Carole Johnstone
It’s a strange building. A commercial high-rise in the city centre with mean-sized, green glass panels and neon-orange metal uprights. I’ve seen it before, of course; passed it every day on the way to the job I no longer have, and wondered often what company in their right mind would choose to have offices inside it. Now I know who chose the first floor at least.
The doorman is skinny and young. I mistake him for a smoker until he sidesteps in front of me as I reach for the door.
“Who you here to see then?”
He has a skewed badge close to his collar; gold and dull with fingerprints, a big hole where the pin has been shoved through his shirt too many times.
Jim Easton
Temple Buildings
“The Nine of Diamonds. I’ve got a job interview at ten. Annie Paisley.”
Jim Easton looks down at his phone and shakes his head. “Don’t have you on the list.”
“Well. It must be a mistake.” I take out my own phone. “I can call them—” But he’s still shaking his head. “What?”
“If you’re not on the list you’re not coming in.”
I snort. “Did you really just say that?” But when he only goes on looking at me like I’m a fencepost, I narrow my eyes. “Is this a joke?”
He blinks. He has a dilated pupil, I notice. The left one, like Bowie.
“Okay.” And under the impatience – I was running late before I even encountered this entirely pointless person; who posts a bouncer outside an office block? – jitters something close to becoming panic. I need this job. “Guess one joke deserves another. Three fish are in a tank. One asks, ‘How do you drive this thing?’”
He gives me another blank look that makes me want to scream. I smile instead, throw in a quick wink. Tony always used to say he’d jump off a cliff if I asked him with a wink.
“What’s the difference between a hippo and a Zippo? One is really heavy, and the other is a little lighter. No? What do you call cheese that isn’t yours? Nacho Cheese.”
This last earns me a chuckle that rattles as if he might be a smoker after all. “That’s a good one.”
“My best one.”
He studies me for a bit, and so I go on smiling the way girls are supposed to smile at boys who are in their way and happy about it.
“All right then,” he grins, displaying very straight teeth. “Guess I can make an exception just this once.”
* * *
“So. Do you know what it is that we do?”
Now that I’m sitting in the very ugly and very maroon office of the man who could be the deciding factor in whether or not I become homeless in the next couple of weeks, my something close to panic is now just panic. I don’t know how to answer that question without admitting that I found the job advert on the floor below my neighbour’s mail-dookit – a PhD lecturer whose hobbies are screwing his students and ignoring his junk mail long enough that gravity eventually scatters it to the four corners of the communal lobby. Until someone – usually me – picks it up.
“I don’t. Sorry.” My chair creaks every time I move, an unpleasant squeal that makes me wince.
“Good,” Mr. Campbell, call me Billy, says. The name doesn’t suit him at all; he reminds me of the guy who played Dougal MacKenzie in Outlander. He has a very impressive moustache.
“Good?”
“Well, let me put it this way.” He leans back in his chair, steeples his fingers. “We don’t want people to know what we do.”
“Right.” I suddenly wonder if this is going to be legal, and my panic gets a little sharper when I realise I don’t care.
“Do you know what the nickname for the nine of diamonds is, Ms. Paisley?”
“Annie. No.” And this time I manage to squash the Sorry.
“The Curse of Scotland. There are lots of theories why – pretty much all of them tied up in one bloody Scottish defeat or another. There are plenty to choose from.”
He looks at me expectantly as if that’s explanation enough, but I bite my tongue and endure the silence, the better not to screw up this interview any more than I suspect I already have.
Billy stands up and then sits down on the desk opposite me and my creaky chair. He’s incredibly tall; his boots almost touch the toes of mine.
“Have you ever been tailgated or cut up on the motorway? Of course you have,” he says putting up a hand. “What about cheated on or swindled? Dumped? Treated like shit on someone’s shoe? Ignored? Fired? There’s an awful lot that can go wrong in a person’s life because of other people. So much that is unjust and unfair.”
He has this way of looking at you that is both comforting and incredibly unnerving – it’s very undivided. Perhaps it’s his equivalent of a wink.
I think of that big client that complained about the order I stuffed up – even though I know I didn’t; all the times Frank the Wank said yes to me coming in late and then snitched on me to HR; all that unpaid leave before Tony was convicted and sentenced. How Frank didn’t just fire me, but did it at a staff meeting for the Christmas party. And then I get hot with shame when I think of Tony, who doesn’t even have the luxury of wondering if he’ll be homeless in a couple of weeks.
“And have you ever wanted those other people just to see it?” Billy says. His big hands are gripping the desk either side of his thighs. “To see you? To visit it back on them ten-fold? Have you ever just wanted to walk up to someone and say I curse you?” He leans more than just a little too close and my chair squeals. “And have them be cursed?”
I think of the nine of diamonds. And then about a dozen bad horror movies. And then that last day in court when Tony had been sentenced. Héloïse Dupont in the same black trouser suit she’d worn every day of the trial, hands folded in her lap, staring always at me. “You curse people?”
He leans back and I see the flash of very white teeth through his beard and moustache. “Indeed we do.”
“How?”
“Every case is different. We might hack their email, their social media. Cancel subscriptions, redirect their mail. Write letters of complaint. Sabotage their job, leave bad reviews. Sabotage their relationships. On occasion, we defraud them out of money, but we always return it.” He shrugs. “One client wanted us to leave bags of dog poo everywhere the subject went, that was it.”
My relief is tinged with almost disappointment. “It’s not real.”
“Oh, but it is.” He gives me a wolfish grin. “The subject will always at some point wonder – is it them? Is it their curse?”
“It’s about power.”
“Yes! The point is less to ruin the subject’s life than to give back control to the client. To have someone believe that you actually have the power to curse them is very…therapeutic.”
“But it’s still not real.”
“The subject’s perception is real. And the client’s power is very real. They have the authority to stop it at any time, after all. The world turns, Annie, on people’s sense of fairness, of justice.” He shrugs. “Even if, deep down, it’s always about revenge.”
I swallow. “How bad can it get? I’m not going to hurt anyone.”
He grins again. “There’s a sliding scale of…punishments, for want of a better word. Various packages are available. Like I said, it’s mostly just inconveniencing people, unsettling them, freaking them out. Every once in a blue moon we’ll get a doozy – big client, big pay-out – but the rest of the time it’s disgruntled ex-lovers, victims of road rage, con men, and so on.” He stands up and goes back around his desk, opens a drawer and brings out a clear wallet. “Our latest subject, for example, is this guy. Ricky Crawford, age thirty-two. Serial cheater; his fiancée found him in bed with her cousin two months ago.”
“Ouch.” The chair shrieks as I lean forward. The photo of Ricky Crawford is smugly handsome in a suit and striped tie.
“Since the fiancée hired us, he’s been on multiple dates with women, via a few very exclusive…” he pauses, smiles, “dating services. But poor Ricky hasn’t had much luck. In fact, if he hasn’t developed some kind of complex about the number of rejections he’s been on the receiving end of, then there’s a lot more wrong with him than an inability to be faithful.” He sits down, raises his eyebrows. “So. Would you do that?”
“What?”
“Go on bad dates with bad guys. To make them feel bad.”
A flash of Tony’s smile and the way my skin always prickles when he touches me. “Sure.”
Billy nods, pushes the wallet back into his drawer. “There are many things you can choose to do working for us – as much or as little as you like, depending on what money you want to make.”
“How do they end? The curses.”
“Usually they just end. Most often, all that’s needed to trigger some kind of remorse is being faced with direct consequences, karma, however they choose to see it. Of course, the real success stories are when the subject begs for the forgiveness of the client. It affords closure to them both. And, with a bit of luck, peace.”
“But what about violence? Surely a subject has gone after a client if they think they’re responsible for what’s happening to them?” A kernel of anger pops inside my belly – small, far smaller than the rage, hot and white, that wakes me up at 3:00 a.m. most nights. “That’s what I’d want to do. Take care of it myself.”
“There are risks. And there have been…incidents.” He gives me what I think is supposed to be a reassuring smile. “But we take every precaution. We provide surveillance for our clients and for our employees, and, if needs be, protection. We have no moral compass about what we do, Annie. We’re hired to do a thing and we do it. But we take absolutely no unnecessary risks either, be sure of that.”
“Okay.” Even though I care as much about that as whether what he’s doing is legal. “So, is that what my role would be then? Ghosting cheats?”
“Perhaps.” He smiles. “Every employee is considered on an individual basis, just as every client is. What are your talents, Annie?”
“My talents?”
“Are you any good with computers?”
“No, not really. I mean, I know I said in my application that I—”
“No matter. Besides, I would say that your biggest asset is that you’re unobtrusive.”
I blink. “You mean invisible.”
He cocks his head. “You’re also charming. When Mr. Easton refused to let you in, you didn’t get angry or loud, you charmed him. That is a talent.”
“That was a test?”
“You’d be surprised by how many folk actually give up and go away.” He shrugs. “You didn’t.”
I jump when the phone on his desk starts ringing.
“That will be a gentleman wanting to confirm a dinner booking at Le Gavroche. Tell him there’s no record of him having made it.”
“Le Gavroche in London?”
He doesn’t reply, only looks at me from under raised eyebrows. I reach over and pick up the phone.
“Uh…hello?” I look at Billy and he raises his eyebrows a little more. “Le…Gavroche. How can I help you?”
Billy reaches over to press the loudspeaker, and an English voice, fast and impatient, bursts into the space between us.
“Yes, hi. Look, I got an email saying I had to confirm a dinner booking I made months ago. Harrison, next Friday at seven.”
I look down at the desk. “I’m sorry, sir, but we have no booking under that name for that date.”
A pause. “What?”
“We have no booking for Harrison next Friday evening.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“I’m afraid—”
“Do you have any idea how important this meeting is for me? D’you have – wait, why the fuck would I have been sent an email today asking me to confirm a booking you’re saying you don’t have?”
My pulse quickens a little at that, and this time when I look across at Billy, there’s a small smile at the corners of his mouth.
“You must have been double-booked in error, sir. We’ve recently switched our software systems, and unfortunately—”
“Well, you can just un-double-fucking-book me then.” Panic has turned his impatience ugly; his voice vibrates. “In fact, let me speak to your fucking manager right now.”
“I am the manager, sir,” I say, sitting up a little straighter. “And Le Gavroche has a zero tolerance policy towards the abuse of our staff, so I’m afraid this conversation is now over.” I pause as his curses echo around the maroon room. “Good afternoon, Mr. Harrison.” My hand is shaking as I set down the handset.
“Bravo, Annie, that was not bad at all,” Billy says, his smile bigger.
“How did you do that?”
He shrugs. “No idea. Many of our employees are, in fact, good with computers.”
“Oh.” I look down at the phone, and then back at him. “So, am I an employee now too?”
Billy stands, and then nods, holding out a large hand for me to shake. “You are, Ms. Paisley. Welcome to the Nine of Diamonds.”
* * *
When I hear the footsteps behind me as I exit the tube and turn towards home – short-heeled and quick, always so quick – my good mood is only slightly dampened. This has been the first great day in weeks. Months. And I refuse to let her ruin it.
I cross over the road, take my keys out of my pocket. Even though it’s barely four in the afternoon, it’s dark, and the white LED streetlights do little more than blacken the shadows between them. She only ever follows me in the dark – at first, I thought because she wanted not to be seen, but it’s just the opposite. She always wants me to know she’s there. And she does it in the dark because she thinks it will frighten me more. And – at first – it did.
I pick up speed as I turn onto the path up to the flat, and I have the keys in the lock before I hear the gate reopen behind me. I rush in and slam the door without looking at its wire-grid window. Spin around instead to look at the flickering overhead fluorescent, the bank of rust-coloured mail-dookits next to the communal stairs. The already overflowing junk mail. I can hear her fingernails tapping at the window and the big handle of the door rattles – there’s a loose screw at its top. One of these days – nights – I’m sure she’s going to wrench it right off.
I don’t confront her anymore because it serves no purpose. She wants me to confront her. Instead, I pretend I don’t see her; I pretend I can’t hear her. I pretend that on the few occasions she manages to get close enough, that I can’t feel her warm breath against my skin. I pretend, as I run up the stairs and fight to hold on to that first great thing to happen to me in months, that she isn’t there at all.
* * *
Nothing happens for days. Almost two weeks. No one answers the number I called to arrange that interview with Billy Campbell. And I start to panic. I’m three months in arrears on paying for the ludicrously expensive lawyer I hired for Tony. I’m already being threatened with the prospect of a debt collection agency and bailiffs for utility bills. Next month’s rent is due. I applied for a loan before I got fired, but haven’t heard anything about that either, and now don’t expect to. I speak to Tony most days, but I can’t tell him about my money troubles or my weird maybe-job because every time he sounds a little worse, a little more subdued, and no matter how bad it gets for me, I’m not the one serving eight years for killing someone while driving drunk.
And then, finally, a big brown envelope. Inside it, a letter addressed to me with the Nine of Diamonds stamped in its top-right corner, and several more envelopes that are completely blank.
Post these letters to the addresses that will be emailed to you in the next hour.
Post BY HAND only within the next 24 hours. Reply to the email once job is completed.
All the letters look the same as each other: white, A4 business envelopes with what feels like only one page of paper inside them. I think about steaming one open, but chicken out. This is my first task; I can’t risk fucking it up. I think about Jim the skinny bouncer. Besides, it might be another test.
I wait until it’s light, and then I go out on foot. I take buses to each location, having already mapped out my exact route in forensic detail. Although all the houses are in south London like my Lewisham flat, they range as far west as Kingston and as far east as Bexley. It takes an alarmingly long time; eventually my adrenaline runs out of steam even if my panic doesn’t. I keep my hood up and my head down; avoiding faces and the buses’ CCTV. By the time I get home, I’m so cold and exhausted that I collapse on the sofa and don’t wake up until the next morning. And when I remember to email that I’ve done it, two hundred and fifty pounds appears in my bank account less than ten minutes later.
* * *
She knows when I go to see Tony. Every second and fourth Friday between 13:45 and 14:30. It’s the only time she follows me during the day. It’s harder to ignore her then, too, those quick sharp clicks in sensible shoes, but I do it. I keep walking and I don’t look back. I think instead of turning into a pillar of salt. I think of a lover left in hell for all eternity. And the whole way to the prison, I don’t look back once.
Tony smiles when he sees me, and hugs me just as hard and long as ever, but there are bigger and darker shadows under his eyes, and he’s lost even more weight.
“Did she follow you again?” is the first thing he says.
“It’s fine. Don’t worry.”
He starts to ball his big hands into fists until he remembers that he’s holding mine. I squeeze his back.
“How are you doing, honey? You don’t look like you’re taking care of yourself.”
He winces and closes his eyes. When he opens them again I see how bloodshot they are. “I’m all right, Annie. I’m more worried about you. What about the overdue payments? How are—”
“I got the loan!” I lie, with as big a smile as I can muster. “And a new job. It’s not much, leafleting mostly, but they pay well, better than I expected.”
“That’s good,” he says. “The sooner you get that law firm off your back, the better.”
“But what about the appeal? I mean, that’s why we’re doing it, right? That’s why we need to pay the—”
“I’m not appealing.”
“What?” I look at the crown of his bowed head, and panic starts to tighten my chest. “But we…you promised that you—”
He looks at me. “I’m not appealing. There’s no point.”
“Of course there is!” But I can see in his eyes that he’s decided, that nothing I say will change his mind. And worse than that, I can see something else, something far more terrible.
“Annie,” he says, reaching across the table to take hold of my hands again. “Baby.”
I realise that I’m shaking my head and trying to stand up.
“Stop,” he says, and I stop. Whenever he uses that voice, sharp but so warm, so full of all the things he’s always been to me – love and want and family, but most of all, safety – I never think of saying no.
“You have to get on with your life, Annie,” he says. “You need to find someone else.”
“I don’t want anyone else, you know I don’t. You don’t want anyone else.” My face is hot, my eyes blurring and stinging, and the last is a question, a plea, because he promised. He promised that we’d be together forever.
“Listen to me,” he says, and his hold on my fingers tightens. “I don’t want you coming here anymore.”
“She’ll follow me anyway,” I say in desperation.
“It’s not just that. This doesn’t have to poison both of our lives.” He lets go of me, taking back his hands even as I try to grab hold of them again. “If you love me, you’ll do what I’m asking you to do. I want you to go. And I don’t want you to come back.”
* * *
Sometimes I dream about the boy. I wake up to darkness, red and white blurry lights, and then the sound – the terrible thud that I feel even in my toes. The scream of brakes and splash of water and the fear in Tony’s curse. The crash against the windscreen, the squeal of a wiper. The circles like a jagged bullseye flashing red and white in the dark. The boy.
And then I wake up for real.
* * *
Life goes on. I start to get regular big brown envelopes, and spend most days pushing those white business letters into letterboxes and mailboxes, even PO boxes all over south London. Many times to the same addresses, again and again, but I force myself not to wonder about what’s inside those letters. Or what might happen to me if I get caught posting them.
Less often, I’m asked to stay in and answer phone calls like the one in Billy Campbell’s office: booking confirmations for restaurants, hotels, and holidays. Or I’m sent a list of places to phone and bookings to cancel myself. Those days I don’t like; I have an irrational terror of being recognised, and the shouting, worse, the upset or panic is too real, too close. Too immediate. It’s the hardest thing of all. That I’m contributing to the suffering of other people – no matter what they’ve done to deserve their curse – when so many things are going wrong in my own life. When I know what it feels like to suffer, to sit in the dark all alone, but seeing no point in getting up, in switching on a light.
Tony hasn’t called, and he’s taken me off his visitor list. And it feels like my bad luck has truly peaked when, on the afternoon of what would have been my next visit to the prison, the first debt collection agency letter arrives. And in the next post, a 30-day eviction notice for outstanding rent. I drink two shots of vodka, think of Billy’s There are many things you can choose to do working for us – as much or as little as you like, depending on what money you want to make, and then I email the Nine of Diamonds.
* * *
The multi-storey car park is mostly empty, even though the shopping mall next door is still open. The top floor is emptier still, and I find the car easily: a silver Audi with the right reg. There’s no one in it.
I’m as dismayed by the bright light in here as I was by the dark late-afternoon outside. I don’t think she followed me; it’s not like she ever tries to hide. And, although there are plenty of CCTV cameras in here, I’m wearing gloves, two hoods, and a scarf pulled up to my nose. I still jump when tyres squeal on a ramp a few floors down, and my heart starts to stutter and flutter.
Come on. Get it done.
I hurry towards the Audi, check again that it’s empty before I swing my rucksack onto the concrete floor. It makes a loud clunk and I cringe, squatting down to peer through the Audi’s windows until I’m certain no one has heard. My hand closes around the screwdriver, and I stay on my haunches as I push it into the first rear tyre. It’s surprisingly difficult. Inside the gloves, my fingers slip and grow quickly sweaty as I push and push, until finally the tyre gives and I hear the whistle of air, feel it cool and quick against my wrists. I shuffle slowly round the car, until every tyre is done, and then I shove the screwdriver back inside the rucksack and bring out the hammer instead. I close the rucksack and put it on; I’ve no intention of stopping to do anything but run once I’ve done this.
There’s a tartan tree air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. We had two cherries on stalks. I can see my reflection in the Audi’s front passenger window: a faceless black hood. I think of waking up in my dream, those blurry red and white lights, a jagged bullseye. I draw back the hammer, and at the last minute, close my eyes – so that I feel rather than see the window smash into pieces. I brace for an alarm, but it doesn’t come; the email assured me the Audi was fitted with an immobiliser and nothing else. I glance left and right as I move around to the front windscreen, and when I draw back the hammer to hit it too, I’ve time to fiercely wish that they’d sent me on a bad date with a bad man instead before someone rushes me from behind.
I know it’s her before I spin round. She flies at me again as I try to ward her off, her hair wild and wet, eyes wide – nothing at all like the woman who’d come to court every day in expensive suits; cool and impervious like a waxwork. Most unsettling of all, she doesn’t say anything, makes no kind of sound. Whereas I’m grunting and shouting and breathing too hard, my panic unwieldy. She grabs hold of my arms – I can feel her nails through my shirt and coat as they dig in and twist – and my scream is more than alarm or shame or anger, it’s horror, instinctive and real – I need to get away. As soon as I remember the hammer I’m already bringing it down towards her, towards that face, that silence.
I miss, and the loud sob that comes out of my chest frightens me more than anything else – a terrified sense of relief that doesn’t come close to registering in her eyes at all. I wrench myself away, and then I’m running back towards the big number 5 on the wall next to the staircase, the hammer clutched to my chest and the rucksack thumping against my back.
* * *
“You’re lucky, Ms. Paisley,” Billy Campbell says. “I don’t usually meet with employees in person. But I’m assured your message was very emphatic.”
I think of the email I sent once I’d got back from the multi-storey and cringe a little. Today his office seems suffocatingly maroon. As ugly and unsettling as those green glass panels and neon-orange metal uprights outside. Thankfully, there had been no Jim Easton.
“I just…” I look down at my bitten fingernails. “I just wanted to be clear – in person – that I don’t want to do anything illegal. Not again. I want to make more money than I have been, but I don’t want to do anything illegal.”
“I see. And is someone forcing you to do—”
“No, but I’m not being offered anything else. I just get sent lists of names and phone numbers and those bloody envelopes, and I can’t survive on that. I asked if I could do what you said, the whole dating cheats thing, and they said…” I make myself look at him, and my chair gives a very pained creak. “They said I wasn’t suitable.”
“Ah.”
That kernel of anger pops inside my belly again. “I mean, don’t you know what they said? Aren’t you in charge?”
“Of recruitment, yes.” His smile is brief. “And I suppose I’m an HR of sorts, hence this meeting. But no, I have no involvement in the day-to-day, so to speak.” He leans forward and his eyes narrow. “Ms. Paisley, pardon my saying so, but you do not look well. Is there something else?”
I blow out a breath, close my eyes. “There’s a woman. Héloïse Dupont.” It feels strangely good to say her name aloud, as if it might diminish her power. “My boyfriend – fiancé – and I…last year we were in a car accident. She and her ten-year-old son were crossing the road. It was dark, wet, and we didn’t see the zebra crossing, and the boy…” The memory of that terrible thud shakes through me; the squeal of a wiper. “It was an accident. The boy died. But it was an accident.”
Billy’s lips press together, but his eyes are sympathetic.
“Tony had been sure he was under the limit. He’d barely had anything at all. But it… She blames both of us. She follows me because she can’t follow him, I guess. I…I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose your son, so I don’t go to the police, it isn’t fair. But she won’t leave me alone. I can’t sleep, I have nightmares, and Tony… Tony—”
Billy stands up and comes round the desk. He leans down to pat my arm before folding his own. “Perhaps, then, we could be of some help?”
I look up at him. “You? How?”
He gives me the benefit of that undivided look again. “You could curse her.”
“What?” And my head shake is furious enough to crack something inside my neck, because instantly a big part of me wants to say yes. Even wonders if that’s why I’ve told him at all. Instead, I think of that rage, hot and white, that always comes back from the nightmare with me. I think of Tony’s face, its dark shadows and concave cheekbones; Did she follow you again? I think of her wild eyes, her never-ending silence; her fingernails against the flat’s wire-grid window, against my skin. I think of sitting in this very office months ago and telling Billy Campbell exactly what I’d want to do if someone ever persecuted me.
“No.” I stand up. “I’ll take care of it myself.”
* * *
She works at a school. She’s a history teacher. I remember thinking at the trial that it was strange; she didn’t look like a history teacher. Or any kind of teacher. And then I remember thinking that perhaps she used to. Before her son died.
The foyer is shiny-floored and bright with light. Empty in the way a place otherwise full of people always feels – a silence that is liminal and fleeting.
“I need to speak to Héloïse Dupont,” I say to the young receptionist.
“She’s teaching at the moment.”
“It’s important. My name’s Annie Paisley.”
The receptionist eyes me with suspicion, not that I blame her. I know I look a mess because I feel one. Frazzled and hollowed out. Down to my last nerve. And it’s raw, thin, about ready to snap.
“It’s an emergency.”
Finally, she nods, picks up the phone, and as soon as she says my name, I hear the dial tone, abrupt and loud.
When Héloïse Dupont appears, I’m startled that she looks like the Héloïse Dupont from the trial again, and not the wild-eyed wraith that has tortured me in the dark for months. She’s wearing another trouser suit, navy rather than black, and her hair is shiny and straight, pulled back into a ponytail.
I walk away from the receptionist, who isn’t even trying to feign disinterest. Héloïse follows me. When I turn around, she looks at me, says nothing at all. And that last nerve frays a little more, all the hot, white rage a rolling boil beneath.
“I came here because I want it to stop.”
She raises just one eyebrow and folds her arms. I jolt, as I belatedly see the traces of a black eye beneath her make-up. Did I do that in the multi-storey? I’m appalled to realise that I don’t know.
“I want all this to stop.”
I fiddle with the strap of the rucksack, its weight heavy against my back. Héloïse recognises it from the multi-storey then, and steps suddenly back, her eyes widening, fear animating her face. When I swing the rucksack around onto the floor to open it, she steps back even more – quick, always quick – her gaze darting to the fire escape.
I think of how much I’ve prided myself in never looking back. In just walking and walking, and only looking ahead. But it’s a lie. My lover is already in hell for all eternity. And worse than a pillar of salt, I’m a statue of stone – carved into a shape that can’t be dissolved or remade. Only shattered.
I reach into the bag, and Héloïse finally makes a sound. The same small sound she made when they found Tony guilty. And when I try to give her the photo, she only looks at it wordlessly and backs a little further away.
I set it down on the foyer floor. Its wooden frame makes a loud clack as I look at Tony and me grinning and holding half-full champagne glasses out towards the camera.
“We got engaged that night. At Carluccio’s. I was so happy.”
I stand up. And hot, white rage bites and burns as I look down at the photo one more time. At my grinning bright-eyed face. Stop, Tony says in that voice, sharp but always warm.
“I wouldn’t let Tony drive. I thought I was okay. Halfway home, he fell asleep, and then…” I swallow. “I must have too.”
I force myself to look up, to look at her. Héloïse Dupont’s face is so white, her eyes look black. She’s trembling all over like an animal.
“I didn’t see you. I didn’t see your son, I didn’t see…Christof…until—” The tears that are running down my cheeks are cool against my too-hot skin. “And I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that we said you were lying. I’m so sorry I let Tony take the blame; he thought…we thought he’d be okay, that he’d be under the limit. And I let him lie. I lied. And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
* * *
The police arrest me a couple of days later, and I’m only surprised that it takes that long. I decline a solicitor. I can tell they think that I’m going to deny my confession because they don’t even ask me if I did it. If I killed Christof Dupont and then lied about it. Instead, they sit me down, make a big production out of reading me my rights again, offering me legal aid, a coffee, a glass of water. And after all that they start talking about Héloïse instead.
“A complaint of harassment has been made against you following an incident on Wednesday the twenty-fifth of November when you confronted Ms. Dupont at her place of work, Claremont High School. Do you deny being there?”
I look at the man who introduced himself as PC Derek Munroe, and wonder how old he is. He’s trying to grow a beard and the tops of his cheekbones are very pink; I wonder if this is his first interview. Beside him, the older and not at all nervous police sergeant whose name I’ve forgotten, leans closer with a glower.
“Answer the question, please.”
“No,” I say. “I was there. I just wanted to talk to her.”
The sergeant spins around a laptop so that its screen is facing me and presses Return. The footage is grainy, from a phone. The angle makes me think it must have been the receptionist. I look even worse than I remember: angry and unkempt, gesticulating wildly, my hair swinging around my face as Héloïse keeps backing further and further away from me, her face pale and distressed as she glances towards the fire exit.
“Looks to us like you’re threatening her,” PC Munroe says.
“I wasn’t. I just wanted to—”
“Seems she might already have had plenty to be threatened about. We have CCTV evidence of someone assaulting her in the East Oak Mall’s multi-storey car park on Thursday the nineteenth of November – that she alleges is also you.”
“No. That was an accident. She attacked me. I wasn’t—”
“You were slashing the tyres and smashing the windows of her car,” PC Munroe says.
“What?” My chest gets suddenly tight.
“You’ve been following her for weeks,” he says, no longer nervous at all. His eyes are bright. “Stalking her. Terrorising her.”
“No.” I try to stand up but my legs feel hot and heavy as if I’ve just downed a shot. “She’s been stalking me! For months.” A brittle kind of dread skates between my shoulder blades like an itch, an almost-knowing that I don’t want to acknowledge.
The police sergeant takes a piece of paper out of an evidence bag and unfolds it. Places it in front of me. Cut up letters from a magazine glued to A4 like something out of a bad film.
You’ve destroyed my life. Yours will be next.
Have you ever just wanted to walk up to someone and say I curse you? And have them be cursed?
“Again, unfortunately for you, Ms. Dupont has just had cameras installed above her front door and window. You’ve been delivering notes like these to her house for weeks.”
We take every precaution. We provide surveillance for our clients and for our employees, and, if needs be, protection.
I wonder what was in the letters that I posted to all those other houses, mailboxes, PO boxes. Perhaps nothing at all, just weeks of blank empty pages.
I think of that big client order that I didn’t stuff up but which got me fired anyway. The failed loan application. The debt collection letters. The eviction notice. Maybe even Tony. There’s an awful lot that can go wrong in a person’s life because of other people. So much that is unjust and unfair. I think of finding that Nine of Diamonds flyer on the floor of the communal lobby, below the PhD lecturer’s mail-dookit.
“I’m the doozy,” I say, and when I laugh, both policemen visibly jump. I’m not surprised; it’s a high jangling thing, that last tortured nerve finally snapped. “I’m the big pay-out. The every once in a blue moon.”
And at once the dread drains out of me – the heat, the panic, that endless keep walking away, don’t stop, don’t look back.
The subject’s perception is real. I think of Billy’s grin. That undivided look that was never his version of a wink. And the client’s power is very real. The world turns, Annie, on people’s sense of fairness, of justice. Even if, deep down, it’s always about revenge.
And I find that I don’t care. I find that I’m glad. I let out the breath I’ve been holding for so long I forgot that I was drowning. I put my hands on the table and breathe in a new one. I look PC Derek Munroe straight in the eye, and I even manage to smile.
“I’d like to make a confession.”