‘What were you doing looking in her drawers?’
‘Did you buy it for her?’
‘No! We talked about this back in the summer – we agreed it was ridiculous and she shouldn’t have it. Why would I go and buy it for her now?’
‘Then how has she got it?’
I couldn’t answer his question, not because I didn’t have an explanation, but precisely because I did. I could only imagine how Damien might react if he knew about Lily’s mystery man. There was no other possible explanation for how she had that bracelet, unless she had stolen it. And Lily was many things, but I knew she wasn’t a thief.
‘Mummy.’
Amelia was standing at the living room door, still crumpled and sleepy in her pyjamas, her penguin clutched in the crook of her arm in a way that made her look so much younger than her eight years. We had given her that penguin when she was two, and for six years she hadn’t slept a night without it.
‘The police were in my room.’
I’d expected her to be angry with me; instead, she threw herself at me, her arms wrapping around my waist and her face disappearing as she pressed herself against my stomach. As I folded my arms around her little body, I considered how slight she was. She always had been; she had been born five weeks before her due date, weighing just four pounds and fourteen ounces, and she had never quite caught up, always looking younger than the other children her age. I was forever worried that her small stature and childlike temperament would make her an easy target for bullies, but thankfully she had so far gone through her school life a happy, popular little girl.
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.’
The sadness I felt for my daughter – for my family – was tainted with anger towards Charlotte Copeland. Though she was a victim, she had made me one too, inflicting upon my children a shame they would be forced to wear like a second skin if this whole sorry mess was allowed to escalate further. I sympathised with her – I pitied her – but I couldn’t help the part of me that resented everything she had brought upon me. She could take it all away again with just a few words, but there was no sign of her doing so.
I could feel Damien’s eyes on me before his focus left my face and slipped down to the bracelet in his hand. He retracted his arm and returned the piece of jewellery to his pocket, as though realising the silliness of it all. Why were we arguing over a bracelet when there were so much bigger matters at hand?
In my pocket, my mobile started to ring. I pulled it out and glanced at its lit screen. Amy.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to take this.’ I leaned down to kiss my daughter’s head, breathing in the comforting scent of the apple shampoo her hair was always washed with. ‘I won’t be long, I promise.’
As I stepped past Damien, he ignored me, coaxing Amelia back into the living room with the promise of a Disney film. Then I realised something. When I had asked him what he had been doing looking through the drawers in Lily’s room, he had never given me an answer.
Seven
I had called Amy after leaving the police station, explaining hurriedly to her answerphone what had happened after I had left the restaurant on Friday night. With hindsight, it had occurred to me that my phone call might have been wasted on Damien even had he answered, and that it would have been better to contact Amy. Her brother was a solicitor, successful and, as such, busy, though by all accounts he wasn’t so popular with the police. There had apparently been several cases in which he’d got people everyone had known to be guilty off scot-free. If he could help them, he could help me, couldn’t he? I hadn’t done anything wrong.
‘Jenna, thank God… are you all right?’ Amy sounded genuinely concerned, and I felt guilty for having dumped my bad news on her in the middle of her relaxing break away.
‘No.’ I paused. ‘No, I’m not okay.’
I did then what I hadn’t allowed myself to do since Friday night. My tears were loud and embarrassing, but an accumulation of stress and anxiety meant I had no reserves with which to hold them back. I had never been accused of trying to kill someone before. My freedom had never seemed so fragile.
‘Jenna,’ Amy said, her voice calm and filled with an attempt at reassurance. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m at home. Well… in the garden, actually. Cruella de Vil is here.’
Amy said nothing, more than aware who I was referring to. She was familiar enough with my family details to know that Nancy and I didn’t get along.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have called you. I shouldn’t have left that message.’
‘You most definitely should.’
‘How was your weekend?’
‘Jenna,’ she said, ignoring my attempt at normal conversation. ‘I’m going to be home by two-ish. I’m coming over, or would you rather meet me somewhere else?’
‘I don’t want you to cut your weekend short for me.’
‘Really, I’m not. I’ve been with him over twenty-four hours – that’s enough for anyone. So, am I coming to yours?’
‘Could we meet somewhere else?’
‘The Swan?’ she suggested.
The thought of going into town filled me with unease. I had no idea how much had already been made public, or what might have been said about me online. I had come from a village where gossip was rife and privacy was hard to come by, and had found that nothing changed with a move to a bigger town.
‘Okay,’ I said, knowing I couldn’t hide forever from what might await me. I still had a business to run, and encountering other people was unavoidable. As well as that, I didn’t want to be in the house. The atmosphere was stifling, as though I had already been deemed guilty.
We agreed to meet at four o’clock, and I ended the call. When I went back into the house, Damien was in the kitchen. He had been watching me from the window.
‘What was so desperate that she couldn’t be kept waiting?’
I glanced into the hallway, not wanting either Nancy or Amelia to hear what I had to tell him. ‘They’ve released me under further investigation.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means they’ll be looking for something to try to incriminate me with.’
‘But you haven’t done anything.’
‘I know.’
Damien’s face relaxed. It was clear he took this to mean that the whole sorry mess of my arrest was already over; that it was all nothing but a silly mistake and the police would soon come to realise it. In truth, it was far from over. I knew there would be worse to come.
‘I’m going to see if her brother will represent me, if needed.’
‘Sean Barrett? Are you that desperate? The bloke’s a crook himself.’
‘That’s unfair,’ I said, though I understood Damien’s concern. Sean’s reputation for being able to secure freedom for the bad guy meant choosing him as a solicitor could make me look like one of his usual clients. I didn’t know him well enough to trust him, but I trusted Amy and I knew the influence she had over her brother.
‘What’s the state of Lily’s room?’ I asked.
‘It’s a mess.’
‘We should tidy it up a bit before she gets back.’
Damien shot me a look I understood – Lily was bound to go nuts when she found out we’d been in her room and had touched her things.
‘We’ll just deal with the worst of it.’
While he went to the living room and spoke to his mother, I stared out of the kitchen window, my thoughts drifting once again to Charlotte Copeland, wondering what she was thinking about in that moment and whether it included me and what I might be going through as a result of her accusation. Not far from me on the kitchen worktop, its charger plugged into a socket at the wall, Damien’s mobile beeped with a text message.
In all our years together, I had never checked my husband’s phone, but something made me pick it up. The message appeared in a flash at the top of the screen, accompanied by a number that hadn’t been saved to a name
.
Hi Damien, are we still on for
I couldn’t see the rest of the message – just that, there and gone in the briefest of flashes. To read the message in full I would need to unlock the phone. I knew his passcode – I had never been secretive about mine – yet I had never before used it to access his phone. I had never imagined I would find myself in a situation where I would be tempted to.
‘You coming then?’
My hand slid from the phone at the sound of his voice at the kitchen door, and I moved away from it quickly, as though its nearness had burned me, and followed him upstairs to Lily’s room. A part of me wanted him to reach out and touch me, to feel his arms embrace me in some sort of act of solidarity and reassurance, yet there was another part that resented his treatment of me since I’d got back from the station. I didn’t believe he thought me capable of what I’d been accused of, but it was obvious he didn’t trust me, not fully.
Did I trust him? I wanted to believe I did, yet the first few words of an unread message were enough to shake a faith that not so long before had felt indestructible. I was being stupid, I told myself. It was probably a client, someone whose laptop he was servicing; someone confirming an appointment. What had happened to make me so suspicious, or was this simply a resurrection of the old me – a me I had tried and failed to escape?
I stood behind Damien at the door to Lily’s room, surveying the mess spread in front of us. Her drawers had been pulled out, clothes flung on to the bed in the police’s search for… what, exactly? It hadn’t occurred to me until that point, but I realised then what they were looking for, and the thought filled me with anger. I was a wife, a mother. Did they for one minute believe that I would hide a weapon here, in my teenage daughter’s bedroom? It made me more determined than ever to prove my innocence, but how I was supposed to go about that, I had no idea.
‘I’m meeting Amy later,’ I told him as I hooked a denim jacket onto a hanger.
‘You’ve only just got home.’
‘I know, but I need to get this sorted out as quickly as possible. I don’t want it hanging over us.’
I watched as Damien returned nail varnish bottles and make-up brushes to the drawers of the bedside table and wondered where the man I had fallen in love with had gone. A memory flashed into my mind, so bright it was almost living; a snapshot of a moment years earlier: Damien sitting on this same bedroom carpet with a much younger Lily by his side, his neck adorned with an array of plastic-jewelled Disney princess necklaces, his face a pink flush of lipstick and blusher – the old ones from my make-up bag that I had given Lily for her dressing-up box. I had only just found out that I was pregnant, and the morning sickness had come suddenly and with force, making me shut up the coffee shop early for the day. Nausea had rolled in my stomach as I stood at the top of the stairs and watched my husband and daughter through the partly open door of her bedroom, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the sight, not yet. I’d watched as Lily applied lipstick to Damien’s cheeks, smearing it in big pink circles that made him look like a cartoon character, and when she sat back, laughing and holding a mirror in front of him, I’d felt my heart swell with love for them as he proclaimed he had never looked better.
‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’
I turned to him, affronted by the question. Just moments earlier, it might have been me asking the same. ‘What do you mean? Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Anything. It seems weird that this woman is accusing you like this. Things like this don’t just happen, Jenna.’
I can’t remember what I was holding – an item of Lily’s clothing, an accessory tossed to one side during the house search – but whatever it was, it ended up flung back to the floor. ‘What are you suggesting?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just saying it’s strange, that’s all.’
We looked at each other for a moment, neither one of us sure what else to say. I could feel myself growing hot with indignation, the thought that he didn’t trust me making my heart race and my temperature flare. ‘I assumed I’d be able to rely on you for support.’
‘And you know you can. You always can.’
It sounded strained somehow, as though even Damien didn’t quite believe the words. I wanted to walk from the room, to go back downstairs and leave the house, but I wouldn’t go until Lily’s room was returned to some sort of state of normality.
We worked separately, continuing the task of tidying up in silence as my mind churned with anxiety about what else could be going on. Why was my husband so suspicious of me? And why was I so suspicious of him?
Eight
I waited for Amy in the Swan, a pub just a couple of streets from the restaurant where we had eaten two nights earlier. I found the quietest corner of the bar, feeling that the eyes of every person I passed were upon me, as though somehow the whole town was aware of the accusation made against me. I had managed to avoid the television and the radio, knowing that news of the attack would make the local news.
I took my phone from my pocket and ran an internet search on Charlotte Copeland. Several Facebook accounts registered to that name were thrown up, but as I scrolled the list of faces there was none that matched the woman who had made the accusation against me. I began to trawl through the profiles of other social media sites but found nothing, and my efforts were halted when I looked up to see Amy approaching.
She looked relaxed from her weekend away, chic as ever in a calf-length coat belted around the waist, her hair piled high on her head in a style that on her appeared effortless and on my own head would have looked as though a bird had decided to set up a nest there. The differences in our weekend experiences appeared stark as she slid into the chair opposite me, and I felt guilty once again at having ended her birthday celebrations with my misery.
‘God, Jenna, are you okay? You look awful.’
From anyone else, I might have taken offence, but it was honesty such as this that had made Amy one of the few friends I had. I didn’t want anything glossed over or avoided for the sake of protecting my sensibilities; I didn’t have time for that now. I wanted someone who would be forthright, and Amy could always be relied upon to be that person.
‘It’s just been mentioned on the local radio news,’ she told me. ‘Don’t worry – your name wasn’t brought up. You could bloody sue them if it was.’
In a tactile gesture that was quite unlike Amy, she reached across the table and locked her hand around mine. It felt awkward, but I allowed it to rest there, appreciating her efforts to make me feel less isolated. It didn’t matter if the place was suddenly filled with people; I could have been surrounded and still have felt myself solitary, adrift with the unsettling turns my life had taken in such a short space of time.
‘Tell me everything.’
Over soft drinks – and in a hushed voice that wouldn’t be overheard – I filled her in on what had happened after I’d left her and Laura at the restaurant on Friday night. She remained silent for most of my account, shaking her head at times, her expression changing as I took her through the stages of my weekend.
‘Do you think I should go back to the hospital to see her? Perhaps she’ll explain why she’s done this.’
Amy shook her head slowly, her eyes fixed on mine as though studying them for signs of madness. ‘The worst idea you’ve ever had. Do not, under any circumstances, go back to the hospital – don’t go anywhere near that woman at all. It will only make things worse for you. If the police are still considering you a suspect and you try to contact her, they’ll see it as a sign of guilt. You could be arrested for intimidation.’
In my lap, I locked the fingers of my right hand into those of my left, squeezing until my knuckles turned white and the veins protruded ice-blue. Near the bar, an eruption of laughter burst through the hum of noise surrounding us, its raucous tone startling me.
‘Why is she doing this to me?’
Amy sighed and reached for her drink. ‘Perhaps it’
s not as personal as you think. I mean, it’s only natural that you’d take it that way – I think anyone would – but perhaps it’s just a case of genuine confusion. Think about it. She was attacked at random. She lost a lot of blood. She might have suffered a head injury when she fell to the ground – we don’t know, do we? When she recognised you at the hospital, her brain made an immediate connection to the event, she put two and two together…’
She trailed off with a shrug, her point made. Everything she said made sense, though I couldn’t understand why it didn’t seem so easily explained to the police. The words ‘under further investigation’ had lingered with me; I wouldn’t be able to tear myself free of them until it was proven that I was innocent.
I fought back tears, determined not to cry in public. ‘Do you think Sean would help me?’
‘I really don’t think it’ll come to that, but if it does, of course he will. He never refuses his little sister.’ She smiled. I wanted to smile back, to pretend everything was fine, that I wasn’t terrified, but my face refused. Instead a silent tear slid down my cheek.
‘This isn’t just about the arrest, is it? You didn’t seem yourself at the restaurant; I knew there was something wrong.’
I wiped a hand across my eye as I thought of the half-read text that had popped up on Damien’s phone, chiding myself for this further show of weakness. I had spoken to Amy about the changes in Damien; it had seemed wrong, as though I was being disloyal, and yet talking about it had offered instant relief. By speaking the words aloud, I’d been able to hear them differently.
‘It’s Damien, isn’t it?’ she asked, reading my thoughts.
‘He’s just… I don’t know. You know when you just know that there’s something not right? He always used to be tactile, but he seems to keep his distance these days. He’s started sleeping on the sofa. He says he’s having trouble with his leg again, but I know that’s just an excuse. And today, when I got home from the police station… It was almost as though he thinks I’m guilty. He just looks at me differently and I don’t know what I’ve done.’
The Accusation: An addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist Page 5
