Flash of metal.
Thunder in my ears.
‘This is the five o’clock news.’
The radio, chirping merrily from the pine dresser laden with photographs (holidays, graduation, wedding); a pretty blue and pink plate; and a quarter bottle of Jack Daniel’s, partially hidden by a birthday card.
The pain, when it comes, is so acute that it can’t be real.
A quick succession of questions race through my head. What will happen to Tom when I am gone? Who will understand him? How will Mum and Dad cope with another child gone?
Above me, on the wall, is a picture of a small white house in Italy with purple bougainvillea climbing up it. A honeymoon memento. The one that Ed helped me to paint.
And here I still am, an hour later, slumped against the wall. My limbs completely numb. Bleeding and waiting. The blood is still streaming from my head, from where I hit the wall. My chest is throbbing. Am I having a heart attack? My silver honeymoon bracelet, which – despite any reasoning – I still wear every day, is cutting into my wrist because of the way I have fallen. And my ankle, which had been throbbing quietly, is now agony.
Still, at least the smell of smoke is getting fainter. It had been rubbery. Rather like a tyre burning. The gloves?
If Carla has destroyed them, there will be no evidence.
And if Joe tells the truth about the key, I might go down instead.
Carla
That last push from Lily had sent her reeling against the kitchen counter. A saucer had fallen off the side, smashing on the floor. She hadn’t been hurt. Just stunned by the push. But not badly enough to stop her pushing Lily back. There had been a hollow crack as Lily had crashed against the wall.
Vaguely Carla remembered staggering over to the sink and trying to get rid of the gloves. Incriminating evidence. How often had she read that phrase in files at work? Essential to get rid of.
They wouldn’t burn properly, so she’d chopped them up into little bits and flushed them down the toilet. Then she’d slumped in the hall, below one of Ed’s rough charcoal studies for the original Italian Girl.
It seemed a fitting place to stop. Her body might not be injured. But her mind seemed to have had enough.
From where she was lying, Carla could hear Lily groaning. Who would have guessed how much blood could gush from the head?
If it wasn’t for the fact that her legs didn’t feel like her own, Carla might have got up to help Lily. She’d had time to think now after that initial shock of seeing those bloody gloves. Strangely, she didn’t hate the woman for trying to turn her in. In fact, if she’d been in her position, she might have done exactly the same.
All her life she’d wanted things that had belonged to other people. The caterpillar pencil case. Nicer clothes. A father. Even her mother had belonged to Larry when she was a child. And, of course, Ed. Until she’d finally got him and saw what he was really like.
She hadn’t, Carla reminded herself, meant to hurt Ed. All she’d been doing was trying to defend herself. Such a fright when the knife had gone into his thigh. How easily the blade had slipped in! Made her feel sick right now to think about it.
I deserve to be caught, Carla told herself. It’s gone too far. Then her eye rested on a photograph of Ed and Tom on the bookcase near her. Father and son had their arms around each other, grinning out of the frame.
Poppy.
How would her daughter manage without her? Mothers needed to protect their children. Now she could see why Mamma had pretended that Carla’s father was dead in the early days. And why, later, she had hidden her cancer. Now she, Carla, couldn’t let Poppy suffer by having a mother in prison. As a child, Carla had thought it was bad enough having a mother with a strange accent who was always at work. But this was going to be far worse. Poppy would be Different with a capital D from the others in her class when she went to school. No doubt about that.
She had to force her shocked body to get up and leave, if only for Poppy’s sake. Reality began to kick in. She’d hung around long enough now. It was time to take a few things. Ed’s grandmother’s ring might fetch a bit and see them through a few weeks.
There was a moan.
She didn’t, Carla told herself, really want Lily to die, especially now she’d got rid of the gloves. All she’d done was push her, although that crack had sounded bad. Yet she couldn’t help her, either. It would compromise her own safety. Maybe when she got out of the house, she could go to a phone box and make an anonymous call to say that a woman was hurt.
‘Lily?’
Footsteps. Someone was coming towards her, through the front door. With a shock, Carla realized Lily must have left it open.
‘Where is my Lily? What have you done to her?’
Carla stared up as fear caught in her throat. It was him! The man who had broken in through the door that night. Something about those black eyes stirred a more distant memory. That stranger at Tony’s funeral!
He ran past her now. Towards Lily. ‘It’s all right, my darling. I’m here.’ She couldn’t hear Lily’s reply.
But she could hear his footsteps coming back now. Could see the glint of metal in his hands.
Carla felt strangely calm.
‘You hurt her!’ he was screaming. ‘You hurt Lily!’
The last thing she could remember hearing was the rush of wind as the blade came down to meet her.
63
Lily
It took me a long time to get better.
Not so much physically but mentally.
It still seems impossible that any of it happened.
When you realize you’re not dying after all, you feel an initial gust of euphoria. ‘You were so lucky,’ everyone kept saying. ‘Someone must’ve been looking after you’ was another favourite phrase.
And you believe it. You honestly do. You look out through the hospital window and see people walking, ambulances arriving, patients in wheelchairs, others on sticks, heads bowed, others laughing with relief. And you know that this is the real world. The one where lives are saved, instead of the one outside where the bad people try to take lives away.
Then, when you’re out in that real world again, that’s when the doubts come crowding back in. That’s when you start to think. If I hadn’t married Ed … if my boss hadn’t put me in charge of Joe’s appeal when I was too young and inexperienced … if I hadn’t allowed my feelings to take over … if we hadn’t met Carla and her mother … if I hadn’t had that drink with Joe in Highgate … if I hadn’t dropped my key … if I hadn’t defended Carla … if I hadn’t opened that envelope …
‘You mustn’t think about the ifs,’ says Ross. He’s been one of my regular visitors at home back in Devon, where I’ve been since they discharged me. There will always be a scar on the side of my head from my fall against the wall, although it might not show so much when my hair has grown back. My cracked ribs (hence the agonizing pain in my chest) have mended now. But my wrist is still playing up, and I no longer wear the honeymoon bracelet which was caught between me and the wall when I fell over. My ankle, which cracked as I went down, is ‘coming along’.
‘Ifs will drive you mad,’ he continues. ‘You did your best, Lily. You really did. And if you made a few mistakes along the way, well, that’s life.’
Mum comes into the room with a tray of coffee for our visitor and hears the end of the last sentence. She catches my eye and then looks away. But it’s too late. I know what she’s thinking. If I’m really going to heal, I have to tell the truth. The very last part of my story. The bit I never told my husband, or the grief counsellor the hospital encouraged me to see.
Ross is a good friend. I owe it to him. And, maybe more importantly, I owe it to myself.