The Divorce: A gripping psychological thriller with a fantastic twist

by Victoria Jenkins

  ‘And you’re delusional.’

  ‘So just say it, then,’ he challenges. ‘Say there’s nothing going on.’

  ‘There’s nothing going on.’ She utters each syllable slowly, holding his eye as she speaks the lie, as though those wide eyes are going to be enough to fool him.

  ‘Tell me the truth. I know you’re having an affair. You’re a shit liar. You always have been.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ she snaps. ‘You know, if you had a life of your own, you wouldn’t have to concern yourself so much with mine.’

  All this time, he realises, he has been focusing his anger on the wrong woman, hating Karen when it was Lucy he should have loathed.

  ‘Who is he? I’m going to find out anyway, so you might as well just tell me now.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who he is.’

  ‘It might matter to Ross, don’t you think? How about we call him now?’ he suggests, reaching into his pocket for his mobile phone. ‘Let’s ask him.’

  Lucy snatches the phone from his hand and smashes it on the ground at their feet. Shards of broken plastic bounce across the driveway.

  ‘You stupid bitch!’ He stoops to collect the phone; the screen is cracked with all the detail of a spider’s web, its face fallen dark. ‘You break everything you touch, you know that? You’re just like him. You’re the destructive one, not Karen.’

  Lucy smiles that smile again, tilting her head to one side as she studies him. With her make-up on and the mask back in place, he realises this is who she really is. ‘Aww, bless you,’ she drawls. ‘Someone really does have a little crush, don’t they? Or is it more of a mummy fixation?’

  ‘It won’t work this time,’ he says, shaking his head, refusing to be trapped by the bait she is setting. ‘You can’t deflect the focus from yourself by trying to make me look stupid. You come here preaching to me about finding out the truth, when all the time you’ve been putting it about like some cheap whore. Is any of this actually real?’

  The slap comes from nowhere, hot and sharp; a cutting sting to the side of his face that leaves his ears ringing with a tinny electrical buzz. He raises a hand to his cheek, his fingertips resting lightly upon the flame that has surged beneath his skin.

  She steps back and loses her balance, making him wonder just how much she’s had to drink. ‘You owe me this.’

  ‘I don’t owe you anything,’ he snaps, and for the first time in his life he realises this might be true. ‘None of this is my fault. I don’t think it’s Karen’s either. And it’s not yours, Lucy. We need to let this go.’

  But he knows she can’t. She has come this far, and though he now doubts everything he thought he knew about her, he knows her well enough to realise that there is only one ending she is intent upon.

  ‘Promise me that this stops now.’

  She refuses to meet his eye. ‘You wouldn’t want me to make a promise I can’t keep, would you?’ She reaches into her handbag and retrieves her car keys.

  ‘You shouldn’t be driving,’ he tells her, trying to reason with whatever element of common sense might be remaining.

  ‘Oh, just fuck off.’

  With one last look at the house, Lucy turns and walks back out onto the pavement, aiming her keys at the car as she unlocks it. He hears her start the engine and turns the other way, walking away from the house where he knows she will be able to see him in the rear-view mirror. Perhaps he should keep walking, but he knows he can’t. She is wrong when she says he owes her. If he is in debt to anyone, it is Karen. He needs to warn her before it’s too late.

  Eleven

  Karen

  I have listened to their raised voices from the other side of the door, though I have been unable to hear the words that have been passed between them. My heart pounds painfully behind my ribs, adrenaline and anger making my pulse race. For a while, I feared Josh Green, but now I realise my mistake. Though he is a liar and a fraud; though they are both potentially dangerous in their ability to deceive, I suspect now that it is Lydia – Lucy – I should have feared most.

  Outside, their voices fall silent, and I sit on the second step of the staircase contemplating what the hell is going on here. My mobile gripped in my hand, I search my email inbox for the messages I was sent, for that elusive question and the sinister statement that have yet to be explained.

  After Lucy left this house for the last time, I called the florist who had delivered the violets here. I knew that data protection would prevent me from getting any details about who had purchased the flowers, though I tried to use the fact that I couldn’t thank whoever had had them sent if I didn’t know who that person was. I gained only the knowledge that they had been paid for using a PayPal account, which gave me nothing useful to go on. I feel sure that the couple outside my door had those flowers sent to me, but try as I might, I can’t seem to make the pieces fit together, and the involvement of either Lucy or Josh still makes no sense to me.

  Lucy returned to the house not long after I had spoken to the florist, smiling at me and mocking her own forgetfulness as though none of what had gone before had happened. I bit my tongue, my isolation in this house reminding me that if I was to reveal to this woman what I now knew of her, I had no idea of how she might react.

  I have believed Josh to be a narcissist, but now it seems that Lucy is something far more dangerous.

  The ringing of the doorbell rouses me from my thoughts. A shadow passes the glass of the front door, but I can’t tell if it is him or her.

  I ignore the first three rings of the bell. On the fourth – after a finger is pressed to the button with an insistency that refuses to be ignored – I get up and move behind the door, close enough now to make out Josh’s silhouette through the frosted-glass panel.

  ‘I’ve called the police,’ I say.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he says hurriedly. ‘I don’t blame you; it’s what I deserve.’

  ‘You need to leave.’

  ‘I know,’ he says, ‘and I will. I just … I want to explain. You need to know what’s been going on here.’

  Just last week I would have agreed with this statement, yet now that Josh – or whoever this man is – is standing on my doorstep once again, there is a part of me that no longer wants to hear the truth. Whatever it might prove to be, it is only likely to hurt me.

  And yet it also seems to me that I can’t possibly be hurt any more in my life than I already have been.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he mutters. ‘This isn’t your fault.’

  I say nothing, not yet knowing what this is. I get the feeling now that whatever truth this man is about to lay bare in front of me, it is likely to be far from the one I might possibly have imagined.

  ‘What’s not my fault?’ I ask eventually.

  ‘Any of this. We shouldn’t have come here, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I listened to her.’

  ‘Did you send those emails?’

  ‘What emails?’

  And though he has told so many lies, I believe this response to be the truth. Lucy sent those emails; Lucy sent the flowers. She was brazen enough to turn up here when she knew that they would be delivered to my door, going as far as to comment on them, to stand in my kitchen and arrange them in a vase while I struggled with just how best I could help this woman escape a violent and destructive marriage.

  But apparently, according to her phone – according to her – I am the bitch.

  ‘Who are you, Josh?’ I ask. I hear the weariness in my voice. I am physically tired, but more than that, it is the emotional drain of these past couple of months that has exhausted me. I understand why Sienna couldn’t take my fears as anything more than paranoia. ‘That’s not your real name, is it? You two aren’t even married – I know Lucy’s married to someone else.’

  In the two days that have passed since I found out Lydia’s real name, I have done what anyone in my position might and checked the internet for Lucy Spencer’s social media profiles. It didn’t take long to find her. I tr
ied to access the private Facebook account that boasts a profile picture of Lucy stretched across yellow Mediterranean sand; her Instagram page that shows a tipsy Lucy toasting the camera with a glass of champagne. Her life is nothing like the fictional Lydia’s, and all this time she has been making a mockery of me. I looked for Josh again too, though I already knew I would find no one of that name matching the face that waits now at the other side of the door. I already knew that he doesn’t exist. Whoever this man is, his name isn’t Josh Green.

  ‘Open the door and I’ll tell you everything, I promise.’

  ‘Anything you want to say to me you can say from out there,’ I tell him. ‘The police should be here any minute.’

  He is probably wondering whether I really have called them, but on this occasion, it is more than just a threat. I know I won’t be taken seriously – after all, as Sienna reminded me, this couple have done nothing to physically harm me – but perhaps the presence of the police might deter him from trying to take this any further.

  Just what exactly do they want from me? Why would anyone carry out this elaborate a charade?

  ‘You remind me of her,’ he says. ‘It was the last thing I was expecting.’

  ‘You need to leave,’ I tell him, though curiosity gets the better of me. Who do I remind him of? Is he referring to his mother? ‘Who are you, Josh?’ I ask again.

  Through the frosted glass, I see him lean against the door. ‘My name is James Blackhurst,’ he tells me. ‘Lucy is my sister. Christine Blackhurst was our mother.’

  Twelve

  Lucy

  Karen is in the garden, trying to rectify the effects of a month’s worth of wind and rain. The flower beds look sorry for themselves in their dilapidated state, the budding tulips and daffodils pushing up from the wet ground and drooping over in the grey air, giving up their ascent after barely breaking through the soil. The path that leads down to the shed is strewn with soggy April leaves, and she brushes them aside, as Lucy suspects she has done with so much in her life. Bags it up. Throws it out. Forgets it existed.

  She doesn’t know yet that they are there. Lucy knows that Karen went into her handbag; she left it there for that very purpose. She has orchestrated so much to suit her agenda: the encounter at the pub, where she knew Karen would be that evening; the bruising that she knew Karen would assume had been inflicted by ‘Josh’. Karen knows that they are not who they have claimed to be, and it amazes Lucy that she failed to work it out for herself.

  And now that she knows who they really are, Lucy would like to know what has been done with the information.

  She came here at first with a purpose, wanting the job to be over as quickly as possible, but as the weeks drew on, she found herself immersed in her role and in her new identity, so much so that she came to look forward to their sessions with Karen, testing how far they could stretch their assumed reality until the picture cracked and the truth began to seep through. And not just for Karen, but for James. She knows that despite everything she has told him – despite everything he has seen for himself – he still doubts the truth of their childhood.

  She thinks she might hate him. She thinks she might have always hated him.

  She has grown to pity Karen her isolated and pathetic life. In a sense, fate has delivered justice enough: Karen is loveless and alone, which seems suitably fitting for a woman who has caused so much irreparable damage to the lives of others. Yet still it is insufficient. Karen has never been held accountable for her role in the events that ruined Lucy’s life; she has never admitted that she was in any way to blame for what happened to her parents. Until she does so, Lucy knows that this will never be over, not for her.

  She watches through the kitchen window as Karen bends forward to pull a handful of weeds from the still-wet earth. Gardening gloves protect her fingers, covering the array of rings that adorn them; the wedding ring she wears among them still. Lucy knows all about Sean: who he was, what he did, how he died. She knows about the abuse Karen endured at the hands of her first husband and the way in which it has skewed her view of men. It made everything so easy for her.

  Lucy has instructed James to search the cupboards for Karen’s beloved tea set. It seems fitting somehow that there should be tea for this last session together, just as there has been for every other. He argued with her in the car on the way over, but he does this every time and she has always known how to get him to do as she wishes. He says he wants this to be over, yet here he is again, doing as he’s told. He has always been the same, so easily manipulated; a puppet she can control and get to dance as she pleases. The thing with James is, he is so unsure of everything: his past, his childhood, himself. She is the only constant presence in his life, and his uncertainty makes him satisfyingly pliable.

  Yet Lucy has taken no satisfaction in certain elements of what has been unrolled in front of them within this room over the past couple of months. She thought she could trust her brother, but he is yet another person who has let her down. She knew before coming here that he doubted their father’s innocence, but she believed that given time he would come to see sense. Instead, that flicker of doubt has turned into a string of questions she hasn’t wanted to give him answers to and an anger that has turned itself upon her. Like Karen, he believes their mother was the victim. The abused wife beaten into silence; the innocent party made submissive under the coercive control of a man who managed to conceal his true self from the rest of the world for the duration of a lifetime. They have played out their parents’ marriage in this room, bringing the final act to an ending that they are still unable to agree upon.

  James places the tea tray on the kitchen worktop beside her before moving to the kettle. ‘We need to tell her the truth. All of it.’

  ‘She already knows.’

  ‘This can’t go any further, Lucy. You’ve got what you wanted.’

  She says nothing, keeping her eyes on the window and following Karen’s movements in the garden. His statement couldn’t be further from the truth: she is still a long way from what she wants. That bitch needs to admit what she’s responsible for.

  Karen turns on the path and pulls her gloves from her hands. Lucy wonders how long it took her, nearly six weeks earlier, to notice that her keys were missing. She had considered the possibility that the woman might have had the locks changed, but no – after finding the keys down the back of the sideboard in the hallway the following week, she must have put their absence down to her own carelessness, believing them to have been there all along, because at that point, she had no cause to suspect anyone; no reason to believe Lucy and James weren’t who they claimed to be.

  Lucy has scanned the kitchen several times when passing on her way to the consultancy room over the past couple of months; the door has usually been open wide enough for her to be able to study its glossy surfaces and its high-end finish. When she came here alone and Karen brought her through here, she was able to assess it in greater detail, planning what she knew was to come. Everything here is so white and sparse, so horribly clinical, that it makes her want to splash it with colour to inject some life into the place. Red, she thinks. She would like to see it smeared in blood; to see a little death injected into it.

  She brushes past the fridge and reaches for a knife from the block that sits near the sink. She sees a shadow sweep by the window, and presses herself to the wall, waiting for the back door to open and Karen to enter the room. She does so a moment later, tracking a trail of wet leaves and soil onto the white-tiled floor, her gardening gloves still in her hand.

  She stops when she sees the two of them, her mouth opening but no sound escaping. With a glance behind her, she realises she has nowhere to go, and that if she steps back outside, then she will be leaving them alone in her home.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  She looks at Lucy as though she still doesn’t see it; as though she still doesn’t recognise the face that has been sitting opposite her once a week for these past few months. Lucy beli
eves that at some subconscious level Karen must have realised before now who she is. She looks like her mother: everyone always told them so. Strangers in supermarkets would comment on their similarities – the same small nose, the same angular features – and each time a comparison was made, Lucy would cringe inwardly. No girl wants to be told she looks like her mother, no matter how attractive the mother might believe herself to be.

  The eyes don’t lie. And Karen has looked at her – really looked at her, in a way no one has in a long time. She has believed in her. She has seen something in Lucy, in Lydia, something she thought she could trust, and she has wanted to protect her. She has been so preoccupied with the idea of protecting Lydia that she has made no efforts to keep herself safe.

  ‘Morning, Karen.’

  Everything started with this woman. Lucy doesn’t know whose idea it was for her parents to visit a relationship counsellor – her mother’s or her father’s – but she knows that the brief spell of sessions marked the end of her parents’ marriage, which marked the end of everything Lucy and James had known their lives to be. The chain of events that followed the decision to come to this woman took a route that no one could have anticipated, but that doesn’t mean there is no one to blame. Karen knows what happened. She knows what she did, yet here she stands, all this time later, in her beautiful home, with her beautiful clothes – her successful career unscathed by what she was responsible for all those years ago – and no one questions what she does. No one doubts who she is.

  Lucy knows how it feels to be questioned. She has spent her life justifying her place in this world, pushed from home to home, from carer to carer, and she knows what it is to wear a label. Her teenage years spent trapped in a care system that failed to provide what it claimed in its name gave her resilience if nothing else; she knows what it means to fight for something, and now she fights for what she believes is right, and for what should have been done years ago if only someone else had been man enough to see that justice was delivered.