Cuckoo (aka Claire, Darling)

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Noah Coors

My breath catches in my throat when Noah walks into the courtroom. He is so devastatingly handsome, his suit cut perfectly to flatter his broad shoulders and chest, the lines of his cutaway shirt collar mirroring his chiselled jawline. I realise, with a shock, that I have not seen my fiancé in person for many months and yet I can see no change in him. I reach for my glass of water with a shaking hand. Grosvenor nudges me under the table and hisses, ‘ Don’t look at him,’ through gritted teeth, and I fight with every instinct in my body to wrench my gaze away from him. Then I feel a pang because he isn’t looking at me. He has avoided my gaze for the entire walk through the room, and as he seats himself at the podium he stares ahead as though I don’t exist. A strangled sound escapes me, somewhere between a cry and a gasp, and Grosvenor nudges me again, harder this time. I take another shaky gulp of water. I thought I could do this, but I can’t. It’s too hard. It’s too hard seeing my boyfriend up there and having so many questions I’m unable to ask him.

I should be angry, should be consumed with rage, but instead all that emotion is manifesting as panicked desperation, a feral need to know what the fuck is going on. Why did he do this to me?

‘Mr Coors, have you met this woman before?’ Dodgson asks.

I straighten slightly in my seat, and my left index finger twitches in anticipation.

‘Yes, I have. We met at Morrisons.’ His voice is raspy, drained by exhaustion and filled with such bitterness that it hurts me to hear it.

‘And what was the exchange?’

‘She was working there, I was shopping. I asked her for a wine recommendation. She gave me one, I bought what I had gone there for, and left.’

‘And that was the entire exchange when you first met?’

‘Yes.’

‘You did not invite her for a coffee afterwards?’

‘I certainly did not.’

I feel my blood boiling. My fingers tighten around the sides of my seat as I try to retain my composure. I focus on my breathing but I’m so angry, so let down by the lies, lies, lies he is telling. Why? And for what? To retain his already-dashed credibility as a one-woman man?

‘How would you describe the interaction?’

Noah does not even pause before answering, as though this question has been rehearsed with Dodgson a thousand times. ‘Fleeting.’

I breathe in slowly, letting all the memories of us flash before me, reminding myself of why I love him, of what we have. Pouring me hot coffee in the morning, the crooked smile that I would wake up to when the smell of roasted beans grew too strong to resist. Laughs and easy conversation at our dinner table each night, often followed by whispered sweetness in the evening, his arm wrapped around me in bed. There was nothing contractual or professional about our relationship; nothing fleeting about us. Something must have happened to Noah that I don’t know about, to make him go back on all of this so cruelly. There has to be a logical reason for his about-face.

‘And what happened after you left Morrisons? Was that the end of your contact?’

‘No. She sent me a friend request on Facebook a few days later. I recognised her from the profile photo.’

‘How did she have your name?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t give it to her.’

I stiffen in my seat, frowning. He’s lying. On oath.

‘Did you accept her friend request?’

‘No, I did not. I felt uncomfortable that she had added me… about the circumstances surrounding it.’

‘And was that the end of your interactions?’

‘No. Over time she added some of my friends, who unknowingly accepted her, thinking she was a random requester. Eventually, one of my friends got in touch with me. She had been added by Claire, and when she had gone onto her page to see who she was, had noticed that there were photographs of me on her page. Photographs that Claire must have taken from my social media accounts and shared as though they were hers. And in some, she had even doctored herself into the image.’

The photograph of us both on Las Ramblas is projected onto a white screen. Beside it is another image, identical except that I am missing, Noah standing alone and smiling at the camera. I feel sick. I look to Grosvenor and she is unnaturally still beside me.

‘How did this make you feel?’

‘Creeped out! That was when I told my friend Harry about the situation, but I just sort of played it down, laughed it off. It felt weird to take it all seriously. Obviously now I wish I had,’ he adds at the end, pointedly.

‘And what did you do after your Facebook friend flagged this behaviour to you?’

‘I blocked Claire. I made all my accounts private and blocked her on everything, even LinkedIn. And I told all my friends who were Facebook friends with her to block her. I also warned Lilah. I didn’t want her to stumble across a Photoshopped image and think it was real, or anything like that. It was embarrassing.’

My ears redden.

‘Was this your first conversation with Lilah about Miss Arundale?’

‘Yes. I hadn’t had any reason to mention her before: she was nobody to me.’

I suck in a breath as though I have been slapped. Nobody? Nobody? I was his fiancée! He was my partner, my everything! I feel myself fight the urge to sob hysterically. I begin trying to hyperventilate as discreetly as I can.

It was April. I was sitting with Sukhi in the office, rain pattering outside and confining us to the depressing ‘breakout’ area, sad sandwiches in hand and a couple of packets of crisps between us.

‘Shit weather,’ she commented.

‘Shit day,’ I countered with a weak smile. She returned it, then paused for a moment before placing a hand over mine.

‘I’m sorry about your mum, Claire.’

I stared very hard at the tabletop, forced myself to feel nothing. ‘It’s fine. It was a long time ago,’ I replied after an awkwardly long pause.

‘I know, but that doesn’t make it any easier,’ she told me, patting me on the hand.

It was seven months since Mother’s death, and after much back and forth with solicitors about probate, her money was to be released later this month.

‘At least you can use some of your inheritance to get on the London game of Snakes and Ladders– buy a property,’ Sukhi tried to joke.

‘No inheritance,’ I replied.

‘No? What do you mean?’ Sukhi frowned. ‘I thought you said that it would all automatically go to you as she had no other close blood relatives?’

I forced a shrug. ‘I didn’t get any money in the end.’

‘I’m sorry, Claire. That’s a real kick in the teeth. I reckon the way I burn through money, my future kids won’t have any either though, bless their hearts.’ Sukhi laughed determinedly, trying desperately to lighten this conversation I seemed determined to keep darkening.

‘She had money. She chose not to leave me any.’

‘What do you mean?’ Sukhi lowered her sandwich, brow furrowed in total disbelief. ‘She left it to someone else?’

‘Yeah. She left it all to some charity for donkeys. Said there was “nobody else” to leave things to, apparently…’

‘Jesus Christ, Claire, that’s… Well, look. I don’t want to comment on your relationship with your mum, but that seems rotten and I’m sorry to hear about it. I’m sorry she didn’t think of you.’

I shrugged, though I felt a dull ache in my chest. ‘Yeah, well. I guess I’m just nobody.’

‘You’re not nobody, Claire. Don’t say things like that. What did Noah say?’

‘He told me she’s rotting away in hell and we don’t need her money anyway. That I have him even if I don’t have her, and that I’m his whole world and she didn’t deserve me.’

‘Sounds about right,’ Sukhi said, nodding.

‘And as far as you recall, that was the end of the harassment? After the social media blocking?’ Dodgson asks Noah.

‘No. She got my phone number somehow, kept leaving me weird voicemails, so I switched off the messaging option and left my phone ringing out. I don’t even know how she got my number – it must have been online somewhere for work or something. She even came to my office. I told the receptionist not to let her in again. I gave security photographs of her. I even gave some to Lilah to give to her own office, in case Claire went after her as well.’

‘What do you mean by went after?’

‘ Well, I didn’t know what she wanted– whether she was after money, or if she was unhinged, or what.’

He pulls at his tie, and I wonder if he is about to choke on all his lies.

‘And so she was now blocked from all your social media, banned from your office, and that was the end?’

‘Well, I also got some emails through to my work address, but I don’t know who they were from. The email was anonymous and the address was a mix of random numbers and letters. To be honest, I didn’t even get them for ages– they were going into my spam folder. But then one day I was looking for something and I found them all, hundreds of them. They were short, saying things like I love you , and See you at dinner . I was so confused, but I assumed someone just had the wrong email address. Now I am convinced it was her.’

‘Hearsay!’ Grosvenor objects, standing up, but her voice wavers in a way I haven’t heard before. My eyes are closed; I can’t bear to look at anyone in this room.

‘And that was the end of the interactions?’ Dodgson asks, rolling his eyes at Grosvenor in a way that I would find incredibly offensive were I not busy loathing my fiancé for the first time in my life.

‘Yes, for a while. I had begun preparing a log for use in requesting a restraining order by this point, but I hadn’t heard from or seen Claire again, so I figured she got the message and was done with me.’

‘At what point did you begin to feel concern for your safety, enough to keep a log?’

‘When I saw the Photoshopped images of us together online. Lilah convinced me it was too far, that I had to put an end to it. I did it to keep her happy – I didn’t really want the hassle.’ Noah’s voice wavers when he says her name. My knuckles whiten.

‘We even put a deposit down on a guard dog, just to make Lilah feel a little safer.’

Rosie’s Rottweilers was to protect them from me? I want to laugh, but I want to cry even more.

‘You felt you were in enough danger to require a protection dog?’ Dodgson asks.

‘Well, no, I never thought it was dangerous. But Lilah was just so weirded out about it all and I wanted to do anything I could to make her feel safer in the house, especially as we were trying for a baby. If she was pregnant, I’d have wanted her to have someone at home to protect her while I was at work. The dog seemed like a good choice.’

The blood is bubbling in my veins, hot and molten.

‘And still you chose not to go to the police?’

‘Lilah wanted to,’ Noah admits, running a hand through his hair and looking down. ‘Obviously I regret not doing so now,’ he says, and his voice breaks. He wipes a tear away.

‘Why did you not?’

‘Because I didn’t want my affairs to be discovered. I was worried that if they began to look into this woman and her interactions with me, then more would be uncovered. Relationships that were real affairs, and I didn’t want Lilah to find out,’ he admits, breaking into a sob, one hand covering his face.

‘And the affairs that were raised, Miss Choi’s testimony– do you have anything to say about that?’

‘They happened, and I’m sorry, but they have nothing to do with this trial, or with what happened to Lilah. If I could take back ever speaking to any of those women and get Lilah back, I would.’

My eyes are boring into his, willing him to look at me, even for just a second. But he doesn’t, and I know why. Because he can’t. My fiancé cannot bear to look me in the eye while he lies, lies, lies through his teeth, to get me locked up. I hold my chin a little higher, as though daring him to glance my way, to unravel, to break and tell the truth to this jury, to this world of people who have been fed lies from his entire circle, his entire fucking contacts book.

But, of course, he doesn’t.

Grosvenor calls for a recess, and that’s when I know I’m screwed.