Precious Thing (22 page)

I paused and played with my hands, as if I was nervous, and then I looked up again at Sally, my voice bigger, stronger this time.

‘We’ve been friends for so long, I know her inside out. I know what she’s thinking, I know what she wants. So I can’t give up on her, she knows I never will.’

Thursday night was
Crimewatch
night and Jake was with me at my flat. We were rarely apart in those days, sharing the same space but somehow allowing each other to breathe. Looking back I can see he was my link to normality, a life raft that stopped me from drowning in Jonny’s loss. He was also separate from you, not yet contaminated by our story which would eventually spill like oil into his life.

Nine o’clock; my heart thudded in time with the beats of the
Crimewatch
theme music. No surprise, Clara, you were the top story. Your now universally recognised face so easy on the eye, and your middle-class credentials meant your story had caught everyone’s imagination, while others of missing women and children were given a few lines in the ‘news in brief’ column or ignored completely.

We waited for the music to finish then Fiona Bruce popped up and, eyebrows knitted in concern, she read the cue to the reconstruction sitting perched on the desk.

‘Tonight we want your help in finding this young woman’ (
points to
picture of you
). ‘It’s been more than two weeks since Clara O’Connor, a young artist from Brighton with a bright future ahead of her, was last seen meeting friends in the city on a chilly Friday night. Despite extensive media coverage and numerous appeals the police are still looking for that crucial bit of information that will bring them closer to finding her.

‘So if you think you might have seen Clara, please get in touch. Your call could be the one that matters.’

And then the VT rolled.

In all honesty I wasn’t convinced your double looked anything like you. Yes, she had long brown hair but it didn’t bounce the way yours did when she moved, and although she was wearing the same mossy green coat you wore on the night you disappeared her gait was all wrong. Jake told me to shut up and watch the film, ‘No one else would notice that,’ he said. The cameras followed your double into Cantina Latina where she laughed with someone I presumed was Sarah Pitts. Then she was outside again on the promenade, saying hello to a man who wore Jonny’s clothes but looked nothing like him. For a sickening moment I thought they might show you embracing, kissing even, a little nod to the police’s narrative of events, but to my relief they just showed you walking along in step with each other.

That’s where it ended. The pair of you on the promenade, heading into the black night, blown away by a gust of wind from the sea.

After the reconstruction it was my turn. I wondered if you were watching somewhere, Clara. I hoped you were. Me, sitting in the dim lights of the studio, my ashen face free of make-up, chewing my lips, fiddling nervously with my fingers. Playing the part of the tormented friend. What was your reaction when you heard my words?

‘I know what she’s thinking, I know what she wants. I can’t give up on her, she knows I never will.’

‘Remind me never to let you on air without make-up,’ Jake said when it was finished. We were sprawled on the sofa. He prodded me in the stomach with his foot.

‘Fuck off,’ I said. There was a cushion between us. I picked it up and went to throw it in his direction but he saw me and grabbed my hand to stop me. It was there again, the flash between us. A look that lasted too long. He let my hand fall.

‘Do you think it’ll work?’ he asked. He wasn’t joking now, his voice heavy, reluctant to say the words that were forming on his lips. He breathed them, so quietly they floated out from him into the air. ‘After all this time, it doesn’t look good.’

I took the cushion and pushed it into my stomach, leaning forward. Everyone thought you had gone, swallowed up by a January night, sucked into the ether. No one would believe me, would they? But they had to; if I only convinced one person that would be enough and I decided there and then that I wanted that person to be Jake.

‘Have you ever just known something?’ I asked. ‘I mean felt it in your bones, had that unshakeable conviction? Sometimes it doesn’t make sense. But you just know. Well, I know Clara is alive.’

I waited for a pat on my arm, a touch to say
there there
. A pitying look –
poor Rachel can’t face up to the truth
. Instead his eyes didn’t leave me, as if what I was telling him had him gripped, as if he had never been as interested in anyone or anything as he was at that moment. Then I took a breath to steel myself.

‘She’s out there somewhere,’ I said and I knew from the look on his face he was wondering why that conviction brought me no comfort, why my face clouded with fear. ‘I think she’s out to get me.’

He listened in silence, for so long, Clara, it broke my heart. He believed me. There was no sliver of doubt, no attempt to convince me otherwise. I told him our secret, I told him what you had done and how it sent you mad. I told him how you blamed me and how I had tried to make things better since you’d got back but how nothing had been right. And I explained how I realised you’d been storing your resentment, bottling it in the deep pit of your stomach, ready for the day when you unleashed it and took your revenge.

Of course there were 300 police officers out there searching for you Clara; your face was so well known it would be hard for you to move around without being noticed. But Jake didn’t question my theory, he didn’t ask how it was possible you could slip through the shadows like a ghost. Like me, he knew anything was possible.

I was so warm with relief I wanted to cry. It was like one of those secrets you guard and dread sharing, only when you do, you wonder why you thought it was so difficult, because the sharing can be beautiful really. Suddenly you are not alone.

I wiped my eyes and Jake’s arm slipped round me. ‘I’m scared,’ I told him. And it was true. You had already destroyed so much, Clara, but you could do much more damage. His arm was pulling me in, little by little, and in his arms I couldn’t be scared because they were strong and I was protected, sheltered. And his breath was hot on my face and I was tingling from that and from his hair which brushed my cheek. We looked at each other and it was there between us, so obvious we couldn’t ignore it, and then I felt his lips, warm, like velvet on mine, and I didn’t pull away. Not when his kisses trailed down my neck, not when his fingers were undoing my shirt, tracing the outline of my chest, not when his hand moved across my breasts. I didn’t pull away. I was warm and alive and melted into him as if we were fusing together. And much later, when he was inside me, I wanted him to stay there forever because we seemed to fit so well but mostly because lying there with him made everything else go away.

I know what you are thinking, Clara: that it was all so wrong, so utterly wrong
,
such a betrayal of Jonny. But it wasn’t a betrayal of him, not really. It was because I loved Jonny so much, because of the huge gaping hole he left inside me that I had to fill it with something otherwise I would have died. So don’t judge me, not until you’ve walked in my shoes.

Our legs were locked round each other’s, and the duvet, which Jake had brought from the bedroom, was wrapped round them, cold and refreshing next to the heat of our bodies. We were eating crisps and drinking gin because it was the only thing left in the cupboard. Jake snatched a look at his watch. ‘The update is coming on any minute,’ he told me. I didn’t want you to come crashing into my living room and intrude upon us. I didn’t want our little bubble of togetherness to be popped. But still, I was curious.

It was Nick Ross this time. He walked over to the makeshift Sussex police incident room where DCI Gunn and the petite woman detective I recognised from the day he showed me the CCTV were sitting. DCI Gunn’s hair had been stuck down and I could make out a faint line of orange on his collar, his frown lines smoothed over with the make-up girl’s brush. He looked stiff, sweating under the studio lights.

Nick Ross: ‘Now on to the disappearance of the Brighton artist Clara O’Connor. Police have had a very encouraging response. Three calls in particular you are especially interested in, is that right?’

DCI Gunn: ‘Yes Nick that’s correct. We’ve had over fifty calls from members of the public who think they may have seen Clara in the early hours of
Saturday morning. But in particular we have had three callers who mentioned the same name in connection with her disappearance. Two of those people have given their name, but one called anonymously. I want to appeal to that caller to get in touch again. Your call will be treated in the strictest confidence.’

DCI Gunn was just getting into his stride when Nick Ross said: ‘Well good luck with that, now over to Fiona with news on that armed robbery in Sheffield.’

Three callers. One name.

‘Maybe the net is closing in,’ Jake said but I couldn’t focus. If the police didn’t believe Jonny killed you now, what trail were they about to follow? Whose name had been mentioned?

I voiced some of these questions to Jake who told me he had a contact,
an old mate who owed him a favour.
He would ask him to find out.

In the end though we found out who it was much quicker than either of us anticipated: announced by two police officers knocking on my door at six in the morning.

C
ONGRATULATIONS, CLARA, I
was the woman suspected of killing you. How did that sound? Did you roll it round your mouth, try it out for size? Did it feel as good as you’d hoped?

I kept thinking things couldn’t get any worse and then bingo, this happened. Well, ten out of ten for imagination, for pure evil cunning. There I was getting my head round the fact you’d faked your own disappearance, you’d killed Jonny, not realising for one terrible moment that there was more to come. The icing on the fucking cake. I was it. Bound up so tightly in your lies it seemed no one would believe me.

I guess you must have loved me a lot to hate me this much.

As soon I was dressed I had been driven from London to Brighton police station where I was handed over to the custody sergeant. He was old and wheezing, bound to a desk because it was the only job he could do. Breathing his coffee fumes over me he explained that I was to be processed, like a slab of meat. I noticed him looking at me curiously. ‘You’re that woman off the telly aren’t you? Don’t you report on crime? Least you’ll know what you’re in for,’ he said, smirking, as if the thought tickled him.

My face coloured with shame.
This can’t be happening
. This happened to other people who took drugs and robbed and killed. It didn’t happen to young women, with successful careers and property and money. I started to cry, hot tears of anger and frustration. ‘There’s been an awful mistake, this has nothing to do with me,’ and the sergeant nodded as if he’d heard it all before.

After half an hour there was nothing left of me. The person with tasteful, expensive clothes and jewellery, the person I had taken years to construct, had vanished. My diamond earrings – a present from Jonny, my Tiffany chain, were all removed. My Mulberry bag, my BlackBerry, my wallet, the belt on my jeans, everything I had brought with me was recorded, bagged and labelled to be handed back to me when (if) I was released.

Next, I was marched to a room to have my photograph taken. The mug shot. My eyes were red from tiredness, puffy with tears. I imagined the photo finding its way into the pages of the newspapers, arranged next to a shot of me as I appeared on TV to show how far I’d fallen.
Crime reporter accused of murder.
How they would love that story. As Robbie would say,
It has all the elements
.

After they had taken a swab of DNA I was finally shown to the interview room where the fun was ready to begin.

The room was grey and fridge-cold. I sat at the table with my solicitor, a woman a little older than me whose name was Kirstin Taylor. I say she was older than me on account of her clothes, which were middle-aged (Boden chic), and the strands of grey that threaded through her dark hair. I remember being strangely relieved to see she wasn’t a man. God knows why, I think I’d harboured some vain hope she would know instinctively that my arrest was an affront to justice. Perhaps I thought she would understand the mechanics of a close female friendship in a way a man never would. But if she did she kept it well hidden, nodding her head, taking notes and saying ‘hmmm’ with her finger over her mouth as if she was discussing a staff issue at work and not an accusation of murder.

I shifted in the chair, and pulled my winter coat around me to calm my chattering teeth. Underneath I was wearing only jeans and a thin cotton top, the first things I’d found to pull on when the police arrived. To make matters worse Jake had answered the door in his TV shirt and boxers. Such a cosy scene: girlfriend and boyfriend waking up together in their flat. Only it wasn’t Jake’s flat and my boyfriend had died less than two weeks before. It didn’t look good.

DCI Gunn came into the room with a woman and sat in the chair opposite. He didn’t acknowledge me, no simple hello, no smile thrown my way. He just sat down and looked through his notes. We were adversaries now, three years of lunches, banter and trust-building sucked out of the room along with the warm air. You see, being accused of murder is a great equaliser, no matter who you are in your outside life; in the interview room with the camera rolling and the eyes staring, you become the lowest common denominator.

‘The time of the interview is ten twenty a.m. Officers present are DCI Roger Gunn, and DS Susan Tomey,’ he said, still leafing through the notes in front of him, underlining a few sentences, scoring a few others out. I couldn’t read them; the print was too small, the table between us too big. It’s a file on me, I thought, all about me, and whatever was written inside it had led them to believe I killed you.

I hadn’t seen DS Tomey before and her face was something of a welcome diversion from DCI Gunn’s in so much as it transfixed me with its ugliness. The front teeth that jutted out, her freckle-covered face, the way her mouth twitched. Rodentesque, I thought. Her hair, tied back severely in a ponytail, was only a shade or two from mine. But I couldn’t detect any evidence of ginger solidarity in the room.