The Rose Petal Beach (50 page)

After this run, I am going to the police station.

I’ve remembered almost everything about the night Mirabelle died.

After this run, I am going to the police station and I am going to confess what I did that night.

This woman, this
receptionist
, has no idea how much I hate her. I hate her voice, her manner, her whole existence. She’s the one who used to say ‘soon’ to me whenever I asked when Scott would be returning to work in those first days when he disappeared. She’s the one who gleefully screens his calls now. For two days I’ve been dealing with her and her attitude. I thought it might be easier in person. It’s actually worse in person because she can see me and look down on me.

I would look down on me, too, I have to accept that. I look ordinary. Yes, I know you never thought you’d hear those words from me, but it’s true. See, my roots are growing out so I’ve got a halo of orange-red developing on my crown. The natural wave is returning to the rest of my hair so I’m not as sleek as I used to be. My complexion is pale, not touched up and brightened by makeup. I am dressed for comfort rather than display: baggy jeans, a T-shirt and this voluminous suede jacket my husband left behind, as well as comfy knickers and bra.

I can’t be bothered with the other stuff right now. I can’t face squeezing into a skin-tight skirt so it shows off my waist, I can’t bring myself to pick up a make-up brush and create perfection. I can’t be bothered to blow-dry or GHD my hair straight. This is me, just as I am. Ordinary.

Guess what? Ordinary ain’t too bad: I have had a few men – men who would never normally look at the me I used to be – do a double-take. And I feel comfortable now that I’m not on show. Ordinary, though, is not what this receptionist respects.

If I was dressed how I used to, she might not be so dismissive.
She might not think she’s got the right to treat me like nothing.

She really has no idea who she is dealing with.

‘I would like to see Mr Challey and I
will
see Mr Challey,’ I tell her.

She sits with her headset and her straight, smoothed and conditioned hair and gives me the ‘good luck with that’ eyebrow and says, as patronisingly as possible, ‘That really won’t be possible, Madam. Mr Challey really is extremely busy.’

‘Fine. In two minutes I am going to start taking off my clothes. Every minute I am standing I will remove another item of clothing until I am naked.’ I look from her to the glass front of this building – this area is very visible to the outside world. ‘Then I am going to start screaming the place down. Yes, the police may well come and take me away, that security guard over there may be able to eject me from the building, but not before I have brought A LOT of attention to your company. You might want to tell Mr Challey that I said all that.’ I raise my hand and look at my imaginary watch. ‘And just so you know, I haven’t had a wax in
a very long time
.’

The Über Receptionist has never been taught how to deal with this. She keeps looking from me to the security guard who is sitting by the door, pretending to have not heard the threat. He doesn’t get paid enough to wrestle with mad women. Especially ones who are promising him a bit of nudity. I remove my jacket and dump it unceremoniously on the ground.

With pursed lips she pushes a button on the desk in front of her. ‘That’s Beatrix Carenden, in case you’ve forgotten,’ I remind her.

Detective Sergeant Harvan would like to kill me.

Normally, I’d expect her to look as if she wanted to lock me up and throw away the key. The look on her face, however, is telling me that she could reach across the table and put her hands around my neck and squeeze until I am dead. I get the impression that her position in the police force has been damaged by Mirabelle withdrawing her statement. It probably doesn’t help that she hasn’t found Mirabelle’s killer – and the best they’ve managed is someone voluntarily coming forward to help them with their enquiries. I get the impression that DS Harvan doesn’t like people making her look bad. Detective Wade seems a fraction less affronted. Maybe he thinks that his pep talk the other day finally woke me up to the fact that I had to tell the truth, but he’s still internally outraged at the gall of me withholding information the last time I was here.

They both sit opposite me, and they have both made their statements for the tape of the date and the time and who is present. Harvan’s yellow pad has a blue, clear-cased Biro on top of it in front of her, her hands are clenched together. Wade also has a yellow, lined pad in front of him but he has his pen in his hand. He is the listener, she is the questioner. I am the talker.

I don’t have a solicitor because, really, what would be the point? I just want the truth to be known. To unburden myself.

‘I still only remember most of what happened that night,’ I say to them, staring down hard at my hands resting on the table. My hand still feels bare without my wedding ring. ‘But I remember most of it now. So, if it’s OK, I’ll tell you what I do remember and then you can decide what to do next.’

The girls are with my parents in London, staying for the weekend, maybe longer. That depends on what happens next. I wanted them away from here when I did this. If they keep me in, I will call Scott and tell him. And even though he’s only partway along his journey to being a good man again, he’ll have to move back into the house and take care of the girls. Live his life around them as I’ve had to do all these years.

I suppose I am a ‘flight risk’ so it’s unlikely I’ll be released on bail. I am not under arrest, so I have not been formally advised of my rights to say nothing that may be later used against me in a court of law, but I have been told that if I am later arrested and charged, anything I say now will be used to build the case against me. Basically, they are telling me I’m allowed to ‘incriminate’ myself as much as I want right now and I can’t say they didn’t warn me when I decide to do the wise thing and get a solicitor.

‘I was very drunk that night. I don’t often drink, so more than two bottles of expensive wine on an empty stomach and frazzled nerves went straight to my head,’ I say by way of a beginning. I’m not sure how I’m meant to begin this so I’m starting here. I may need to go back, I may need to skip very far forward, but this is where I am starting this: my confession.

I’m not sure how I’m meant to begin this so I’m starting here. I may need to go back, I may need to skip very far forward, but this is where I am starting this: my confession.

I was very drunk that night. I don’t often drink, so more than two bottles of expensive wine on an empty stomach and frazzled nerves went straight to my head.

I only mention it was expensive wine because it came from Scott’s personal collection. It’s obscenely expensive and rare, and I opened both bottles at the same time because he had hurt me and I knew the quickest way to hurt him was through his pocket. I didn’t intend to drink both bottles, I just wanted him to see them there on the table and know his precious wine hadn’t gone on an important person but little old me. The stupid, clueless wife he’d been cheating on. Even better if it was left out and spoiled.

I was so angry. I suppose I should admit that. I thought at the time that Mirabelle had betrayed me. We were meant to be friends, really close friends, I’d trusted her with so much of myself – things I didn’t even tell Scott, nor Beatrix. I genuinely thought Mirabelle had had an affair with my husband and she wanted him to leave me. It was all Scott’s fault, but he was trying. Or that’s how he painted it to me – he was trying, we were trying to fix our relationship, mainly for the sake of the children. I was deluding myself, I’ve accepted that now. But Mirabelle had suddenly been the reason for everything going wrong.

I know that’s not right. It wasn’t her fault, even if she had been sleeping with him, it was all down to Scott. There’s a particular kind of hatred that grows inside you, though, when the other
woman has made herself a part of your lives. When she has insinuated herself into your heart and mind, into the hearts, minds and lives of your children, and all along has been laughing at you behind your back. What else would she have been doing but laughing at me if she had the capacity to betray me like that?

I sat in the kitchen drinking and brooding and obsessing, that rage building until I was out of my chair and creeping out of the house without any shoes on.

I wanted to talk to her, to see if she could make me understand why she had done it. It was stupid to go there because I wasn’t rational, I wasn’t sober, and if I am honest I wanted to hurt her as much as she’d hurt me. I’m talking about then, of course, all that I knew then, not what I know now.

What I remember most is the feel of the pavement under my feet. It’d been raining earlier in the day so the pavement was still that earthy damp of not quite evaporated rain. I felt every stone underfoot, but I must have been sober enough to avoid stepping in any bird droppings, which are rife in our road.

She opened the door and I was awestruck as I often was when I saw her. You’ve met her, you know that she’s that special kind of beautiful woman who is completely comfortable in her skin. She was in her silk dressing gown, with her big fluffy slippers on, her hair was bunched up on top of her head.

She looked so normal. She’d been sleeping with my husband for months and months and yet she looked so normal. Serene. Beautiful. She shouldn’t look so normal and balanced and everything I wasn’t. I wasn’t jealous so much as angry for being made to feel second-best, if that makes sense. She didn’t do that, I just felt like that after everything – after all the time we’d spent together, talking and sharing and being friends. After she’d encouraged me to take up running, and put myself first every once in a while, and have the confidence to be myself despite what the world around me was saying about being a mother and a wife and a woman, all along she’d been after my husband. She’d been worming her way into my life.

She sighed when she saw me, then looked away over my shoulder as if seeing if there was something more interesting out on the street. ‘Yes? What do you want?’ she asked, hostility in her tone.
She
was being hostile to
me
?

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

She stopped looking over my shoulder and concentrated on me. ‘You’ve been drinking?’ she said, suddenly full of concern. And then she looked 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 said to her, I was swaying at that point.

‘Come in here,’ she said and before I could properly protest, she took hold of my arm, pulled me into the house.

‘Get off me!’ I screeched at her, pushing her off. ‘Don’t touch me ever again!’

She let me go and I fell into the wall, which I was glad of because it was solid and I could hold onto it to keep me steady.

‘I need to know why you stabbed me in the back,’ I remember saying.

‘You can believe whatever else you like about me, but I wouldn’t do that to you,’ she said. ‘Especially not with him.’

‘Why would he lie?’ I said. That was when standing became too much and I collapsed.

She shook her head at me, looking so sad.

‘Maybe he’s not lying about what he’s been up to,’ she said, ‘just who with? Maybe that’s why you’re so willing to believe what he’s told you because deep down you know he’s got someone else?’

‘I saw the text messages,’ I said to her.

‘What text messages? I never sent him any text messages. If you knew how much I hated him, you would know that I wanted nothing to do with him so there’s no way on Earth I’d send him text messages.’

‘“I know it’s wrong but I can’t help feeling how I do. I know you’re married, but I’m willing to wait. I’d wait a lifetime for you
to be ready to be with me properly. It’ll cause a lot of hurt, and I’m not proud of that, but I love you”,’ I said to her. ‘You wrote that, didn’t you?’

She stood there blinking at me, obviously shocked that I’d seen the text messages, horrified that I remembered it enough to quote them; she didn’t know they were burned into the very fabric of my being.

‘You need to leave, right now,’ she said and started to pick me up.

I didn’t really want to be picked up, I was drunk and I felt perfectly happy sitting on the floor with the world not spinning. ‘Get off me, get off! I told you not to touch me!’ I was hitting back at her, kicking out so she would leave me alone. ‘Don’t come near me! Go away! Don’t touch me!’

That was where the memories ended originally. The next thing I could remember, the next memory I could hold onto with any certainty, was waking up in bed fully clothed with no shoes or socks, a raging headache, cuts and bruises on my hands and forearms and the sense that something very bad had happened.

When I heard about the violence involved in her death, and remembered the rage in my body and mind, recalling that the last thing I knew for definite was that I’d hit out and kicked at her, I thought I’d done it. Then the memories came back, in flashes and feelings and déjà vu-like moments. As they came back I stopped being scared of them and instead grabbed at them, held them close and added them to the other patches in my memory until I could recall whole chunks of time. I don’t remember all of it. I do remember that after a while she stopped trying to get me up, she stood back and looked down at me in abject despair.

‘I don’t like to see you like this,’ she said.

‘How am I supposed to be when it’s all gone wrong?’ I asked her. ‘Tell me why you did it in words that I can understand and I’ll feel better. This hit by a truck feeling will go away, I know it will. I just need to understand why.’

She sat down next to me. I rolled my head along the wall, my neck felt very bendy because I was so relaxed, and looked at her. She looked back at me. ‘I can’t tell you that, because I didn’t do it.’

Mirabelle was a kindred spirit. I think we both felt lost in the world sometimes. What’s to say I wouldn’t do what she did if I fell in love? I always thought I knew what I would do in any given situation, but when I found out my husband had cheated on me I hadn’t chucked him out. What’s to say if I met someone I fancied enough, I wouldn’t break my wedding vows, decide that getting laid was more important than staying faithful to my husband? Maybe I would have been Mirabelle in that situation?