The Dinner Guest

by B P Walter

  ‘I wanted to believe Collette would keep her word about no longer taking the stuff. I really did. And for a while, it looked like she was managing to do it. Then it became clear she was still seeing him. Still spending time with Johnny, even though she knew what he’d done to me. I began to have panic attacks. Would wake up at night, convinced the men in masks had returned and they’d castrated me or raped me with the hunting knife, or bound me up again in ropes. I began popping pills – opioids, on prescription – convinced I could still feel the bruises from their rough treatment of me. I was terrified Collette might bring him to the highlands and I’d have to see him face-to-face. I started to avoid her, even though this clearly hurt her. I was tempted to have it out with her, tell her she’d betrayed me, her brother, by continuing with that psychopath. But I didn’t. I couldn’t talk about it all. It was at Christmas when she came up to me and asked – in fact pleaded – for me to join her and our mutual friends, David and Sylvia Gibson, along with some of their cousins, on a skiing trip in Norway. They’d hired a few cabins and she said she was worried about me and it would probably help. I didn’t have to ski; she just said a change of scene and being around people would help both of us. She was worried about me, sitting in the castle with my thoughts. Eventually I gave in. She was going for a couple of weeks at the start of January before her university semester began.

  ‘The first few days were actually really good. Like, more than I could have ever thought possible. It did wonders for my spirits, and the change of scene really did have a rejuvenating effect. I’d always got on well with the Gibsons and it was really nice to spend time with them again. Their cousins were really nice too. All of it was going surprisingly well. Until one night, when we were having dinner in the main hotel building, Collette disappeared off for about half an hour. When she came back she had snow in her hair; she’d evidently been outside. Later I would discover she’d been outside to let someone into her cabin. Someone who’d just arrived. In Norway.’

  As Matthew paused I felt myself tensing, realising where this was heading. Of course, I’d always known the vague circumstances around the death of Titus’s father, but never had Matthew told me them in such clear detail, with such deliberate attempt to get the whole story across to me, the full picture. And I had a really horrible feeling of foreboding that I couldn’t shake off. A strong part of me even wanted to run out of the room, out of the house, away from his strained, slightly trembling voice. Away from what secrets it could reveal. But I didn’t.

  I carried on listening – a decision that would change our lives for ever.

  Matthew had to take a quick break at that point. He’d been talking for a while and hadn’t gone to pee since we’d got home from Oxford. While he went to the bathroom, and no doubt checked Titus was still safe in his room with his music playing, I went into the kitchen and grabbed some leftover pizza and pushed it into my mouth. I was suddenly starving. When Matthew came back he glanced at the pizza in my hands, and I instinctively offered it out. He shook his head and went back into the lounge. I followed, sat down, and allowed him to continue.

  ‘The holiday became something of a nightmare from then onwards. Collette stopped joining in as much with our activities. She mostly just spent time with Johnny in her cabin. When I realised he was there, I very nearly flew back home, but even that seemed impossible. I was sick outside in the snow; I struggled to get out of bed in the mornings. The closest I got to him was when Sylvia insisted we all had a photo together with our ski things. A whole bunch of other people had joined us in the week – university friends of Sylvia and a few guys David knew from home, who in turn brought their girlfriends. Somehow, the increase in numbers helped me feel a bit better. Anyway, we were having a photo done near one of the slopes – Sylvia had asked one of the staff to take it – and just as we were gathering round, I heard a voice I couldn’t forget. It was his voice. Johnny’s. He and Collette had joined us without me noticing. I’m not even sure what he’d said – something about him being fucking frozen. But it instantly took me back to that night. The black-clothed figure in the fox mask, pressing the cocaine-covered knife against my nose. And then I briefly saw Collette’s face. Her eyes. She was off her face. High as a kite. And something in me snapped. I left the group and went back to my cabin and packed up all my things. David came and found me just after I’d called reception to ask for a car to take me to the airport. He was confused why I was going. Did Collette know I was leaving? Was I feeling unwell? He kept asking all these things, but all I could do was shake my head and say I had to go home. And I did. I flew back to Scotland that afternoon.

  ‘My mother was concerned when she saw me getting out of the car without Collette. I’d felt relief wash over me when I boarded the plane and managed to hold myself together so I didn’t end up the mad one sobbing in first class. But once I’d stepped inside the castle, I fell into my mother’s arms and sobbed. I told her he was there. Johnny Holden was there. And I thought Collette was using again. To my shame, I abandoned both my mother and my sister after that. My mother kept questioning me. Wringing her hands about how she couldn’t get on a plane but how she wanted to go and find Collette herself. I didn’t help her. I left Scotland, went to London for a few months, and tried to bury myself in PhD research. It was March when I discovered Collette hadn’t returned from Norway. I was astounded by this news. It had been over a month, nearly two, since I’d flown back to the UK, leaving her there. My mother phoned to tell me Collette was pregnant. She was out there in Norway expecting her first child. Her first child with him. So we went out there by cruise ship. It took two weeks. Collette was dismissive and rude to us both, even though we’d travelled all that way. Johnny was belligerent and sneering towards my mother and when I started to get angry he said to me, “Calm down, love, don’t want you crying like a girl, do we?” I knew of course what he was referring to and it had its desired effect. It made me want to leave immediately. But in the end, Collette practically threw us out.

  ‘We missed the birth, months later – something that still pains my mother. She had a horrendous bout of flu, and wasn’t able to leave her bed – not that Collette gave us much warning. My mother pleaded for me to fly out and be with her, give her some support, so I did my best to push my fears of Johnny to the back of my mind and flew back out on what was now a familiar journey. They weren’t coping. Worse than not coping. They were a mess. It became obvious within minutes of being in their company that they were using something. I wasn’t sure what, but both were lying there like zombies on the beds, sofas, while the baby – Titus – was crying in a horrible plastic cot. I shook Collette, trying to wake her. She just murmured something like, “The birth was horrible” then went back to sleep. Johnny was dead to the world, asleep on the sofa in his pants like some teenager recovering from a hangover. Then I noticed the plate next to him. And the needles. And the bent spoon.

  ‘I should have taken the baby and run away with him or something – just left them both to their vile habits – but I didn’t know how they’d sorted it with passports and hospital visits. I was completely out of my comfort zone, out of my area of expertise. Collette and I had a bit of a shrieking match when she woke up properly. She took up the screaming Titus in her arms and said it was normal for mothers to go a bit off the rails in the first few weeks. I told her intravenous drugs was a bit further than off the rails. She said that stuff was just Johnny’s; she hadn’t touched it. I asked what she had touched, whether she was breast feeding, whether the drugs could be getting into her child’s mouth. She told me to fuck off and more or less kicked me out of the flat. I went for a walk around the woodland. Had dinner up at the main hotel building. Booked into a room there and slept for a few hours. Took a shower. In the late afternoon, I wandered back down to their cabin. It was twilight and I could see their lights were on, including the hanging ambient lighting of the veranda. As I walked up the steps, it became clear someone was in the hot tub. It was Johnny. He was asleep, or
smacked out of his head, once again, his chin lolling in the water. Then, as I got to the top of the steps, I saw what was nestled in his arms. Nearly underwater. It was the baby. It was Titus. He had sat down in the hot tub, high off his head, with a baby in his arms. He was dangerous. A sick psychopath.’

  Matthew paused, his eyes wide at me. And at long last, something fell into place. That horribly cold sense of dread that had been growing within me was rising. My eyes met his. And then I knew what he had done. Knew where this was heading. Had I always suspected this to be the case? Had I known, deep down, that there was something troubling about the death of Titus’s father? Maybe. But that wasn’t what was burning within me, threatening to break out, to lash out, to make me tear down the house with rage. It was the fact he was only telling me now. That he’d let us build a life together, involved me so closely in the life of his adopted son, with this lie buried so deep into the fabric of our existence. In that moment, I wanted to scream. But I said nothing. I just waited, and before long, he took a deep breath and continued.

  ‘I walked over to the hot tub and immediately lifted Titus out of the water. Thank God I arrived when I did as his head could have been submerged any second. Johnny had had him wrapped in a towel, which was soaked through with water. I picked up Johnny’s discarded clothes on the floor and used them to dry the baby off, then I went inside, jiggling him in my arms, trying to stop him crying. Collette was asleep on the sofa. She stirred a bit when I came in and mumbled to shut the baby up. She may have thought I was Johnny. She had a massive joint in her right hand, which was resting up against the sofa. Considering they were living in a wooden cabin, the idea of them messing around with lit joints and flames terrified me. I took the joint from her fingers and crushed it out onto a plate on the coffee table. I put Titus down in his cot and he stopped crying after a minute or two. Then I went back out to the lounge. Collette had gone back to sleep and Johnny was still in the hot tub outside. Time sort of slows down for me from that point onwards. But I know quite clearly my thought processes as I watched what was happening. As I walked closer, I could see that Johnny’s limp, pale body was sliding off the ledge inside the tub. And he was slipping deeper into the water. I expected him to take a gasp as the waterline went past his mouth. I expected an instinctive attempt to cling onto life to kick in. But it didn’t. Then it crept past his nose as his head dropped forwards, submerging the rest of his face into the warm water. No thrashing. No wild attempts to save himself. He just slid under. And didn’t come back up.’

  It was time for me to speak now. For if I didn’t, I feared I would scream. ‘You didn’t do anything to save him?’ I said the sentence quietly, but my clenched teeth betrayed my trembling emotion. Matthew noticed and he looked devastated by the question.

  ‘No. But … please … can’t you understand? Can’t you see why? He was destroying Collette’s life. He put me and my mother in an impossible situation. We would have been forced to involve the police, lawyers, potentially land her in prison. Social services. Custody battles. And not to mention what he…’ he stumbled, his voice quivering in a half sob, ‘what he did to me. I still dream of that night. A bolt of panic runs through me whenever I see a children’s animal mask. Have you ever wondered why sometimes I jerk awake in the early hours and struggle to get back to sleep? I’m haunted by it. Haunted by what he and his masked maniacs did to me.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’ I stopped myself from shouting, but I rose out of my seat and stood, in the centre of the lounge, unsure if I wanted to fly at him in rage or leave the room in protest, unable to cope with the depths of his secrets, the amount that had been unsaid between us. ‘You told me you weren’t there. You’ve always said… You’ve … lied to me all this time.’

  ‘Oh, come on, what good would it have done? That’s not something anyone wants to know. That their husband is guilty of, what … manslaughter? Maybe not even that. And besides, I prevented a death. The only reason Titus is alive upstairs now is because of me. Can’t you celebrate that? Can’t you cherish that one brilliant part of what happened?’

  I was close to shouting at him that it was not enough, not enough to excuse the years of deception, but then something else struck me. I paused, then collapsed back down onto the sofa, my head in my hands, my fingers rubbing into my eyes. I allowed a few more seconds to tick on as I tried to make my heart slow down. Then I said, as calmly as I could, ‘I still don’t understand what the fuck this has to do with Rachel.’

  Chapter Forty

  Rachel

  Less than a week to go

  In the nights leading up to the murder, I allowed myself to dwell on the past. Allowed myself to dwell on memories I normally tried to keep locked up. Doing so both stoked me up to press forward, and reminded me why it all mattered. As if I needed reminding.

  Travelling over to Norway to find my brother was one of the most difficult, most stressful times in my life. Through talking to some of Collette Jones’s university friends, and Johnny’s business acquaintances, I’d discovered Matthew Jones had flown out to try and convince his sister to break up with my brother and come home. He was staying in a room in the main building of the posh hotel complex. Of course, I couldn’t afford anything of the kind, what with my mounting credit-card debts and the less-than-secure state of my income. So I booked myself into a hostel on the outskirts of the forest, a half hour walk from the ski resort. It was a dreadful place – mix-gendered dormitories filled with penniless students going backpacking and various other unsavoury-looking characters. I was terrified. But I had to carry on, for the sake of my brother.

  The first shock was to find out he was now a father, meaning I, of course, was now an aunt. I had no idea Collette was pregnant; they’d been out in Norway for so long at this point, and I think she stopped him from letting his family know. I hammered on the door for ages before it was opened by a sleepy-looking Johnny. His hair had grown from the close-shaved look he had when he was in England. It reminded me of when he was younger, his scruffy blond hair adding to his cheerful, sunny personality. I saw Collette wandering into view behind him in a dressing gown, clutching something making a mewing, coughing sound.

  ‘Oh my God, Johnny,’ I gasped, my hands rising to my mouth in shock. ‘What have you done?’

  That meeting didn’t go well. He was either drunk or stoned and accusing me of ‘stalking him like a fucking nutcase’. Things got heated pretty quickly the next day when I went back and told him it would break Mum’s heart when she found out he’d had a child without telling her and that he needed to come home and we could work out what to do all together. He’d stood up, standing shakily in the hot tub he was sitting in, towering above me, told me I was being selfish and just wanted us to be a ‘happy little family’ which was, according to him, ‘a fucking fantasy I needed to let go of’. He then called me a bitch and told me to fuck off. I knew it must be the alcohol or drugs talking, but I still looked back up at him in shock. That was when it caught my eye. The mark on his right arm. Little circular wounds, merging together into one blot. Needle marks. So he had started on heroin. And short of calling the cops and trying to land my own brother in a Norwegian jail, there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.

  I only saw Matthew three times when I was there. Well, four times actually. But I wouldn’t discover the third until a long time after. The first was when I saw him strolling towards the cabin on the first day I arrived, the second when I had journeyed into the main building of the hotel, desperate for a proper meal. I’d been buying snacks at a nearby petrol station, but on the third night couldn’t bear it any longer. I went into the luxurious, warm main entrance of the hotel, and was about to be shown to a table in the restaurant when I saw the occupant of the one next to me. ‘Oh please,’ I said very quietly to the waiter, ‘perhaps … a table near the back, by the windows?’

  ‘Of course,’ the waiter said, giving me a kind smile. Before I was led over to the other side of the restaurant, I glanced
at the young man. He was pretty-boy handsome, and everything from his cream cable-knit jumper to his manicured nails shouted money and comfort. He was rubbing his eyes with his hands, and when he set them down on the table I saw his face. Stressed, tired, a man – no, a boy – out of his depth. I’ve often wondered, looking back, how things might have turned out differently if I’d gone to sit at that table and explained to him we were both there for the same reason. Offered to join forces in persuading our siblings to come home. But I didn’t. I went and ate a horrendously expensive meal I couldn’t really afford on the other side of the restaurant, and kept my head down for the rest of the evening.

  The next day I went for a long walk around the grounds of the hotel, and into the forest that bled into its grounds. Even though I was in the process of giving up my studio and photography business and looking for other employment, I still carried my camera around with me to take occasional pictures. There was something about it that soothed me.

  That was the day Johnny died. I flew back to England in the late afternoon. I would never forgive myself for not trying to visit him again. The body was returned to us in the UK – Collette wasn’t married to him, and I don’t know who they considered his next of kin, nor how the Norwegians worked the whole thing out, but eventually we were allowed to hold the funeral at home in Bradford. Collette came on her own. She sat at the back, sobbing quietly. None of us spoke to her.

  The months and years that followed were almost unbearably difficult as my mother’s cancer took hold, her grief over her son’s death knocking down any fighting spirit she may have had. Her strict Catholic upbringing caused her to refuse to believe she had an illegitimate grandson out there in the world.