The soft October light threads through the branches of the rowans that line Melissa’s street in Islington, north London. Sunbeams glaze the ruby-red berries in an autumn vignette as illusory as a dream, while adrenaline keeps me moving through it. It’s eleven already and I just hope I’m early enough to catch her before she leaves to start preparations for tonight’s show.
She never replied to my email, but it wasn’t hard to find her address online. In contrast to Shauna, every aspect of Melissa’s life is available on one platform or another. A large brass knocker hangs on the yellow door of the Victorian terrace I recognize from a home tour in Hello! magazine, the intricate fanlight and the stained-glass panel surround even prettier in real life.
She opens the door on the third knock. In the moment before she realizes, I catch a glimpse of celebrity Melissa, slim and smiling in a Breton top and skinny jeans. It’s still her, even if the shape of her face has changed, her cheeks high and plump, the skin taut across them. Her smile freezes and then falls, and the longer she says nothing, the more afraid I am she’ll close the door and leave me out here in the cold.
“Can we talk?” I ask. “Please?”
“Lou, what a surprise,” she says, one hand still on the door. “I … I’m busy right now, I have to get ready for the show. Maybe tomorrow? Or Monday. Let’s set something up for then, OK?”
“Melissa,” I say loudly, “we can either do this out here right now or you can invite me in and we can speak in private. But I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”
Melissa glances right and left, and then opens the door and ushers me in. She leads me along a bright and airy hallway with ornate coving and varnished timber floorboards.
“Nice house,” I say as we continue down a staircase to a kitchen–dining room that opens onto a lush, sheltered garden.
“Thanks. Would you like coffee?” she says in a voice tainted with resignation.
“Sure.”
I look out at the garden while Melissa packs coffee into the filter of an elaborate espresso machine.
“So,” she says as I take a seat opposite her at the marble-topped island, “what did you want to talk about?”
“Liam Kelly.”
“Who’s that?”
Her delivery is so genuine I could almost believe her.
“I know you’re Liam Kelly.”
She holds on to her innocent indignation for several seconds until I stare her out of it. The mask falls slowly before she speaks.
“How?”
“Does it matter?”
She shrugs and a rush of rage catches me unawares. And I realize I’d wanted her to feel some remorse, some duty of care toward me.
“I need to know why you don’t want me to testify.”
“I thought I made that clear,” she says. “Shauna’s not able for this.”
“What do you mean by that? Ronan said she’s fully behind the action.”
“Ronan’s too close or maybe too busy to see it.”
“To see what?”
She eyes me up, deciding just how much to reveal.
“Shauna was my best friend,” she says, “and I had to watch her lose everything. You didn’t hang around for the worst of it. She lost her career, her health, all her hopes and dreams. She never got over what McQueen did to her. She was never able to trust anyone again.”
“What about Nigel?”
“That fucker?” Melissa shakes her head. “He was the last person she should have married. He wanted the beautiful, thin, wealthy Shauna. He had no time for anything below the surface.”
“Oh god,” I say. “I wanted to hear she’d been happy.”
“She never had any luck with men.” She looks at me. “Or women.”
The flush in my cheeks surprises me and I look down into my coffee cup.
“How do you know about Nigel anyway?” asks Melissa.
“Carol told me.”
“You talked to Carol?”
“Yeah, she’s all right now.”
“So I hear. I remain a skeptic.”
I laugh. I don’t blame her.
“But I still don’t understand why you’re so against the lawsuit. I mean, I was reluctant too, but surely it’s the right thing to do? And after everything Shauna’s been through, don’t you think she deserves some sort of closure?”
Melissa takes a deep breath and exhales through pursed lips.
“Because it will kill her.”
The grim intensity of her stare leaves me in no doubt she believes this.
“What? How?”
“You’ll just have to trust me on this.”
It’s that Highfield circle of silence again and I refuse to yield to it anymore.
“Jesus Christ, Melissa, you expect me to take your word after all the lies you’ve told?”
“It was never personal,” she says with a defensive pout. “I did it for Shauna.”
“Can you hear yourself? I honestly don’t know how you sleep at night. I went to prison.”
“It was Shauna or you. I made a choice, that’s all.”
I feel her slipping from my grasp, but I can’t stop.
“You’re delusional,” I say, voice rising out of control. “It’s not just what you did back then. Have you forgotten your email threatened my family too?”
Melissa folds her arms and I’m sure my time is up.
“You weren’t the only one who suffered,” she says. “You’ve no idea how hard it was for Shauna. And for me too. I had to clean up his blood, for fuck’s sake.”
In the screaming silence that follows, everything I’ve ever questioned about that night starts to make sense.
“You were at the pool?”
“I thought…” she says, confused. “Shauna said she told you.”
“She never told me that.”
Panic spreads slowly across Melissa’s seamless face as she realizes what she’s done, how the balance of power has shifted.
“I thought you found her in the changing rooms,” I say. “That’s what you said in court.”
“I … eh…” she says, struggling for words.
“It was you,” I say. “You’re the reason I went to prison. The reason I lost Shauna.”
I slap my hands onto the marble worktop and Melissa’s afraid to say another word. As if her silence could save her now.
“You forced Shauna to testify against me. You cleaned up the murder scene to frame me.”
I’d always wondered why there was no blood found, mine or his, evidence of the struggle I’d described to the Guards. I pace up and down behind the kitchen island as each new implication lands.
“You lied in court.”
She is so still I’m not even sure she’s breathing.
“And now, the email. You were scared I’d tell.”
The skin strains across her cheeks as tears swell in her eyes.
“I only ever did any of it to protect Shauna,” she says.
“From me?”
“No,” she says. “You don’t understand. She was delirious when I got to the pool. She didn’t know what she was saying, she would have confessed to anything. You left her there to deal with him alone and I had to step in and take over.”
The tears run down her cheeks and we are both back there, eighteen and exposed.
“We’d already worked it all out,” I say. “Shauna was going to say that he slipped and fell. She was supposed to go and get help.”
“But that was before,” she says.
I struggle to remember, to put together the pieces that never quite fit.
“Before what?”
It’s just a flicker, a split second of panic on Melissa’s face.
“Before, eh … I arrived,” she says as her breath picks up pace. She looks away and wipes her fingers across her cheeks, but I can’t let it go.
“Did something happen? When you arrived?”
She covers her face with her hands and shakes her head.
“Tell me,” I shout. “Tell me what happened.”
“No,” she says. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
“What’s going on, Melissa?” I say as my mind races with the possibilities. “If something happened after I left, don’t you think I deserve to know?”
Her shoulders heave with the force of her sobs but she says nothing.
“Well, if you won’t tell me,” I say, “you’d better give me some way of contacting Shauna. Or I swear to god I will go to the press with all of this. I have nothing left to lose, and you have everything.”
When Melissa finally slides her hands from her face it’s not fear or anger I see. It’s pure sadness. Neither of us speaks as she opens a drawer, takes out a pen and notepad and starts to write. She can barely look at me as she tears out the page and hands me a Dublin address. It’s what I’ve been looking for all this time. A chance to confront Shauna and her version of the truth. And now I’m more afraid of it than ever.