The solicitor smoothed the skirt of her fitted dress before sitting beside me. ‘You’ve been accused of a violent assault,’ she said, as though I might need reminding of the fact. ‘At the moment, the accusation made by the victim is currently all that stands against you, so my advice is to tell the truth and stick to the facts.’
‘What do you mean, “at the moment”?’
‘In order to charge you, the police will need evidence beyond the accusation.’
‘I didn’t do it,’ I told her, feeling certain already that this woman didn’t believe me. She was supposed to be on my side, yet it occurred to me that she was unlikely to care what happened to me. I hadn’t hired her; I wasn’t paying her. The title ‘duty solicitor’ seemed apt; she was there through obligation, not because she wanted to help prove my innocence.
‘Then they won’t find any evidence.’
She spoke so simply, as though everything was as straightforward as her tone implied. But I knew it wasn’t. I would be guilty until proven innocent, and how was I supposed to do that? I had been there with the victim. The police had seen me there. If Charlotte Copeland, for whatever reason, wanted to accuse me of causing the injuries that had led her to that hospital bed, they would believe her, wouldn’t they? Why would she lie?
‘Will I be charged?’ I asked quietly, hearing the tremor in my voice.
‘As I said, not without evidence.’
‘And if I am? What happens then?’
‘If that happens, you’ll need a solicitor to make an application for bail.’
‘You won’t do that?’
‘I’m here as duty solicitor. Who you employ after this is entirely up to you, but as I said, it may not come to that. Give your account of what happened as simply and honestly as you can. Try not to get too emotional – just stick with the facts. If there are any questions you’re unsure about, wait for me to step in, okay?’
I nodded, but it was without conviction. Beneath my T-shirt, my heart was pounding, and a rush of blood to my brain had prompted a headache that was fierce and relentless.
A moment later, the door opened, and two plain-clothes officers came in. The man introduced himself as DC Cooper and his female colleague as DC Henderson. He clicked a button on the tape recorder and spoke their names again before giving the name of the duty solicitor, Louisa Jones.
‘Interview with Jenna Morgan commencing,’ he said with a glance at the clock, ‘at eight seventeen pm. You understand the allegation that’s been made against you, Mrs Morgan?’
I nodded.
‘Please speak for the recording, Mrs Morgan.’
‘Yes, I understand.’ My voice didn’t sound like mine. It was brittle and sharp, already defensive.
‘Charlotte Copeland has identified you as the person responsible for her assault,’ said DC Henderson. ‘We’d like you to take us through your version of what happened the night before last.’
‘My version?’ I glanced at Louisa, remembering her words about being honest and sticking to the facts. ‘I’ve already told you what happened. I told the officers at the park last night.’
‘If you could tell us again, please.’
I started at the restaurant, explaining why I was there, and ended with the police arriving at the park. I recalled each moment in as much detail as possible, from feeling cold and wishing I’d worn a pair of tights, to panicking that I was doing something wrong and not following the 999 operator’s instructions properly. I didn’t want to say that I saved Charlotte’s life – she might well have survived without my efforts – yet at the same time I wanted to make them realise that my being there could only have been a good thing. I had tried to help her. Now I was paying for it in the worst of ways.
‘Last night, when you spoke with our colleagues, you didn’t offer much in the way of a description of the man you say you saw fleeing the park?’
There was an inflection at the end of DC Cooper’s sentence; it was a question, not a statement.
‘It was dark. He was wearing dark clothes, and I was at least… I don’t know… two hundred metres away.’
‘Quite a distance, then. How can you be sure it was a man?’
‘I can’t. I mean… I’m pretty sure it was a man.’
The two officers sitting opposite me were offering little in the way of reassurance, but then why would they? As far as they were concerned, I was guilty, identified in person by the victim. I had no defence to help me, and yet surely anyone could see the implausibility of the accusation made against me. Why would I have stabbed her, then stayed with her and helped her until the paramedics and the police arrived?
‘Mrs Morgan.’ DC Cooper leaned forward and studied me across the table as though I hadn’t already been in the room with them for the previous fifteen minutes. ‘Had you had any contact with Charlotte Copeland before last night?’
I noticed that the tone of his voice had changed, the politeness abandoned. I shook my head. ‘I’ve never seen her before.’
‘So you have no idea why she might want to accuse you of the assault against her?’
‘No,’ I said, trying to keep my voice as steady and level as possible. ‘I can only assume that she’s confused. Of course she recognises me – I was there with her. She was in a bad way before the ambulance arrived. The loss of blood… it must all seem like a blur to her. Perhaps she thinks––’
I was stopped short by the touch of Louisa’s hand on my knee beneath the table.
‘It’s not Mrs Morgan’s job to explain the accusation made against her, Detective.’
‘We’re just establishing the facts,’ DC Cooper stated, eyeing the solicitor with impatience.
‘You’re missing the crucial fact that you have no evidence with which to charge Mrs Morgan,’ Louisa said, looking from one officer to the other. When neither spoke, she continued, ‘Holding her here any longer is a waste of everyone’s time.’
The two officers exchanged a glance that confirmed her statement as correct. I should have felt relief, but there was nothing but the terrifying sickness that had lodged in my chest and was threatening to steal the breath from my body.
DC Cooper sat forward. ‘Interview paused at eight forty-two pm.’ He stood, and DC Henderson followed.
After they’d left the room, I found myself unable to speak, though there was plenty I wanted to say. The solicitor and I sat in silence, as though both unsure what we were waiting for. A short time later, DC Cooper returned alone.
‘Follow me,’ he said.
Louisa scraped back her chair as though everything was done and dusted, but I knew even then that it was far from finished. ‘What happens now?’
‘I’ll show you back to your room,’ DC Cooper said, as though he was a hotel employee and I was a paying guest; as though his parting phrase was sufficient to answer the flurry of questions that had settled in my head like a snowdrift, blocking any escape I might have had from my thoughts. When I looked at Louisa, she offered little more in terms of reassurance.
‘I thought I’d be released?’
‘They can hold you for up to twenty-four hours,’ she replied. ‘If no further evidence comes to light, they’ll release you. Find yourself a solicitor. Just in case.’
I followed them both from the interview room and along the main corridor, back to the cell where a sleepless night awaited me.
Six
I was released without charge under further investigation on Sunday morning. I had never heard the phrase ‘under further investigation’ before, though it was obvious that the police had no intention of dropping their suspicion of me. I wondered why they had kept me overnight just to release me without charge, but when I asked the desk sergeant who returned my belongings to me, his response was vague, a non-committal, ‘we’ll be in touch’ apparently considered sufficient to clear up my confusion.
It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time I arrived home on Sunday morning. The first sound I heard upon stepping into the house was that of my yo
unger daughter’s tears, and it pierced my heart more sharply than any knife could have done. It didn’t take me long to realise what had happened. The drawers in the hallway were open, half of their contents strewn across the top of the unit and the rest abandoned on the floor; the coat rack was a tangle of jackets and raincoats, as though each had been removed, shaken and haphazardly replaced. I imagined that the search must have taken place recently, and I understood then why they had kept me there for as long as they had. In the confusion of the aftermath, Damien had had no chance to begin to tidy up. And why should he? I thought. Though I had created it unwittingly, this was my mess, not his.
The door to the living room was ajar, and through the gap I could see Damien’s legs. I imagined Amelia curled up on the sofa beside him, still in her pyjamas, her legs pulled up beneath her, her head resting on his chest as she sobbed into his T-shirt. She had always been a daddy’s girl, something I had mockingly lamented over the years but had secretly been grateful for. My relationship with my own father – with both my parents – had been strained, with physical and emotional closeness an experience to which I had never been exposed, and I was thankful that Amelia and Damien had found the connection I had always craved.
When I heard movement from the kitchen, my first assumption was that it was Lily. Moments later, I realised I was wrong when I was confronted by my mother-in-law, Nancy, who came into the hallway carrying a mug of tea and a hot chocolate topped with a snowy peak of whipped cream and a sprinkling of tiny marshmallows. She looked at me as though I shouldn’t be there, as though this wasn’t my own home, and I felt my face burn with the shame of what I could only guess she might have heard.
‘Jenna. We didn’t know when you’d be back.’
Of course not, I felt like saying. Had anyone even bothered to try to find out?
From the corner of my eye I saw Damien move at the sound of his mother’s voice; a moment later, he joined us out in the hallway. He looked exhausted, and I was hit by a wave of guilt that left a bitter yet familiar taste in my mouth. He told Amelia to wait where she was for a minute before he pulled the door shut behind him. I shot him a look that said I’d rather he’d closed the door with Nancy on the other side of it. But what had I expected? To be greeted with open arms and a strong shoulder to lean upon, much as I had just two nights earlier? I had kept the truth from him – unnecessarily and inexplicably – and he was obviously still smarting from the fact.
‘Why did you lie?’
I felt a knot tighten in my stomach, and that taste, like bile, bitter and acidic, rose again in the back of my throat. For an awful moment I wondered what he was referring to.
‘All that talk of running late and getting pizza… Why didn’t you say you’d been arrested?’
‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
He looked at me so coldly that it was as though he was looking through me. I was all too aware of Nancy’s presence, so typical of her not to use some tact and leave us to have this conversation alone.
‘Didn’t want to worry me? I’ve been trying your phone all night. I’ve called every hospital in South Wales. If you’d just told me where you were, I wouldn’t have been left wondering what the hell was going on.’ He lowered his voice to a hiss. ‘You could have been dead for all I knew.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, knowing the words would be greeted with resentment. ‘I didn’t realise they’d keep me there all night.’ I looked past him, down the length of hallway and into the glimpse of dining area I could see through the partly opened kitchen door. The table was littered with books, papers and stationery, everything stacked haphazardly and apparently at random. The place had been turned inside out. ‘When did they come here?’
‘They left just over an hour ago.’
‘They had a warrant?’
‘They didn’t need one, apparently. They’d been granted a “section 18” search, whatever that means.’
I felt sick. My thoughts were snapped back to the previous evening, and to the detective’s expression when he had returned to the interview room to take me back to my cell. Had he already known then that they would go to my house, and was that why they had kept me there overnight? When Charlotte had made her accusation against me, had she known that she would bring this to my home? Perhaps her thoughts hadn’t stretched as far as the repercussions of her claim; maybe, amid the confusion of her injury, she was unable to see past the association she had made with me. Whatever her state of mind, it was difficult to regard her words as anything but personal, as though she had done this to ruin me.
Damien turned from me, his eyes following mine.
‘Damien called me when the police showed up,’ Nancy said, handing him the tea. ‘He didn’t know what else to do.’
The comment shouldn’t have annoyed me as much as it did, but at that moment I think anything Nancy might have said would have caused me frustration. It didn’t surprise me in the least that calling her had been his first thought. It was always the case.
‘It was the first I knew of where you were,’ he said, gesturing with an arm flung in the direction of the chaos. ‘I’d been calling round the hospitals – I thought you’d been in an accident. Quite a way to find out your wife has been arrested.’
‘It’s all a mistake,’ I told him, the words pouring from my mouth too quickly. As soon as they’d left me, I heard how they sounded. I was trying to convince myself of my innocence as much as I was trying to convince Damien, as though the hours spent in that station had tainted me with the invisible brand of a criminal.
‘Well, I’d assumed so.’
Hostility seeped from him like cheap aftershave, heavy and choking. Had things been right between us, he would have been offering me comfort, reassuring me that he was on my side and that we would work together to prove my innocence. But things hadn’t been right for a while now, and it had taken the events of the previous twenty-four hours to highlight a truth I had been trying to ignore. Damien was there, but the husband I knew had left me, and I didn’t know where he’d gone or why.
I wondered how much additional poison Nancy had been able to add to a recipe already soured with doubt and mistrust.
‘Why didn’t you answer?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘When I called you yesterday. Why didn’t you answer? Where were you?’
Damien glanced to his left, and at his side his hand fumbled distractedly with his jeans pocket.
My tone was accusatory, though I tried to speak as casually as possible under the circumstances. I had spent my time in that police cell trying to fight away thoughts of where my husband might have been and who he might have been with, though I knew there was little more than my own overactive brain to justify my paranoia. I didn’t want to think it possible that Damien might be having an affair, but his recent uncharacteristic silences and strange behaviour were leading me up paths I’d never thought I’d have to travel, not with him, at least; though I knew from previous experience that nothing could ever be guaranteed, not even the character of someone you thought you knew better than anyone else.
‘I’m in for questioning as well now, am I?’ he spat. ‘I was here, wondering what the hell had happened to you. And looking after our daughter while the police were turning the house upside down.’
I bit my lip, feeling the injustice of his acrimony. ‘Is Amelia okay?’
I was still aware of Nancy at my side, lingering there like the ghost of Christmas past.
‘No. She’s been bloody distraught.’
I looked down at the floor, guilty, but still not able to forget that he had hesitated before he’d answered my question about where he’d been. He could have lied; it would have been easy for him to do so. I hadn’t been there to know any different.
‘I’ll take her the hot chocolate,’ Nancy said, finally leaving us alone.
‘And Lily?’ I asked, when the living room door had closed behind my mother-in-law. ‘Is she here?’
Damien shook his h
ead. ‘She didn’t come home yesterday. She texted to say she was staying at Maisie’s.’
My head swam as I realised that wherever she had really spent the previous night, it was all my doing. If I hadn’t made her get out of the car the previous morning; if I had dealt with the situation of her mystery man better and earlier; if I hadn’t taken that bloody shortcut through the park on Friday night, none of this would have happened. Lily would have been safely home with us, where I could have kept my eye on her.
‘I’m glad she wasn’t here,’ Damien added. He reached into his pocket and pulled something from it before glancing at the living room door as though to check that his mother wasn’t listening in on the conversation. ‘And I’m glad I went into her room before they turned it upside down. Want to tell me what this is?’ He produced a delicate silver bracelet, holding it flat on his outstretched palm. His eyes met mine questioningly, his eyebrows raised as he waited for an explanation.
I recognised the bracelet instantly. A couple of months earlier, when Lily had got her AS results, she had asked us to buy it for her, completely undeterred by the extortionate price tag. She had argued with us when we’d told her that she couldn’t have it, and I had reasoned with her that if she wanted it badly enough, she would work hard and save for it. I tried to persuade her of how much better it would feel wearing it with the knowledge that she had earned it rather than just being given it, but my attempts were met with rolled eyes and a comment on how unfair we were.
‘It’s not like you can’t afford it,’ she had said, which had made me even more determined that she wouldn’t have it, not unless she did as I had suggested, got herself some permanent part-time work and saved so that she could buy it for herself.
I stared at the bracelet in Damien’s hand, unable to explain its presence in the house. Though she had earned money on and off with her various part-time jobs, there was no way she could have saved enough to buy it.
‘Where did you find that?’ I asked.
‘In a drawer in her room.’
The Accusation: An addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist Page 4
