‘I do know,’ she says, looking me in the eye. ‘Trust me, I know a bad person when I see one, Dan.’
‘But you don’t know for sure. You can’t ever know for sure if you weren’t there. This is weird. Fucking weird. Don’t you see that? Why wasn’t your reaction to call the police and tell them you were my alibi? Or to at least come upstairs and see for yourself what had happened?’
She lets out an ironic laugh and whispers forcefully, ‘You think I wanted to see your wife’s dead body? Seriously?’
‘I would’ve wanted to know what happened, to at least ground myself somehow. I wouldn’t have just suggested disappearing off into the night.’
‘You did, though, didn’t you? You came down those stairs with your bags packed. You said you were going.’
I shake my head. ‘I’d just found my wife dead. Someone had set me up to look like I’d killed her. Do you know how you’d react in that situation? No, neither did I. I panicked. I needed space to think and get my head round it.’
‘And is it any clearer now?’ she asks, knowing full well what the answer is. ‘There’ll be a way of proving you didn’t do this, Dan. We just need the distance, mentally and physically, to be able to work it out.’
I put my head in my hands. ‘This was a stupid idea. A really fucking stupid idea. Even if we can prove something, how do we explain running away as soon as we found the body?’
‘Why should we need to?’ she says. ‘Just tell them the truth. Tell them what you just told me. If it was your honest natural reaction and instinct, why should you need to explain it? You’d just been set up for murder, you were in an extreme situation and you reacted instinctively. You didn’t commit a crime.’
‘I’m pretty sure not reporting a dead body is a crime,’ I reply.
‘Yeah, because that’s the crime they’re going to be investigating.’ Strangely, Jessica’s sarcasm seems to calm me slightly. It adds an odd sense of normality to the situation. No matter how much that puts me at ease, though, I still can’t shake off the nagging suspicion about Claude. It’s become overpowering.
‘You’re not the only one with good instincts, you know, Jess.’
‘How do you mean,’ she asks, more as a statement than a question.
‘I mean Claude. I know there’s something not right there. There’s been something between you two, hasn’t there? Something . . . wrong.’ She says nothing, so I continue. What I say is more a stream of consciousness than anything. But there’s an almost false facade to Jess. As if her controlling, confident manner is just a mask to cover traumatic events in her past. ‘I’ve heard about girls like you. You jump into bed with every guy who wants it because that’s what’s natural to you, isn’t it? You told me after the first time we did it that sex had been devalued for you. I didn’t know at the time what that meant, but now I think I do.’ I see her jaw clench. ‘Jess, were you abused?’
‘You don’t know anything,’ she says, fighting to wipe a tear from her eye.
‘Is that why you felt safe here? Is that why, when the pressure was on, you felt you had to come here? I mean, it was pretty obvious you didn’t want to be here, but felt you had to be. What do they call it, Stockholm syndrome?’ She doesn’t say anything. ‘Jess, did Claude abuse you?’
‘What the actual fuck?’ she yells, looking at me with her raging red eyes. ‘Are you shitting me? Of course he fucking didn’t. I can’t even believe you’d say that.’
‘Jess, just tell me. I . . . I care for you. I want to know. I want to understand. I want to help.’
‘You can’t help. I don’t need help. And you don’t need to understand.’ I say nothing, but she speaks anyway. ‘Claude did not abuse me. Alright? That’s all you need to know.’
What seems like only a couple of seconds, but must’ve been more, is broken by the sound of Claude’s footsteps on the gravel, making their way back towards the kitchen.
14
The winters at Pendleton House have always been cold, but this one has been particularly brutal. The snow has come in droves, coating the grounds with layer upon layer of thick white blanket. It’s drifted up the walls and the trees, smoothing the sharp angles and making everything look as though it’s melted into a huge mass of white. The boys shiver in their beds, each of them knowing damn well the nuns won’t be shivering.
The radiators have been clattering and clunking for weeks, working overtime to try and keep the house warm. So far, they’ve managed to stop it completely freezing over, but the night-times are still bitter. Some nights, if he breathes out carefully and catches the light of the moon in the right way, he can see his breath misting in front of him.
Daniel knows that in some of the other rooms, the boys huddle together at night for warmth. He can only imagine the Mother Superior in her own bedroom, the radiator no doubt searing hot, her doubled-up duvet keeping her warm and toasty. The boys have only recently been allowed an extra blanket – a heavy, coarse woollen throw that scratches at his arms if he doesn’t keep them below the covers. Not that arms outside of blankets is an option in this weather.
Teddy Tomlin isn’t the sort of boy who’d want to huddle together for warmth, anyway. He’s a lone soldier, a boy who prefers to keep himself to himself. Earlier this evening, Mr Duggan came to visit. A couple of the boys were passing through the lobby when he arrived and they said he stank of whisky. Not long after, the Mother Superior came to take Teddy Tomlin. He’d been in a bad mood all day, Teddy. All week, really. All the boys went through periods of resentment, of hating everything about the place. Daniel was the same. But he’d learnt to keep it under lock and key. Teddy was a little slower to learn. He was reluctant earlier when the Mother Superior came in and asked him to follow her. He already knew that Mr Duggan was here and was well aware what it all meant. For the first time since he’d been there, Daniel saw signs that Teddy Tomlin was starting to rebel. He didn’t realise it at first, but that began to stir up feelings of rebellion within him, too. When a troubled yet peaceful and gentle soul like Teddy starts to fight back, you can’t help but be stirred.