Come a Little Closer

by Karen Perry

  She thinks she sees a small flash of terror in Leah’s eyes, but then the young woman gives herself a shake, that steeliness coming back into her resolve.

  ‘Jake never trusted him. But I … I felt something for him – something platonic,’ she adds quickly. ‘Friendship. I felt he understood something about me.’

  ‘What about Jake?’ Hilary asks, and Leah puts her hand to her hair, sweeps it back off her face.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she says plainly. ‘It turns out he wasn’t the one for me after all.’

  She meets Hilary’s gaze with a smile touched by defiance, and goes on: ‘I’m fine. I really am. It feels right – inevitable, I suppose. He’s gone to Scotland. His son is there and he wanted to be close to him. And there was nothing really keeping him here.’

  ‘Except you.’

  ‘Yes. But that wasn’t enough. And I think both of us knew that. Even before Anton … what happened …’ Her words die away, and Hilary sees her expression grow thoughtful, introspective.

  ‘Years ago,’ Leah says, ‘I told a lie about something that happened. A serious lie. While I was in hospital, I kept thinking about it, about all the people I’d hurt because of that lie – the damage I’d done. I thought about how I’d lived for years with this shadow hovering over me. I lived like I was afraid the whole time of being found out.’ She fixes Hilary with her clear-eyed stare. ‘I can’t do that any more. When Anton put that pillow over my face, I thought I was going to die and I wanted so badly to live. I don’t like thinking about what would have happened if you hadn’t come into the room. All I know now is that I’ve been given this second chance and I don’t want to mess it up. I want things to be different now. Do you know what I mean?’

  Hilary says yes. She understands. A second act. A renewal.

  Leah glances once more around the room, and then says: ‘I think that’s enough now. Will we go down?’

  It’s different now out in the hall. As if by saying those words aloud in the bedroom, Hilary has released some tension that was within her. Leah’s voice also sounds lighter, less tense, as she walks towards the door. She tells Hilary how Mark came to visit her in hospital. How he’d felt guilty for renting the flat to them, for inadvertently putting her in harm’s way.

  ‘He didn’t really believe it, you see, that his father was guilty of the crime. But now …’

  ‘I think we all know now.’

  They’ve reached the front door and Leah draws it open.

  ‘Well, goodbye, then,’ Hilary says, and to her great surprise, Leah steps forward and puts her arms around her, drawing her into a firm hug. There is real warmth in that embrace, and Hilary hears the deep chime of sincerity in Leah’s voice when she says, ‘Thank you,’ close to her ear.

  She is taking the camellia from the back seat of the car when she sees the two of them leave the house. Leah gives her a little wave, and Hilary responds, watching as they walk slowly down the street. Leah’s limp looks more pronounced out in the daylight, and Hilary watches as Mark offers her his arm and she leans on him – something courtly and romantic about the gesture – a closeness between them as they disappear around the corner.

  Clouds are gathering in the sky. Rain is forecast for later in the afternoon, and Hilary would like to get the camellia into the ground before the downpour. She carries it out into the back garden, smiling to herself as she imagines Greg’s surprise when he comes home from school and sees her handiwork. With the new plant waiting in its pot on the grass, Hilary fetches the spade and begins digging.

  It’s hard work. The fuchsia has been in the ground for close to twenty years. It was one of the first things they planted after moving here. Its roots are deep and spreading. Hilary works with dogged determination, the spade slicing through the earth. At intervals, she pauses in her digging and pushes hard against the main trunk, then pulls it, trying to loosen it from its mooring. Eventually, she feels it give. She puts down her spade and grabs hold of the bush with both hands, braces her feet against the earth, heaving with all her strength. Her body aches with the effort, but she feels it come. Moments later, the bush leaves the ground, its roots clogged with soil. Hilary drags it to one side. Then, with her spade, she begins to hack at the roots in a bid to free the clay that’s lodged there, a great ball of it. She hits it with the blade and something comes loose and falls out.

  At first, she thinks it’s a rock covered with muck, but when she prods it with the spade, she feels the softness of it. Putting down her tool, she lifts the bundle and is surprised by how light it is, lighter still after she shakes some more hardened clay from it, using her hands to sweep off the dirt. It’s a bundle of cloth – what might be a blue stripe runs through the ruined fabric. Shaking it out, something drops to the earth with a small thud. Hilary’s eyes go to the ground.

  She looks down, and it’s as if she’s staring down a long, silent tunnel. The garden falls away. A great stillness comes over her.

  It’s a knife. A kitchen knife, no more than eight inches long. It is caked with dirt, but she can clearly make out the shape of it, the heft of the handle, the long, thin blade.

  Her limbs don’t shake when she bends down slowly to pick it up. A dead calm has come over her, a simple understanding. The long slow ‘ah’, like a last release of breath.

  She sits at the kitchen table and waits.

  Everything inside her has slowed, grown still. She is sitting there, perfectly calm – almost serene – when he arrives home from work.

  The energy of his busy day is brought into the house with him as he comes into the kitchen, slings his bag on to the countertop. ‘Hey there, how are you?’ he says, at the sink, filling a glass with water and putting it on the table. ‘Good day? God, I’m starving. I stopped off at Supervalu, picked us up a couple of steaks …’

  He has come forward to kiss her when his words trail off.

  On the table in front of her is the knife, still caked with mud. The ancient T-shirt in which it had been wrapped and concealed sits alongside it. Hilary’s hands are folded neatly in her lap. She watches her husband’s face, the initial spark of confusion clearing, replaced by the shock of understanding. The blood drains from his face.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says hoarsely, the word a croak.

  He pulls out a chair quickly and collapses on to it, his eyes fixed on the knife, staring at it with disbelief.

  She doesn’t say anything, just watches as he leans his elbows on the table, rubs his nose and mouth with the back of his hand. Still he can’t drag his gaze from the knife, as if fearful it might, at any moment, jump up of its own accord and attack him. She can hear him taking quick, short breaths, and in a voice that is immeasurably calm, she tells him: ‘Have a drink of water.’

  He does as she instructs, grabs the glass, like a lifeline, gulps the water. He closes his eyes briefly as he sets the glass down, and when he opens them, he is looking at her. A fearful look.

  ‘Did you know?’ he asks quietly.

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Sometimes I thought you might have guessed.’

  He looks again at the knife, squeezes his eyes shut, and whispers, ‘Christ,’ under his breath. She watches as he exhales – a long, slow breath to calm himself – and then, when he is ready, he starts to tell her.

  ‘The strange thing is, I liked Charlotte,’ he begins. ‘I know you thought she was trouble, but she was always nice to me. A flirt, yes, but she could be funny as well, and attentive. Whenever we’d talk, I always felt she was genuinely interested in what I was saying. She was nice – far nicer than her husband.’ Hilary notes the change in his tone, wistfulness giving way to hardness. ‘He was a creep. Chasing other women – not even trying to conceal it. He thought he was God’s gift. I couldn’t understand what she saw in him. And the mind-games they played with each other – it was head-wrecking. I felt sorry for her.’

  He kneads his hands above the table. She sees the whiteness of his knuckles.

  ‘I knew you liked him, but
I told myself it was nothing, just some stupid crush. You were all over the place after we’d lost the baby, so I let it go, presuming it wasn’t serious, just some stupid infatuation that you’d get over once we’d moved into our own place. But then at the party –’

  He breaks off suddenly, and she sees the emotion springing up inside him.

  ‘Go on,’ she tells him, in her quiet, firm voice.

  ‘I just wanted to let off steam. It had been a hard summer for me. I’m not sure if you even realized that at the time. Trying to get this place done, dealing with builders who knew I didn’t have a fucking clue … And you, Hilary. You were so upset after the baby. I didn’t know how to deal with you. It was like treading on eggshells all that summer. I wanted to protect you – to comfort you – but you just kept holding me at arm’s length.’ He shakes his head, as if annoyed with himself. ‘That night, when we went to the party, I just wanted to get drunk and forget about things for a while. So I laid into the booze, and got lost in the party. It was not until well into it that I realized you weren’t there.’

  Understanding is coming to her now, returning to that night, her mind reeling backwards.

  ‘I was looking for you when I found Charlotte. She was coming in from the garden with her little boy, and it was clear she was worked up. “Looking for your wife?” she asked me, in a catty kind of way. And then she told me to look for you in her husband’s shed.’

  Hilary feels the breath drawing into her lungs, the cold rattle of it. Her feelings colour with shame as she listens to him tell of how he’d gone down into the garden, how it was dark, how he’d seen them emerge from the shed, watching from the shadows while Anton helped her fix her clothing, the two of them clinging together for one last embrace. The thought that he was there in the darkness of the garden witnessing that – not the sex, but the attempt at concealment, the way they separated from each other, him going back in first, followed a minute later by her, each of them shaking themselves off, trying to look ‘normal’ … Nineteen years ago but the memory feels vivid and fresh.

  ‘What then?’ she asks softly, needing to draw him on, not wanting him to lose the story now when they are so close to the truth.

  He shrugs sadly, his eyes inward-looking, weary with remembering.

  ‘I pretended nothing’d happened. Rejoined the party, kept on drinking. I couldn’t look at you, though.’ His eyes flick to hers, something sharp in his gaze. ‘So when you told me you were going home, I said I’d stay on. Somehow I felt you were relieved at that.’

  She holds his gaze, heavy with accusation. ‘Please go on,’ she urges softly.

  The hardness in his stare fades.

  ‘I stayed on, even when the party dwindled. At one point, Charlotte came over to me and asked me if I was okay. I said yeah, even though it was clear I wasn’t. She suggested I stay on until everyone else had left. I knew what she meant, so I asked, “What about Anton?” She told me not to worry. That she’d got rid of him. We’d be alone and free to enact our revenge, she said. I knew full well what she wanted and part of me wanted it too. I was so shocked by what you’d done. I couldn’t believe it. It was stupid, but I thought, Why not? Why shouldn’t I, if that was the way you were carrying on?’

  A certain bullishness has entered his tone, an angry self-righteousness. She does not challenge him. She knows that if she is patient, if she is calm, the truth will come out.

  ‘I pretended to leave,’ he says next. ‘Drunk as I was, I knew that I didn’t want any of our neighbours to suspect. I hid in the bathroom until the last person left, and then I went and found Charlotte. She was in the kitchen, cleaning up. “I thought you’d gone,” she said.’

  He stops, a wary look coming over his face. ‘Well, I think you know what happened next,’ he says.

  ‘Tell me.’ Her voice has lost its softness. She is calm, but her tone is hard, her gaze steely.

  ‘We started kissing. Things were getting a bit out of hand. I mean, I thought that was what I’d wanted. She was a good-looking woman and I wanted to get my own back on him – and punish you too. But somehow, when it came to it … It was weird being with her, like it just wasn’t right. She smelt different from you, she felt different. When I kissed her, rather than feeling aroused, I felt kind of … intimidated. It was embarrassing. We were both there together with one aim in mind, and I just couldn’t …’

  His hand goes up to cover his eyes. It’s like he has to shield himself from her gaze as he tells her what happened. Hilary listens without saying a word. She imagines the scene: the two of them entwined in that kitchen, Charlotte fumbling with the buttons of his jeans, reaching inside to find … What? Shyness. Softness. Humiliation.

  ‘She kept laughing at me. Thought it was hilarious. I tried to walk out and leave her, but she kept pulling at me, stood in front of me, barring my way out into the hall. And all the while she’s laughing and mocking me, saying stuff – lewd, disgusting stuff. I just wanted to get away from her. “Perhaps, if I act more like your stupid little wife,” she said. And then – then she starts putting on this voice, this whiny little voice, like she was trying to mimic you but in the worst possible way. Saying those disgusting things in that ugly voice – I just wanted her to shut up!’ His eyes bulge, his voice lowered to an angry hiss. And then his gaze drops, falls to the knife sitting between them on the polished surface of the table.

  ‘There’d been a cake,’ he says forlornly. ‘She’d used the knife to slice it.’

  The work of an instant. A rush of blood to the head. One swift movement of the hand.

  ‘I couldn’t believe what I’d done,’ he says, his voice small and astonished. ‘She just went down. I didn’t know what to do – there was so much blood. Everything just happened so fast. A few seconds – a minute. I was afraid to touch her, even to feel for a pulse. Not that I needed to. I could see she was dead.’

  His T-shirt was covered with blood, and his hand. His mind was racing, chasing through all sorts of permutations of how he might be caught.

  ‘I just took the knife and ran,’ he tells her. ‘And it’s funny the things that occur to you, even in a situation as shocking and stressful as that. Like how I took care not to step in the blood, how I thought to cover my fingers with a clean corner of my T-shirt when I opened the front door, and the same when I pulled it shut behind me. That I would have the presence of mind not to leave fingerprints … I still thought they’d come for me, though. It was a miracle there was no one on the street. It was so late at that point – past three a.m. A miracle that no one was looking out of their window or driving past in their car.’

  It was only when he reached his own house that he realized he had no clue of what to do with the knife. That was when the idea came to him.

  Their garden was a mess after the builders. Scrubby grass grew in tufts among the debris left behind after the renovation. They’d had vague plans to clear it up, perhaps put in a patio once they had the money. But neither of them had much interest in gardening. Their focus was all on the house.

  ‘I picked a spot near the back. It was difficult to see anything in the darkness, but I just pulled at this weed that was as big as a shrub. It came out, leaving a hole that was large enough until I could sort out something later. I pulled off my T-shirt, which was spattered with blood, and wrapped the knife in it.’

  He’d covered it over, replacing the weed, then let himself quietly into the house, stripping off the rest of his clothes in the kitchen and putting them into the washing-machine. Then he’d stood at the sink scrubbing his hands, his arms, his face, his torso – scrubbed his skin raw.

  ‘I stayed on the sofa that night. I was afraid of waking you. Afraid that you’d ask me something and then somehow know what was wrong, what I’d done.’

  He lay awake all that night, thinking over various options, all the while alert to noises outside. He kept expecting to hear the whine of sirens, the screeching of brakes outside. But the police never came, and by the time the sun had ris
en, he had a plan.

  ‘As soon as it was light, I got up and showered. Then I went outside and began working on the garden, digging it over, like it was a regular Sunday-morning thing to do. Which it was. People are always doing their gardens on Sundays.’

  He’d made sure that the knife was hidden, and then he’d gone to the garden centre, with his crippling hangover, and bought a range of different plants. It seemed important that he make it look like a big project – like he’d decided to landscape the whole back garden. He spent a fortune, he tells her now, just to conceal the reason for planting that single fuchsia bush.

  ‘I kept thinking they were going to come for me,’ he says now. ‘When they interviewed each of us – all the guests from the party – I was sure I’d let something slip or that someone else’s account would point the finger in my direction. For weeks, I hardly slept, so sure they would find something – some trace of evidence that would link me to her death.’

  In the end, the party saved him. After the number of people who had been present, trampling through the house, the place was a mess of fingerprints and forensics. The door-to-door questions, the trawling through differing accounts, never turned up the murder weapon or indeed the murderer himself.

  Except for Anton.

  ‘I felt conflicted,’ Greg tells her now. ‘I knew it was wrong – an innocent man going to prison. But then I thought, Well, how innocent is he? His behaviour towards her was terrible. And he was fucking my wife!’ His indignation bursts through, then recedes. ‘Sorry,’ he tells her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He shakes his head. ‘For years, I thought it would be okay. That I had put it all behind me. That I was safe. But then when Anton came back, and I could see you obsessing all over again … I just wanted him to go away. To leave us in peace. I thought if I could just scare him away, but …’

  His eyes come to rest on the knife sitting on the table between them.

  ‘Hilary,’ he says. ‘What are we going to do?’

  Clouds are gathering overhead in thick, tight bunches. The sky has darkened, and in the garden now a chill wind blows. All traces of summer heat have fled. Autumn is finally here.