The Dinner Guest

by B P Walter

  I drive the car smoothly up to the Ashtons’s manor. I sold the BMW late last year, swapping it for a lower, smaller Porsche. I felt I needed a change. Best leave the past in the past. The house on Carlyle Square has also been sold; I set the ball rolling as soon as I could. I was curious to find how little attachment to it I had after what happened. I just knew that was a section of my life that had come to an end. Titus had no wish to stay there either. After living between my mother’s Wilton Crescent property and the manor in Essex, Titus and I had temporarily moved into a hotel. We needed some space away from my parents, even if they thought it was silly when we could have stayed in either of their properties. But there was something about the impersonal anonymity of hotel life that suited us both in that strange hinterland between Rachel being charged and the trial. Those autumn months where both of us seemed to be sleepwalking through our lives. I think my mother would have liked Titus to move in with her, but the boy was adamant he wanted to stay with me. I don’t know whether she was afraid for his safety, remaining in the care of a murderer, or if she just wanted to keep an eye on him. Whichever it was, she’d finally relented, pleased at least that we’d picked The Hari, a hotel within walking distance of her house.

  Last week, however, we’d let our rooms go and had moved – permanently for now – into Marwood Manor. Lord and Lady Ashton had recently decided the place was getting too big for both of them to be rattling round in at their age, and had moved into the still sizable, 1980s-built annex to the north of one of the surrounding fields. They assured us they wouldn’t bother us every day and that Rupert, Titus, and I would more or less have the run of the manor to ourselves.

  The question of Elena is a thorny one and something that has been solved only temporarily. On the lucky side, she decided to take a job working for the Republican party in the US. She’ll be out of our hair most of the time, leaving her daughter in the UK to live with her father in his Clerkenwell apartment. It suited their fractured family dynamic just fine. Especially since she and Titus still seemed to be equally keen on spending time with each other.

  I arrive at Marwood at about 3pm to find Titus and Rupert playing tennis in one of the courts round the back of the house.

  ‘Who’s winning?’ I call out as I watch them from the side.

  ‘We’ve rather lost count,’ shouts a breathless Rupert as he only just catches a ball fired from Titus from the left.

  After their tennis match, Rupert and I walk back to the house whilst Titus practises his serve. ‘A letter came for you today,’ he says. ‘I didn’t open it, but I think … I think you should read it immediately.’

  I look at him, puzzled. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think it’s come from HMP Graze Field.’

  The name doesn’t click for a second. Then one word enters my mind with a combination of a jolt and a shiver. ‘Rachel.’

  He nods, then walks over to a wooden tray on a side table near the front door and hands me the envelope. I open it, read for a few seconds, then look back at him and nod. ‘It’s from her.’

  Graze Field Prison is an imposing, seventeenth-century manor house, now repurposed to hold female convicts and young offenders. It looks like something out of a horror movie as I approach it in the car and follow the signs to the car park round to the side near some fields. The prison entrance, then the process of signing in and being searched to get inside, is a lot more mundane and routine than I expected, although by the time I’m seated with everybody, the trepidation of what I might find on the other side is starting to get to me. I see Rachel immediately when we’re sent through into a large room resembling a school hall. It’s not that she looks particularly different from the other women in here; it’s her body language that sets her apart. She looks as cool and alert as if she were a manager of a company about to interview a prospective new member of the team.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, trying to keep my voice as calm as she looks. I’m not sure I succeed, as it comes out as more of a low bark.

  ‘Hello Charlie,’ she says, and gives me a thin smile. I notice now how her physical appearance has markedly changed since I last saw her at the trial. Although she always had a slim frame, she’s lost a notable amount of weight. Her jaw and neckline are now pronounced and sharp, giving her a more unforgiving, maybe even crueller, look than before. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  I take my seat, feeling awkward and a little nauseous. I find it hard to meet her eyes; she keeps hers trained on me, like a sniper fixing on a mark. ‘Well, like you said in your letter, I didn’t really have much of a choice.’

  ‘That’s right.’ She gives a short, business-like nod, as if satisfied I understand her message. I get the feeling she’s enjoying having the upper hand here. ‘Since we don’t have long, and I think we’ll both agree that we’d be better not to make meetings like this too frequent, I just thought it might be good for both of us to go through a few things before we start off properly.’

  I frown at her. ‘Start what off properly?’

  She smiles. ‘The rest of our lives, of course.’

  The smile unnerves me. Makes me wary about what she’s about to say.

  ‘So,’ she says, shifting her chair closer to the table. ‘Now the dust has settled, I wanted to explain everything. I thought it was … well, your right. Right to know.’

  ‘Why you did what you did?’ I ask.

  She lowers her voice to barely a whisper. ‘Why I gifted you your freedom.’

  I don’t like the way she words this, and I feel my insides tighten as I finally allow my eyes to meet hers.

  ‘This is all going to sound a bit harsh about your dead husband, I’m afraid, but since the last time I saw you together you’d just plunged a knife into his heart, I don’t think you’ll find this too upsetting. But if you need a break at any point, do say.’

  It’s a weird thing to say, reminiscent of the police interviews I’d gone through in the months after Matthew’s death. I don’t reply, just wait for her to carry on. She clearly has a little speech planned and, in spite of my discomfort, I’m keen to hear it.

  ‘I wanted your husband dead for years. Really, really wanted it. Desperately. I imagined all the ways one could possibly kill someone. You could probably call them fantasies. They helped me get to sleep at night. Anyway, you’ve probably worked out by now that Matthew killed my brother, Johnny.’

  I nod.

  ‘I thought you might have. Did he tell you? Or did you piece it together yourself?’

  ‘He told me,’ I reply.

  She nods. ‘I thought his conscience might crack. Was it, by any chance, on the day of the Ashtons’s anniversary party?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She nods again. ‘Men really are so predictable, aren’t they?’ She rolls her eyes to the ceiling. ‘And they have a habit of underestimating women. Matthew underestimated me. What I would do. What I would endure. But I don’t think you did.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I say. ‘I knew there was something … wrong about you. Something Matthew, in his constant effort to be nice to people and make friends, couldn’t quite see.’

  Rachel looks at me, her face thoughtful, and I wonder if there’s perhaps a touch of respect in the gaze. But then she says, ‘He was just so keen to get to know me, wasn’t he? That took me by surprise at first, but when his WhatsApp messages started getting more and more flirty – well, I worked out he swung both ways. He was after something else from me other than book chat. That’s another thing men all have in common: they think with their dicks. You weren’t much better, really … so frightened that I was trying to seduce him or I had some perverted obsession with your adopted son. It always just comes down to sex, doesn’t it? Didn’t think to look elsewhere, did you?’

  Her tone has become quiet, low, dangerous. I stay silent, uncomfortable in the knowledge that her assessment of me and Matthew has been, at least so far, depressingly accurate.

  ‘First, let me clear up why you killed him,’ she says, sounding a
bit more business-like again. ‘It was because of his affair with the Ashtons’s daughter, wasn’t it?’

  I give her a short nod.

  ‘And did you find that out on the night of the party?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘A bit later.’

  A look of surprise flashes through her face. ‘Oh, well, I had presumed he would have told you everything all at once. Especially after … oh gosh, you don’t know, do you?’

  ‘Know what?’

  She grins, relishing being the bearer of news. ‘Know that he was shagging her at the party. I caught them. They were in the bathroom, him and Elena. I’d followed them, of course, and could make out the shape of them through a crack where the door doesn’t meet the hinges. I waited until they’d finished before I confronted him. But, well, it’s all a little bit tacky, isn’t it? And a bit ironic, really, since I’m fairly sure the reason why my brother was allowed to die was because you lot viewed him as tacky. Working class. A low-life. Not one of the club. Went to a comp in Bradford, not a private school in Berkshire. A salesperson and small-scale entrepreneur rather than a high-flying company director or fashion designer or politician.’

  This irritates me, as she probably knew it would. ‘He was a drug dealer.’

  She shakes her head. ‘No, I’m sorry, but that’s wrong. He was a drug user. He was unwell.’

  I let out a noise of disbelief. ‘He chose to take that stuff. He knew the risks. He knew the law. He knew what it would mean as soon as he started smoking and sniffing and injecting.’

  She continues to shake her head, slower now, as if staring at a hopeless child. ‘Such hypocrisy. I would bet anything in the world – not that I have much left to bet – that you would indulge in a line of cocaine after a night at a glitzy awards dinner. Or perhaps the odd pill on a night out?’

  I’m furious at my own body for betraying me; the rage building within me causes my face to burn hot, the back of my neck prickling.

  ‘I think to most people it would be blatantly obvious what you and your lot do. You shift the goalposts for the less privileged. The goalposts that dictate what’s right and wrong, what’s success and failure, what’s deserved and undeserved.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything of the kind,’ I say through clenched teeth.

  ‘Then why wasn’t my brother allowed to live?’

  ‘Because,’ I say, louder than I intend, then lower my voice again, ‘because he was a layabout, drug-dealing vermin who destroyed the life of his girlfriend and the family that surrounded her.’

  More shaking of her head. ‘You’ve got it the wrong way round.’

  This makes me pause. ‘What?’ I say, looking at her knowing, infuriatingly self-assured expression. She sighs.

  ‘It wasn’t Johnny who introduced Collette to drugs. It was the other way around.’

  There’s a shifting of the ground beneath me. A sense of déjà vu is corrupting my sense of reality, as if I’m being thrown back to a time in the past. Matthew standing next to the fireplace in our lounge. Telling me everything. Everything in his own words. His words. Things fitting into place for me. And now here it is happening again. Different truths, different stories. And always me, the one in the dark, the one from whom the secrets are kept.

  ‘You’ve been lied to,’ Rachel says, simply.

  I shake my head. ‘No … no that’s not … Collette wasn’t into drugs before she met Johnny…’

  Rachel shrugs. ‘I can’t prove it, of course, but from what Johnny told me, she already had established connections with dealers before she started her degree at Durham. Johnny just had the misfortune to shag her one night out the back of a club during her first term. Like your husband, he had a bit of trouble keeping his dick in his pants. But when he met Collette, he changed. He was always a kind, caring boy. Always looked out for me and Mum and Dad. Worked multiple jobs in shops and factories to bring in money. But when he started seeing Collette, his kindness and sense of duty went into overdrive. Everything he did was part of this huge effort to please her. And, thanks to her slipping an MDMA pill onto his tongue that night in the alley behind a club, he developed a taste for the same substances that she’d become acquainted with at whatever posh school she’d attended.’

  I can’t cope with this. This is all wrong. It can’t be true; it just can’t be. I’ve seen photos of Johnny Holden. He looked awful – drug-addict thin, tattoos, not the kind of guy you’d want to meet on an empty street at night.

  As if she can read my thoughts, Rachel carries on, ‘I think your crowd just presumed he was the more natural criminal. Couldn’t possibly be dearest, darling Collette, could it? With her Dior coats and Mulberry handbags and a cut-glass English accent even though she was Scottish. But honestly, can’t you see there’s a problem if you never thought to question all of this? Never thought that maybe there was a clear attempt to paint her as the victim, him as the poison, the parasite, the thing they needed to get rid of.’

  I shake my head, slowly. ‘I … don’t know… I never thought…’

  ‘No, well, you wouldn’t, would you.’ Her lips twist as if in revulsion at me. ‘You really are all the same.’

  ‘But Matthew said … he said he was attacked. By Johnny. He said Johnny and a group of other young men turned up in the night and terrorised him. They did terrible things. Threatened to castrate him, kill him, forced him to take cocaine… It was … it sounded monstrous. And it was because he had been trying to get Colette to give up the drugs, distance herself from Johnny, do rehab or whatever was necessary to keep herself away from that sort of lifestyle.’

  Rachel raises an eyebrow. ‘Johnny? Terrorise someone? I can promise you, no matter how many drugs he took, I can never imagine him ever doing something like that.’

  I am struggling to fit this together in my head. ‘So you’re saying … Matthew was making it up?’ Even as I say this, I realise I can’t accept it, not when his description of the event had been so chillingly detailed. Rachel’s view of her brother must be a delusion, warped by her years re-living rose-tinted family memories before everything went wrong.

  She looks back at me as if I’m stupid. ‘He’s already proved to be a liar at heart, hasn’t he? Did you even know he fancied women? In fact, did you even know him at all?’

  This question hangs in the air between us for a few moments. I don’t answer it, and I don’t think she expects me to. Then she carries on, ‘Even if he was attacked, I could very much imagine other people not wanting him interfering in his sister’s life. I imagine she was very useful to a number of dealers – putting them in touch with other rich, young people like her. Maybe she was a bit loose with her tongue, blamed her brother too loudly for her attempts to detox.’

  She may be right about some things, but she’s wrong about this. I am sure of it. I’d seen the horror of those memories come to life in Matthew’s eyes. Rachel must be blinded by her guilt, her sadness, her love for her deceased brother. Although I suppose, perhaps, she could suspect that of me. Blinded by guilt. Blinded by love.

  I bring my hands to my face and rub my eyes. I’m suddenly feeling very tired. I thought all this was put to bed. I thought I was free from this turmoil.

  ‘So maybe now you can understand why I wanted your husband dead. But in case you haven’t fully realised how deep my hatred goes, I’ll give you some context. I was happy before Collette came along. I’d opened my own photography studio and gallery space in Bradford. I’d made a life for myself. But then Johnny needed to borrow money. He said he’d been stupid and borrowed some money from dodgy types. I gave it to him, of course. I couldn’t bear the idea of him being beaten up by thugs for the sake of a hundred quid. But then he needed more. And more. His behaviour became alarming. Once I’d got a handle of what was going on – the drugs, the drinking, and who was the cause – I went to Collette’s flat. Spoke to her properly. Begged her to leave him. She told me to fuck off. Accused me of being a meddling bitch. Told me they were in love. Well, that love didn’t exa
ctly go very well for them, did it. Nor me.

  ‘I sold my gallery space to pay for Johnny’s rehab, along with a good chunk of my parents’ savings. It didn’t work. He absconded. And, of course, ended up jetting off to Norway with her. He told me where he was going, at least, which wasn’t always the case, giving me the chance to follow him over there. I tried to confront him a few times, but he acted like I was being whingey and stopping his fun. He told me I was an embarrassment in front of his new friends. But I saw the way they looked at him, with his strong Yorkshire accent amidst their plummy Oxbridge vowels. Him boasting about getting his first batch of fitness clients for his personal trainer business while the others smirked behind their hands at him. He was embarrassing himself enough without my help. Not that I excuse their snobbery. I firmly believe they’d have been the same towards him even if he’d been more reserved, less hyper. He hadn’t gone to Eton; he hadn’t grown up in a townhouse in Chelsea or amidst the rolling hills of a country estate. He was an outsider. They’d have made him feel it regardless.’

  I shake my head. ‘You don’t know that. Not for sure.’

  She rolls her eyes at me. ‘Still defending the clan, are we?’

  I breathe out slowly, trying to control my emotion. ‘Stop grouping people together like that. It’s identity politics, pure and simple. And I detest identity politics.’

  ‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Maybe because you’ve had advantages handed to you from birth that others can only dream of. But yeah, do correct me if I’m wrong. I do love being lectured to about privilege by a male millionaire with aristocratic ancestors.’

  ‘It may have escaped your notice,’ I say, through gritted teeth, ‘but I have, all of my life, been in relationships with men. And it wasn’t so long ago when my so-called privileged elitist community would have ostracised me if I had chosen to carry on being true to myself and not been a good little boy and married a woman to keep up the perception of respectability. So don’t you dare think my position in this rich-people fantasy you’re so keen on believing in has always been so safe. I lived with the chance of being an outcast every single day of my youth. I’m just lucky to have been born when I was and not a few decades before. But of course, none of that suits the narrative that you’re so desperate to craft, so do feel free to ignore it.’