by T. M. Logan
“We have to sit tight, Rowan, until the police get here. In the meantime, I’m going to talk to Sean. Find some answers.”
He was in the kitchen, Jennifer backing him into a corner. The argument died on their lips as I appeared in the doorway.
“I need some air, Sean. Let’s go out to the balcony, shall we?”
He nodded. He looked like a man who was on his way to the gallows and knew his soul was already damned.
“Aye,” he said softly.
It was time for the truth.
72
The air outside was thick with humidity, the storm to our south casting the land into deep shadow. It was pushing up fast and would be overhead soon. For now, though, the evening sun continued to beat down on the villa with an intense, relentless Mediterranean heat that started to bake my skin as soon as we stepped outside. Sean and I found a couple chairs and sat down at the far edge of the balcony, the French countryside spread out below us like a watercolor painting in vivid greens and deep, earthy browns.
“Before I say anything else, Sean, I just want to make one thing clear between us.”
“OK,” he said uncertainly.
“I’ve never trusted anyone in my life the way I trust you,” I said. “Not even my parents or my sister. The things I tell you, the things we share—I trust you completely.”
He nodded but said nothing.
“But this week that trust has been tested to the limit, to the point where I thought things would never be the same again, that we could never go back to the way they were. But I still think there’s a chance we can go back. Do you?”
He swallowed hard. “I hope we can.”
“Well, the only way that’s going to happen is if you trust me. You have to trust me. You have to tell me what’s going on, right here, right now. I need the truth.”
“I know.”
“And I swear to God, I swear on my life, if you don’t tell me the absolute truth—and I mean everything—the first thing I’ll do when we get home is file for divorce. It’ll kill me, but I will do it.”
“Don’t,” he said quickly. “Don’t do that.”
“No more secrets, then.”
He nodded. “No more secrets.”
“Good.”
He seemed to buckle in on himself, slumping into his chair as if he had been holding something back for so long that all of his energy was exhausted. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper.
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t push Izzy over the edge.”
I took his big right hand in both of mine. “I know, Sean. I know you didn’t.”
He looked up, blinking in surprise. “You do?”
“Yes.”
“But you thought I…”
“I’ve finally figured some things out.” It was nowhere near the truth, but I needed him to think that I knew, to push him into telling me. “I just need you to help me put the pieces together in the right order.”
He leaned back in his seat until he was staring straight up at the sky, at the dark clouds gathering overhead.
“Jesus, what a mess. What a fucking mess.” He looked down at me again. “It was when you mentioned Alex Bayley that I knew there was no point carrying on. That it was all over.”
“Tell me,” I said. “All of it.”
He rubbed his face in both hands, exhaled heavily, and looked out at the view for a moment, at the dark hills in the distance, before turning his attention back to me.
“It all started a few weeks ago,” he said.
“Go on.”
He hesitated, then plowed on.
“I was out running, training for that half marathon I was going to do. It was late and I was on those quiet little back roads out by the golf course and I came up behind a car stopped at a junction, just sitting there, lights on, engine running. Just this one car, no one else around. I thought maybe they were lost or something. It was only when I came level with it that I could see the driver was sitting behind the wheel, on his phone, and there was this mountain bike on the road in front of him, all bent out of shape. I looked back at the driver and recognized him.”
I remembered yesterday, Daniel finding himself alone in the villa; Jennifer’s insistence that her boys would never have taken one of the cars out.
“It was Jake, wasn’t it?”
“In Jennifer’s car. I’m about to knock on his window but then the next thing I know he’s slammed the car into gear and he’s off, like a bat out of hell. So it’s just me and this twisted-up bike, but then I see the cyclist. The impact had thrown him into the hedge on the far side of the road. I was sort of in shock, I think. I checked on the lad and he still had a pulse but he was in a bad way; he wasn’t wearing a helmet and his face was covered in blood. I take my phone out to call an ambulance but as I’m dialing, it starts ringing in my hand. It’s Jen, in floods of tears, begging me not to say what I just saw, not to give her car’s license plate number, to leave Jake out of it. I didn’t know what the fuck to do, she was so upset.”
I force myself to breathe.
“So you agreed.”
“I didn’t know what to do! I wanted to do the right thing and Jennifer was distraught. I wanted to help her, so I rang off, called the police and said I’d just found this lad and his bike, and that was it.”
“You didn’t mention the car, or the driver.”
He shook his head, the wind whipping at his hair. “Jen was in such a state, I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“You lied to the police?”
“I wish to God I hadn’t now.”
One little lie, one little deception to help a friend. And it had led us all here, shattered by grief, waiting for the police to arrive again.
“And that’s why you stopped going out running.” I shook my head. “I thought it was because you were saving your energy for an affair. God, I’m such an idiot.”
“We created fake profiles on Messenger to stay in contact, in case either you or Alistair ever looked at our phones. We were updating each other, working out what we should do next if things got dicey. The cyclist was in intensive care, and everyone was hoping he’d pull through.”
Need to talk to you
—Does K suspect anything?
She has no idea. But I can’t go on like this
—We’ll decide when we’re in France. Figure out what to do
Can’t keep my mind on anything else
“She was CoralGirl—those were the messages I saw on your phone.” I frowned at another memory. “But what about on Tuesday when I unlocked your phone and sent an invitation to her? It was Izzy who turned up.”
He looked at the ground.
“As soon as you went inside, I checked my phone and saw what you’d done. I managed to send Jennifer another message, calling her off. I was panicking, sure you knew what was going on by that point, so I suggested to her that she send Izzy up instead so she could get started on making tea.”
“And Izzy did what she was asked.”
His face crumpled, as if he might break down again.
“She was trying to be helpful.”
“Sean,” I said, “the cyclist was Alex Bayley, wasn’t it? From Lucy’s school?”
He nodded but said nothing.
“And he died.”
“Yesterday.”
“His friends put a tribute page up on Facebook. So that’s why Jake wanted to get wasted.” I had a sudden flash of Izzy trying to prop the teenager up as they struggled up the garden. “Why he was looking for oblivion.”
“He’d been holding it together, more or less, while Alex was still alive in hospital and they thought he’d pull through. It must have been after the water polo yesterday evening that they found out he’d died of his injuries.”
I thought about Jake’s and Ethan’s phones bleeping every few seconds while they were in the pool, notifications on social media as the news spread across their peer group like a wildfire.
Another piece fell into
place.
“And when Izzy found him in the gorge, he told her what he’d done, didn’t he? When he was drunk, he told her he’d killed someone?”
“Izzy confronted Jen about it this afternoon. Jen told me she begged her to keep it secret but Izzy wasn’t having any of it because of what happened to her fiancé.”
I remembered a packed church, standing room only, Izzy lightning-struck with grief for Mark, the man she had been about to marry. “Killed in a hit-and-run, and they never found the driver. There was absolutely no way she was going to be a party to that happening again, was there?”
“Not in a million years.”
“The one crime she was absolutely never, ever going to overlook, no matter who was involved. Because it happened to her.” I took a deep breath. “She was about to tell me this afternoon but I was too pigheaded to listen. And that’s when the fire started.”
“Yes.”
A cloud covered the sun, the temperature dropping a few degrees as the wind grew stronger.
“Fires started in more than one place, a distance apart, to ensure the flames take hold and can’t quickly be put out—I’ve seen it in arson cases before.” I shook my head. “I knew there was something off about it as soon as I saw it.”
“I had no idea Jen would go as far as she did,” Sean said. “No idea what she was capable of.”
“She was determined to keep it from me, at all costs.”
“She was.”
The picture was becoming clearer, but there was still one crucial point that I didn’t understand.
“Jen and Alistair are our friends and we want the best for their boys, I understand that. But what I don’t understand is, why didn’t you tell me about this?”
He stared at me as if the answer were obvious.
“Because of who you are, because of what you do. Because of what you’re like. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If I’d told you, it would have put you in an impossible situation, and we both know what you’re like: everything is black and white in your world; you would have marched me down to the police station in five seconds flat to change my statement.”
I considered this for a moment.
“You’re probably right.”
“You know I am.”
“They can’t stand outside the law. No one can.”
“Maybe not. But there’s another reason I didn’t tell you. A much more important reason.”
“What reason could there possibly be for withholding evidence and impeding a police investigation into a serious accident?”
“Because, Kate,” he said slowly, “it wasn’t an accident. Our daughter asked him to do it.”
73
Daniel
Daniel couldn’t remember the last time it had happened: a text from his sister. Maybe never. Back in England, most of the time she barely even noticed he was there, let alone spoke to him. Let alone texted him. But out here at the vacation house it was different. He’d given her those sweets last night and they’d had a nice chat, about all sorts of things. Daniel loved proper talks with her. It was true that he enjoyed winding her up, but he also looked up to her and was proud of her in a way that he couldn’t quite explain, and when she was nice she was so nice, so thoughtful and sweet and kind to him, that he wondered where that nice sister went the rest of the time.
He’d bought more sweets in the village today so maybe they could have another chat, and he really wanted to talk to her now after what had happened at the gorge. There was a funny, hard lump in his throat whenever he thought about Izzy. His eyes got twitchy, like he might cry again. She had fallen into the gorge and banged her head and now she was …
He didn’t want to think about it on his own anymore.
What he wanted to do was talk to his sister. He clutched his phone, the old iPhone with the cracked screen that he’d begged to inherit when his dad had last upgraded.
And then, like magic, it pinged with a text.
You OK? Got something to cheer you up, little bro. X
Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Daniel grinned and texted back three smiley face emojis and three kisses. He bounded across the corridor to her room, knocking lightly on the door, but she wasn’t there. Her room was empty. He texted her back.
Where are you? x
Lucy’s reply dropped in immediately. He read it and frowned, replying as fast as he could type.
Are we allowed? x
—Of course, little bro x
He smiled again. He couldn’t ever remember her getting him a present. Maybe when he was small, like a baby or something, but not that he could actually remember. The idea that she had gone out and spent her own money on a treat made him a bit happier just thinking about it.
Something to cheer you up, she’d said.
Daniel wondered what she’d got him. Sweets, hopefully. Maybe an inflatable for the pool, or a Frisbee for the beach. He was good at Frisbee.
He ran to his room, grabbed the bag of Haribo that he’d bought from the village supermarket, and ran down the curving staircase to the ground floor. Mum and Dad were still on the balcony, deep in conversation. Their heads were close together, like they were talking about a top secret thing. Something told him that he shouldn’t disturb them so he went back into the villa, down the steps into the games room, and out the side door that led straight out to the pool. There was no one around. The wind was whipping up little waves on the surface of the swimming pool and big gray clouds filled the sky, covering up the sun so it looked more like home than being on vacation. The clouds made it weirdly dark already, like it was almost bedtime.
Daniel made his way down through the garden and out through the big iron gate into the vineyard.
Halfway down the hill, he flinched at a colossal crack of thunder almost directly overhead.
And then the rain came.
Just a few spots at first, pit-patting on the vines alongside him, warm drops on his forearms and cheeks, growing faster and faster, every new drop followed by two more until, within a matter of moments, it had turned into a continuous roar as the full fury of the storm broke overhead. For a second, he thought about turning around and going back up to the villa. But Lucy was down in the woods, waiting for him. He didn’t want to let her down. And she had a present.
He decided to run instead.
A flash of lightning hit across the valley and another furious boom of thunder ripped the sky, so loudly that he hunched his head into his shoulders as he ran. It sounded as though the thunder was right above him, right on top of him.
At the edge of the woods, near a burned patch of grass, he stopped to catch his breath. The rain pounding on the leaves of the trees was a continuous barrage of noise and his T-shirt was already drenched. His hair was plastered to his scalp with rain and his glasses were smeared with raindrops. He took them off and wiped them on his sodden T-shirt, but as soon as he put them on they got smeared again. It was like looking through a car window when the wipers weren’t going fast enough. He peered into the woods.
There. A glimpse of his sister’s blond hair moving through the trees.
He set off after her.
74
I thought I’d misheard him.
“Lucy did what?”
Sean didn’t break eye contact.
“Did you know they were in a relationship, her and Alex Bayley?”
“What? No!”
“She was well and truly smitten. He was this good-looking rugby lad, played for one of the big team academies. Saracens, I think. I only found this out from Jen after what happened.”
“Why did she never tell us?”
“She thought we wouldn’t approve, that he would distract her from her GCSEs. Anyway, they broke up about a month ago and he had—he had a video of her that he was circulating to his mates.”
There was a sudden chill at the top of my spine, icy fingers lain across my skin.
“What kind of video?”
“The worst kind.”
<
br /> I remembered our conversation from a few days ago.
A video with you in it, Lucy?
The sort of thing … you wouldn’t want me to see?
She had told me, she had tried to tell me. But I hadn’t got the message, too preoccupied with my own problems.
“As soon as I knew it was out there,” Sean said, “I did what I could. I got it taken down off a couple of sites, but by then a lot of her classmates had already seen it.”
“Christ,” I breathed. “Go on.”
“Do you remember Russ and Rowan’s barbecue, when we all got together to plan for the vacation?”
“I remember Lucy being particularly grumpy and shouty and making us half an hour late because she wouldn’t get up and get dressed.”
“Jake followed her around like a puppy dog all afternoon, remember? Then she and the boys disappeared for an hour, in that office pod thing that Russ has at the bottom of his garden.”
“Daniel teased her about it.”
“Yeah.” He looked up at the sky, the clouds now hanging ominous and dark above us. The wind was picking up. “Let’s go inside, looks like the heavens are about to open.”
We went into the dining room and sat down at the end of the long table, right where I had sat with Izzy just a few hours before. My heart was heavy, like a lead weight in my chest, just thinking about her. I felt the tears coming again and blinked them back.
Sean held his hand out to me.
“Have you got your phone?”
I took my phone out of my pocket and unlocked it for him.
“What are you doing?”
He took the phone from me and went to a site called VideoVault, logging in with his own ID.
“Apparently Ethan was in the habit of taking candid pictures of girls, to look at afterward. He took some of Lucy. Little video clips, too, when she didn’t realize it.”
He found whatever he was looking for and turned the phone sideways, holding it up so we could both see.
“What am I looking at?” I said.
“Just watch.”
The video loaded. No titles, no intro, the film jerky like cell phone footage. The angle was looking up toward Lucy, as if it had been filmed from someone’s lap, but she was close and clearly identifiable on the left-hand side of the screen. A wooden-paneled wall behind her—presumably the inside of Russ’s garden office—and a bottle of his favorite cognac open on a low table in front of her. Our daughter was slumped on a sofa, one strap of her low-cut top loose on her shoulder, angry spots of color in her cheeks.
