The Guilty Party

by Mel McGrath

  Speaking out is hard when you cannot speak. Being a messenger is hard when you do not know how to reveal your message. This is how fossils begin their journey from life to death, isn’t it? As shells and bones lying in the mud. Time turns them to stone. It turns them into forgotten things, objects that cannot move or speak or hear, that can do nothing but wait for the storm to wash them up onto the beach, among the pebbles. Perhaps someone will pick them up and turn them over in their hands and say, Look, here is a messenger, I wonder what the message could be? Perhaps the tide will suck them back onto the sea floor.

  The first time I died, after going into the water, I came back and these days I’m more immune to the seductions of the process. I am also more familiar with it, which is how I know it is happening again. I have the same feeling of pressure, the burning in the lungs, the sense of there being no air. Is this another kind of drowning, a different path to death, or something else? Is this, I wonder, what being murdered feels like? The hand pressing the pillow into my face wants to push me into the murk from where I can never return. That is why they are trying to kill me. Should I stay down here on the seabed or rise up and speak? Should I fight to stay alive? What exactly am I fighting for? Do I remember?

  Yes, I think I do.

  How can I create a storm when I cannot move? The person trying to kill me knows this. They are afraid of me moving, they are scared of me creating a tumult. But if I am to rise from the sea, if I am to come out of the water I must find a way to struggle to the surface.

  This time I am not floating towards a horizon. I am kicking and screaming but nothing is moving and my screams are silent. This time dying hurts because I am not going to go down without a fight. Not again. There is no wave of sadness. This time there is only rage and rage is powerful. This is, after all, what has been keeping me alive. I have things to say and I will say them. But the pressure on my lungs is a terrible thing and there is no air in my throat and my life feels as if it no longer belongs to me and right now I don’t know what I can do to reclaim it.

  If I could shout I would. If I could thrash and punch and claw my way out of this I would. But I cannot make my body move.

  Time is running out. I sense that. My thoughts are becoming incoherent. I need oxygen.

  What did you do?

  I did nothing.

  I need to act while I can still think. Before the process of dying is complete. I will not be killed. I want to live. I will live.

  I have things to say.

  If I can move something, anything, then I stand a chance.

  What can I move? Let me try.

  Time is running out.

  If I could release the pressure on my lungs. If I could move.

  Let me try. What can I move?

  Oh yes! My jaw! If I can move my jaw then perhaps I can bite or scream. I must move upwards, up through the water. I must surface. What a long way it is, from the sea bed to the place where water meets air. What a steep climb. I must rise, though, I must surface into consciousness before all the air is gone from me.

  My lungs hurt, my throat hurts, my face hurts, my heart is kicking like an antelope as the lions bring it down. All I have to do is to open my jaw and use my throat and shout out. I am confused. I am on the sea shore, I am at the top of the cliff, I am on the surface of the water.

  A siren goes off, no, a shriek. A scream of sorts. That is me. I am shouting and thrashing against the pillow. And suddenly the pressure stops and I can feel my lungs heaving for air and my chest expanding and my throat coughing and I am free. I am on top of the cliff, I am at the surface of the water. When I open my eyes now what will I see?

  ‘Cassie? Cassie!’

  My eyes fix on a blur of human skin. Oh, it’s so bright! There is too much light.

  But that’s it! I have done it. I’ve come back from the almost-dead. I am here. I am in the world.

  You did nothing.

  But I did, I did. I saved myself. And now I can tell my story.

  ‘Nod if you understand what I’m saying to you,’ a voice says.

  I know this voice but not its owner. I nod because I am beginning to understand all sorts of things.

  ‘My name is Frank. I’ve been looking after you since you were transferred up here. You were shouting just now, do you know that?’

  I am saying something but I don’t know if Frank can hear me. I think what I am saying is ‘Bo.’

  Someone enters the room and shines a light in my eyes and tests my reflexes and pats me on the hand and says some things, but the words fly by before I can catch them.

  ‘This is Dr Hale,’ Frank says, in a voice that suggests he is repeating something. ‘She’s the neurologist.’

  Dr Hale says I have been in a coma. She says I’ve been coming out of it for the last few hours.

  ‘We’ve been expecting you to wake up.’

  I have woken. I have swum from the seabed towards the light. But now the light is blinding. Give me time and I will adjust to this new world which is not new but the old world into which I have been reborn.

  ‘Oh, your pillow must have fallen on the floor,’ Frank says. He’ll fetch me a clean one when he gets a moment.

  Dr Hale says not to try to say anything yet. She says I will feel confused. I do, though not about some things. I do not feel confused about the fact that Luke Bowen put a pillow over my face and tried to kill me. He would have succeeded if I hadn’t come up to the surface, if I hadn’t decided to live.

  The pillow will have Luke Bowen’s DNA on it. There will be CCTV footage of him leaving the hospital. When I can I will tell them that. And I will tell them about Gav and Marika and about Rachel and all the events at the Wapping Festival and then, later, on the Isle of Portland. I’ll tell them everything they need to know about Anna.

  ‘Don’t worry if you can’t speak. It’ll come,’ Frank says. Dr Hale has gone but someone else is in the cubicle with him. There’s murmuring and the fragments of some conversation. Someone is touching my face, but ever so softly now. There’s a sound coming from me. It’s meant to convey meaning but I’m not sure it does.

  I cannot see yet. My eyes are open but I cannot see.

  Frank says, ‘When you’re more awake the police would like to speak to you. Someone called Julie is here from the Port of Portland Police, but there’s no hurry.’

  I would like to speak to you too, Julie. I should have spoken to you before. But now I have more to say. The confessions I’ve been hearing. The secrets people will tell you when they think you will never be able to tell.

  The sound of people talking.

  There is an ammonite on my wrist, on the delicate skin under which the blood vessels run like seaweed. I may be looking at it or I may simply be remembering it.

  I am drinking something sweet through a straw.

  If my eyes are open they may be blinking at a postcard of an old cottage with tiny windows and a forlorn air, sellotaped to the cot sides of the bed. It could be a warning or it may be in my head.

  There is a lot in my head and even more in my heart.

  ‘Your friends left that,’ Frank says. So this means my eyes are open. Yes, I can see Frank’s face now. Eyes as deep as wells. Brown, beautiful, expressive eyes. ‘They’ve been here every day,’ Frank says. ‘The couple come together and the other one – Dex is it? – always on his own.’

  The voice changes tone. Maybe Frank and Julie are speaking to each other but I only pick up the tail end of the conversation, Frank saying, ‘Since then I haven’t seen the couple at all.’

  Julie’s voice now, her hand on mine, her body warmth like a small sudden sunburst on the skin of my cheek.

  ‘Cassie, you might not be able to answer this right away. Can you tell us what happened at the cliff, before you went into the water?’

  I can hear this now, I can understand it all. But it is too complicated to say right now. This is more than me and Bo. This is Dex and Gav and Marika. Most of all, this is Anna.

  ‘She�
��s getting tired,’ Frank says.

  My eyes are shut because everything is blurry. Because the world has not yet come into focus in my head. But I want to say, I need to speak.

  I am saying no. I have risen to the surface of myself to say no. Because if we don’t say no, the ones who bear witness, then who will?

  44

  Cassie

  Afternoon, Tuesday 25 October, Royal London Hospital

  Waking from a coma isn’t as simple as stirring from sleep. Days slide by and still I have one foot on the seabed and another on dry land. Bit by bit, taking my time about it, I move into consciousness, first for a few minutes, then for an hour, for two, three, until I am awake more often than not. Dr Hale tells me that for someone who was in the water as long as I was, I am lucky to be waking at all.

  I told you at the start that I would spill all the secrets and that everything would be explained. But every story contains more secrets than you can know and there are always fewer explanations than you imagine.

  Anna never called for help, as I asked her to. She knew it was safer to let me drown. When I did not, she and Luke (I prefer to call him by his real name these days) visited me from time to time here at the Royal London. They wanted to keep an eye on my progress and put on a show. Perhaps they felt sorry for me, though I doubt it. Dex came too, though only ever when he thought Anna and Bo wouldn’t be there. When they were together, neither Anna nor Luke ever said anything, but the moment one of them left the room the other would confess. The burden of their secrets was too heavy for them. They did not know then that I had already begun to rise through the layers of consciousness, and was listening and took in everything I heard. But stories aren’t evidence. And perhaps Anna and Luke knew that too.

  It was Portland, not me, that did for Luke. Hours after the incident at the cliff, a local man confessed to attacking his ex-girlfriend and the Port Police released Dex. He remained a person of interest in Marika Lapska’s death. The police knew all along that Marika delivered pizzas to Dex and Gav’s house, because they checked her employer’s records. The fact that Dex hadn’t shared that information when he’d first spoken to them had made them suspicious then so they took him back in for questioning. That led to a search of Fossil Cottage which led in turn to the discovery of Luke’s pills – street Rohypnol, the kind which does not colour liquids, only ever bought for one purpose and the same drug as found in Marika’s blood – where I’d left them, behind the sofa, only my and Luke’s fingerprints on the foil. They also found traces of the drug on a coffee mug in the room at the top with a view out across Chesil Beach. They took Luke in for questioning in London and, of course, he denied everything but they’d gone to his apartment building, checked out the CCTV, and seen Marika arriving at the building on the night of her death then leaving again not long afterwards.

  Luke realised the noose was tightening that weekend on Portland. It was why he’d slipped roofies into my coffee. He was hoping I’d forget about Marika. Perhaps he was counting on me falling from my horse. Then he was hoping I would drown. Finally he was banking on my remaining in a coma. But I proved remarkably resilient. It was only when I began to show signs of emerging back into consciousness he decided he would have to kill me, but by then he was a desperate man. A few hours after he put a pillow over my head, the concierge in his block of flats saw him on CCTV in his car in the underground car park of his building, with the engine on and a length of garden hose leading from the exhaust. The concierge pulled him from the car. He went back to Dorset, to his old fossiling haunts on the Jurassic Coast. He must have grown tired of running away because he turned himself in. Perhaps he knew the police would catch up with him eventually. When he was charged with the sexual assault on Marika, police sent their digital forensic specialists in search of the Big Black Book to use as evidence, but Luke was skilled enough at the technical stuff to ensure all digital traces of it were gone. There are women out there still who might never know what happened to them when they made the fateful decision to swipe right on the profile of a cool-looking tech entrepreneur with a charming manner and a taste for expensive wine.

  Julie told me that if the Group hadn’t gone to Portland, the police may never have discovered the truth. They still haven’t, not quite, but it is easier this way. Luke Bowen has taken the rap for Marika’s death. Friends should do their best to get each other’s backs. Luke himself would say that, I think. It’s the least he can do.

  As soon as I was able, I told the police all I knew about the events in the alleyway in the churchyard. By then they knew that Marika had gone in the water somewhere near there. They had a forensic hydrologist on it and they were sure that what happened to Marika was unlikely to be a suicide. A body is found in the Thames every week. The police know how river suicides work. People wanting to die launch themselves from bridges or buildings into the middle of the body of water, from where they know they will have less of a chance of dragging themselves out. They do not simply step off into the water, because it is too easy to get back to land. After the article appeared in the Standard, a passer-by came forward to say that he had seen two women fighting in the alley at Wapping Old Stairs. He had given a description of a dark-haired woman in a red dress. Police checked a newsagent’s CCTV on Wapping Wall and saw Anna leading Marika towards the river. When they questioned Anna, she claimed she’d put a drunk woman into a passing cab, but searching the alleyway they found drag marks and traces of Marika’s blood.

  On the night of the festival police had also questioned a man named Oliver Seton who appeared at A&E with a head wound, claiming a woman called Anna had thrown a vase at him. He said he didn’t know her last name, only that she was married and had a son called Ralph. The case was hardly the most urgent that night and so it languished in the police records until an officer found the time to check the apartment building’s CCTV and identified Anna as the woman who had thrown the vase. It was this which spurred them to return to Wapping Old Stairs and this time, caught on an old nail at the edge of the steps, they found Anna’s silk scarf and on one corner, inside the hand-rolled selvedge, preserved from the water by the fabric, a single pubic hair. It belonged to Marika.

  It was Julie, the Port of Portland policewoman, who told the detectives in London that Anna hadn’t called for help on Portland for more than two hours after Gav fell from the cliff. And it was Frank, the nurse, who told Anna I was waking up and noticed a flicker of panic on her face.

  It must have been then that Anna and Luke hatched the plan to kill me. I became the final piece of the puzzle. The one who knew for certain what they had done. They did their research, Dr Hale said. Coming to the surface can be dangerous. The brain flips out and shuts the organs down or else sends out panicky signals to the heart. People in comas don’t always make it. Sometimes they have seizures. Sometimes their hearts give out.

  Not long after Luke gave himself in, the police picked up Anna. She cried and begged, and tried to play the mum card, but for once in her life, Anna’s luck had run out.

  There are real ravens and peregrine falcons on Portland, but Julie’s laugh is a raven’s cackle and when I think of her, I think of the way a falcon singles out its prey and with outstretched talons, swoops in for the kill. Fossil Cottage exists, you can find it on the internet. If you like you can rent it for holidays and weekends, though now I’ve told you what happened there, you might think twice. But there is a Fossil Cottage in my mind now too, one that listens and watches and sometimes groans at night and other times has conversations with owls. When I sit there in my imaginary Fossil Cottage, Marika comes to me and we talk.

  I’m due to be discharged soon. Dr Hale thinks it could be tomorrow. I’ll be returning to my room in the shabby flat share in Tottenham and to pizza night and rubbish telly and to the uncomplicated company of my flatmates. And it will be all the aces. Will said he’ll come up and visit some time and if he does, I’ll show him the view across the bus station and I’ll tell him everything I’ve seen.

/>   It is impossible, I have discovered, to be a bystander without becoming a witness, and to witness an act of violence is to have its dark energy work deep inside you. What we saw in the alleyway could not be unseen and in some unspoken way we understood the risk we were taking by pretending it could. Perhaps we can never really know how even our most intimate friendships will fare until they are put to the test. The centre did not hold for me and Anna and Bo and Dex, not so much because we witnessed an act of violence on a late summer evening, though that was certainly the catalyst, but because the friendship we shared had no heart.

  Though I never knew Marika, she is a livelier presence in my heart than Anna, Bo and Dex were or will be again. But Marika did not die so I could be saved. This is not one of those narratives. Her death was brutal and senseless in the way that the deaths of women at the hands of the men who feel entitled to hate them and the women who collude with their hatred always are. Marika counted not because she redeemed me, but because she was Marika. Her life has a value her death can never begin to match.

  A while ago now I told you that when I was done with telling my story, when everything had been explained and the secrets were finally out, I would ask you a question. And in a while I will. Before I do, let me say I know this is the part of the story where you might expect to find out who raped Marika in that alleyway on a late summer’s night – but life is sometimes more complicated than that. The statistics tell us that most rapists are repeat offenders, and that means Marika was probably not her rapist’s first victim and almost certainly not the last. Rape is usually a serial crime and rapists get away with it all the time. I can only hope that the man who rammed Marika Lapska against a wall and left her like a dropped tissue in the alleyway of a churchyard is caught before he can destroy other lives but, the truth is, he is most likely still out there. Although he remains the chief culprit, in one sense, all four of us are guilty too. We saw it happening and for all our separate, dishonourable reasons, we did nothing to stop it. We are all implicated not only in Marika’s rape but in her death, too. Because when a crime is committed there are no bystanders or onlookers. There are only witnesses.