The Dinner Guest

by B P Walter

  I sat, watching my husband standing there, tense and strung out, and got the sense we were arriving at a moment we’d always been destined to reach at some point. It was as if the world was changing before my very eyes. Things I’d regarded as certain, although unexplored, were exploding off into new avenues of unsaid truths and downright lies. An energy was burning through me – an energy that made me want to seize Matthew and shake the full story out of him and demand he tell me every last horrid detail. But I didn’t do this. I had to let him tell it in his own way. Somehow I knew that would be the best thing to do. And judging by his body-language and flushed appearance, he was about to reveal something momentous.

  ‘She tried to break up with Johnny,’ Matthew said, his eyes distant, his mind back among the demons of his past. ‘But as you can imagine, he didn’t take the news well.’

  Slight tremors became visible in his face in that moment. His cheek twitched; he blinked quickly and rubbed his eyes. I had the impression he was re-living something. An old memory he’d kept buried for years was being dragged to the surface. The past was coming back, ready to decimate the present, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  ‘Johnny did something. Something I’ve … never really spoken to anyone about. Not properly. Apart from Collette. She knew everything that happened. And I think it destroyed us both. Her through denial, and me from the sheer horror of it.’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Rachel

  Less than a week to go

  I sat in my bedroom in Meryl’s flat, my laptop open in front of me. I felt both excited and a little sad as I tapped away at the computer, opening up multiple tabs. I knew it would be one of the last nights I spent in a comfortable, gorgeous room. It would all change soon. But there were a few things I needed to find out first.

  I knew showing my hand at the Ashtons’s manor would speed things up. Remove the safety net I’d crafted for myself. But this lifestyle I’d managed to build was never meant to last for ever. In the years that followed, I would examine in granular detail those last couple of evenings of freedom as I went for evening walks around the quiet streets of Belgravia, or drifted through the private gardens of Eaton Square. Evenings when thoughts of giving up my main aim surfaced, like a dull, distant voice in my head telling me that what I was about to do was morally wrong. That I should just carry on as I was. Living. Enjoying London life. There were times I even imagined an alternate future for myself, where I continued working for Meryl as her assistant, moving into the apartment on Belgrave Place when it was finished, having a flat all to myself of the kind I’d never have dreamed of before. Maybe Meryl would leave me something in her will when she died and I’d be able to keep the flat. I’d have been able to sell it for millions of pounds and buy a large estate in Yorkshire. Move back to start a new life as I journeyed through my middle age. But I’d dashed all hope of that as soon as I entered that bathroom in Marwood Manor and allowed Matthew Allerton-Jones to realise who I was. So whenever those thoughts of abandoning my plan surfaced, I let them float away, as if they were leaves on a stream.

  The tabs I’d opened on my laptop were for a number of websites, some medical and some forums, giving clear instructions. They specified which knives would be best to use, which techniques would work with nearly all sharp blades, how to angle the knife, when to release the pressure. It was all there, easy to access at the tap of a few fingers on a keyboard. Like most things these days.

  I didn’t bother to use private browsing, not that that would delay the police much anyway. I had no interest in trying to put off the inevitable. When the computer forensics people searched my laptop, it would all be there, plain to see. If they wanted to know why, well, that would be a good test of their detective skills. They’d figure it out, in the end.

  Once I had all the information I needed, I made my decision. I would do it later this week. I’d give time for the shrapnel from my little bombshell to ricochet through the Allerton-Jones family for a few more days. Perhaps he’d tell his husband what he did. Or maybe he’d try to carry on as normal. Whatever he did, he knew I was there, nearby, less than a couple of miles away.

  Waiting. Like a coiled spring.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Charlie

  Less than a week to go

  I felt myself getting a little cold, wary of what he was about to tell me. Something new and clearly deeply uncomfortable for him to remember. Matthew took a moment to refill his glass, sipped and let the whisky swirl around his mouth. Then he set the glass down and said, ‘Johnny Holden attacked me. I was staying the night at the castle alone. I was working on a PhD application and thought I’d appreciate the peace and quiet. Collette was in Durham and my mother was visiting a friend in Edinburgh. I’d been working late and went to bed at around one in the morning. At about 2am, I was woken by a thud, but didn’t think much of it – just presumed it was a cat or something outside. It was when I heard a creak on the landing that I woke up properly. Four men walked into my room, dressed in black and wearing the masks of woodland creatures. A squirrel, a rabbit, a badger, and a fox.’

  He winced, closing his eyes for a moment, as if pained by the images he was trying to describe. ‘It’s hard to put into words how paralysing fear can be. I thought I’d fallen into a nightmare, a literal, living nightmare. For a few seconds I couldn’t move. Then I saw they were carrying rope. That was when I tried to run, but they grabbed me as I leapt out of bed and set about tying me up. They tied up my ankles and arms – not much, but enough so they could carry me easily even as I tried to kick free. Some material was put in my mouth and taped to my jaw. They took me down the old servants’ stairs at the back of the house and out the kitchen door into the grounds. In the garden, by the fountain, they made me sit on one of the benches and then one of them brought out a knife. A thick, hunting knife. I can honestly tell you, in that moment, I thought I was going to die. I thought they were going to cut my throat and let me bleed to death on a bench in the garden, to be found by my mother or one of the gardeners.’

  He stopped for a moment, then went over to the drinks table and poured himself some more whisky and took a sip. When he put the glass back down, I could see his hand was trembling.

  ‘They used the knife to cut off my boxers. Slashing at the material, so I had scratches down my thighs. But aside from these few scrapes, they didn’t hurt me with it. Instead, they humiliated me. Laughed at me. Made threats about what they were going to do to me. Jeered at me, as I sat naked and trembling, shining the torches they were carrying in my face then turning them off and on so I couldn’t properly see. Then, when I thought they’d finally follow through on one of their sickening threats, one of them – the man with the fox mask – produced a bag … like a freezer bag. One of them held a torch to it so I could see what it was. It was a bag of cocaine.

  ‘Two of them held me down, while the fox and the badger covered the blade of the knife in the powder and then put it to my nose. Because my mouth was gagged, I had no choice but to breathe in. They held it there, the blade digging into me, as I tried not to hyperventilate, knowing the more harshly I breathed, the more cocaine I would take in. I’m not sure how much I ended up consuming, but they dipped the knife into the bag a number of times. It was the fox who kept making me take the stuff. And on one of the doses – the second or third, maybe – he said to me, ‘Mess with your sister’s life again, and we’ll fuck you up worse than this.’ Whether it was the drugs, or from trauma, or a cumulative effect as a whole, I felt my heart beating faster and faster and I began to feel extremely sick. I thought I was having a heart attack. The world had already been spinning, but at that point it felt like it had properly turned upside down. I couldn’t tell what was happening any more. I may have had a small fit, or just blacked out, because I awoke to them lowering me into the fountain head-first, one of them shrieking in my ear; I’m not even sure what it was he was saying. It may have been just a long continuous moan to disorientate me. The
y kept pulling me in and out of the water, each scrape of the stone fountain against my flesh sending stinging pains all over my body. It may have lasted a few minutes or a few hours. I ended up passing out again. Perhaps they thought they’d killed me and fled. Maybe they just got bored. Or felt they’d completed what they set out to do. I could have easily drowned or died from the cold, left there half submerged and naked in the fountain for the rest of the night.’

  I leaned forwards, astonished by his words and, strangely, compelled by them. I was gripped by this hidden chapter in my husband’s life and how it had shaped him as a person, whilst all this time he kept it hidden from view. Like a bad dream you filed away and tried not to think about. Except this hadn’t been a dream. This had been true brutal trauma. And I didn’t know whether to hug him close and tell him nobody would ever hurt him like that again, or let my anger boil over and make it clear to him how betrayed I felt by him refusing to let me in on such a momentous part of his life.

  When I opened my mouth, I paused a little, unsure of what to say. Then I asked the question at the forefront of my mind. ‘How did Collette react when you told her what her boyfriend had done?’

  A small tear fell silently from Matthew’s right eye. ‘I think that’s the part that upsets me most, to this day.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Charlie

  Less than a week to go

  I struggled to see how Matthew’s ordeal could have become any more upsetting than it was already. I was wrong, of course.

  ‘Did Collette find you, after the attack?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘When I woke, I imagined it was her. That she’d come to rescue me. But it wasn’t. It was just the teenage boy who worked with our head gardener on the estate. I’d gone through too much at that point to feel anything other than a dull relief. The lad – to my shame, I didn’t know his name – seemed to think it was funny. The benches around the fountain were littered with vodka bottles, and one of the masks was floating in the fountain’s water. The fox mask. I think the boy thought there’d been some sort of party. He may have even made reference to a stag do or something. I didn’t correct him. I just nodded and tried to clamber out of the fountain, but struggled. He helped me out and offered me his jacket so I had something to wear on my walk back to the house. I’m not sure what it was about that – maybe just because it was a moment of kindness after experiencing so much horror – but it made me burst into tears. It probably terrified him.

  ‘Although he was only about four years younger than me, it must have been a bizarre sight to witness – the man of the castle, found naked in the fountain of his own garden surrounded by vodka bottles and cocaine, crying like a child. But he didn’t run; he just awkwardly told me things “weren’t that bad” and we all had a wild night now and then. So he walked me back to the castle. He had to help me – I was trembling so much – and by the time we’d got up the stairs up to my room I think he realised something serious had happened, as he started to suggest phoning someone for me, perhaps even an ambulance. I begged him not to; I said I was fine and I didn’t need any help. I just needed to go to bed, to sleep. Forget everything. But it wasn’t over. There was a surprise waiting for me in my room. The boy opened the door for me and helped me in. I was shivering terribly by that point and he picked up a towel I’d left on the floor so I could put it round me. That was when he noticed the photographs. All over the bed. Must have been a hundred or more. Polaroids. They were scattered all around the duvet and pillows. I think he said something like “fucking hell” when he picked one of them up and offered it out to me.

  ‘The first one I saw confused me. It was of a woman’s naked breasts, a hand touching them. I asked the boy what it was doing there, but of course it was a pointless question. I looked down at the rest of them and a few seconds later realised what they were. They were photos of Collette. In a lot of them, she was completely naked; some had her legs open. In many of them, she was accompanied by a young man. His face wasn’t visible in most, but it was pretty obvious who it was. Johnny Holden. Some of them showed her sucking his cock, others were of him fucking her. She looked off her face, wasted, high, stoned. I was already in pure shock when I saw them, but this was the final straw. I crashed across the room into the en suite and was violently sick. I don’t know whether the gardener’s boy recognised Collette from the photos. He may never have seen her, since she visited so infrequently and the estate was so large. Or maybe he presumed I had some sick, incestuous porn thing going on with her. I don’t know. But the vomiting made him even more keen to call someone, and again I begged him not to. In the end, he helped me into the bed, the photos brushed onto the floor, and filled a glass of water from the bathroom. I hope I said thank you at the time, but I think I fell asleep almost immediately. I slept through the whole day and into the evening, waking when it was getting dark around 7pm.

  ‘My phone had been on my nightstand the whole time. When I woke, the battery was dead and I put it on charge. Tons of missed calls and messages came flooding in. They were from Colette. She said Johnny was furious, that he blamed me for getting her to leave him and give up the drugs. She was terrified of what he’d do to me. It was only moments after I’d showered and dressed that I heard the front door go. Part of me was terrified it was the gang of men back again for round two, but then I heard Collette’s voice calling me. She was beside herself. She had got the train up, terrified of what she might find. I got quite upset when I saw her. She could tell immediately something had happened, even though I didn’t really have any visible marks aside from a small cut under my nose from where they’d held the knife to me. We went down to the servants’ area and sat in the kitchen like we’d done as children when we still had live-in staff. We were always getting in their way, but loved the warmth of the Aga and our cook, Mrs McDonald, often gave us gingerbread. Of course, on that horrible evening there was no freshly baked gingerbread. Just basic decaffeinated teabags, stale biscuits and Collette trying to get me to tell her what had happened.

  ‘When she’d got it out of me, she cried and hugged me. Then I told her I wanted to call the police. That was when things turned tricky. She told me he’d got her fingerprints on bags of cocaine – a large shipment he was helping to distribute. He was starting to earn quite big money from it all, and she’d helped him pack some of it up and into bags. I asked her how could she have done such a thing, but she just shook her head, tears spilling from her eyes and said, “Oh dearest, if only you knew what love was like.” I felt sick hearing her talk like that. Talk as if their love was some Romeo and Juliet star-crossed lovers’ romance. I told her he was a psychopath; what he did to me was horrific. I thought I was going to die. She was upset by it, I could tell, but she said if I went to the police he had evidence that would land her in prison. Evidence that she’d assisted – even funded, with her own money – some of his criminal activities. She told me that if I could bear not reporting the incident, she really would go clean; never touch the stuff again. I asked if she would leave him for good too. Never touch him again. Never see him again. Never contact him again. She wouldn’t assure me on that. She said things weren’t that simple.

  ‘That was when things turned bitter between us. I didn’t want to talk to her after that. I told her she should go back to Durham. I wouldn’t go to the police because I didn’t want her to go to prison, but I couldn’t be around her if she was still seeing him. I left her in tears in the kitchen. I feel awful about it now. And at the door, I said something worse. I told her he had images of him fucking her. They’d been left on my pillow. And I said, “I’ve still got them in case you want to keep them for your scrapbook.” That was a reference to something she used to do as a kid – even into her teenage years.’

  I nodded, ‘I remember you telling me about it, when Titus used to do the same when he was younger.’

  Matthew looked sad and distant after I said this. ‘Perhaps he inherited her creative streak,’ he said, his eyes shin
ing. ‘She didn’t just do it for holidays, though. She’d fill these large, leather-bound books with photos of all sorts of things. Animals, pages from books, leaves. She’d always have a new project on the go. And somehow, me mentioning something so vulgar in the same breath as one of her childhood passions felt nasty. Ugly. Something broke between us that day. Things were never the same again, right up until she died.’

  Matthew paused, and looked over at me. It was as if he knew what I was thinking. Knew that I was going to ask the question that had been on my mind since he started talking. ‘You never felt you could tell me?’

  As I said it, his face crumpled into something broken, fractured, like a smashed mirror. For a second, I thought he was going to burst into tears. Then he pressed his fist to his mouth and took in a deep, shaky breath.

  ‘There’s more. A lot more. To be honest, all that stuff was just the beginning.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Charlie

  Less than a week to go

  Matthew settled himself down into the single-seater chair near the fireplace. He rubbed his face. Brushed his fringe away from his forehead. Then focused his eyes on the floor as he continued to talk.