I make a ‘pah’ noise. ‘I was married to him for fifteen years. We’ve brought up a child together.’
For a minute, I stop, remembering the paternity test. I squash the guilt back into its box. Then I continue. ‘You were a plaything. A nothing. You were with him for the blink of an eye. That’s no marriage.’
‘It is in the eyes of the law. And you’re forgetting something. We have a child.’ Her fists clench by her side. ‘They’ve sent my daughter to foster-parents. I need you to help me get her back.’
I try to bury a small stirring of sympathy. ‘A baby,’ I spit. ‘You’d only just started. You haven’t had to go through what I have. Haven’t had to give up everything to look after a demanding child while Ed –’
‘Ha!’ Carla breaks in furiously. ‘Don’t be so self-righteous. I’ve paid my dues too. Ed wasn’t an easy man to live with. The drinking, the lies, the mood swings, the jealousy, the so-called artistic temperament …’
So he was the same to her too? I feel a shot of pleasure. Yet when it comes from her mouth, I find myself wanting to defend him. He was under pressure … he felt everything too deeply … Why is it that I seem to remember the best side of my ex-husband instead of the bad bits? Yet I am forced to agree that he had his defects.
‘He was so controlling,’ shudders Carla. ‘And he was a bastard to you.’
This isn’t a word I care for, but I find myself nodding. Then I stop. Time to be professional. ‘Controlling?’ I repeat. ‘Is that why you killed him?’
She leans forward now. Her hands are clenched into two small balls. I can smell her breath. Minty. Fearful.
‘Someone was there. I told you. I saw a man.’
‘Well, that’s convenient. What exactly did this man look like?’
‘Can’t remember.’
She sits back now, supported by the wall, crossing her legs on the bed. Cool. Too cool. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m in shock. By the way, do you have a hairbrush on you?’
A hairbrush? Seriously?
‘I shouldn’t be here either,’ I say, getting to my feet. It’s true. I should be at the hospital, in the morgue. Identifying my husband instead of allowing Ross to do it.
‘No. Please. Stay.’
Her hand reaches out and catches mine. It’s cold. Stone cold. I try to pull it back, but it is clutching mine, continental style, as if we have just met at a dinner party and discovered we have a mutual friend.
‘I need you, Lily. I want you to be my lawyer.’
‘Are you insane? Why should I help you? You stole my husband.’
‘Exactly. But if you defend me, it’s a message to the rest of the world that even the woman I wronged believes I didn’t kill Ed. The barrister that you pick will trust you. And you’re a good person. You have a reputation for saving the underdog.’
Her eyes flicker. ‘And that’s what I am now.’ Gone is the confident young woman. The latchkey kid is back.
But I’m still getting my head round all this. ‘Let’s say you are telling the truth. What’s in it for me? Why should I help the woman that destroyed my family?’
‘Because you lost all those defence cases before you moved out of London.’ Grown-up Carla now steps in. ‘You might be doing all right with negligence cases. But this is a chance to prove you can do it again with a murder.’
She looks at me like she knows she’s hit a nerve.
‘Please, Lily. Do it for Poppy if you can’t do it for me.’
‘Who?’
‘My child. Our child.’
I hadn’t known her name. Deliberately. I’d asked Ross not to tell me. It made her less real.
‘If I go to prison, I’ll lose my daughter.’ Carla’s eyes fill with tears. ‘I … I didn’t feel well for a time. I wasn’t … I wasn’t a great mother. But now my own mother is dead.’
I hadn’t known that. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I murmur. ‘How?’
‘Cancer.’
Carla lifts her big brown eyes to mine. ‘I miss her so much! I can’t let Poppy miss me like that. Please, Lily. You’re a mother. Help me.’
‘Maybe,’ I say, feeling an almost pleasurable harshness coming out of my mouth, ‘foster care is the best place for her.’
Her eyes bore into mine. ‘You don’t mean that, Lily. I know you don’t.’
Damn her. She’s right. This is a baby we’re talking about. A baby who will be screaming with anguish because she can’t smell her mother. Children, however old they are, need their parents. How would Tom cope if I wasn’t around?
‘But I’m not sure I believe that you’re innocent.’
‘You have to.’ Carla’s hands are tightening even more firmly round my wrist. She’s a small girl again. I am the older woman. Too old to be a sister. Too young to be a mother. Yet we have so much in common. It’s as if her life is inextricably bound to mine and, however hard I try to shake her off, she’s always there. An evil shadow? Or a child who’s been misunderstood?
I run my hands through my hair. ‘How do you know I wouldn’t put up a poor defence? To make sure you’re convicted to get back at you.’
Her eyes are trusting. ‘Because you’re too moral for that. And because you’re also ambitious. Think about it, Lily. You could go down in history as the lawyer who helped acquit your husband’s new wife.’
It bears, I must say, a certain ring to it. And yet there are numerous holes in this argument, so many flaws in the defence. I also don’t care for the fact that Carla keeps using my name. It’s a legal technique to get a client onside. And she knows it.
‘There’s still the small matter of who murdered Ed if you didn’t do it.’
Even as I say the words, they don’t feel true. My husband – because that’s how I still see him – can’t really be gone. He’ll be at home. My old home. Sketching. Breathing.
Carla’s grip is strong for one so small. I’m still trying to shrug it off, but she’s determined, it seems, to hang on to me as if I am a lifebelt. ‘Ed was up to his eyes in debt. I don’t think the money was always borrowed from official places. Maybe someone wanted it back. Surely the police could find out. And I saw that man at the door. Someone must have seen something.’
She seems so certain. My legs begin to shake as if someone else is rocking them.
‘There’s something else too. I’ve been receiving anonymous notes.’ Carla’s eyes are locked on mine. ‘They implied something bad would happen to me and Poppy because of what I’d done to you.’
I go hot, then cold.
‘Have you kept them?’
‘Only the last. Then I tore it up, like the others, because I was scared Ed might go mad. But I’d recognize the handwriting again.’
Handwriting?
A paralysing chill crawls down the length of my body, eating it up, inch by inch.
‘You can’t afford me.’ I’m clutching at straws now. ‘I can’t do it for free. My firm will need to charge you.’
Those eyes now glint. She can tell she’s winning me over. Suddenly I know what she’s going to say before she says it. ‘Ed’s sketches! The ones he gave me as a child. They’re worth something now. I will sell them to prove my innocence!’
It tastes, I have to admit, of the most delicious irony.
58
Carla
Of course, Carla told herself, she hadn’t meant all that stuff about needing Poppy and getting her back. That was just to get Lily onside.
For the first time in months, she was finally feeling more like her old self. With Ed gone, she was no longer a child who did everything wrong. She no longer had Poppy’s screams ringing in her ears day and night: a painful reminder, as if she needed one, that if it hadn’t been for getting pregnant, she would still be free. Without the child, she was sleeping better, although her dreams were still punctuated by Mamma. Sometimes she would sit bolt upright in the night, convinced her mother was still alive. Then she would remember. If only, she sobbed, hot tears streaming down her face, she could have been with Mamma at the end.
Meanwhile, she had to convince the judge that she was innocent.