by Tina Seskis
But no-one was feeling very compassionate. Barry knew Stephen had been sidelined just so they could crack on with reporting the story, and although he ought to have felt sorry for his long-time boss, for the way his world had come tumbling down, Humpty Dumpty-like, he’d still been smarting from Stephen favouring that upstart reporter Maddie ahead of him, belittling him like that in front of her when she’d come bounding in like a bloody spaniel with her precious sodding lake story. So when Barry had been asked by the publisher to take over the reins, just for a few days initially while they worked out what to do, he had taken tremendous joy in sanctioning every ghastly detail to be printed. He had zero loyalty to his boss now – and why the hell should he after all he’d done for Stephen over the years, and for what? Barry had also delighted in transferring Maddie from the news desk to cover Big Brother, which no one watched any more, and he’d relished having Stephen’s office cleaned out – he, Barry, couldn’t possibly work in all that mess. It was retribution time. It was bloody brilliant.
71
Sardinia
The bedroom was still so brutally hot Nigel needed to do something, and quickly. He felt frantic, useless, frantically useless. He stared helplessly at the phone his daughter had fetched for him. He didn’t know the Italian number for emergency services, and there was no one to ask. Maybe Sissy didn’t need an ambulance anyway, he thought – he shouldn’t panic, he just needed to cool her down. What else could he do? An idea came to him and, although it wasn’t a particularly good one, action felt better than inaction. He raced to the walk-in store cupboard where Stephen and Juliette kept everything that there was no other place for: deckchairs and beach toys, a tool kit, a broken barbecue, spare faded cushions for the outdoor furniture, fishing gear, a battered straw picnic basket. Yes. Tucked on a high shelf right at the back was the silver electric fan, still in its box, that he’d remembered seeing. He clambered over the folded-up deckchairs and with his fingertips edged it off the shelf, catching it mid-air as his body bent half backwards into the sun-loungers.
Nigel ran back to the bedroom where his wife was lying with her eyes closed, breathing raggedly, her face obviously badly burned, and he took the fan out of its box and searched ineffectually for a socket, looking everywhere, seeing nothing. The ones for the bedside table lamps were hidden behind the bed, inaccessible. There must be another one somewhere, surely. He scanned along the skirting boards, and then for maybe the fourth time along the length of the frieze of the tastefully naked couple pastel-painted across the back wall, the one against which the bed was butted up – and finally, there in the corner, amongst the tangled twining grapevines, he found the socket. It was quite a way from the bed, but the cord should be just about long enough to reach her.
Nigel plugged in the fan but it refused to work. He checked its settings, made sure it was definitely switched on. He jiggled the plug around. As he wiggled the cord increasingly manically (he still wasn’t sure it would do much good, but he didn’t know what else to do, proving useless in a crisis) the fan leaped into life, and his heart jumped – thank God – and then the whirring stopped, fading out limply, as if it couldn’t be bothered, as the electricity cut again. He cursed it. Maybe he should run next door, try to find someone else who could call a doctor, perhaps send Nell; she was sensible. He couldn’t think straight – his mind had always been so clear in the face of his own impending death, but at the thought of anything happening to Sissy, he was derailed, a mess. Yes, he’d get Nell to go for help. He’d ask her in a minute, once he’d got this sodding fan going.
Nigel jiggled the plug in its socket yet again, and it seemed to move more freely than it should, as though there was merely space behind it, rather than wall. The fan jittered in and out of life, teasing him. The TV ads were deafening from the lounge, and there were some groans he didn’t like the sound of, this was Italy after all, you never knew what they might put on, even in the middle of the day.
‘Turn that TV off now!’ he yelled, but the children ignored him. He shoved in the cord harder and waggled it angrily, furiously, and at long, long last the fan started up its shiny revolutions, rhythmically in synch with the moans from the living room, and at the very same time a blue crack of electricity flew through the air from the socket, and then it flew through Nigel, and the fan stopped again.
72
Wandsworth
Early on a Wednesday morning in September, not long past midnight, Stephen Forsyth sat in the office in the eaves of his two-million-pound house – perfectly located close to the common and just five minutes’ walk from his favourite (Michelin-starred, no less) restaurant on Bellevue Road – with his own newspaper’s site open on the twenty-seven-inch iMac that graced his vintage Danish desk. His wife lay passed out on the bed in the luxurious guest room below. Although Stephen was ridiculously drunk, he could still just about focus on the text. The next day’s stories had been published two minutes earlier. It was the fourth one, on this, the day after the inquest, which attracted his attention. ‘Mother who abandoned her son for love’ was the headline. ‘Loner Kingston’, ran the copy, enthusiastically endorsed by Barry a couple of hours earlier, ‘developed a deeply entrenched distrust, verging on hatred, of women after his own mother Eileen walked out on him, according to an unnamed source. Terry Kingston, who quite sensationally is the secret half-brother of this paper’s editor, Stephen Forsyth, who is currently suspended (Barry must have had that bit put in, Stephen fumed), was the prime suspect in the initial inquiry into the death of Siobhan Benson, 44. Kingston’s mother left the family home when her son was just two years old to move in with her former next-door neighbour, a mere half a mile away, and she soon bore a new child, Stephen. According to our source, Terry Kingston never forgave her.’ Stephen finished reading, put his head in his hands and sobbed snottily, like a toddler.
Ten or so hours later, Juliette and Stephen sat sullenly opposite each other across the solid oak table, which he noticed was badly scratched in one place (had one of the kids been scribbling again, did she ever fucking supervise them?) in their large German-manufactured kitchen. Its white high-gloss finish was sparkling, the surfaces unusually clear of the normal detritus associated with a household made up of a (before now) largely absent father, sluttish mother and three unruly children. The housekeeper had been so titillatingly embarrassed by the revelations of the Daily Mail when she’d arrived that morning it had given her a rare flare of energy, and she had taken to the kitchen as if to a human catastrophe clear-up – an earthquake perhaps, or maybe a hurricane. She had donned her pale-blue housecoat and pink Marigolds and whipped through the room, emptying the dishwasher, piling all the clean stuff onto the island (making the place look temporarily worse), putting away the cutlery with dangerous efficiency: large knives deftly dispensed to the magnetic rack on the wall, knife-thrower-like; forks and table knives and spoons and teaspoons tossed into the appropriate sections of the cutlery drawer expertly, like quoits at the fair; ladles and serving spoons zealfully attached to hooks like hanging victims.
Mrs Redfern had then turned her attention to all the crap on the draining board: dinner plates stacked up, still full of leftovers; two wine glasses, one smeared with gash-red lipstick; three (three!) empty wine bottles; an assortment of dirty bone-china mugs from Heals and Harrods and various unheard-of stately homes; half-full tumblers of orange juice and water; flattened individual smoothie cartons oozing gunk; a lone squashed pear with a single bite out of it. It’s an absolute bloomin’ disgrace this house, she’d thought, as she picked bills and colour supplements out of slimy puddles on the counter-tops, shook sticky unidentifiable drips and burned crumbs off them onto the work surface, scraped the resulting mess off the counter into her rubber-gloved hand to be dispatched into the bin, dunked the dishcloth in hot soapy water and cleaned the Corian (whatever that is, she harrumphed, all that money and you’re not allowed to use Flash on it, I ask you) surfaces so they shone. She’d then vacuumed and mopped the floor like a mania
c before whirling upstairs, uncharacteristic energy not yet spent, to attend to the children’s rooms – on her way stomping noisily past the firmly shut door to the master bedroom in the hope that someone might come out; sneaking a hopeful peek into the spare room, where she tantalisingly saw a pair of beautiful bare feet hanging over the end of the bed; listening fruitlessly at the bottom of the stairs up to the office in the eaves.
Stephen and Juliette were not appreciative of Mrs Redfern’s earlier efforts as they sat at the table nursing monumental hangovers – in fact they didn’t even notice that the kitchen was tidy for a change. Juliette probably wouldn’t have done anyway, even on a good day, and Stephen was too wrapped up in the horror of his apparently imploding life. It was disastrous. The press was still getting tremendous mileage out of the body in the lake story, especially Stephen Forsyth’s involvement, there were just so many angles. And now on top of all the damage that had already been done to Stephen’s reputation, this week the Sun had taken delight in the unveiling of Juliette’s affair (as it turned out it was bloody true, the whore – and not just with anyone, but with that fucking snake Alistair Smart!). Stephen felt sick to his stomach. That wasn’t even the half of it, it got way worse than that. Last night with his wife, in their drunken, violent shouting match (Juliette had gone for him first, he hadn’t meant to catch her eye, he’d just been defending himself, for fuck’s sake), she’d told him that Siobhan had claimed he’d been to blame for Nigel’s death in Sardinia, and that when she’d blurted it out Renée had gone nuts and started calling him a murderer. Stephen was terrified – he knew he wasn’t guilty of murdering Nigel, but he must admit he’d always felt slightly responsible, and if it got out he definitely could be accused of fraud, or perverting the course of justice or something – or maybe even manslaughter, he didn’t know the Italian law on that.
How the fuck would Siobhan have known about the socket though? He thought he’d dealt with all that. Sissy must have known somehow, and must have told her. He tried to clear his head, ignore his wife as she sat half-dead across the table from him. OK, he’d known he’d done up the apartment on the cheap, even been aware that the electrics were faulty, but he hadn’t meant to kill anyone, and it’s not like he had wired the sodding plugs himself. And he had felt terrible about Nigel, killed off by electricity, not cancer, in the end, and after everything he’d been through. But really, Stephen told himself yet again, as if saying it often enough would make it true, Nigel had been lucky to be alive anyway, he’d been read the last rites ten years beforehand, no-one ever thought he was going to pull through. The cancer would probably have come back anyway, it usually did, and Nigel had had ten good bonus years. And at least the kids’ screams at discovering Nigel had alerted the neighbours, so they’d managed to get Sissy to hospital in time; they hadn’t been left as orphans, thank Christ. They could so easily have lost their mother, might well have done save for the accident, if all Nigel had been doing for her severe heatstroke was plugging in a fucking fan. Surely it was better for them to have had their father die rather than their mother?
As Stephen sat with his head in his hands, he remembered how much he’d panicked when he’d first got the call about Nigel’s death, had known he had to do something – you never knew with the Italian authorities, it definitely could have got nasty. So he’d contacted Terry’s brother-in-law, Gianfranco, as soon as he could, just in case the police did end up getting involved, and Gianfranco had sorted it all out, had had the socket repaired by someone who knew what they were doing – Stephen’s offer had been far too attractive for him not to.
Stephen had always thought that would be the end of it, but it turned out Sissy had somehow known what he’d done all along. And now, thanks to Siobhan, apparently so did the rest of Juliette’s friends. He was fucked, especially as someone had already leaked it – even if the press hadn’t actually implicated him yet there’d still been a story about someone dying in his holiday apartment. What if some dogged reporter decided to check it out further? He couldn’t go down for murder though, he told himself, he definitely wasn’t a murderer … it had been an accident. He hadn’t wanted Nigel to die, he’d quite liked the bloke. How dare anyone call him a murderer?
As Juliette slumped further into her chair, Stephen thought of all her fucking bombshells last night, all the revelations, the other rumours circling – and he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do about any of them, now they were surfacing, rotten and stinking like Siobhan’s bloated corpse. He was finished, surely.
Stephen let out a howl, and it sounded villainous, comedic, although in truth it was desperate. (Juliette barely looked up, it was like she’d been drugged or something.) He’d been humiliated, abandoned, well and truly shafted. His life was being picked over as if by vultures on a stinking rubbish dump, and although he tried not to acknowledge it, Stephen realised it was what they call comeuppance, retribution. He thought about Nigel, Juliette, Renée, and he felt defeated, ready to succumb, penitent even. He deserved what was coming to him.
As Stephen continued to look across the table at his ghost-like wife, whom he had adored once as an example of what he could become, he thought of the hateful, damning things they had screamed at each other last night, and he wondered whether the children or, worse, the neighbours had heard, resulting in yet more ways for damaging stories to get out. And as he stared at the puffiness around his wife’s left eye, Stephen wondered where a rope or some kind of lead was, so he could go out to the garage now, before he had to face anyone.
73
Berkshire
‘Hello, Giles, it’s me, Cynthia … Yes, yes, I’m fine. I’m so sorry to ask, but are you able to come home? … Yes, I know it’s the middle of the day, it’s just Juliette’s here … Yes, yes she is, she got the train, I picked her up from the station … Now, yes please … She wants to know about her mother … Yes, I do mean her … Yes, yes, she has … All right. (Long pause.) Hello, yes, I’m still here … You can? Oh, thank you! See you soon, dear. Bye-bye.’
Juliette looked at her mother, at the lines around her eyes that were beginning to attest to her approaching middle-age, and she felt sad for Cynthia, could see how hard it was for her too, but it couldn’t be helped. She had to discover the truth at last – it was as if once she’d started this, had found out the name, made the fruitless phone calls, the real story had to come unfurling out, whatever it might prove to be. She’d waited her entire life, but it seemed she couldn’t wait any longer. She needed to know now.
Cynthia seemed unsure what to do with herself while they waited for Giles, so she made her excuses and went upstairs to put away the clean laundry, blowing her nose as she went, and when she’d finished she came down to the kitchen to make more tea, and her eyes were red. Juliette had moved from the living room and was already sitting at the kitchen table – its blue and white gingham oilcloth and bowl of jaunty yellow tulips made her feel better somehow. Juliette smiled nervously at Cynthia, too on edge to notice her mother’s pain. Yes, she thought, it was much nicer in here, with the dog asleep on his bed in the corner, this was where she wanted to hear her story. She took off her lace gloves and looked at her hands, at the wide palms, the chipped polish, the long snaking lifeline. She studied her fingerprints, unique to her, made by someone. She waited.
74
Barnes
Natasha sat at her dining table looking out onto the garden, a huge glass of wine and today’s newspapers in front of her, a cigarette to her lips: it seemed that once she’d started smoking again after Siobhan’s death she’d been unable to stop, especially since the inquest. As she flicked through the pages, she decided that she really did have to divorce Alistair now, there was no alternative course of action after all this – the past few weeks had been intolerable, really they had. Her whole carefully constructed world had come tumbling down, her sham marriage revealed, the hardness in her heart right there for all to see, in three glorious double-page spreads of a gutter tabloid. All thei
r secrets had been paraded like trophies: the affairs, the feuds, the abandonment of their friend, the role of Stephen’s unsavoury half-brother, even something about Nigel’s death – how on earth had they dug that one up? The one thing that hadn’t leaked out, thank God, was that she and the others had changed their story – that they’d lied to the police at first, and only admitted later what they’d heard, what they’d said, when called back in for further questioning after Terry Kingston’s statement had directly contradicted theirs. Not that it had helped at the inquest, of course – it had still been clear they’d deserted their friend, they’d still come across as callous bitches (She can bloody drown for all I care), just not lying ones. Their lives would be forever blighted by it.
Natasha wondered for the millionth time what had actually happened that night, how Siobhan had really died. She supposed no-one would ever know for sure. They’d never charged Stephen’s brother with anything, and they hadn’t managed to turn up any other potential murderer – but neither had they ever been one hundred per cent certain what had caused the dent in her head. And of course no-one knew what Siobhan had been thinking at the time, and it was too late to ask her. Maybe she did it deliberately, Natasha thought, surely that was the best answer of all, if she’d had to end up dead, that she’d intended it. She’d seemed so miserable that night anyway – with her job, her boyfriend – and then she must have regretted some of the things she’d said, they’d been so horrendous; and besides she’d been completely paralytic, couldn’t possibly have been being rational. Yes, maybe that was it.
Natasha stood up. She was in her office attire: trademark suit, crisp blouse, high heels. Her dangly earrings looked incongruous, ridiculous, her pathetic attempt at cheering herself up, moving on, getting over Siobhan’s death – after all, she’d been fond of Siobhan once, wouldn’t wish what had happened to her on anyone. Natasha had been planning on going back into work this morning, but now it came to it she found she still couldn’t face it. No, she’d have to continue to lie low until all the stories had died down – but now Stephen had been suspended that didn’t seem very likely any time soon. His own newspaper’s coverage seemed to be even more vicious than the others’ – he could never go back there after what they’d written about him and his family, and she wondered briefly what would happen to him, not that she gave a shit of course, not after what he’d done.
