The Accusation: An addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist

by Victoria Jenkins

  Charlotte shook her head slightly, the effort it took to do so draining her of the last of her energy. Her face fell to one side, and I repositioned myself, clambering across her while trying to keep pressure on the wound.

  ‘Try not to move. Just stay with me, okay? Don’t close your eyes. Charlotte?’ I put my phone on the ground and clicked the fingers of my free hand in front of her face. ‘Charlotte! Shit!’ I grabbed the phone. ‘I’m losing her! For God’s sake, please, where are they?’

  As the operator began to answer me, trying to calm me with her measured tones, I heard the ambulance in the distance, its siren steadying my heart rate. ‘They’re coming,’ I told her. ‘I think they’re coming.’

  Within less than half a minute, the far end of the park was lit with headlights, and I was frantically waving my phone in the air, its torch turned on, desperate to be spotted in the darkness. ‘Over here! Quickly!’

  The engine was cut, and I waited for the sound of boots on concrete, still pressing the jacket to Charlotte’s neck, still praying she’d stay with me until the arrival of someone who knew what they were doing. I felt a hand on my shoulder, heavy yet reassuring.

  ‘Okay, let’s take a look at her. What’s your name, love?’

  When she didn’t answer, the paramedic looked at me.

  ‘Charlotte,’ I told him. ‘Her name’s Charlotte.’

  ‘All right, Charlotte love, I want you to try to stay awake, okay? Stay with us.’

  He gestured to his female colleague, who reached for the large box she had carried with her from the ambulance. I stood and stepped back, almost losing my balance. I had been crouching so long, my legs felt numb, and now the blood rushed back to them. Charlotte’s eyes had fallen shut.

  ‘Is she going to be okay?’ I asked, my words barely audible, the voice that escaped me not sounding like mine.

  ‘Wait with us until the police arrive,’ the female paramedic said, not looking up at me. ‘They’ll want to speak to you.’

  I nodded, the most I seemed able to manage. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the sight of them hovering over her, looming and retreating as they produced more and more equipment, and the feeling of uselessness that not long ago had consumed me was replaced by the sensation of being absent, as though I was not really there and this wasn’t really happening. I was standing apart from my body, watching myself watching.

  There was a surge in noise as further sirens approached. The paramedics were talking, to Charlotte and to each other, their words increasingly rapid. There was engine noise, there were lights and a sudden rush of people, and while my eyes were still focused on what few glimpses of Charlotte I was able to snatch, a hand on my arm ushered me away, moving me towards the pool of light around the police car.

  ‘Are you okay?’ the officer asked me. I realised I had barely acknowledged him; I couldn’t have said what he looked like or how old he might have been. I nodded and felt something being put around me, then remembered that my jacket was still with Charlotte, soaked in the blood that had seeped from her wound.

  ‘You called the ambulance?’ the officer asked me.

  I nodded, apparently unable to form words, exhausted by the ordeal and by the not-knowing what would happen to the woman now. What if she died? If I had got there two minutes earlier, could I have stopped what had happened? If I had acted more quickly – put pressure on the wound before being instructed to do so by the 999 operator – would she have had a better chance of surviving her injuries? What if something I had done had made her condition worse without my realising?

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked again.

  He said something more, to someone else, but I didn’t hear his words. He caught me as I fell forward, and the next thing I knew, I was sobbing into his jacket, the weight of the trauma trying to drag me to earth.

  Two

  There was blood on my dress, in my hair, on my hands. I turned my key in the door quietly, not wanting to disturb the silence of the house. The only sound was the faint murmur of the television from the living room. Damien had waited up for me; either that or he had fallen asleep on the sofa, the remote control probably still at hand.

  I clicked the front door shut gently behind me and stood in the darkness of the hallway, the soft glow of lamplight escaping in cracks from the living room door to my right, quiet washing over me. There was usually something so reassuring about that late-night peace, a kind of comfort in knowing that the girls were upstairs, safely tucked in their beds. The house was secured and the night that stretched ahead of me, beautiful with its dark promise of a restful sleep, would roll into a new morning, always bringing with it a fresh start. That night, it didn’t feel that way. That night, I felt as though the darkness was a threat and not a comfort, as though I had brought something into the house with me.

  There was a mirror hanging on the wall to my right; an old-fashioned rectangular sheet of glass framed in gold that had belonged to Damien’s late grandmother. There was a smear of something on its surface – make-up, perhaps. I imagined Lily standing there, peering close to her reflection, her fingertips lightly tracing the soft flesh beneath her lower lashes before they connected with the glass and left a smudge of foundation that would stay there until someone cleaned it away. She had started wearing more make-up than usual, her customary flick of mascara and smear of lip gloss replaced with a look that was too heavy, too old for her youthful skin. She was grown up, and yet she wasn’t. She was a young woman, but still a little girl.

  When I looked beyond the smear of make-up, I saw my own reflection, pale and almost not-there, ghost-like. There was blood on my face, two lines of badly painted brownish-red camouflage at my jawline, and my make-up had smudged around my eyes, casting dark shadows beneath them. I looked as though I was ready for a bad-taste Halloween fancy dress party; as though if I stared at my reflection for long enough, I might raise the corner of a sinister smile.

  The living room door opened and Damien appeared.

  ‘Where have you been? I was just about to call the––’ One look at me and he stopped short. His gaze lingered on my chin and then moved down my dress, resting on my hands, my bloodstained fingers. ‘What the hell’s happened to you?’

  I had no idea what the time was. The officers who had taken my statement in the park had insisted on driving me home, despite the house being just a few streets away, and yet they could have taken me anywhere, I wouldn’t have noticed. I had lost all sense of place and time.

  Damien moved towards me and wrapped his arms around me, and I found myself crying again, my tears soaking his T-shirt. It smelt familiar: the favourite aftershave he always wore.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, the words spoken into my hair.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  He pulled away from me and studied my face for a moment before leading me down the hallway to the kitchen. I wished I was able to read his thoughts – to know what the look on his face meant – but I was too preoccupied with the memory of what had happened, still feeling the horror of the other woman’s blood on my skin, so close I could almost taste it on my tongue.

  In the kitchen, I propped myself shakily on a stool at the breakfast bar while Damien put the kettle on. When I asked him for paracetamol, he found a box and snapped two white tablets from their plastic strip, then brought me a glass of water.

  ‘I’ve been calling you,’ he said. ‘I was worried.’ I hadn’t looked at my phone since the call with the 999 operator had ended. There is nothing more annoying than the sound of a mobile phone conversation in a restaurant, and so I made it a habit to always turn mine to silent whenever I was out. In the park, I hadn’t had a chance to think about the fact that Damien might have been trying to get hold of me, and it occurred to me then that Laura would have been doing the same, holding me to my word when I’d told her I would text when I got home.

  I glanced at the clock above the microwave. It was ten to two. Nowhere other than the dodgy cl
ub above the discount store would be open at that time, and no one over the age of twenty-five or under the influence of fewer than six drinks would ever go there.

  ‘What’s happened?’ There was something strange in his voice, something that dreaded the answer before he had even given voice to the question.

  ‘Someone was stabbed,’ I said, the words sounding as though they were coming from someone else’s body, the experience of it all still not quite belonging to me. ‘A woman in the park. She… I helped her.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Damien came to stand beside me, and I allowed the weight of my body to rest against his. He waited for the words for come, for me to spill the story of what had happened during those past few hours in my own time, and when I was finished, he continued to hold me, not saying anything.

  ‘So did you actually see it happen?’

  I shook my head. ‘I saw someone running away, but that was it. I wasn’t near enough to get a decent look.’ I pulled away from him, feeling awkward at our prolonged closeness. Things had been strained between us for a while, and we rarely embraced. ‘I’m sorry I worried you. Are the girls okay?’

  ‘They’re fine. Amelia fell asleep watching Mary Poppins.’

  ‘Poor you,’ I said with a smile. Since taking her to the cinema to see the remake, she had become obsessed with the original, learning all the words to the songs and singing each in her best faux-posh Julie Andrews voice, with the occasional mockney Dick Van Dyke effort thrown in for good measure. ‘Lily all right?’

  Damien nodded. ‘On that bloody phone till God knows what time again.’ He rolled his eyes and I said nothing, a frisson of guilt curling in my stomach. I would talk to her about it when we were alone tomorrow, but at that moment I couldn’t bring myself to linger on the subject.

  ‘Is she going to be okay?’

  It took me a moment to realise he was no longer referring to Lily. ‘I don’t know. She’d lost consciousness by the time the ambulance left.’

  ‘Jesus.’ He shook his head and went to the kettle. It had boiled a while earlier, but he hadn’t yet got around to making the tea. I watched him as he took tea bags from a jar beneath the windowsill, sugar from the one next to it. ‘Stabbed,’ he muttered, more to himself than to me, and shook his head again.

  While he finished making the tea, I went upstairs to wash and change before coming back down to join him. We took our drinks through to the living room and sat side by side on the sofa. I should have been exhausted, yet my body had somehow pushed through it, my brain too wired to find rest. I told him about the paramedics, the police, my statement, the short journey home in the back of the police car, filling the next hour with talk of nothing but what had happened.

  ‘I need the loo.’ Eventually I put a hand on Damien’s knee and pushed myself up from the sofa. I didn’t need the toilet; it was an excuse to leave the room. The more we had talked, the more my thoughts had drifted to Lily and her late-night phone call. They were becoming something of a habit.

  I pulled the living room door closed behind me and went upstairs to my older daughter’s bedroom. Her room was a mess – clothes abandoned on the carpet, a cosmetics bag emptied over the dressing table, dirty plates and glasses everywhere. Her duvet was crumpled and piled high, and if it weren’t for the cascade of dark hair that escaped from the top of it, I might have thought at first glance that she wasn’t there.

  As always, her mobile phone was close to hand, precariously balanced on the edge of the bedside table. I reached for it and tapped in the code, having watched her in the car the previous day and memorised it. I didn’t feel guilty; she had lied to me, and I was doing this for her own good.

  Password incorrect, the phone informed me. I typed in the six-digit combination again, making sure I hit each number correctly. Wrong again. Putting the phone back on the bedside table, I stared at the mountain of duvet that was my daughter and wondered exactly when our relationship had changed. There had been a time not so long ago when she would have talked to me about anything, when I had considered myself – perhaps naively, maybe optimistically – her friend as much as her mother.

  Whatever had altered between us, one thing was clear. Lily was one step ahead of me.

  Three

  The following morning, Lily came downstairs wearing skin-tight jeans and a top that grazed her waist, giving the occasional flash of her belly button. Her body had changed so much recently, with the childlike narrowness of her hips giving way to curves that made her look older than her years. She was becoming beautiful. The problem was, she knew it. I didn’t want her to become one of those girls – one of those duck-lipped, bushy-eyebrowed Instagram teens – who had become a stereotype for an entire generation, and I had always hoped that intelligence would be enough to deter her from following the herd.

  ‘You were back late last night,’ she said casually, passing a hand over my loose hair as she walked past me. ‘All-night rave up at Spoons?’

  I flashed her a sarcastic smile and shoved a box of cereal in her direction. ‘We’re out of bread,’ I told her, trying to maintain a sense of normality, hoping my dark thoughts and the truth of last night wouldn’t make themselves known in my pallid complexion. I had decided not to tell Lily about what had happened, knowing she might slip up and mention it in front of Amelia. My younger daughter was sensitive enough already, and I wanted the park to remain a safe place, not somewhere she would fear.

  The thought that danger lay so close to our home was disturbing. As far as I knew, Lily had no plans to go anywhere other than her job interview that day, and if she did intend to go elsewhere, I was going to insist that either Damien or I gave her a lift, though I’d find out where she was going first before offering my husband’s services; if she was going to visit him, I didn’t want Damien to find out, not before I’d had a chance to speak to him about it.

  Lily pulled a face at the cereal and went to the fridge instead, pulling out a tub of yoghurt and a carton of strawberries. On top of the microwave, where it was plugged into its charger, my phone beeped. It was a message from Ffion, who was in charge of the coffee shop that day.

  Ellie has called in sick, but Kirstin said she’d cover. Just letting you know x

  I texted back. Thanks, that’s great. I’ll call you later.

  I trusted Ffion with the running of the coffee shop, though Saturdays were our busiest day. Time allowing, I resolved to pop in at some point that afternoon.

  Amelia’s voice seeped from the living room, intermingled with the grating tones of Dick Van Dyke. ‘The more I laugh,’ she sang, ‘the more I fill with glee…’

  ‘I can’t cope with that much longer,’ Lily said, shooting a glare at the closed door. ‘Seriously… how many more times is she going to watch it?’

  Though I agreed with the sentiment, I didn’t care how many times Amelia watched the film; I was glad that at least one person in the house could find something to smile about.

  ‘She’s happy,’ I said. ‘Leave her be.’

  I caught the face Lily pulled. ‘You okay, Mother? Someone drink a bit too much last night?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that.’

  Thoughts of Charlotte kept me distracted from Lily’s increasingly annoying attitude. She had recently developed a confidence that was far from attractive; if anything, it was making her look like a spoiled brat. I was going to tell her so, but not while we were in the house and there was a chance Amelia might overhear. I was also keen to keep the conversation away from Damien, so I saved it until we were alone in the car, where I approached the subject that had sat silently between us with a little more force than I should have.

  ‘You’re still seeing him, aren’t you?’

  The sigh was audible enough to be offensive, as though I was inconveniencing her by wanting to know the details of her private life. If this was any normal teenage relationship I wouldn’t have been so insistent, but I had reason to be concerned. A few weeks earlier, Amy had told me she’d seen
Lily in a restaurant with a man, a man who according to her was at least late twenties, maybe early thirties. When I confronted Lily about it, she at first tried to deny that she’d been where Amy claimed to have seen her. Then I showed her the photograph that Amy had taken: a distant shot, poorly lit, that had only captured the back of the man and a side profile of Lily but was more than enough to prove that it was indeed her and she’d been caught red-handed – or in this case, red-faced – guilty as charged. Her outrage at Amy’s invasion of her privacy made itself known in a screaming tantrum that was followed by a series of slammed doors.

  The following day, when she’d calmed down a fraction, I’d tried to talk to her about it. I asked her who he was and where they had met, but she was not exactly forthcoming with details, only repeating that he didn’t treat her like a little kid, which was apparently all that Damien and I did. She tried to tell me that it had been dinner, nothing more, and that there was nothing serious going on between the two of them. I’d made her promise not to see him again, and in yet another example of my astounding naivety, I’d believed her when she’d told me she wouldn’t.

  I had made attempts to find out who this man could be, trawling through Lily’s social media profiles and employing Amy’s help to find out what we could about him, but my efforts at playing private investigator had led me nowhere. I still didn’t know his name. Now I felt as though Lily – as though the two of them together – had been laughing at me, and the thought made me determined to find him and make sure he was never able to bother a teenage girl again.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re still on about this.’ Lily raised a leg and put her foot on the dashboard.

  ‘Oh really? And why would that be?’