Chapter 12
JEMMA
‘I don’t understand why you won’t drive me to my dad’s first,’ I say. I should never have accepted her offer of a lift home, should have insisted she call a taxi to collect me. ‘Please. I need to get back to my daughter. I don’t want her to have to deal with this without me there.’
‘I keep explaining, Jemma,’ Sergeant Zailer says. ‘The officer who’s going to drive you home is—’
‘It’s not home. I don’t live there.’ Why the hell didn’t I learn to drive when all my friends did? If I had, if I owned a car and had come here in it, I could get up and leave whenever I wanted to. No one’s arrested me.
Yet.
While I’m auditing past mistakes, not fully charging my phone before coming here is right up there with the best of them. If I could talk to Lotts for even ten seconds, I’d feel so much better.
‘Right. Well, your driver’s on her way,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘And we might as well talk while we wait for her rather than sit here in silence. Are you sure you don’t want a lawyer?’
‘Are you sure you can’t remember what I said the last two times you asked me?’
‘You’re not a criminal. So you seem to believe, at any rate.’
‘Look, you know I didn’t do it. When was Marianne killed? Around 5.30, right?’
‘Maybe,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘Though if you were to ask the police doctor … Apparently it could have been earlier from a medical point of view. Quite a bit earlier.’
She wants to make her meaning clear, though she doesn’t state it directly: by ‘earlier’, she’s suggesting I might have killed Marianne before coming here.
‘DS Kombothekra told me the murder happened between 5.20 and 5.30. And I was here then, talking to you and your weird husband.’
‘Right. But … that isn’t the “get out of jail free” card you seem to think it is.’
The word jail is one I definitely didn’t want to hear. My brain feels slow and heavy, clogged with clumps of solid terror.
I can’t go to prison. What if Lottie doesn’t believe me when I tell her I didn’t do it?
I have to make sure she does, that she’s in no doubt.
What I really need is to be able to think, uninterrupted, for at least an hour. Not much chance of that.
Marianne is dead. She’s dead.
I can’t seem to convince myself it’s true.
In 2012, when Paddy and I found her lying white-faced on her kitchen floor, blood leaking from the wound in her throat, I had to work to convince myself in the opposite direction.
I found a pulse, but she was lying so still, and I was more convinced by the appearance of death than by the slow beat beneath the skin of her wrist.
This time she’s really dead. Unkillable Marianne. And I have no idea if my life has been saved or ruined.
‘If you really didn’t kill her, or get Tom Tulloch to kill her, then someone else did it and we’ll find out who,’ Sergeant Zailer says.
‘Try not to worry too much, but … you need to be realistic. Do you know how rare it is for someone to be murdered at the very moment that someone else, someone who wants to murder them, is confessing to nearly having done it at the exact time that it was getting done? Blimey.’ She smiles.
‘I don’t want to have to repeat that sentence, so I hope you got the gist. Point is: even if it wasn’t Tulloch, you’re going to fall under heavy suspicion.
How does anyone know you didn’t hire someone else to do it instead? ’
‘But … that would make no sense. If I’d decided to go through with it, why the hell would I come here and tell you all about it?’
‘Great question,’ Sergeant Zailer says in a flippant tone. ‘Anyway, last I heard, no one’s been able to get hold of Tom Tulloch. I wonder why that might be.’
DS Kombothekra must have told her about Tom, because I certainly haven’t. ‘If you’re suggesting Tom did it—’
‘The thought did cross my mind, yeah.’
‘There’s no way,’ I tell her. ‘Not without me giving the go-ahead, and I didn’t. Also, I never told him today was the day.’
Someone knew, though. Dad? Paddy? Not Ollie, surely.
Yes, Ollie’s possible too, if Marianne told him all about my laptop diary, and she might have. His name’s all over that file, on nearly every page, and she loves nothing more than creating drama.
Loved. Past tense.
I suppose it’s possible that someone else altered the spelling of Ollie’s name, to implicate Marianne. They’d have known I’d think it had to be her.
She always made sure to spell Ollie’s name the way he did, even though it wasn’t her favourite spelling. She said to me once: ‘If he’s determined to get it wrong, we’ll all have to do the same, I suppose. It’s his name, after all – his choice.’
That was for his benefit, though, and it was seventeen years ago.
It doesn’t mean Marianne wasn’t the one who got into my diary and made those changes.
She knew I’d be the only one to see them, and Marianne had no qualms about horrifying me – far from it.
After the N.P. Pelphrey incident, shocking and upsetting me became her favourite hobby.
But why would she look there? Why would she think a laptop is where a diary might be found?
She was always strictly a pen and paper woman.
She refused even to keep appointments and calendar items on her phone or computer – everything had to be on paper, in beautiful notebooks.
The first diary I ever had was a present from her and it was more a work of art than an item of stationery.
The old rage burns inside me again as I remember how upset I was when it first went missing – when Marianne ‘borrowed’ it and read everything I’d written, including some very unflattering things about her.
It’s embarrassing, how many years it took me to start suspecting her; I totally fell for the ‘Jemma’s so absent-minded, she loses everything’ narrative, even though I should have known I was anything but.
‘Tell me about her,’ Sergeant Zailer says. ‘Marianne.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Why did you hate her so much?’
‘Mainly because I was scared of her. It’s impossible to love someone you’re terrified of.
You’d always rather they weren’t there. And …
she had to be in charge of everything and everyone.
All she cared about was what she wanted and needed – nothing and no one mattered apart from that.
She persuaded me to stay with Paddy, my husband, when she knew I loved someone else more.
That’s on me, too – I let her persuade me.
I was pregnant with Paddy’s baby, so it was my decision.
I made my choice for Lottie’s sake, my daughter, but Marianne wasn’t thinking about me or Lottie at all.
She wanted me with Paddy and not Ollie for reasons of her own. ’
‘What reasons?’ Sergeant Zailer asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Now that she’s dead, you never will.’ This is delivered with a twist of, Didn’t think of that, did you?
‘I didn’t plan … what I planned because of any of that,’ I explain. ‘Believe it or not, I’m not such a monster that I’d kill someone just because I hated them and they’d lied to me or … used me, or whatever.’
‘Then why?’
I have no proof of what I’m about to say, but I’m talking to the police, and this really matters, and it’s the truth, so here goes.
‘I knew Marianne was going to do something terrible to me. I didn’t know what, but it didn’t seem impossible that she might kill me.
I was scared that if I did nothing, I’d …
The danger felt so real. I started to have nightmares about it.
Sometimes I’d catch her looking at me and it was as if she was warning me with her eyes: “You just wait. You’ll get what’s coming to you.
” But what could I do? I couldn’t come here and report a look I found threatening, could I?
She’d have denied any intention to harm me, and everyone would have believed her because of course devoted stepmums don’t kill their stepdaughters. ’
And even if she never touched me, never hurt me, I knew I would never be free of the terror that she would …
‘The idea wouldn’t leave me alone,’ I tell Sergeant Zailer.
‘Someone had tried to kill her before. Trying to kill her was a thing that already existed in the world. Don’t get me wrong, I thought the attack on her was terrible when it happened, even given the way I felt about her, but everything changed in July.
It was the room, the way she’d destroyed her study … ’
Sergeant Zailer waits for me to say more.
Once the wave of revulsion has passed, I tell her about Marianne inviting me up to the top floor, promising to unlock the door and show me her study’s secrets, me and only me.
I describe what she was wearing, the contrast between her elegance and the scarred wreck of a room she seemed so proud to have created.
As I’m speaking, I have to keep reminding myself that, no, this was not some lurid tale invented by my melodramatic imagination. It really happened, all of it.
‘I didn’t understand at first why she’d be so eager to show me a room full of nothing,’ I say. ‘And then, when I understood, I wished I didn’t. She’d done it to spite me, because she knew about Norman Pelphrey.’
‘Who?’ Sergeant Zailer asks.
‘A locksmith. Lives in the next village. Marianne found out I’d contacted him.
I wanted to know what was in her study that no one was allowed to see.
Didn’t want to wait much longer to get the answer.
I’d spent years rummaging through her bags and pockets, any chance I got.
Marianne being Marianne, she never once left the key in a findable place.
I still don’t know where she keeps … kept it,’ I correct myself.
‘So one day, I decided to contact a locksmith.’
‘Norman Pelphrey,’ says Sergeant Zailer.
‘He was the nearest one I could find. About five minutes’ drive away. I rang him and he was sort of … weirdly curt with me. I didn’t give it a second thought, just assumed he was a rude git.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t approve of breaking into other people’s locked private spaces?’ Sergeant Zailer suggests.
‘I’m not that stupid,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve got a key to Dad and Marianne’s house.
I’m officially allowed in every other part of it.
Paddy, Lottie and I used to live there. When I rang Pelphrey, I pretended it was my house, my locked room – except I’d lost the key and couldn’t get in.
Dad and Marianne were out all day. It was the perfect opportunity.
No one would have suspected anything was amiss, since I was inside the house already.
But Pelphrey couldn’t come and help me. Didn’t say why.
Just dismissed me, rudely. I didn’t think anything of it until I tried the two next nearest locksmiths, both in the Heckencotes area.
They were both equally rude and abrupt, told me to forget it, basically. ’
‘So … is there a link between rudeness and locksmith work?’ says Sergeant Zailer.
‘Marianne had paid them off.’ I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that she didn’t guess. It’s too insane to be guessable. ‘Those three and more. Anyone in the Sleathams who might conceivably have come out to Devey House. Marianne had pre-bribed them all.’
The look of astonishment on Sergeant Zailer’s face is gratifying.
‘And they’d all been expecting my call for some time, as Marianne delighted in telling me, immediately after she’d shocked me by revealing the room she’d destroyed.
She’d known I’d been trying to get in and failing to find the key, and she’d anticipated my exact thought process.
Knew what I’d do next. She was way ahead of me, explaining to any locksmith she could find that her boundary-violating daughter was intent on invading her personal space and—’
‘Wow,’ Sergeant Zailer says quietly.
‘Yeah. They’d all promised to report back to her, once I got in touch, which Pelphrey and probably others dutifully did.’
‘Jemma, did you try to kill Marianne in 2012?’
‘What?’ Where the hell did that come from? ‘No. Of course not.’
‘Who do you think did? And who do you think did it this time, if it really wasn’t orchestrated by you?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘I find that quite hard to believe,’ says Sergeant Zailer.
Me too.
‘Until July, when I went to see him in Cambridge – two days after Marianne’s big empty study reveal – I thought it had to be Ollie,’ I say. ‘Despite his alibi, which the police told us at the time was watertight. “The Ollibi” – that’s what Suzanne called it. But … now I don’t think it was him.’
‘How come?’ asks Sergeant Zailer. ‘Did he tell you something that changed your mind?’
I nod. ‘He told me a lot. Trouble was, every single thing he said was cancelled out by something more important that he didn’t say.’