by Jane Holland
‘I’m not going to interfere,’ he says, but takes a few steps away from the car.
‘You were his friend,’ Ruby says accusingly. ‘You came with David once to visit his grandad. I was his live-in carer, you know. His grandad was a very sick man. He had dementia too, like Celeste here, but it was cancer that got him in the end.’ She gives a short laugh. ‘You don’t remember me from those days, do you?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Logan shakes his head, and takes another step forward. I try to warn him with my eyes to stay where he is, but he’s not looking at me anymore, only at Ruby. ‘I did go with David once to visit his grandad. But I don’t remember you, no.’
Her eyes spark at that, and her hands tighten on my mother’s shoulders, keeping her close. I’m suddenly afraid she will try throwing her over the guard rail; they’re so close to it, only a few feet away. But Ruby seems to want to talk first. ‘Did… Did David ever mention me?’ She pauses, looking at him almost eagerly. ‘Did he ever talk about me to you?’
Logan makes a helpless gesture. ‘Not that I recall. Should he have done?’
‘He saw me several times a week for nearly three years. Whenever he looked in on his grandad, in fact.’
‘Jack.’
‘That’s right.’ Ruby sucks in her breath. ‘I was always there for Jack. Nothing was too much. I wanted David to know that, to see how much I was doing for his grandad.’
‘I’m sure he appreciated it.’
‘Yes.’ Ruby nods slowly, staring at him. ‘He did. He might not have said so, but I knew. Just like I knew how much Kate was hurting him.’ Her eyelids flicker. ‘After Jack passed, I moved house to be nearer David. I didn’t like to bother him; he had his own life. But sometimes, when he went out for a coffee at the weekend, I’d sit opposite him in the café, and just smile. He’d smile back too, and I knew it was a comfort for him to see me.’ Her face hardens as the sound of police sirens fill the air, followed by the sound of rhythmic thumps as the cars begin to ascend the ramps at speed, heading for the roof. ‘Then he started bringing Kate into the café, and going shopping with her, and sometimes he’d take her back to his flat.’
‘You were spying on him,’ I say incredulously. ‘On us.’
‘I was keeping an eye on him. I promised Jack before he died. I said, “Don’t worry, love, I’ll keep an eye on your boy.” And he died peaceful, because of that.’ She looks at me with open hatred. ‘But David didn’t die peaceful, did he? You split up with him. You drove him to take his own life.’
‘I didn’t split up with him. I just said… let’s spend some time apart. Let’s take five. He’d been acting so strangely. Constantly not turning up for dates, or picking fights and accusing me of seeing other men. I loved David, he was… God, he was kind and beautiful. But he was broken too. And we both needed some space.’
‘What David needed was to be loved. To be held and comforted. Not pushed away like he meant nothing.’ Ruby’s eyes spit rage at me. ‘I would have loved him properly. I would have been there for him, whatever he did to me.’
‘David wasn’t himself,’ Logan says quickly, taking another step towards us. ‘It was nothing to do with Kate. He’d been depressed for a long time, even before he started seeing her. And he admitted to me himself that he was treating her badly.’
‘Liar,’ Ruby snarls, and turns, dragging my mother nearer the edge.
‘No,’ I scream, and rush forward.
‘Stay where you are, both of you. Unless you want her to die.’ Ruby pushes my mother half over the guard rail. She looks back at me, her face aglow with a kind of madness. ‘Come to the edge, Kate. And when you get here, climb up on the rail. If you do that, maybe I’ll let your mother go.’
With an eerie siren wail, the first police car rises over the peak of the top ramp, blue lights flashing on the night air, and accelerates towards Logan.
‘Do it now,’ Ruby shrieks, thrusting my mother further over. ‘Or else.’
‘Okay, okay, I’m doing it.’ I hurry to the edge, and peer over. The rail is narrow and the drop is staggeringly high. I feel sick and unsteady, but swing my leg up and try to hoist myself onto the rail. ‘Oh, Christ.’
‘Kate, don’t,’ Logan shouts, sounding anguished.
‘Shut up,’ I mutter.
If I had any choice in the matter, I absolutely would not be doing this, I think furiously. But it’s me or my mother. And I can’t let it be my mother. I couldn’t live with myself afterwards, any more than David could live with his depression a moment longer. Though why he chose to punish me by killing himself right in front of me, I will never know. Perhaps he too, like Ruby, thought I was a cold bitch who had driven him to suicide.
Somehow, I clamber onto the rail, and lie astride it, clinging on for dear life and too scared to open my eyes.
‘Now, let her go,’ I moan. ‘You’ve got what you want.’
‘Stand up. Jump.’
‘Let her go first.’
‘I want to see you jump. Then I’ll let her go.’
I can hear more police cars arriving, doors opening and slamming, voices on the air. Logan is explaining the situation, giving them names. I’m desperate for them not to interfere, listening to my mother whimpering with fear a few feet away as she dangles head-first over the street in a chill wind.
‘No, you’ll push her off once I’ve jumped.’
‘I promise I won’t.’
‘I don’t trust you,’ I shriek.
There’s a short silence. I can hear Ruby’s breath panting.
‘Fine,’ she says, and I hear my mother’s moan as she’s pulled back from the rail. ‘I’m sending her back to the car.’
I open my eyes, and crank my neck round, desperate to make sure my mother is safe. My side is pressed against the guard rail, so painful it’s like an ice pick slowly skewering my internal organs. I see my own blood on the concrete, and experience a nauseating wave of faintness, and then raise my eyes in time to catch the white ghost of my mother in her nightie, shuffling on bare feet towards the Fiat…
My view is suddenly blocked by Ruby’s grim figure.
‘Right, now jump,’ she says, and prods me with something sharp. The scissors, I realise.
‘Not yet. I need to see her safe first.’
‘She’s safe enough.’
‘Logan, help my mother. Come and get her.’ I hear running footsteps, and Ruby steps aside to show me Logan supporting my mother with a police officer on her other side, the two men carrying her away as quickly as possible, her bare feet lifted off the ground to protect them. ‘Thank God.’
The scissors are thrust into my leg, and I yelp.
‘Now stand up and jump,’ Ruby yells. ‘Like David did. Or I’ll push you over, do you hear me?’
Sod that, I think.
Grabbing the scissors as they’re shoved towards me again, I wrestle her for them one-handed, still balanced precariously on the narrow rail hundreds of feet above street level. She howls with fury, and would probably have pushed me off, but I quickly roll towards her and let myself fall the other way, onto the car park concrete.
The jolt is sheer agony, and I give a high-pitched yelp.
She follows me into a crouch, screaming with frustration, trying to heave my body up again, to get me back on the rail.
My hand jerks sideways, still clutching the scissors between us, and they spin away from us both. There’s blood in my eyes again.
Vaguely, I see her gaze follow the scissors.
Then she bends and hisses at me, ‘You know why David asked you to come here that day? Why he wanted you to see him jump?’ Her face leers into mine, inches away, her breath hot. ‘Because I told him you’d been cheating on him. I sent him anonymous notes, listing all the times you’d been unfaithful.’ Her face cracks at last into a kind of rictus, her mouth agape with pain, her eyes tortured. ‘I never meant for him to die,’ she sobs. ‘I wanted him to be free, so he’d see how perfect we were for each other. I would have been everything to him. David wa
s mine, not yours. He was always mine, mine, mine!’
The police are running towards us, shouting a warning to get down on the floor. As though I’m not already on it. One of them grabs her by the arm.
‘No,’ Ruby gasps, and tears herself away from him. With a mad lunge, she throws herself over the guard rail, and disappears, still screaming, ‘Mine!’
A sickening, familiar crunch follows.
I close my eyes.
EPILOGUE
The doorbell rings just as I’m sitting behind the desk in my father’s old study, finishing an outline for my proposed thriller. I’ve been working on it for several weeks now while researching the background, and I’m beginning to feel satisfied with the structure at last.
When I go out into the hall, Logan is already there. ‘I’ll get it,’ he insists.
‘You look very fetching in that pinny,’ I tell him.
He shoots me a mock-threatening look, and throws open the front door. ‘Mr Adeyemi,’ he says, and shakes the man’s hand in welcome. ‘Come in, Celeste is expecting you.’
Mr Adeyemi nods at me as he takes off his coat. ‘How are you, Miss Kinley? I’ve just finished that course of rehabilitation therapy for my back. I know you had some trouble. Are you feeling any better?’
The stab wound Ruby gave me caused some serious issues at first. I was in hospital for almost ten days after that night in the car park. But the infection that set in was eventually resolved with antibiotics, and the scar is healing nicely now.
‘Much better, thank you.’ I grin. ‘I just have to be careful with sudden movements for a while. Not to reopen the wound, you know?’
‘She has to lift her left leg when she sneezes,’ Logan murmurs. ‘It’s quite entertaining to watch.’
I return the mock-threatening look he gave me before.
Mr Adeyemi pauses before the new addition to the hall: a small, oak-framed portrait of David, with soft lighting above it to provide a focal point and a gold scroll beneath bearing his name and dates.
‘This is marvellous,’ he says, studying the painting in surprise. ‘But I don’t understand how it was possible.’
‘Logan had it cut out from the original canvas for me. It proved impossible to fix the damage Ruby did to the rest of us, but… David was still intact. So here he is, in pride of place. And with a beautiful new frame.’
‘It’s lovely indeed. A fitting tribute to his memory.’ He gives me and Logan a curious look, then smiles. ‘Well, where is the lady of the house? I have promised to come once a week to talk with her. Dr Forster apparently believes this will be helpful.’
‘I imagine Celeste will be pretty pleased too,’ Logan says. ‘She likes you.’ He pauses. ‘A lot.’
Mr Adeyemi allows himself a small smile. ‘And I like Celeste. A lot.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ I show the solicitor through to the living room. ‘I’ll let you two talk for a while. Then I’ll bring some tea through in about half an hour. How’s that?’
‘Perfect.’
‘Mr Adeyemi is here,’ I announce breezily, and Mum, who has been playing with her tangled knitting on the sofa, looks up in delight.
‘Abayomi!’ she exclaims, astonishing me by actually remembering the man’s first name. She pats the sofa cushions next to her, her smile a blessing. For a while after Ruby’s death, I thought she would never smile again. But as the weeks have passed, she’s gradually come out of her shell and is almost her old self again. ‘Come and sit with me. I’m knitting, do you see?’
‘Hello, Celeste,’ he says deeply. ‘You are looking well.’
I smile and leave the two of them together.
Logan has removed his pinny but is still in the hall, admiring David’s portrait. ‘Your brother had such a gift,’ he says. ‘What a waste for him to die so young.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘For both of them to die so young.’
I curl my arm into his. ‘Finished baking your cake?’
‘Finished writing that synopsis?’
‘More or less.’
‘The cake’s in the oven. Don’t let me forget to take it out. Then I’ll have to get back to work.’ Logan has been offered a position at a rival firm; it’s only part-time for now, but he hopes to make it full-time eventually. He shoots me a look. ‘So you know whodunnit now?’
‘I’m alternating between two theories,’ I admit, cuddling into him with a wonderful sense of happiness. I’m much happier staying home with Mum as her carer while writing thrillers to keep my brain active, and the book deal I’ve just been offered should help keep us going for a while. Having Logan come back to live with us felt like the end of a terrible nightmare, with a glorious new dawn ahead. So we both have a few money worries; so what? We’ll work it out together. ‘But I should know by the end of the book.’
Logan shakes his head in smiling disapproval. ‘I applaud you for deciding to give up editing and take up novel-writing instead. But surely you learnt as an editor that an author needs to plan her books thoroughly before writing them?’
‘But that would spoil the surprise,’ I say innocently, and laugh at his expression.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This one is for my regular readers and supporters, who are such an inspiring and loyal group of people. You are the ones who keep my fingers on the keyboard and who never fail to remind me that there are readers waiting – often impatiently! – for each new book. That’s so important for a writer, especially during dark days when the going gets tough, and it’s easy to forget what’s at stake each time you sit down to a manuscript in progress. So, thank you for reading and rating my novels, for being there for me on social media, and for keeping me in touch with the important stuff.
Inge Street, for instance, and Pierre L’Allier. You are the readers I’m thinking about as I write this. Thank you, Inge. Thank you, Pierre. This one’s for you.
My grateful thanks also to my marvellous agent, Alison Bonomi from LBA, who has been there for me through difficult times too, my number one supporter and friend. Thank you, Alison, and thank you also to the whole wonderful team at LBA!
Thank you also to my editor for this book, Alice Rees. Your enthusiasm got this idea off the ground in the beginning, and your editorial suggestions made this book tighter and better, so thank you. And thank you also to the hard-working and inspirational publishing team at Lume Books: James, Rebecca, Rufus, Imogen. You are all brilliant!
Finally, a huge thank you to Steve for being such a considerate husband, and to my kids Kate, Becki, Dylan, Morris and Indigo, for putting up with an absent-minded writer for a mum, and for making me endless cups of tea!
