They stared at each other, mutually uncomprehending, mutually horrified.
She let out a startled gasp but she did not scream, because although he was an intruder, he was not a stranger. It took her a moment to place him in this context, to work out why he shouldn’t be here, and then to realise the enormity of the fact that he was.
Parlabane felt like he was falling. That lurching beneath his feet had opened a chasm that was swallowing him.
Headlong into the abyss.
He had thought he was venturing into the darkness on Lucy’s behalf, ever wary of dragging her down with him. But all the time, she had been the one leading him there, and he hadn’t seen it.
She had been in the same position as Peter: raised with the trappings of great wealth but denied the privileges and freedoms to which she must have thought she would be one day entitled. She was the one who came to Parlabane with her doubts over the accident, and if she had never done that, then certain apparently damning evidence against Diana would never have come to light.
Follow me down.
Jesus, it was so obvious now. She had given him a list of names: some of them unknowingly primed by Peter to pass on just the right information. Now he understood why Alan Harper was puzzled that Peter should be reaching out to him of all people, confiding in him about his married life and depicting his wife as a controlling obsessive. It was so that Harper would feel the need to unburden himself later, troubled by the fact that Peter had left a distraught message on the night he apparently died, worrying about being in too deep.
Follow me down.
When Parlabane had begun to think there was probably nothing more to the story than how it appeared, he had gone for a drink with Lucy, at her request. She left before him, and shortly afterwards he was abducted, drugged, driven around in a van and then dumped back at his flat. All he knew about his assailant was her distinctive scent, which Lucy knew to be Blackberry and Bay, because Peter had given it to Diana as a present.
Follow me down.
Peter had primed Harkness by mentioning Diana’s student-years tragedy, and then Lucy had subtly nudged Parlabane in the right direction so that he would track down Emily Gayle. She said there was a friend Diana was still in touch with from her time at Oxford, but pretended she couldn’t remember the name, so that he didn’t twig he was being manipulated.
She had been part of the insurance con from the start. She had recruited the money and assistance of Sam Finnegan, and it had then been her crucial role to drip-feed the story to some mug of a journalist who would think he was discovering all of this for himself.
Somewhere amidst the maelstrom he found his voice. He surprised himself by how calm he sounded. He surprised himself that he didn’t scream with hurt and anger.
‘Hello, Lucy.’
He heard hurried footsteps, Peter having emerged from the bedroom to realise something was wrong. In a moment he was at his sister’s side, his ashen face a mix of incomprehension, outrage and fear. Like Lucy he had pulled on a T-shirt, the kitchen being too cold for sitting around in the altogether. He had a bandage around his shin: a shallow place to cut to the bone.
‘Who the hell are you? What are you doing in our house?’
It was Lucy who answered, her voice low and broken.
‘Peter, this is Jack Parlabane.’
It was possible to see it in his eyes the moment he deduced what this meant: the flash of panic Diana had described.
‘Sounds like you shag pretty well for a deid bloke. But if you thought you were well fucked five minutes ago, I’ve got some difficult news.’
Peter looked around, frantic, calculating, like he was searching for a way out. Parlabane couldn’t see one.
He edged past Lucy and lunged towards a worktop, hauling open a drawer and brandishing a carving knife.
‘Peter, what are you doing?’ she asked, tremulous, afraid.
‘He’s the only one who knows. If we get rid of him … if we…’
He couldn’t even bring himself to name it. That didn’t augur well for his ability to do it, but the guy was desperate, and right then he believed Parlabane was the only thing standing between him and several million pounds.
‘I’m not the only one, Peter. My associate knows where I am and knows everything else too. This phone has been uploading video of everything since I got here. It’s being relayed straight to Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod of Police Scotland. Believe me: this is over.’
Peter began advancing. His eyes were wild, his hands shaking. He needed to believe there was still a way out of this.
‘Why did you come alone, then? You’re lying.’
Parlabane held his ground. He knew the back door was still open, so flight remained an option, but he had a reason to believe it wouldn’t come to that.
Peter stopped. His expression was aghast, haunted as he gripped the knife in front of his face. He wasn’t coming any closer, but Parlabane knew he still needed to talk him down.
‘The hardest part of this was when you had to hit her, wasn’t it?’
Parlabane saw that flash in his eyes again: an awareness of his own vulnerability.
‘It was crucial to the plan: on the night you disappeared, you had to provoke a final argument, and you had to hit her. Diana told me. She thought you were shaking because you were angry, but you were trembling because of what you knew you had to do. You had to hit her hard enough to leave a mark for the cops to see. Doing that took more guts than cutting yourself.’
Peter didn’t have a brutal streak, cornered or otherwise: it was merely another of Lucy’s lies, part of the narrative they had constructed.
‘It was only one punch, but it was harder than all the other stuff, wasn’t it? Ruining Diana’s life, pretending to be in love with her, setting her up for a murder conviction: you could do all that. It was a game: a real-life role-playing game. That’s second nature to you, but violence is not. When you bundled me into that van with a sack over my head, it wasn’t just so that I couldn’t see your faces. It was so that you couldn’t see mine.’
Parlabane watched him crumble as he spoke. His eyes closed, wincing in remembrance of the punch, then tears fell as he let the knife slip from his grasp.
Lucy ran to him, putting her arms around his shoulders as he fell to a crouch. Down on the cold tiles they clung on to each other, helpless and broken. They flinched from Parlabane’s gaze, as though in his eyes they saw how they would be regarded when the world found out. They were wretched, naked in their shame. In that moment, he understood that not everything they had told him and Diana about their upbringing was a lie. He could see that they didn’t choose this, and for that he felt a brief moment of sympathy.
But they did choose what they had done to Diana, and what they had tried to do to Liz Miller. They did choose what they had done to him.
Eventually, Lucy looked up at Parlabane.
‘What was the hardest part for you?’ he asked her. ‘Faking that you liked me?’
She looked away again, said nothing.