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

by Victoria Jenkins

  ‘Ironman?’ I asked, as I had already done with several people that evening.

  He nodded and smiled. ‘I must be mad, right?’

  His accent was different to the Welsh accents in the west; his vowels a little softer, the ends of his words more rounded. It had taken me a while to get used to the local accent, and as a London girl I had stood out like a sore thumb, my voice raising the apparently inevitable question of how I had come to be there.

  ‘You’ll be fine. If I can do it, anyone can.’

  ‘You’ve done it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, placing the drink he’d ordered on the bar between us, ‘but there was no need to sound so surprised at the possibility.’

  We exchanged a smile, and as he placed a twenty-pound note in my hand, I realised I was flirting. This was something that hadn’t happened in a long time. There was only one other person who had ever had that effect on me.

  ‘I’ll bring your cutlery over,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He had lingered there, still looking at me, before smiling again and going back to his table. When I brought the cutlery, the others with him barely acknowledged me, but I could feel his eyes on me as I moved between them, and I knew I wasn’t imagining the attention he was giving me.

  ‘I might see you tomorrow, then.’

  I was back behind the bar again at this point, their meals all finished and his friends already headed towards the door. He placed some empty glasses on the bar and met my eye with a smile. My face must have betrayed my confusion.

  ‘The run goes past this way, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, right. Yeah, it does. Good luck.’

  ‘I’m going to need it,’ he said. ‘Wait outside with a pint for me, will you?’

  I smiled and he left, but I was still watching him when he turned at the door to look back, and I was surprised by my feeling of disappointment at his departure, and at the thought of never seeing him again.

  I looked out for him the next day when I was clearing tables, finding excuses to go near the windows or to pop outside to clear abandoned glasses, on the off chance that he might not yet have finished the triathlon, and I might see him running past. In the stream of colourful T-shirts, tired limbs and reddened faces, none of them belonged to him, and I resigned myself to the fact that that was that, and it had been foolish of me to imagine anything more might have come of our meeting.

  The following day, I worked my shift at the B and B. Some of the guests from the Ironman event were still there, and as I watched them head to and from the breakfast room, I kept an eye out in the hope one of them might be him. It wasn’t like me to find myself so preoccupied with anyone who wasn’t Lily; I had moved to Llangovney to disappear, and as such had managed to keep myself quite anonymous. Yet there had been something about this man – this person whose name I didn’t even know – that kept my thoughts returning to him, and I wondered whether, in the past thirty-six hours, his mind had strayed at all towards me.

  When I finished work, the weather was terrible, so Lily and I caught the bus into town and went for a swim at the leisure centre before heading home for an afternoon of Disney and popcorn. She curled up against my chest on the sofa, no longer a baby but a little girl, and I remember watching her as she gazed at the television, marvelling at how quickly she was changing and how lucky I was to have her in my life. Later, there were moments when I craved those days, missed it being just the two of us. Despite the loneliness and the solitary nights, it felt as though I had everything I’d ever wanted.

  The following evening, I arrived at the pub at just gone six. It was quiet, as it always was on Mondays, and my boss was sitting at the end of the bar eating his dinner.

  ‘All right, Jenna love.’ He gestured to the till. ‘Someone left that for you.’

  I slipped off my jacket as I went behind the bar. There was an envelope at the side of the till, no name written on it, but when I held it up to the landlord, he nodded. I took it with me into the tiny cupboard that passed as a staff room, where I hung my jacket on the back of the door.

  I didn’t see you waiting with that pint, the note inside read, but I’ll forgive you this time. Maybe we could go for a drink together one day? Damien.

  His phone number was printed at the bottom. I smiled, feeling stupid and juvenile for allowing myself to react to a stranger’s attention with teenage butterflies. Since moving to the village, I hadn’t really spoken to anyone who existed beyond my day-to-day life: the regulars at the pub, the guests at the B and B; the postman and the couple who owned the convenience shop down the road.

  Near the end of my shift, just before last orders, I glanced at my phone.

  Lily has been sick. She’s OK but crying for you a lot.

  I cursed myself for not having checked the phone sooner, and when I told the landlord, he said I could finish early to go and get her.

  When I picked her up from the childminder’s, she was still awake. She was usually sleeping by that time, and I was able to carry her home in her pyjamas, but that day she was fractious and unsettled. The childminder told me she’d been sick twice in the last hour.

  The front door was barely closed behind me when she threw up again, managing to cover us both. I carried her to the bathroom, peeled off her clothes and cleaned her up in a shallow bath before dressing her in clean pyjamas. Then I stripped off my own clothes, throwing on the nearest T-shirt I could find, and cuddled up to her on my bed, smoothing her hair as she fell asleep against my chest. Once she was settled into a deeper sleep, I left her on the bed and went to the kitchen, where I threw her sick-stained clothes and my own into the washing machine, forgetting the note still tucked in my jeans pocket.

  Eleven

  My coffee shop was just off the high street, where the rental costs were a third of those just around the corner. I unlocked the front door and deactivated the alarm before flicking on the lights, knowing I couldn’t stay there for too long; if anyone saw the place lit up, they might think it was open earlier than usual. Dealing with customers was something I wasn’t ready for; I had gone there purely because I wanted to be away from the house. I needed to be on my own for a while, to give myself a chance to put things straight in my head, and the coffee shop was the only place to which I could escape.

  I had been tempted to text or phone Laura, to just come out with it and ask her what she’d been doing with Damien at our house on Saturday. Logic stopped me, along with pride; I knew that if I did, there was a possibility she might mention it to Damien before I had a chance to speak to him about it. The truth was, I didn’t want to speak to him about it. My life felt uncertain enough; if the ground was about to give way beneath my marriage, I didn’t want to be the one responsible for precipitating the final collapse, not when I was guilty of unwittingly creating the tremor that was already rocking our family. Besides, it seemed too unlikely for it to be a reality, and when the portion of my brain that still retained some sense kicked into gear for a moment, the thought of Damien and Laura together seemed nothing but absurd. Blurting an accusation at either of them would do nothing but make me look stupid.

  Yet in the moments when the weaker part of my brain took hold – the part that still saw darkness in everything, believing nothing could ever be truly good – the possibility of an affair between Damien and Laura continued to prey upon me. Laura had been to our house with her kids on plenty of occasions when Damien had been there, but I had never thought of her in any other way than I had come to think of myself – as a mother. Outside of these visits, she and Damien had no connection; we weren’t the type to do double dates with our friends and their spouses. Though she wasn’t as well dressed or as confident as Amy, perhaps there was something about her I had missed. It would never have occurred to me before to regard her as a threat, and yet a flicker of doubt within me had sparked the fear that perhaps that was what she had always been – a more organised, slimmer, athletic version of me.

  I dropped onto one of the sofas
near the counter. My legs felt leaden, and I was so tired I could have curled up and gone to sleep there and then had my mind not been so set against finding any sort of respite from the demons plaguing it. The truth, I realised, was that focusing my thoughts on Damien was an attempt to keep my mind from Charlotte Copeland and from the uncertain future in front of me. I wondered how she was, what sort of recovery she was making, though Amy had warned me not to make any contact. Anything I did where that woman was concerned now had the potential to make me look guilty, and I knew that keeping my distance was for the best.

  I scanned the books on the shelves near the sofa, realising that Ffion had rearranged them at some point during my absence. The place had been left spotless, as it always was when she was in charge. I was lucky to have found her; a single mother, as I had been, she was hard-working and conscientious, and I could rely on her to run the place without my always having to be there to keep an eye on things.

  The coffee shop had been open for nearly ten years, and in that time I had managed to secure a regular and loyal customer base. Thanks to word of mouth and a 4.8 TripAdvisor rating, the business had done better than I could ever have hoped for; so much so that I had come to think of it as my ‘forever’ job. I hadn’t been naive about the chances of success when we’d initially opened, knowing that a majority of businesses failed within the first year, but with hard work, long hours and a gritty determination not to let my family down, the Snug had kept on running while five other coffee shops within a couple of miles’ radius had come and gone.

  I’d found out I was pregnant just over a year after it had opened. The timing wasn’t ideal, and I’d known it would be difficult juggling family life with a newborn while running a business, but Damien could barely contain his excitement at the news, and I was determined to push my anxieties to one side. He was supportive of the shop and did so much to help with Lily, and I spent my pregnancy working hard, doing everything I could to ensure that a solid foundation was in place before the baby arrived. It was during that time that I was lucky enough to meet Ffion, and she quickly became my assistant manager. I saw in her myself as I had once been, and it felt good to be able to offer her a break.

  There was a tap on the glass of the shop door. I turned, ready to tell whoever was there that we weren’t open. But it wasn’t a customer; it was the police. One uniformed officer, with another in plain clothes. The latter held his ID to the glass; it introduced him as DS Maitland. I opened the door cautiously, reluctant to let them in but even less enthusiastic about the thought of leaving them outside the shop for anyone passing to catch sight of.

  ‘We have a warrant to search the premises.’

  ‘What?’

  They stepped past me, and I was powerless to stop them. I realised that with a warrant, they had the right to do pretty much whatever they wanted, even though it would be pointless. Another unjustified invasion of my privacy.

  ‘This is starting to feel like a witch hunt,’ I told them, my heart throbbing and voice shaking. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, I keep telling you.’

  I stood back and watched, helpless, as the uniformed officer headed straight to the kitchen, while her colleague went behind the counter and started pulling open drawers and cupboards. I was already mourning the tidiness I had only recently admired, knowing that I would have to get everything back in order by opening time the following morning.

  ‘This is a waste of everyone’s time,’ I said, trying to keep the anger from my voice.

  The plain-clothes officer said nothing, his attention focused on the till. ‘Got a key for this?’ he asked.

  With a sigh, I dug my keys from my jacket pocket and joined him behind the counter. I opened the till and waited as he searched it, wondering exactly what he had been expecting to find there.

  I was distracted by the sound of the shop door, my heart skipping at the thought of a customer walking in and seeing the police searching the place. But it was only Ffion. She was in the process of shrugging her jacket from her shoulders; unnerved by the sight of a stranger at the till, she stopped short and looked at me questioningly.

  ‘Everything all right, Jenna?’

  ‘I’ve had better mornings,’ I muttered. I turned back to the officer. ‘This is a waste of time,’ I said again, as though repetition alone would be enough to hammer the point home. ‘What are you looking for anyway?’

  ‘Sarge.’

  As if on cue, the uniformed officer appeared at the kitchen door. I turned at the sound of her voice, my heart stuttering to a painful halt when I saw what she held in her gloved hand.

  ‘Hidden behind one of the fridges,’ she said.

  I looked from one officer to the other, disbelieving. ‘That’s not…’

  My voice trailed into silence, which I realised too late only served to make me appear guiltier. I turned to Ffion. Her eyes had widened, and she looked as though she was contemplating walking back out of the shop and trying again, convincing herself she had walked into some parallel universe.

  As the female officer placed the bloodied kitchen knife into a clear plastic bag, her colleague stepped behind me, blocking my path as though fearing I might try to run from the building.

  ‘Jenna Morgan,’ he began, ‘I’m arresting you for wounding with intent. You do not have to say anything…’

  Twelve

  This time, when I was allowed my phone call, there was no hesitation over who to contact. Amy said she would ask her brother to get to the station as soon as possible, advising me not to answer any questions until he did so. I found myself waiting in a cell identical to the one I had been in just the previous morning, only this time the sense of hopelessness that engulfed me couldn’t be pushed to one side with logic or reason. Last time, there had been no evidence against me. Now, a bloodied knife had been found on premises I owned, and I had no explanation for how it had come to be there.

  Events of the past couple of days played over and over in my head, the sounds getting louder each time, the colours brighter and migraine-inducing. When I tried to view them from different angles, they always looked the same. I cursed myself for having gone out on Friday evening, wished that I had stayed at home with my family, and the thought of how different things might have been had I never taken that short cut home through the park became so overwhelming that it felt as though it would consume me.

  I didn’t know how long I was waiting before Amy’s brother arrived; I had lost all sense of time, and I had no watch or phone with which to track the passing minutes. At the sound of the cell door being unlocked, I stood hurriedly. I must have looked a mess, my hair stuck to the back of my neck with nervous sweat; the leggings and oversized jumper I had thrown on that morning ill-fitting and marked with days-old coffee stains.

  In stark contrast, Sean Barrett wore a crisply pressed suit; his dark hair was swept to one side and an expensive watch glinted around his wrist. It had been quite some time since I had seen him, with our last encounter at a family wedding to which I had been invited by Amy as her plus-one. I remembered how, even then, at an occasion that should have been relaxed, I found his presence slightly intimidating, his confidence such that he managed somehow to overshadow other people when making no effort to do so. People wanted to talk to him, to listen to him, and I was happy to do so if it meant staying in the shadows of any unwanted attention.

  ‘Jenna,’ he said, once we were alone. ‘Nice to see you again.’

  I forced a smile, though it felt like the last gesture I was capable of. ‘This is all a massive mistake.’

  ‘Amy’s told me some of the details,’ he said, pulling his trousers up at the thighs as he sat down on the hard blue mattress. ‘Here,’ he gestured beside him, ‘you need to fill in the gaps for me.’

  I sat next to him and reeled off for what felt like the hundredth time what I had already told several officers, as well as Amy and Damien, starting with Friday evening and ending at the coffee shop. ‘That knife was planted there,’ I told him.


  ‘By?’

  This was something I hadn’t wanted to think about, though I knew I was going to have to. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was there a break-in?’

  I shook my head. In many ways, I wished there had been. Explaining all this would have been easier had there been evidence that someone had forced entry into the building while no one else was there.

  ‘How long can they keep me here?’

  ‘Thirty-six hours.’

  ‘Thirty-six? I thought it was twenty-four, then they have to charge me or let me go.’

  He shook his head. ‘The severity of the offence here means they’ve got thirty-six hours. But look, it’s very unlikely any fingerprint test results will be back in that time, so the evidence against you is currently circumstantial.’

  He sounded confident, but from what I knew of Sean, this was his default setting. I was grateful to have him on my side. If anyone could prove my innocence, I felt sure it would be him.

  ‘I’m sure you were told this last time, but when they interview you today, answer as briefly as possible, okay?’

  I nodded. I felt sick. I had been offered a drink and something to eat but hadn’t been able to stomach either; now, my head throbbed with dehydration and there was an awful empty burning in the pit of my stomach.

  Shortly afterwards, DC Cooper arrived to take us to one of the interview rooms. I was expecting his female colleague, DC Henderson, to be there with him, the same as last time; instead, an older man, maybe mid fifties, was waiting for us, already seated at the table.