by Wendy James
But the girl was adamant. It’s not that she couldn’t go back; she wouldn’t. She didn’t want the college place, didn’t even want to go to university. It was all bullshit, anyway. Who had she been kidding? She had no idea what she wanted, but she knew it wasn’t going to be found in the hallowed halls of academia, the dull dorms of St. Anne’s.
“So what do you think you’re going to do, exactly?” Honor was half-exasperated, half-admiring.
The girl shrugged. “I dunno. I’ll get a job, find a place to live. I just need to rethink.”
Honor suggested she get in touch with her guardians or the school, at the very least—just to let them know, stop them raising the alarm. Hadn’t the new term begun? The girl shook her head. Her school had an extra week off. They wouldn’t be worried, not yet. Her foster parents wouldn’t have a clue—they hadn’t been expecting her back before school anyway. And even once term began, it would be a couple of days before the school got worried enough to contact her foster parents. And they’d have to check that she hadn’t run off with her mother—something she’d done once or twice when she was younger. And tracking her down could take some time. Anyway, she’d turned eighteen, so officially she was no one’s responsibility. The girl explained all this completely dispassionately, without any self-pity: it’s just how it was, how it had always been.
The elements of tragedy weren’t lost on Honor; she was moved, almost against her will. She told Ellie that she could stay the night in her apartment—there was a spare room, and her husband was away for a few days. If she got a good night’s sleep, perhaps her head would be clearer and things would look different. She might change her mind.
“Life’s much harder than you think, Ellie,” she said quietly. “And for a girl like you, with no family, no connections, it’s even more difficult.”
She wasn’t sure what her own motives were, exactly. This sort of spontaneous kindness was certainly out of character. Perhaps there was an element of empathetic recognition—she’d been feeling raw for the last week or so, had been cast back into the memory of her own adolescent unhappiness by Chip’s revelation.
Honor sent the girl for a shower and, while she was in the bathroom, googled her name, suddenly anxious that a search might be already underway. The girl was so young, so vulnerable, and it seemed extraordinary to her that no one had noticed her absence. But there was nothing. The only web reference to her was in the school’s newsletter, naming her a member of the year’s “leadership team.” There was a photo of her receiving a prefect’s badge, perfectly demure in her old-fashioned kilt, her hair pulled back into a bun, face scrubbed.
Ellie wandered back into the room, wrapped in a towel. Honor closed the tab, and the browser opened on an old “Whatever happened to” article about Suzannah Wells that she’d been obsessively reading the previous day. A publicity picture of the bikini-clad starlet was juxtaposed with a candid shot, taken five years or so after the series ended.
“Hey,” the girl said, peering over her shoulder. “I know her.”
“Really? I’d have thought you were a bit young to have watched that rubbish.”
“No, not the show, the woman. I mean, I’ve never actually met her, but I know who she is. She used to live in Manning—she taught drama at the private school there. I used to see her around the place. Do you know her?”
“A little. She lives in the town where I grew up. Enfield Wash.”
“Is she your friend?”
“My friend?” Honor shrugged. “Not really.”
The girl was still looking at the photograph. “Is she still a teacher?”
“She is. Why?”
“She was involved in some scandal at the school and had to leave. Everyone was talking about it just before I went to the Abbey.”
Honor’s journalist antenna was up and quivering now. “What sort of a scandal?”
“I dunno exactly. There were all sorts of rumors. I think some girl there accused her of touching her or something. It was probably bullshit, but the parents made the school get rid of her. The girl was expelled anyway. She ended up a big fat loser.” She gave a desolate little laugh. “Like me, really.”
The girl wrapped her thin arms around her body. Her face was pinched, her eyes huge and darkly shadowed. She looked about twelve.
“What the fuck am I going to do? I really don’t want to go back to school, but there’d be no point anyway. The trial exams start on Monday, and I haven’t done anything. There were assignments, too. And I need crazy high marks to get into St. Anne’s.”
“Maybe it’s not that bad. Aren’t there extenuating circumstances? Maybe you can say that you . . .”
“What?” The girl snorted. “What the fuck can I say? That I forgot to study? Maybe I suddenly got amnesia but I didn’t know it? Oh, I know—maybe I could say I was knocked unconscious for the entire break. That I was kidnapped.”
And there it was: the seeds of a plot.
HONOR: JULY 2018
The story came together remarkably quickly. It was bizarre, almost unprecedented, but its very improbability made it seem even more authentic. Who could make this shit up? Once upon a time, they’d have needed a knight in shining armor to make it properly satisfying. At the very least, there’d have been a sweetly handsome young prince eager to wake the heroine from her slumber to administer true love’s kiss. But women, and girls, too, had moved way beyond that. And the story didn’t need it. It already had all the best elements of a fairy tale—the poor girl made good, the single tragic mistake, the imprisonment in the tower, the brave and brilliant escape—without all the complications that true love inevitably brought. Honor might have designed the basic structure, but the girl was a natural confabulator, coming up with plot twists and diversions that would never have occurred to her. In another life, with a different kind of background, maybe Ellie would have been a novelist, a playwright.
Under different circumstances, perhaps Honor would have been disturbed by Ellie’s enthusiasm, her willingness, her lack of compunction when it came to destroying the life of an innocent stranger. But the beautiful logic of revenge only accentuated the perfect synchronicity of Ellie’s arrival at this particular moment. Honor had nothing but admiration for the girl’s singularity of focus, the way she’d thrown herself into it, as if it were a school assessment, a major work for one of her final subjects. There were definite similarities, she supposed: the whole thing could be viewed as a radical performance piece, or some avant-garde installation, with real-life consequences.
And any guilt Honor might have felt on the girl’s behalf was easily dispensed with. There was no question of manipulation. Honor had been up front about what the girl was likely to achieve in the way of fame and fortune once the story hit the media. Ellie wasn’t doing it for Honor—she was doing it for herself.
When the girl asked what was at stake for Honor, she told her the truth—or as much of the truth as she understood herself.
The girl nodded sagely. “I knew there had to be a man involved somehow. When it’s revenge, there always is.”
Usually it was Honor’s job to fan the flames of a fire that had already been lit, to add some fuel, work hard to control the conflagration. But this time it was different—she got to build the pyre and strike the match. This time it was her fire.
Honor had come up with the big-picture stuff, the concept, but the girl was more methodical, smarter about the details, working out who was where when and knowing how to make sure every possible loophole was closed. She wrote down all the days, all the times. She could see all the places where things might go wrong, where there were gaps in the plot, so to speak, and worked out ways to fill them.
It was her idea that Honor visit the house, to take photographs of the room, of the staircase, of the layout of the yard, of the house from the outside and inside, of details that would be impossible to know otherwise. Her idea that she removed some things and planted others.
Ellie had read accounts of other victi
ms’ time in incarceration. Of course her imprisonment wouldn’t be anywhere near as long or as dramatic as that girl in Germany, the trio in Cleveland, Elizabeth Smart. But every word she said would need to sound real, feel authentic.
She was well aware that however genuine-seeming, her story wouldn’t be accepted as tragic, or even all that terrifying: she’d have lost only weeks and not years of her life. There was no way her story would be as explosive as those other girls’. Oh, there was the hideous craziness of the situation—the middle-aged woman kidnapper, the mad old lady. And then there was the girl’s own backstory—her difficult past, her heroic transformation, the near ruin of all that hard work. Her escape. “They’re going to like that, aren’t they?” The girl giggled. “The fact that I managed to get out, that I’m resourceful. I’m literally girl power in action, aren’t I?” She’d looked so pleased with herself that Honor wondered if she was actually beginning to believe her own fabrication.
But it was still not enough. They needed another angle. Something big. Bigger than big. Something to get the public sharing and tweeting in outrage.
“What if we say that they were raping me? That would be gross, wouldn’t it? Women raping a young girl? People would love that.”
Honor considered it, but only for a moment. Displaying the appropriate level of trauma might be difficult for Ellie—who wanted badly to get on with the rest of her life—to sustain. And perhaps it was too grotesque to be media-friendly in the long term.
“Or what if I suggest that the bloke’s involved? That could work. The other two would look like victims, too, and I could be singlehandedly kicking the patriarchy’s ass. That way the story would be more . . . relevant, don’t you think? And it’d be nice for you, too.”
Her idea was good. It was so tempting, so zeitgeisty in these #MeToo days, but it was dangerous enough as it was—making him central would only complicate things. And perhaps implicate Honor. She was going to inflict pain on him—it just wouldn’t be direct.
In the end it was Honor who came up with it—the accusation that would provide both motivation and sensation and, with an ironic twist, an impossibly elegant coup de grâce, which would make her revenge all the more satisfying. All the sweeter.
It was easier than Honor had ever imagined. So much of it depended only on Ellie’s word—and who was going to question her seriously when there was all the DNA evidence to substantiate what she said? No one ever argued against that shit these days. And even if they tried, there was too much—clothes, bodily fluids, hair. It was irrefutable. And then there were Ellie’s own memories of her time in captivity, the details that were surely unknowable otherwise.
It was too much, too compelling, and there wasn’t even a hairbreadth of doubt. No one would be speculating about whether the whole thing was a setup—not even the flat-earthers on the net. No one seemed to be talking conspiracy, inventing ways in which Ellie could have set the whole thing up. Because why would she? It had been established, and confirmed by Suzannah herself, that she’d never even met Suzannah before. There was no question of revenge, of spite, of payback for past injustices.
Getting the nurse onside was an unexpected bonus. Sally O’Halloran had been at school with Honor, who remembered her as weak, the type of girl who collapsed into defensive, whiny tears when challenged. A coward, easily persuaded.
Honor hadn’t been expected at the nursing home, had arrived unannounced and earlier than usual—she had other plans for the afternoon, the evening. There’d been no one at reception, so she’d headed straight to her father’s room without bothering to sign in.
The door to her father’s bedroom was ajar, and she’d pushed it open farther without a sound. There was a nurse in the room, but she hadn’t noticed Honor, had her back to the door, her attention on her patient, who was lying on his bed. Honor couldn’t see her face, but she’d recognized Sally O’Halloran’s graying bob, her narrow shoulders. She’d recognized, too, the frozen horror of her father’s expression.
You filthy old bastard. Sally had hissed the words, but Honor had no trouble making them out. You dirty old man. What did I say to you yesterday? That if I had to clean up your disgusting mess one more time I’d be rubbing your face in it. I ought to make you eat it. You’ve got a bell, you stupid prick. Why don’t you try ringing it next time?
Honor’s first instinct had been to intervene, to shout at the woman, to report her, see that she was dismissed, deregistered. Arrested. But Honor rarely operated purely on instinct. She knew that even the worst moments could be turned around, put to good use.
She took her phone out of her bag, clicked the video function on, zoomed in. She watched the woman hold the shit-laden sheet close to her father’s petrified face, listened to her taunts and threats, heard her father’s desperate moans, witnessed his fear.
She backed away, quietly pulling the door closed. She felt vaguely guilty. Perhaps she should have intervened, saved the old man this indignity, but she knew the feeling would pass eventually. Honor had long recognized the importance of holding her fire, biding her time; she understood the way past misdemeanors could provide future advantage.
SUZANNAH: JANUARY 2019
There was no way to avoid the crowd as we exited the courthouse. Hal made a brief statement to the media, emphasizing my innocence, the elaborate nature of the hoax, the cruelty of the perpetrators, the amorality of elements of the press. He was confident there would be an investigation into the crime committed against me. It was clear that there were several persons of interest, including the so-called victim, but at this point the most important thing was that I would be able to resume my interrupted life and career, enjoy my pregnancy, try to forget all about this nightmare.
Chip, Mary, and I stood beside him, blinking into the flashing bulbs.
Questions were shouted, but Hal shook his head. “That’s all I’m going to say for now. My client will make an official statement in the next day or two, but for the moment that’s it.”
I heard the buzz of their voices as we pushed through the crowd. Chip had one arm around my shoulders; his other hand gripped Mary’s elbow.
Suzannah, have you got anything to say? Suzannah, how does it feel? Suzannah, are you going to sue? What’s next, Suzannah? How do you feel, Miss Squires? Mary, have you got anything to say?
Mary wrenched her arm out of Hal’s grip and stepped forward dramatically. She glared out into the crowd, raised an imperious hand to silence them.
“If they’d listened to me in the beginning, we’d never have had to put up with any of this shit.”
“What do you mean, Mary? What did you tell them?”
“I told them that little bitch had my Chanel pajamas, but I never said she stole them. That was the other one. They weren’t listening properly, were they?”
The crowd laughed.
Mary kept going, encouraged. “And I always knew that little bitch was lying.”
I grabbed her arm, hissed, “Oh God, Mary, can you just not?”
“How did you know that, love?”
I knew what was coming next, but short of throttling her, there was nothing I could do.
“The way she . . .” Mary’s mischievous smile faltered. “The way . . .” She stared out at the crowd, her face blank, gaze unfocused. She looked exhausted suddenly, and very, very old. She moved close to Chip, clutched his hand.
“Can we please go home now?” Mary’s voice was tremulous, small. “I’m tired.”
I had glimpsed Honor as we walked out of the court and could just make her out now, trying to push her way through the onlookers gathered at the bottom of the courthouse steps. I was free; my life and my reputation had been restored. I should have been happy to get out of there, start afresh, move on, forget. But there was still so much I didn’t know, that I needed to know, if my—our—life was ever going to return to something resembling normalcy. While Chip and Hal helped a slow and uncertain Mary to negotiate the stairs, I hurried past them, ignoring Chip’s surpri
sed words of caution, as well as the avid curiosity of the crowd, then rushed along the footpath, propelled as much by a desire for information as by rage.
“Honor.”
She paused, turned slowly, her reluctance evident. “Suzannah.”
“Why? Why the fuck, Honor?”
There was the sound of feet pounding.
“Oh Christ.” Chip was behind me, his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t need this right now, Suze.” His voice was low, urgent. “We can do this some other time, some other way.”
“She only wants to know why. I think that’s reasonable after what she’s been through.” Honor’s voice was icy.
“What you’ve put her through, you crazy bitch. What you’ve put us both through.”
Her eyes widened. “What I’ve put you through?” She laughed, shook her head sorrowfully. “I take it you haven’t told her, have you, Chip?”
HONOR: OCTOBER 1986
His reaction to her news wasn’t as she’d imagined it.
The pregnancy was a disaster, on every level. What else could it be? No sane person could think it was anything but a disaster. Honor wasn’t even eighteen yet; he was only just. They both had their whole lives ahead of them. She’d been prepared for him to be shocked. Panicked. Had expected a degree of fear, even.
But she’d imagined, too, a degree of concern for her, thought he’d ask how she felt at the very least. And she’d imagined some acceptance of the mutuality of the whole thing—they’d done this together; now they would sort it out together. She wasn’t expecting contrition, exactly, but something like it. Surely they were in this sick-making boat together, even if they were both about to scuttle it and swim back to shore.
Oh, she hadn’t imagined fanfares or marriage proposals, declarations of undying love. She wasn’t stupid. (And she didn’t want that anyway—she was going somewhere; she was going to be someone.) But she hadn’t imagined this blank disavowal of responsibility, of complicity either. And she could never have imagined him saying what he’d said—his eyes hard, voice cold. He’d looked right through her as if they were strangers, as if what they’d done, what they’d been, had meant nothing to him.
