The Rose Petal Beach (56 page)

‘If I stop those girls from hurting, from having to go through the hell of a police investigation and a trial, maybe it’ll be OK. Maybe something in the universe will shift, everything will be righted and she’ll love me again. Like she did before. She’ll look at me at me how she used to and I’ll finally have her back. I wish you could understand, she is everything to me, I want her to love me again. I’ll give anything for her to love me again.’

‘I … my friend knew the beautiful woman was talking about the end of her professional life and of her life on Providence Close, but my friend realised that it really should be the end. She had gone around to see if the beautiful woman was all right, if she could change her mind, and there she was, barely dressed, and letting the running partner into her house. She wasn’t even discreet about it. While my friend waited for the running partner to leave, she thought about what the beautiful woman was going to give up and she realised it wasn’t enough for the running partner to lose everything material, she had to know what it could feel like to lose everything.’

‘You’re not listening to me. I need you to make a new statement. Say they threatened you, say you were scared of how it would hurt Challey’s children, say anything, I’ll say I saw her leaving just now—’

‘So you
were
out there. Have you been watching me?’

‘Not how you mean.’

‘Which means yes.’

‘Will you stop changing the subject? My bosses want to go after you for
wasting police time, this is serious. You need to go back on the record.’

‘You’re not listening to me. Which means there’s no point talking to you any longer. I’m going to take a bath.’

‘No, you’re—Put your dressing gown back on. Get back here. Don’t you walk away from me. Don’t you ever—’

I try to forget what happened next. I try not to think about it because it could have gone differently if she had listened. Everything would have been better for all of us if she had done the right thing.

‘Arrgghh! What are you doing? You almost pushed me under then. Can you leave? I have nothing more to say to you.’

‘Well I’ve got plenty to say to you.’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘Who do you think you are? I’ve put everything on the line for you – at work and at home.’

‘I know, I know. I’m really grateful but—’

‘There are no buts in this. I will do anything to protect my career and family, and if that means hurting you, that’s what I’ll do.’

‘Hurting me? Are you threatening me? I think your bosses will take a very dim view to that, don’t you? I think you should go before you get yourself into any more t—’

‘She really did love y—the running partner. She had every chance to live, but she gave up her life for you. I’m sure you’re very pleased about that.’

Tamia Challey is staring at me with those doe eyes she must have used on Mirabelle a thousand times to turn her head. The look turns slowly to disgust. I liked it better when she was that tiny bit afraid of me.

‘She didn’t mean me,’ Tamia Challey says quietly, scorn now added to her disgust. ‘She meant her daughter, Fleur. She wanted her daughter to love her again. Leaving her was the very bad thing
she did in the past. I’m guessing she thought that if she could somehow balance the cosmic scales, do something for my children, she’d be allowed to be a bigger part of her daughter’s life once more.’ Tamia Challey takes an age to blink, to shake her head a fraction, to wind her fingers around her bare ring finger. She isn’t moving in slow motion, the world is. The world has slowed down with what she has said.

‘You never bothered to ask what the very bad thing she did in the past was, did you? You thought it was some crime she committed so you didn’t ask in case you were forced to report her. It’s ironic that you were so hard on me for being in denial about the man I love when you essentially did the same about the woman you loved.’

Tamia Challey is lying. She has to be.

‘What’s even more ironic is that you’ve behaved exactly how Scott used to – only concerned with your needs, your wants, your sexual satisfaction. You just assumed Mirabelle meant me – another potential lover – because that’s what you would mean. That’s what you would do.’

Tamia Challey shakes her head at me again, still in slow motion.
Her daughter.
The words are crawling around my brain, eating through my mind like maggots devouring a rotting corpse. I have seen that, of course. I have seen that and hundreds of other things just as terrible, just as disgusting. And that is what is happening inside me at the moment. She was doing it to get her daughter back.

When I saw that room at her house, which was basically a shrine to her daughter, I’d been as stunned as anyone who didn’t know her. But I knew she was a free spirit, that in a divorce she would have been brave enough to leave her child with her dad.

‘Did you ever even ask about her life away from you? Her hopes, her dreams? What had happened in her past? Or was it all about what she did for your life, your sexuality, your this, your that? You, you, you.’

Every trace of fear has been erased from Tamia Challey. She is
talking to me as if I am just anyone. ‘Careful you don’t topple off that high horse of yours, Challey, it’s a long way down.’

‘Oh I know. I know.’ She stands, obviously ready to make her sweeping exit on a dramatic one-liner that is meant to put me in my place.

I could never understand what Mirabelle saw in her. Every time I encountered her I was surprised again that she had Mirabelle enraptured. Mirabelle was like the air you breathe. She was the woman who you could not live without once you became involved in her world. She was so beautiful, her body divine, her mind incredible. I could not lose her once she was mine. I could not let her go. Not for anyone. Not even for Mirabelle herself.

Why would Mirabelle want Tamia Challey? The best answer to that Tamia Challey could come up with was that she didn’t, that everything she did was for her daughter. That made sense. Everything made sense if you looked at it through Tamia Challey’s eyes.

‘No high horse,’ she says. ‘But I don’t have to live with being a murderer.’

Is that it? The best one-liner you can come up with?

Who would want to look at the world through Tamia Challey’s eyes?

I roll my eyes at the drama queen and pick up my book again. I can do this. Tamia Challey has every reason in the world to lie about who Mirabelle was doing it for. Why wouldn’t she? She knows that no one has anything on me, and she knows that
she’s
the reason Mirabelle is dead. If I was her, I’d lie and lie again. Everybody lies, especially to themselves.

Tamia Challey was trying to hurt me in the only way she knows. I don’t care if it all made sense once she said it. Why Mirabelle said more than once she felt awful about what we were doing to my family. Not awful enough to stop it. But if she really was doing it for her daughter then that would put a different spin on things. I might even have understood if she had explained why she was
doing it, but to let me believe it was Tamia Challey, even as I held her under the water …

This would have turned out differently if Mirabelle had been honest with me. This is Tamia Challey’s fault, of course, and she has to pay for that. When they found her ring, I thought it was a gift from the heavens. I could put her in the house on the night of the killing. But she managed to wriggle out of that one. I will make her pay for this. I will.

‘Wade!’ I say when he approaches the table and sits down where Tamia Challey sat. ‘What are you doing here?’

He stares at me as if I am a stranger, his face stern and serious. He is like a brother to me, we work almost without words – we know what the other is going to say, we can guess what tangent the other is going to go along. I haven’t liked keeping the other side of me away from him, but he wouldn’t understand. He understands facts, he understands motives, he does not understand passion and love and the need to save yourself no matter what the price.

‘I told her she was crazy,’ he says, his tone has that evenness he uses when he starts an interview with a suspect. ‘That’s why I told her where you’d be. Crazy woman with a messed-up life trying to mess up everyone else’s life, too. I told her to go and talk to you and that I would stand over there out of sight because it was going to be a short conversation. I told her, afterwards, she was going to be arrested for wasting police time and attempting to pervert the course of justice.’

‘She is crazy. She does have a messed-up life.’

‘I watched her sit down. I watched as she didn’t get up. You didn’t tell her to go away. You talked to her. You
explained
. She didn’t even say anything to me as she left, she simply looked at me like she had stared in the face of the devil. You know what that’s like, we’ve done it enough times.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong, you know, Wade. I admit I did know Ms
Kemini outside of the case. It wasn’t the wisest move to—’

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ he interrupts, rising to his feet. He removes his handcuffs from his belt and places them on the table. ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way.’

‘Wade, this is ridic—’

‘I mean it, Harvan, I don’t want to hear it. Stand up.’

‘No. This is all a big—’

His hand is on my biceps then, dragging me to my feet. His handcuffs are in his other hand, then one half is linked around my wrist, the other is linked around my other wrist.

‘Erica Harvan, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder and attempting to pervert the course of justice. You do not have to say anything, but it will harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

This is all a huge misunderstanding, Wade will understand. He may not completely comprehend passion and love and fear, but he’ll understand this in the end. He really will.

Mrs C has asked me to meet her here, at the beach.

It’s my most favourite place in Brighton and I’d love to spend all my time here if it was possible.

We’ve been sitting here in silence for quite a while, she has something to tell me. I could tell by the way she spoke on the phone, by the anxiety on her face as she walked towards me, and from the fact she’s started shaking.

I don’t want her to say whatever it is she’s going to say. I want her to keep it inside because I’m only just adjusting to this world where Mum is gone and I can call her that without hesitation. It’s an odd place. The anger doesn’t burn as hard, the feeling of being robbed isn’t as potent. I’m starting to feel normal, I think.

‘I know who killed your mother,’ Mrs C says, as gentle as a bird’s wing through the air. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry that it happened. And I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. But I thought you might prefer to hear it from me rather than the police.’

‘So it wasn’t you?’ I say, with the faintest wisp of humour.

She shakes her head. ‘No, sweetheart, it wasn’t.’

‘Just checking,’ I say, my voice all high and bright. ‘OK.’ I’m trembling as I reach into my inside pocket for a cigarette. Proper, full-on shaking. How I’m supposed to light it with this shaking I have no idea. I manage to get a cigarette out of the packet, but then I put it back in again. I don’t want to smoke. I don’t want to do anything, least of all hear what Mrs C has to say.

‘Who was it?’

She puts her arm around me, holds me close like Mum used to do when she was reading me a story and we would snuggle up on
the sofa. I’d move as close as I could to her and wish the story would go on forever so I wouldn’t have to move away from her. Mrs C holds me close as she tells me the story of my mother’s death. She tells me who. She tells me why. But she doesn’t tell me what I can do about it. And she doesn’t tell me how I’m supposed to live with knowing this thing. And she doesn’t tell me that it’s going to stop hurting and horrifying me one day. But she does tell me this: ‘Your mother was one of the most wonderful people I’ve known. She did wrong but she knew that and she was still an incredible human being. I loved her so much. I wish I’d been half as brave as she was and even a fraction as brave as you are.’

My voice won’t work to let me speak.

‘I brought this,’ Mrs C says, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a large sandwich bag filled with rose petals. ‘I thought we could sprinkle some on the sea and wish her well upon her journey.’

I face Mrs C. My head is a whizzing mass of confusion. ‘I’d like that,’ I say. ‘I’d really, really like that.’

‘I’m ready,’ I say to her.

‘Right. Come on then, let’s go,’ she says.

I hesitate, despite thinking I was ready. I look around the hallway to my flat, knowing that the fridge is stocked, the bedroom has clean sheets, extra duvet, a stack of DVDs, an even bigger pile of books and magazines, a water jug, comfy pyjamas instead of the on-show lingerie I used to wear. I have the phone. I have the huge television regifted from my best friend’s living room. Everything is ready, but I feel I am looking around for the last time.

‘I’m scared, Tami,’ I confess.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘And you’re also being incredibly brave.’

‘I don’t feel it.’

‘You are. You can still be scared when you’re being brave. You
can
do this,’ she reassures. ‘Besides, what’s scarier, first chemo appointment or your mum coming for an extended visit?’

‘
Don’t
!’ I hiss at her, but I also laugh as she knew I would. ‘I’m actually now tempted to go get back into bed until it all goes away. Mum included.’

‘When does she arrive again?’

‘You know full well she arrives the day after tomorrow.’

‘Yes, I do.’ She picks up her bag, then my bag and opens the front door, then she turns back and holds out her hand. ‘Come on.’