Chapter 43
Silence. Lucy has no idea what to do. By the look of them, neither Edgar nor Rachel do either. They’re motionless.
‘Why are you all staring at me like that?’ Anna’s shifting from side to side in her seat, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her black Puffa jacket.
There’s a slight smell coming off her, an undertone of bonfire.
But of course, it’s not bonfire, nothing as benign as that.
Lucy shivers at the thought of flames engulfing the house, the charred ruins this woman must have seen.
‘Tom Wright? You knew him?’ Rachel says. She sounds totally shaken.
‘I said so. He was my solicitor. Why are you all looking so shocked?’
‘The thing is,’ Rachel says, ‘that we’ve just been told that a longstanding colleague of my husband’s has been seriously injured in a house fire. He was staying with Tom Wright.’
‘Victor’s my friend,’ Edgar says. ‘Not just my colleague.’ Anguish comes off him in waves; his fists are clenched tight by his side. Lucy has to exercise every ounce of self-control she has not to move closer and put her arms around him.
‘I can’t get my head round this,’ Rachel says. ‘How come you didn’t stay with him last night?’
‘I slept in the hostel. The one where I met you,’ Anna says. She’s speaking quietly, her face averted. ‘I was trying to be independent – Tom had already done a lot for me. I’d already stayed with him for one night, and he was giving me work. I didn’t want to be too much of a burden.’
‘What time did you leave his house?’ Rachel says.
‘In the afternoon,’ Anna says. She pauses, then: ‘Look, what are you getting at here? Are you trying to suggest I had something to do with this? Why would I want to hurt Tom? I thought you were going to help me, not make accusations against me. I don’t have any idea what happened.’
‘Did you go and talk to the police when you got to the house?’ Rachel says.
‘No. I was too scared.’
‘What is the point of all these questions, Rachel?’ Edgar says.
‘Do you really think this woman has anything to do with it? Stop playing Miss Marple.’ He’s been sitting, shaking his head, but now he leaps to his feet, jumping up with such force that he pushes his chair to the floor behind him.
Lucy jumps, pushes her hands tight between her thighs to hide their tremors.
‘Edgar,’ Rachel says, reproachfully. ‘Calm down. I’m just talking to Anna.’
‘Don’t fucking tell me to calm down,’ he says.
‘You need to sit down. We need to work out what’s going on.’
‘Like some pound shop Agatha Christie? Tell you what, it was Miss Scarlett over there in the doorway with a tin of petrol. This is a complete waste of time.’ He points straight at Anna whose cheeks flush as red as the colour he’s named her.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Edgar,’ Rachel says. ‘Sit down and be reasonable.’
He doesn’t sit down, leans against the kitchen counter. Lucy can almost feel a pulse coming from him, matching hers.
‘You said there was an incident that meant you got out of prison later than was planned, Anna,’ Rachel says. ‘What did you mean?’
Anna looks around from one to the other of them, as if weighing up how much she can trust them.
Lucy can’t work out how old she is; she could be anything from twenty-five to forty, lines in her face that tell of sleepless nights and hard living.
She’d said she was in prison – how long for, Lucy wonders.
And for what? Despite all her left-leaning credentials, her usual caution about rushing to judgement on anyone, Lucy doesn’t trust Anna.
It’s all too weird, the coincidences that are building up.
Anna evidently feels similarly cautious. It takes her a long time to speak, and even then, the words come out slowly.
‘There was trouble on another wing. They needed to move someone into my cell, so I was put on the First Nights Unit for my last night. A woman was brought into the cell I was in halfway through the night, and by the morning, she’d killed herself.
She cut her own throat. I was checking her and as I was standing there, the guards came into the cell.
They thought I must have killed her, so the police interviewed me.
Eventually they realised they were wrong, so they let me out.
’ She pauses, as if choosing what to say, then continues.
‘Tom represented me, ended up giving me a bed for the night. That’s it. ’
Silence. The tension is back in the room, so solid Lucy could lean her head against it. She’d love to. She’d love to shut her eyes, go to sleep, and for all this weirdness to be over. But she knows she can’t.
There’s something else, too. Anna has left something out, she’s sure of it. She was going to say something after they let me out, but she didn’t. Lucy wants to know what it was.
‘Do you know who she was?’ Rachel says. ‘The woman who died?’
‘They said her name was Kelly Green,’ Anna says. ‘The woman who I was asking about earlier.’
Lucy doesn’t recognise the name. Edgar and Rachel are looking at each other now, interest in Anna gone.
‘This is going to sound crazy,’ Rachel says. ‘But Victor appearing, and now Tom being killed? It’s all too much of a coincidence. Edgar, it has to be her. Marie.’
Her voice is so scared the hairs rise on the back of Lucy’s neck.