‘Mmm. I should talk to her tonight, smooth it out. I’ve really upset her.’ My eyes were dry from staring across polluted streets; I balled my fists into the sockets. ‘It’s just as well we can’t afford a car, isn’t it?’ He didn’t get the reference. ‘I mean, she might have a go at the tyres . . .’ My joke fell flat.
‘Well, I hope she meant it, about backing off till the appeal,’ said Kit. I leaned into his chest; my ear found his heartbeat. His arm was heavy on my shoulder. ‘It’ll be good for her. She’s too dependent on you. You can’t carry her forever. And . . .’ Kit pulled out of our hug, took a huge gulp of air, then blew it out for twice the count, like a yoga exercise. ‘I need you. I can’t . . . Mac . . . I . . . he looks like he’s going to die. I didn’t know what to say to him. I’m out of my depth.’ He inhaled the next sentence. ‘I’m fucking – all this shit . . . I’m drowning, Laura.’ It was the first time I’d seen him cry since Lachlan died, and entirely different. Grief had drawn from Kit a slow, steady sobbing but this was a series of explosions, each wordless shout more powerful than the last; his tears were heavy and copious. I tried to put my arms around him but he swatted me away, although when I put a hand on his back he let it stay. He dropped his head down into his chest, his body a tight curl, making me aware of an almost prim straightness to my own back. I kept my palm flat against his ribs, feeling his lungs punch against them, until he had cried himself out.
The next day was a Saturday; we lay in for hours, the slats of shade a crawling sundial on our skin. Confident that Jamie wouldn’t write today, I held back from checking the doormat; I didn’t want Kit to notice that I was always rushing down to fetch the post. It was lunchtime when at last he got round to it.
The scream that ricocheted up the stairwell was as high and girlish as last night’s tears had been masculine. I only thought for a tenth of a second it was one of Jamie’s letters; the noise was too primal.
I met Kit on the third-floor landing, a bloodied shard of glass in his left hand. He’d gone pale; freckles I hadn’t noticed in years stood out on the bridge of his nose.
‘It looks worse than it is,’ he said, unconvincingly. ‘Some bloody Friday night pisshead thinking it’s funny to push this through the door. We’re getting one of those wire baskets for the letterbox.’
The timer on the light went out and for a moment we were in pitch darkness. I felt my way to the top of the landing and hit the switch. Kit had shifted, his left foot upturned to display a three-inch gash along his sole.
‘When did you last have a tetanus booster?’ I asked.
‘Last year,’ he said.
‘Let me have a look, see if we need to take you to hospital.’ He hopped his way to the futon. I laid his foot across my lap and trained the anglepoise on his sole while I checked him for splinters. The cut was long but shallow, and already beginning to clot. There was one more sliver embedded inside his arch. ‘I think your footballing career is over,’ I said, as I homed in on it with my tweezers. ‘There.’
‘Wheurgh,’ he said. When I squinted to examine the glass, I saw and smelt the evidence at the same time. A smear on the fragment of palest pink wax; the trace scent of Blood Roses. My eyes travelled to the mantelpiece. The middle candle, the one I’d started to burn, was missing. I remembered the way she’d swept all her stuff into the bag. Had the candle been caught up or deliberately stolen? I pictured her, hanging around until our light went off before feeding broken glass through our letterbox, and reached for the support of the armrest. Was this vicious act the flipside of the adoration she’d shown so far? And why? Because we had challenged her story? Or was she just lashing out because of the stress of the appeal being dragged out for so long?
‘This is my candle,’ I said to Kit. I held the glass out in my hand. Not we, I realised with horror. Me. She knew I was always the first one downstairs. Me. ‘Someone’s smashed up the candle and then posted the bits through the letterbox.’
I didn’t need to name her.
Kit blanched even further. ‘Why would she do that? That would be mad.’
That night, when Kit was asleep, I went on his laptop and read every word of jamiebalcomeisinnocent.co.uk. with a mounting sense of discomfort. In the last twenty-four hours Beth had shown herself to be duplicitous and vicious, and my previous certainty had been cut adrift. I read Antonia’s statement over and over again and Fiona Price’s bullseye rang in my ears. ‘You got carried away with the drama, didn’t you?’ What if I had not got carried away with Beth’s drama, but she with mine? Had Beth gone mad because Jamie raped her? Or had she said he raped her – or gone along with my assertion that he’d done it – because she was already mad?
Until that day I’d been thinking about the campaign in binary terms: either Jamie was in denial, or he was calling the world’s bluff. But now a third possibility was inescapable, and one in which I was horrifically culpable. What if Jamie was innocent?
Chapter 37
KIT
20 March 2015
Rain cover off. Rain cover on. Lens filter off. Lens filter on. Battery removed, checked and reinserted. Strap adjusted.
‘Would you stop fucking fiddling with your camera,’ says Richard.
‘Sorry.’ I set my hands back in my lap and resist the urge to drum my fingers on the window of the bus.
‘Sorry mate, I didn’t mean to snap,’ says Richard. ‘It’s just, you know.’ He gestures out of the window. The atmosphere in the bus as it wheezes up Húsareyn resembles the sky outside: dark and rumbling. The clouds are fast-moving but thick. Sheep dot the fields; here and there, black rocks jut through the tufty grass and heather. There’s a flash of colour on the horizon; three pink coaches, beetling up the neighbouring mountain. Instinctively I throw my hood up.