Because She Loves Me

by Mark Edwards

  Jones motioned for Moseley to do the talking.

  ‘Our lab analysed the substance you brought in,’ he said. ‘It is indeed heroin. As you told us. We also had the plastic container fingerprinted. Can you guess what I’m going to say?’

  ‘That Charlie’s prints weren’t on it?’

  ‘Correct. Actually, we don’t have Charlotte Summers’ prints on record. But we do have yours.’

  I swallowed. A dim memory surfaced, of a cop in a different station pressing my fingers into a pad of ink.

  ‘And there was only one set of prints on the bag, Andrew,’ Moseley said. ‘Yours.’

  ‘I’m not denying that I touched it. You know I did. I handed it to you! But Charlie must have worn gloves.’

  Moseley stared at me. ‘Here’s what I think happened. You and Karen Jameson had a disagreement over the money she owed you. Or perhaps it was a lovers’ quarrel. Karen was jealous of your new, younger girlfriend. You murdered her, injected her with a dose of nearly pure heroin while she slept beside you, then panicked and came up with this crazy story about your girlfriend doing it.’

  ‘Pretty nasty,’ Jones said. ‘Killing one girlfriend and trying to frame the other for it.’

  ‘This is mad,’ I said. ‘It was Charlie. I can’t believe you haven’t talked to her. She’s still out there. Listen, if you don’t get her in custody, I have no idea what she’ll do. I’m worried she’s going to do something to Sasha.’

  Moseley raised an eyebrow. ‘Sasha? Who’s that?’

  I didn’t like his expression. ‘A friend.’

  The two detectives exchanged a glance. ‘Quite the Casanova, aren’t you? It’s always the quiet ones.’

  I could sense Jones sizing me up, a slight curl to her lip. It was dawning on me that maybe I should ask for a solicitor. It would have to be the duty solicitor as I didn’t have enough money to hire my own. But would that seem like an admission of guilt. This whole thing seemed so ludicrous that I couldn’t believe the detectives weren’t going to break into laughter at any moment, point at me and say, ‘Gotcha!’

  ‘If I was guilty, why the hell would I come here and bring you the heroin? As far as I know you weren’t even treating Karen’s death as suspicious until yesterday.’

  Moseley leaned back and the look he gave me chilled my blood. ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, is it, Andrew?’

  My words could barely squeeze past the lump in my throat. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Come on. Don’t act the innocent.’ He actually said those words. ‘We had a look at your record.’

  The door opened and another plain-clothed policeman stuck his head in, gesturing to Moseley.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, pausing the interview, and both he and Jones left the room, leaving me alone in a horrified daze.

  I knew exactly what Moseley was talking about.

  It was a memory that was so painful, that so conflicted with my current image of myself, that I kept it locked away in a consciousness-proof box. Sometimes, the memories seeped into my dreams and I would wake up feeling ashamed and jittery. But if they tried to escape during waking hours, I would push them straight back into the box.

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ I said to the empty room, my voice weak.

  But sitting there in the interview room, punch drunk, weakened and exhausted, I no longer had the strength to hold the box shut. The lid flew open and, like wasps escaping from a bottle, all the memories came flooding out.

  After our parents died, when I was sixteen and Tilly fourteen, I went to live with Uncle Pete (my dad’s brother), Aunt Sandra, and their kids in Hastings, a few miles along the coast from our family home. Their daughter, Michelle, was my age, and my other cousin, Dominic, was thirteen. It was just me because Tilly was in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which had a specialist department for dealing with people like her: accident victims who had broken their spines. We visited her every weekend, driving up to Aylesbury, the whole journey like a trip on a rollercoaster. Every lurch of the car sent bubbles of panic through my blood. I held my breath every time we passed a truck. It was terrifying and I had to be dragged into the car every time like a dog being dragged into the vet’s. Uncle Pete, a no-nonsense, balding bank manager with the emotional intelligence of a goldfish, was a firm believer in getting back in the saddle, in embracing your fears. After a while though – and, I’m sure, some stern words from Sandra – Pete relented and let us go by train. I could cope with his passive aggressive comments about the extortionate costs and the stale buffet sandwiches far better than I could handle being driven on motorways.

  Because Hastings and Eastbourne are only thirty minutes apart, I was originally going to return to my old school to study for my A-levels. But on my first day back I realised I couldn’t handle the pitying looks, the soft voices, the sympathy. At lunch time, I sat on my own, chewing food I couldn’t taste, an invisible force field around my table. A couple of upper sixth form girls came over to talk to me, and if I’d been a different kind of person I could have milked it, let them look after me. They could have passed me around, the sad orphan virgin, and made me merely a sad orphan.

  Instead, I went home that night and announced to Pete and Sandra that there was no way I could ever go back. A week later I was enrolled at Hastings College, where no one knew my history. I was just another gangly teenager. I didn’t tell any of my new friends about my parents or my sister. When they asked if I wanted to meet up at the weekend, I made up an excuse about a part-time job. I invented a back story for myself, one in which I’d been to private school in Los Angeles, where my dad worked in the movie industry and my mum was a soap opera actress, but they’d sent me over to England to learn about the ‘old country’. No one ever asked me why I had a Sussex accent; it’s easy to live a lie when everyone around you is a self-absorbed teenager. And I discovered that making up stories made me feel better about my real life. I became addicted to lying. I even began to believe the fiction myself – it was easier to inhabit this invented world than live in the real one and deal with the terrible, all-encompassing grief that made my bones ache, the urge to cry as constant as the need to breathe. It was comforting to think that my parents were living the good life in Hollywood.

  The only people who knew my real past were my new family, though I hated thinking of them like that. Everything about them, compared to my former life, irritated me. Uncle Pete and his boring stories; Aunt Sandra and her cooking which was nothing like my mum’s (she used the wrong kind of meat in shepherd’s pie, for a start); Michelle, who was much cooler than me, with an older boyfriend who took her out every night, driving up and down the seafront with the other boy racers. Then there was Dominic. Thinking about Dominic makes me prickle with shame. I haven’t seen him in over ten years. I’m sure if he saw me in the street he would hide. One day, when Pete or Sandra die, we will have to attend their funeral together. The prospect of that day stays firmly locked in my box.

  Dominic was a typical thirteen-year-old boy in most ways. Spotty, awkward, addicted to his PlayStation. He was also somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Brilliant at maths and chess, but fragile and cripplingly shy, barely able to cope with the social side of school. I am not exactly sure whether he was ever given a special educational needs statement, even if such things existed in those days. I was too wrapped up in my own problems, not privy to my aunt and uncle’s conversations. All I knew was that Dominic made me feel awkward and uncomfortable. He would ask me questions that I didn’t want to answer, questions about the accident, about what it sounded like when we hit the lorry, whether I knew the velocity of the car when it collided with the truck, whether I remembered our Nissan rolling over and how loudly Tilly had screamed. Thinking back, I guess he was trying to make mathematical sense of it, find a neat way in which he could understand it. Being asked these questions though, mere months after it happened, repeatedly, made me w
ant to punch him. I avoided him as much as I could. I didn’t want to hit anyone. I didn’t like or understand these feelings of rage and the urge to commit violence. I had never been like this.

  I had been assigned a bereavement counsellor after the accident, a man with nostrils like the entrance of a great forest, who wanted me to talk to him about my feelings. I tried, at first. I didn’t tell him about the sadness and fear and anger that would swoop down out of nowhere, when I was waiting to cross the road, or that were provoked by a misplaced word, like Dominic’s questions. I pretended I was fine, tried to convince him. I lied to him, told him things I thought he’d like to hear, based on a TV documentary I’d watched.

  The only person I could be honest with during this whole period was Tilly, on the rare occasions I was left alone with her, flat on her back in the hospital, the rest of the family gone to the cafeteria, nurses coming by every so often to turn Tilly to prevent bed sores. Tilly and I would talk about Mum and Dad, but also the future: Tilly was going to get better and I would look after her. She was going to be a paralympian athlete. She would hold my hand and cry and I would whisper that I was sorry, that it should have been me.

  Between my made-up life at college, the lies I told my counsellor and pretending to be fine in my new home, my visits with Tilly were what I clung to, little moments of reality that allowed me to hold on to my true self.

  Christmas was coming and we had arranged to visit Tilly on Christmas Eve then stay overnight in Aylesbury so we could be with her on the day itself. I was desperately looking forward to it, had starting to hype up this event in my head as a turning point, a day on which I would begin to claw back some happiness.

  Then Uncle Pete announced that, because the trains on Christmas Eve were going to be ‘a nightmare’, we would have to drive.

  I begged him to let us take the train. Since we’d stopped travelling to the hospital by car, the auto journeys had taken on a near-mythical horror in my imagination. I couldn’t picture myself in a car on a motorway without bloody, fiery disaster striking – and Dominic would be there recording the velocity and decibel levels as the car burst into flames around us. I saw his charred skeleton in my daydreams, reciting numbers and poking at a calculator with a blackened, smoking finger.

  ‘The trains will be a nightmare,’ Pete repeated, and Sandra agreed. They understood my fear, but I was worrying about nothing.

  ‘Your uncle will drive carefully, sixty in the slow lane all the way. Won’t you, Pete?’ Sandra tried to reassure me, but I didn’t trust my uncle. He didn’t say yes at all convincingly.

  I managed to enlist Dominic, who didn’t want to go by car either, mainly because he hated being squashed in the back between Michelle and me. He complained and moaned about it, and asked if he could stay at home on his own, but that just made Uncle Pete laugh and start talking about Macaulay Culkin. Dominic went into a major sulk, locking himself in his room, while I stoked his resentment by reminding him constantly how awful the journey was going to be.

  As December 24th approached – and my excitement about Christmas curdled into dread – I began to panic. How could I stop us going? I wanted to see Tilly, but I couldn’t get into the car. I had become like one of those people who is terrified of flying, who would need to be given a general anaesthetic before getting on a plane. I needed to do something.

  We had the internet at Pete and Sandra’s, unlike most people in England back then. When everyone was out one afternoon I dialled up and searched for ways to disable a car engine. My plan was to sneak out the night before Christmas Eve, do something to the car that would mean we’d have to get the train.

  I found the answer pretty quickly – or as quickly as anything could be found online in those days. Sugar in the petrol tank. Simple. I crept downstairs after everyone had gone to bed, grabbed a bag of granulated sugar from the cupboard, along with a plastic funnel, and went into the garage. I poured a pound of sugar into the tank then went to bed, confident that we would be travelling by train the following day.

  But that’s not what happened.

  The next day, when I got up, I asked Sandra where Pete was.

  ‘He’s gone to the petrol station to fill up before the journey,’ she replied.

  I walked out to look in the garage. The car was indeed gone. My plan hadn’t worked. I started to tremble. But then the phone rang inside the house. It was the police. Uncle Pete had been in an accident.

  What I hadn’t realised, hadn’t discovered through my internet research, is that a car with sugar in the tank will start up and travel a little way before it breaks down. Pete had been halfway across the busiest crossroads in town, the roads full of last-minute Christmas shoppers, when his car had suddenly broken down. The car behind went into his rear, another car ploughed into that; it caused a four-vehicle pile-up. Uncle Pete was all right apart from minor whiplash and the fact that his precious motor was written off. The woman in the car behind was less lucky; she banged her face on the steering wheel, suffered concussion, broke her cheekbone.

  When the police and insurance companies got involved, they quickly discovered the sugar in the tank. When the police turned up on our doorstep and told us what had happened, questioned everybody, I had known there was only one thing I could do.

  Thirty-seven

  ‘You told them you saw your autistic cousin do it,’ Moseley said, tutting. He and Jones had been gone for ten minutes before returning, their expressions even graver than before. ‘Pinned it on Dominic. Seems like that’s your way of operating, isn’t it? Point the finger of blame.’

  ‘But I owned up in the end,’ I protested.

  ‘And why was that?’

  I stared at the surface of the desk. ‘Pete looked at the history on my computer.’ I didn’t know you could delete it, not back then.

  ‘So you didn’t actually own up. You were found out. How long was this after the incident?’

  I had a feeling he knew the answer. ‘About a week.’

  ‘During which time your poor cousin had been through hell, I bet.’

  ‘He denied it, said it was me. But they didn’t know which one of us to believe. Until they found the evidence.’

  They both shook their heads slowly, looked at me like I was a kitten killer, the lowest piece of scum who’d ever sat in front of them. It was exactly how everyone had looked at me back then, when I’d been found out.

  ‘I was a different person back then,’ I said, thumping the table. ‘I was a kid, one who’d just lost his parents. I was fucked up, confused. Terrified of going in that car.’

  ‘I understand that, Andrew,’ Moseley said. He was a few years younger than me but he talked to me like I was the guilty sixteen-year-old liar I’d been that Christmas. ‘But in our job, you know what we see more than anything? Patterns of behaviour. People who do the same things, make the same mistakes, over and over again. This is your nature. You fuck up, and you blame someone else. You make accusations. You know what else I think, why you came to us in the first place? You want to get rid of this girlfriend of yours, Charlotte, but you’re too much of a coward to go about it the manly way. So instead of telling her you don’t want to be with her anymore, you go extreme and decide to get her arrested.’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘You saw a way of killing two birds with one stone.’ He smiled at his own joke.

  ‘I want a solicitor,’ I said.

  ‘Oh really? Very well. Duty solicitor OK, or have you got your own?’

  ‘Duty,’ I said quietly.

  ‘All right. We’ll arrange something.’

  He knocked on the door of the interview room and a uniformed constable came in.

  ‘Put Mr Sumner here in a holding cell,’ Moseley said. ‘We’re postponing our little chat.’

  ‘Am I allowed a phone call?’ I said.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘We’ll arrange that too.’
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  ‘Listen,’ I said, before they escorted me from the room. ‘Have you talked to Harold, the old man in the ground floor flat? He can verify what I’m saying. He’ll tell you how shocked I was when I heard that Karen was dead. You need to go round there.’

  ‘We have,’ Moseley said, his voice flat.

  ‘And? What did he say?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything,’ said Jones from behind me. I turned around and thought the look she was giving me might turn me to stone. ‘He’s dead.’

  I stared at her. ‘Harold?’

  ‘Trying to pretend you didn’t know?’

  I swung round to face Moseley. ‘It must have been Charlie. She did it to stop him talking. Must have thought he’d seen her. When did you find him? How long has he been dead? Oh my God.’

  That poor old man. The dark spirit that he had warned me about, that had been following me around – well, now it had visited him. Yet again, it was my fault.

  ‘We thought you might be able to tell us that,’ Moseley said.

  I sank back into my seat. I was too shocked to respond. When had Charlie done it? Thinking that Harold had spotted her and could ID her, she must have gone straight round there this morning after I’d spoken to her, while I was being kept waiting here. Now I knew why the two detectives had left the room halfway through my interview. If I’d had any last lingering doubts about Charlie before, I didn’t now. And, I realised with a lurch, it was my fault. I had lied to her about Harold definitely seeing her. His death was down to me.

  ‘If he died this morning, while I was here,’ I said, raising my face, wondering how pale I looked, ‘then how can I know what happened to him?’

  I could tell that Harold’s death had complicated things for Moseley. Probably, they were waiting for the coroner to tell them the time of death. I could see in the DC’s head that he was trying to work it out, figure out how I fitted in to everything. And they weren’t going to let me go till either the time they were allowed to hold me for ran out or they solved the puzzle. The most maddening thing was that I knew the solution, had told them – and they wouldn’t believe me.