by Lucy Foley
For some reason I didn’t bother to tell him that I walked home alone every night and that I’d been more drunk than this before when I did, sometimes with a complete stranger in tow. I think we both knew, even then, that it was mainly an excuse to keep the conversation going, to stay in one another’s company.
I don’t remember which of us made the first move. I just recall that suddenly we were standing in an empty alleyway, and all I could hear was the sound of our breathing. Just beyond that alleyway was the thoroughfare of Cheapside and cars and people, and beyond that the whole city, lit up, chaotic, with all its millions of inhabitants. But in that dark passage it was just the two of us, and we were both breathing very loudly. And neither of us was suddenly quite so drunk. That flash of desire had sobered us. And then there was the light pressure of his thumbs on my hipbones, and I could feel the greater pressure of him between my legs, how hard he was. And I took his hand and guided it up, beneath my skirt, and he groaned against my neck.
The sex was quick: it had to be, in that public place. Anyone could have come across us, at any moment. It was also very good. I came embarrassingly quickly. But he, despite the alcohol and the awkwardness of our position (he had to hold me up against the wall), followed soon after. It was the strangeness of it, I think, the illicitness of it, that made it incredibly exciting. Afterwards, we stayed glued together for several seconds, his face in my neck. I couldn’t believe what we had done.
He said it out loud. ‘I can’t believe that just happened.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Let’s … Let’s just pretend it didn’t.’ A small secret part of me was thinking: Would anyone have done? Was I just some girl in a bar, the right place, the right time. Or was it me?
These things should not have mattered, I knew. And yet they did. Because for so long I had assumed he saw me as the colourless, uninteresting counterpart, and that was why he had hardly bothered to speak to me. Now, here, was a new, thrilling possibility. That in fact he had desired me.
MIRANDA
I turn at the sound of footsteps behind me on the path. It’s Julien, clutching a towel about his waist, his feet skidding on the mud.
‘I’ve made a big mistake,’ he says in a let’s-all-be-adults tone. ‘I know I’ve made a big mistake. But I’ve been under a lot of stress.’
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘you’ve been under a lot of stress?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s – a deal went bad. And I’d cut Mark in on it. He wasn’t happy.’
I think back to what Mark said on the first night, when he grabbed me. The reference to Julien’s ‘dirty little secret’. The choice of words had struck me as odd at the time. I’d thought he was talking about the insider trading, but now I understand. ‘He knew,’ I say, ‘didn’t he? About you and—’ I can’t bring myself to say her name, ‘—her.’
‘I let something slip, when I was very drunk. I felt so guilty … I wanted his advice. He is – was – my best mate. And now he’s threatening me, Manda.’
He looks ridiculously sorry for himself. I really, truly detest him, in this moment. Not just for what he has done, but for his cowardice, his pathetic self-pity. ‘All of this,’ I say, ‘has been brought on by you, you fucking idiot. All of it because you always want a little bit more. You always think you’re entitled to a bigger share. I should have seen this coming a mile off. Of course you were going to have an affair. Though I would never in a million years have thought of Katie. I thought you might have better taste than that.’
He grimaces then, a little quirk of the mouth, and for a surreal moment I actually think he might be about to defend her to me. Clearly, he thinks better of it. I know him too well; he’s more worried about saving his own bacon.
‘She seduced me, Manda.’
My skin crawls. ‘Don’t fucking call me that,’ I hiss.
‘Sorry. But I want to make that clear. It was all her. I think … I think she had a plan, from the moment she saw me sitting there in that bar. I think she knew, looking at me, at the state I was in – that I would have been incapable of resisting. I didn’t have a chance. It was like that time in Ibiza.’
‘What time in Ibiza?’
‘Oh God.’ He looks as though he immediately regrets having said anything. He rubs his face with a hand. ‘You might as well know. That holiday we all went on. The last night. She came on to me. It was … crazy. I was a bit out of it, and I was missing you … She was like a woman possessed, Manda – sorry. She was all over me.’
I stare at him, bile rising in my throat. Ibiza. While I was at my grandmother’s funeral … he was sleeping with my best friend. It wasn’t that long after we’d first started going out, well before we were married – all of which makes it worse, means that that disgusting secret has been there between us for all that time. Julien is clearly regretting having revealed any of this to me. He makes a kind of desperate sweeping gesture with his hand, as though trying to brush it from view, and says, ‘But … what I want to say is, I didn’t mean any of it.’
It would almost be amusing, I think. To watch him falter, to continue to dig himself into this particular grave. Amusing if, that is, he weren’t my husband, the man to whom I have given over a decade – all my youth – and if I weren’t really the butt of this particular joke.
‘Anyway,’ Julien hurries on – he must see the disgust and utter incredulity on my face – ‘when we bumped into each other in that bar … I think she saw I was at a low point. You’d been treating me like a second-class citizen. Barely speaking to me. I felt like an utter failure, a disappointment. She made me feel … desired, desirable. I tried to call a stop to it. I went around to her apartment the next day, to tell her to call it off. But she wouldn’t let me do it. I was so weak, I see that. She was like a drug habit I couldn’t shake—’
I hold up a hand. ‘What script are you reading from, Julien? Do you have so little respect for me that you think I’m really going to buy any of this pathetic, clichéd crap?’
He makes a pleading, feeble gesture with his hands. ‘I just wanted to try to explain.’
‘Well. It’s not going to do any good. Can’t you see that? I’m not buying any more of your utter bullshit.’ I think that if I had a weapon now I would kill him. If I knew the combination to that store with the rifles I think there would be very little stopping me from taking one, going back to the sauna, and shooting both of them dead. Do people still get lighter sentences for crimes of passion? Any sentence, right now, seems worthwhile. No one screws Miranda Adams over like this.
I don’t have a rifle. But perhaps the weapon I do have is more powerful than any gun.
The insider trading. I’ve been involved, of course. But I could get a good lawyer. My parents would help me out. And however bad it might be for me, it would be a tiny fraction of the shit that would descend on Julien. In this moment, it seems worth it.
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I do know what I’m going to do. I’ll log on to your precious bloody Wi-Fi and send a sodding email right now. It will take a click of a button. Just one fucking click. I may not have a career, but I have friends, Julien – you know them too. Olivia, you know she’s now at The Times? Or Henry, my ex from before uni? He’s at the Mail now – I can just imagine the headline they’ll dream up for you. And you know what? I reckon I could do pretty well from it myself.’
He takes a step back. His face is in shadow. I can hardly make out his features, let alone his expression. And, not for the first time – but with much better reason now – I think: I do not know this person at all. I do not know what he is capable of.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
I walk back into the office. Doug’s sitting there – and I’m about to tell him what I heard just now in the bathroom, when the phone rings. I pick it up. ‘Yes?’
‘Hello, Heather, it’s DCI Alison Querry here.’
‘Have you found a way to get here?’ I can feel Doug’s eyes on me.
‘Wel
l,’ Querry says. ‘We’re still working hard on that, of course. The forecast suggests that the snow should be easing off in the next few hours, then we can make an attempt with a chopper. But there’s something else. I just wanted to let you know that unfortunately I’m being called away: DCI John MacBride is going to take my place. He’s extremely capable, I need not add. I’ll put you on the phone to him now.’
My brain is racing. Alison Querry is the lead on the Highland Ripper investigation. If she’s been called away from this one, that means …
As DCI John MacBride introduces himself I am hardly listening. I am googling with one hand, Highland Ripper, then the NEWS tab. The headlines triumph out at me from the screen: ‘Suspect arrested in Glasgow hideaway’, ‘Raid on Glasgow Lair of the Ripper’, ‘Ripper Routed?’ They’ve found someone. Glasgow is over two hours’ drive from here, more in bad conditions. This can only mean one thing. If they have indeed found the man who killed those other women, he can have had nothing to do with this particular murder. It was someone else. It was someone here.
One day earlier
New Year’s Day 2019
KATIE
Julien comes back into the sauna. Dimly, I register how absurd he looks: completely naked, his cock curled up from the cold, his feet covered in mud. And just for a moment, with perhaps the greatest force since we first started seeing each other, I ask myself, What am I doing?
Has it all been about Julien? The secret longing I have harboured for him for all these years? Or has it also been about Miranda? I could never have admitted this to myself, not before. But for all the remorse I felt, looking at her standing there, staring in horror, for all the shame … was there not something else? The tiniest hint of Schadenfreude? About, for once, having one up on her?
I’d like to point out that I originally went to the sauna just to try and warm up from that horrible icy bath in the loch, not with an assignation in mind. I’d probably been in there for about ten minutes when there was a knock on the door.
I opened it, and saw Julien. He grinned at me, came in, quickly, furtively. Immediately, he began to shrug out of his clothes.
In spite myself I felt a shiver of excitement. Of anticipation.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’ve put her to bed – she’s completely out of it. And Mark’s passed out in the Lodge, and Emma’s back at her cabin. It’s just us. I was actually on my way to your cabin when I saw the light on here and thought … well, what a good idea.’
‘What if Miranda wakes up and finds you gone?’
‘She’s going nowhere. So it’ll be like last night. I’ll just tell her I’ve been for a walk.’
Sometimes it has made me uneasy, the speed at which the lies come to him. ‘And you think she’d believe you? Julien, it’s three in the morning.’
‘Yes, I know. But you see … she knows I’ve had a lot on my mind recently.’
‘The thing you’d like to share with me but can’t possibly tell me about?’
‘Yes. That.’
I don’t know why it stung, that he had persistently refused to talk about it. ‘We seem to have shared quite a bit recently,’ I said. ‘I suppose I just can’t understand why you wouldn’t talk about this particular thing.’
‘I don’t want to burden you with it,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for you to know. Like I’ve said, if I told you, too, it would make you guilty by association – complicit.’
‘But I am guilty,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said, and reached for me – but not without a backward glance, as though anyone could possibly see anything through the locked shutters. ‘So deliciously guilty.’
‘Julien,’ I said. ‘What are you … I thought we had agreed—’
He silenced my protest with his mouth. He ran his hands up and down my arms, then down my back, cupping my ass, lifting me up so that I had no choice other than to lock my legs around his back. All my resistance had melted, instantly.
‘That was before,’ he said. ‘We agreed that before.’
‘Before what?’
‘Before I realised that I’m completely obsessed with you. These last few weeks, not seeing you – Christmas at Miranda’s parents …’
‘I’ve felt sick with guilt,’ I said. ‘Physically sick, Julien. I literally was – on the train, I had to go and throw up in the toilet.’
Although, actually, that might have been due to the thing I discovered this morning.
‘Poor Katie-did.’
‘No, don’t give me that. We can’t go on like this. It isn’t fair on Miranda.’
He nodded. ‘It isn’t fair on Miranda,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I think we should tell her.’ I opened my mouth to protest, but he shook his head. ‘Hear me out. We were just kids when we got together. She seemed so certain of herself. She was dazzling. I wanted a bit of that. And yes, I fancied the pants off her. But then, over the years … all that drive seemed to go. Everything she wanted changed. She didn’t want to do or be something amazing. She just wants things now, all the time: holidays and clothes and a new car and, well, a baby. But she hates kids. I’m not even sure she doesn’t want a baby just because everyone else has one – because it’s “Life Goals”.
‘And with you, Katie-did … it’s different. It’s more complex. It’s deeper. It’s so much … freer.’
I thought of that little plus on the stick. I’d wait, I thought. I’d find the right moment.
‘You know who you are. You have a career, a life. You don’t need me to validate who you are.’
I felt a strange, unexpected wave of sympathy for Miranda: over ten years, they have been together. In what world could that not be called deep? But beneath the sympathy, despite all the guilt … yes, I realised there was some dark, complex pleasure. All those years of playing the wing woman, the second fiddle, the understudy. Now, finally, I had bested her at something.
DOUG
Something has woken him. His body is alert, prickling with awareness – his mind struggling to catch up. He has been wrenched out of his whisky-soaked stupor agitated, his heart going double time. He looks about himself. He is surrounded by broken glass. But now he remembers … before he passed out he’d thrown his tumbler at the television, enjoyed the sound of it shattering the screen. Enjoyed how it briefly drowned out the sound of the guests partying over at the Lodge, the music turned up full blast. Making a mockery of his own ‘celebrations’ – a bottle of single malt and the depressing spectacle of others’ happiness on the screen. Then he had drained the last drops straight from the bottle and sunk finally, gratefully, into unconsciousness.
But now something has roused him. A knock on the door. Loud as a rifle shot.
He stills, listening like an animal.
It comes again.
He didn’t imagine it. He gropes for his watch. It’s four in the morning. Who could need him at four in the morning? Heather, he thinks, incoherently. She might need his help, somehow.
He opens the door, looks out with bleary eyes. It’s her, the guest, the beautiful one. Except she looks … terrible. Still beautiful, in a long golden gown, but with a wrecked quality to everything: the fabric of her dress ripped, her face stained with make-up. Her lipstick is a long smear across one cheek.
‘Hi,’ she says, swaying slightly on her feet. ‘Sorry, I hope it’s not an imposition.’ He is drunk, but she is drunker. The realisation sobers him.
She peers beyond him. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘It’s really empty in here. Very … minimalist.’
‘You can’t come in here,’ he says. He tries to block her entry with his body; she wriggles past.
‘But I brought champagne!’ She holds up an open bottle. Dom Pérignon, the really posh stuff. ‘You wouldn’t let me drink the rest on my own, would you?’ As she steps nearer he realises that the now familiar smokiness of her perfume is tainted by something sour and rank.
He feels like an animal, routed out in its cave, its safe and private space. She takes a step forward and
takes his head in her hands, and kisses him. Her mouth is a concentration of sourness, but also that perfumed smokiness, which seems to wrap itself around him. And her tongue is deft, and she has fitted her body to his. It has been so long. He feels desire rise up in him – mixing uncomfortably with the anger he still feels at the interruption. She is reaching for his fly, unzipping him, reaching her hand inside. Her fingers are tangling in his hair.
‘No,’ he says, his mind clearing.
She steps back from him. Her lip curls. ‘Pardon?’
‘No,’ he says again.
‘Fuck you! Don’t tell me you don’t want it. I can see that you do.’
‘I can … make you a cup of tea,’ he says, though he has no idea whether he currently has the wherewithal to complete this task.
She laughs, staggers on her glittery heels, and then scowls at him. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says. And then she points at him. ‘I know you want it. I’ve seen how you look at me. At that dinner … yesterday, on the shoot. You don’t fool me.’ She is furious, wrathful, her finger stabbing at his chest. ‘But you’re too scared. Do you know what you are? You’re a fucking coward.’
Those words. He feels the rage and grief rising inside him, like that other time. He feels the red flood of his anger come down over everything, and something inside himself loosen, loosen … and break.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
‘That was the police,’ I tell Doug. ‘They’ve found the Highland Ripper. Miles away from here, so it doesn’t look like he’s anything to do with us. It must have been someone here.’
As I say it, I hear the truth of it for the first time. It becomes real. They are here. ‘And I just heard something, while I was in the bathroom—’ I stop, catching sight of the look on Doug’s face.
