Victoria and I have both stopped but Onnie is staring at me. Now we’re closer, I can see the tears in her eyes, the streaks of blackened mascara, the rawness of her mouth. ‘You killed him,’ she says to me. ‘It’s your fault he’s dead. You pretended to care, but you didn’t. He died because of YOU.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s not true.’
‘It is. You were leaving him. You broke his heart. You lied to me, pretending you were all sad that he was dead. You made me feel sorry for you. Guilty. Well fuck you.’
She pushes Howard into the road with her knee. An approaching car swerves slightly to avoid him, sounds its horn. Victoria takes a step forward.
‘Don’t you come near me. You lied too, Mum. You’re all liars. You made me feel I was the bad one. I was the failure. I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me? How could you have let it happen?’
Victoria lets out a sob. ‘It wasn’t like that. We’ll talk about it. I’ll explain.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ Onnie shouts. ‘I hate you. I hate myself.’
She turns away and, still dragging Howard, stumbles on towards the bend. Over her shoulder, she yells again, ‘You killed him, Lizzie. The only person I’ve ever loved is dead.’ She sounds as if she’s choking. We’re almost at the point of Zach’s accident. The tree is near. It’s blocking the last of the sun, dappling the road. She stops again. A container lorry thunders past, its horn sounding. She takes a sideways step out towards the road. She bends to pick up Howard. He’s struggling, scrabbling in her arms.
She says, ‘I thought you liked me. You turned out to be just like everyone else.’
‘Let’s go back to the car. Let’s talk about it.’
‘I’m tired of talking. I’m tired of everything.’
Victoria lets out a cry and pushes past me. ‘Don’t come near me,’ Onnie says. She has put the dog down but she picks him up again and takes another step out. She is right on the edge now, dangerously close to the path of the traffic. A van in the inside lane swerves, sounds its horn, accelerates. ‘Are you going to try and save me? Or the dog? Would you give your life for him? You wouldn’t for me.’
A black sports car snarls. She is distracted for a moment. And then she stares at me again, with a terrible expression on her face. I know what she’s about to do. We’re too close to the corner. The cars are going too fast. No time to stop. No room here to swerve. Victoria has started screaming.
I don’t think. I just run. Onnie sees me coming, hurls herself forward on to the road. She is spreadeagled, her face down – I see her arms go out, the dog under her. I imagine the screech of brakes, the heat of diesel, the crumpling of metal. I feel a rush of air on the backs of my knees and I am on top of her, pulling her up and backwards, yanking, my arms full of hair and body, my fingers scrabbling at her clothes. She is pushing against me, panting, crying. I don’t know where the dog is. But I don’t let go of Onnie. I stumble backwards under the weight, and my feet tangle. We fall. Zach’s tree closes in above us. Branches drag at my face. My head knocks against the root. My cheeks are stinging, cuts on my arms. Somewhere I can hear Howard barking, the sound of feet running towards us. But I’m still holding on to Onnie and even though she’s fighting and kicking out, I’m not going to let go.
We’re straddled across the gully. I can see the trunk of Zach’s tree. The lilies are still there, blown aside from the base of the tree, the cellophane yellowed, the flowers brown and desiccated. The note’s still attached. I can read it from here. The heart with the name around it. X E N I A.
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,’ I sob in Onnie’s ear.
The fight has gone out of her.
My eyes are still on the note with the flowers. From where I’m lying, my head close to the ground, the letters seem to run the other way.
It says A I N E X.
Her name, Aine, with a kiss. Onnie.
In my ear, she says, ‘I did it for Zach.’
‘But he’s dead,’ I say, and the words fill me with relief. ‘Zach is dead.’
Zach
14 February 2012
I am calm. My emotions have shut down. I’m not angry, or perhaps my own pure anger isn’t like other people’s. It doesn’t flow, like blood, or crackle like fire. It’s a heavy, solid object. I clutch it against my chest. It’s drawn through my skin and becomes a hard case around my heart.
That letter – every phrase in it was targeted to hurt. She’s leaving me and she can’t even do it truthfully or honestly. She needs ‘space’ to fuck her other man. She doesn’t love me. End of story.
The house is tidy and clean. That’s important. I’ve removed all evidence of my brief occupancy. The bed wasn’t even slept in. We’ve run out of bin bags. I gave Onnie the last one. I put the empty whisky bottles, my dirty clothes and Onnie’s towel in a holdall I found in the cupboard. I have scrubbed the bathroom and polished the chair where I sat to open her letter. I rubbed it so hard I almost gave myself blisters. If I wasn’t in a hurry to leave, I would have burned it.
I finished that painting she liked. It lacked something. The dealer in Bristol said my art needed more ‘emotional engagement’. Well, I’ve added a figure. Zach Hopkins – off to face his death. She’ll find it after it’s happened. She knows me well. She’ll understand. Does it represent hope or despair? She can work it out.
It might destroy her, my death, and its aftermath. She loves me enough for that, even if she doesn’t know it. Can you kill someone from beyond the grave? A new one on me.
I’m not your average killer. I’m different. My legacy, my life’s work: not the pictures in the end. Polly Milton – I didn’t mean for her to die. She must have hit her head when we fought, toppled in. I hardly heard the splash. Charlotte, too, an unnecessary accident, if a planned one. I shouldn’t have slept with her, but she should have been more careful. Her fault.
I’ll find the car in a minute, climb over the back fence and along the alley to where Jolyon said he’d leave it. I’m waiting until the world is in bed, for the roads to empty. The rain has eased off. Heavy clouds are rolling in off the sea. I’ll stop for petrol. A full tank. Roof down. A bit of fog: good. A fast road and a wall, or a tree: that’s all I need.
The walls are closing in. That confidence I felt earlier, I can feel it slipping. People are always quick to judge – they take the easy moral route. People never look beyond the cliché. Lizzie won’t forgive me, even if I sorted the situation. Perhaps I can’t forgive myself. I should love that girl. I should feel something. I don’t
People always . . . People never . . . What was it Lizzie said? She’s right. The rest of the world, all those people lumped together, they’re all the same. I am different.
A slight dizziness has come over me. Set off in a minute. Not enough sleep. Too much . . . too much thought.
Lizzie. My Lizzie. I thought you could save me. You’ve destroyed me instead. It turns out I don’t want to live without you. Ironic that. I could say forget me, but I can’t. I don’t want you to move on. I want us to be together. I want you to remember me, to feel me close to you, every day.
Lizzie – one last gift to show my love, to carry for ever: my death.
Chapter Twenty-five
Lizzie
I did read Zach’s diary. I might not have done if it hadn’t been for Onnie. I didn’t want her knowing any more about him than I did. I grieved for a while, dwelt painfully on my part in his death, and then one night I read it alone, as I planned, in an empty house. I played Elvis Costello. Occasionally I broke off to pour myself a glass of water. At one point I put my head between my legs. I didn’t cry, though, even when I read about Onnie. His daughter. I was proud of myself for that.
He wasn’t who I thought he was: that’s the cliché, that’s what I told Jane. He had secrets and his mind twisted in private in a way that was foreign to me. ‘We were all fooled,’ Jane said, to make me feel better. ‘We were all charmed by him. Evil can be attractive. Everyone knows that.’<
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I showed the diary to Hannah Morrow. Victoria was obviously against it, but I felt I had to. There were too many holes in his narrative, too many disturbing details. She took it to Perivale, and investigations into the deaths of Polly Milton and Charlotte Reid were eventually reopened. No further evidence was unearthed in the case of Polly Milton.
Charlotte Reid’s death was a different matter. CCTV footage was discovered of Zach arriving at Brighton Station at eleven on the morning of her death and a witness came forward who claimed to have seen him outside her house shortly afterwards. A new inquest was ordered, but the evidence was deemed circumstantial. Her parents were photographed leaving the coroner’s office, her mother hardly able to stand for grief. Nell gave a statement on how sinister she had always found Zach. ‘There was something off, if you know what I mean.’ It’s easy to justify things after the event.
The press got hold of it, despite Victoria’s best efforts. The Daily Mail went to town on the dangers of Internet dating and there was an in-depth article in the Sunday Times about Charlotte Reid’s death. In the end, it was Onnie who revealed her own side of events. A piece in the Guardian Family section appeared three days after she left the Priory, where she had been treated for ‘borderline personality disorder’ in tandem with post-traumatic stress. The piece was entitled ‘My Father, My Lover’ and pretty much ended Alan Murphy’s leadership ambitions (he fell at the first ballot). I found it almost unbearable to read, but not for the obvious reasons, perhaps. She was staking a claim on Zach, a claim on his memory.
She wrote me a letter – one of the steps in her recovery programme – saying how sorry she was for sleeping with Zach, and for being so ‘annoying’ afterwards. She confessed she had rung a few times in the months after Zach died and then hung up. (The other silent calls, the police have assured me, were the result of ‘hitches’ in call-centre technology. I have been advised to report them to Ofcom.) I don’t want to see Onnie again – I am sure that’s best – but sometimes I think about her face when she held out her damaged wrists, the vulnerability, the anguished gratitude, and wonder if things might have been different.
People have been very kind to me recently – much kinder than I deserve. Not just Peggy and Jane and colleagues at school, but the police too. Everyone is pretending they understand how I could have convinced myself Zach was alive. No one looks at me as if I am mad. Perivale, muttering about Morrow’s ‘lack of experience in matters of such sensitivity’, was keen to lay out the evidence – specifically the report from the Scientific and Technical Services Unit. This catalogued the chain of evidence: skid marks, vehicle liquid spillage, the scatter pattern of surviving car pieces, road condition readings and a computer chip proving the Fiat had been driving in excess of 80 mph. ‘No one parked that car against a tree and lit a match,’ Perivale said. He also put me in touch with PC Paul Johns, the missing persons manager for the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, who said the disappearance of Jolyon Harrison had never been a high-priority investigation. Jolyon was deemed neither vulnerable nor representing high risk and at the Rogue Nightclub in Bude had told several witnesses he was heading off to Cambodia for a business opportunity. It also turned out he owed money to some people in Truro. PC Paul Johns concluded he had ‘found himself in a spot of bother and scarpered’.
The diary, Perivale told me early on, is my insurance policy. ‘Mr Hopkins wouldn’t come back now, even if he could,’ he said. ‘He’d be arrested the moment he walked through that door.’
‘Are you humouring me?’ I said, looking him in the eye.
He smiled thinly.
Most of my hauntings have been explained. I already knew it was Onnie who had the clothes and the picture from Gulls, but she had also wrecked the studio in her distress the day after he died. It turns out it was Peggy, irritated at my lack of generosity to Alfie and convinced I wouldn’t notice, who took the Rotring pens. She brought the red lipstick back, too, after finding it one day down the back of her sofa. She had just forgotten to mention it. The dead bird – Jane looked that up for me. It’s not unusual apparently. Collision with windows is one of the three most common causes of bird death in the UK, along with cats and cars. ‘The British Trust for Ornithology says up to a hundred million birds strike windows each year in this country, and a third of them die.’
Sam’s attack was one of several muggings to take place that winter. Howard discovered Zach’s poisoned marrowbone when the storm blew the shed door loose. The Xanax had deteriorated in the damp, so there was, luckily, only enough to make him ill, not enough to kill him. The man in the bathroom my mother talked about – I think her brain was dredging the trauma of seeing Zach that first time. The two missing china cottages turned up at Peggy’s house: ‘Really? You were concerned about their disappearance? My bad. If you like them that much you can have them yourself.’ I think a nurse at the hospital stole my mother’s ring.
When I thought I saw him, across the car park at the greyhound track – it was my imagination playing tricks, my own obsession catching me out. Because that’s been the thing this whole time, my obsession. Jane and Peggy have both separately said how I was ‘the victim’, the hapless object of Zach’s obsession. But I’m the one who was obsessed. There are passages in his diary that shock me. But when I think about Zach, my heart still beats faster, something deep in my stomach clenches. Peggy says he pulled the wool over my eyes – her phrase – but he didn’t. Not really. I think I always knew something was deeply wrong. In my darkest moments, I wonder whether I loved him because of what he was like, not despite – his anger, his jealous flares, they excited me, made me feel alive. I loved a possible, probable murderer: what does that say about the workings of my own heart? He was wrong about one thing: I would have forgiven him for sleeping with Onnie. He didn’t know what he was doing. Perhaps, after all, I would have forgiven him even if he had.
People ask if I wish I’d never met him, but it would be like wishing away the blood in my veins, or stripping my body down to its white bones.
He loved me back. I know that now. That’s what shines out of his diary. Sam, who has read it, says Zach wrote for control, to self-justify. ‘Duper’s delight: a common facet of the sociopath,’ he explained, ‘an extreme glee in getting one over on others.’ It’s not how it seems to me. If I close my eyes to certain parts, if I try and forget the other women and Onnie, it reads to me like a declaration of love. His love for me led to his death. It’s a simple equation. It’s my mind, since he died, that has twisted and manipulated, that has misconstrued, that has dreamt of hauntings and revenge, waited for violence. People stroke and hug. They can talk as much as they like about grief and bereavement, abusive relationships, the mindset of the victim. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not the one they should be worried about.
Epilogue
May 2014
Last weekend we were up in Northumberland. Sam’s parents live in Newcastle and we spent a few days with them before driving up the coast to a cottage I had rented through the National Trust website, inland a bit from Berwick-upon-Tweed. We wanted to give Agnes her first glimpse of the sea.
It rained almost continuously, which kept us in or pottering around the local shops. But on Sunday the sun cracked through the clouds and we drove to a clifftop car park we had located on the map. It was a long hike down to the shore, across a high field where two skylarks erupted, to the top of a headland, and then a steep final descent on a zigzagging path in a dip in the cliff. At the bottom, we made a camp in the cup of the sand dunes. Howard chased the seabirds, and Agnes sat on a rug, propped up by the picnic basket, small fists waving.
We had brought sausages and bread and wine and Sam collected driftwood to make a fire. No one else around. Or hardly anyone; a couple of figures in the distance. I remember clocking them; I tend to be aware of strangers. When you lose a person you’re close to, whatever the truth of the relationship, you never stop feeling that something is missing – not really. But it was late afternoon; that ti
me on a Sunday when you’re normally gearing up for school or work. There was a bank holiday ahead of us and we were luxuriating in the feeling that we were bunking off. The sand stretched, stippled, in all directions. Wind bent the beach grass. You could taste the early breath of summer in the air. It was heaven.
I said I’d go when we realised we’d left the matches by the kitchen stove. I love Sam. I love my daughter. Every day I want to pinch myself; I can’t believe how lucky I am. But I still quite often seek out opportunities to be alone.
We’d passed a garage back on the main road. I climbed back up to the car and drove there, parking on the forecourt to one side of the pumps. There were no other cars. Inside, a young woman with heavy bags under her eyes was sitting behind the glass partition at the till. The shop was empty. I was choosing a bar of chocolate when I sensed a presence. The door must have opened and closed without me noticing. A single figure, tall, dark-haired, was picking out a pint of milk from the cold storage.
Something about the shape of him, the gait, lopsided, stooped. He was wearing heavy boots, the kind worn on building sites, jeans and a pale blue shirt. He crossed the shop in front of me and stood at the counter to pay. I waited behind, hardly breathing. What I could see of his face was brown, weather-beaten; hanks of hair hung forward across his brows.
He didn’t look at me until he reached the door and then he turned, caught my gaze, trapped it for a fleeting moment in his.
Of course it wasn’t. Too tall, his face too angular. But I didn’t move an inch until the door jangled shut.
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