by Mark Edwards
‘Yes?’
‘You haven’t ever . . . been on my Facebook account on my computer . . .’
She interrupted. ‘No, of course not. What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing. Just being an idiot.’
The women who unfriended me on Facebook must have done it themselves. Maybe they were tired of reading about my new girlfriend and my leg injury. I had been pretty boring on there recently, I had to admit.
‘I’m going to miss you,’ I said a bit later, as she stood in the doorway with her little suitcase.
We hugged and kissed. I had tears in my eyes.
‘It’s only a few days, silly,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘And when I get back—’
‘We’ll be living together.’
She kissed me and ran her hand over my chest. ‘How am I going to get through four days without your body?’
‘I don’t want you to go, Charlie.’
She laughed. ‘Oh God, look at us. Lovesick before we’ve even parted.’ She gave me the naughty look I liked so much. ‘But our reunion will be fun.’
I went downstairs with her and waved her off. I watched her walk along the road, her black coat flapping about her, red hair whipped by the breeze. She turned and blew me a kiss. She was lovely. How could I ever have doubted her?
My mobile rang as I was going up the stairs.
‘All right, mate?’
‘Victor!’ I was lost for words temporarily. ‘How are you?’
He made a familiar groaning noise. ‘A lot fucking better than I have been. I’m in Brixton at the moment. That’s near you, isn’t it? Fancy meeting for a coffee? Oh, and by the way, I’m not a fucking paedophile.’
We met at a coffee shop in the market and as I approached the table Victor stood and gave me a bear hug. His eyes were moist and he smelled of cigarette smoke.
‘You OK?’ I asked. I had never known him to be tactile before and was sure he didn’t smoke.
‘Yeah, yeah, I’m good. Do I smell of fags?’
I nodded.
‘I need to quit again. You know, I hadn’t even thought about smoking for ten years. Then as soon as all this shit kicked off, the only way I could get through it was by chain smoking.’ He drummed his fingers on the big wooden table. He was all nervous energy, twitches and tics. ‘I got a call from the police this morning. They’re dropping all charges.’
‘Oh, that’s brilliant.’
‘Isn’t it? Though they shouldn’t have charged me in the first place. I mean, me, a paedo! I’m the kind of bloke who thinks people like that should be strung up by their bollocks in public. The thought of it . . . Jesus.’
‘So – what happened?’
He blew on his coffee. ‘The police don’t know who’s behind it, but someone set that site up to stitch me up. This whole thing about me going to meet a young girl . . . I’ll tell you what happened.’
I waited while he pulled the words together in his head.
‘So, a few days before this all kicked off, I had this weird friend request on Facebook. Someone called Sarah Smith. Middle-aged, quite attractive, same age as me. I thought it must be some old classmate I don’t remember and accepted it. Didn’t think nothing of it.
‘Then I started getting messages from her, saying I looked really fit in my pictures.’ He laughed humourlessly. ‘So I made the mistake of responding, didn’t I? Flirting. I mean, I thought it was just a bit of harmless fun. I wasn’t going to do anything.’ He sighed. ‘Then she suggested meeting up and I said yes.’ He pulled a face. ‘That’s the bit my missus is upset about. But I really wasn’t intending to do anything. I was just, I don’t know, curious.’
He fiddled with a cigarette packet as he spoke, turning it over and round in his hands, picking at the edges, the gruesome image of a man with a throat tumour rotating in front of my eyes.
‘Except she didn’t turn up, which to be honest was a massive relief. I went home and the next day the police turn up and show me that website. They’ve got all these screenshots from Facebook—’
‘I’ve seen it,’ I said.
‘I thought you might have. But the screenshots were Photoshopped and Sarah Smith’s profile was changed to that of a twelve-year-old girl. Same profile but new photo, new age, new everything. And there were photos of me at the meeting point, lurking about looking shifty. Someone must have been taking pictures of me with a long-lens camera.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Yeah. Anyway, the police tracked down the IP address of this Sarah Smith, who was obviously a made-up person, to an internet cafe here in Brixton. No CCTV or anything, though, not that the police are really that interested.’
‘Is that why you’re here?’
He nodded. ‘I wanted to check the place out. See if I saw anyone I recognised. But no joy, just a load of students.’
‘What about the images on your computer?’
He rubbed his face. ‘Christ. The police showed me the pictures. I’m never going to get over it, mate. Little kids . . . Actually, I can’t even talk about it. Heartbreaking stuff. The kind of stuff that makes you want to seriously hurt the people responsible.’
‘I don’t even want to imagine it.’
‘Vile stuff. Anyway, the police accept that they have no evidence that it was me who downloaded the pictures. Loads of people have access to my computer – the cleaners, the IT department. Plus we had a break-in a few days before this all happened. I didn’t report it because nothing got nicked and I didn’t want the hassle. So the police thought I was lying at first.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, my lawyer was able to persuade them they didn’t have a leg to stand on and they’ve finally dropped the case.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Too right. Come on, let’s go outside. I need one of these.’
We stood outside in the cold and he lit up. ‘I’ll quit soon. Maybe I should try one of those e-cigarettes. Anyway, there are two things I need to talk to you about. The first one is the job. I’m really sorry, mate, but business is pretty bad at the moment. Emma and the others did their best while I was away but there are a lot of twats out there who decided they didn’t want to do business with us anymore. Now I’ve been cleared I’m hoping they’ll come crawling back. But in the meantime, I can’t afford to take anyone on. I feel crap about it, but . . .’
‘It’s fine.’ I tried not to show my disappointment. ‘I’m just happy the mess is being sorted. What was the second thing?’
He blew out smoke and squinted at me. ‘Have you . . . heard about Karen?’
I stared at the ground. ‘Yes. Awful. Do you know how it happened?’
‘It was a heroin overdose.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. I heard from her sister, Violet, who’s a friend of the missus. They had the coroner’s report yesterday. Heroin. I can’t believe Karen was into that shit.’
I couldn’t either. ‘She wasn’t into drugs when I was with her. The odd spliff. We took E together once because she’d heard it was meant to be an amazing experience. But heroin?’
‘I know. I spoke to her a few weeks ago, just before all this paedo crap happened. God, that seems like a long time ago now. We mainly talked about me but I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think if she seemed different in any way. Like I’d be able to tell. Most drug users function pretty normally, especially early on.’ He tutted. ‘We talked about you a bit. She told me she was really happy with the work you did for her, in the end anyway. She thought it was a bit weird though.’
I hadn’t been listening properly, because I’d been remembering the phantom text I’d received from her the night I’d taken the sleeping pills, asking me to call her. The text that I was sure I’d hallucinated. I snapped out of my reverie. ‘What was weird?’
‘You. Sending your girlfriend r
ound there to get your money.’
It took a moment for this to sink in. ‘What?’
‘Karen said that you sent your bird round to see her, to have a go at her about making you do all that work again. She was really surprised, thought you’d turned into a right wanker. Karen said your bird said something about how no one could get away with trying to take advantage of you anymore. Hey, are you all right, mate? You look like you’re about to have a funny turn.’
I sat down. All I could think about was what Charlie had said the night Sasha had come round for dinner. If you wanted to murder someone, the best way to do it would be to make it look like a drug overdose.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ I said.
Twenty-nine
Victor took me back to my flat in a taxi and escorted me up the stairs, huffing and puffing behind me and exclaiming loudly about how someone ‘should put a fucking lift it here.’
Sat down at the table with a cup of tea – three sugars – in front of me, Victor said, ‘Fucking hell, Andrew, talk about an attack of the vapours. I thought I was going to have to carry you to the cab.’
‘It’s the hangover,’ I said. ‘Low blood sugar.’ I sipped the hot tea, the sweetness bringing me back to life. But my heart was skittering, banging.
‘Whatever you say.’ Victor had found a can of Coke in the back of the fridge, which he cracked open, a little wisp of condensation rising and catching my eye. ‘So are you going to tell me what’s going on?’
I couldn’t meet his eye. ‘Finding out about Karen – that’s all it is. It’s such a shock.’
He scrutinised me. ‘So you knew your girlfriend had been to see her?’
‘I . . . Yeah. I didn’t want her to, but . . .’ I trailed off, unable to force the lie out.
‘Pretty shitty thing to do, if you ask me,’ Victor said. ‘Maybe I got you all wrong, Andrew. Maybe you’re not the decent bloke I thought you were.’
I couldn’t speak.
‘Anyway, I need to get home. The missus is cooking a special celebratory dinner tonight.’
‘All right. Thank you for, well . . .’
‘Yeah. Whatever.’ He smiled sardonically. ‘Better make sure I don’t piss you off, hadn’t I? Don’t want your girlfriend paying me any unexpected visits.’
I watched from the window as he headed off down the road, then sank onto the sofa, head in hands.
I hated lying to him, but I had no other choice, not until I had all this straight in my head. If I had told Victor that I hadn’t known about Charlie going to see Karen he would have started asking questions – questions which would lead on to me telling him all the things I had suspected her of, before Tilly had sprung to her defence, including setting him up. And if I told him that, he would go to the police.
I couldn’t have that, not now. Not before I had figured it all out. I couldn’t risk it. I loved her. If she was innocent and got the slightest hint that I suspected her of doing these terrible things, I’d lose her. No relationship could survive such an accusation.
I made myself a coffee, splashed my face with freezing water from the tap. My head felt clearer.
Here was what I knew: Charlie had said, albeit in a jokey way, that if she were going to murder someone, she would fake a drug overdose. Karen, who had never been into drugs, as far as I knew, had died from a heroin OD. Charlie had secretly visited her shortly before Karen died. Also, she had said to me, by text, that she thought Karen had taken advantage of me – the words she had used when she went to see Karen.
If I was on a jury, would I convict her on that basis? It was – what was it called? – circumstantial evidence. Charlie’s defence would be that she was only kidding about the heroin overdose, that she would never actually kill anyone.
What about her motivation?
That was simple: jealousy. Charlie hated me working for Karen, loathed me having anything to do with her. Maybe she thought I was still interested in her, that we would have an affair. But I hadn’t shown any signs that I was still into Karen, had been moaning to Charlie about how annoyed I was with her. I could picture Charlie going to see Karen on my behalf, thinking she was doing me a favour, getting my money. But why do it without telling me? And where was the cheque? She hadn’t given it to me.
I tried to think it through, how it might have happened. Charlie goes to see her, on the pretext of getting my money, and then – what? Did she always intend to kill her or was it only something that happened after she’d met Karen? Did Karen say something that enraged her, that made her flip out, her jealous fury driving her to do something terrible? She hadn’t done anything on their first meeting, so she would have had to go back.
How do you give someone a smack overdose anyway? I imagined the possible scenarios: Charlie slipping a loaded syringe out of her bag, plunging it into Karen’s arm; hiding in her flat when she was asleep and slipping the needle into her skin; holding a gun to her head and instructing her to inject herself. None of these scenes, especially the one involving the gun, seemed realistic. They were like snatches from noir films, with Charlie in the role of the deadly femme fatale. Maybe Karen really was into drugs. Thinking about it, it did fit with her experimental, hedonistic persona. She had told me on many occasions that she was willing to try anything once, that she believed in having as many interesting experiences as possible before she died. Karen had seemed ill and pale the last time I’d seen her; her tardiness in paying my invoice was uncharacteristic. If she had been addicted to heroin, and Charlie had somehow found out, all she would have to do would be to turn up with a narcotic peace offering, some extra-pure gear that Karen couldn’t cope with.
The light-headed sensation was returning, like there were huge, rubbery bubbles floating in my skull. Could I picture Charlie doing those things? I’d already been through this once, had shared my fears with the group the night before, and convinced myself it was ridiculous. Charlie was lovely. Warm, generous, kind, nurturing, sensitive. Almost everything she had done for me had been sweet and selfless, the actions of a woman in love. She had a strong moral core too: she loathed exploitation, as I had seen when she’d discovered I had a cleaner; she cried if she saw someone being bullied on TV; she refused to watch films or programmes in which children were hurt because it affected her too much. She had told me she worked for the NHS, when she could have made more money accepting contracts to work for private companies, because she believed in the cause.
‘They helped my mum when she had cancer,’ she told me. ‘For a while, I wanted to be a nurse or a doctor, but I wasn’t cut out for medicine in the end. Hence project management.’
The Charlie I knew and loved was a good person.
And yet. There was her jealousy. The explosion of fury and self-destruction the night I’d stayed over at Sasha’s. She had shown a violent side that night, even if it had been directed at herself. She could be confrontational. The very first time I’d been out with her, she’d started an argument in the pub. She definitely had a dark side, a wild aspect to her personality that made her do things that most other people wouldn’t do: like have sex in a freezing lake in the middle of winter. These were just the things I knew about. Because as Henry had said, all the weird stuff in my life had started after I met Charlie.
I vacillated. Could she have done it? As I grappled with the question, a voice inside my head shouted at me to stop. The word ‘love’ wasn’t strong enough for how I felt about her. I could hardly imagine life without her. So how could I entertain the notion that she was a killer? This notion was like a virus invading my bloodstream, and my love made antibodies that fought and rejected every negative thought.
I got up and made another coffee, leaned on the worktop – one of the many places in the flat that bore a ghostly imprint of our lovemaking – and waited for the kettle to boil.
What did I really know about Charlie? I hardly knew a thing about her past.
She was cagey about her entire existence before she’d met me; was equally secretive about the parts of her life that didn’t involve me now. I’d never been to her place, though she told me it was because it made sense for her to come here, where we had privacy, no housemates listening outside the door.
I had never met any of her friends. But she hadn’t lived in London long, said she didn’t know anyone here.
I imagined myself in court again, a witness – for the prosecution! – explaining my relationship with Charlie. Would I look like a fool? The guy who doesn’t know anything about the woman he’s been sleeping with for the last two months, who he’s about to move in with. I tried to justify it to myself. It had been an insane rush, passionate, exciting, with no pause for reflection. Charlie had a talent for diverting me if I asked her anything. I had been concerned about it at first, about how little she gave away, but then I decided to let it go. All I really cared about was what she was like in the present, who she was when she was with me. There would, I had thought, be plenty of time for us to share stories about the past.
This was agony. I knew people would say that if I refused to go to the police, I should talk to her about it. But what was I supposed to say? ‘Charlie, did you kill Karen and arrange to have me pushed down the stairs? Oh, no reason – just curious.’
It wasn’t funny though. It really wasn’t. Because this was not just about me and Charlie and the things I thought she might have done. It was also about what she might do in the future if I didn’t act.
If Charlie had killed Karen, then surely any woman I had a relationship with would be in danger. Like Sasha, I realised. Could Charlie be responsible for the stuff that had happened to her too? Sasha was convinced it was Lance and Mae, but she might change her mind if I told her about Charlie’s jealousy. There was Harriet, too. She’d already been burgled – and the thief appeared to have targeted the lingerie I bought her, a detail that made my head hurt. What if that was only the beginning? Again, I found it painful to contemplate. But if Charlie was really behind this, then everyone I knew, including me – especially me – was in danger.
