Am I Guilty

by Jackie Kabler

  There was a suspicious look on Oliver’s face, but he looked slowly from his father to me and back again, then nodded.

  ‘Sure. Zander and all that. Sorry, Flora. Hope you’re OK.’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks, sweetie,’ I said. ‘Just a bit embarrassed your dad caught me having a sniffle. I think I’ll go upstairs and have a bath and an early night.’

  I turned back to Greg, not quite meeting his eyes.

  ‘Thanks, Greg, for being so nice. Goodnight.’

  ‘’Night, Flora. Take it easy.’

  His tone was light, casual, and I slipped gratefully out of the room, patting Oliver on the arm and smiling at him as I passed. He smiled back, and I was relieved to see that the look of suspicion was gone. Maybe he hadn’t seen the kiss, after all? Shit, why had Greg done that? And why hadn’t I stopped him? What was it with these bloody men?

  Deeply grateful that the girls were in bed and that Annabelle had gone to the cinema with some of her mummy friends, I climbed the stairs to my room, locked the door and ran a deep, bubbly bath. I stayed in it for nearly an hour, topping it up at regular intervals, feeling my muscles finally relax and the tension in my neck and shoulders ease.

  I’d have a little chat with Oliver tomorrow, I thought – get him on his own and make sure everything was OK. I was pretty sure that even if it wasn’t, even if he had seen something of what had just happened with Greg, I’d be able to make it all right. I knew how to handle Oliver. But Greg … I wasn’t so sure how to handle Greg. Keeping away from him was the obvious answer, but it didn’t seem to be that easy. I was still pretty certain he didn’t actually fancy me, though, despite what he had done tonight. It was like the last time, when he’d got me alone in his study. He wanted to know what I knew. He was scared, and that made him dangerous.

  I wriggled my toes against the tap and thought back to the night I found out. It was a Friday night, and Rupert was away on business – or, more likely, away shagging bloody Mia, again – and Thea had called to say she was stuck on a slow-moving train from Glasgow, where she’d been on a buying trip to a kilt factory or sporran shop or some such thing. Isla had arrived early evening anyway, as she did most Fridays, so once the kids were in bed we’d ended up chatting in the lounge, over a bottle of Prosecco. And that’s when she told me.

  To this day, I don’t know why she did – it’s not like we were the best of friends – we got on OK by that point, but not to the level of sharing our deepest secrets. I found it weird, how even though she and Thea were so close, obsessively so at times, she would sometimes say really nasty things about my boss. I’d thought about it a lot, trying to apply what I’d learned in my psychology classes at uni to Isla and Thea’s relationship, trying to analyse the complexities of it. And I’d come to the conclusion that Isla’s feeling of no longer being number one, of coming in fourth in Thea’s affections behind Rupert and the children, was sometimes hard for her to handle, and that her way of dealing with this perceived snub, this demotion, was to occasionally let rip at Thea, try to humiliate her. To her face, now and again – I’d heard a few bitchy, vicious remarks being exchanged between them, although their rows never lasted long – but more often, behind her back, to me or even to Rupert, who would be taken aback on occasion to find Isla backing him against her friend. That night, though, she dropped the bombshell.

  ‘We were out, Thea and I, and we were on one of our biggest ever benders. I mean, we can both drink, but that night we were so pissed. I mean, properly pissed. Rupert was away, and Nell was at a friend’s for the night, and I don’t remember where you were. It wasn’t long after you’d started working here. Anyway, we were in All Bar One, and …’

  And she told me the whole story. How two men had come in, acquaintances of theirs, both out without their wives, and how the four of them had carried on drinking together until closing time, and then somebody had suggested, half-jokingly, that it might be fun to get a hotel room and order room service and have a bit of a party, and how they’d ended up getting not one hotel room but two, and then the obvious had happened. And how Isla had actually ended up dating her guy, Alan, for a month or two afterwards – ‘well, I say dating. Having an affair with, more accurately,’ she said – but how it had then fizzled out, and she hadn’t seen him since. But how things had turned out a little differently for Thea. Because, a few weeks later, Thea had discovered she was pregnant. She’d hoped, prayed, that the baby was Rupert’s, even though she’d had a feeling, right from the beginning. But when Zander was born she’d managed to do a sneaky DNA test, and her fears were realized. The baby wasn’t Rupert’s. He was the child of the man she’d had the one-night stand with. Horrified, she had told nobody except Isla, desperate to stop Rupert finding out, and as far as I knew he still didn’t know, still thought Zander had been his baby. She didn’t tell the biological father either, Isla said.

  ‘But I’m pretty sure he suspects, Flora. Because just look at him. Look how like his real dad Zander looks.’

  And she was right. Zander looked exactly like his real dad. That hair, those eyes. The likeness was, when you thought about it, unmistakable, and it still astounded me that, even now, it seemed that nobody else had ever guessed, or even suspected. How nobody else knew that Zander was, quite, quite obviously, Greg Garrington’s son.

  26

  THEA

  ‘Thea, I’m really not sure what your barrister can do with this information in court. I mean, it’s great that you’re remembering things, finally. But – I mean, are you remembering, really? We’d need proof, you know? And … well, how likely is it, when you think about it? That somebody deliberately put your baby back outside in your car, on one of the hottest days of the year? Who would do that? The house was full of your family and friends. Why would any of them do something so wicked? What would the motive be? It would be murder, plain and simple. And with not a shred of evidence? Unless somebody actually confessed, you’d have a pretty impossible time convincing a jury.’

  Bernard Gilchrist grimaced at me, tapping his pen on the legal pad on the desk in front of him. My solicitor was a short, rotund man with cheeks so pink they looked as if he spent several minutes scrubbing them with wire wool every morning. To his left, his colleague Robina Watson was nodding, agreeing with him.

  ‘I feel for you, Thea, I really do. It’s a terrible thing you’re dealing with. But you took responsibility for your child’s death right from the beginning, remember? To change your story now … I mean, the jury just needs to decide whether the mitigating factors – your probable postnatal depression, your alcohol issues at the time – are enough to find you not guilty of involuntary manslaughter. To begin to suggest at this late stage that the baby’s death wasn’t down to you at all, that somebody killed him … well …’ She sighed heavily. She was in her fifties, an attractive woman with auburn hair in a severe, upswept bun, her skin free of make-up other than a slash of vibrant red lipstick. ‘I just don’t think it’s going to help, to start throwing accusations around, with zero evidence. I’m sorry, Thea.’

  I looked from one to the other, a tight knot forming in my chest. I knew they were right, but I’d woken up this morning feeling more convinced than ever that no matter how impossible it was, I had to try to work out why I was so sure now that things didn’t happen the way everyone said they did. The fact that my solicitors clearly thought I was crazy was a blow, but I’d half-expected it. I was going to have to do this on my own.

  That afternoon, I cleared all my Just Enfant paperwork off the dining table and sat down with my notebook. It was raining, one of those raw, early February days when it never seems to get quite bright enough to turn the lights off, the wind making the windows rattle, the sky bruised, grey with angry purple patches.

  Nell was coming home later, after school, but I had several hours before she’d be dropped off, and I needed to do this now, feeling that if I wrote it all down it might suddenly become clearer. It was probably pointless, but at least I would feel that I
was doing something. So, how should I go about it? I thought for a moment, trying to separate my own feelings from this, to think about it dispassionately. I needed to think like a detective, I decided – needed to treat it like a crime scene, with an unsolved murder. If I was Poirot or Miss Marple or someone like that, I’d treat everyone as a potential suspect, wouldn’t I? And then look for motive. So that’s what I’d do.

  I began with a list of everyone who’d been in the house that afternoon. Me, obviously, and Isla, and Nell. Flora. Rupert, later. And two Garringtons, Greg and Millie. Seven of us, but only four to consider if I was ruling myself out, and the children too. Eight-year-old girls didn’t kill babies, especially as both Nell and Millie had adored Zander so much. He was like a real live doll to those two. I crossed out their names and looked at the list, trying to pretend that I didn’t know these people, trying to be objective. Isla, Flora, Rupert and Greg. Shit, if any of them saw that I was doing this they’d think I’d finally lost it, wouldn’t they? But I’d started now. I took a deep breath, cracked my knuckles and added a column to the right headed ‘Possible Motive’.

  Right, Isla first. I wrote down (did she drive car home?) in brackets after her name, then paused. I still had no idea what that would signify, but it needed to be asked, and noted. My pen hovered on the motive column. God, this was hard. Then I wrote: was unhappy about me having children, especially when Zander was born. Resented time I spent with them and not with her.

  Hardly a motive for murder though, I thought. Nobody kills a baby just because they’re not getting to spend as much time as they used to with the child’s mother. Ludicrous. Still, carry on. OK, Flora. I blew out forcefully. This was stupid. I couldn’t remotely think of a motive for Flora. She was good at her job, good with the kids, kept herself to herself … I left the line blank for now and moved on to Rupert. Shit. OK.

  We hadn’t been getting on. He hadn’t bonded well with Zander. Possibly suspected he wasn’t his father.

  I stared at the words. Written down, it looked so callous, so cruel. But, looking back, if I was honest I think Rupert knew, or at least suspected, right from the start. It was just so bloody obvious. Zander looked so … so different, from any of us. I was so dark, my hair such a deep brown it was almost black, Nell’s too, our eyes both a matching chocolate. And although Rupert shaved his head, what hair he did have was brown too, not quite as dark as ours but still dark. Then there was Zander – the blondest, most blue-eyed baby ever, his hair almost white, his eyes bright as a summer sky.

  I’d been horrified, when I’d seen him, when the doctor first put him on my chest in the delivery room, when Rupert had leaned in to drop a kiss on his new son’s head. Well, not horrified, not by Zander, that sounds dreadful – I loved him desperately, almost painfully, from that first second, just as I had Nell. But I’d hoped so fervently, so feverishly, through my entire pregnancy, that my gut feeling was wrong, that this would be my husband’s child. That I wouldn’t be punished for my one, huge mistake, for getting drunk and sleeping with Greg. That I’d been weak enough, yet again, to be led astray by Isla, and this time with unthinkable consequences.

  It had been a moment of madness, something I’d bitterly regretted from the moment I’d crawled out of that hotel room bed, something that had haunted me every day since. But as soon as I saw Zander, in that first second, I knew. I knew he was Greg’s, and that a lifetime of deceit and pain lay ahead.

  Rupert said nothing, not initially, but I would see him sometimes, in those early days, staring at Zander while he slept, running a finger across that white-blond hair, a slight frown on his face.

  I managed to avoid Greg for about two weeks, sending Flora or Nell to the door when he came to drop off or collect Millie, but I knew I couldn’t do it forever. And so came the day when Rupert was at home, all of us there together, and Greg brought both Millie and Sienna round, the younger girl desperate to meet this beautiful baby her big sister kept coming home full of stories about.

  Zander was in his pram in the corner of the room, and the three Garringtons stood around it, Sienna and Millie cooing and stroking, while I sat rigid in an armchair, waiting for the inevitable, my stomach churning so badly I thought I might actually vomit.

  It didn’t take long. Greg stared into the pram for a moment, then turned to look at me, his face such a picture of fear and realization that for a moment I was transfixed, unable to move or speak. Then he turned away again and I knew that he knew, and then I looked at my husband and instantly knew that he knew too. His eyes were glued to the little tableau in the corner, flitting between Greg and the white-blonde heads of Millie and Sienna, and there was so much pain in his eyes that my heart suddenly felt as if it was breaking.

  And still – and this was almost the weirdest, most bizarre thing about this whole ludicrous situation – nobody said a word. Not ever. I never admitted it, Rupert never asked me, Greg never confronted me. Why? Why on earth did none of us ever talk about it? Were we really all happy to live a lie, live out this unspoken conspiracy? It seemed so.

  Rupert never spent much alone time with Zander, not like he had with Nell, never truly bonded, but when we were together as a family he was fine, playing with the baby, feeding him, smiling at him. Nobody would ever have known. How crazy was that? He just carried on, and he and Greg carried on acting totally normally when they were together, too. They were never best mates, but on social occasions, at parties, they’d always end up drinking beer together, chatting football or cricket or politics or whatever, and that didn’t change.

  The way they behaved, both of them, meant that I was able to kid myself, a lot of the time, that it was all OK, that neither of them knew anything at all. And I took that, and I ran with it, because that way I could live with the guilt a little more easily. That way, the shame of what I’d done wouldn’t completely destroy me. And so that was how it was, for months. All three of us, living a big fat lie. Four of us, if you count Isla, the only person I’d actually told. All of us, sharing an unspoken secret.

  I’d stopped breastfeeding Zander within a couple of months. My milk had begun to dry up, something I was still convinced was a physical symptom of my inner turmoil, and he wasn’t getting enough food, waking in the night, crying with hunger. I knew Rupert thought it was strange, uncaring of me, to stop so soon, but how could I explain?

  By then, I was as sure as I could be about Zander’s parentage, but even so, I needed to know for definite, just in case. So, like in a scene from a soap opera, I furtively rummaged through Greg’s jacket in the hall one day when he was drinking coffee in the kitchen while he waited for Millie. I found a comb, which I sent off to one of those online DNA test companies. And of course, the test was conclusive.

  Probability of paternity given the DNA evidence is at least 99.9999% compared to an untested random man of the UK population.

  I still remembered that there were four 9s after the decimal point.

  I started avoiding Annabelle after that, too, making excuses to rush off when I saw her at the school gates or during Millie/Nell exchanges, although I was pretty certain that she, like most people, never suspected a thing. She never even remarked on Zander’s colouring, just admired his good looks.

  Poor, innocent, sweet Annabelle. I hated myself even more each time I bumped into her, feeling lower and more depressed daily. It was, later on, easy to explain those feelings away as postnatal depression, to use that as an excuse for what happened, but I knew it was the guilt that was predominantly to blame. It was around then that my drinking got worse, my need to escape from what I had done leading me to seek oblivion from time to time, the strain of living with it every day sometimes overwhelming. And still, the secret remained a secret, even though it wasn’t a secret at all, not really, because we all knew the truth. Twisted, wrong, perverse, wasn’t it? But that was what we all chose to do, to ignore it, to carry on. And so it continued.

  I dragged my thoughts back from the convoluted mess my life had become and tr
ied to concentrate on my list. Rupert.

  We hadn’t been getting on. He hadn’t bonded well with Zander. Possibly suspected he wasn’t his father.

  I crossed out the words ‘possibly suspected’ and instead wrote ‘knew’. He did, of course he did. But was that a motive, really? If you think a child isn’t yours, you don’t hurt the child, do you? Of course you don’t. It’s not the child’s fault. You’re more likely to want to hurt the mother, punish her for being unfaithful. Although … my breath started to quicken. What would hurt a mother more than to kill her child? And even worse, to kill her child and make her think she had done it? It would be the ultimate revenge, wouldn’t it – to take away the thing that is most precious to your cheating, lying bitch of a wife, and then get her locked up for years too, as a sort of bonus? Oh my god. Could Rupert … was it possible?

  I flung the pen down onto the table, where it landed with a clatter, and stood up, my whole body suddenly shaking. It was the most logical motive so far, but Rupert? This was my husband, a man who I’d loved and trusted for years, a man who I’d rarely even seen roused to temper until recent months, never mind hurt anyone.

  I started to pace the room, my mind racing. Rupert couldn’t, wouldn’t. And yet, grief and anger and betrayal might do terrible things to someone, might cause them to do things they would never normally dream of. And Zander wasn’t, after all, Rupert’s son. They were not related, not at all. Could what I had done, my deceit, have made my husband do something so terrible? If it did, then it was my fault after all, that Zander had died. It was all down to me, whichever way you looked at it.

  I stopped pacing, trying to calm myself, deliberately slowing my breathing. Stop winding yourself up, Thea, I thought. This is all just speculation. Finish what you’re doing first, then think about what it all might mean. I sat down again, reached for the pen and tapped it on the paper next to Flora’s name. I needed to write something next to it. I thought for a moment, then scribbled: was sometimes annoyed by his crying when she was trying to work. It was pathetic, but it was all I had. And it had been Flora who’d found Zander, who’d run frantically inside with my dead baby in her arms, shaking and crying, horrified. You can’t fake that sort of shock, that grief. This wasn’t Flora. Move on.