When the cut was clean, I patted it dry with toilet paper and then stuck on another of the dressings I had stolen from the shopping center. I held it against my ribs, shutting my eyes against the pain as I pressed down, and even through the layers of gauze and paper, I could feel the heat coming off the wound. There was nothing to be done apart from crossing my fingers and trusting to my immune system. Shivering now, I pulled the bloodstained top back over my head, dragged on the fleece, and tried to think what to do.
My ticket wouldn’t work on this line—which meant I would somehow have to blag my way out at the other end. That might be easier at a small country station, maybe even one small enough not to have ticket barriers. The only question was where.
I dug in my pocket for my phone, to check the train’s stopping points, but before I could open it I saw a Signal notification on the lock screen. It was a message. From Hel.
“Jack?” it read. “Are you there? How did it go?!”
A rush of relief spiked through me. Hel. God, I wanted nothing more than to talk to her—I wanted to blurt out this whole tangled mess and get her cool, analytical appraisal of what the fuck was going on and what all this meant.
Was it really possible that Cole was responsible for Gabe’s death? He hadn’t killed him—I was sure of that, or at least, as sure as it was possible to get without having witnessed the murder myself. The shock in his voice when I had told him, the anguish as he had stammered out “They—they cut his throat?” That hadn’t been fake, I was sure of it. But the insurance—why else would he have taken out the insurance? That wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. He must have spent days getting hold of Gabe’s ID, his credit card details, filling out forms. That was coldly premeditated in a way that made my head spin, and I couldn’t begin to parse what it all meant.
Hel was the one person whose opinion I trusted more than anyone else’s in the world—more than Gabe’s, in a way, because Gabe was an optimist, and his perspective was always colored by wanting the best for people and believing the best of them. Hel was… well, she wasn’t a pessimist exactly. But more of a realist. We had been through the same things, survived the loss of our parents when we were barely adults. We had both lost our trust in things turning out okay that night, in a way that Gabe never had. And besides, Gabe was gone.
Because of that, she was the only person who might, just might, be able to help me get to the bottom of this. But it wasn’t just my own confusion stopping me from replying. There was something else, a feeling which I realized now, looking down at the lock screen, had been dogging me for some time, ever since I messaged Hel before I went into Sunsmile. I hadn’t had time to think about it then, but there was something wrong. Something…
And then it came to me.
In fact, it was staring me in the face with its little round eyes.
Hel’s shocked emoji, the one she had sent me two messages ago. And before that, the now-deleted “You go first” message with its uncharacteristic smiley face. Two emojis that she had never used in her texts before.
And something else came to me too—something that made me go first hot and then cold with realization, and then grope my way to the closed toilet lid to sit down before my jelly legs gave way to the rocking motion of the train.
Cole had been the one to tell Hel about Signal.
Cole had given Hel my throwaway number, had told her to message me on a burner phone. Except… what if he hadn’t? What if this whole thing was a setup? What if the person I had been texting the whole time was… Cole?
The thought made me feel almost violated. And yet… it explained something that had been preying on me ever since I saw the police at Sunsmile, and which I had not been able to figure out since: how they had known I was there at that very moment. That was information I had only given to Hel.
Someone had betrayed me. And I was as certain as I could be that it wasn’t Hel.
A nauseous wave of cold dread threatened to swamp me. But I had to be sure.
“Hel,” I typed back, “this is going to sound really stupid, but I need to ask you something. What was the name of your childhood teddy? The big blue one?”
There was a long, long pause.
Then, “Jack, is everything okay?”
“It’s fine, but I need you to tell me this, Hel. What was his name?”
Another pause.
“Fuck,” the reply came back, swiftly this time. “It’s bloody years ago. I can’t remember. Bluey?”
I felt like I had just touched an electric fence—a jolt of panic so strong I bit the inside of my cheek. If I could have, I would have thrown the phone out of the train window. But it didn’t open, and anyway, I couldn’t afford to lose it.
There was a knock at the door, but I ignored it. Instead, I stared down at the phone screen in front of me, a mixture of disgust and fear coiling inside me.
“Why?” the message came back. But it was too late. I knew.
That teddy bear had been Hel’s pride and joy. She had taken him to bed every night for sixteen years—and even then, he wasn’t thrown away, just retired, with honors, to a shelf above the wardrobe. He was one of the few things she had taken with her when we cleared our parents’ house, and now he sat on top of Kitty and Millie’s wardrobe in their room. There was no way, absolutely no way short of a coma, that Hel could have forgotten Bluebell’s name. It was engraved in my memory, let alone hers—the endless wails of “I’ve dropped Bluebell!” every night as he fell from the top bunk to the floor; the arguments every holiday over whether she could take him, and if so, whether he had to travel in the suitcase or could be carried in her arms; the terrifying twenty-four-hour scare when he got lost on the underground. The idea that Hel could have forgotten what he was called—well, it was laughable. She would as soon have forgotten Roland’s name.
I wanted to cry. But I couldn’t.
“I know,” I typed back instead. “You can stop pretending.”
Another pause.
“I’m sorry?”
“I know,” I typed again, and pressed send. Then, “I know, Cole. I know everything.”
There was another long, long pause, and then my phone began to ring.
As it did, there came another knock at the door, this one more urgent.
“I’ve got a desperate toddler out here!” I heard from the other side.
I stood, unhooked the rucksack from the back of the toilet door, and then opened it with an apologetic smile at the scowling woman standing with her little boy in the corridor.
The phone was still ringing as I moved to the far side of the little vestibule. The train lobby was the old-fashioned kind with a window that opened, and in spite of the cold wind blasting through I made no move to shut it. Hopefully the sound would cover our conversation.
I waited until I heard the lock of the toilet door slide shut, and as it clicked, the phone in my hand stopped ringing.
I was about to call back when something occurred to me, and I stopped and dug in my pocket. The Post-it with the number I had taken off the Sunsmile database was still there.
I took a deep breath—and typed it into Signal. Then I pressed call.
“You don’t understand.” It was Cole’s voice, shaking, and for the first time since Gabe’s death I didn’t feel a rush of pain at how similar they sounded—just disgust, and disbelief at my own stupidity. How could I have thought Cole sounded like Gabe? They were nothing alike. Nothing.
“Oh, I understand,” I said. My own voice was level, almost unnaturally so, with the effort of keeping it low. “I understand everything. Why did you do it, Cole?”
“You don’t understand, I didn’t want this—I didn’t want any of this. I was trying to protect you!”
For a second, I couldn’t find the words to reply. Then I did, spitting them into the receiver with a force that took even me by surprise.
“Fuck. You.”
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“A fucking lying, traitorous, murdering—” I stopped, searching for a word bad enough for what I wanted to call him. “Cunt,” I finished, and now my voice wasn’t steady, it was trembling almost as much as Cole’s. “That’s who I’m dealing with. How could you? How could you do it to him? He was your best friend.”
“He was a fucking fool,” Cole said, and there was real agony in his voice. “I tried to warn him off, but he wouldn’t let it go. And you think all this is me? It isn’t me. I never wanted this. I was doing the only thing I could, which was to try and protect you. There was nothing I could do to save Gabe. All I could do was make sure you walked out of this.”
“You didn’t protect me, you fucking framed me, you imbecile,” I almost shouted down the phone, and then forced myself to lower my voice to a venomous whisper. “Are you seriously going to stand there and say that taking out that insurance was an act of protection? As if any amount of money could make up for Gabe’s death! You didn’t protect me, you gave the police a cast-iron case against me. Are you trying to tell me you didn’t think of that?”
“Of course I thought of that,” Cole snarled, “but if you’re in prison, they can’t murder you too, you stupid bitch.”
“Who?” I demanded. “Who? Who are you talking about? Who would want to kill Gabe, who would want to kill me?”