83

JEN

‘Tell me!’

Bex is looking frightened now. And so she should be. Laurence has disappeared out of sight completely and we’re standing on a stretch of the Heath not covered by security cameras. With one quick cut Bex would be dead. But before I do that I want some answers.

‘Just fucking tell me!’ I repeat.

‘Okay … But listen, before you do anything … reckless, you have to know that it was all done in your best interests. She was old, past her prime.’

I do everything in my power to stop myself from killing her there and then. I need more from her. But I know I don’t have that much time. I feel the questions burning my mouth.

‘And the death certificates?’

‘Yes.’

Her voice is so quiet I can barely hear it.

‘What did you say?’ I press the knife down and cut into her skin.

‘It was me. I sent them in to the paper.’ Her voice rises in pitch as she begins to panic even more. ‘But it was because I knew you wouldn’t be happy – you wouldn’t be happy … in Switzerland.’

So it was all to do with me leaving.

‘Before you called me, I’d read your column. About your decision to move to Basel with James – I mean Laurence. I didn’t want you to go. I couldn’t imagine a life without you.’

‘So you thought the best thing for me was to get me sacked?’

‘You were always complaining about the column, how you felt trapped by it. How it ruined your friendships. How it put pressure on your relationships. I thought you could do … better.’

‘Better?’

‘You’re such a brilliant writer, Jen. I thought you could use that time to write that novel you were always going on about.’

‘Didn’t you think about how the loss of that job – and the way I lost that job – would affect me? I had a nervous fucking breakdown, if you don’t remember.’

‘But I was there, wasn’t I? It wasn’t too bad, just the two of us. It was like the old days.’

‘For God’s sake, Bex. Can’t you hear what you’re saying?’

‘But we were happy then. And we’ll be happy in the future. Laurence wasn’t right for you. He never was. He didn’t support you like I did. I know you thought that there was a hope of a second chance, but … I was doing you a favour.’

I look down at her shaking hands. She’s still clutching her iPhone. It’s recording everything.

I wrench the phone from her. ‘And what do you think you’re doing with this?’

‘Nothing. I guess it must have just switched itself on.’

I don’t believe her. My guess is that she’s going to use it for something. What? Was she going to blackmail me into staying with her? What lengths would she go to in order to try to control me? Images from our friendship flash through my mind. The first day in halls. How she took me under her wing. How she remoulded me. How she said she wanted to protect me. I remember how angry she’d been when I wrote about her in that student newspaper all those years ago. At the time I mistook her reaction as a simple desire for privacy, but now I realise that she didn’t want anyone to go digging in her past. I didn’t question it at the time. How malleable I had been. Had she always sensed that I could be manipulated like this? What was wrong with me? How long had she been planning her sick form of mind control? How else could you describe it? I’d come so close to doing it – to killing Laurence. But what was going on in her fucked-up brain?

With my free hand, I switch off the video and open up her Twitter account, looking for any signs of @WatchingYouJenHunter and those other accounts. But there’s nothing. I put the phone in my pocket, out of her reach, but continue to press the knife down hard on her neck.

‘And the messages?’

She doesn’t respond.

‘The messages?’ I push the knife deeper into her skin.

‘That – that really hurts.’ She takes a quick breath. ‘I – I used a different phone to send them.’

‘So I’m guessing you did everything. You were the one wearing that mask when you attacked me on the Heath. And then you placed it in Laurence’s bathroom cupboard so that I’d find it there. All because you – you wanted me to feel so much hatred of him that I’d kill him.’

She can’t speak now.

‘And the murder–suicide on Kite Hill? I can hardly bear to ask you. You did all of this … for what? So that I’d still like you?’

‘You – you don’t understand,’ she says, panic in her voice.

‘But … this?’

‘What other option did I have?’ She pronounces the words with a normality that only emphasises her twisted reasoning, as if she’s explaining why she bought a jar of instant because the shop had run out of ground coffee. ‘I couldn’t let you go to Switzerland. I couldn’t …’

‘But didn’t you have any feelings for that poor girl? For Vicky?’

‘She was collateral damage.’

‘What?’

‘It was Daniel I hated. Because he left me.’

So she had lied about that too – she was the one who had been rejected. Her eyes are full of anger.

‘People shouldn’t leave me.’ She spits out the words as if there’s poison in her mouth.

It was all beginning to make some kind of sense.

‘I loved him, once. He was everything to me. But then he said he’d found somebody else. I had to deal with him. I pretended to be his friend. It was a long game. But all the time I hated him.’

‘And Laurence? He didn’t rape you, did he?’

‘He used me,’ she says, her accent taking on more of an Essex twang. ‘Fucked me and then wanted to get rid of me. But then he wanted to take you away, out of the country. I couldn’t let him do that. Even after I thought he was out of the picture, after everything I’d done with the death certificates, after you’d lost your job, after you’d split up, there was the prospect that you’d get back together. You were going to have lunch together. You seemed excited at the idea of seeing him. I couldn’t risk that. It was the natural thing to do. I could get rid of them all. So I could keep you close.’

I look at her as if seeing her for the first time. Her proximity to me – the sight of her – disgusts me. I feel my mind splintering apart again as I’m forced to reassess everything I think I’ve known about her.

‘And that scene at Colchester station – you staged that just for my benefit?’

She doesn’t answer the question. ‘It’s always been the same,’ she continues. ‘People wanting to leave me, get rid of me. First my mum. She tried to abort me. But I taught her – and Dad – a lesson, all right.’

The confession about her mother turns my insides. I think about the newspaper cutting and wonder what part she had played in the deaths of her birth parents. Bile rises in my throat, but I swallow it down, the liquid burning the back of my throat, my stomach.

‘Then Alice.’ She whispers the name so softly I can hardly hear her.

It means nothing to me. ‘What? Who’s Alice?’

‘The girl across the road from us. He wouldn’t let me play with her. She could have been my friend. Dad dragged me away from her house. It could have been different.’

She isn’t making any sense now. I spool through what she’s just told me in a bid to try to understand. There are so many fragments that it’s difficult to assemble them in my mind, like trying to glue together the shards of a broken mirror.

‘So you thought that by making me … making me kill Laurence, you’d what – have me with you for ever?’ The thought of it almost makes me gag. ‘The truth is, you make me sick.’

‘Don’t say that, Jen. You don’t mean it. We’ve always been close. We’re like sis—’

‘We’re nothing like sisters. In fact, it would have been better if you’d never been born.’

The fury that burns in her eyes frightens me, but I force myself to continue.

‘In fact, your mother should have got rid of you. She should have—’

‘Shut up!’ she screams.

Just then I hear something – someone – nearby. I turn my head away from her and in that moment Bex takes advantage of the diversion. She brings up her leg and knees me in the stomach. I feel the air rush out of my lungs. She grabs my hand and presses down on my wrist, twisting it out of shape. I try to keep hold of the knife, but the pain is too much. The bones in my hand feel like they’re breaking. I let the knife drop, and hear it smash onto the ground, but, just before Bex bends down to grab it, the sound of running echoes around me.

There’s a witness coming to Bex’s aid.

They’ll see the scene in front of them – Bex’s injuries – and assume that I’m the violent one. I’m the one who should be locked up. Bex will tell the police about my history of mental illness, all of which can be checked out. I will be sentenced, and Bex will be free to carry on, perhaps even fixing her sights on a series of new, unsuspecting victims.

As I stumble backwards I see a woman in grey jogging gear rush between us. I know her, but I don’t understand what she’s doing here. I do a double-take. It’s Julia Jones. She snatches up the knife.

‘Thank God you arrived when you did,’ gasps Bex, now kneeling on the earth. ‘Can you call the police? I was being attacked … you must have seen what she was doing.’

Julia looks from Bex to me and back to Bex again.

‘What the fuck are you waiting for?’ shouts Bex. ‘Can’t you hear what I’m saying? Look at me – look at my neck.’ She gestures to the cuts I made, shows her the blood oozing out of the surface wounds. ‘Look at what she did to me!’

Julia adjusts her fingers around the knife and in a flash, before either Bex or I know what is happening, she’s brought it down to Bex’s level. She swipes it across her neck, cutting deep into her skin. Julia stands back as the blood spills out of her. Bex opens her mouth to scream, but she finds she can’t make a sound. Her eyes stretch wide. I’m back where I started, witnessing Vicky’s terrible death and Dan’s suicide on Parliament Hill Fields.

I think I must be hallucinating. That Julia is a figment of my imagination, some kind of spectre conjured by my subconscious as a way to protect myself and my sanity from what I’ve just done. I must have killed Bex myself and this … all this is a kind of living nightmare. I force myself to blink, take some deep breaths. I turn away from the scene, look across the empty Heath, focus and refocus on trees, grass, the sky, the clouds in distance. But when I turn back Bex is dying, and Julia is watching her die.

I can’t understand it. I can’t take it in. I don’t know what to do. Before I open my mouth to ask her the question – why? – she stops me with one word.

‘Harry.’