You can’t have a happy ending unless everyone is happy, and I wasn’t happy.
Let me be clear: I was blissfully content to be with Mark again. For the first time since John Webster had begun to disrupt our lives, we were able to be together without a shadow chilling the air around us. John had disappeared, apparently for good. I knew him well enough to believe he would regret the way he’d appeared at our last meeting. I had twitched the curtain back and surprised him before he was ready for the spotlight. He could cope with anger and fear, but never ridicule. I thought he’d meant it when he said he wasn’t coming back.
And even if he did, I wasn’t afraid of him any more.
No, the bar to my happiness was that every so often I would find myself thinking of Vicki and how she had died in my home, and what John had said about her murder. Her ghost seemed to trail around after me when I was in the flat, silently trying to get my attention, standing at my elbow waiting for me to acknowledge that she was there.
There was nothing new to report, Jennifer Gold told me in an apologetic way when I called her.
‘We’ve been putting everything together for the court case. The prosecutor thinks it’s worth a try but she’s not holding out too much hope if the defence are on their game. We didn’t get anything off the forensics, as you know. There was a mixture of third-party DNA on her skin and clothing, but nothing that was significant enough to test.’
‘What if it wasn’t them?’
Silence on the phone. Then, ‘What do you know that you’re not telling me?’
‘Nothing. Really, nothing. I was just wondering about her personal life.’ What about my old friend Harry?
‘I looked into it.’ She hesitated, weighing up whether she could tell me more. ‘I had full cooperation from anyone I spoke to.’
I tried to read something into the DS’s tone – a suggestion that she wasn’t convinced by Harry’s story, a hint that she was interested in finding out more – but there was nothing to hear.
The memory of Vicki’s sweet, hopeful little face made me lie awake at night staring at the ceiling while Mark sprawled beside me, snoring on two-thirds of the mattress. I turned it over and over in my mind, remembering what had happened before Vicki died, and after, and that day.
‘You need to work it out,’ Mark said one evening, out of nowhere.
‘What?’
‘Vicki.’ He was adding vegetables to a stir-fry and the sound of hissing oil meant it was impossible to talk for a moment. When it died down, he said, ‘You won’t be able to move on until you know what happened, and I like this place, but I’d like to live somewhere warmer at some stage in my life.’
‘Mark—’
‘You need to know, don’t you?’ He crossed the room and put his arms around me. ‘So find out.’
I leaned against him and thought about it. He was right. I had to know.
A day or two later, I went to see Jennifer Gold. She looked tired, her hair scraped back in a ponytail, her shirt crumpled and creased from long hours at work.
‘I still don’t have any news,’ was how she greeted me.
‘I know. Look, I know this is a strange question but did you keep a record of the search of my flat and the things you took away?’
‘Of course.’
‘Could I have a look at it?’
She left me sitting by her desk while she went to get it. I saw her scanning through it before she brought it back, trying to work out what I wanted to know. This case bothered her as much as it upset me, I thought.
Once she gave the booklet to me, I read through it with care. They had done their best to list everything, including a pizza box that had been propped up beside the bin and the receipts from the items Vicki had bought.
‘What are you looking for?’ Jennifer had been watching me read with barely suppressed impatience.
‘Could they have missed out on mentioning something else?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like a note I left Vicki before I went to work. I didn’t want to wake her.’
‘Handwritten? Definitely not. We would have paid close attention to it.’
‘Maybe she put it in the bin.’
‘We took the contents of the bin too.’
‘Oh.’
‘What did the note say?’
‘Nothing much,’ I said, and got the look I deserved. ‘I promise I’ll tell you when I can. I need to get a couple of things straight first.’
I had written something about Harry, I half-remembered, and I didn’t want to think about what that might mean.
But of course, I had to.
One Saturday afternoon in February, I went around to a neat little house in a back street of Clapham and knocked on the door. The window was full of stacked boxes: the occupants were moving out. When the door opened, I smiled.
‘Lucky I caught you. I didn’t know you were moving.’
Vicky ran a hand over her stomach. ‘Well, we decided it was a good idea once I found out I was pregnant.’
‘Pregnant? My goodness. That was fast.’ I looked again and saw that her body was very slightly rounded. If she hadn’t drawn my attention to it, I would never have suspected a thing.
‘Thank you,’ Vicky cooed. ‘It was a honeymoon baby.’
‘There wasn’t much else to do,’ Harry said from behind her, and she rolled her eyes as if she’d heard that one before.
‘How are you?’ I asked him.
‘Not bad, not bad.’ He looked tired, though, and he’d lost weight. His hair had thinned dramatically. He looked ten years older than when I’d seen him at the engagement party at the end of October. ‘This was good timing. We’re moving on Monday.’
‘Where are you off to?’
‘The most gorgeous house in Norfolk.’ Vicky was glowing with pride. ‘Huge. So much space for the baby to run around when he’s old enough. Or she. We decided not to find out what we were having.’
‘The main thing is that it’s not twins,’ Harry said, with a little too much feeling.
‘The main thing is that he or she is healthy,’ Vicky said, and smiled to take the sting out of her words. She had mellowed, I thought, but she hadn’t mellowed that much.
‘Anyway, why did you want to come round, Ingrid?’
‘I just wanted a quick word with Harry,’ I said. ‘In private, if that’s possible.’
‘Very mysterious.’ She turned and went into the tiny sitting room where she started putting cushions into packing crates, singing under her breath.
‘Come in, come in. Let me make you a cup of tea.’ Harry ushered me into the kitchen where every surface was covered in stacks of plates or packing boxes or bubble wrap.
‘I won’t stay long.’
‘What can I do for you?’
I went over and closed the kitchen door softly. There was no point in being vague. ‘Did you tell the police that you were having an affair with your neighbour Vicki?’
‘Yes. I contacted them straight away when I heard she was d-dead. They were able to keep it p-private.’ He was trembling, I noticed, and stumbling over his words. ‘How – how did you know?’
‘She told me.’
‘When?’
‘Your engagement party. The night before she died.’ I took pity on him. ‘It wasn’t common knowledge. I don’t think she had told anyone else.’
‘Right.’ He leaned back against the kitchen counter. ‘Okay. I don’t want to complicate my life. Especially now.’
‘No. That would be awful.’
My tone made his head snap up, but he had enough control of himself to keep his voice low. ‘Do you think I don’t miss her? Do you think I’m not devastated that she’s gone? I can’t even mourn for her in case Vicky notices something is wrong.’
‘You haven’t told Vicky.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Why wouldn’t you tell her now?’
He looked baffled. ‘Why would I? There’s nothing to be gained by telling her.’
‘You’d rather keep lying to her.’
‘I don’t like lying. But you do what you have to do.’
I nodded slowly. ‘I thought that might be how you felt about it. It must have been very important to you to keep the affair a secret.’
Harry’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Do you recognise this?’ I showed him the bracelet I was wearing, the silver one that I had lost and Webster had found.
He shrugged. ‘Not really.’
‘I rang the bar where you had your party. They found it when they were cleaning up. The barman remembered because you took it and said you would get it back to me yourself, and Vicky wasn’t pleased, and you ended up arguing. He thought it was a sad way to end your evening.’
‘I remember that.’ He was frowning. ‘I had forgotten though, genuinely.’
‘I think you meant to give it back to me. I think you came to my flat – because you knew where I lived, and it wasn’t far from your office at the time – and you meant to leave it there for me, but you found Vicki was there instead of me.’
‘No.’
‘I think you were surprised to find her there when you were expecting me to come to the door.’
He looked as if he was going to be sick, then and there.
‘I think you argued,’ I went on. ‘Maybe she said she was going to tell Vicky that you’d been sleeping with her, or maybe she wanted to continue the relationship when you wanted to end it, or you wanted to keep seeing her even though you were getting married. You had a disagreement, anyway. Things became heated. One of you picked up a knife – one of my kitchen knives. I think it was probably you, because you dropped the bracelet as you reached for it. The bracelet fell into the toaster. The police missed it when they were searching the flat, and so did I for a few weeks, so I never made the connection with you, or the engagement party, or even Vicki’s death.’
He stared at me in mute misery. His eyes were dark and empty.
‘You struggled. It was more of an accident than anything … even though she was stabbed forty-two times and crawled across the living room to get away from you. That’s the story, isn’t it? Am I right?’
Harry swallowed. ‘Almost.’
‘What did I get wrong?’
‘I was in a meeting all day. In Paris. I got back at ten o’clock that night, on the Eurostar. The police checked my tickets, and the CCTV. I wasn’t here.’
‘So who—’
Harry raised a finger to his lips, which were bloodless. ‘I gave the bracelet … to her. She said she would put it through your letterbox. She said she was happy to do it. That was how we ended the argument. With me saying she could deliver it.’
I imagined Vicky coming to my flat, buzzed into the courtyard by one of my neighbours. Maybe she had seen Vicki through the window, or maybe she had knocked on the door and discovered her when she opened it.
What on earth are you doing here? Did you have a good night?
And then she had walked in and sat down on the sofa – maybe to talk about the party and her ring and the honeymoon – and the note I had left for Vicki had been right in front of her. I thought of my black handwriting, all too legible:
And do not ring Harry! He doesn’t deserve you.
Vicky would have noticed her fiancé’s name, in the circumstances. I knew she was jealous, with good reason.
I knew she had a temper.
What does that mean? Explain it to me? What do you mean, you can’t? Why are you crying?
Or maybe she had come there primed for a fight with me, ready to unleash the hostility that had been bubbling under the surface the previous night, and found her worst fears realised in a different way.
Tell me what I want to know. Has he been cheating on me with you?
The bracelet tight in her fist. Pacing the flat. How could you. How could you.
Reaching for the knife that was hanging in the kitchen, ready to be used.
Killing the woman who threatened her beautiful perfect marriage, and her beautiful perfect life.
‘What are you going to do?’ Harry’s voice was a whisper. ‘Are you going to tell the police?’
I hesitated. There was no physical evidence. She had covered her tracks well, removing the knife and not leaving a usable fingerprint or a hair behind. I was the only person who could say that the bracelet had been in the toaster. Adam was hardly going to be a star witness, even if he was prepared to give evidence, and John was gone. It would be my word against hers. There was no guarantee the CPS would take a case on that basis.
But I would be a reliable witness, and there was the evidence of the bar staff who remembered the engagement party and the bracelet and the argument. Harry might even give evidence against her, if the police could talk him round.
I thought he had loved poor little Vicki very much.
‘The baby …’ Harry faltered. ‘What about the baby?’
‘What if she harms the baby, Harry? Can you take that risk?’
His eyes filled with tears, but he didn’t respond.
‘I can’t, you see,’ I said softly. ‘I have to try to keep you and the baby safe. I can’t pretend Vicki isn’t dead. Her injuries were catastrophic—’
‘Stop.’ He turned away from me sharply. ‘Vick’s been so much better lately.’
‘She’s happy at the moment, because she got what she wanted. It’s not safe for you or the baby, Harry. And it’s not right.’
‘She has to live with herself. Don’t you think that’s enough of a punishment?’
I didn’t answer him, because I could only have said no.
I walked out of the kitchen, and found Vicky standing in the doorway of the sitting room. She looked down at the bracelet on my wrist, and back at my face.
‘Did you get what you wanted?’ She asked the question in a pleasant tone, and I knew she was guilty.
‘I think so.’
She nodded slowly. I let myself out of the house without saying anything else, and the knot in my stomach got tighter and tighter as I pulled out my phone and called DS Gold.
I believed Vicky had committed a terrible, evil crime and it wasn’t up to me to decide what her punishment should be.
I would place my trust in justice, unlike Adam Nash and his fellow conspirators. I would tell the police what I knew and what I suspected. I would let them investigate Vicky. I would give them a chance to find the evidence that would put her behind bars for life.
I think about death a lot, and the truth. I think about evidence.
Evidence is more important than the truth.
Evidence is everything.
I put my faith in the law and in evidence, because when it comes down to it, evidence is all that matters.