My mouth has gone dry. Even if I knew what to say, nothing would come out of it. I swallow hard, digging with my tongue for saliva. I can’t put the moment off any longer. I have to make a decision…
‘Guilty,’ says Isobel. ‘I’m guilty.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Me
Isobel’s voice is strangely strong and calm. Alice and I gasp out loud. Jay swings his head to face her and for a split second loses his balance.
‘No, Izzy,’ whispers Alice. ‘Don’t do this.’
Jay tightens his grip again. ‘Shut up and let her talk!’
Isobel draws herself up. ‘Let Alice go and I’ll tell you what happened.’ Her voice is growing stronger with every word. ‘I’ll write it down in a confession and you can show it to the police.’
‘She didn’t do it,’ Alice croaks, as Jay presses the blade on her throat. ‘She’s lying to save me. Saying what you want to hear. She didn’t kill her – she was with me that night.’
‘That’s not true and she knows it,’ says Isobel. ‘Alice lied for me. I told her I was worried because I didn’t have an alibi, so she told the police we were together, but it wasn’t true – we’d had an almighty row; we’d split up. So I went to Birmingham and—’
‘Stop it! Stop it, Izzy!’ says Alice, writhing in Jay’s grasp. ‘She’s lying, Jay, I know she’s lying. Izzy – tell the truth or he’s going to kill all of us.’
Jay drags the blade lightly across the surface of Alice’s neck, drawing a thin streak of blood. Isobel screws up her eyes. ‘Well?’ he says. ‘Did you or didn’t you kill Cara?’
‘She didn’t, she didn’t!’ cries Alice, her eyes darting towards me. ‘It was that little bitch’s mother – Rebecca Banks!’
‘Becca? That’s a new one.’
‘It’s true! The police know now that it wasn’t you, they told me – I came here to give Isobel the news.’
‘Really? Is that so? How interesting.’ A low chuckle rumbles in his chest. ‘Well, well, well, what a shocking twist. To think that after all these years it was dear, sweet Becca. What do you make of that, Isobel?’
‘It… it makes s-sense,’ she stutters. ‘She was sick in the head, violent…’
‘Yeah, see what you mean…’ Jay jabs a look at me. ‘Did you know your mother was a murderer?’ I shake my head.
What is he playing at? No way can he possibly believe Becca killed Cara. Alice is mad if she thinks this is going to save Isobel. It’s too late. The woman’s already confessed.
Jay presses his head against the side of Alice’s face. ‘So tell us all about it. We’re gagging to know how we got it so wrong.’
‘Well… um, it was that tape she made – they worked it out from that.’
‘Who worked it out? Not Chief Constable Durley, surely; he’s too thick. The youngster, was it? DS Myles?’ I flinch at the sound of his name.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me. He’s good, isn’t he? Sharp as the blade of my knife.’ He presses down again on Alice’s neck and she lets out a tiny gasp.
‘Don’t hurt her, please,’ cries Isobel. ‘You know the truth, now let her go.’
‘But we’ve only just begun,’ says Jay. ‘I want to hear all the details. The how, the when, the why. I want the full trial. Surely you want to know too, Isobel? After all, Becca killed the only woman you ever really loved. Isn’t that right, Alice?’
‘If you say so.’
‘Oh, I do say so. Poor Alice, you never could compete, could you? No matter how hard you tried, Isobel still didn’t love you as much as she loved Cara. Wouldn’t even let you play the leads in her shows. But this is your chance to win her heart! Make her see you’re not just a washed-up old has-been and show her just what a terrific little actress you really are.’
Alice winces. ‘Just tell me what you want me to do.’
‘Play the barrister. Make the case against Becca, and if you convince me that she killed Cara, I’ll let Isobel go. How’s that for a deal? Then you two can ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after… Go on, the stage is yours.’
Her face fills with panic. ‘I can’t… I don’t…’
‘What’s the problem? You’re supposed to be a fucking actress, aren’t you?’ Jay barks. ‘Act it out! Come on, this is Courtroom Number One. You’re Queen’s Counsel for the prosecution in your fancy wig and gown. Don’t turn it down, love, it’s the best part you’ve had in years.’
‘But… I don’t know…’
‘Do as he says, darling,’ says Isobel gently. ‘Do it for me. Tell them what Becca did.’ Her voice is quivering with hope. But there’s no chance Jay will let Isobel escape – not now she’s confessed. Can’t she see that he’s just jerking her around? He wants to torment her, prolong her suffering. Finally Christopher Jay is in charge of the show, and he’s going to make the most of it.
Jay tuts. ‘If you’re not interested, just say.’
‘I can’t… can’t do it with you holding me like this.’
He thinks about it for a second, then releases her and steps back.
‘Don’t forget, I’m right behind you,’ he whispers menacingly. ‘Now get on with it. Give us the performance of your life.’
I sneak a look across the room to Alice’s bag, lying in the doorway where she dropped it. A small can of hairspray has rolled out onto the floor. Jay’s wrapped up in his absurd melodrama; he’s forgotten all about me. If I could run forward, grab the can and spray it in his face, then knee him in the balls… It’s got to be worth a try. Making sure his eyes are fixed on Alice, I slide myself quietly off my chair and slowly stand up.
Alice clears her throat. ‘Yes… well… Rebecca Ba—’
‘Not like that!’ shouts Jay. ‘Start again and do it properly! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…’
I take a small step forward.
‘Sorry, yes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury… Rebecca Banks was having an affair with you– I mean, with Christopher Jay– um, at the same time as he was seeing Cara. Cara Travers. Yes, and Becca was madly jealous because she loved Jay and wanted him all to herself.’
‘And? What happened that night? Come on, use your imagination. Act your heart out or I
’ll slit Isobel’s throat and have done with it.’
Another step.
‘Okay, okay… yes… It was about ten o’clock on the night of the murder. Rebecca Banks went to 31 Darkwater Terrace and knocked on the door. Cara opened it and her face fell.’
‘Go on,’ says Jay. ‘Let’s have some detail.’
And another. Like Grandmother’s Footsteps.
‘There she was, in her pretty yellow dress covered with roses, her long hair down like a princess. All excited and eager…’
‘That’s more like it. And what did Becca say?’
I’m getting nearer.
‘ “I’m a friend of Isobel, we need to talk. Can I come in?” ’
‘Hang on,’ says Jay, holding up his hand. ‘Becca wasn’t a friend of Isobel’s. Are you taking the piss? Get it right!’
Alice swallows. ‘Sorry. A friend of Jay, I mean. Yes, Cara let this stranger in, even offered her a glass of wine.’
Almost close enough now. Another small step.
Jay prods her in the back with the tip of the knife. ‘Enough scene-setting. Cara’s standing there in her yellow dress, looking as pretty as a picture – what happened next?’
Suddenly a trigger goes off somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain and I let out a gasp. Jay hears it and turns to me. ‘What is it?’
Fuck. ‘Nothing… nothing. I was just… listening.’
‘What are you doing standing up? Get back! Go on, right back! Sit in your chair and don’t move, or I’ll tie you up again.’ He waves the knife at me and I shuffle all the way back to the starting line, cursing myself.
‘This is getting boring,’ he says, turning his attention back to Alice. ‘Let’s get to the climax. Come on, little Miss Actress, show us what you’re made of. Who knows, when all this is over, Isobel might even give you a starring role in her next production.’
Alice clears her throat again. ‘Well… Cara and Becca started talking about… about Jay, and the conversation soon turned nasty. Cara got upset, hysterical. She said she loved Jay and she refused to give him up. They’d be together forever, she said.’ Her voice is shaking with emotion. ‘She told Becca to get out. There was a horrible, ugly fight, and before Becca knew it, she had a knife in her hand and… she stabbed Cara in the stomach.’
Jay claps his free hand against his thigh. ‘Very entertaining, well done. What do you say, Isobel? Not quite BAFTA material, but better than you thought, eh?’ His voice suddenly hardens. ‘It’s all complete crap, of course. Do you think I’m stupid? No way did Becca kill Cara – your case is full of holes. One: they didn’t know each other, never even met. Two: Cara and I were finished and she didn’t want anything more to do with me. As for my affair with Becca… I didn’t get together with her until after the trial.’
Alice turns around to face him. ‘Well, that’s what the police told me,’ she blusters. ‘They’ve got DNA proof too, they’ve worked it all out. It gets you off the hook, so if I were you I’d just go along—’
‘You’re lying to me.’
‘I’m not, I promise,’ she pleads, ‘on Isobel’s life! Please, please, you’ve got to believe me, Isobel didn’t kill Cara!’
But Jay’s right. Alice is lying. The yellow floral dress – I saw it in the scene-of-crime photos at Eliot’s flat. Crumpled above her knees, stained darkly with her blood. Only the jury would have been shown those photos. Apart from the police, the only other person who knew what Cara was wearing that night was her killer. Becca didn’t kill Cara. She wasn’t the stranger at the door, the ‘friend of Isobel’. It was—
I catch a sharp intake of breath and my hands shoot up to my face. I know. I know! And I can’t hold the truth in any longer. The words shoot out of my mouth and fly across the room like missiles. ‘It was you, wasn’t it, Alice?’
She swings back to me. ‘What?’
‘You were supposed to be lying, but you accidentally told the truth.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ Her eyes dart from side to side and she spins round to Jay, hopping like an animal trapped on all sides. ‘She’s just covering up for her crazy mother.’ She’s trying to sound dismissive, but there’s a telltale tremor in her voice.
I stand up and take a step closer. ‘All these years, the police have been looking in the wrong place, at the wrong relationship. The centre of the love triangle wasn’t Cara, it was Isobel. And who loves Isobel more than anyone? You! You went to Birmingham to tell Cara to back off, but she refused. There was a fight, just like you said. You stabbed her and left her to die at Darkwater Pool.’
‘I’ve never even been to Darkwater.’ Alice turns again and directs an appealing look towards Isobel.
‘Really?’ I say. ‘You mentioned the other night how creepy it was.’
‘Everyone knows that! Don’t listen to her, Izzy.’
‘What happened next? After you killed her? You didn’t panic, did you? Just put the knife in your bag, took the postcard and caught the early train back to London. You even had the nerve to offer to give Isobel an alibi for the night.’
‘Stop it, you stupid little bitch! You’re going to get us all killed.’
‘You see, only the murderer would know what dress Cara was wearing…’
‘I made that up – for dramatic effect.’
‘But you were right. Cara was wearing that dress. You remember the one, don’t you, Isobel?’
‘Yes,’ she whispers, ‘it was my favourite. She must have put it on to please me… Oh Alice… Alice… All these years we’ve been together, sharing our lives, sharing our bed. And all that time it was you – you killed my darling Cara…’
‘Your darling Cara?’ mocks Alice, spitting out the words. ‘She never loved you, not like I do. She would have hurt you, she would have broken your heart. I couldn’t let her do that. I had to stop her, Izzy. I did it for you, to protect you. I did it for us.’
There’s a long pause – long enough to rewind thirty years and fast-forward back to the present. And then the universe changes. It happens so quickly, I don’t really see it, but suddenly Jay has leapt on Alice, grabbing her from behind and driving the knife down into her stomach, heaving it out again and holding it triumphantly in the air, its blade thick with her blood. He lets her go, staggering back as she falls to her knees, groaning and clutching the hole in her gut. Isobel starts to hyperventilate, screwing up her eyes as if expecting to be next. But Jay drops the knife, then walks unsteadily into the hallway and out of the front door.
What have I done?
There’s blood everywhere. Everywhere. I lurch forward and turn Alice onto her side, pulling her knees up. Her mouth is open in an expression of astonishment and her limbs are twitching.
I rush over to her bag, pick it up by its bottom and tip out the rest of its contents. Mascara tubes, a lipstick, pens, a spiky comb, mirror, purse, car keys spill noisily onto the slate tiles. Picking up her phone, I dial 999, my trembling fingers sweaty on the screen. But there’s no signal. Of course there’s no fucking signal, this place is too remote. Jesus Christ, why didn’t they have a landline installed? I tuck the phone into my jeans pocket.
Alice has gone quiet. Her skin is as pale as paper and her eyes have rolled into the top of her head. The blood, black on the granite floor, is sticky beneath my feet. I bend down and pick up the knife, then go to Isobel and start hacking away at her bonds.
‘Listen, Isobel. I need you to drive until you get a signal. Jay took your keys, so take Alice’s car. I’m going to stay here and look after her.’ I pull off the ropes and remove the strips of towelling from her legs, but she doesn’t move. ‘Please Isobel, it’ll be quicker if you go, I can’t drive. If we don’t get an ambulance, Alice is going to die.’
‘Too late.’ Her voice sounds strange and distant.
‘No, if you hurry, you can save her.’
‘She let Cara bleed to death.’
‘Don’t think about that now. Listen to me!’ I shake her by the shoulders. ‘If you’re not up to
driving, you’d better stay. I’ll go on foot. You find some towels and press down on Alice’s wound. Keep pressing as hard as you can till the ambulance arrives. Promise me you’ll do that? Isobel?’ She doesn’t respond – just looks straight through me like I’m made of glass. ‘Isobel, please don’t let her die. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
I step outside the cottage into sudden darkness. It’s the middle of the night and the sky is jet black, studded with millions of stars. The rain has stopped and I can hear the endless roar of the sea nearby, underscoring the silence. There are no security lamps and tonight’s thin rim of a moon is hardly giving off any light. Does Alice’s phone have a torch? I swipe into her apps, finding it and shooting the bar up to maximum. Even then, it’s almost impossible to see where I’m going. I inch my way forward, shining a dim path over the gravel, looking for the start of the track we drove down to get here. But it’s pitch black and I’m feeling disorientated. There seem to be two paths here, but I don’t which one leads back to the road.
‘Help!’ I shout. ‘Ambulance! Police!’ My call echoes uselessly through the darkness. If I could just get a signal on the phone… I run around the back of the house, through the wet, uncut grass of what must be a garden, holding the phone up and twisting it around, praying for it to leap into action. As I move further away from the cottage, a single bar appears; it flickers for a brief joyous moment then fades to nothing. But it’s hopeful. Maybe I’ll get a better signal nearer the sea.
I find a gate at the bottom of the garden and step onto a deeply furrowed farmer’s field, uneven and muddy. My torch passes over something green growing in straight lines, and I find the edge, where there’s more room to walk. After a few unsteady paces, I stop and hold the phone up to the sky, squinting in the darkness to see the signal. The single bar appears again and my heart leaps with hope, but as I walk on I trip over a jagged stone. I stagger forward, trying to save myself, and the phone flies out of my grasp. I land badly, scraping my elbows and knees. Now I can’t see a fucking thing…