Precious Thing

by Mcbeth, Colette

  I go to pull the rest of the photographs out of the box when Laura returns. Seeing me with them I catch something in her eyes and then in a flash it’s gone again. ‘I was just coming to get those,’ she says, ‘I’ll keep them safe shall I?’ And she swoops down and lifts the box with its clues to the past out of my reach.

  I must have stored that memory away under lock and key in my mind, choosing on some subconscious level not to acknowledge its significance. Because suddenly it is all so obvious, so utterly, blindingly obvious I wonder how I couldn’t have seen it before. And now that I have seen it, in brilliant, flashing Technicolor, there is no going back. Something inside me is unfurling; the layers and layers of lies that made up the story of me, of us, Clara, it is all unravelling.

  No one is ever who they appear to be. Not me. Not you.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  IT WAS UNLIKELY the police were going to make it a priority. You could almost hear the conversations in the control room – Got something for you, Sergeant, there’s been laughter in a house in Kensal Rise – and even with Jake trying his best to explain the wider context, you got the sense it wasn’t exactly blue-light material.

  ‘I still don’t understand how the fuck anyone could have got in. It’s too fucking weird,’ he said when he put the phone down. He started pacing up and down the living room, pulling at his hair. I wondered whether he was beginning to doubt me; it was a fairly implausible scenario after all. I guess that was what you wanted, wasn’t it Clara? For me to look like I was losing my mind. ‘How can you be sure it is her laugh, Rach, I mean it could be anyone’s.’

  See that’s the thing, no one else understood. No one understood how close we were, the way we knew each other right through to our bones.

  ‘It is her laugh,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been more certain of anything.’ I moved close to him and wrapping myself round his neck I whispered in his ear, ‘You can leave if you want to, I wouldn’t think any the worse of you for doing it. I’d understand.’

  He pushed me off him like I’d given him an electric shock. ‘Don’t ever fucking say that to me again,’ he said and stormed out of the room. That was the first time I had ever seen him angry.

  The police sauntered up to see me a few hours later: a young officer in his mid twenties with dirty blond hair accompanied by a woman who looked like she’d been on the beat too long. Her dark hair was cropped in a no-nonsense mum cut (we used swear we’d never have one, didn’t we?), her narrow, make-up-free eyes surrounded by crow’s feet and a frown line that sliced through the middle of her forehead. She introduced herself as DS Richardson. I showed them in, sat them down and offered them coffee, which they (she) declined.

  ‘Miss Walsh,’ she said, wasting no time on pleasantries. She managed to speak through her nose and look down it at the same time. ‘I understand you think someone has been in your flat, presumably while you were otherwise engaged with our colleagues in Sussex?’

  I don’t know why I was surprised to learn that my name came with a back story these days. My arrest had been all over the news the previous night. Your disappearance alone had been a big story; now a semi-famous crime reporter had been thrown into the mix’ it had all the right ingredients as we said in the business. I hadn’t read the papers that morning but I knew they would be screaming TV Girl in Murder Probe. In years to come reporters would put me on their CVs: I covered the Rachel Walsh story.

  A few days ago people believed everything I said, I had that sheen that comes with being successful, well known. Now here I was trying to present a story that most sane people would find questionable. Someone broke into my house and played laughter. What a fucking lunatic.

  ‘She found a CD playing in the stereo. It was on a timer,’ Jake said. ‘It’s still in there.’ Thank God for Jake. At least one person found the story credible.

  DS Richardson walked over to the stereo and paused. ‘You say it’s a recording of someone laughing?’

  ‘Yes. It woke me up in the middle of the night. Someone wanted me to hear it, to spook me.’ I hated how ridiculous I sounded.

  DS Richardson leant forward and peered at the stereo as if it would offer up some clues. ‘May I?’ she said, her finger hovering over the play button.

  I nodded and raised my hands to my ears to block you out. I didn’t want to hear your laugh again. Not ever, but it filled the room once more, ricocheting through me. Then mercifully it stopped.

  ‘It’s sick, really, just sick with everything else going on,’ Jake said. DS Richardson made a point of ignoring his outburst and turned to me.

  ‘Do you have any idea why someone would want to do this?’ she asked in such a calm, even voice I wanted to shake her.

  ‘It’s her laughter,’ I said and waited for a reaction. But her face gave nothing away. I wondered if she’d practised the blank look for so long she’d actually lost the power of expression.

  ‘Whose laughter?’

  ‘It’s Clara’s. I’d know that laugh anywhere.’ Finally her face moved, a flicker of surprise and disbelief escaping from behind her mask. And then she caught it and froze her features once more.

  ‘We are talking about the same Clara O’Connor who has been missing for two weeks, who has been the subject of one of the largest inquiries Sussex Police have ever conducted. You’re saying someone has recorded her laughter, broken into your flat without any signs of forced entry and placed a CD in your stereo to play to you in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, wondering whether I should add, I know it doesn’t sound very plausible but it’s true, before deciding it would make me look even more desperate.

  The sidekick was taking notes, looking up occasionally to glance at DS Richardson – you really want me to write this crap down? – then carrying on with his scribbling.

  ‘We understand you have reported instances of stalking,’ she flicked back through her notepad, ‘as long as a year ago.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you think the two could be connected?’

  ‘No, I think that’s what I’m supposed to think.’

  ‘Would you care to explain what you mean?’

  ‘What I mean is the stalker, if you can call him that, well, he used to send me e-mails and letters, all fairly low-level, harmless kind of stuff. Then suddenly Clara goes missing and I’m getting texts and letters and someone is getting into my house changing things around and leaving me things like that.’ I pointed to the stereo. ‘It’s not the same, it doesn’t feel like the same person.’ I walked over to the window to peek through the shutters and sighed, a heavy sigh. Outside the street was quiet; the reporters and camera crews had packed up, leaving their takeaway coffee cups in the road.

  ‘With stalkers we often see their activity start like that and then escalate, it’s quite common,’ DS Richardson told me.

  She wasn’t listening to me, she didn’t understand what I was trying to say. So I made it clearer.

  ‘I don’t think Clara is dead.’ I focused on a black mark on the wall, just below the mirror, a fingerprint; anything to avoid their faces, and then turning to face DS Richardson I said, ‘I think she is stalking me, I think she is trying to set me up.’ The words echoed around the room, loud and unbelievable. No one looked at me, no one said anything until I broke my own rule and filled the silence.

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ I said.

  They stayed for another hour, asking all the obvious questions like: how do you suppose she got in? Do you think someone is helping her, and the most difficult one to answer: why would she want to frame her best friend for murder? That was a whole dissertation’s worth of an answer – Why did Rachel’s and Clara’s friendship turn toxic? Discuss – and I didn’t think DS Richardson or her sidekick were up to it so I palmed them off with the usual she is certifiably mad line. It wasn’t a tag you’d like but to be honest you hadn’t left me many options.

  The question that troubled me the most was how you had got in. Not initially,
I mean, swapping the photographs was easy – you still had a key to my flat. But I had changed the locks since then. Knowing you could enter the flat freely, unseen, was more unnerving than you could ever imagine. The sound of the ice in the freezer, a dripping tap, a voice outside, I jumped at them all. I couldn’t sleep. I needed to do something to feel safe again.

  ‘What’s freaking me out,’ I said to Jake, ‘is that I think she’s watching me and I can’t see her.’ We were sitting in the kitchen, jittering from the fifth coffee of the day, wondering what the hell to do with ourselves.

  Silence hung over us for moment until Jake got up and walked out of the room muttering something about setting up an undercover shoot for Monday.

  And the thought blinded me.

  Cameras.

  If I caught you on camera, they’d have to believe me.

  I opened up my laptop and Googled security cameras. I could buy a package: one for the kitchen, one for the living room and watch the pictures on my laptop when I was out of the house.

  Watching you, watching me.

  I called Jake back in and told him my idea.

  ‘Genius,’ he said and planted a kiss on my forehead. ‘How soon can you get them?’

  The website said seven days which meant a whole week not knowing who was in the house.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ said Jake, ‘the guy we use for the hidden cameras in Clerkenwell owes me a favour.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, letting my head fall on his chest. ‘Thank you for taking care of me.’ And he squeezed me in a bear hug.

  ‘It’s the alpha male in me.’

  ‘Do you know,’ I said, extricating myself from his grip and looking up to him. ‘When all this is over, I want to go away for a long holiday, somewhere about as far away from here as you can get.’

  ‘Australia, the other side of the world,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s far enough.’

  ‘Do I get to come with you?’

  ‘You don’t get off that easily,’ I said, my mind already transporting me to a place far away from here.

  Next, I phoned Mickey the locksmith to check he had changed every door- and window-lock. He sounded mildly irritated by the interrogation.

  ‘Every single one was changed luv, just like you asked.’

  ‘I’d like them done again,’ I said, cupping a set of keys in my hand.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘I just want to be absolutely sure, that’s all. And I want an extra bolt on the front and back doors.’

  ‘Well, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘I need them done today,’ I said.

  ‘I only work a half-day Saturday …’

  ‘I need them today.’

  ‘OK, I get the picture, luv, I’ll be round in half an hour. Cost extra, mind you, for such short notice. I take it you want me to cut you four this time in case your boyfriend loses his again?’ I stopped still. From the living room I could make out Jake’s voice on the phone talking cameras, reeling off his shopping list of requirements, ‘I need them soon as you can, mate,’ he was saying but his voice was growing faint, drowned out by the clamour in my head.

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked, finding my voice.

  ‘I said I’ll cut another set for your boyfriend. He said he’s always losing his.’

  For a moment I let myself pretend. I still had a boyfriend. How typical of Jonny to lose his keys. And then the pretence came crashing down on top of me.

  ‘My boyfriend died.’

  A cough and the sound of papers being shuffled at the other end of the line.

  ‘But he came in here the other day, said he was locked out and you were at work. I wouldn’t normally do it but he had a letter with his address on, and it was getting late, I thought I was doing him a favour.’

  My whole body stiffened, the blood was pumping in my head.

  He.

  A man.

  Not you, Clara.

  Just when it was all clear in my mind.

  I gripped the receiver and shouted down it: ‘What did he look like?’

  Mickey cleared his throat. I could hear his breaths, deep, deep, through the line.

  ‘Late twenties, wearing a green parka coat. He had a hat on, I couldn’t see his hair. Has something happened, luv?’ His voice was pleading, shaky. ‘I’ll be round right away to change them, free of charge of course.’

  The thoughts clunking in my head created such a noise I could barely hear him.

  I don’t believe it is Bob the stalker.

  I think it is you.

  And somehow you’ve persuaded someone to help you.

  ‘I’ll just grab my things and be with you in ten,’ said Mickey, trying to reassure me.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  JONNY WAS BURIED in the ground three weeks after his body was found. It was a miserable, sodden day where not even a sliver of sunlight poked out from behind the grey clouds.

  The thought of him lying cold and wet forever in the soil of a St Albans graveyard haunted me. The burial was Sandra’s choice. If she had asked me (she didn’t) I would have told her Jonny would have wanted to be free somewhere, but I didn’t have the stomach to fight her. The truth was we’d been too wrapped up living our lives to plan our funerals. And Sandra obviously wanted somewhere physical to be with him, to visit and lay carnations and chrysanthemums, all the flowers he would never have chosen.

  I don’t feel like going into any detail about Jonny’s funeral. I don’t think it’s right to let you in on it, not after what you did. But I’m not afraid to tell you that in those moments standing at his graveside, cold tears on my face, wind whipping my body, I truly believed I hated you. I thought I hated you more than I ever thought possible. I hated you for the years of lying, for the blame you placed at my feet, the way you tried to destroy me but ended up destroying the person I loved the most in the world. I hated you because I had trusted you and you betrayed me.

  That’s how far you had driven me away, Clara.

  And yet the weight of grief pressing down on my shoulders, crushing me into the ground, gave me some insight into how you must have felt when Niamh died. When part of you was taken away.

  Whereas before your grief at her death was unfathomable, now I understood it. But there were many other questions that needed answers and only one person who could provide them. It was time to return Laura’s calls.

  Her voice was a softer version of Niamh’s without the rasp and rattle of years of Marlboro Light smoking or the close-to-the-edge emotion that my mother’s always carried.

  ‘Rachel, darling, how are you my dear …’ She let her sentence trail off for a moment and coughed. ‘I’m so glad you called, I’ve been trying desperately to get hold of you. What a ghastly thing, and the papers, I don’t know how they get away with printing such nonsense, I really don’t.’

  ‘Can we meet? I need to speak to you. In person,’ I said abruptly.

  ‘Well … of course, Rachel, I have the ladies’ tennis tournament tomorrow but I’m free the day after. We could do lunch somewhere, my treat, or I tell you what, you come here and I’ll cook your favourite meatballs.’

  They were my favourite when I was ten. I am twenty-seven years old.

  ‘I need to see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Darling, that’s just not …’

  Fuck the tennis, Laura, and fuck your meatballs.

  I took a deep breath and spoke slowly and deliberately.

  ‘It’s about Clara.’ Your name sent a charge down the line.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing that she’s missing, poor girl. Such an awful, awful thing. I’m just devastated by it, I know you must be too.’ Her voice was shaking. ‘You must be in a dreadful state, darling, and the police, for them to even think you could have done something, well they’ll look bloody stupid when they realise their mistake. I hope someone gets the sack for this. Really I do wonder about policing these days, Ethel up the road was mugged the other day and they couldn’t
have been less interested—’

  ‘Laura, please,’ I said, cutting through her monologue. ‘I need to know.’

  She still lived in the same large double-fronted villa in Hove where Niamh’s wake was held a decade ago. She put it up for sale once and the estate agents described it as elegant, a stone’s throw from the beach, although who could have thrown that far I never did find out. I was glad when she decided to keep it; it had been a place of refuge from the chaos of life with Niamh, where the kind of order and tidiness I craved ruled. In the summer the wisteria would creep up the doorway in a flush of pink and the smell of Laura’s sweet peas would hang in the air. She’d hurry me out into the back garden leaving Niamh behind and whisper all the Latin names of the plants to me as if they were secrets for our ears only. Niamh rarely sauntered out in the summer, the sun too bright for her night-time eyes, but on the few occasions she did I’d block her out of my eyeline just so I could keep up the pretence that Laura was my mother for a few moments longer.

  I didn’t trust my memories, now. I’d clung to Laura in those days because she was different from Niamh, not realising how similar they really were. Sure, Laura’s house was more ordered, her cooking edible, she talked to me, she indulged me. But she had also been complicit in hiding the truth from me, in guarding Niamh’s lie. At their core there was very little difference between the two sisters after all.

  The bell was old and large and gold and rang as if it was sending a message to the servant of the house to answer. Laura opened the door in her tennis gear. Was she hoping to squeeze me in between matches? She wore a smile on her face that didn’t reach her eyes.

  ‘Rachel.’ She pulled me towards her and hugged me tight. An older, bonier version of her previous self. Her skin was a deep shade of brown, despite the winter, and wrinkled beyond her years. Too much time on the tennis court. But the eyes, the pale blue of them, the way they looked deep into you, all-knowing. They were Niamh’s. I felt myself recoiling from her embrace.