The Divorce: A gripping psychological thriller with a fantastic twist

by Victoria Jenkins

  Karen Fisher took her life away. She is answerable for it.

  The counsellor jolts back and steadies herself on the nearest worktop. Lucy wonders which she saw first, her or the knife. She holds the handle tightly in her right fist, the blade tilted at an angle so that it catches the light from the ceiling.

  ‘How did you get in here?’

  Karen glances past Lucy and looks at James, who is standing behind her. She must realise that they have already been here a while: beside him on the worktop is the tea set he has taken down from the cupboard next to the fridge. Karen glances at the microwave, where she left her phone plugged into its charger. Lucy has already spotted it, and has removed it so that Karen is unable to get her hands on it. It wouldn’t be of much use to her now anyway, not while she’s standing here facing someone who has a knife in her hand and the intention to use it should it become necessary. What does Lucy have to lose now? Her relationship with her husband is dead: she realised that long before she started these sessions with James. In an ironic way, marriage counselling has been good for her, despite not attending with the man she is married to.

  Her relationship with her brother has assumed a similar status. They had a chance to fix things – he has had an opportunity all these weeks to prove himself worthy of her loyalty – but he has chosen to ruin anything that might have existed between them, and so it stands that all familial bonds are dead and there is nothing left for her to hold on to.

  Karen Fisher killed her family. She deserves to pay for what she did.

  ‘I know who you are,’ Karen tells her. ‘And I know why you’re here. What was the point in any of this? It hasn’t achieved anything.’

  ‘Actually, you’re wrong there. It’s been quite enlightening really. For one, it’s made me realise I don’t love my husband any more. My actual husband, I mean. I’m going to tell him we’re getting a divorce.’ She studies Karen’s face as she speaks, waiting for a reaction to the words; words she knows she has heard before, long before they met. She sees it in the flicker of her eyes, though Karen tries so obviously hard to contain the response. ‘What’s wrong? Has something I’ve said touched a nerve? Is that what happened, Karen? Is that what my mother told you too?’

  Karen is shaking her head. She must be scared – her attention flits from the knife to Lucy’s face and back again – but she is managing to maintain an appearance of control. ‘This is madness. I want you to leave my house, both of you.’

  ‘Has the kettle boiled yet, James? I think we could all do with a nice cup of tea. What do you think, Karen?’

  Karen’s eyes rest on the knife gripped in Lucy’s hand. ‘I think you need to leave this house before I call the police.’

  ‘What are you going to do that with?’ Lucy asks, reaching into her pocket with her free hand. ‘This?’ She retrieves Karen’s mobile and waves it tauntingly before putting it away again. ‘Your landline seems to be down, as well,’ she adds. ‘Shame.’

  ‘Does your husband know you’re doing this? Your real husband. Ross, isn’t it? Not that hard to find, thanks to the internet. I wonder what he’d make of it all.’

  Karen’s words exude a confidence that Lucy knows is faked. She almost sounds like her, she thinks, as though she is trying to reflect her own air of authority; as though by doing so she might be able to deter Lucy from what she is doing. But she won’t. She can’t. No one can.

  Karen glances behind her again, as though considering an escape through the back door. Startling her with her swiftness, Lucy steps forward and brushes past her, raising the knife to Karen’s eyeline as she closes the back door, locks it, removes the key and puts it in her pocket with the phone.

  ‘I doubt he’d be interested. We live very separate lives.’

  ‘So I saw.’

  James’s eyes narrow and he looks at Karen questioningly, searching for an explanation for the comment.

  ‘Didn’t she tell you?’ Karen asks, reading the look. ‘I saw her in the pub with another man. They weren’t exactly hiding themselves. Pretty blatant, actually.’ She turns to direct her words at Lucy. ‘It was almost as though you wanted people to notice you, in fact.’

  Lucy smiles. That was exactly what she had intended. It wasn’t difficult to discover what Karen does in her free time: her life is so boring and structured that any idiot could easily find out where she might be at any given day and time. Clients until 2.30 p.m. on weekdays, food shop on a Friday afternoon, art class on a Tuesday evening. It is all so sadly predictable and so mundanely vanilla. She wonders what Karen gains from the tedium of routine; whether she uses it as way of punishing herself for what she is guilty of.

  She doubts it. To feel guilty, Karen would have to acknowledge fault.

  She sees what Karen is doing, trying to cause a rift between them that might shift the focus away from herself and her crimes. She is set to fail miserably: the relationship between Lucy and James can’t be any more frayed than it already is. The damage was done long ago –over twenty years earlier, in fact, when Karen Fisher tore their family apart.

  ‘You sent those emails, didn’t you?’ Karen says. ‘And the violets, too. A nice touch.’

  ‘Violets?’ James repeats.

  ‘Whatever you think I’m guilty of,’ Lucy says, brushing off her brother’s interruption, ‘it’s nothing compared with what you did.’

  ‘How did you find me?’ Karen asks, ignoring the comment.

  Lucy had known the question would arise. In truth, it was far easier than she had anticipated to find out the identity of the elusive marriage guidance counsellor. She had overheard enough conversations – arguments, really – between her parents to know that they had been seeing one; all she’d had to do was find out who it was. After her mother was arrested, she and James had been taken by social workers back to the house to collect some of their belongings. That was when she had found the address book that was kept by the telephone in her parents’ room, placing it in her box of things as though it was her own. Once she had the address it was easy to find out what sort of ‘counselling’ was carried out there; all she had needed to do was find a name. That had come years later, once her resentment had been given time to fester into a full-blooded desire for revenge.

  ‘I’ve had plenty of time,’ is the answer she offers. ‘Like you said, the internet makes everything so easy now.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  Lucy looks casually at the kettle before returning her focus to Karen with a smile. ‘How about a nice cup of tea for a start?’ She thrusts the knife towards her, silently instructing her to set about her task. ‘Once you’ve done that,’ she adds, ‘you can give us the truth.’

  She jabs the knife in Karen’s direction for a second time, prompting her to do as she is told. She watches Karen as she pours water from the kettle into the teapot and places everything on the tray that is set ready for her, a repetition of a ritual she has carried out countless times. Watching the woman, she feels a hatred that is more intense than ever.

  Lucy’s life as she had known it came to a sudden and violent end over two decades ago, when she was just thirteen. After that, nothing was ever the same again. With no other family to take them in, she and James were moved from home to home, branded with the mark of their shared past; she entered adulthood with nothing and tried to regain some control by marrying into wealth. Ross Spencer is an entrepreneur in the field of pharmaceuticals, a self-made millionaire, and the most boring man she has ever met. She realises now the mistake she made, though had she wanted to acknowledge it, she would have been able to admit it years ago: she doesn’t love her husband – she never did – but he offered her a security she had been lacking all those years, since the day a grenade was thrown into her life.

  The person who threw the grenade is here now, still looking at her as though incapable of seeing the truth that stands in front of her.

  ‘We’re going to do this properly,’ Lucy tells her, stepping past her to pick up the tea tray.
‘Just as we’ve been doing all these weeks.’ She thrusts the knife towards James; he takes it, though it is obvious to them all that he does so reluctantly. ‘Follow me. Let’s go through to the consultancy room,’ she says, mimicking Karen’s voice.

  ‘You don’t have to do everything she tells you, James.’

  Lucy turns sharply, slopping boiling water from the teapot onto the tray. Her face flushes with anger, her cheeks reddened with objection at Karen’s challenge to her authority. ‘Yes he does,’ she says softly, her voice a contrast to the violence she feels building inside her; a violence that is visible to everyone. ‘And so do you. Understand?’

  Karen follows now, seeming to finally realise that no matter what power she thinks she has, the knife in James’s hand cancels it out.

  ‘You know that I can’t give you the truth, don’t you, Lucy?’ she says as they enter the consultancy room. ‘I can tell you what I saw, but only your parents know the truth of what really happened.’

  ‘But they’re not here any more, are they?’ Lucy says, as though Karen needs reminding of the fact. ‘And you’re responsible for that.’

  And now Karen needs to pay for what she did.

  For Lucy, Karen’s truth is the only one that remains. What she saw – or what she thinks she saw – was the beginning of the end.

  Or perhaps not. Things had started to go wrong when that girl lied to the police and told them her father had touched her. Everyone knew she was a liar, even the police, but her mother had decided to believe the allegation, as though pledging love and loyalty to someone meant nothing and could be as easily torn to pieces as the paper the declaration was signed upon. She had always been against him, always trying to make his life difficult. No wonder her father treated her the way he did.

  No wonder that James gives her little other option now than to treat him in much the same way.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Karen takes a seat on the sofa to which Lucy gestures. Lucy places the tea tray on the table while James lingers near the window, his concentration split between the carpet at his feet and the clock on the far wall. He is refusing to make eye contact with either woman, as though doing so would be confirmation of whose side he is taking. She was reluctant to bring him here with her today, but this is it: he has one final chance to prove himself.

  She remembers how her father looked that night she saw him come home late; the night he was released from the police station after his arrest. She had been in bed – her mother thought she was asleep – but when she heard the front door, she went to the landing and stood at the top of the stairs watching him take off his coat and shoes. He looked so tired, so drawn, and she knew even then that something was very wrong. And then there came the argument. He told her mother he was innocent; as far as Lucy could see, that should have been enough for her. He was her husband. He was their father. He wouldn’t have done what that girl had claimed.

  She takes the knife from James. ‘So let’s hear it then,’ she says, turning the blade towards Karen.

  ‘I’m not sure what you want me to say, Lucy. What is it you think I’ve done?’

  ‘You know what you did. Just how do you sleep at night?’ She tilts her head to one side, relishing the effect her words have on Karen, the echo of the email she sent. Though her message was short, it took an unexpectedly long time to construct. It had to be precise. It needed to have the right impact. ‘You took everything from us,’ she adds.

  Lucy was aware of everything that had been said about her father, but she knew it was all lies. For months her parents continued to believe she knew nothing about what was going on – as though thirteen was too young to understand what a sexual allegation consisted of, as though her hearing hadn’t yet developed to its full adult capacity and she was incapable of comprehending the angry words that were passed in badly hushed tones on the other side of the wall at night – but she knew exactly what was happening. She knew that her mother believed what that girl had said.

  Her father was a popular man, successful and well respected. He was a doctor, for goodness’ sake: he healed people. He had a reputation that went before him; a reputation that lived on long after he had died. For all the letters she sticks after her name on her website – for all her fancy magazine-cover home interiors and her fine bone china – Karen is nothing in comparison.

  ‘Why violets?’ Karen asks.

  ‘It’s Lucy’s middle name,’ James answers for her. He stares at her questioningly, clearly wondering just how much she has done without his knowledge. If she had told him, he would have tried to stop her. He thinks things have gone too far, but for Lucy they haven’t gone nearly far enough. She doesn’t care what James thinks; she never really has. She isn’t answerable to him; that isn’t the way their relationship works.

  ‘It’s after my grandmother,’ Lucy adds. ‘Dad used to recite a rhyme that his grandfather had written for her. Hush little baby, dry your eyes, Daddy’s going to sing you a lullaby. Sleep little darling, don’t you cry, dream sweet dreams beneath a violet sky. Pretty, isn’t it? He might have recited it to his grandchildren one day, but you killed any chance of that.’

  Karen is shaking her head in vehement denial. Lucy hates her with a violence that makes her body shudder. How different her life might have been had it not been for Karen’s interference in things that were nothing to do with her. This woman took her own experiences, her life with her first husband, and dumped them at her parents’ door, leaving Lucy and James to live with the consequences.

  ‘I did what I thought was best. I am so sorry for what happened, Lucy, sorrier than you’ll ever know. I was trying to protect your mother. I was trying to protect you.’

  Lucy laughs; a bitter, sharp noise that punctures the silence of the room. ‘The only person she needed protecting from was you.’

  Lucy knows what she saw. She knows what she heard. She was home earlier than expected that afternoon and her parents were in the kitchen. Her mother had planned to pick her up two hours later; she was supposed to have gone to a friend’s house after school, but she had argued with the girl at lunchtime and had decided not to go. James wasn’t at home; he went to some geeky games club after school every Thursday and wasn’t due to be dropped back for another couple of hours.

  The kitchen was a mess, she remembers: dirty dishes piled high on the worktop by the sink and clothes thrown against the closed door of the washing machine. Her father was a man of routine and order and he liked the house to reflect his principles, but during those past few months something had happened to her mother. The woman who usually held everything together – if only for the sake of appearances to the world that lay outside their little corner of suburbia – had been replaced by someone who drank wine at the kitchen table into the early hours of the morning and didn’t get up from the bed in the spare room until around midday.

  When Lucy arrived home, her mother was sitting at the table, her father standing beside her, a sheet of paper brandished in his hand. Neither of them noticed their daughter standing in the doorway, and when she heard her father’s words, she stepped back again, disappearing from their view.

  When were you going to tell me about this?

  Her mother snatched the paper from his hand, scanning it as though she didn’t already know its contents. I’ve tried, she said, not meeting his eye. I’ve tried everything, and nothing is ever good enough for you.

  Her father stepped back and folded his arms across his chest. You can’t do this.

  Of course, Lucy can’t really know what each of them was doing: she was on the other side of the wall. But she thinks she knows what happened. She thinks there is only one way it could have happened.

  I can. I didn’t believe it until now, but I can and I’m going to.

  A moment of silence followed. Lucy held her breath, as though her parents might be able to hear the rise and fall of her lungs from the other side of the kitchen wall. She was used to these silences. She knew how to fill them with noise fr
om inside her own brain; how to make the bad things fade until they weren’t there any more and all she was left with was an empty space in which to start again, like a child with a crayon and a blank sheet of white paper.

  This is her doing, isn’t it? What have you told her?

  Nothing. This is about me, Stuart … just for once, this is about me.

  There was a scraping of metal chair legs upon the tiled floor as her mother stood from the table.

  She’s twisted your mind against me, do you know that? Everything was fine before we started seeing that woman. I told you to leave it, but you just wouldn’t let it go, would you?

  I was trying to help you. I stupidly thought I could, but you’re beyond that, aren’t you? You can’t help yourself either. This is who you are.

  Her father’s voice was calm, as it always was. It was only her mother who raged like a crazy person.

  I’ll take the children. Is that what you want?

  No. You can’t.

  Lucy heard something else then: something crashing to the floor as it was knocked from a worktop. Later, she saw it was the blue patterned vase her father had bought her mother as an anniversary present, years earlier. It was beyond repair. Something in so many pieces wasn’t worth trying to save.

  Don’t! Get off me!

  I won’t let you do this!

  Lucy’s body stiffened at the sounds that followed: the scuffling of feet along the kitchen floor; the cupboard door that was smashed shut; the dull thud; the single guttural groan. She waited for what would come next, but all that filled the hallway was an awful deathly silence that seemed to last for ever. When she finally moved, she went into the kitchen with her breath held, not knowing what she might find; not ready to face what she was unable to bring herself to imagine.

  Her mother had fallen back against the fridge, her chest heaving; her lungs gulping ragged gasps that punctuated the silence of the room. Pieces of blue china lay scattered at her feet. Amid them lay the divorce papers her husband had thrown back at her. Her eyes were fixed on the other side of the kitchen; Lucy followed their path to where her father sat slumped against a cupboard, a knife plunged into his chest, his shirt stained in bursts of red that had patterned the fabric with a macabre Valentine’s bouquet.