‘Believe me, we’re used to that, Nora. These were sent from your phone, and the date-stamps on your replies correspond to your runs in the forest, and the trip to the clay-pigeon range.’
‘But I didn’t take my phone on my runs!’
‘The GPS evidence is pretty conclusive. We know that you went out of the house and up the hill until you got a signal.’
‘I didn’t send them,’ I repeat, hopelessly. I want to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over my head. Lamarr is looking down at me from her full height, no cosy sitting on the bed now. Her face is set, like carved ebony. There’s compassion in her face but also a kind of rigour that I never noticed until now. Her face has the sort of unsparing detachment I imagine an angel might show – not an angel of mercy, but an angel of judgement.
‘We’ve also got the report back on the analysis of the car, Nora. We know what happened.’
‘What happened?’ I am trying not to panic, but I know my voice has got shaky and shrill. They know. They know something that I don’t. ‘What happened?’
‘Clare picked you up. And when she was safely on the road and travelling at speed, you grabbed the wheel – do you remember? You grabbed the wheel and forced the car off the road.’
‘No.’
‘Your fingerprints are all over the wheel. The scratches on your hands, the broken nails – you were fighting Clare. She has defensive wounds on her hands and arms. Your skin was under her nails.’
‘No!’
But even as I say it, I get a flash, like a nightmare breaking into day: Clare’s terrified face, green-lit by the dashboard glow, my hands grappling with hers.
‘No!’ I say, but there is a sob in my voice. What have I done?
‘What did Clare tell you, Nora? Did she tell you that she was marrying James?’
I can’t speak. I just shake my head, but it’s not a denial, I cannot deal with this, I cannot take these questions.
‘The interviewee is shaking her head,’ Roberts puts in gruffly.
‘Flo told us what happened,’ Lamarr says relentlessly. ‘Clare asked her to keep it under wraps. She was planning to tell you this weekend, wasn’t she?’
Oh God.
‘You’ve never had another relationship since you broke up with him, isn’t that right?’
No. No. No.
‘You were obsessed with him. Clare put off telling you because she was worried about your reaction. She was right to be worried, wasn’t she?’
Please let me wake from this nightmare.
‘And so you lured him up to the house, and then you shot him.’
No. Oh Jesus. I must speak. I must say something to make Lamarr shut up, to make these smooth, plum-coloured, vicious accusations go away.
‘It’s true isn’t it, Nora?’ she says, and her voice is soft and gentle, and finally, at last, she sits on the end of my bed and puts out her hand. ‘Isn’t it?’
I look up. My eyes are swimming, but through it I see Lamarr’s face, her sympathetic eyes, her heavy earrings, impossibly heavy for such a slender neck to support. I hear the click and whirr of the tape recorder.
I find my voice.
‘I want to see a solicitor.’
28
I TRY TO think back to the time-stamp of the first text, the one I supposedly sent to James, the one sent from my phone at 4.52 p.m. I was out on my run. My phone was unprotected, up in my room. So who else had access to it?
Clare hadn’t arrived yet – I know that for sure since I met her in the drive coming up to the house, but it could have been any of the others.
But why? Why would they want to destroy me like this – destroy James, destroy Clare?
I try to think through the possibilities.
Melanie seems the least likely. Yes, she was there while I was out on my run, in fact she was one of the few people who was up and about at the time of the second run. But I can’t believe that she could possibly care about me or James enough to do this. Why risk everything to incriminate someone she’d never even met? And besides, she’d gone by the time James arrived, by the time … by the time … I shut my eyes, trying to shut out the pictures of James lying shattered and bloody on the wooden floor. She could still have swapped the cartridge, a tiny voice whispers in the back of my mind. She could have done that any time. And maybe that would explain why she left in such a hurry …? It’s true. She could have swapped the cartridge. But surely she couldn’t have predicted the rest – the open door, the gun, the struggle …