Precious Thing (32 page)

‘She was going to tell you, you know, that day before my eighteenth, before everything happened. I’d made her promise. I felt so wrong keeping it from you. That was why she was so nervous, so uptight, she was working up to it. She was trying to make everything perfect that day and then you argued with her and spoiled it and she couldn’t do it then. She hated you for spoiling the moment. And then you killed her.’

I remembered Laura’s words;
you
begged Niamh not to tell me, Clara, to give you time to let it sink in, and now you expected me to believe your lies. I thought back to that morning of the barbecue before you came round, the crackling heat of the day hanging heavy in the house. Niamh chopping and humming and talking too fast, her eyes darting around. On edge. It was because she wanted to make everything perfect for
you
, not me. Even a decade later I saw it as clearly as if it were happening right now in front of me. You were lying. You were trying to torment me with your twisted version of the past; you wanted
me
to think I had got it wrong.

‘We both know that’s not true. You can’t come here and expect the truth from me and still spin me your lies,’ I said.

It was your turn to laugh. You threw your head back, your hand still resting on the knife.

‘Jesus, what the fuck do you know about the truth, Rachel? You have no concept of it. Everything that happens to you is moulded to fit your own ends. You killed your fucking mother so you need to cast her as this evil villain to absolve yourself from what you’ve done. Poor little Rachel, poor unloved, neglected Rachel. But it wasn’t like that. She wasn’t like that. She tried hard with you, Rachel, she tried to make you love her but she couldn’t. She didn’t live up to your expectations, she wasn’t quite good enough so you wrote her off. Literally. You got rid of her like some unwanted fucking baggage because you got it in your mind you would be better off without her. And then you moved on to me.’

I let you continue with this monologue of yours, the torrent of accusations, the raw fury you’d suppressed for so long finally finding its outlet. You had no idea what it was like to have Niamh as a mother. All you had was a two-month-long honeymoon that would have turned sour and destructive if she hadn’t died.

You were in full flow and with every sentence I watched the flush on your face grow deeper, the beads of sweat on your top lip multiply, the tremble of your hands become more pronounced. I was watching, watching, never taking my eyes off you for a moment.

‘That day,’ you spat, ‘that day when you told me what happened – and don’t dare, don’t fucking dare deny you told me – you said you’d given her the sleeping pills and then you saw my reaction, you knew you’d made a mistake by telling me. Didn’t you? You knew you’d totally misjudged it. You revealed yourself to me that day, all the things people had told me about you and I had never believed. Well, I started believing them then.

‘You knew it had all changed, that all of a sudden your best friend had become your biggest threat because I wanted to go to the police. I wanted you to tell them what you had done. I wanted you to face up to it. But you would never do that, would you, Rachel? So you did what you always do, you turned it round and made me think I had imagined what you said, like I was going fucking crazy. Oh God, I was such an easy target, my mother had just died and I was literally collapsing with grief and guilt and I came to you with it, this guilt I had about giving her one fucking sleeping tablet, and you made it grow inside me. You fed my fucking guilt every day, always there, watching over me, suffocating me.
Don’t worry, Clara, I won’t tell anyone,
you’d breathe into my ear
, your secret’s safe with me.
It all became so clouded, so foggy, I didn’t trust myself to think any more, let alone remember clearly what had happened. You’d created this fucking nightmare for me. How could you do that?’

You stopped to wipe fat tears away from your face with the back of your dirty hands, streaking your face as you did it. You looked so pitiful, I wanted to reach out to you, but I knew I couldn’t. Not yet.

‘Going away, even knowing you had persuaded my dad to have me fucking sectioned, even knowing he believed you over me, that was nothing compared with the relief I felt just to escape from you.’ You jabbed your index finger at me, as if you were going pierce me with it.

‘I thought I never wanted to see you again but when I came back I realised I had to see you to prove to myself you had no power over me any more. And then we met and you were so nice, so fucking lovely, it broke my heart. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d got it all wrong. I’d come back hating you and wanting revenge and yet you’d do things that were so wonderful and kind and you’d make me laugh and I’d feel this love for you seep into the hatred again, diluting it.’

‘And then you changed your mind,’ I said.

You started laughing again, a horrible, empty cackle that echoed in my ears, and your tears were mixing with the snot on your face but I didn’t dare move to offer you a tissue.

‘Jesus Rachel, are you for fucking real? I changed my mind when you tried to push me off a mountain.’

I closed my eyes. We were living in parallel worlds; there was no use in trying any more because somehow, whatever I did, whatever happened to you would always be my fault. I let my head slip down into my hands as your words kept coming at me.

‘That day, you know in the mountains, it was so beautiful, the sky and the powder, all of us peeling down the slopes. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. You reminded me why we’d been friends, the fun, your ridiculous beer-drinking party trick. And then we went for that one last run. We were climbing the mountain on the chair lift and I thought,
I need to know
. I needed to know if I’d dreamt it all up in my mind and you really were my friend. Because I couldn’t stand the doubt any longer. I needed to get everything straight in my head. That’s when I asked if you killed her. I was watching your face all the time and I saw it, just a beat, a tiny ferocious flash of anger, and then you hid it again. But you knew, didn’t you, that you’d let your mask slip. You knew that all your efforts at friendship had been in vain because I’d seen it. Oh God, we used to joke that we didn’t need words to communicate. Well I didn’t need you to say anything that day because your eyes told me everything.

‘The next thing we’re on a black run, of course it was quiet, we were literally on our own, the last run of the day, and I was trying to go fast to get away from you and you came at me with your poles, so close to the edge, and you pushed me. That’s all I remember; the next thing I was waking up in hospital.’

There was nothing really to say to all of this, no point in defending myself because it was all so fanciful, the work of a 100 per cent fucked-up mind.

I let you take a breath.

‘That’s some theory you’ve come up with, Clara. I guess you found a kindred spirit in James? After all, he convinced himself it was my fault his sister drowned, my fault she capsized in the lake. And who made him believe that? Sarah of course. What a coincidence that you’ve all become such good friends.’

Your eyes bored into me. ‘Sarah knows what she saw in the lake. Even after all these years she knows what she saw. Lucy’s canoe capsized and you were the only one close to her. You shouted you were helping. But you didn’t help, did you? You kept your oar just out of her reach and Sarah saw it all but she couldn’t get to Lucy on time, and when she told the teachers, you were so convincing in your lies that no one believed her. No one believed that you would deliberately let someone die just to get your own back. Lucy pushed you in the water one day and made everyone laugh at you and the next day she was dead. Because you can’t stand people making a fool of you, can you, Rachel? You can’t stand the shame of it, so she had to pay.’

I couldn’t believe you were throwing this at me now, the oldest story, the one we had gone over so many times and every time you told me you believed me.

‘Fuck, when I think of how I stood up for you at school when everyone else was against you. I didn’t want to believe you could do that. You are so fucking evilly persuasive, the way you cast your spells and make people believe anything.’

‘Is that so?’ I asked, unable to sit back and take your accusations any longer. ‘So let’s get this straight: I am the crazy person here, am I? Well let me ask you this: do I have a whole county’s police force looking for me? Have I lied and plotted to frame my friend? I’m not hiding out in a beach hut with filthy nails and bleached hair. Look around, Clara, look for fuck’s sake,’ I shouted, rage surging through me. ‘I am successful, I have a great job, I have this flat, I
had
a boyfriend who worshipped the ground I walked on. Everything in my life was so fucking perfect, so clean and ordered, and you … you couldn’t stand it, could you? So you had to destroy it. You went and killed Jonny to get back at me for something I haven’t done.’

‘No,’ you screamed, ‘don’t you dare turn this round. I did not kill Jonny. I didn’t fucking kill him. He wasn’t supposed to die.’

‘Well he’s dead, Clara, so whatever was
supposed
to happen doesn’t matter much now, does it?’

You scratched your head with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife as if you were scratching a drying sore.

‘He wasn’t meant to die,’ you said, your head rocking back and forth gently like you were repeating a mantra. ‘We just needed him to get to you. Can’t you see that? You deserved to be punished, Rachel, someone had to punish you for what you did. Someone had to stop you.

‘It was James’s idea to play dead and frame you for my murder, at least that way you would finally pay the price for what you did to his sister and Niamh. We had it all planned. I arranged to meet you on Friday night and then I’d vanish. I wanted to get away from everything here anyway, James did too; we were going to India to start with. So what did it matter if everyone thought I was dead.’

‘So why involve Jonny,’ I spat, my mind reeling at your cunning. ‘Why not leave him alone and he’d still be alive?’

‘Because I needed the police to think I was having an affair with Jonny.’

My motive.

The penny dropped.

There was no air to breathe in the room. I was too hot, flames licking my head, fire in my stomach.

‘And the picture … the laughter?’ I could barely get my words out.

‘I wanted you to know it was me, to be so sure of it but have no one believe you. I wanted you to know how I felt all those years ago. To know the truth but have no one believe you. I wanted it to send you crazy.’ You looked pleased with yourself for a moment.

‘I told Jonny we were all meeting up as a special surprise for you. He was reluctant at first, but he would have done anything for you. We arranged to meet at my flat.’

‘That’s when you gave him the sleeping pills?’ I asked. ‘Of course it had to be sleeping pills.’

You nodded in agreement.

‘After that we drove along to Cantina Latina and we waited for you to leave.’

I remember how he looked on the CCTV, leaning into you, eyes closed. I thought it had been a trick of the camera.

‘Sarah called us as you were leaving to warn us. She said you were pissed, which was always part of the plan, to get you as drunk as possible, so we waited until we saw you walking along the promenade and dragged Jonny out of the car. He wasn’t totally out of it by then, he could walk. We just needed to be seen in the same area as you.’

‘And you’d checked where the CCTV cameras were, I take it. So it all worked out beautifully,’ I said. ‘Except Jonny died and you didn’t make your getaway after all.’

‘James left him near Preston Park; he was clothed. It was cold I know, but Jesus Christ, we didn’t expect him to die – he was wearing a jacket when he left him. He must have stripped it off, you know people do that when they’ve got hypothermia. It wasn’t our fault.’ The words came out shakily, without conviction, because you knew that it
was
your fault, didn’t you? The unavoidable truth that you had killed him.

‘Well whose was it? It wasn’t his fault he ended up dead in the mortuary, his mother wailing because she’s lost her only son, ripped apart by grief. It wasn’t his fault he was so full or life and he had it stolen from him so fucking needlessly.’

‘Don’t, Rachel, don’t. I swear we didn’t mean it. I would never ever do that. I would never ever have tried to kill him.’ You wiped your nose with the back of your sleeve. ‘James heard they’d found his body when he was driving to see me, it was in the headlines on the radio. He had to pull over, on to the hard shoulder, so he could throw up. And then he told me.’ You were wailing now. ‘I didn’t believe it at first, I couldn’t believe how it had all gone so wrong. And then I just wanted it all to end. James had to hold me back from running into the sea because that’s all I wanted to do. Disappear into the waves, sink down somewhere cold and still and never resurface again.

‘He should still be alive, I should be thousands of miles away from here. It all went wrong,’ you said needlessly.

‘Why didn’t you leave, make your getaway?’

‘Amber,’ you told me. ‘Amber went to the police to report me missing so fucking quickly. We couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think they’d start a missing person’s inquiry so soon but there I was, all over the news, my face in every fucking newspaper. We couldn’t try to leave when all that was happening. We thought we’d let it die down – these things do, don’t they, we thought everyone would get bored with me after a few days and then …’ You still couldn’t say his name.

‘And then they found Jonny’s body,’ I said, finishing your sentence. Poor dead Jonny, the final nail in your coffin.

You opened your mouth, staring at me, unable to speak, like something was shattering within you. Every piece of you breaking up.

You were trapped, Clara, nowhere left to go.

James, Sarah, Debbie: they couldn’t help you now.

There was only me left to protect you.

Suddenly, a new plan was forming in my head.

‘Where do you go from here, Clara?’ I asked, gently this time.