He laughed.
‘Not a smart move, Jenna. Threatening behaviour with an offensive weapon on top of your existing charges? My, my, they’re going to throw the book at you, aren’t they?’
‘I’ll throw this at you if you don’t just fuck off,’ she said with desperate clarity.
Lawrence lunged and she was about to jab the blade at his face when they were distracted by an almighty noise and rushing wind through the window.
‘God, a helicopter,’ she breathed.
‘Some press outfit or other,’ said Lawrence. ‘I bet you’re on News 24. Aerial shots of this place all over Sky. You should turn it on and see.’
‘I don’t have a TV.’
‘On your phone then?’
‘You just want to be a star, don’t you, Lawrence,’ she said with pitying sarcasm. ‘Is that what this is all about? You don’t have any talents of your own so you’ve decided you’ll get a bit of fame by association with me?’
He was at the window now, looking out at the hovering copter. He seemed to have forgotten that Jenna had a knife, but he soon remembered when she came up behind him and put its tip to the side of his neck.
‘Get. Out,’ she said softly. ‘Just turn around and walk out of that door, to the front door, then out of the front gate. You’ll get your picture taken, and you’ll like that, won’t you? Your fatuous, grinning mug all over the front pages tomorrow. Except it won’t be – it’ll by my face, and Jason’s, because you are completely irrelevant.’
‘Put down the knife,’ he said, his voice wobbly with fear.
‘I could up the ante,’ she said, pushing it that tiny bit further, just enough pressure to make him think his skin would puncture at any minute. ‘I could say I won’t put it down until you call the police and make a confession.’
‘I have nothing to confess,’ he said levelly. ‘Whatever you’ve come up with about me is false. You’ve jumped to conclusions, because you don’t like me, and Watson hates me.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Just put down the knife and I’ll go. I promise. Please?’
‘OK.’
She moved it an inch from his neck.
He hurried out of the room and she followed him to the front door.
He turned back before leaving.
‘You will sell this place to me,’ he said. ‘And if you don’t, I’ll buy it at auction after the repossession. Because you’re finished, Jenna. So sleep on it. I’ll still be around in the morning.’
It was a relief to see him go, but his words haunted her as she went to the kitchen to pour herself a stiff drink.
She was finished.
Coming back from a scandal like this would be incredibly difficult, both personally and professionally, but perhaps not impossible. Her mind ran over the situations of various celebrities who had ended up in hot water – you still didn’t see them panhandling on street corners. Well, not many of them. Oh, God.
She drained the tot of brandy and went to lie on her bed, the trials of the day taking their toll, at last, on her reserves of energy. She felt sapped and wrecked, a shell of herself. But at least she lay on her own bed in her own house, whereas Jason …
The thought of him, standing on that parapet, terrified and desperate, brought tears to her eyes and she wept until she was spent, then went to the kitchen for more brandy.
There was no evidence against Lawrence, nothing she could do about anything. It was hopeless, and all was lost. She made sure her phone was switched off and drank brandy until she passed out.
Chapter Nine
She woke up with a fearful headache and Bowyer curled up on her chest. The weight of him had led to nightmares in which she was being pressed to death as torture to try and extract information about Jason’s crimes. Waking up was both a relief and a torment.
She needed water, but the idea of lifting her head from the pillow didn’t appeal. The idea of doing anything didn’t appeal, come to that.
She could hear distant voices, unusually, because this place was so quiet and protected from the outside world. Of course it would be the press, manning their barricades, in case she came out to give a statement. Not bloody likely.
She shut her eyes again, thinking of Jason. For some reason, she pictured him in a suit with arrows on, eating thin gruel in a darkened dungeon. Obviously this wouldn’t be the case, but the vision pierced her heart all the same.
Bowyer’s hungry mews eventually forced her from her bed to feed him.
She drained a litre of water and took some painkillers. No food – she couldn’t even face a sliver of dry toast. A sense of dread at what might happen when she switched on her phone hung over her. She postponed the evil hour by taking a long bath, but it couldn’t be avoided forever.
Dressed in capris and a vest top, for another glaringly hot day, she pressed the on button and awaited the onslaught of text tones and missed call alerts.
There were many. She left the phone bleeping away to itself while she tidied the room and straightened the bed, then came back to it.
She had to return the calls from her people at work, her PR and her lawyer. The rest were personal or speculative contacts from various arms of the media.
The calls were long and heated and, by the time she had dealt with them all, her throat was dry and she felt hot all over, and wrung out.
In the meantime, the morning papers had been delivered. She turned them face down on the kitchen table so the England cricket team’s latest woes were all she had to worry about.
‘I don’t want to know,’ she muttered to herself.
She lay on the bed again, staring at the ceiling, screening phone calls, until finally there was one she thought she should take. It was from the police station.
‘Ms Myatt? Sergeant Black from Bledburn Central Police Station. I’ve got a young lady here who wants to make a statement. She’s asking if she can speak to you first.’
Mia?
An arrow of hope shot into Jenna’s heart. Was it possible?
Without enquiring any further, she gabbled, ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ and hung up.
The next question to arise was how to get out of here without running the paparazzi gauntlet. The front door was clearly out of the question – was there any chance of vaulting over the back wall? She hadn’t even made it to the end of the garden yet – at a certain point, two thirds of the way back, it became too tangled and overgrown with brambles to contemplate. But perhaps if she took a good, hacky knife and a stepladder …
She hurried to the kitchen and selected the most evil-looking of her Japanese Saji knives, grabbed the stepladder she’d been using to strip the bedroom wallpaper, and set off through the back patio doors. Stepladder under her arm, knife held out in front of her for optimum safety, she marched across the less neglected stretch of the garden, until she reached what had once been the orchard and was now a dark and twisted thicket, hosting who knew what.
She put down the stepladder, resolving to come back for it, because this would be hard and possibly dangerous work. Her knife sliced through the thorny branches with ease, but there were so many of them, and the distance to hack through so uncertain that she was soon disheartened. It was going to take far too long.
Perhaps she could just climb the wall a bit closer to the house? But, she thought, she would probably be seen. The beauty of going over the rear wall was that it backed on to the church graveyard, and she doubted that the vicar would allow enterprising snappers to set up their tripods among the lichened headstones.
But she was already scratched halfway up her arms and hot and itchy with the effort of what she had done, and still the wall was nowhere in sight.
She dropped the knife and took a deep breath. Her priority was to get to the police station. Never mind all this ducking and diving.
She wiped her forehead and bent to pick the knife up again. Something lay, not far off from its glinting blade, at the foot of a withered apple tree. It was a coi
n, an old one, not in current circulation, with a hole bored into it, as if it had once been a pendant or keyring charm.
She picked it up and saw that it was a gold sovereign, of a design much imitated even now in the form of rings and other jewellery. This was no copy, however, but a genuine article. It had been a keepsake, perhaps a treasure.
And on the bark of the old tree, she noticed some initials carved. DH and FJ, with the classic heart around them. DH must be some olden Harville, she thought, and FJ his sweetheart. Perhaps they had married.
She resolved to look into the history of the Harvilles and try to identify these lovers, now long gone. But first, there were lovers in today’s world to consider: herself and Jason.
She put the sovereign charm into her bag and turned back. There would be no wall-climbing today.
She put on a cardigan to hide her scratches and opened the front gate to the expected barrage. Clicks and shouts and rude, forceful figures standing in her way. She swept past them all, keeping her eyes to the front and her mouth shut.
Even as she climbed into her car, a camera was pushed in beside her, so that she had to struggle to get the door shut. She drove off, chased by a gaggle of the more desperate sorts until they could no longer keep up with her.
Wryly, she wondered how many had got their shot, and which one would end up in the sidebar of shame. Not that she cared.
There were even a few stragglers at the police station, and these were the ones whose long wait was rewarded, for they would get a rarer photograph.
She ran up the steps to the front door and hurried to the desk. Annoyingly, there was somebody already there, making a very long meal out of reporting somebody parking over his driveway. The sergeant gave her an apologetic look and pointed towards a side room.
She expected to see Mia. She didn’t get what she expected.
‘Kayley! Hello. What are you doing here?’
Kayley looked sheepish and took a sip out of her cardboard cup of coffee.
‘I’ve come to make a statement,’ she said. ‘But I wanted to talk to you first.’
‘A statement?’ Jenna struggled to overcome her disappointment, but it wasn’t easy. ‘Has there been trouble at the youth club? Something to do with the talent contest?’
‘No, that’s not it. Look, I had no idea about you and Jason. Obviously.’
‘Is this to do with Jason?’ Her heart lurched. She wasn’t sure if it was up or down.
‘Yeah. And before I tell you, I’m sorry. OK? I didn’t know it would work out this way.’
‘I’m all right. Where did you get the coffee?’
‘Vending machine, out in the hall. D’you want one? I’ll get it for you. Least I can do, in the circumstances.’
Jenna watched, nonplussed, as Kayley went out of the room, returning a minute later with another cardboard cup.
‘So,’ said Jenna, taking a sip of the scalding liquid. ‘What’s this all about, then?’
‘I’ve come to tell them that Jason didn’t know anything about what was going on with those drugs.’
‘Have you really?’ Jenna spilled a splash on to her hand. It hurt, and would leave a mark, but she could hardly have cared less. ‘How come? How do you know?’
‘All right, I’m going to go back a bit. I’m Mia’s best friend from school – you met up with Mia yesterday, I heard?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, me, Mia and Jase were all the same year at school together. They were the lovebirds of year eleven, and I got left out because they were always together, and I suppose I was jealous. I took against Jason from then. Just in a silly teenage way, I mean. There wasn’t anything serious to it. I just wanted the times Mia and I used to have back. I missed her.’
‘So you and Jason didn’t get on?’
‘No, I wouldn’t say that. I put on a good face. We went to the same parties, socialised with the same people. In the end, I got so lonely I went out and got myself a boyfriend, just so I could do coupley things with Mia and Jase. We did everything together. And I mean everything.’
She gave Jenna a significant, slightly shamed look, and Jenna remembered what Jason had told her about the wild sex lives of the young people on the estate. She didn’t want to know more.
‘So, you know them. Is this what’s going in your statement?’
‘No, this is just the background. I wanted you to know the full story before you … Ah, whatever. Anyway I ditched the boyfriend, because we had nothing in common, and decided to get a life. Went to college, did my youth work qualification, kept away from the dodgy parties. But I got invited to a different type of dodgy party by a lad on my course – a party up at Harville Hall.’
‘My house!’
‘Yeah, except it was Lawrence Harville’s house, then. I didn’t know it, but it was party central. The place was falling down around him, but you could get anything you wanted there, do anything you wanted, have anyone you wanted. It was a different world. Anyway, Lawrence took a shine to me. I think he liked having a bit of rough. We got together, in a way. I mean, I were never his girlfriend. He wouldn’t have taken me out anywhere nice. But I got a lot of booty calls.’
‘Oh God, I hate him,’ muttered Jenna, unable to contain herself.
‘I brought Mia along to one of the parties, and then he dumped me and went for her. Well, she is pretty. I’d kill for her looks. She got into drugs, big time, and – I don’t know, I didn’t want to know, I never asked – I think she started dealing for him, in the pub. She stopped seeing so much of Jason because he didn’t know anything about it. I stopped seeing Lawrence and going to his parties. It was all starting to look a bit too sick for me. I just wanted a normal life.’
Her voice had a note of plea in it, and Jenna felt sorry for her, despite herself. She knew how easy it was to get sucked into dark places – she’d seen it over and over in LA. Some of her most promising talents were drying out, in psychiatric facilities, right now.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘And you’ve done well for yourself. You do good work at the Youth Club.’
‘It’s not enough,’ Kayley said, hollowly. ‘I’ve done something horrible and I can’t stay quiet about it any more.’
‘So what’s the horrible thing?’ asked Jenna, but she was starting to see the picture.
‘I kept away from Mia, Jase, Lawrence, everyone, for a couple of years. I heard on the grapevine that Mia was getting more and more involved, and Jason was getting more and more pissed off with her. In the end, I think Lawrence just decided to get him out of the way. He turned up at my flat one night, and asked me to give him my rucksack.’
‘Harville?’
‘Yeah. I was surprised to see him – it’d been a while – and I asked him what the hell he wanted my rucksack for, and he got nasty. Brought out a load of photographs of me, off my face, and naked and whatnot at his parties. Send he’d send them to the Youth Service, and the local paper, unless I just handed it over, no questions asked and nothing to be said about it ever again. If the police asked me, I was to say I’d lent it to Jason, and didn’t know any more than that. And then I was to get off the estate for the night and stay with a friend until morning.’
‘Oh, God. You’re the friend of Mia’s.’
‘Yeah, but I didn’t know what was happening. Nobody told me, until I saw Mia the next day.’
‘Lawrence took a lot of trouble to cover his tracks.’
‘He used my rucksack, then got Mia to give it to Jason to deliver to the house – he’d had a tip-off that it was going to be raided, so he thought he might as well take Jason down, since he was going to lose a lot of stock.’
‘Whose was the house?’
‘Just one of his goons. A pathetic druggie called Blister. He’d got him to take the full rap for it, promised him a better crib when he got out of prison, if he kept schtum about his suppliers and higher-ups.’
‘And you knew all this, but you never said anything?’
‘I couldn’t. Law
rence had those photos. Plus he knows some bad people in Nottingham. Hitmen, even. I didn’t dare.’
‘But now?’
‘I could keep my trap shut when it was just Jason on the hook. But you? You really don’t deserve it. When I saw those stories in the newspapers, I felt like scum. I’d rather go down myself than let you go down for me.’
‘Jason doesn’t deserve it either,’ Jenna said, still angry, but moved by Kayley’s open and sincere confession. ‘He has a life to live, and an amazing talent to give the world. You nearly deprived us of that.’
‘I know. Believe me, I can’t feel any worse than I do. If I could turn back the clock—’
‘I know, I know. Everyone has regrets, but these are serious ones.’
‘I had no idea you and he …’ She gave Jenna a quizzical look.
‘I found him in my attic. Can you believe that?’
‘I can’t believe you didn’t scream the place down, then call the police.’ Kayley smiled, weakly.
‘I almost did. I’m very glad I didn’t.’
‘So is there, like, you know, you and him …?’
Jenna bit her lip and nodded slowly.
‘Wow. That’s romantic. Like a story.’
‘It’s romantic, right up to the point where he gets arrested for a crime he didn’t commit.’
‘And that’s where I come in,’ said Kayley, drawing a deep breath. She stood and went to the door. ‘Shall we?’
Jenna could only wait in reception while Kayley was taken to an interview room. Time dragged, and stretched, and did everything it could to elongate itself. Jenna drank three cups of vending machine coffee, before realising that it wasn’t really helping.
Her idea of looking at the news sites on her mobile phone proved to be unwise – in the hurly-burly, she had forgotten that she, herself, was front page news. She was shocked to see a headline ROUGH DIAMOND with a picture of herself and Jason, in the front garden, at the time of his arrest.
She wondered how supportive Deano would be feeling now.
She didn’t have to wait long to find out.
Diamond Page 22
