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

by Victoria Jenkins

  I decided against mentioning the text message. I hadn’t really seen it; not all of it, at least. Every logical cell in my brain told me it was something innocent – a sentence that could be finished in a thousand different ways, all harmless – and yet I couldn’t help but let myself hold on to the notion that it wasn’t.

  Amy was listening to me intently, her eyes fixed on my face, her fingers idly twirling a loose strand of hair. ‘Maybe what he’s saying about his leg is true.’

  Amy was right, as she so often seemed to be. She knew all about Damien’s accident; though I didn’t meet her until after it had happened, she’d seen us at our worst, when we were struggling to navigate our way through the set of cruel circumstances life had unexpectedly thrown at us.

  ‘Maybe,’ I admitted.

  ‘Have you spoken to him about it?’

  I shook my head. ‘There’s enough going on already. He still doesn’t know about Lily, and I’m worried that if he finds out now, it’ll be worse, because he’ll wonder why I didn’t tell him before.’

  ‘I thought all that was finished with?’

  I raised an eyebrow and sighed. ‘So did I, but apparently not.’ I told her about the bracelet, about how Damien thought I had bought it for her. Like me, Amy couldn’t see any explanation for how Lily had come to have it, other than as a gift from the mystery boyfriend.

  ‘We need to find out who this bloke is.’

  I smiled at her use of the word ‘we’. I should have been approaching this with my husband, and though I appreciated Amy’s loyalty and her concern for Lily’s welfare, the absence of Damien’s help stung. It wasn’t his fault, I realised that – I had kept him in the dark about Lily’s secret and had made him an outsider.

  ‘I’ve tried,’ I said, though she already knew this. I had scoured through Lily’s social media, keeping a check on who she was following and friending, but her accounts had always been kept private and she didn’t seem to use them much. I’d always thought it was because she was too sensible to absorb herself in life online as so many young people her age seemed to, but I was quickly learning that perhaps that wasn’t the case. Now I feared that her apparent common sense was a ploy to conceal her teenage stupidity.

  Amy held her glass to her lips, hesitating before taking a sip. ‘You need to follow her.’ She set the glass back down, its clink on the table punctuating her statement with the finality of a full stop.

  ‘Follow her? I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s… I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right.’

  I’d felt uncomfortable enough just checking her phone, imagining how I might have reacted at that age if my parents had done the same. The difference, I knew, was that I hadn’t given them reason to suspect me – not at that age, at least – whereas Lily had given me plenty.

  Amy pulled a face. ‘A grown man getting involved with a teenage girl isn’t right either.’

  I exhaled loudly and pressed a hand to my forehead. Amy was completely correct. Lily was going to hate me for it, but if it meant keeping her protected, then I was going to have to become exactly the kind of parent I had sworn to myself I would never be.

  ‘I think he’s having an affair.’

  I watched Amy’s face make the leap in conversation from Lily’s mystery man back to my husband. ‘Damien?’ She shook her head. ‘You’re not serious?’

  The words had just escaped me, and I regretted them as soon as they’d been spoken. I knew why to an outsider the possibility seemed implausible. Damien was a family man, always there for his children, consistently supportive of his wife. From the outside, I had it all; now, I sounded nothing but ungrateful for everything I’d been given.

  ‘I’ve been so wrapped up with whatever’s going on with Lily… I think I’ve just tried to block it out. But something’s not right, Amy, I just know it. He’s there, but he’s absent, you know what I mean? The way he looks at me sometimes… he just isn’t him any more.’

  I repeated my own words in my head as I watched disbelief play out on Amy’s face, and I knew I was being irrational; paranoid even. Perhaps she was right, I thought. Damien was a good man, a man who had picked me up when I’d had nothing and helped me find a life that I could finally be proud of. Perhaps it wasn’t Damien who had changed at all. Perhaps I was the one who was different now.

  Nine

  When I got home from meeting Amy, Lily was upstairs in her bedroom. Though Damien and I had tried to tidy up, we were never going to be able to put everything back in the right place. She was going to know her things had been gone through, and she would be furious. I had hoped to be back before she was, so that I could be the one to tell her about the police, but as always, I was too late, and Damien had done it. I knew my absence would be cause for further argument, and once again, I realised it was justified.

  The door to her room had been left ajar, and as I crept up the final steps to the landing, I could hear her crying. Lily never cried. Her emotions tended to make themselves known in exaggerated facial gestures and the slamming of doors, and the sound of tears made her seem more vulnerable than I’d felt her to be in a long time. Though she was seventeen, in so many ways she was still just a child: headstrong, impulsive, impressionable.

  ‘Lily.’

  She turned at the sound of her name, quickly wiping the back of her hand across her face, not wanting me to see evidence that she had been crying. In doing so, she smeared a dark trail of mascara across her temple.

  ‘When were you going to tell me about that woman?’

  I sighed and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to force back a headache I’d been battling since meeting up with Amy. ‘I wanted to tell you yesterday,’ I said, going into her room and closing the door behind me. ‘But I knew how important that job interview was to you – I didn’t want you going there with that hanging over you. And I didn’t know she was going to accuse me, obviously.’

  ‘You kicked me out of the car. You were happy enough for me to go with that hanging over me.’

  I sat at the end of her bed, waiting for her to join me. She didn’t.

  ‘You won’t say anything to Amelia, will you?’

  She rolled her eyes as though I was stupid for feeling the need to suggest she might.

  ‘Have you heard back about the job yet?’

  ‘No. They said I’d hear from them within a few days.’

  ‘I’m so sorry about your things,’ I said, taking in the chaos that surrounded us despite our attempts to make things appear as normal as they could be. ‘I didn’t know they’d do this.’

  She looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘You’ve been accused of stabbing someone. What else did you think they’d do?’

  I glanced at the bedside table and wondered whether Damien had returned the bracelet to the place he’d found it. No doubt it would have been one of the first things Lily had looked for after discovering the police had been here. She wouldn’t want Damien or me to know about it, and I couldn’t mention it without her knowing that one of us had also been through her things.

  She dropped down beside me suddenly, folding against me like a rag doll, and I put an arm around her, pulling in the warmth of her. The next thing I knew she was sobbing against my chest, clinging to my sleeves as she had done when she was a little girl.

  ‘Why is that woman saying what’s she saying, Mum?’ she snivelled through her tears. ‘You’d never hurt anyone.’

  I pulled her closer, breathing in the scent of her shampoo as I’d done with Amelia, wanting to stay like this forever.

  ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. I wish I did, I really do – maybe then I’d be able to do something about it.’

  ‘Have you seen what’s being said online?’

  I swallowed noisily; Lily probably heard it. I had been tempted to look for my name on the internet, wondering how long it would be before news of my arrest circulated among people I knew, but had decided not to expose myself to further unnecessary torme
nt and had successfully resisted.

  ‘I don’t want to know. Whatever it is, it’s rubbish. I was arrested, but I wasn’t charged. I haven’t done anything wrong, love – I don’t need to tell you that, do I?’

  She didn’t answer, but her head nuzzling at the crook of my neck confirmed her faith in my innocence. It was comforting just having her there, so much closer to me than she had been in some time. Our falling-out over her boyfriend – or not, as she had so repeatedly and vehemently claimed – had caused ongoing friction that had kept her at arm’s length, and it hadn’t gone unnoticed by Damien.

  ‘Have I been named?’ I asked, curiosity and fear getting the better of me. I wasn’t sure whether it was legal for my name to be released when I hadn’t been charged with anything, but I knew how cheap talk was and how quickly gossip could be spread.

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Try to stay off social media for a while,’ I advised. ‘It’ll all blow over soon enough and then they’ll find something else to talk about.’ I ran a hand over the smooth sheen of her hair. ‘No one’s said anything to you, have they? Or about you?’

  She shook her head against my chest, and a wave of relief surged. I could handle trolls condemning me from behind the safety of their keyboards, but if Lily was dragged into the firing line, that would be a different matter.

  ‘Tell me if anyone says anything to you.’

  She nodded again, though I noticed that it was with less conviction.

  We were interrupted by Damien, who stepped quietly into the room with a sheepish expression on his face. ‘You two okay?’

  I nodded, but gave him a look that Lily couldn’t see. I hoped he understood what it meant: that we should go easy on her for a while. Regardless of the drama I had unwittingly brought into the house, he was still consumed with thoughts of that bracelet, and the last thing any of us needed was for him to find out that she had been involved with an older man.

  ‘Cup of tea, love?’

  The question was directed at Lily, who pulled herself away from me and sat up, shaking her head without acknowledging Damien. His eyes were focused on her, willing her to look at him. Then he glanced at me, and his face changed, aware I had been watching him.

  ‘I’ll have one,’ I said.

  He nodded and turned away. As he reached the door, I noticed the limp that seemed to affect him sporadically.

  He closed the door behind him, and I waited to hear him head back downstairs before I looked at Lily questioningly. ‘Everything all right between you two?’ The exchange – or lack of it – had been odd to say the least, the atmosphere fractious and fragile. Whatever had gone on between them, neither seemed to want to raise the subject in front of me.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘I said it’s fine,’ she snapped. She stood and went to the window. The curtains were pulled back and the night sky loomed dark and heavy, not a single star in sight. ‘Do you trust him?’

  ‘He’s my husband,’ I said defensively, at once annoyed and perplexed by the question. ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Just wondered,’ she said with a shrug, her back still turned to me. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  She didn’t answer me, so I stood from the bed and joined her at the window, feeling my pulse skip a beat. I knew there was something going on with my husband; I had known it for a while. The silences, the absences, the evenings that passed with us barely exchanging a word.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You can’t go around making insinuations and then just expect me to ignore them,’ I said, folding my arms. ‘Come on. What do you know? Why shouldn’t I trust him?’

  Lily was still looking out of the window, and when my gaze followed hers, it stopped at the park, the events of Friday evening playing out soundlessly in front of me, the memory still sharp.

  ‘Laura was here.’

  It was not what I was expecting. We stood in silence for a moment, Lily’s attention still averted from me as my thoughts raced along a series of possibilities I hadn’t anticipated and was unprepared for.

  ‘What do you mean, here?’ I eventually asked.

  ‘Here, in the house, with Damien.’ She moved away from the window and picked up a book from the chair in the corner, putting it back on the shelf with the others that were lined up there.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday, when I got home from the interview.’

  ‘Doing what?’ I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  ‘I don’t know. They were in the kitchen together.’

  Beneath my clothes, my heart rate slowed a fraction. I had imagined the worst, that Lily was about to tell me she had come upstairs and found them in bed. They could have been doing anything, I rationalised; Laura could have been here for any number of reasons.

  ‘She probably popped in looking for me.’ But she hadn’t texted me back, I thought. After I’d messaged her outside Sainsbury’s, I’d heard nothing from her in return. The thought drew me in a different direction. Had the half-read message I’d seen on Damien’s phone been from Laura? The only mobile numbers I knew from memory were Damien’s and Lily’s – I had a job to remember my own much of the time. Laura’s had been entered into my phone years earlier, without me ever having to take in the details of the digits.

  Are we still on for

  I shook myself for being so foolish and for allowing my mind to take me to such ridiculous, unlikely places. Damien was loyal. Laura was my friend. Friends were something my life had lacked until recently, and I didn’t want to lose the few I had because of my suspicion and paranoia. There were reasons why I found it difficult to trust – reasons why I had spent years keeping people at arm’s length – but I had made a good life for myself now and I couldn’t allow myself to ruin it.

  The events of the previous forty-eight hours were making me see things that weren’t there and imagine things without justification, and yet a niggling doubt remained. Why had Laura been at the house, and why hadn’t she or Damien mentioned it?

  ‘Maybe,’ Lily said with a shrug, the word spoken with such cynicism that I knew she didn’t believe it.

  I had known Laura for almost seven years, having met her at playgroup when Amelia was just a baby. We had clicked in a way I never seemed to with the other mothers, and I’d wondered at the time if my isolation was caused by my lack of enthusiasm for conversations involving sleep schedules and nappy rash. I loved my daughter as much as anyone else loved their children, but it was nice to talk about something that wasn’t baby-related, and Laura had been refreshingly happy to oblige.

  ‘Did they see you?’ I asked. ‘Did you hear what they were talking about?’

  Lily shook her head. ‘I went upstairs – they didn’t see me. But I saw them at the front door. He kissed her.’

  I felt my body turn cold. ‘What do you mean, he kissed her? Kissed her how?’

  Lily shrugged, as though the details weren’t important. ‘On the cheek. He kissed her and he thanked her, then said something about looking forward to next week.’

  He kissed her on the cheek. It was nothing, I rationalised. Just a friendly goodbye. Then I thought of Laura sitting in the restaurant with Amy and me – mentioning circuit training as though it was any other weekend – and I wondered whether she could betray me in this worst of ways. I’d made other acquaintances after opening the coffee shop, but nobody I thought of as a friend. I had just two of those – Amy and Laura – and the thought that one of them might have been betraying me with my own husband made me feel sick to the stomach, as though there was no one in this world I was able to fully trust.

  Ten

  Lily was three years old when I first met Damien. We were living in a small Welsh village called Llangovney, near the Pembrokeshire coast, in a three-storey terraced house in which the ground floor had been converted into a self-contained flat. The owner – an elderl
y lady whose decreasing mobility meant she would have benefited from swapping places with us – occupied the rest of the house above. I lived in dread of the day she would tell me she was selling up and moving somewhere smaller and more manageable; my rent was cheap, a reduced price agreed on the basis that I looked after the upkeep of the garden and cleaned for her once a fortnight. I did more than that and was happy to, picking up items from the shop for her and taking her mail to be posted. If anything had happened to her, I didn’t know where Lily and I would have gone or how I would have afforded to keep a roof over our heads. The thought often struck me as uncharitably self-obsessed, but at the time I couldn’t afford to be anything else.

  Six mornings a week, I cleaned rooms at a local B and B. The owners, Brian and Elaine, allowed me to bring Lily with me; she was a well-behaved child, docile and easy-natured, and they would often take her from me for half an hour to walk her around the garden and look for birds, or to play with the collection of toys they kept in a box in the kitchen for her. There was never any mention of children of their own and I never liked to ask whether they had any. They seemed happy to help me, and I was grateful for the employment.

  I would spend the afternoons with Lily, playing in the park or out in the garden at the flat, and when it rained, we would often visit the nearest library, a thirty-minute bus trip away. Five evenings a week I worked behind the bar at the local pub, which was just along the street from our flat. One of our neighbours – a woman with three children of her own and a husband who often worked away – looked after Lily during those hours; her fee ate into my earnings but my rent and food bills were still just about manageable. I kept going by telling myself that things wouldn’t always be the way they were, that life would get better and easier, but in truth I could never see how that might become a reality. Then I met Damien, and everything changed.

  That weekend, an extreme triathlon event was passing through the village. The Ironman took place on the same weekend every year, with two and a half thousand participants undertaking a gruelling challenge of a three-mile swim in the ice-cold sea at Tenby and a one-hundred-and-twelve-mile cycle ride, topped off with a marathon. The local B and Bs were always full, and the pub in which I worked offered a special Ironman menu the day before the event, which consisted of carb-loaded pasta dishes, one of which Damien came to the bar to order.