Lasting Damage

Chapter 27

Saturday 24 July 2010



I can’t move or speak. There’s parcel tape wrapped round my head, sealing my mouth shut. Once he’d done that, Kit taped my wrists together behind my back and forced me down on the floor. There might have been a chance for me to get away, but I didn’t take it, if there was, and now I’m going to die. When Kit’s ready. And if not being dead gets any worse than it is now, I know how to speed up the process – all I have to do is let myself cry. I’d be unable to breathe within minutes, and I’d suffocate.

‘I didn’t want to kill them, Con.’ He has to raise his voice to make himself heard over the noise of the flies. ‘Four lives, two of them kids. It wasn’t an easy decision, not until I thought about us. Our future children. This is the home our children deserve.’

I don’t want to listen, but I force myself. I wanted to share Kit’s reality. This is Kit’s reality. This man, this monster, is my husband. I loved him. I married him.

‘I didn’t want to kill Jackie either,’ he says. ‘She wasn’t judgemental when I told her what I’d done. She didn’t panic like I did. The wrapping was her idea, to keep the smell to a minimum. Airtight, she said.’ He stops, looks over at the bed. ‘I don’t know why the flies came,’ he says vaguely. ‘Do you think maybe they’re not airtight?’

Looking at me, he remembers the tape that’s preventing me from answering him. Remembers that he was in the middle of telling me a story, about Jackie not panicking. ‘She went into their emails,’ he says. ‘Contacted their works saying there was a family emergency, that they wouldn’t be in for a while. And the school. She kept their mobiles charged, monitored them – when texts arrived from friends and family, she’d text back, pretending to be . . .’ His body judders, as if a current’s running through it. ‘Pretending to be Elise Gilpatrick,’ he says eventually. The name of the woman he killed for no reason.

‘I was falling apart, Con. It was Jackie who kept me in one piece, Jackie who had a plan. I went along with it because I was a coward, and because . . . how could I not help her, after everything she’d done for me?’

I flinch as he lunges at me, starts scratching at the tape on my mouth. ‘Why don’t you say something?’ he hisses in my face. His fingernails dig into my skin. Apart from hurting me, it has no effect. Kit picks up the knife, looks at it, then puts it down again and leaves the room. I count. Seven seconds later, he’s back with a pair of nail scissors. I keep as still as I can as he hacks at the tape, but he’s shaking too hard and ends up cutting my mouth. ‘Sorry,’ he breathes, sweat running down his face and neck.

A few more seconds and he’s cut all the way through the tape – I can speak again, if I want to. Blood trickles down my chin. My new cuts start to throb, gathering more pain with each beat.

Kit stands back and stares at me. ‘Say something,’ he orders.

I shouldn’t allow myself to hope, but the hope is there, allowed or not. He taped my mouth shut, then cut the tape away. It’s a clear reversal, one that allows me to believe that he might put his intention to kill me into reverse as well. ‘What did Jackie want to do to me?’ I ask. ‘Did she want you to kill me too?’

‘No. She’d have done it herself. She knew I’d never be able to do it.’

I’d never be able to do it. I’d never be able to do it. I cling to those words.

‘A lot had to happen before she could kill you,’ Kit says. ‘She had to set it all up first, so that you’d be blamed for the . . .’ He glances over at the bed. ‘The others, you know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how she could think clearly, but she did. Do you want to see?’

‘See?’ I repeat blankly.

Kit smiles, and for a moment I’m dropped back into our old life together, our normal life. I’ve seen this smile many times before: when Kit makes a joke that he’s pleased with, when I say something that impresses him. ‘I’m offering you proof,’ he says. His smile has vanished. His voice is harsh.

‘Show me,’ I say.

Kit nods, turns his back on me. I hear him run downstairs. When he comes back, he’s holding a battered sheet of white A4 paper. There’s spidery handwriting on it. Jackie’s handwriting. Kit holds it in front of my face. I read it three or four times. I shouldn’t be able to understand. I try pretending I don’t, but it doesn’t work. I know immediately what Jackie meant when she wrote these words.

I feel defiled, claustrophobic, as if I’m trapped inside her warped mind, unable to escape the tainted swirl of her thoughts. I have no choice but to admit that this is real, since it’s here in front of me. All the same, I can’t believe it. Until four days ago, I had no idea Jackie Napier existed.

I’m glad she’s dead.

‘None of it was my idea,’ says Kit.

‘You killed the Gilpatricks.’

He cranes his head away from me, as if I’ve tried to hit him. ‘That wasn’t an idea. It wasn’t planned, it . . . Jackie was the planner, not me.’ He lets go of the paper. It falls to the floor. ‘She seemed to be able to anticipate everything, and I couldn’t even see the next step.’

Did she anticipate you strangling her?

‘She predicted that you wouldn’t be able to stay away from Cambridge, after you found the address in the SatNav,’ Kit goes on. ‘I didn’t believe her – I thought there was no way you’d travel all that way in the hope of catching me out. Jackie laughed when I said that. Called me a naïve idiot. She said she’d prove it to me: she took two weeks off work and staked out Bentley Grove. Soon as the Gilpatricks left in the morning, in she’d go to number 12, to wait for you. She knew what you looked like – she must have spent hours on Nulli’s website, staring at your photograph. She envied you like crazy.’

Envied me. Who wouldn’t want to be married to a deranged killer?

‘Two Fridays running, she saw you. Then we knew – even I worked it out. Friday was the day you’d go, if you went at all. Mondays and Wednesdays there was a chance I’d be at home, Tuesdays and Thursdays you were at Monk & Sons. Friday was your only free day when I was in London for sure.’

I nod, trying to ignore the sick feeling spreading through me. How does Kit expect me to respond?

‘Sometimes Jackie followed you,’ he says. ‘To Addenbrooke’s, or into town. I told her she shouldn’t take the risk – I couldn’t stand the thought of you noticing her and confronting her in case she gave something away, but she just laughed at me. “I only get noticed when I want to,” she said.’

‘She was wrong,’ I say, shocked by the hoarse sound of my own voice. ‘I knew someone was following me.’

I mentioned it to Alice when I first went to see her – that once or twice, in Cambridge, I’d heard footsteps behind me. She prescribed me a remedy for that precise delusion: Crotalus Cascavella.

Wrong.

I didn’t need a brown bottle full of something dissolved in water. I needed Jackie Napier to die.

Obsessed with Gils since Pardoner 2003. There’s only one thing that can mean.

‘The Gilpatricks bought 18 Pardoner Lane, didn’t they?’ I say. ‘When you . . . when we wanted it.’

I don’t need an answer – I can see it in Kit’s face.

‘You pretended you didn’t want it any more, blamed it on my . . . problems. You must have loathed the Gilpatricks. And then . . . what, they moved? They bought 12 Bentley Grove, and . . .’

Rent out 11, live at Pardoner.

‘Jackie. Jackie bought 18 Pardoner Lane.’ I’m still working it out as I say it. ‘You probably gave her some of the money.’

‘How could I do that?’ Kit says angrily. ‘I don’t have any money that you don’t know about.’

‘I was too much of a mess to move away from my family, but that wasn’t a problem for you,’ I say, thinking aloud. ‘You could live in Cambridge with Jackie. The two of you had been waiting for 18 Pardoner Lane to come up for sale again, but when it did, you didn’t want it any more – Jackie did, enough to buy it, but you . . .’ Yes. It has to be. ‘You wanted whatever house the Gilpatricks wanted, and that wasn’t 18 Pardoner Lane any more – it was 12 Bentley Grove.’

Disjointed ideas clash in my mind. What did Kit say about Jackie waiting in number 12, watching for me, knowing I would come looking? Soon as the Gilpatricks left in the morning . . . So they weren’t dead at that point. And if Kit hadn’t killed them yet . . . ‘How did Jackie get the keys to this house?’ I ask. ‘Was she . . . ?’ Her pink denim jacket, a Lancing Damisz key-ring in the pocket. Her black spider handwriting, on Lancing Damisz paper. ‘She was an estate agent, wasn’t she? Did you meet her in 2003? Did she sell this house to the Gilpatricks?’

Kit doesn’t answer. He looks away.

‘She did, didn’t she? And she kept a copy of the front door key.’

‘We used to meet here, when they were out,’ Kit mutters, eyes down. ‘It was a stupid game we played, but it was better than the real life she wanted us to have together. I couldn’t bring myself to set foot in the Pardoner Lane house, not once she’d bought it. She wanted me to move in there with her, but how could I? I lived in Little Holling, with you – at Melrose Cottage.’ He says it as if I don’t know already – as if I’m a stranger he’s introducing himself to. Telling me about his life. ‘I never loved Jackie. The one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to live with you, wherever I lived but . . . the game had gone too far by then. And . . . it was more than a game. I wanted . . .’ He clears his throat. ‘I didn’t see why the Gilpatricks should have what I wanted. That was when it all started to go wrong, when they bought our house.’

I wait.

‘Jackie and I had terrible rows,’ Kit goes on eventually, so quietly I can barely hear him. ‘I didn’t really want this place . . .’ he gestures around him ‘. . . but it was easier to pretend I did than admit the truth. Jackie knew it was bullshit – she went on and on at me, telling me the Gilpatricks wouldn’t be selling anytime soon, that this was their forever home, trying to get me to admit that I’d stop wanting it anyway as soon as I could have it, even if they did decide to move again. She was furious with me – how could I have let her buy 18 Pardoner Lane if I wasn’t planning to live there with her? The rows got worse and worse, and then . . .’ He shakes his head.

This time I can’t guess. I have to ask. ‘Then what?’

‘The SatNav thing happened. And Jackie decided it was destiny – the solution to all our problems.’

‘How? How, Kit?’

‘Number 11,’ he whispers, folding his hands into a tight ball. ‘Everything pointed to it. Eleven was what we called this house – you remember the old joke?’

I bite my lip to stop myself from screaming.

‘There were keys in a bowl in the kitchen with a label on that said “Selina, no. 11”, and after the SatNav disaster, you thought I was shacked up with someone at number 11 – nothing I said could persuade you it wasn’t true. One day Jackie asked me if I knew how much bigger number 11’s garden was than the garden here.’ Kit jerks his head in the direction of the window. ‘I didn’t know what she was talking about. She had this strange expression on her face. It scared me. I realised then: she was halfway to being mad.’

‘She’d used the keys from the kitchen and let herself into number 11,’ I say.

He nods. ‘She wanted to check out the house where I was supposedly leading my double life. She thought it was hilarious.’

I glance down at the sheet of paper on the floor, remembering Jackie’s words: Same house, but much bigger garden, southfacing – more desirable – OBVIOUS AND UNDENIABLE – MEANT TO BE!!

‘She thought she’d found the perfect solution.’ Kit shrugs. ‘We could buy a house almost identical to the Gilpatricks’ but better, on the same street. “You’ll be able to lord it over them,” she said. “All we need to do is persuade this Selina woman to sell.” She started talking about putting shit through the letterbox, Nitromosing her car . . . I didn’t even know what Nitromose was. I told her not to be ridiculous – even if we could drive the owner out of her home, we’d never be able to afford a house on Bentley Grove, this one or number 11. I was seconds away from telling Jackie I couldn’t go on the way we were when . . .’ He breaks off.

A heavy sense of calm spreads through me, like a drug. I fight the urge to close my eyes. ‘When she explained to you exactly how it could work,’ I finish Kit’s sentence. ‘If I died at the right time, with the right price on my head, then you could afford it. What was her plan? First, get me out of the way at Nulli. All the stress I was under after finding that address in your SatNav – you were supposed to suggest to me that I stop working for a while, hand everything over to you. And then, what, sell Nulli, with Jackie passing herself off as me to sign the relevant papers? She looked like me, superficially – shoulder length dark hair, slim. With my passport, and a solicitor who’d never met me—’

‘I didn’t, though, did I?’ Kit snaps. ‘I never suggested you give up work – everything I did from that moment on was to protect you from this . . . this madwoman I’d got us involved with. You don’t have to believe that, but it’s the truth.’ He lets out a bitter laugh. ‘Jackie accused me of being the crazy one. To her it was so obvious, so simple – we sell Nulli, buy 11 Bentley Grove with a huge mortgage and a whacking great life insurance policy, with her posing as you, then . . .’ Kit covers his face with his hands. Groans.

‘Then kill me, cash in, and get a house worth 1.2 million for two hundred and fifty to four hundred grand, depending on how low Selina Gane was willing to go to get rid of her house quickly,’ I say, aware of the uselessness of my words, wishing they were knives. ‘The house where she’d been persecuted by someone she didn’t know, for no reason that was anything to do with her. So, what did you say? Did you say, “No, I don’t want Connie dead”? Did you say, “I’m going to the police”?’

‘I couldn’t go to the police. I . . . I did my best to stall her by . . .’

I wait.

Kit changes tack. ‘Anyway, her plan wouldn’t have worked,’ he says defensively. ‘Who’d have given us a mortgage for that amount once we’d sold Nulli and had nothing?’ Is he daring me to call him a liar, or has he forgotten about Melrose Cottage because it suits him to do so? He and Jackie would have got their mortgage – someone would have given it to them, especially if whoever bought Nulli kept Kit on as CEO on some exorbitant salary.

‘I had to pretend to go along with it, pretend we’d do it eventually, once we’d got the details right. Jackie enjoyed the planning. We stopped fighting. Completely. Sometimes I thought – I hoped – that working on the details might keep her happy for ever, that she’d never need to . . . take it any further.’

‘So your aim was to guarantee Jackie’s everlasting happiness?’

‘No! You don’t understand,’ Kit sobs.

‘I do,’ I tell him. ‘I wish I didn’t, but I do.’

I watch as he struggles to compose himself.

‘Jackie could and would have ruined my life if I’d said no. I had to give her something to hold on to. I never loved her, Con. She was more like . . . I don’t know, a colleague I felt I had to be loyal to. She loved me, though – I was in no doubt about that. You know she . . . she cried for nearly two hours after we . . . did the filming.’

Is he talking about the virtual tour?

‘She insisted on wearing my wedding ring to do it – she wouldn’t explain why. Just kept saying it would be funny, but that wasn’t the real reason. If it was funny, why did she go to pieces when I asked for it back afterwards? I felt worse taking that ring off her than I did . . .’ His mouth sets in a line, as if to stop the words escaping: than I did strangling her to death.

‘How bad did you feel about butchering an innocent family? Where does that fit in, on your scale of guilt?’

‘If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll tell you something I never told Jackie, not even at the end,’ Kit says, ignoring my question. ‘I thought about telling her, but I didn’t. It would have been vindictive.’

I wish he’d told her, whatever it is, if it’s something that would have hurt her. I wish he wouldn’t tell me, but I say nothing to stop him.

‘The address in my SatNav?’ he raises his voice, as if afraid I might not hear. ‘I programmed it in.’

‘I know that,’ I say, starting to cry at the stupidity of it all – him telling me something that I’ve been telling him and that he’s been denying for six months. ‘I’ve known all along.’

‘I did it deliberately,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d take my car that day, because of the snow. I wanted you to find out, Con. I wanted you to stop me. Why didn’t you stop me?’





I didn’t kill the Gilpatricks. I didn’t kill them. It’s not my fault that the Gilpatricks are dead.

I don’t know how much time has passed since Kit and I last spoke to one another. There’s a hole in my mind and I can’t find where it ends. The flies are still buzzing. The smell is worse.

Did I imagine it, or did Kit tell me the rest of the story? He wanted it to stop, all of it. I couldn’t stop it for him, so he killed the Gilpatricks – it was their fault he was in the predicament he was in, so they deserved to die. Did Kit say that, or am I imagining what he might have said?

It was easy for Jackie after that – she had him exactly where she wanted him. She could help him escape the four murders he’d committed, but only if he agreed to a fifth. Only if he accepted that I had to die.

Jackie copied the key to number 11, let herself into Selina Gane’s house with some prospective buyers, and told a pack of lies about a woman who looked very much like Selina’s strange stalker woman putting the house on the market, pretending to be Selina. Maybe she did other things to drive Selina out too – maybe she Nitromosed her car, whatever that means. Whatever she did, she got the result she wanted: number 11 went on the market.

Why the next part, though? I don’t have the energy to ask Kit. They must have moved everything out of the lounge at number 12, where the blood was, and replaced it with the contents of number 11’s lounge. Risky; someone could have seen them. They’d have had to move furniture and pictures across the street. But no one did see them, or else they’d have gone to the police. Of course no one saw them; Bentley Grove is the sort of street where people make a point of not noticing – the kind of street that makes a stalker feel entirely comfortable. No one around during the day apart from one very old man who sleeps most of the time.

Jackie had access to the right kind of camera, and to the Lancing Damisz website. Jackie lay down in the Gilpatricks’ blood, and she and Kit made an alternative version of the virtual tour for me to see, so that I’d go to the police and talk about blood and murder. I would be hysterical – exactly the sort of person who might, later, suffer an accident that may or may not be suicide. Kit must have done the filming. Was Selina Gane supposed to find out that someone was claiming there had been a murder in her house, the house she was already desperate to get shot of, and lower the price?

When was I supposed to have my accident? Not before Kit and Jackie, posing as me, had bought 11 Bentley Grove. The police wouldn’t have had too much trouble working out the chain of events: I’d been obsessed with the Gilpatricks since 2003, when they had bought the house I’d set my heart on. I was so obsessed that I’d persuaded Kit to buy 11 Bentley Grove, directly opposite the Gilpatricks’ new house, so that I could spy on them, but it turned out that spying wasn’t enough for me – one day I cracked and killed them, all of them. I was so deranged that I killed two young children.

She kept hassling the police with some made-up story about a dead body on a website – everyone knew it was a lie. There was no evidence of any blood on the carpet – the police checked.

The guilt had driven her mad.

They found her DNA all over number 12, you know. All over the bodies.

‘What?’ says Kit, making me jump.

Did I say something?

‘I made it easy for her,’ I tell him. ‘Jackie. She didn’t have to pretend to be me so that the two of you could buy 11 Bentley Grove – I came up with a plan of my own to buy it.’ A chill seeps into my bones as I realise what this means. ‘That’s why you killed her, isn’t it? Once I’d . . . Once we’d bought the house, she’d have wanted to move on to the next stage.’

I think of what Kit said before: I killed her to save you. By insisting on buying 11 Bentley Grove, I was bringing forward my execution date. And signing Jackie’s death warrant.

‘When you said you wanted to buy it, you know what went through my mind?’ Kit says. ‘ “This can’t be happening,” I thought. “Jackie never said this would happen.” How pathetic is that?’

‘No one can predict everything, not even Jackie.’

‘No,’ he agrees. Listening to us having this conversation, I can’t believe we are about to die. Maybe we’re not. Kit hasn’t touched the knife for a long time. Or at least, I think it’s a long time. Perhaps it isn’t; perhaps it’s just a few minutes.

‘No way she could have known about Mr and Mrs Beater and their Christmas tree,’ he says. ‘She got a massive kick out of going to the police and treating them like idiots, saying she’d seen what you’d seen, but it wasn’t part of the original plan.’

I don’t know what he means.

Kit must be able to see that I’m confused, because he says, ‘The police didn’t check out your story like they were supposed to – they didn’t see any reason to mention to Selina Gane that someone was claiming to have seen a picture of a slaughtered woman in her house.’

And so there was no reason for her to lower her asking price from 1.2 million to the nine hundred thousand that Jackie had in mind.

‘Jackie’s colleague Lorraine explained to them that the carpet in number 11’s lounge was the same one that had been in when she’d last sold the house – and there was the stain to prove it. That was it, end of story – Grint wasn’t going to take it further on your word alone. Once Jackie threw her hat into the ring, he thought again – Christmas tree stain notwithstanding. If two people, entirely unconnected to one another, see the same dead woman on the same website at the same time—’

A shrill ringing sound cuts across Kit’s voice. We both jump. I start to shake uncontrollably. The doorbell. The police. ‘Hello? Kit? Connie? Are you in there? Open up.’

Not DS Laskey. Simon Waterhouse.

Kit picks up the knife and points it at my throat. The tip presses against my skin. ‘Don’t say anything,’ he whispers.

‘Mr Bowskill, can you open the door, please?’ That’s Sam Kombothekra.

‘We’re coming in anyway,’ Simon Waterhouse yells. ‘You might as well let us in yourself.’

Hearing their voices sharpens my mind. There are still things I don’t understand, things I want to understand while Kit and I are alone together. I don’t know what’s going to happen to either of us, but I know for certain that we won’t be in a room together, just the two of us, ever again.

‘Grint asked Jackie if I was the one who pretended to be Selina Gane and put 11 Bentley Grove up for sale.’ My words tumble out too fast. ‘She said no.’

‘If she’d said yes, you’d have known she was lying. Grint had no reason to doubt Jackie when she came forward to say she’d seen the body, but if you’d told him she was a liar, he might have taken a closer look at her.’

‘And found the connection to you.’ Yes. That makes sense.

‘Bowskill! Open up! Don’t do anything stupid. Connie, are you all right in there?’

The knife cuts the bottom of my neck. It makes me realise my lips are still bleeding. I wonder how much blood I’ve lost. Thinking about it makes me feel weak.

‘What about the dress?’ I ask Kit.

‘Dress?’ He enunciates the word oddly, as if it doesn’t belong in our conversation. He’s beyond lying now; I don’t think he knows what I’m talking about.

‘My birthday present.’

‘That was nothing. I told you it was nothing,’ he says impatiently. ‘I had to buy you a birthday present, and I bought Jackie a present at the same time – I liked that dress, that’s all. I bought one for you and one for her.’ He sniffs, wipes his nose with the back of his hand. ‘All I wanted was for all this . . . shit to end well – for all three of us. All the shit that wasn’t my fault, or yours, or Jackie’s. None of us deserved any of this – they’re the ones who deserve it.’ He jerks his head towards the bed. ‘Do you want to see them? Do you want to see their smug faces?’ He takes hold of me, pulls me to my feet.

‘No!’ I scream, thinking he’s going to show me the bodies. Instead, he drags me down the stairs and into the lounge. There’s a lock on the door. Kit slides it across. He puts down the knife, walks over to a cupboard and opens it. He pulls out a photograph, throws it at me. It lands on Jackie, face up. It lands on Jackie, dead. Dead Jackie. A man, a woman, a boy and a girl. On a bridge, eating ice creams. Laughing.

I know the woman’s face. Elise Gilpatrick’s face. How can I know it? It makes no sense.

What makes sense? Jackie’s body lying here like rubbish – does that make sense?

Kit walks slowly towards me, holding the knife in front of him. Where’s Simon Waterhouse? Where’s Sam? Why can’t I hear them any more? I try to send a message to them, knowing it’s useless: Please come. Please. There’s nowhere for me to go, no way of getting away from Kit. He’s fire, a tidal wave, a cloud of toxic air – he’s everything bad there’s ever been, coming for me. He’s not looking at me any more; his eyes are on the photograph, on his victims’ faces. Nothing is their fault – I know that perfectly well – but they are the reason.

I’m going to be killed because of a family called the Gilpatricks.

There are four of them: mother, father, son and daughter. ‘Elise, Donal, Riordan and Tilly.’ Kit tells me their first names, as if I’m keen to dispense with the formalities and get to know them better, when all I want is to run screaming from the room. ‘Riordan’s seven,’ he says. ‘Tilly’s five.’

Shut up, I want to yell in his face, but I’m too scared to open my mouth. It’s as if someone’s clamped and locked it; no more words will come out, not ever.

This is it. This is where and how and when and why I’m going to die. At least I understand the why, finally.

Kit’s as frightened as I am. More. That’s why he keeps talking, because he knows, as all those who wait in terror know, that when silence and fear combine, they form a compound a thousand times more horrifying than the sum of its parts.

‘The Gilpatricks,’ he says, tears streaking his face.

I watch the door in the mirror above the fireplace. It looks smaller and further away than it would if I turned and looked at it directly. The mirror is shaped like a fat gravestone: three straight sides and an arch at the top.

‘I didn’t believe in them. The name sounded made up.’ Kit laughs, chokes on a sob. All of him is shaking, even his voice. ‘Gilpatrick’s the sort of name you’d make up if you were inventing a person. Mr Gilpatrick. If only I’d believed in him, none of this would have happened. We’d have been safe. If I’d only . . .’

He stops, backs away from the locked door. He hears the same footsteps I hear – rushing, a stampede. They’re here. The police are finally here. Holding the handle of the knife with both hands, Kit drives it into his chest. The last thing he says is, ‘Sorry’.



*

POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/29IG





Caroline Capps

43 Stover Street

Birmingham

24/12/93



Dear Caroline



Sorry if this letter is blunt, but some of us prefer to be straightforward than two-faced – not you, obviously. You told me you believed me, but now Vicki and Laura are telling me you don’t – apparently you only said you did to be polite, and because you feel sorry for me.



Luckily, I don’t need your sympathy. In my eyes, you’re the one who needs pity, if not full-blown psychotherapy. I have been dumped several times in my life, and have never had a problem admitting to it. And I have NEVER sent dozens of photos of myself to an ex-boyfriend either – why would I? Do I seem that insane to you?



Your boyfriend is the insane one around here – he’s a loony as well as a liar. He took the photos you found – he’s obsessed with me, though I’ve spoken to him for a total of about ten minutes. Why don’t you prove it to yourself? Follow him one day – it won’t take you long to catch him pursuing me round Cambridge with a camera. By the way, if you could ask him to stop, I’d be very grateful.



And just to clarify one more thing: yes, I’m saying he didn’t dump me, but I’m not claiming I dumped him, as you seem to think I am. No one dumped anyone – THERE WAS NO RELATIONSHIP IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! I shouldn’t have to tell you this – if your radar hasn’t detected that I’m your friend and he’s a creep, there’s no hope for you.



Elise





Friday 17 September 2010



I ought to sit down, relax, but I can’t. I stand by the lounge window, next to the Christmas tree stain. Waiting. Still twenty minutes before she’s due to arrive. When I see a car pull up outside, I assume it can’t be her. When a tall redhead with a long, elegant neck gets out of the car, I tell myself she can’t be Lorraine Turner, she must be someone else.

I’m wrong. ‘Sorry I’m so early,’ she says, shaking my hand.

‘I’m glad you are,’ I tell her. ‘Come in.’

She crosses the threshold tentatively, as if afraid she might regret it. ‘I can’t pretend to understand,’ she says. Giving me the chance to explain if I want to.

I don’t. I smile, say nothing.

‘You’re absolutely sure you want to sell the house?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’ She can’t question me for too long without seeming rude. Knowing a little of what I’ve been through, she won’t want to upset me.

She makes one last effort to get me to talk. ‘When did you complete on the purchase?’ she says. Estate agent language.

‘Yesterday. I rang you straight away.’

She gives up then, goes upstairs to start taking her photographs. The second she’s left the room, I regret my reticence. She seems nice, and I need to stop assuming everyone’s untrustworthy. Most people aren’t Kit Bowskill and Jackie Napier.

Nobody is Kit Bowskill, and nobody is Jackie Napier – not any more.

When Lorraine comes downstairs, perhaps I’ll tell her. I’m not ashamed of any of it. I bought 11 Bentley Grove because I promised Selina Gane that I would. How could I let her down, after giving her my word? When I made the promise, I thought I’d be able to live in number 11, because nothing bad had happened there – because it wasn’t number 12. Maybe I would have been able to, if things had turned out differently – if I hadn’t ended up in that room with the flies and the wrapped bodies, helpless with terror . . . But after what I went through, I can’t live on Bentley Grove. It would be impossible.

So I’m putting my new house up for sale, having bought it only yesterday. And when I sell it, I’ll buy a house on a different Cambridge street. I’ve seen a few things on Roundthehouses that look promising, but I’ll wait to see which college I end up at, and maybe try to buy somewhere nearby. Fran rang yesterday and said she’d heard about a Cambridge college that’s specifically for mature women students. Her encouragement goes some way towards making up for Mum and Dad’s silence on the subject of my belated university education.

11 Bentley Grove isn’t all I’m selling. London Allied Capital are in the process of buying Nulli from me, for about half of what it’s worth, but the amount of money isn’t important – my freedom is all I care about. A new start.

I hear Lorraine moving around upstairs. She’ll be down soon. I open the bag I’ve brought with me. One more piece of unfinished business to attend to. I take out the print Kit gave me all those Christmases ago – the laughing girl sitting on the steps of King’s College Chapel – and slot it in between the wall and the sofa that Selina Gane didn’t take with her. It’s a nice picture, and I can’t bring myself to throw it away even though I don’t want to keep it. Maybe the house’s new owner will find it and be pleased. He or she will see the ‘4/100’ on the mount and believe, as I did, that it’s a print.

It isn’t. Kit took the photo himself. The girl in it is eighteen-year-old Elise Gilpatrick. Or Elise O’Farrell, as she was then, when she and Kit were undergraduates together and she made the fatal mistake of rejecting his advances.

I can’t leave her behind the sofa; it feels wrong. I pull the frame out and put it on the mantelpiece, lean it against the wall where Selina Gane’s antique map of Cambridgeshire used to hang. That’s better.

‘Goodbye, Elise,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Footsteps on the stairs. Lorraine’s on her way down. I get ready to smile and offer her tea or coffee.





Acknowledgements



As always, I am profoundly grateful to Peter Straus and Jenny Hewson at Rogers Coleridge & White, and to Carolyn Mays, Francesca Best, Karen Geary, Lucy Zilberkweit, Lucy Hale and everyone at the continuously brilliant Hodder & Stoughton. I thank my lucky stars several times a day that I ended up with all of you – and then I decide it was fate, not luck.

Thank you to Liz and Andrew Travis for donating their business to the good cause of fiction, to Beth Hocking for passing on a useful contact, and to Guy Martland for supplying the necessary gruesome facts about malodorous bodies and mummification. Thank you to Anne Grey for teaching me everything I know about homeopathy, to Lewis Jones for referring to someone as ‘Gummy’ in my presence, to Heidi Westman for mentioning a minor incident involving a SatNav that, as far as I know, was never satisfactorily resolved and therefore remains rather suspicious (though far be it from me to cast aspersions . . .) Thank you to Mark Worden for the Pink Floyd book, to Paul Bridges for the surname anthology (which immediately fell open at the name ‘Gilpatrick’), to Tom Palmer, James Nash and Rachel Connor for editorial advice in the early stages, and to Stuart Kelly, who introduced me to the concept of the mobilising grievance – mine is that I didn’t think of it myself.

Thanks to Dan for the Christmas tree stain (ahem) and the unconventional house name ideas. Thank you to Phoebe and Guy for the lovely cards and presents when I finished the book, and for their crucial insights regarding Ben 10 aliens.

Major thank-yous to John Jepps and Peter Bean, for all the usual reasons, and this time for an extra reason too, which will only make itself apparent if they read the book.

Thanks to Geoff Jones, and to the mysterious (and, I have no doubt, non-fictional) ‘Mr Pixley’, who kept offering just a bit more money than I did. Hmm . . . Thank you to the Jill Sturdy Centre for giving rise to an intriguing plot possibility.

I can only imagine how sick of me the estate agents of Cambridge are. They might be pleased to know that I found the right house in the end, or they might simply shudder and growl at the thought of me. Whichever is the case, thank you anyway to Nick Redmayne, Chris Arnold, Oliver Hughes, George Moore, Stewart Chipchase, James Barnett, Richard Freshwater, Robert Couch, Michael Higginson, Zoe and Belinda from Carter Jonas and the rest. I promise I won’t move again soon.

Thank you to my virtual spiritual home, the Rightmove website (on which I can safely say there are no images of dead bodies, having examined every single house and each floorplan in great detail). I’m not an addict; I could stop anytime I wanted to. And besides, it’s not bad for you if you do it in moderation, and I’m down to an hour a day. Thank you to both Trinity College and Lucy Cavendish College in Cambridge – my non-virtual spiritual homes.

Thank you to Will Peterson for being amazing and lovely, to Morgan White for the bench plaque witticism, to Jenny and Ben Almeida for the new married surname idea.

Finally, I would like to thank Alexis Washam, Carolyn Mays, Francesca Best and Jason Bartholomew for rallying round during the fraught (nay nightmarish) Chapter 27 emergency. Without your help, Chapter 27 would never have pulled through.

The poem ‘When First My Way to Fair I Took’ is by A E Housman.