Chapter 7
JEMMA
The door closes and Sergeant Zailer’s gone. I’m alone. I didn’t hear a key turn, but I get up anyway and walk over to the door to check. Not locked. The door opens easily.
That’s good. I’m free to go if I want to.
I close the door, go back to my chair and reach into my bag for my phone, sure that by now Lotts will have decided Paddy’s explanation of where I am and what I’m doing is insufficient and sent me a ‘Where the hell are you, Mum?’ message.
Damn. My phone’s out of battery. A flash of panic passes through me.
I should have texted Lottie directly in the first place.
Instead, I sent the explanation for my absence to Paddy, knowing he’s a much less efficient communicator than our daughter; knowing he wouldn’t immediately hit reply and demand more information.
For today only, until this task is done, I need things to be a little vague and blurry – and for that, Paddy Stelling is always your man.
I’ll think of a convincing story to tell Lottie later.
And Paddy. I can hardly say I came here to stop myself committing the murder I’ve been planning for months.
Suzanne heard the unedited version, late last night – I always tell her everything – but no one else.
Nobody wants to hear something so disturbing about their mother or their wife, however true it might be.
It’s fine. I force myself to breathe fully and deeply for a few seconds. Lottie will be fine. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before the most senior detective gets here. Sergeant Zailer said he was on his way. “The head honcho”, she called him.
There’s a small table in front of me, and I’ve got my laptop with me, so … I pull it out of my bag, open it and go straight to the file called ‘Diary’. Until DS Head Honcho turns up, I can write about what’s happened so far with Sergeant Zailer and DC Waterhouse.
I’d be embarrassed if anyone knew how hard I try when I write my diary. The effort to turn it into something that might one day have readers who aren’t me – that might even be publishable … Though of course I could never publish it while Dad and Marianne are alive.
Listen to Lady Muck, still waiting for her adoring fans to turn up.
Most lonely, confused children invent imaginary friends to keep them company.
After Mum died and Dad became preoccupied with keeping Marianne happy to the exclusion of all else, I invented an imaginary cheering audience that followed me wherever I went and whooped ecstatically at everything I accomplished: good exam results, victories in school netball matches, getting asked out by a fanciable boy.
Except the person these non-existent fans couldn’t get enough of wasn’t me, Jemma Upton.
In my fantasy life, which for many years felt more real to me than my real one, she was called Lady Muck.
That was her stage name – or, I should say, mine.
Mum used to call me it as a joke when I asked for breakfast in bed or for more marshmallows to be added to my cup of hot chocolate.
‘All right, Lady Muck,’ she’d say affectionately as she got up to get me whatever it was I’d asked for.
The nameless hordes of devotees I’d invented hung on my alter ego’s every word.
Most of what she had to say was about Marianne Upton, naturally – formerly Marianne Taggart, a woman who had gone with alarming speed from being Lady Muck’s mother’s good friend, whom she’d met on a garden design course, to being the fiancée and then the wife of Lady Muck’s poor deluded father.
Wasn’t it the day before Nancy Upton’s funeral that Marianne had first been spotted at the Upton family home, tiptoeing out of a bedroom that was definitely not yet hers?
Why, yes, it was. And hadn’t her hand lingered a suspiciously long time on Gareth Upton’s arm at the wake, after the funeral?
Why, yes, it had.
Lady Muck’s audience applauded fanatically whenever she produced her punchline: Marianne must have set her sights on this father and soon-to-be-spare husband long before Lady Muck’s mum had died.
I open my diary file and start to scroll down, looking for where the last section finished so that I can start writing a new one about the events of today.
I’m nearly there when something stops me in my tracks.
At first I think it’s just a typo, but there it is again.
I was right: something wrong had snagged in my mind when I’d looked at it before.
I scroll up a bit, then down. It’s everywhere: the same mistake over and over. I feel light-headed and force myself to take three deep breaths. It can’t have been the computer that did this. And I know it wasn’t me …
Ollie’s name is spelled wrong. I’ve now seen four of them: ‘Olly’ instead of ‘Ollie’, in three separate diary entries.
No one would spell his name like that except for …
A memory comes back to me: 2006, Ollie sitting in the kitchen at Devey House, fending off the attack on his name more charmingly than I’d have thought possible if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes: You’re right, he told Marianne.
It probably does work better spelled with a ‘y’.
Certainly looks better written down, and I can see the argument for fewer letters.
Haha! Why add unnecessary clutter? If I were starting from scratch, I think I’d opt to be Olly-with-a-y for sure, but the trouble is, I’m just so used to the way I’ve spelled it all my life.
I had cut in at that point. Told him there was absolutely no need or reason for him to justify the spelling of his name, which was his business, and none of my stepmother’s.
I grip the edges of the table in front of me. How many ‘Olly-with-a-y’s am I going to find? Is it just these four, or …
In my panic, unable to focus on how to get back up to the top of the document, I decide the fastest way is to close it, then open it again.
There it is in the very first entry: ‘Olly’. Spelled the wrong way.
This is my diary, mine and mine alone, that no one else even knows exists.
Or do they?
I didn’t do this. It wasn’t me. I spelled it right every single time. I’d never get Ollie’s name wrong.
Someone’s done it, though. Someone has broken into my diary file and left their snide, taunting calling card.
There’s only one person I know who’d do that.