The sleek, modern mansion was, of course, encased in a grand brick wall that ran around the entire property, large wrought-iron gates guarded by a small black box that decided who would be admitted entry. Evie had no key fob, so her only choice was to press the silver buzzer and wait.
After a few minutes there was no answer, so she pressed her finger against the button harder now, keeping it there, the angry buzzing somewhat satisfying. It sounded like she felt: determined and pissed off.
‘Who is it?’ a female voice sounded tired and apprehensive. Evie pulled out her phone and checked the time. Christ, it was after eleven. Where had those hours gone? She remembered digging out one of her mother’s secret bottles – she wouldn’t miss it and even if she did remember where she’d stashed it she’d assume she’d drunk it herself – but that was around eight thirty. Had it really been nearly three hours ago? It wasn’t until she had been nearing the end of the bottle that she’d decided to call a taxi to the Addlington residence, so yes, it probably was quite late. Fuck it, she hadn’t slept properly for weeks – let this woman lose a few minutes’ rest.
‘I’m here to speak to James,’ Evie spoke into the box. ‘My name is Evie, he’ll know why I’m here.’
‘James isn’t here. Do you realise what time it is?’ The voice wasn’t dissimilar to her mother’s, a cut-glass accent tinged with annoyance. Well screw her, Evie had more reason to be annoyed, didn’t she?
‘I’ll wait here then,’ she said, injecting as much defiance as possible. ‘Unless you want to let me in?’
There was a pause. ‘Evie who?’
‘Evie Rousseau.’
She waited for the response, knowing the information wouldn’t go down well. This woman didn’t sound like a housekeeper – was she James’ mother? Did she know about Evie? About the grandchild she had lost?
‘Rousseau? What do you want? Did Dominic send you? What does he want?’
Obviously not. If she’d known then she would have been aware that her father would never have sent her here, would never have allowed her to come had he been at home when the taxi had arrived to collect her.
‘I told you, I’m here to see James,’ Evie’s voice was thick from the drink and she was cold and impatient. ‘It’s nothing to do with my father. James and I,’ she felt stupid all of a sudden – she had barely said this out loud to anyone, now she was declaring it to a box – ‘James and I were together. And now we’re not. And I want to hear him say he didn’t want me.’ She hesitated, unsure whether to add the words, but the alcohol lowered her inhibitions and loosened her tongue. ‘Or his baby.’
She didn’t hear the woman gasp – she’d obviously taken her finger off the intercom as the air was dead and silent. Without another word from the box, the gate buzzed and Evie pushed open the pedestrian entrance.
The front door of the Addlington residence was open when she reached it, and a silhouette of a woman was blocking the light from the hallway. James’ mother stood in the doorway wearing a housecoat, her blonde hair piled in a messy bun on top of her head and her face devoid of make-up, but still Evie could see how beautiful she was, the same fresh-faced beauty of her only son.
That beautiful face creased into a frown as she watched Evie stumble up the pathway.
‘You’re drunk,’ she stated, her frown changing to disgust mingled with confusion. ‘I thought you said you were pregnant? Was that a lie?’
‘I was,’ Evie scowled. ‘But your wonderful son refused to admit the baby was his. Told me I was easy and stupid. I . . .’ Evie choked back a sob. ‘I’m not pregnant now.’
Understanding dawned on Daphne Preston-Addlington’s face. Yes – now she knew what her son had done, and what Evie had been forced to do to her grandchild. Evie hoped it hurt.
‘I told you, James isn’t here,’ Daphne said, her chin jutting out in defiance. There wasn’t a flicker of compassion in her face, no sympathy or apology. She cared as little about Evie and her baby as her son had. ‘And he won’t be back tonight. You should go home.’
‘And I told you, I’ll wait. Even if I have to wait all night.’
Even as she said the words Evie debated the intelligence of the idea, but she’d said it now, spurred on by anger and alcohol. There was no way she could leave with her tail between her legs now. This was her only chance to speak to James and if she had to she would wait all night.
‘Fine, have it your way.’ Evie’s mouth dropped open in shock as the woman swung the door shut in her face, leaving her standing on the doorstep in the freezing night.
She stood there for about twenty minutes, stepping from one foot to the other to keep warm, throwing the occasional look up to the only lit window in the house – presumably James Sr and Daphne’s bedroom. No one looked out, the house stayed stubbornly silent and closed.
Finally, the crunch of tyres on gravel made her head whip around to the driveway where the gates were opening automatically. Evie couldn’t make out the car, just the headlights moving towards her, but she knew it must be James. His mother must have called him and he’d come back from wherever he was to see her.
Evie’s heart leapt. This was it, she was about to see that face again. Maybe he would take her in his arms and kiss her, tell her how sorry he was. How would she feel when that happened? It was too late for their baby – could she ever forgive him for that? But she knew she could; she was there, after all.
She smoothed down the front of her jacket, hoping her breath didn’t smell too much of the whisky she had downed earlier and her make-up wasn’t spread across her face. As the car pulled to a stop and the driver door opened she thought she might stop breathing. Then, as her father’s profile came into view, she wished she had.
40
Richard
Richard tore through the upstairs of the house he’d once shared with the love of his life, pulling underwear from drawers, overturning mattresses. He had started in the bathroom, despite how unlikely Evie’s passport was to be in there, the little bottles of lotions and potions like tiny knives to the heart. Finding nothing unusual he braced himself to move on to their bedroom – the room he’d barely been in since coming back to the house. He’d been sleeping in the spare room, his bed too much to bear alone.
If Evie’s passport was still in the house – and it had no reason not to be – then it was either going to be in here somewhere or the study, another place so filled with her that it seemed impossible to approach. He couldn’t believe he was even having to do this – until six weeks ago they had been a normal couple, engaged to be married, as in love as any two people he knew. Since that night he had been in freefall, being knocked from side to side by one detail or another, all mounting up to the conclusion that he’d had no idea what was going on in Evie’s life. But he intended to find out.
Rebecca was downstairs again – she barely left him alone for five minutes these days. He knew she was only looking out for him but her presence could feel so oppressive, and so . . . unfair. Why Evie? Why not her shadow?
He was being unfair and he hated himself for it. If there was anything to be said about Rebecca it was how much she loved Evie. Her devotion to her best friend couldn’t be questioned, even if it had seemed a little weird to him at times. And the way she had looked after him these last few weeks – he didn’t know what he’d do if she gave up on him now.
Pushing open his bedroom door felt like an immense task every time he did it. Walking in felt like bumping into an ex-girlfriend on the street and feeling as though they belonged to another lifetime, another world you no longer lived in. He tried not to look at any of her clothes or jewellery but it was impossible. She was everywhere. The first time he’d been in here he’d broken down at the sight of a T-shirt discarded carelessly on the chair. He remembered telling her not to leave it there, she’d only have to come back to a messy room and tidy it anyway. The realisation she was never coming back to put the T-shirt away had been unbearable.
He pulled things from the top of t
he wardrobe: their electrical box full of wires and chargers to items they probably threw away a long time ago; some photography magazines; Evie’s camera box. As he pushed it to one side he realised it was lighter than it should have been if Evie’s camera was still in there. Not her professional top-of-the-range model that he’d bought her as a Christmas present; that still sat in its box, patiently waiting for her to come back and pick it up, put it to her eye and begin to click. She would smile to herself, as though with a camera in between her and the world everything took on a magical quality that she could only see through the viewfinder.
No, this empty box used to contain her first ever camera, an ancient model given to her when she was seventeen, although he doesn’t recall if she ever said who by. And now it’s missing, the box instead filled with small beige envelopes.
41
Evie
‘What are you doing here?’ Evie demanded as her father marched towards her in the darkness.
‘I could ask you the same,’ Dominic Rousseau replied. ‘But looking at how you can barely stand up straight I’d say the answer lies at the bottom of a bottle.’
‘I have every right to come here,’ said Evie obstinately. ‘I’m seventeen. It’s ridiculous to just ban me from seeing someone, like it’s 1952! I’m allowed friends, you can’t just lock me in the house!’
Dominic raised an eyebrow. ‘And do you really want your friend to see you in this state? Do you even realise how drunk you are, Evelyn? You should think yourself lucky James wasn’t in and—’
‘How do you know he isn’t in? And how did you know where I was anyway?’
‘Daphne called me, in the middle of a conference call to Japan, I might add. She was concerned about you.’
‘Not concerned enough to let me in the house,’ Evie retorted.
‘Well, let’s just say things between our families are . . . tenuous. I gather you told her about the . . .’
‘The baby?’ Evie saw her father flinch. ’Yes, as no one else had bothered. Don’t worry, she didn’t exactly look heartbroken when I told her it was dead.’
‘That would require having a heart to break,’ Dominic muttered. ‘Come on, Evelyn, I know you’re upset—’
‘You know nothing!’ Evie screamed. ‘You know nothing about how I feel! I killed my baby – our baby – do you understand that? A living thing inside me that relied on me to keep it safe and bring it into the world and I killed it as easily as stepping on an ant. How do you think that makes me feel? I’ll tell you – like a murderer. Well if I’m guilty of murder then he’s,’ she jabbed a finger towards the house, ‘guilty of manslaughter. And so are you, and Monique, and James bloody Addlington Senior. All of us, we all are!’
Dominic moved towards Evie, his arms outstretched. ‘Sweetheart, you had a difficult choice to make but you made the right decision. In time you will see that.’
‘Get away from me!’ Evie screamed, stumbling backwards. ‘I want to see James!’
‘If you stay here causing a scene Daphne will call the police,’ Dominic said, his voice hardening. ‘Now get in the car, or I will drive away and let her have you arrested.’
Evie looked up at the huge house. All of the lights were out now, as though the house and its occupants had turned their backs on her, trying to pretend she wasn’t there. Was it true, was James out living his life, having fun while her heart lay broken on his front doorstep?
Her head hung in shame and misery, Evie got in her father’s car and sobbed the entire way home.
When she woke the next morning she was grateful to find that her father had already left for work. She could barely remember getting out of the car and into bed, yet that’s where she awoke, so someone must have put her there. Her head throbbed with pain and shame. Thank God James hadn’t been home. Would his mother tell him she had been there? She hoped not.
Sneaking out of her bedroom and into the kitchen to search out painkillers and a bottle of water, Evie noticed a brochure lying on the kitchen table. Turning it over, hoping it was for some exotic holiday at long last, she saw it was a prospectus for a photography course at the University of London, complete with welcome pack bearing her name. So her father had decided what to do with her. He was sending her to London.
42
Rebecca
I hope you didn’t think you’d got away with it.
‘What is it?’ My eyes go from his pale face to the paper in his hand. ‘Richard?’
When I emerge from the downstairs toilet – yes, I rent a flat whose rooms I can count on one hand, yet Evie and Richard have a downstairs toilet – Richard is staring at a small bundle of envelopes on the kitchen worktop, an elastic band sitting discarded nearby. I recognise them instantly but try not to look too shocked until I see what they are, try to forget that I’ve seen the letters before in a different pair of shaking hands.
‘These,’ he jiggles it slightly, ‘were in the box where Evie kept her first camera.’
‘Well what are they?’ I snap a little impatiently. When he doesn’t answer I just take one from the counter and scan it, just like the first time, when Evie showed them to me. It’s a printed sheet of A4 with just one line:
I hope you didn’t think you’d got away with it.
‘Is this Evie’s?’
Richard frowns. ‘Whose else could they be? It’s not mine so unless the cat put them there I’d say they were hers.’
‘What do the rest say?’ I’m careful not to let my emotions show on my face, Richard is on a knife edge and one wrong word at the moment feels like it could tip him over. Don’t make a big deal of this. Be cool.
‘More of the same,’ he says, opening the others in turn. ‘Cryptic “I know what you did last summer” style things. And none of them actually mention what they know about.’
‘Then it’s probably nothing,’ I assure him, wishing I had just told him weeks ago, so I didn’t have to lie to him now. ‘You hear about these things all the time, people sending these vague kind of things in the hopes that the person has done something wrong.’
‘Do you?’ He’s going through the notes again, spreading them out on the worktop, five in total. Actually I’ve never heard of that happening but I’ll say anything at this moment to put his mind at rest. ‘I’ve never heard of that. And why would she keep them?’
‘Maybe she was going to show them to you and forgot?’ It sounds weak even to me. If Evie wanted to show Richard the notes she would have done so when she got them – blackmail isn’t the type of thing you forget about. And she’d shown someone, of course, just not her husband. ‘None of them are dated – they could be years old.’
‘Then why keep them?’ he asks. ‘If she knew what she was going to do . . .’ his words tail off. ‘She must have known I would find them at some point, mustn’t she? Do you think I should tell the police?’
I’m pretty sure Evie wouldn’t want the police finding those letters. I’m not even sure myself why she kept them – did she not think about the fact that Richard would have to go through her things at some point? Or maybe she thought life here would just carry on exactly the same, her house, her bedroom, only an Evie-shaped hole torn out of the picture.
‘No,’ I say. ‘The police think she killed herself. These letters don’t really contradict that, do they? Either they’re nothing, in which case you’re wasting their time, or Evie was being blackmailed, in which case perhaps she did what she did because of whatever these letters are referring to.’
Maybe it’s a good thing he’s found these. Perhaps now he’ll stop going on about murd—
‘Or maybe she was killed because of it.’
43
Evie
There was one thing that made her exile from Wareham bearable, or rather, one person. Evie had thrown herself into university life, accruing one casual acquaintance after the other, avoiding any kind of meaningful relationship – and who could blame her after the humiliation she’d suffered from the last time she let herself fall in lo
ve? Finally she could see what her mother had been running from all of these years – the unbearable pain of loving a man who didn’t love you in the same way. It could either make you guarded with your heart or reckless, desperate for someone to take it in exchange for their own. Evie had swapped hers with Rebecca.
She and Rebecca had been fused at the hip ever since the morning she had followed her into the greasy spoon and Evie had shown her the photographs she had taken. Evie had been desperate to see the girl again, intrigued by someone who had acted with such indifference when the boy she was seeing had betrayed her so easily. Evie hadn’t known when she met the guitarist that he had a girlfriend, although she’d hardly been surprised when Rebecca had shown up clutching her bacon sandwiches. Her experiences of the unfair sex had hardened her to betrayal, and here was a girl who was either used to being treated so callously or had at least been expecting it. A girl who would understand, as Evie did, that a soulmate didn’t have to have a penis. And Rebecca had felt the connection too. There had been that one awkward moment when Evie’s father had made a surprise appearance and Becky had felt as though she had been used as a distraction; which Evie supposed was only fair and partly true after all. It was entirely possible that her father may have mentioned that he would be coming to see her – it was even possible she had dropped some hints that she had wanted him to come. And when he had announced that his week-long visit had to be cut short to only one night she’d been bloody furious. She wasn’t her mother – to be picked up for photo opportunities and discarded – and she intended to prove that to him, although she’d never intended to hurt Becky’s feelings in the process. She had apologised profusely to Rebecca for the scene that had ensued and her new best friend hadn’t been able to stay mad at her for long.
Since then they had spent nearly every day in each other’s company, meeting after lessons, staying at each other’s houses. For Evie, Rebecca was like the sister she had always wanted. She was funny and interesting, and the best part was she didn’t even know it. It was nothing like being with Harriet and Jessica who only listened to you because they were waiting for their turn to speak. Her old friends seemed more like accessories now, something that looked good on your arm but had no more value to your life than a handbag or a bracelet. And she had been the same to them. She had meant nothing to these girls, nothing more than a sounding board for their boasting and benchmark for their common competitions – what she had with Rebecca was the closest she had experienced to a real friendship in her entire life. In fact, it felt exactly the same as what she had had with James.
The Night She Died Page 13
