by Ruth Ware
‘My guess,’ I say slowly, ‘in fact it’s not a guess, I think it’s pretty damn near certain, the school didn’t see those drawings until after Ambrose was dead.’
There is silence. A long, dread-filled silence.
‘So what you’re saying …’ Thea says at last, and I can see her trying to figure it out, trying to make it mean something else, other than the obvious conclusion we are all trying to skirt around. ‘What you’re saying is …’
She stops.
Silence fills the air, the noise of the cafe suddenly seeming very far away, and almost muted in comparison to the words that are screaming inside my head.
I can’t believe I am about to voice this aloud, but someone has to. I draw a breath and force myself to come out with it.
‘What I’m saying is, either someone was blackmailing him … and he knew those images were about to be sent and acted before the shit could hit the fan … or …’
But then I stop too, because I can’t say the last thing, it’s too horrific, it changes everything – what happened, what we did, and most of all the possible consequences.
It’s Fatima who spells it out. Fatima, who is used to giving out life or death information – life-changing diagnoses, stomach-punching test results. She swallows the last of her mint tea, and finishes my sentence for me, her voice flat.
‘Or someone murdered him,’ she says.
ON THE TUBE on the way home the facts seem to jostle and tumble inside my head, ordering and reordering, as though I could make sense of all this if only I shuffle the deck in a different way.
Accessory to murder. Maybe even a suspect myself if Fatima is right.
This changes everything, and I feel hot and cold at the realisation of what we may have blundered into. I feel angry – more than angry. Furious. Furious with Fatima and Thea for not being able to reassure me. Furious with myself for not working this out sooner. For seventeen years I have been pushing away thoughts of what we did that night. For seventeen years I have been not thinking of what happened, trying to bury the memories under a hundredweight of mundane, everyday worries and plans.
I should have thought about it.
I should have thought about it every day, questioned every angle. Because now that I have unpicked that one thread, the whole tapestry of the past is beginning to unravel.
The more I think back, the more certain I am that the drawings had surfaced only that morning, the morning after Ambrose’s death. I had spoken to Miss Weatherby the night before at supper, she had asked after my mother and my weekend plans. There was absolutely no hint of what was to come, no hint of the raw shock and fury we saw in her face the following day. She could have been a truly extraordinary dissembler – but why? There was no reason for the school to wait before confronting us. If Miss Weatherby had seen those pictures on Friday, she would have hauled us into her office that same day.
No, the conclusion was inescapable: the drawings turned up after Ambrose died.
But who? And almost as importantly, why?
Someone blackmailing him, who had finally followed through with their threat?
Or someone who had murdered him, trying to provide a motive for his suicide?
Or … was it possible … could Ambrose himself have possibly sent them, in a fit of remorse, before taking his fatal dose?
But I shake that idea off almost straight away. What Ambrose did in drawing us might have been wrong, legally and ethically, an abuse of his position as Fatima had said. He might even have come to feel that himself, with time.
But I am absolutely and utterly convinced that, whatever he was feeling, Ambrose would never have posted those drawings to the school. Not to save his own shame, but because he would never have put us through the kind of public humiliation that ensued, would never have put Kate through it. His affection, his love for us was too great, and one thing I know, as the Tube train rattles through the tunnel, the dusty wind warm in my face, he did love us, for Kate’s sake, and for our own.
So who then?
A blackmailer from the village, who came to the Mill one day and caught sight of something he thought he could use?
I want it to be true. Because the alternative … the alternative is almost unthinkable. Murder.
And then there are far fewer people with a motive.
Not Luc. He is the one person who lost most from Ambrose’s death. He lost his home, and his sister, and his adoptive father. He lost any security he had.
Not any of the villagers, at least not that I can see. They might have blackmailed him. But they have no reason to kill a man who was one of their own.
So who then? Who had access to the drawings, and access to Ambrose’s stash, and was in the house before he died?
I press my hands to my temples, trying not to think about that, and trying not to think about the last conversation we had, Fatima, Thea and I, as we walked to South Kensington Tube, sunglasses on against the fierce, bleaching summer sun.
‘Listen, there’s just one more thing …’ Thea said, and then she stopped, in the archway to the Tube station, putting her fingers to her mouth.
‘Stop biting your fingers,’ Fatima said, but with concern, not censure. ‘What? What is it?’
‘It – it’s about Kate. And Ambrose. Shit.’ She ran her fingers through her short hair, and her face was stiff with apprehension. ‘No. No, it doesn’t matter.’
‘You can’t say something like that and not tell us.’ I put out my hand to her arm. ‘Besides, it’s obviously eating you up. Spit it out, whatever it is. You’ll feel better. What do they say – a problem shared?’
‘Fuck that,’ Thea said brutally. ‘Much good it’s ever done us.’ Her face twisted and then she said, ‘Look, what I’m about to tell you – it’s not that I think – I don’t want you to think …’
She faltered, pinching the bridge of her nose beneath the sunglasses, but Fatima and I kept silent, sensing that only waiting would bring this confession out.
And at last she told us.
Ambrose had been planning to send Kate away. Right away. To a different boarding school.
He had told Thea just the weekend before, when he was very drunk. Kate, Fatima and I were swimming in the Reach, but Thea had stayed up in the Mill with Ambrose, as he drank red wine, and stared up at the vaulted ceiling, and tried to come to terms with a decision he did not want to make.
‘He was asking me about schools,’ Thea said. ‘What Salten was like, in comparison to the other places I’d been. Whether I thought changing so often had screwed me up. He was drunk, very drunk, and not making complete sense, but then he said something about the parent–child bond, and I had this horrible cold lurch in my stomach. He was talking about Kate.’
She takes a deep breath, as if even now the realisation shocks her.
‘I said, “Ambrose, don’t do this. You’ll break Kate’s heart.” He didn’t answer straight away, but at last he said, “I know. But I just … I can’t let it go on like this. It’s all wrong.”’
What can’t go on? Thea had questioned him, or tried to, but we others were coming back, and Ambrose had shaken his head, and taken his bottle of red wine and gone up the stairs to his studio, shutting the door, before the rest of us had come in from the Reach, wringing water out of our hair and laughing.
And all that night, and the rest of the week, Thea had looked at Kate wondering, does she know what he’s planning? Does she know?
And then Ambrose had died. And everything fell apart.
I can’t let it go on. Thea’s voice, echoing Ambrose, rings in my head as I walk back from the Tube station, hardly feeling the hot afternoon sun on the back of my head, I’m so preoccupied with my own thoughts.
It’s all wrong. What did he mean? I try to imagine what Kate could have done that would be bad enough for him to consider sending her away – but my imagination fails. He had watched Kate, all of us, stumble through that year making mistakes and questionable decisions, exploring drink and d
rugs and our sexuality. And he had said nothing. In a way it was no wonder, with his own past he had few stones left to cast. He only watched with love and tried to tell Kate and the rest of us when we were putting ourselves in danger, without judgement. The only time I can remember him getting really angry was over the pill Kate took at the disco.
Are you mad? he shouted, his hands in his wiry hair, making it stand up on end like a rats’ nest. Do you know what those things do to your body? What’s wrong with some nice healthy weed for crying out loud?!
But even then, he never grounded her, there was no punishment – just his disappointment and concern. He cared for her, for us. He wanted us to be OK. He shook his head when we smoked, looked on with sadness when Thea turned up with plasters and bandages over strange cuts and burns. When we asked him, he counselled, offered advice. But that was it. There was no condemnation, no moral outrage. He never made us feel wrong, or ashamed.
He loved us all. But more than anything, he loved Kate – loved her with an affection so fierce that it took my breath away sometimes. Perhaps it was the fact that it had been just the two of them for so long, after Kate’s mother died – but sometimes, there was something about the way he looked at her, the way he tucked her hair behind her ear, even the way he evoked her in sketches, as though he was trying … not to trap her exactly, but to pinpoint that quintessence that would enable him to preserve something of her forever on a page where it could never be taken away from him. It sang of an adoration that I glimpsed sometimes in my own parents, but dimly, as if through misted glass or far away. In Ambrose. though, it was a flame that burned fierce and bright.
He loved us, but Kate was him. It was impossible to think of him sending her away.
So what could be so bad that he felt he had no choice but to part with her?
‘Are you sure?’ I asked Thea, feeling as if my whole life had been shaken like a snow globe and left to resettle. ‘Is that really what he said?’
And she only nodded, and when I pressed said, ‘Do you think I’d get something like that wrong?’
I can’t let it go on …
What happened, Ambrose? Was it something Kate did? Or … the thought twists in my stomach … was it something else? Something Ambrose was protecting Kate from? Or something he himself had done?
I don’t know. I can’t answer the questions, but my head is spinning with them as my feet eat up the distance between the Tube station and home.
Our road is coming closer, and soon I will have to push these thoughts aside and become Owen’s partner and Freya’s mother.
But the questions beat at me, things with wings and claws, battering against me so that I flinch as I walk, turning my face as if I can avoid them, but I can’t.
What did she do? What did she do, to deserve being sent away? And what might she have done to stop it?
ACCESSORY TO MURDER.
Accessory to murder.
No matter how many times the phrase repeats inside my head, I can’t seem to understand it. Accessory to murder. An offence which carries a prison sentence. In the darkness of my bedroom, the blackout blinds drawn against the evening sun, Freya in my arms, the repeated phrase washes over me in a wave of cold terror. Accessory to murder.
And then it comes to me like a chink in the darkness. The suicide note. That’s what I have to hold on to.
I am feeding Freya down to sleep, and she is almost unconscious, but when I try to take her off she grips me, monkey-like, with her strong little fingers, and begins sucking again with renewed determination, burrowing her face into my breast as if she can return to the safety of my body.
After a minute of this, I realise she is not going to let go without a struggle and I sigh, and let my weight fall back in the nursing chair, and my thoughts return to their round-and-round, their back-and-forth.
Ambrose’s note. A suicide note. How could he have written a note, if he were murdered?
I read it, though all I can remember now are short phrases and snatches and the way the writing seemed to disintegrate into straggling letters at the end. I am at peace with my decision … please know, darling Kate, that I do this with love – the last thing I can do to protect you … I love you, so please go on: live, love, be happy. And above all, don’t let this all be in vain.
Love. Protection. Sacrifice. Those were the words that had stayed with me over the years. And it made sense, in the context of what I’d always believed. If Ambrose lived, the whole scandal with the drawings would have come out – he would have been sacked, and his name, along with Kate’s, would have been dragged through the mud.
Back then, when we got that call into Miss Weatherby’s office, I had had a sense of pieces falling into place. Ambrose had seen the storm coming, and had done the only thing he could do to protect Kate – taken his own life.
But now … now I am not so sure.
I look down at the baby in my arms and I cannot imagine ever leaving her willingly. It’s not that I can’t imagine a parent killing themselves – I know that they do. Being a parent doesn’t grant you immunity from unbearable depression or stress, quite the opposite.
But Ambrose was not depressed. I am as certain of that as I can be. And more than that, he was the last person I could imagine giving a shit about his reputation. He had means. He had friends abroad, many friends. And above all he loved his children, both of them. I cannot imagine him leaving them to face music he was too frightened to face himself. The Ambrose I knew, he would have scooped his children up and taken them to Prague, to Thailand, to Kenya – and he would not have given the smallest of shits about the scandal left behind, because he would have had his art and his family with him, and they were all that mattered to him.
I always knew that, I think. It’s just that it took having a child of my own to realise it.
At last Freya is properly asleep, her mouth slack, her head lolling back, and I lower her gently to the white sheet and tiptoe out of the room, downstairs to where Owen is sitting watching something soothingly mind-numbing on Netflix.
He looks up as I come into the room.
‘Is she down?’
‘Yes, she was knackered. I don’t think she was very happy about me being out today.’
‘You’ve gotta cut those apron strings sometime …’ Owen says teasingly. He’s only trying to wind me up, I know it, but I’m tired and stressed and knocked off balance by everything that happened today, still trying to make sense of the envelope of drawings and Thea’s revelations, and I snap back, without meaning to.
‘For Christ’s sake, Owen, she’s six months.’
‘I know that,’ he says, nettled, taking a sip of the beer that’s sitting at his elbow. ‘I know her age as well as you do. She’s my kid too, you know. Or so I’m led to believe.’
‘So you’re led to believe?’ I feel the blood rising up in my cheeks, and my voice when I repeat his words is high and cracked with anger. ‘So you’re led to believe? What the fuck does that mean?’
‘Hey!’ Owen puts down his glass of beer with an audible thud. ‘Don’t swear at me! Jesus, Isa. What’s got into you lately?’
‘What’s got into me?’ I am almost speechless with fury. ‘You make a crack about Freya not being your baby and you ask what’s got into me?’
‘Freya not being – what the hell?’ His face is genuinely confused, and I can see him replaying the conversation of the last few minutes, and then realising. ‘No! Are you out of your mind? Why would I mean that? I was just trying to say that you need to chill out sometimes, I am Freya’s dad, but you wouldn’t know it by the amount of childcare I get to do. How the hell could you think I’d imply that she’s –’
He stops, lost for words, and I feel my cheeks flaming as I realise what he meant, but my anger doesn’t abate; if anything, it rises. There’s nothing like being in the wrong to make you fight back.
‘Oh well, that’s OK then,’ I spit. ‘You were just implying I’m some kind of controlling obsessive lunatic who won�
��t let her husband change a nappy. That changes everything. Of course I’m not cross now.’
‘Oh Jesus, will you stop putting words into my mouth?!’ Owen groans.
‘Well, it’s hard not to, when you make these cracks without ever coming out with your point.’ My voice is shaking. ‘I’m fed up with these constant little jibes about stuff – if it’s not childcare it’s bottles, and if it’s not that, it’s getting Freya out of our bedroom and into her own. It feels like I –’
‘They weren’t jibes, they were suggestions,’ Owen interrupts, his voice plaintive. ‘Yes, look, I put my hands up, it is something I’ve been starting to get frustrated about, especially now she’s six months. She’s on solids – isn’t it a bit weird breastfeeding her when she’s getting teeth?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything? She’s a baby, Owen. Give her solids! What’s stopping you?’
‘You are! Every night it’s the same thing – of course she won’t go down for me, why would she when you won’t stop breastfeeding?’
I’m shaking with anger, so furious I can’t speak for a minute.
‘Goodnight, Owen,’ I eventually manage.
‘Hang on.’ He stands up as I begin to walk out of the room. ‘Don’t come all high and mighty. I didn’t want to have this bloody argument in the first place. You were the one who dragged it all out in the open!’
I don’t answer. I begin to climb the stairs.
‘Isa,’ he calls urgently, but softly, trying not to wake Freya. ‘Isa! Why the hell are you being like this?’
But I don’t answer. I can’t answer. Because if I do, I will say something that might damage my relationship beyond recovery.
The truth.
I WAKE WITH Freya beside me, but the rest of the double bed is empty and for a moment I can’t work out why I feel so wretched and ashamed, and then I remember.
Shit. Did he sleep downstairs, or come up late and leave early?
I get up very carefully, pile the duvet on the floor in case Freya wakes and rolls off the bed, and pulling my dressing gown on, I tiptoe downstairs.
