The First Mistake

by Sandie Jones

  ‘Ah, that’s a shame as I’m literally coming past it. Never mind, perhaps another time.’

  ‘Well, if you’re passing, I suppose you could pop in. It’s all supposedly locked up – health and safety and all that.’ He laughs throatily. ‘But if you go around the back, there’s a loose hoarding that you can slide across. Don’t tell anyone I told you though, or they’ll come down on me like a ton of bricks. I’ve already been paid a visit because kids treat it like a playground, and if anything happens to one of them, apparently it’ll be on my head. How ridiculous is that?’

  ‘Crazy,’ says Alice, desperate to get off the phone as Beth gives her the thumbs-up.

  ‘Perhaps we could meet for dinner to discuss the way forward. I’d hate for you to miss out on this opportunity, just because—’

  Alice cuts him off, unable to listen to this odious little man any longer.

  ‘Fine, I’ll give you a call tomorrow,’ she says before putting the phone down and turning to Beth. ‘Now what?’

  ‘Just ask Nathan to meet you there,’ says Beth authoritatively.

  ‘But what for?’

  Beth turns to look at her and they share a momentary understanding. An unspoken agreement that everything will be all right.

  ‘Where the hell are you?’ barks Nathan through the loudspeaker. ‘What’s going on? We’ve got to complete on Japan.’

  Alice feels bizarrely detached – as if she’s landed in a movie of someone else’s life.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ he goes on. ‘Time’s running out.’

  ‘Who for, Nathan?’

  ‘What do you mean, who for? Us. You. AT Designs . . .’ He sounds slightly hysterical. ‘If we don’t do it now, we’re going to miss this opportunity. I’ve worked so hard for this, Alice.’

  ‘You have,’ she agrees, though on the opposing side to her, it seems. ‘Meet me at the Temple Homes development on Bradbury Avenue.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘We got the go-ahead on the job I pitched for.’

  ‘This isn’t the right time Alice – we need to get Japan done first.’

  Alice looks at Beth, her eyes wide, her thoughts frantic.

  ‘Just get him there,’ hisses Beth, under her breath.

  ‘The only chance of getting “this done” is if you meet me at Bradbury Avenue.’

  ‘Jesus, I’m on my way,’ he says gruffly.

  ‘Wait here,’ says Beth, as they park up in one of the adjacent roads to the Temple Homes site.

  ‘What? No!’ says Alice as she wrestles to undo her seatbelt. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Just give me five minutes with him,’ says Beth, leaning back into the car. ‘He needs to know what he stands to lose if he doesn’t give me the money back.’

  Alice leans her head back onto the headrest and laughs falsely.

  ‘Do you honestly believe that he’s going to pay you back?’ she asks.

  ‘If he knows he’s about to lose everything . . . you, the girls . . .’

  ‘Do you think he cares enough?’ says Alice impatiently. ‘What part of his behaviour in the last hour has made you think that he has mine and the children’s best interests at heart? He thinks he’s about to defraud me of a million pounds. He’ll be intending to leave immediately – he’d have to, before I found out that he’d sold me a worthless piece of shit. Do you honestly think that on his way to wherever he’s going to go and hide, he’ll suddenly develop a conscience and think, Oh, hang on – I’d better pay Beth back her mother’s life savings from ten years ago?

  ‘If what you’ve told me is true, we need to work together to make sure he never does this to anyone else, ever again. It’s the best we can hope for.’ She softens her tone. ‘I’ve done what you’ve asked me to do. Now let me go and speak to him.’

  Beth considers this for a moment, as if sizing up the options. ‘I’ll give you five minutes, then I’m coming in.’

  Alice walks around the back of the boarded-up site until she comes to a loose panel that she can just about squeeze through. She looks up at the four-storey building, its slab floors and ceilings being held in place by metal stilts. A dormant crane stands against the open-sided structure.

  She climbs the concrete staircases up to the top floor and looks down to where Beth’s car is parked. Nathan’s BMW speeds down another adjacent street before coming to an abrupt stop as he bumps it up onto the pavement. Everything about him looks chaotic, whilst Alice feels strangely calm.

  He finds the same loose panel as she did and jumps over the pipework laid out along the muddy trenches.

  ‘Alice!’ he calls out.

  ‘I’m up here,’ she replies, the whipping wind carrying her voice.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ he says when he reaches her, a little out of breath. ‘Why have you dragged me out here? We haven’t got time for this, you need to authorize the bank and Yahamoto and get Japan done.’

  ‘I’m not completing on Japan,’ she says, her voice wobbling.

  He starts to come towards her. ‘You have to, darling. We’ll lose a hundred thousand pounds if we don’t.’

  ‘Is that not enough for you, Nathan? Wouldn’t you have been wise just to take the deposit money and run?’

  ‘Wh-what?’ he says, as his eyes slide from side to side. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘But you wanted to hold out for the big one, didn’t you?’ Alice goes on. ‘You got greedy. What were you going to do with the money, Nathan? Do you have another life all lined up, ready to walk into? Were you going to use the money to charm your next victim? Like you did me.’

  ‘Darling, you’re not well,’ he says, opening his arms out to her. ‘I know you’re back on the tablets, you’re drinking too much, you’re allowing things to get to you and mess with your head. You need help.’

  Without even thinking, she steps forward and slaps him hard across the face. He holds his burning cheek with his hand and looks at her in shock.

  The mask finally slips. ‘You’re going to go through with Japan,’ he hisses. ‘Get on the phone now and authorize completion.’

  She stands there, jaw set, but her heart is beating so fast she’s sure she can feel it banging against her ribcage. ‘I’m not doing it, Nathan.’

  He lunges at her and pins her against a concrete pillar. ‘You don’t have a choice,’ he says, his breathing heavy. ‘Just get on the phone and do it.’

  ‘No,’ she croaks, shaking her head as much as she’s able to.

  He hits the wall above her head with his fist. ‘Fucking do it. Now!’

  Alice recoils as his knuckles pass within millimetres of her face. She feels unable to breathe, her lungs burning, as she struggles to keep calm. Nathan grabs her roughly by her cheeks and she’s sure she’s stopped breathing altogether.

  ‘Nathan!’ calls out Beth from the top of the stairs.

  His head spins around. ‘You?’ he questions, as if unable to believe what he’s seeing. He looks from Beth to Alice and back again. ‘What the fuck . . .?’

  ‘Is it true, Nathan?’ asks Alice, his grip on her face weakening. ‘Did you steal Beth’s money?’

  His eyes are wide, his pupils dilated.

  ‘You owe me,’ hisses Beth.

  ‘For what?’ laughs Nathan hollowly. ‘It was your own greed that brought you down.’

  ‘You killed my mother,’ she says.

  ‘That’s a little over-dramatic, isn’t it? Did I force either of you to give me money? Or did you give it to me willingly?’

  Alice wants to close her ears, so that she can’t hear what her husband was capable of in a different life.

  In this life, she says to herself.

  ‘You were going to do it again, weren’t you?’ says Alice, trying desperately hard not to cry as the reality hits her. ‘You were prepared to walk away from our marriage and children, for money.’

  ‘I’ve done my time,’ he spits. ‘There isn’t another man on this earth who would have put up with what I’ve had to. Co
nstantly having to reassure you, convince you that nothing was going to happen to me, that I wasn’t going to leave you like your beloved Tom did. You sucked me dry, Alice.’

  ‘Don’t you dare put yourself in the same sentence as him,’ she screams, hitting Nathan’s chest with all the strength that she can muster. ‘You will never be the man he was. He was cut from a different cloth. You don’t even come close.’

  He grabs hold of her wrists and leans in so that his face is just millimetres from hers. ‘Cut from a different cloth, you say? I very much doubt that. I think we’re a lot more similar than you think.’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ says Beth, stepping forward.

  ‘Or what?’ he snarls.

  Beth raises her arm to hit him, but Nathan catches it and twists it up and around her back. His face is distorted and beads of sweat are dotted on his forehead as he moves towards the edge of the building, taking Beth with him.

  ‘Get on the phone,’ he says to Alice. ‘Authorize the deal.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asks. ‘When did you become this person I don’t recognize?’

  ‘You made me like this,’ he spits. ‘You, her, him . . .’

  ‘Him?’ Alice questions.

  ‘Darling Tom,’ he says, snidely. ‘The golden child who could do no wrong.’

  Alice shakes her head in confusion, whilst Beth winces as he tightens his grip on her.

  ‘You’re not making any sense,’ says Alice. ‘What has Tom got to do with any of this?’

  ‘He took what was mine,’ says Nathan. ‘You both did.’

  Alice looks to Beth, her expression as puzzled as her own.

  ‘You think that AT Designs is all yours?’ he shouts at Alice. ‘Well, it isn’t. Whatever Tom put in, half of it was mine. So all this time you’ve been bleating about it being Tom’s company, how his interests have got to be protected, how you’ve got to do right by him . . .’

  ‘Nathan, you’re . . . you’re not making any sense,’ stutters Alice, feeling as if she’s being suffocated by his words. ‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’

  ‘A million pounds for Japan is what I’m due. It’s rightfully mine. It’s what I should have had all along.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Alice.

  ‘Because Tom and I are cut from the same cloth.’

  Alice shakes her head. ‘You couldn’t be further from the man he was if you tried. You’re nothing alike.’

  Nathan throws his head back and laughs. ‘And yet so similar, don’t you think?’ He waits for Alice to take the bait, but she looks at him, dumbfounded.

  ‘Come on,’ he exclaims. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you how similar we are? How our profiles match in certain lights? How our mannerisms mirror each other?’

  Alice can’t separate her lucid thoughts from the living nightmare she finds herself in. She thinks back to seeing Nathan walk into the garden of the psychiatric unit; feels his warm eyes taking in his surroundings before they settle on her. They’d seemed gentle, familiar. Had she been drawn to him because there was a comforting resemblance to the man she’d just lost?

  Had the way he sometimes ran his hand through his hair reminded her of someone else? Had his slightly lopsided grin subconsciously infiltrated her brain, masquerading as someone else’s? Had she fallen for him because he seemed so much like Tom?

  ‘Wh-what are you saying?’ falters Alice.

  ‘I’m Tom’s brother,’ says Nathan bluntly.

  46

  The floor feels like it’s falling away as Alice’s legs buckle beneath her. She lands heavily and tries to focus but everything around her is spinning.

  ‘Alice!’ she hears a woman cry, but it sounds muffled and a long way away. She turns towards the direction she thinks it came from, though she can only see the blurred outline of two bodies close together.

  ‘Y-you . . . you can’t be,’ she croaks, her mouth feeling like it’s filled with cotton wool. ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Well, you’re looking at the impossible,’ he says.

  ‘You’re Daniel?’ she asks, unable to process the question, let alone the answer.

  ‘Oh, so he did talk about me,’ says Nathan acerbically.

  Alice can barely speak, the words that are circling in her head are banging against the sides of her skull.

  ‘When did you know?’ she asks. ‘Why didn’t you tell me who you were when you found out who I was?’

  ‘Oh darling, I’ve always known who you were,’ he says patronizingly. ‘As soon as Tom died, I came looking for you.’

  ‘No, no,’ says Alice, shaking her head, refusing to believe what he’s saying. She thinks back to that day in the unit. He was there to see someone else. He was there by chance. ‘No, you’re lying. You came to see someone else.’

  ‘I came there to see you,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d be desperate by then, and you were. You would have clung to anyone who showed you sympathy.’

  Alice is still shaking her head vehemently.

  ‘That was the easy bit,’ Nathan goes on. ‘If I’d known I’d have to wait all this time to get the money, well . . .’

  ‘But . . . but why?’ Alice manages.

  Nathan’s face clouds over. ‘Did you honestly think it was fair that the inheritance from my parents, our parents, should all go to Tom?’

  The Evans family had split into two uneven factions before Alice and Tom had even met. It seemed they’d done all they could to help their volatile and capricious son and brother. And by the time Alice was welcomed into the family fold, there was little to show for Daniel’s existence aside from a few childhood photos on the mantelpiece.

  Alice remembers them being the ironic backdrop as her and Tom, along with his heartbroken parents, sat in their dining room, stunned by the news that their youngest son had been convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years in prison. His mother’s face was crumpled with grief, as if she’d lost the only child she’d ever had, and his father’s stiff upper lip was close to collapsing.

  ‘I don’t want that boy’s name mentioned ever again,’ he’d said. ‘He’s been trouble ever since he was sixteen and there’s no part of me that’s surprised to find him in the position he is now. It’s as if this was always going to be his path. Well, long may he walk it, but he’ll be doing it on his own.’ He’d put his arm around his wife and she fell into him, her agony unlike anything Alice had ever seen.

  ‘You can’t just freeze him out,’ Tom had said softly. ‘He’ll always be your son.’

  ‘He’s no son of mine,’ his dad had said.

  ‘They disowned you,’ Alice says to the man she no longer knows. Her eyes regain their focus as she stares at him. There is no part of him that she recognizes as her husband. ‘They wanted nothing more to do with you.’

  ‘But Tom would have put them up to that. I know he would.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong,’ says Alice. ‘He tried to do the exact opposite, but your parents wouldn’t hear of it.’

  ‘I only have your word to take for that.’

  ‘So when you came out of prison, you assumed Tom’s name and date of birth?’ Even as she’s saying it, it sounds too absurd to be true.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t exactly use my real name,’ he says, half-laughing. ‘As a convicted fraudster I was going to find it hard going. Tom, or Thomas as my parents used to call him, was, apparently, a good upstanding citizen, and as I knew more about him than anyone else, he seemed the obvious choice.’

  Beth looks at Alice, wide-eyed, as his admission takes hold.

  ‘So, you planned all this from the outset,’ says Beth, her voice shaking. ‘You were always looking to defraud me. It wasn’t just an opportunistic one-off.’

  Nathan laughs heartily. ‘What? You think I fell in love with you first, and robbed you second?’

  ‘But, I—’ starts Beth.

  ‘I also knew who you were before I met you. Those dating sites are an invaluable source of vulnerable, needy women, looking for a knight in shi
ning armour. I didn’t need to read too hard between the lines of your profile to find out who you were. By the time we met, I knew your full name, what you did for a living, who your father was and where your mother lived. All I had to do then was wait for you to get greedy – and boy, did you get greedy.’

  Beth turns and raises her free hand, striking him on the face. He pulls her hair, yanking her head back, and she screams.

  ‘Beth!’ Alice calls out as she struggles to get up.

  Beth is writhing, frantically trying to get a grip on him as he stands behind her with his hand furled in her hair, pulling on her scalp.

  Alice runs unsteadily to where they’re standing, perilously close to the edge. ‘Get away from her,’ she screams, raising her arms. But just before she gets there, Beth kicks up with her foot, her heeled boot landing square in Nathan’s crotch. He momentarily lets go of her as he doubles over in pain and in that instant she pushes him with all her might.

  He stumbles backwards as if in slow motion, and Alice tries to grab him, but instead of taking her hand, he reaches for Beth’s. Beth squeezes her eyes shut as she’s pulled towards the sheer drop, and in that split second Alice has to decide who she’s going to save. She lunges at Beth with everything she’s got, tackling her side-on. The force sends both Beth and Nathan upwards, seemingly flying through the air, their arms flailing. Alice reaches out and feels a hand grip onto hers. She closes her fingers around it as tightly as she can and pulls back with every shred of strength she can muster.

  It’s only then, as the body falls heavily on top of her, that Alice is aware of the choice she’s made.

  It was the right one.

  EPILOGUE

  I clamped my eyes shut as the floor fell away beneath my feet. The air whipped through my hair and I steeled myself for the cold, hard ground that was coming up to meet me.

  I forgot to breathe – it seems that when you think it’s going to be the last breath you take, you want to hold onto it for just that little bit longer.

  Alice could only save one of us, and after everything I’ve put her through, it didn’t deserve to be me. But it seems that a true friend will always be there, to catch you when you fall.