The Divorce: A gripping psychological thriller with a fantastic twist

by Victoria Jenkins

  I told her what I had been trying to do, that I had stressed to the authorities what had been happening inside this house. I explained how I might help her during her trial, but she already knew that nothing had been documented. Counselling involves the safety of privacy, and what I hear is spoken for my ears only. I keep no records, though it is standard practice for some, I believe that doing so goes against everything the very nature of my profession represents. Kept in my head, the details of other people’s lives are safe from prying eyes and ears. My methods have been designed to protect, yet they have had the opposite effect. Where Christine and Stuart Blackhurst were concerned, I had no proof of anything. Without evidence, my statements meant nothing.

  You said everything was going to be okay. You told me I was doing the right thing.

  Christine sobbed through her sentences, each word barely audible as it fell into the next. I remember trying to reach for an arm to steady her, and how she swiped my hand away from hers, her nails catching the back of it and breaking the skin, two small spots of blood bubbling to the surface. It felt like the least I deserved. And I remember what I noticed then for the first time, fixed to the wall that ran up the stairs: two photographs framed in gold, one of a boy, and the other of a girl.

  She had never told me what her children were called, and her husband had never named them either. Even within the confines of the four walls of my office, everything she had done was with the aim of keeping them safe. And with five little words I had managed to shatter everything she had strived so hard for.

  You need to leave him.

  I recall the last words she ever said to me.

  I should never have listened to you.

  I failed Christine’s children once, but I can’t let that happen again. They deserve to know the truth, regardless of whether it is what they want to hear.

  As though stealing a thought from my brain, James speaks for the first time in ages. ‘He did it, didn’t he?’ he says, ignoring the look his words receive from Lucy. ‘All of it. The sexual assault allegation as well?’

  I nod. ‘I’m sorry, James, I really am. But I think you already knew.’

  He nods and turns to his sister, who is crying now; angry, silent tears rolling down her made-up face. Memories of their third session come rushing back. It was Lucy who brought up the subject of the allegation, but it was James who responded to it with such anger and resentment. I assumed he was adamant about maintaining his innocence, yet I see it so differently now. He wasn’t angry with the girl; he was angry with his father. He was angry at Lucy for trying to dissuade him from a truth he knew to be real.

  ‘She admitted she’d lied,’ Lucy says.

  When they relived their parents’ marriage in my house – when they moved through the motions of replaying their memories, each in their own way trying to persuade the other that their version of events was the correct one – they changed the details of the past, enough for me to fail to see what was happening right in front of me.

  ‘Did she, though?’ I challenge her. ‘Did she really admit that, or did she say it because she feared that no one would believe her or that she might end up worse off if she tried to pursue justice? Things were very different back then. She wasn’t allowed anonymity in the way she would be now.’ I turn my attention to James, knowing that if either of them is to believe what I am saying, it will be him. ‘I have no proof of this, but I think your father might have paid her off to keep her quiet. He could afford it, and your mother would never have noticed – she had no access to their finances.’

  ‘His finances.’

  I ignore Lucy as I continue to appeal to whatever element of reason her brother might possess. ‘It was the nineties; things were very different back then. You’ve seen how many men have got away with this sort of crime over the years – it’s been all over the news. How many so-called celebrities have we seen having to face up to their crimes decades later, people who no one would have suspected because they were so popular and well respected? Things have changed. If your father was still alive now, perhaps he’d finally be made culpable too.’

  ‘Don’t you dare say another word!’ Lucy rushes towards me like a charging animal. She raises the knife, but it is knocked from her hand by James, who lunges towards her with an extended arm, swiping the blade from her grasp. It hits the carpet as he flails back, blood dripping from the cut that has been sliced across his palm.

  ‘Everything she’s saying is right,’ he gasps, clenching his hand into a fist to try to staunch the flow.

  ‘You’re pathetic,’ she snaps, spitting the words at him. She drags her sleeve across her face and steps back, trying to regain her composure. ‘We all know about your sad little schoolboy crush. Has she got you so excited you’re willing to forget what she did?’

  She moves to retrieve the fallen knife.

  ‘But what did she do, Lucy, really? She was trying to help.’

  ‘By splitting our family up?’

  ‘By trying to protect us.’

  Lucy laughs snidely and throws her hands in the air in an exaggerated, false gesture of acceptance. ‘Oh, okay, that’s all right then. Thank you,’ she says, turning to me. ‘Thank you for helping protect me from a man who did nothing but love me. Thank you for killing both my parents and leaving us in a series of shitty care homes that did nothing but fuck us both up. Have you forgotten what happened to you?’ she shouts, turning her attention back to her brother. ‘Have you forgotten all the shit you had to put up with in those places?’ She steps towards him, reaches out a hand and presses her fingertips to his nose. He flinches at the touch of her skin upon his and backs away from her.

  ‘They broke his nose,’ she says, turning to me. ‘Some of the other kids, they were trying to hold his head down one of the toilets. For a skinny little thing he was pretty strong – he kept trying to fight them off. It would have been a lot less painful just to let them have their few minutes of fun.’ She turns back to her brother. ‘And who was there for you, James? Who was the only person to ever look out for you? It wasn’t her protecting you then, was it?’

  James glances at the knife back in Lucy’s hands, wary of the way it is being waved around with the careless abandon of a child in possession of a lit sparkler. The pain on his face says he is aware now just how deeply a surface wound can sting. He won’t push her any more, not when he knows she is still capable of worse.

  ‘I know what you did for me, and I’m grateful for it,’ he says. ‘But I never realised I’d be in so much debt for it.’

  She opens her mouth, her eyes narrowed with indignation. ‘I could have left you. They wanted to split us up plenty of times, but I made sure it never happened.’

  ‘Perhaps it would have been better if you had.’

  The look on her face changes in an instant, her anger crushed beneath a weight of hurt.

  ‘All you’ve done is try to control me. That’s not love, Lucy. That’s what Dad did to Mum.’ He looks at me, searching for an answer to a question he hasn’t asked. I nod. I don’t need to say anything; they both know the truth. It occurs to me that these two adults are still children, repressed by a childhood that left them with permanent scars. The ways in which they’ve dealt with the aftermath of everything they were exposed to have obviously been very different.

  I move tentatively from the side of the room, confident that for the moment at least, Lucy won’t try anything stupid. I pull a handful of tissues from the box on the sideboard and pass them to James, who bunches them in his hand and presses them to his palm. They quickly turn red; the wound is deeper than I realised. Giving up on the bloodied tissues, he shoves them into the pocket of his trousers and holds out his uninjured hand to his sister.

  ‘No one else needs to get hurt,’ he says.

  She looks at his outstretched arm before turning the knife and placing the handle in his palm. Then, leaning to the table in front of me, she pushes my teacup towards me. There is only a small amount left in it, and she s
wirls it around for a moment before putting it back down.

  ‘Too late for that,’ she says, looking at me blankly. ‘You may as well finish your tea, Karen. Enjoy it … it’s your last.’

  She steps wordlessly past her brother and leaves the room. The two of us wait, stunned into a moment’s silence, before my attention is drawn back to the teacup and to the possibility of what has been implied. We hear the front door slam behind Lucy as she leaves the house; I wait a beat, anticipating her return, but she is gone.

  ‘You should have told me who you were. All this could have been avoided.’

  He says nothing. We both know what I’ve said is untrue: Lucy would have kept going, with or without him.

  ‘What does Lucy’s husband do?’ I ask quietly, though I already know the answer to the question. I need to hear it again, to have my suspicions confirmed as more than simply paranoia.

  ‘He works in pharmaceuticals.’ James is also looking at the table, his face telling me he is thinking the same as I am. He stares at the teacup, his words – Lucy’s words – assuming a greater possibility.

  My stomach makes a strange and alien noise and I feel something like a cramp grip my insides, making me nauseous. I look at the dregs of the tea on the table in front of me; they stare accusingly back, taunting me with their silence. Has she done what we suspect she has? Have I been poisoned? I made the tea; Lucy didn’t go anywhere near it, other than to carry the tray into this room. Surely in that time she wasn’t able to do anything to it, though I realise there have been plenty of times my eyes have failed to see what has been right in front of me. If Lucy is capable of the level of deceit that has been played out in this room during the past few months, it seems likely she is more than able to perform a sleight of hand that has gone unnoticed.

  ‘I don’t feel well.’

  I try to shake myself from the thought of what might have been done. She left the insinuation in the air, made more of a threat by the words she didn’t speak. But Lucy tells lies, doesn’t she? She has been lying to me for months. She has been lying to herself for years.

  She’s going to lie to you.

  ‘James, please. I need your help.’

  I continue to stare at the almost empty teacup on the table, as though I will find an answer in the remnants of the drink. Nausea turns in my stomach and a dull pulse builds in my brain as James takes his mobile phone from his pocket and dials 999. I hear him ask for an ambulance, though the words are muffled as though I am hearing them from under water. I feel as if I am somewhere else, another day, another life; no longer really me, as if all this is happening to someone else.

  ‘Okay,’ I hear James say to whoever has answered his call. ‘I’ll tell her. Karen,’ he says, turning to me, his voice laced with panic. ‘You need to make yourself sick. Now.’

  I leave the room without speaking to him and go to the downstairs toilet, where I stick my fingers down my throat. I didn’t eat breakfast this morning, and my empty stomach burns as I retch. Bile escapes me, but there is little more.

  ‘Karen.’

  James is in the hallway.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ he says through the closed door. ‘This wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted the truth. I wanted to know where I come from.’

  I stand, flush the toilet and wash my hands. Pressing my palms to the edge of the sink, I lean forward and study my eyes in the mirror, as though I might be able to detect signs of poisoning. I realise it is futile; I have no idea what I am looking for. Yet as I gaze at myself, I see something that has been hidden for the three years since Sean has been gone. Behind the tiredness that waters my eyes and the sadness that sits upon my features, there is life. Maybe I hadn’t realised it until now, but more than ever, I want to live.

  When I open the door, James is there waiting for me, and for the first time ever I find myself able to believe his words without questioning them first. Whatever he is guilty of, I accept that he had no intention of things going this far.

  ‘You already knew the truth,’ I say.

  His eyes are cast downwards, knowing that what I say is right. I wonder what he has apologised for. Is it these last few months of lies, or is it this, now: the possibility of what his sister has done, of what she is capable of?

  I go to the kitchen and he follows. I open the fridge and pour myself a glass of milk, standing at the sink and sipping it carefully, trying not to linger on the thought of what Lucy might have laced my tea with. I think I remember reading once that milk can help dilute detergents that have been ingested, though I have no idea whether this is simply an old wives’ tale.

  ‘They said they won’t be long,’ James tell me, as though my fear has been uttered and has broken the silence that sits between us.

  ‘The Playing Field,’ I say, thinking aloud.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The Playing Field,’ I repeat, my stomach turning with something that feels like more than fear alone. ‘You remembered the name of the play your father took your mother to see.’

  It wasn’t easy to do, but once I learned the couple’s true identities, I managed to trace the play and the theatre at which it was shown. It ran there for five nights during May of 1985; it took eight phone calls and three former members of staff to help me find a record of it. It might seem trivial, but it mattered. It matters. It means that at some point James was told about it, presumably by his mother, and that decades later, he still remembers.

  It means his memory is reliable; far more so, apparently, than his sister’s. Where doubts have begun to creep into my consciousness, certainty steps in to smother it. I made no mistake about Stuart Blackhurst, though I have made many about his son.

  ‘There are plenty of things I remember.’

  I recall the way he raised the subject of the play; the way he challenged Lucy to remember what it was called. He was questioning her memory, her reliability, suggesting even then that she wasn’t to be trusted.

  ‘You were trying to tell me something, weren’t you? Even back then at that first meeting.’

  ‘I know what Lucy is,’ he tells me, ‘but I wanted to believe her. I’ve always wanted to believe her. She’s all I’ve got left. And no one wants to think their parent is capable of the kind of sins my father was guilty of, do they? You can pretend it isn’t real for a while, but you can’t avoid the truth for ever. I’ve lived in the shadow of what he was my whole life. I can’t do it any more.’

  I lean against the worktop and close my eyes at the sound of Sean’s voice in my head. We sat in this kitchen together three weeks before he died, drinking lager he’d been told he shouldn’t drink while having the conversation both of us had wanted to put off for as long as possible.

  You’ve got to live your life, Karen. You have so many years left ahead of you. Make them good ones.

  Every word he spoke sounded wrong to my ears. How could I even contemplate carrying on after he was gone? When his life ended, so would mine. In all my adult years, the only happiness I had known had come after I had met him; I didn’t know how to exist in a world where he wasn’t. A future without him was a future I didn’t want to face.

  I found ways to fill my days, and a purpose in helping the couples I would invite into my home, but in the three years that have passed since that conversation in this room, I realise I haven’t done what Sean requested of me. I have existed, moving through the motions of everyday life in a pretence at living. And only now, with the past standing in front of me, do I understand that he was right.

  ‘You’re not your father, James.’

  The tension eases from his face; he looks relieved, grateful even. With just those few words I seem to remove a doubt that has been hanging over him, possibly since he was just a child. The violence he has almost been capable of, the anger he carries with him, never appearing to know where might be safe to leave it, the uncertainty of his childhood that has shaped the adult he has become – all these things he has kept with him, gripping on to them for fear that losing them mi
ght leave him adrift; hating their closeness for the possibility that they make him a product of where he has come from.

  Where James – where Josh – was once so confusing in all his contradictions, now it seems he couldn’t be easier for me to read. He hasn’t wanted to admit to himself what his father was for fear that he is something like him, that there may be a part of him that is a reincarnation of Stuart Blackhurst, a man he has tried to emulate during these past couple of months, having spent a lifetime attempting to hide from the truth of what he was.

  ‘He had a chance to put things right. He never took it. You need to live your life now.’

  The irony of my words is interrupted by knocking at the front door, and as James goes to let the paramedics into the house, I know I won’t let Lucy Blackhurst do this to me. Her family has marred so much of my past; they don’t get to take my future. This isn’t how it ends.

  Were you totally gripped by The Divorce? Read the first book in Victoria Jenkins’ bestselling thriller series, The Girls in the Water, here.

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  The Girls in the Water

  Detectives King and Lane Book 1

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  * * *

  When she woke, she found herself in darkness. She couldn’t move. She was going to die and she had no idea why…

  * * *

  When the body of Lola Evans is found in a local park on a cold winter’s morning, Detective Alex King and her new recruit Chloe Lane are called in to lead the hunt for the killer.

  * * *

  Days later, a second girl goes missing. It seems the two shared a troubled history, and were members of the same support group. What secrets were they keeping? And who is the monster preying on these vulnerable girls? As the detectives start to piece together the clues, it becomes clear that the murderer's reach goes even further – back into the painful past of Chloe Lane herself. Chloe realises that she too is in danger – as she uncovers secrets about her own brother’s death which someone will kill to keep hidden.