The Dinner Guest

by B P Walter

  I stepped back into the room, ‘Yes?’

  I heard Titus sit up a bit more in his bed. ‘It was weird, you know. Rachel being in the room. I can’t quite work out what was a dream and what wasn’t but … I think she may have been standing here for quite a while before I realised she was real. It was … just weird.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Eventually I took a deep breath and said, ‘Try to put it out of your mind. I’m sure she didn’t mean any harm.’

  A few moments of silence passed, then he said, ‘OK,’ and I heard him relax back down into the pillows. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Night,’ I said softly, and closed the door, just as Matthew was approaching from around the side of the pool.

  ‘Is he all right?’ he asked, looking worried.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. I nodded towards our room, pointedly, and he got the message. Once we were inside with the door safely closed, I replied properly. ‘He told me a bit more of what happened.’

  Matthew looked worried. ‘OK. So … what did he say?’

  ‘He said Rachel was standing over him for quite some time.’

  His face became puzzled. ‘Then why did he scream and say it made him jump?’

  ‘He thought he was dreaming at first, I think. Then when the figure in the room came over to his bed and started stroking his hair, he then woke up properly. It’s enough to freak anyone out.’

  Matthew nodded, slowly. He looked thoughtful, then said, ‘I think I should go and check on him.’ He went to move past me, but I held him still.

  ‘Don’t. He’s going back to sleep. I really think it would be best to just let him … I don’t know, forget about it. Just for tonight. Then tomorrow we’ll sort things out properly.’

  This earned me a quizzical look. ‘Meaning…?’

  ‘Well, sending Rachel home for a start.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m not sure we could do that, since she’s not exactly our guest, is she?’

  I thought about this. He was right of course, although her presence did depend on us tolerating her. ‘Perhaps we could talk to Meryl,’ I said, thinking out loud.

  Matthew nodded. ‘We can do that. Calmly.’

  I frowned, offended. ‘Don’t say that. I’m not about to start shouting at her or anything.’

  Matthew held his hands up. ‘I know, I know, I just want to make sure we don’t upset her. I think I should talk to her.’

  ‘She’s my godmother!’

  Matthew sighed and walked away from me over to the table at the end of the room. I saw him stop and look around. ‘Where’s my phone?’

  He didn’t seem too worried at first, but then after checking under the desk and the armchair in the corner, I saw his movements become quicker. ‘It was definitely here; I put it on charge before we went to bed.’

  I felt anxiety start to spread through me. In the commotion, I’d just let go of the device and hadn’t noticed where it had gone. It took us a good five minutes until eventually, after we’d stripped the bed, we found it tangled up in one of the duvet’s folds.

  ‘How on earth did it get in there?’ he said, more to the air than to me, although I was growing more and more concerned at how I didn’t really have an answer.

  ‘Maybe we knocked it off the table when we ran out of the room?’ I said, realising how nonsensical it sounded after it left my mouth.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ he said, staring at it in his hand as if it were about to start talking to him and explaining its sudden ability to fly.

  ‘Then either this place is haunted, or your memory isn’t as good as you think it is.’

  He didn’t seem happy to drop it, but to my relief he eventually got back into bed and we turned off the light.

  Something was niggling at me and I didn’t feel I could let the evening end without mentioning it. ‘It is possible … that Rachel could be a paedophile. I know it’s rarer in women, or at least I assume it is. But it’s possible.’

  I hadn’t expected this to be greeted warmly from Matthew, and what he said next surprised me. ‘It crossed my mind … but it doesn’t really fit, does it? He’s almost at the age of consent; it’s not like he’s a little child.’

  ‘It’s still illegal,’ I said. ‘Both here in the US, and back at home, even if he isn’t exactly a virgin, as we know from his Kensington adventures – something you seemed way more worried about.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, letting out a sigh. ‘I’m not excusing it. Let’s just … talk about it in the morning.’ He turned over onto his side, signalling the end of the discussion.

  It took me a long time to fall asleep and, judging by the tossing and turning from Matthew, rest didn’t come easy for him either.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Charlie

  Three days after the murder

  I tell the detectives what happened that night in Long Island, keeping details as close as I can to the truth, whilst taking care to leave Titus out of the story. In his place, I put Matthew as the unclothed male in question, backing away from Rachel’s midnight visitation.

  ‘And how did Rachel know you wouldn’t have been in the room with Matthew?’ DI Okonjo asks, still writing in her notebook.

  ‘I’d mentioned I was going for a run, earlier in the evening before dinner. I encouraged Matthew to join me but he said he wanted an early night.’

  DI Okonjo doesn’t look convinced. ‘Still seems strange she’d take that risk, though. I mean, that’s a pretty late run.’

  I shrug. ‘Well, she probably saw me leave. Waited for her chance.’

  ‘Her chance to pounce.’ DS Stimson nods, apparently familiar with this kind of situation, which earns him a disapproving glance from his superior.

  ‘Did your parents and Rachel’s employer Meryl take against her after this … situation? I’m presuming you told them.’

  A slow, icy trickle feels like it’s making its way down my back. This was something I hadn’t considered how to deal with. To be honest, I’d barely considered anything properly.

  ‘No. We were going to the next day. Matthew and I … we talked about it, once Rachel had gone back to her room. But we decided not to say anything. Just to keep an eye on her. And to be fair on her, after that she didn’t try anything again.’

  DI Okonjo raises an eyebrow. ‘We’re going to speak to Meryl later,’ she says. ‘Get her take on the whole thing. She was understandably in shock when we first spoke to her, so it would be good to check over these details. See if anything new comes to her.’

  I don’t know if the detective sees the worry in my eyes, or if she’s just waiting for a reaction, but she holds my gaze for what feels like a disproportionately long time. Then she says, ‘We’ll leave it there for now. But we may need to talk to Titus again at some point.’

  The chill down my spine develops into an icy burn. I only manage a jerky nod, and, ‘Right,’ before I stand up a little too quickly and show the detectives out of the library.

  ‘We appreciate this is a difficult time,’ DI Okonjo says as she steps out of the front door. ‘I hope you understand we just want to make sure the charge against Rachel is safe and there isn’t anything … unusual going on here.’

  ‘Unusual?’ I ask, my voice sounding uncharacteristically high-pitched.

  She doesn’t reply to this directly, just nods and steps out the front door.

  ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Allerton-Jones,’ DS Stimson says, sounding a touch friendlier than he had when he first entered. Maybe the two of them have a good-cop/bad-cop thing going on that they haven’t quite ironed out. Then I see DS Stimson look round the outside of the house once again as he walks down the steps, and shake his head with a smirk. We aren’t people to them, I think. We’re things. Props in their pantomime. Actors in their strange play, there to be moved about and manipulated.

  ‘If they do need to speak to Titus again,’ Jacob says as I close the door, ‘just give me a call. And remember, you can ask to be present as the boy’s
appropriate adult. He doesn’t need to do it alone.’

  I nod. ‘Thank you. I’m going to need to think about things for a bit. Do you want to speak to my father at all? I can go and find him.’

  Jacob shakes his head. ‘I’m actually running late for another appointment. Your father phoned me just in time before I set off.’ He surveys me as if I were still a child, sitting on the window seat as my parents hosted dinner parties, occasionally trying to talk to the guests in my no-doubt irritatingly precocious way. ‘Chin up, my dear boy,’ Jacob says, laying a hand on my shoulder. ‘And of course, it goes without saying, I am very, very sorry for your loss. I’m not sure I said that properly before. It breaks my heart to see your family experience something like this. But I’m sure you’ll all come out the other side.’

  I give him a thin smile. ‘I do hope so.’ I open the door again and Jacob leaves. ‘Someone’s delivered flowers,’ he says, bending down to pick them up. ‘Odd for them not to ring the doorbell.’

  I take them from him. The bunch is made up mostly of roses, already arranged in a glass vase, and there is an envelope attached to them. I bid Jacob goodbye and close the door, setting the flowers down on one of the little tables in the hallway, leaving the envelope next to them. I’m about to go upstairs and check on Titus when my mother spots me from down near the entrance to the kitchen.

  ‘Darling, what’s happening? Have the police left?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say distractedly, not wanting to discuss what was said but knowing I probably should.

  ‘Your father’s in his study and wants to talk to you,’ she replies, her worried eyes peering into mine. ‘You really don’t look that well,’ she says. ‘I think you should probably have a lie down.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I reply, distantly. ‘I just want to check on Titus.’

  She looks even more pained at this. ‘I really hope you know what you’re doing,’ she says, but lets me go without further protest.

  I don’t know what I’m doing. In fact, this past forty-eight-hour period has been a journey of painful self-discovery for me: that I’m terrible at tactics, planning, and thinking on my feet. I can feel the situation hurtling out of control and I take the stairs two at a time as I march upstairs.

  Titus is in bed. It’s alarming me how he seems to have taken to sleeping during the day since his father’s death – although I have to remind myself it has still only been two days. I don’t know how long shock and grief are supposed to last, but it’s probably reasonable for a fifteen-year-old boy to still be reeling from the violent events of two nights previously. As I draw close, I discover he’s not asleep, but reading a book on his side, the hardback cover pressed into the pillows. I sit down next to him and he closes the book, keeping his hand at the page he’s up to, allowing me to see the title in full: Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising. I find the bleakness of his reading choice – an unusually violent and genre-focused choice for a reader usually more concerned with the classics or literary fiction – so disquieting it almost makes me flinch. I decide, however, not to remark upon it. ‘How are you?’ I say quietly, as if the room itself were asleep and too loud a noise would cause frightening things to happen.

  ‘I’ve been better,’ Titus replies, pulling himself up in the bed so he’s facing me properly.

  ‘Do you need to talk?’ I ask, laying a hand on his arm.

  Titus shakes his head.

  ‘The police were here just now. I thought they’d ask to speak to you, but they were just interested in me today. They’ll probably return, though, once they’ve spoken to Meryl.’

  He looks puzzled. ‘Meryl?’

  I take a deep breath. ‘The situation involving Rachel, in Long Island, when she came into your room at night … I told them about that. But I said it was your dad’s bedroom – our bedroom – she came into, not yours. I said I was out for a run and she tried to … get with him. And he turned her away. I thought it would be a good way of making it seem like she was … I don’t know … bitter towards him. But I forgot…’ My voice shakes now, almost turning into a sob. ‘I forgot that she might have told Meryl that it was your room, not Matthew’s, she was caught in … so this may have just made things worse.’

  I wipe my eyes and try to control my emotions, breathing slowly and clearly, my brain a mixture of panic at the situation and anger at myself for being so stupid – and for crying in front of Titus when I needed him to stay strong.

  Titus surprises me with a small shrug. ‘We’ll just say Meryl’s wrong. That Rachel was probably upset about the ordeal but said it was me in order to … I don’t know … divert attention away from what really happened. In fact, are you sure Rachel would even tell Meryl anyway? Surely she’d have just been thankful nobody else heard the commotion and just, well, tried to forget about it?’

  I’m impressed at how much more of a handle on the situation Titus seems to have compared to me. Even if I am keeping secrets from him. For his own protection, of course.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, nodding slowly to myself, ‘you’re right. You might need to say that to the police, if you’re asked.

  He nods. ‘OK.’

  I look at him, and he looks at me, and it’s as if, in that moment, I can see a replay of the whole violent carnage of that evening played out in slow motion: the blood, the gasps of shock from Matthew, and then Rachel, standing there, telling us what to do.

  ‘If you wanted all this to stop, right now, I wouldn’t blame you,’ I say, my voice low but thankfully steadier than it has been. ‘If you didn’t feel you can go through with this … with the lying, for the rest of your life, I would understand. I’m doing my very best for you, to make sure things don’t change, to make sure me, you, my parents, all stay a united team. But if you think it will be too difficult, now is probably the time to say.’

  He’s still staring back at me, his face oddly blank. Then finally he says, ‘I think we should carry on as we are.’

  I give his hand a squeeze, then get up from the bed. ‘I’ll leave you to your book. But come and find me if you need anything.’

  As I close the door, I see him settle back down into his strange reading choice, leaving me feeling even more uneasy than I had when I entered the room.

  Back downstairs, I know I should go to see my father to update him on my talk with the detectives, but detour via the kitchen for a glass of water. I see on the table my mother’s brought through the flowers I’d left in the hallway and left them on the kitchen table, the card now out of its envelope. I pick it up and glance through it. Then I see the name and freeze. It takes me only a few seconds to read the note, but I force myself to do it again, slower, taking in every single word, every fucking word. Then I pick up the vase and carry it roughly – vase, wrappings and all – and drop the whole thing in the sink, allowing the glass to smash. Grabbing a fire lighter from the windowsill, I begin flicking it at the flowers until the paper surrounding them catches alight. The roses themselves don’t burn properly, but start to shrink and curl as the wrapping flares around them, the smashed glass encased within it now breaking loose into the sink. Then I hear a noise from behind me.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Rachel

  Two months to go

  I expected Matthew and Charlie to out me to everyone the next day after they discovered me in Titus’s bedroom. But, to my surprise, nothing further was said about it. Or at least, nothing to me. I suspected Charlie may have mentioned something to his mother, because she gave me another of her strange looks over lunch the next day. I decided it would be best to keep my distance from all three of the Allerton-Joneses and instead keep my attention on making sure Meryl was happy and had everything she needed, along with getting through book after book by the poolside.

  It was the week after we returned to London when things became difficult. Meryl was asking me about timings between her hair appointment and the book-club meeting in the evening. The two of us were expected at
Carlyle Square at 7pm, and when I looked up at Meryl over the pages of her diary, I felt my lip tremble a little. ‘I … I don’t think I’ll come,’ I said, trying and failing to look and sound normal.

  Meryl’s kind green eyes rested on me. ‘My dear,’ she said, laying a hand on my arm, ‘what on earth could be the matter?’

  I let my knees collapse so that I was sitting on the sofa and Meryl sat down next to me. Her hand once again ended up patting my arm, and after a few seconds of swallowing hard to hold back my tears, I was finally able to speak. ‘I don’t think … I would be welcome.’

  Meryl brought her hand back to her lap. ‘I don’t understand, my dear, why would you not be welcome?’

  I dabbed at my eyes with the back of my hand. I was supposed to be keeping a cool head. A calm, clear game, that was my aim. But suddenly, I felt a real, burning need to confess something, anything, some aspect of what happened in New York, otherwise I felt like I would shatter into a thousand pieces. ‘Something … something odd happened.’

  ‘Odd, what do you mean, odd?’ Meryl said, her brow creasing.

  I couldn’t hold her gaze for long, and instead focused on my hands, clasped around her diary in my lap. ‘I … I walked into the wrong room, one night. I was by the pool reading and I fell asleep. All the rooms look the same from the outside around the pool area and … well, when I went back into what I thought were our quarters, I ended up in Titus’s room. It was an accident, but when he noticed there was someone in his room he shouted. Not that I blame him; he must have been freaked to think a stranger was in his room. So Matthew and Charlie burst in, and because Titus was in bed … unclothed … and I was just in my bikini … well, it looked…’

  I looked to the side to see Meryl nod understandingly. ‘It looked improper.’ Meryl took a deep breath, then said, ‘Listen to me, my dear. I’m going to let you into something that I ask you to keep to yourself. Both men are very protective of Titus. Understandably so; they are the boy’s guardians. But it’s all wrapped with the situation involving Matthew’s sister, Collette, Titus’s birth mother. She died of a drug overdose shortly after Titus’s birth, same as the boy’s father a month or two earlier over in Norway where they were staying. Tragic. Absolutely tragic. A total waste of life. So much potential, never realised. So all of that is tied up with their relationship with the boy. The pressure, the sense of responsibility to give the boy a stable, loving home – something he was denied when his parents died. Essentially, what I’m trying to say is, don’t take it to heart. They’ve always been a tad over-protective. I’m sure they’re just feeling embarrassed that they over-reacted.’