Because She Loves Me (32 page)

My flat was only ten minutes’ walk from the park. I felt so sick, my head thumping with every step, that I could only walk slowly. After what felt like the longest walk of my life, I reached my building. As I felt in my pockets for my keys, I heard a car door shut and looked up.

It was DC Moseley. Great. That would save me from making the call.

‘Mr Sumner,’ he said, sauntering over to me. ‘Will you come with me, please?’

‘What for?’

‘I need to ask you some questions.’

Thirty-six

This time, there was more than one detective in the room. Beside DC Moseley sat a female officer with chestnut hair, wearing a suit that, unlike Moseley’s, looked cheap and worn, though she was a higher rank than him. This was Detective Inspector Hannah Jones. She sat back in her chair, head crooked to one side, regarding me like I was an interesting yet slightly repulsive painting in a museum. They had kept me waiting in the room for over an hour and a half before coming in to talk to me.

‘Why didn’t you talk to Charlie?’ I asked. ‘She came to find me. I’m worried that she’s going to—’

Jones cut me off. ‘We will talk to her, don’t worry. But we want to talk to you first.’

‘Ask me more questions, you mean?’

They exchanged a glance.

‘Tell us again about finding the bag of heroin in your flat,’ Moseley said.

I went over it for what felt like the hundredth time. This was how the police wore people down, tripped them up if they were lying. They asked you to repeat the same story again and again until you got so tired that you let your guard down, made mistakes. This thought was chased by another:
Do they suspect
me
?

‘You don’t think I had anything to do with Karen’s death, do you?’

Jones motioned for Moseley to do the talking.

‘Our lab analysed the substance you brought in,’ he said. ‘It is indeed heroin. As you told us. We also had the plastic container fingerprinted. Can you guess what I’m going to say?’

‘That Charlie’s prints weren’t on it?’

‘Correct. Actually, we don’t have Charlotte Summers’ prints on record. But we do have yours.’

I swallowed. A dim memory surfaced, of a cop in a different station pressing my fingers into a pad of ink.

‘And there was only one set of prints on the bag, Andrew,’ Moseley said. ‘Yours.’

‘I’m not denying that I touched it. You know I did. I handed it to you! But Charlie must have worn gloves.’

Moseley stared at me. ‘Here’s what I think happened. You and Karen Jameson had a disagreement over the money she owed you. Or perhaps it was a lovers’ quarrel. Karen was jealous of your new, younger girlfriend. You murdered her, injected her with a dose of nearly pure heroin while she slept beside you, then panicked and came up with this crazy story about your girlfriend doing it.’

‘Pretty nasty,’ Jones said. ‘Killing one girlfriend and trying to frame the other for it.’

‘This is mad,’ I said. ‘It was Charlie. I can’t believe you haven’t talked to her. She’s still out there. Listen, if you don’t get her in custody, I have no idea what she’ll do. I’m worried she’s going to do something to Sasha.’

Moseley raised an eyebrow. ‘Sasha? Who’s that?’

I didn’t like his expression. ‘A friend.’

The two detectives exchanged a glance. ‘Quite the Casanova, aren’t you? It’s always the quiet ones.’

I could sense Jones sizing me up, a slight curl to her lip. It was dawning on me that maybe I should ask for a solicitor. It would have to be the duty solicitor as I didn’t have enough money to hire my own. But would that seem like an admission of guilt. This whole thing seemed so ludicrous that I couldn’t believe the detectives weren’t going to break into laughter at any moment, point at me and say, ‘Gotcha!’

‘If I was guilty, why the hell would I come here and bring you the heroin? As far as I know you weren’t even treating Karen’s death as suspicious until yesterday.’

Moseley leaned back and the look he gave me chilled my blood. ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, is it, Andrew?’

My words could barely squeeze past the lump in my throat. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Come on. Don’t act the innocent.’ He actually said those words. ‘We had a look at your record.’

The door opened and another plain-clothed policeman stuck his head in, gesturing to Moseley.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, pausing the interview, and both he and Jones left the room, leaving me alone in a horrified daze.

I knew exactly what Moseley was talking about.

It was a memory that was so painful, that so conflicted with my current image of myself, that I kept it locked away in a consciousness-proof box. Sometimes, the memories seeped into my dreams and I would wake up feeling ashamed and jittery. But if they tried to escape during waking hours, I would push them straight back into the box.

‘That was a long time ago,’ I said to the empty room, my voice weak.

But sitting there in the interview room, punch drunk, weakened and exhausted, I no longer had the strength to hold the box shut. The lid flew open and, like wasps escaping from a bottle, all the memories came flooding out.

After our parents died, when I was sixteen and Tilly fourteen, I went to live with Uncle Pete (my dad’s brother), Aunt Sandra, and their kids in Hastings, a few miles along the coast from our family home. Their daughter, Michelle, was my age, and my other cousin, Dominic, was thirteen. It was just me because Tilly was in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which had a specialist department for dealing with people like her: accident victims who had broken their spines. We visited her every weekend, driving up to Aylesbury, the whole journey like a trip on a rollercoaster. Every lurch of the car sent bubbles of panic through my blood. I held my breath every time we passed a truck. It was terrifying and I had to be dragged into the car every time like a dog being dragged into the vet’s. Uncle Pete, a no-nonsense, balding bank manager with the emotional intelligence of a goldfish, was a firm believer in getting back in the saddle, in embracing your fears. After a while though – and, I’m sure, some stern words from Sandra – Pete relented and let us go by train. I could cope with his passive aggressive comments about the extortionate costs and the stale buffet sandwiches far better than I could handle being driven on motorways.

Because Hastings and Eastbourne are only thirty minutes apart, I was originally going to return to my old school to study for my A-levels. But on my first day back I realised I couldn’t handle the pitying looks, the soft voices, the sympathy. At lunch time, I sat on my own, chewing food I couldn’t taste, an invisible force field around my table. A couple of upper sixth form girls came over to talk to me, and if I’d been a different kind of person I could have milked it, let them look after me. They could have passed me around, the sad orphan virgin, and made me merely a sad orphan.

Instead, I went home that night and announced to Pete and Sandra that there was no way I could ever go back. A week later I was enrolled at Hastings College, where no one knew my history. I was just another gangly teenager. I didn’t tell any of my new friends about my parents or my sister. When they asked if I wanted to meet up at the weekend, I made up an excuse about a part-time job. I invented a back story for myself, one in which I’d been to private school in Los Angeles, where my dad worked in the movie industry and my mum was a soap opera actress, but they’d sent me over to England to learn about the ‘old country’. No one ever asked me why I had a Sussex accent; it’s easy to live a lie when everyone around you is a self-absorbed teenager. And I discovered that making up stories made me feel better about my real life. I became addicted to lying. I even began to believe the fiction myself – it was easier to inhabit this invented world than live in the real one and deal with the terrible, all-encompassing grief that made my bones ache, the urge to cry as constant as the need to breathe. It was comforting to think that my parents were living the good life in Hollywood.

The only people who knew my real past were my new family, though I hated thinking of them like that. Everything about them, compared to my former life, irritated me. Uncle Pete and his boring stories; Aunt Sandra and her cooking which was nothing like my mum’s (she used the wrong kind of meat in shepherd’s pie, for a start); Michelle, who was much cooler than me, with an older boyfriend who took her out every night, driving up and down the seafront with the other boy racers. Then there was Dominic. Thinking about Dominic makes me prickle with shame. I haven’t seen him in over ten years. I’m sure if he saw me in the street he would hide. One day, when Pete or Sandra die, we will have to attend their funeral together. The prospect of that day stays firmly locked in my box.

Dominic was a typical thirteen-year-old boy in most ways. Spotty, awkward, addicted to his PlayStation. He was also somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Brilliant at maths and chess, but fragile and cripplingly shy, barely able to cope with the social side of school. I am not exactly sure whether he was ever given a special educational needs statement, even if such things existed in those days. I was too wrapped up in my own problems, not privy to my aunt and uncle’s conversations. All I knew was that Dominic made me feel awkward and uncomfortable. He would ask me questions that I didn’t want to answer, questions about the accident, about what it sounded like when we hit the lorry, whether I knew the velocity of the car when it collided with the truck, whether I remembered our Nissan rolling over and how loudly Tilly had screamed. Thinking back, I guess he was trying to make mathematical sense of it, find a neat way in which he could understand it. Being asked these questions though, mere months after it happened, repeatedly, made me want to punch him. I avoided him as much as I could. I didn’t want to hit anyone. I didn’t like or understand these feelings of rage and the urge to commit violence. I had never been like this.

I had been assigned a bereavement counsellor after the accident, a man with nostrils like the entrance of a great forest, who wanted me to talk to him about my feelings. I tried, at first. I didn’t tell him about the sadness and fear and anger that would swoop down out of nowhere, when I was waiting to cross the road, or that were provoked by a misplaced word, like Dominic’s questions. I pretended I was fine, tried to convince him. I lied to him, told him things I thought he’d like to hear, based on a TV documentary I’d watched.

The only person I could be honest with during this whole period was Tilly, on the rare occasions I was left alone with her, flat on her back in the hospital, the rest of the family gone to the cafeteria, nurses coming by every so often to turn Tilly to prevent bed sores. Tilly and I would talk about Mum and Dad, but also the future: Tilly was going to get better and I would look after her. She was going to be a paralympian athlete. She would hold my hand and cry and I would whisper that I was sorry, that it should have been me.

Between my made-up life at college, the lies I told my counsellor and pretending to be fine in my new home, my visits with Tilly were what I clung to, little moments of reality that allowed me to hold on to my true self.

Christmas was coming and we had arranged to visit Tilly on Christmas Eve then stay overnight in Aylesbury so we could be with her on the day itself. I was desperately looking forward to it, had starting to hype up this event in my head as a turning point, a day on which I would begin to claw back some happiness.

Then Uncle Pete announced that, because the trains on
Christmas
Eve were going to be ‘a nightmare’, we would have t
o d
rive.

I begged him to let us take the train. Since we’d stopped travelling to the hospital by car, the auto journeys had taken on a near-mythical horror in my imagination. I couldn’t picture myself in a car on a motorway without bloody, fiery disaster striking – and Dominic would be there recording the velocity and decibel levels as the car burst into flames around us. I saw his charred skeleton in my daydreams, reciting numbers and poking at a calculator with a blackened, smoking finger.

‘The trains will be a nightmare,’ Pete repeated, and Sandra agreed. They understood my fear, but I was worrying about nothing.

‘Your uncle will drive carefully, sixty in the slow lane all the way. Won’t you, Pete?’ Sandra tried to reassure me, but I didn’t trust my uncle. He didn’t say yes at all convincingly.

I managed to enlist Dominic, who didn’t want to go by car either, mainly because he hated being squashed in the back between Michelle and me. He complained and moaned about it, and asked if he could stay at home on his own, but that just made Uncle Pete laugh and start talking about Macaulay Culkin. Dominic went into a major sulk, locking himself in his room, while I stoked his resentment by reminding him constantly how awful the journey was going to be.

As December 24th approached – and my excitement about Christmas curdled into dread – I began to panic. How could I stop us going? I wanted to see Tilly, but I couldn’t get into the car. I had become like one of those people who is terrified of flying, who would need to be given a general anaesthetic before getting on a plane. I needed to do something.