by T. M. Logan
71
No one could speak.
We sat in horrified, shell-shocked silence in the lounge, all of us gathered in one place, trying to absorb the horrifying news we had carried up from the gorge. Some crying, arms around shoulders, others staring at the carpet. Lucy and Daniel sat close together by my side, both in tears, holding hands. They hadn’t done that for years.
A pair of officers from the Gendarmerie office in Béziers had been notified and would be here within the hour, Lepine had told us. Despite his promise that one of the firemen would stay in the gorge until then, he had pulled his young crewman out at the last minute, insisting he needed his whole team to attend a road accident on the nearby D909. Izzy’s body was covered and marked off with red-and-white tape, and Alistair had volunteered to go down and wait, to ensure nothing was disturbed before an officer could get here. We were told – strictly and without exception – that no one was to touch or move the body.
Finally, Russ spoke up.
‘A crime scene? Really?’
‘Potential crime scene,’ I said.
‘I suppose I assumed that it was an accident.’
Sean nodded grimly, tears on his face. He looked wretched. Broken. ‘Me too,’ he said.
I wiped my eyes with a tissue that was already sodden.
‘Yes, but the police will have to start from an assumption that all possibilities are open, then work their way back from that. They have to rule out all other options before they declare it an accident. That’s what UK police would do.’
Jennifer sat with her boys, each hand tightly clutching one of theirs, staring ahead, unseeing. She looked shattered, defeated, devastated. I suppose we all did.
‘I can’t believe she’s gone,’ she said, almost to herself.
‘But what if it wasn’t an accident? What if it was something else?’ Russ asked.
‘Like what?’ Sean said.
There was more silence, for a long moment. No one wanted to say it. Eventually, I spoke up.
‘Foul play,’ I said quietly.
‘But that’s crazy,’ Rowan said, looking around the room. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Sean said abruptly.
‘Of course,’ Russ said.
‘Crazy,’ Jennifer agreed.
I studied the faces arranged around the lounge, ten of us where just an hour ago there had been twelve. Friends and families. Rowan and Russ, Jennifer, Jake and Ethan, Lucy, Daniel, little Odette.
And Sean, sitting next to me with his strong arm around my shoulders.
Even though I knew what it meant, it wasn’t until that moment that the enormity of it hit me. It felt as if all eyes in the room were on me.
Izzy had been involved with my husband. She had been about to confess to their affair, about to detonate a bomb under his marriage. About to expose his adultery and lies.
And now she was dead.
I couldn’t stop glancing at the scratches high on my husband’s right cheek, three small vertical lines of angry red, close together, from his temple to his ear. He’d said he’d fallen, been scratched by a thorn bush amidst the smoke and chaos while searching for our children. But they didn’t look consistent with that kind of injury to me – they were too regular, too uniform. Too straight.
They looked like fingernail marks.
An ugly, twisted thought came crawling right after it: Izzy was left-handed. A left-handed person would lash out on the right side of an attacker’s face . . .
After the fire started, Sean was in the woods the longest. On his own. He went back in on his own. He came out on his own. I didn’t see what he was doing. No one did. So no one saw how he got those injuries.
Perhaps he hadn’t been on his own the whole time.
The logical part of my brain laid out a horribly plausible scenario, displaying it like a reel of found footage. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get rid of it. Couldn’t turn the projector off. Every time I tried, it just came back louder and brighter and more convincing than before: Jake and Ethan, angry that they had to fly home early, messing around with matches in the woods, accidentally starting fires not in one place but in two. That was why my first view of the fire had struck me – because it was not just in one spot. Two separate fires, thirty feet apart. Perhaps a competition between teenage brothers, to see who could get flames going the quickest? And then panicking when it spread, running away and leaving it to burn. In among the smoke and chaos, Sean finds Izzy out by the bluff. Or she finds him. A chance meeting, and their lovers’ argument is reignited – she wants to get their affair out in the open; he is desperate to keep it a secret. Passions are high and tempers flare, things get out of hand. She had always been feisty but he is almost a foot taller than her and so much stronger. She makes an ultimatum: perhaps she lashes out and he is just defending himself, perhaps he doesn’t realise they’re dangerously close to the edge of the cliff and then—
All of a sudden I can’t stand him touching me.
The scenario plays on a loop in my head, a grimly credible montage of images that becomes more and more real, the longer I think about it. The hairs on the backs of my arms rise.
What have you done, Sean?
My God, what have you done?
72
The heat of Sean’s arm over my shoulders was suddenly unbearable. He had always radiated heat, always warmed our bed on cold nights, and I had long joked that he was the hot-blooded Irishman who had melted my cool English heart.
Hot-blooded like a killer?
I shifted slightly away from him on the sofa.
‘Crazy or not,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level, ‘if the police end up going down that road, they’ll have an immediate shortlist of suspects.’
‘Who?’ Rowan said.
‘Well, the people in this room.’
She was shaking her head. ‘One of us?’
‘Yes.’
There was another uncomfortable silence while that sank in.
‘In that case,’ Rowan said finally, ‘we should probably get our story straight.’
‘Our story?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just – you know. What happened.’
I wanted to hear Sean’s story more than anything. I was tired of suspicion, of guesswork, of only knowing half the facts and trying to work out the other half for myself. It had been five days since discovering the messages on his phone, five days of anguish and lies and heartbreak that had ended in tragedy. So I wanted to hear Sean’s truth. I owed it to my friend. But at the same time, I was terrified of what he might say.
‘How about the truth?’ I said.
‘That’s what I mean,’ Rowan said.
‘OK. The truth.’ I turned to look at my husband, my eyes drawn again to the three vertical scratches on the side of his face. ‘How about we start with you, Sean?’
‘Me?’
‘Did you see Izzy in the woods?’
He shrugged, shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. I found Lucy well off the path, then, when I went back in, Russ was already on his way back with Odette.’
Liar.
But Rowan was nodding. ‘I saw you heading back down to the clearing as we were coming out.’
‘Then what?’ I said.
‘Then I looked around a bit more for anyone else, but the smoke was really thick by that point and I could hardly see anything. I blundered into that thorn bush like a proper eejit and thought it was time to get the hell out of there.’
‘You didn’t see Izzy?’ I asked again.
‘Nope.’ His voice cracked. ‘I wish I had.’
‘Did anyone else see her?’
Everyone shook their heads.
‘No one saw her fall?’
Silence.
By virtue of my job, I knew something that no one else in this room did. Pushing someone from a significant height – a tower block window or a rooftop or a cliff edge – was tough for investigators because there were virtually no forensic traces unless t
here was a struggle beforehand. No murder weapon – just gravity; no blood spatter on the offender’s clothing. No defensive wounds. No forensics to link victim and perpetrator. Without a witness, CCTV, or a confession, it was incredibly difficult to prove the victim didn’t just fall.
From a forensics point of view, it was pretty much the perfect murder method.
Had I ever told my friends that? During a tipsy conversation over a bottle of wine? When I’d first started training with the Met as a crime scene investigator, they’d been very curious about procedure, about which TV police shows were the most realistic on the forensic side, and which the least. They thought I had the most interesting job.
But had I told them this particular fact? Maybe, maybe not. I couldn’t remember. I was more likely to have told Sean, I realised.
‘OK,’ I continued, shaking the thought off. ‘What about the fire?’ I turned to Jake and Ethan. ‘How about you two? Do you know how it started?’
Jennifer jumped straight in before they could respond, an indignant edge to her voice.
‘Hold up just a minute! Why should my boys know anything about it?’
‘They were there.’
‘All the kids were playing down there.’
‘Did you boys see anything?’
Both teenagers shook their heads, but neither of them would meet my eye.
‘Did anyone see how the fires started?’
More shaking of heads.
Jennifer said, ‘It could have been kids from the village, coming up through the gorge.’
‘All right, did anyone see any local kids down there this afternoon?’
She shrugged. ‘Can’t say I did, no.’
‘Has anyone seen any local kids down there on any day this week?’
There was a muttering of negatives from around the room.
‘Maybe we should wait for the police before we start getting into this?’ Russ said.
I turned on him, my frustration boiling over.
‘We have to pool what we know, work out how it might have happened.’
Sean took his arm off my shoulders.
‘One of the firemen found Izzy’s glasses in the clearing,’ he said. ‘Near the edge of the gorge. He had them in one of those plastic evidence bags.’
Rowan nodded. ‘I saw that too. One of the lenses was shattered.’
‘She must have lost her glasses in the confusion down there,’ Sean added, ‘and been disorientated by the smoke. She might have been running?’
There was a brittle, mechanical edge to his voice that I didn’t recognise.
Liar, I thought.
But once again, Rowan was nodding. ‘There was a lot of smoke blowing around,’ she said. ‘Maybe she just didn’t see the edge.’
It was the third time in as many minutes that Rowan had done it. Every time Sean says something, she backs him up. Why? What does that mean?
But even as I asked myself the question, an answer arrived. An answer that was supremely cynical and cruel and unfair in the circumstances, but wasn’t that what my life had turned into? This was how my mind worked now.
You don’t want a scandal, do you, Rowan? No sordid affairs, no foul play, no criminal investigation. Just a tragic accident. Nothing that might derail your precious business deal – and your multi-million-pound payout.
73
Jennifer seemed to come to her senses, sitting up straighter in her seat.
‘OK.’ She looked pointedly at me. ‘What else will the detectives want to know?’
‘I don’t know too much about French police procedure,’ I said, ‘but I’d assume they’ll want to take statements from all of us, establish some facts, look at the scene and make a decision from there.’
‘And what else, Kate?’
‘What do you mean?’
Jennifer looked at her sons, slumped on the sofa. ‘Hey, why don’t all the young folks go downstairs to the games room while the grown-ups talk about this? What do you think, guys, get some drinks and put a DVD on or something? Would you do that for me, Jakey?’
Jake shrugged and stood up, followed by his brother. Then Lucy and Daniel were on their feet, Lucy taking her brother by the hand and leading him out to the staircase. Of the five children, only Odette remained, thumb in her mouth and anchored to her mother’s lap, head against her chest. Normally a babbling spring of chatter, I had not heard her utter a single word since returning to the villa after the fire, and she didn’t speak now – but neither did she move. Rowan stroked her daughter’s long red hair, a gesture that said to everyone: my baby stays with me.
Jennifer gave Rowan a sympathetic smile and turned back to me.
‘Listen, Kate, I know it was an accident, we all know it was an accident; I just think there are certain things we don’t need to tell the police.’
‘Such as?’
‘Do you really want me to say it?’
With most of the children gone, that left an even half-dozen of us: me, Jennifer, Rowan, Odette, Russ and Sean. And now all eyes were on me, on the blush rising up in my cheeks. But why not? Why not just put it all out there? It didn’t matter any more, none of it mattered, not really. The events of the past week were distant and trivial compared to the tragedy of today.
‘If you have to.’
‘Well, like what we discussed at the café yesterday.’ She hesitated, then ploughed on. ‘That you thought Izzy was having an affair with Sean.’
Russ looked up sharply.
‘What?’
Beside me, Sean put his head in his hands. ‘Jesus H Christ,’ he said. ‘No, no, no.’
Russ said, ‘An affair? What the hell?’
I turned to my husband.
‘I found the messages on your phone, Sean. From CoralGirl. The day we got here. Messages saying you couldn’t stop thinking about her and you couldn’t go on like this and did Kate suspect anything?’
The silence in the room was absolute.
He shook his head, but said nothing.
‘I wish I’d asked you there and then, but I lost my nerve.’ Fresh tears came, spilling down my cheeks. ‘I wish I’d just come right out with it and confronted you. Oh God, maybe if I had done that then Izzy would still be alive.’
Rowan came and sat down next to me. ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Kate.’
‘All I knew was that it was one of you three. Actually, at first I thought it was you, Rowan.’
‘I know. But you were wrong.’ She threw a sharp look at her own husband. ‘And so were you, Russ.’
‘I know that now,’ I said. ‘Then it seemed like maybe it was Jen because there was a video that Daniel shot which caught them together, going for long walks into the village, that kind of thing. But I wanted solid proof, so I got into Sean’s phone when he was sleeping, pretended to be him and asked this CoralGirl to meet down in the woods. But it wasn’t Jen that turned up. It was Izzy.’
‘Jesus,’ Russ said under his breath. ‘When was this?’
‘Two days ago. Tuesday. When Izzy turned up in the woods I didn’t know what to do because it looked like I was wrong again. It totally threw me off. Then I got back to the villa and Sean had wrecked his phone deliberately by jumping into the pool with it in his pocket, so I wouldn’t be able to confront him.’
Rowan said, ‘Is this true, Sean?’
He simply shook his head, eyes fixed on the floor.
Please just tell me. No more deception. No more lies.
‘Tell me, Sean,’ I said, pleading with him. ‘I have to know the truth.’
‘No.’ His voice was barely above a whisper.
‘I don’t believe you. Why can’t you even look at me?’
He lifted his head to face me, his eyes bloodshot and brimming with fresh tears. ‘I said no. It’s not true.’
I shook my head. Even now he couldn’t come clean. I wondered what had happened to the man I married, how long ago it had gone wrong between us.
And look at us now: wronged wife and desperate lover. D
e facto suspects in the death of our dear friend.
‘It doesn’t matter if you deny it,’ I said. ‘Izzy was about to tell me herself, she asked me for a private talk after dinner tonight. Something personal. She actually started telling me, and then everything went a bit crazy with the fire and—’
‘And now here we are,’ Rowan said quietly.
‘I didn’t do anything to Izzy,’ Sean blurted suddenly. ‘I swear. I would never have hurt her.’
Jennifer gave him a sympathetic smile. ‘I know that, Sean, we all know that.’
Do we?
‘I’m so sorry for bringing it up, Kate,’ she continued. ‘I just think it’s better if we don’t mention any of this to the police. It gives you . . . motive, I guess?’
‘I never hurt her!’
‘I know, but that’s exactly what I mean. If we tell the police about all of this, it will send them on some kind of wild-goose chase that none of us wants. We’d all hate for Izzy’s family to have her name dragged into that kind of tabloid nonsense.’
‘Agreed,’ Rowan said.
I swiped at my tears with the heel of my palm. ‘I never even saw her down there in the woods when it was all happening.’
Jennifer patted my knee. ‘No one did, Kate. It’s not your fault.’
Odette, still sitting on Rowan’s lap, whispered something to her mother. Rowan frowned.
‘Say that again, darling.’
Odette shook her head vigorously.
‘Come on, darling. It’s OK, I promise.’
Odette put her mouth close to her mother’s ear and whispered again, louder this time, but not loud enough for the rest of us to hear.
‘Are you sure, darling?’ Rowan said softly. ‘Super super sure?’
Odette nodded. Just a tiny movement, almost invisible, a dip of her little chin without breaking eye contact with her mother.
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Does she want to go down to the games room with the other children?’
‘No,’ Rowan said, her face darkening. ‘She said she – she saw something. When she was hiding in the tree trunk she saw Izzy at the edge of the bluff. With someone.’
I flinched as a distant rumble of thunder rolled across the sky.
