The Rose Petal Beach (36 page)

Which begs the question: where is he? Which also begs the other question: why didn’t he come to me? Which also begs the third question: why, when everything was revealed, didn’t he warn me that she knew?

There is only one answer to all these questions, of course, and obviously you know the answer: he’s done a runner, is currently holed up somewhere licking his wounds, having decided it’s every person for themselves as soon as the fan got hit.

That, or she’s killed him. Which isn’t even funny considering what happened down the road.

I turn away from the door, force myself down the path, and pause at the gate. I’m not sure what do now. Where to go, what to do, what to think.

My eyes alight upon their family car, an ordinary car. Scotty –
Scott
– has a GT-R, a £75,000 car, which he replaces new every year. She has been driving this one for the past five years. She had been planning on buying herself the GT-R at one point because she’d been given an enormous bonus for the way she orchestrated TLITI’s transition from being an in-company department to becoming its own company
and
making a huge profit in its first year. She’d wanted a sports car, but decided to put the money into savings as a deposit on a family house. Even though they found the perfect house, and it was an amazing place to bring up their children, she still thinks of the black GT-R she wanted to buy.

I don’t know how I know that about her, about her life, but I do. I know lots of tiny, inconsequential details about her that make up her life, make her the person she is.

My mind cycles back to what just happened: she knows.

All things considered, it’s amazing I’m still in one piece.

I like to think of Mirabelle as being surrounded by flowers, roses of course. I like to think of her lying on that beach of hers, surrounded by rose petals, sleeping. Just sleeping. Maybe she’ll be wearing her white dress from the painting, but her face will be soft, her eyelids resting gently closed, those long, black eyelashes of hers sitting on the rise of her perfect cheekbones. Her hair, shiny and curly, framing her face, pooling on her shoulders.

I have to think of her like that. I have to, and I have to make it a clear image I can hold in my head. I have to see the creases of her dress, each seam, the perfectly turned-out hem; I have to picture the smoothness of her flawless complexion; I have to hold onto the twirls and coils that make up her beautiful hair; I have to cling onto the fluid length of her limbs, conjure up the curve of her stomach, the swell of her chest, the slenderness of her neck and shoulders.

I need to do this every time I think of her because of what that policewoman told me. The details of how she died are scorched into my head and I can’t erase them. Like the extreme pornography I saw on Scott’s computer, it plays on loop in my head.

The images of her being pushed into the bath, the flailing of limbs, the choked, watery screams, the determined violence of hands around her neck, drowning and strangling her at the same time. Those images work their way through my mind, unspooling themselves over and over. Almost every time, the person whose hands are around her neck are mine.

I hate the fact Scotty – Scott – wasn’t free when we fell in love. If you knew me, you’d know I’m not like that, this isn’t the sort of thing I would normally do. I mean, yes, some might say I have ‘previous’ when it comes to liaisons with unavailable men. But I don’t
mean
to do stuff like that. I promise. And I double promise I’m not a man-stealing slut. Life simply seems to work out that way.

You see, I’m one of those women who get on better with men than women. I’m certainly no ‘handmaiden’ as Mirabelle said, but it’s been like that since I can remember. I have been through phases where I’d accumulate female friends but the rivalry – the trying to outdo each other in looks and clothes and make-up – would become too intense and we’d have to take a break from each other. Then, of course, there was the way they were so suspicious of me because I could hold my own in a conversation about the latest Michael Kors collection
and
about who was going to finish top of the Premier League.

As soon as these ‘friends’ had fellas and I didn’t, it became allout war. As time went on, I was dropped by a lot of my women friends and I saw more of their husbands at the footie or down the pub.
I
was being friendly, having a laugh, enjoying my life, nothing more. However, when these men’s other halves heard that ‘Beatrix’ had been there too, there’d be a scene and tears and ultimatums, and most of the blokes would ditch me for the quiet life. EVEN THOUGH WE HADN’T DONE ANYTHING.

The ones who didn’t ditch me met up with me in secret. That was when things started to get complicated, the secrecy, the shared worry about being caught … The forbidden nature of it … All of those things often pushed us closer together.

I hated myself for it, truly I did, and I rarely did it more than a handful of times with these men because I knew what was coming – I knew they would fall in love with me, they would want more and I couldn’t give them more because, well, my husband left me for some whore and I would never do that to another woman. I would never let a man leave his wife – and sometimes kids – for me. Screwing them was one thing, breaking up their marriage was another.

After the last one, Craig, a guy I’d got to know first through work and then through going to the footie, did actually leave his wife even though I’d dumped him, I swore to myself no more.

I’ll never forget seeing Craig’s wife in Sainsbury’s a few weeks after he left. She looked like she’d been hit repeatedly by a bus. Her hair was unwashed and hung in greasy clumps around her face, she was gaunt, her skin almost alabaster white, and her clothes were practically hanging off her. In all the time I’d known her before we drifted apart, I’d never seen her without make-up and immaculately turned out clothes.

Guilt took the breath right of my lungs and I stepped behind a woman in white handing out strawberry cheesecake samples to hide from her. Craig had sworn to her – he told me – there was no one else. ‘I told her that I loved her but I wasn’t in love with her any more. We can tell everyone that I turned to you for comfort after things had ended,’ he’d said to me in my flat the night he left her. ‘No one need ever know when we fell in love.’

‘But I’m not in love with you,’ I’d said to him, confused, wishing he would go. He’d seemed so sexy before when he was off limits, but in leaving his wife he was transformed into a liar and a cheat. Exactly what my ex-husband had been.

‘You do love me, I can tell,’ he’d said.

‘At no point did I mention love. It was a bit of fun, no one was meant to get hurt and you weren’t meant to leave your wife. Why did you leave your wife? What did she ever do to deserve that?’

He stayed for what felt like hours, trying to change my mind, until I told him that I would tell his wife if he didn’t get the hell out of my flat. He left saying he’d wait for me and I knew I’d have to avoid him. Seeing his wife was horrendous. I remembered that look well, I remembered how it felt to have your whole world obliterated. To go from being with the man you loved and knew inside and out to dealing with a stranger, one who saw your relationship completely differently to how it actually was.

After that, I promised myself no more married or attached men. Even if he was divine, even if his other half was controlling him by not letting him be friends with any woman he wanted to hang out with, I would stay away because of the devastation it caused.

Everything had been fine, it’d worked, I turned down every opportunity I had to be with a married or attached man and felt very proud of myself.

Until there was Scotty.

The sound of running water scares me. It bubbles an icy fear through my heart.

It’s unsettled me since Mirabelle died, but after what DS Harvan did and said, the sound now terrifies me. I get a cold trickle of fear running through my body and I have to stop myself from shaking. I try to conjure up the image of her surrounded by flowers and sometimes it works, the terror banished. Sometimes the images combine and there are rose petals in the water, there is Mirabelle at rest in the water and there is no sound. Other times, it is a pointless exercise. I am enslaved and tortured by it, powerless while it rampages through me.

I think the sound is one I heard that night. The night she was murdered. Since I know I didn’t have a bath that night and I don’t think Scott did, either, all I can think is … I might have heard it there. I might have been there when she died.

I’m not sure. That’s the worst part, I suppose. Not knowing for sure if I was there while the bath was running, if I crept up behind her, pushed her in and then held her down until she stopped fighting, until she was gone, if that was where the scratches on my arms came from. Could I have done that? I was so angry. Not that night, but every night and every day since Scott’s arrest, if I’m honest. I was hurt, horrified, shocked, shaken, scared, but underlying that was anger. Most of it at myself, for not guessing, for not seeing it, but a lot at Scott, at Mirabelle. The result, of course, is I’m now scared of what I am doing – running a bath for my children.

The very act of pushing in the plug, turning the five spindles at the top of the tap with my hand, wrenches and wrings my
stomach. I reach out and take the organic, sensitive bath wash from the window ledge that doubles as a shelf and flip it open. My hand is shaking, of course. I drizzle some into the bath, watching it turn the clear water a milky white that obscures the bottom of the bath and the fish-shaped bathmat. I look away from the bath then. It’s always at that point, when clouds of white begin to streak the water before dispersing, that I have to look away. It reminds me of something. I’m not sure if it’s real, or if it’s something I’ve conjured up to fit in with the images that the policewoman evoked for me. But it’s making something that was a pleasure, a great way for us to spend time together, a fraught experience.

‘Are you two ready?’ I call out of the bathroom door. I take a deep breath to centre myself, to push away the memories that I am sure are false. I would not do that. I have to keep reminding myself, no matter what I was feeling, no matter how angry I was, I would not KNOWINGLY kill someone. I couldn’t.

Could I?

‘Ready!’ Anansy squeals, arriving in the bathroom first, her towel in hand, still dressed in her pyjamas. Her hair is technically still in the three plaits I’d put in earlier – in reality, strands of her hair are escaping all over her head in a cute, chaotic mess. I remember my mother
despairing
because I would look very similar to Anansy by tea time, no matter how neat I started the day. I don’t really remember why, that’s just the way it was, to paraphrase Anansy.

‘I’m here,’ Cora says, sauntering into the bathroom, wearing her fluffy dressing gown, a towel wrapped into a turban around her head. She is so from the wrong era, she should be in 1950s Hollywood, with a cigarette holder suspended between the fingers of one hand and martini glass in the other. I can imagine Mirabelle looking that elegantly glamorous of an evening.

As Cora sheds her dressing gown, I want to grab her, stop her from getting into the bath, stop her meeting the same fate as
Mirabelle. That is an irrational reaction and instead I get down on my knees to help Anansy finish getting undressed.

It’s OK to put them in the bath. Nothing is going to happen in the bath, nothing bad happens in the bath. What happened to Mirabelle doesn’t happen to people that often. People die, yes, but not like that. Not
murdered.

Anansy is splashing water, Cora is not. I’m surprised that Cora is still willing to share a bath with Anansy, but she doesn’t mind. I’ve asked her more than once if she feels weird at all, or if she’d like to have her own baths, but she looks at me as if I am crazy. She loves spending time with her sister, they really are the best of friends. They’ve been closer since Scott was arrested, but almost inseparable since Scott left.

The sound of water being moved by bodies, warm, living bodies, is magnified. Deafening. It’s like standing on top of the ocean in the middle of a storm, everything sounds rough, dangerous, deadly. I close my eyes because I can’t slam my hands over my ears without unnerving the girls, but that, of course, makes it worse. Take away one sense and the others become magnified. I knew that. So why did I do something so stupid, something that almost instantly turned up the volume, brought the ocean crashing all around me?

She sighs.
In my head
Mirabelle sighs. She looks away over my shoulder as if checking if there is something more interesting out on the street. ‘Yes? What do you want?’ she asks, hostility in her tone. She was being hostile to me? Me?

‘I want you to tell me why you did it.’ I slur.

She focuses on me then, stops looking over my shoulder, stops ignoring me and concentrates on me. ‘You’ve been drinking?’ she says, suddenly full of concern. And then she looks down at my feet. ‘And you’ve got no shoes on. Oh God, Tami, what are you doing to yourself?’

‘Stop pretending you care,’ I say to her. I am swaying because I can’t stay upright and still.

‘Come in here,’ she says and before I can properly protest, she takes hold of my arm, pulls me into the house.

‘Get off me!’ I screech at her, pushing her off. ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me!’

‘Mama, what’s the matter?’ Anansy asks, dragging me back into the bathroom.

I am shaking. My back is flat against the wall. I don’t want to rely on gravity and the present to stop me from falling back there. I need to hold on to something.

‘Are you OK, Mama?’ Cora asks.

Their concerned faces look at me from the bath and I know I am scaring them. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I say, taking a chance on letting go of the wall. I’m fine. I’m not falling backwards. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’ I’m fine. Everything is fine.