Chapter 59
Words are rusty for Marie, her tongue slow to form them. She had the old story down pat, but now she’s having to learn a new one. She thought she knew her skeletons, but she was wrong. They’ve been put together backwards – now she needs to re-form them, revise.
It’s time to talk. She leans forward to the hospital bed, takes the girl’s hands in hers.
Where to start, though? At what beginning? The point where she fell in love with her teacher, like all the best stories? The point where he fell in love with her, too? Or so she’d thought. It felt true, though. Right and true and everything she could want. Everything he could want, too.
‘You and Edgar?’ Lucy says.
‘Yes.’ Marie bows her head.
But he already had everything he could want.
With a baby on the way. That’s when she’d got drunk, gone round to his house.
Met his wife. They’d sat together, talked, but then – according to the old narrative – something in Marie must have snapped.
She’s never been able to remember what happened next.
The last memory she has is of passing out, hammered, before coming round and going to find Gabriela upstairs in her bedroom – in their bedroom, the room she shared with Edgar, whom Marie loved – and standing with her hand upon the doorknob, before blackness descended.
A dark, blood-red mist. That’s what the prosecution said in their opening speech.
She couldn’t argue with it. She was found passed out drunk next to Gabriela’s body, knife in hand.
She’d drugged the poor woman, they said, waited for her to sleep, slashed at her.
Watched her bleed out. It must have happened.
It must have gone the way they said. As they spoke, a red fury glowed in Victor’s eyes while he watched her like a viper from across the court.
If he could have killed her right then on the spot, she knows that he would have.
A pause, then: ‘That’s what they said I did,’ Marie says.
‘I believed them, too. I mean, I was so jealous of Gabriela sometimes. There were some moments I wanted her to be dead. Not to kill her. But I accepted I could have done it, so I went with it. Pleaded guilty, accepted the punishment I was given – a life sentence, with a minimum term of twenty-three years. I served five years in prison. When Edgar contacted me to tell me about his proposed scheme, that I could be released but that I’d be totally isolated, looking after a child-killer .
. . well, of course I said yes. I didn’t think I deserved such kindness. ’
She describes the years in the wilderness, the hunger when the food didn’t arrive. The elation when there was something extra in the delivery. How vulnerable it felt to be completely in Edgar’s power.
Lucy is scowling with concentration. Marie knows that the girl’s confused, that she only regained consciousness a couple of hours ago. It might be too soon to be laying all this information on her, but in her shoes, Marie would want to know.
Footsteps at the end of the bed. Lucy looks up, blinking in surprise.
Victor has arrived. He smiles at her, his face unscarred although he’s got bandages round his neck, his hands.
Lucy smiles back, a warmth creeping up inside her to see him so comparatively unscathed.
He takes a seat next to Marie, touching her shoulder as he does so.
‘You’re OK?’ Lucy says.
‘Later,’ he says. ‘Keep going.’
Marie resumes her story. ‘Sometimes, it would calm down. For a long time, things had been normal – regular deliveries, nothing strange. But over the last months of it, it’s like we went back to the bad old days, when it was so unpredictable.
Strange items in the deliveries. A true crime magazine with a child-killer on the front.
That had Janice in pieces. A bunch of lilies, too. ’
‘Why lilies?’ Lucy says.
‘They were the flowers at Gabriela’s funeral. Hundreds of the things. The stench was awful. They arrested me as I walked out of the crematorium. I’ve never forgotten the smell.’
Lucy pulls a face. ‘I can’t bear them, either. Not since my mum’s death. People kept sending them even though my dad said not to.’ Her grasp tightens for a moment on Marie’s.
Marie takes in a deep breath. ‘That wasn’t the worst, not by far. The worst was the booze. They kept sending it – he kept sending it. Janice drank herself to death. I don’t think he cared about her, not so much – he did it to torture me.’
Victor interrupts. ‘I thought Edgar wasn’t paying attention when I emailed him about the notebook.
Turns out I was wrong. Not that he could tell me – he knew I’d go straight to the authorities if it came out that he was running psyops on his own little prison experiment – psychological operations.
Basically, he was trying to mess with their brains.
He didn’t want anyone to interfere. That’s why he was so dismissive. ’
‘That notebook,’ Marie says. ‘It turned everything on its head.’ She stops and roots through her bag, then pulls out a letter, the envelope already open.
‘The notebook. Buried for so long in a box of Gabriela’s belongings that were sent back to her parents.
They could finally bring themselves to go through it – told me about it the moment they found it.
I tried so hard to get Edgar to pay attention, but he had his own agenda,’ Victor says.
He pauses for a moment, his face contemplative.
‘At least he listened in the end. Edgar dropped a letter to me in hospital. It was when he took the baby to his sister’s.
There’s a note addressed to you inside – we opened it, I’m afraid. ’
‘What is it?’
‘Just read it.’
Marie knows what it says. She’s read it so often she knows it by heart.
Dear Lucy,
You won’t believe me, but that was wonderful. I wish I’d met you sooner. But it’s too late. I won’t bore you with platitudes about meeting someone better – obviously you will. But I hope you’ll remember me with a little kindness.
I don’t have much time. I’ve given the notebook to Victor.
I recognised the handwriting immediately.
The only place where it wasn’t properly disguised.
Where she’s discovered that Gabriela is pregnant, she thinks that I’ve been lying about it being a marriage in name only.
It’s the last entry she wrote – she was clearly too upset to remember to be discreet.
I was wrong. We were all wrong. Marie didn’t stalk Gabriela, or kill her. I’ve done a monstrous thing.
It wasn’t Marie. It was Rachel. I’ve been blind all along.
She’s going to kill me now, but I hope she leaves enough evidence that she can be brought to justice at last. Victor’s right – some people don’t deserve forgiveness. I’m one of them. This is all I deserve, too.
Thank you for last night. It was amazing.
Edgar
Lucy looks up from the page, meeting Marie’s gaze.
‘Rachel was obsessed with Edgar from the moment she set eyes on him,’ Victor says.
‘We never knew. She was a student here ten years ago, that’s when she met him.
She fixated on him right then, hiding in the shed, spying on Gabriela, writing these horrific notes.
She could pretend to herself they had an unhappy marriage, but when she found out Gabriela was pregnant .
. . that’s when she lost it. Marie turning up off her face when Rachel was about to attack Gabriela was a gift to her. ’
‘She set me up,’ Marie says. ‘I felt so guilty about everything, I just took it. And she waited in the wings, made herself useful to Edgar. I loved him, but he was a weak man. Always had to have a partner.’
Victor picks up the story again. ‘She thought she’d got away with it, but the moment I told her that the notebook had been found, her time was up. That’s why she tried to kill me. She didn’t know I was going to come to Cambridge to find him.’
‘She might have got away with it, too,’ says Marie. ‘So many factors at play. Victor coming to Cambridge, Edgar reading through to the end and finding those pages in Rachel’s handwriting. My escape.’
‘Did she want us to find you? When she sent Anna and me north?’ Lucy says.
Marie shakes her head. ‘It was only when she listened to Anna’s message saying I’d escaped that it gave her one last desperate chance to try and get away with it. When she sent you guys off in the car, she was in full destruct mode. Scorched earth.’
A pause. ‘She was trying to kill me. And Anna,’ Lucy says. It’s not a question. ‘She did something to the car. She knew it was going to crash.’
Victor nods. ‘You tried to take Edgar away from her. Anna was just collateral damage. She wanted you to die, she was going to kill Edgar. She was totally reckless, even locking herself in the burning shed in a desperate attempt to make it look as if Marie had tried to kill her after murdering Edgar. But she didn’t get away with it this time. ’ He doesn’t need to say any more.