Should I warn her not to let Beth get too close? I chicken out. Instead, I dictate my own numbers, landline and mobile, to the machine, and then ring off, setting the phone down next to me on the computer table.
I look again at Kit’s map of eclipses. His trip complete, he can now replace a red thread with a gold one, stretching in a little arc north of these islands. He’s even cut the gold thread to size and set it out on top of the printer. I think about pinning it on the map, just for something to do, then think better of it. To deprive him of the ritual would be like opening a child’s advent calendar. A shaft of tenderness breaks through my anger at him, confusing me further. I want his help. I want to scream at him. I want him to hold me. I want to push him down the stairs.
Downstairs, the walls and floor are clean, for the most part, but the bin is already starting to smell, a horrible cloying fruity odour that’s mixed in with the dried-out bone broth cup. I pause for a moment of brief nostalgia for my blunt pre-pregnancy sense of smell, then haul the bin bag and its contents through the hall. On the front doorstep I drop the lot in the wheelie bin. The whole job takes less than four seconds. I’ve turned my back to the street when I feel a rush of air at my neck, displaced by the body behind it.
‘Laura!’ Beth barrels into me, pushing me into the hall with more force than I could ever equal. I trip on the threshold and fall forwards, leading with my belly as the Minton tiles rise up to meet me.
Chapter 55
KIT
8 May 2000
On the morning of the trial, I woke up with a long, hungry intake of breath, like someone had been holding a pillow to my face. I was momentarily disoriented to find myself in a chintzy room above a pub. Laura slept – also fitfully – by my side, a twitching innocent embodiment of everything I had to lose. We were in Truro town centre but you would never have known you were in a city from the silence outside. Where were the refuse lorries? The sirens? The fights? I lay awake in the hotel room, which was so suffocatingly floral I was surprised it hadn’t given me hayfever, and wished myself back in London.
I was uneasy about leaving my brother. Our father’s death had been a release that bordered on anti-climax; or it would have been, had Mac not taken up the hellraiser’s baton like it was a bottle the old man had pressed into his hand. I worried about him; I worried about Ling and little Juno: but most of all I worried about myself.
I was shot through with the stupid, childish longing for a magic wand. When I was young, and my world consisted of my family, my telescope, and a yard of Philip K. Dick novels, I daydreamed constantly of Kit’s Adventures in Time Travel. I ran through the usual fantasies from killing Hitler to fixing the lottery, but now I knew that, given the power of time travel, I’d return to the previous August and intercept Beth on her way to Lizard Point. One momentary loss of reason had undermined my whole sanity; I took monthly health checks at the STI clinic and kept them up ridiculously, superstitiously, long after any infections I might have passed on to Laura would have showed up.
That morning, I stared through dim light at the shipwreck painting on the wall, wondering where Beth was now, and whether she had slept. She must have been reliving from the inside the sickening image that played over and over in my mind’s eye, of Jamie tearing into her. The thought of it made me whimper; beside me, Laura stirred in her sleep. I put my hand on her shoulder until she stilled again.
My heart hurt with the hope that Beth would keep quiet about our night together.
I am glad that I didn’t know then how impulsive she was, or it might have stopped beating altogether. No matter how hard the defence might go at her, I willed her to keep sight of how my quick thinking, in the moments after Laura found her, had made this trial viable.
I had been waiting for ten months to get the call from the CPS saying that they knew about my involvement with Beth, that she had confessed to it at the last minute and their whole prosecution would fall apart if Jamie’s defence so much as blew on it. I was merely waiting for it to come out at trial.
There seemed infinite variables to consider. Would Beth break down and tell them about me under cross-examination? Had someone seen us after all? Had they found my DNA on her? Hair, skin; we had been all over each other. Semen. We had both showered the following day, but body fluids loitered internally for days. While they did not have my DNA on file, I was sure that, if they mentioned an unidentified male, I’d do something to give myself away – to Laura if not to the court. At night I dreamed that the defence team had somehow swabbed me in my sleep, and had dreams where they called me as a surprise witness, my infidelity literally under the microscope.
It was only when we were back in Cornwall that I realised finding traces of a man other than Jamie on Beth’s body had implications for her, too. I knew from Laura that although they weren’t supposed to get a woman on ‘loose’ behaviour, it didn’t stop them trying.
Laura’s insistence on hanging around the courtroom that first day was pure torture.