Chapter Forty-Four
JILL NO LONGER works on Fridays, so she is having a second cup of coffee in the kitchen with Ted.
Ted no longer works at all. From what she can tell, Ted spends all his time ruminating on how to get them out of the mess he got them into, with little result.
The tension, the lack of resolution, is driving her mad.
She’s thinking about going out, getting out of the house, when she hears the doorbell. She immediately tenses.
Ted glances at her. ‘I’ll get it,’ he says, and goes down the hall to answer the door.
Jill stays in the kitchen, straining to hear.
She thinks she recognizes Lara’s voice. Slowly, Jill comes out of the kitchen and down the long hallway.
She’s not expecting what she sees. Lara is in the foyer, with a nasty bruise blossoming on the side of her face.
Ted has taken her coat, and Jill sees that Lara also has bandages all down her right forearm.
‘What happened?’ Jill asks.
‘We need to talk,’ Lara says in a voice that makes a chill go down Jill’s spine.
Ted looks worried and turns away from her. What’s going on? Jill thinks. ‘Okay,’ she says, and leads them into the front room.
Lara sits down in an armchair and regards them both with a hardness in her eyes that Jill has never seen before. Like flint. It throws Jill off balance. Why is she here?
‘A man broke into our house last night,’ Lara says. ‘Ben is dead.’
‘Oh my God!’ Jill blurts out. Her head swims. She glances in shock at Ted, but he doesn’t meet her gaze. He’s watching Lara instead, his face an unreadable mask.
‘What happened?’ Ted asks.
‘He was looking for something,’ Lara says bitterly. ‘Something we didn’t have. Some camera footage.’
Jill feels physically ill.
‘What are you talking about?’ Ted asks, in apparent confusion.
‘Oh, stop pretending, both of you!’ Lara cries, leaping up out of her chair. ‘You know what’s going on!’ She glares at them with tears of pain and fury in her eyes. ‘And now Ben is dead! And it’s your fault!’
‘It’s not our fault,’ Ted says automatically, but lacking all conviction, Jill thinks. He doesn’t convince Lara.
‘You’re liars! And murderers!’ Lara cries.
‘You obviously killed Greg! And someone put cameras in your house to spy on you and now they’re holding it over your heads, aren’t they?
Only you don’t know who it is, do you, because you thought it was me!
And you sent that man last night to get the files, and he killed Ben!
Admit it!’ She turns to Jill. ‘You thought I planted those cameras, didn’t you?
Is that what you thought, of your best friend? ’
Jill can’t feel her body any more. She’s numb.
She can’t bear it, being accused like this.
Lara looks so upset, so wronged, that Jill can no longer believe that she is behind this.
And now somehow Ben is dead? And Lara hates her, and she’s right to hate her, Jill thinks.
It is their fault, it is all their fault, all of it.
But she’s not going to admit it. She’s never going to admit it.
Lara leans forward, toward her. ‘All I ever did was support you! I suspected that things didn’t happen on that boat the way you said.
Because of Ramirez. And because you’ve been so freaked out, Jill.
I thought you couldn’t live with what you’d done, or that you were afraid of Ramirez.
But it’s someone else you’ve been afraid of all along, isn’t it?
Someone has some videos of you. And I can just imagine what’s on them.
The two of you, congratulating yourselves on a job well done.
An accident at sea! No proof! No witnesses!
And you get millions! But there is proof, isn’t there?
And you’re fucked. And you’re panicking and you sent someone to threaten me and Ben, to get us to give up the footage.
Only WE DON’T HAVE IT!’ she shouts. ‘You thought it was me because I have a key, is that it? And I knew the security code.’ Now she rips off her bandage to show her sliced arm.
‘He tortured me! And then he murdered my husband, my good, kind husband! He forced him over the railing, from the top floor. He killed him. And it’s on you! ’
Jill can only gape in horror. She can no longer look at Lara’s face, contorted with grief and fury, so she stares at her arm, with its hideous carvings, slightly puffy.
Then Lara says, more quietly, ‘So you tell me who he was. Tell me who murdered Ben.’
Jill turns to face her husband.
Ted can’t believe this is happening. He can’t believe that Ben is dead.
How the fuck did that happen? It must have been John, who he met with just two days ago.
What a fuckup. Obviously, things went badly wrong.
So John isn’t perfect either. It gives him no satisfaction.
Because Ted is left here having to deal with the consequences.
He should have dealt with it himself. His mind has been working furiously throughout Lara’s diatribe, his body surging with too much adrenaline.
How can he salvage the situation? What the fuck does he do now?
And Jill is looking at him with that familiar, nauseating mixture of fear and blame.
She thinks this is his fault too. He must deny it.
‘How do we know you’re telling the truth?’ he says to Lara.
Lara turns to him and strikes him hard across the face. ‘How DARE you!’ she cries.
His face stings, his eyes blur.
‘Sit down, Lara,’ Jill says, her voice firm. He’s surprised to hear his wife speak. Suddenly she is taking charge.
‘I’m so sorry, about Ben. I know how much you loved him.’ Her voice breaks. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’ She stops for a moment as if to collect herself. ‘But we have no idea what happened at your place. We didn’t send anyone. I swear. You have to believe me.’
Ted watches as Lara faces his wife with disbelief. She says scathingly, ‘Who else would send someone to get those files? And why the hell would I believe you?’ She transfers her gaze to him. ‘You’re murderers.’
‘No, Lara, we’re not!’ Jill insists. ‘We didn’t hurt Greg – it was an accident!’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Lara says coldly.
Ted finds his voice. ‘What did you tell the police?’
Lara replies, her voice shrill, ‘Oh yes, it’s still all about you, isn’t it?’
Ted just waits. He’s afraid to say anything else; anything he says will only feed her fury.
All at once she seems spent. She slumps into the armchair, tears streaming down her face. Ted glances anxiously at Jill; she appears to be frozen. After a while Lara says, ‘I protected you.’
Ted waits for more, but she takes her time. She adjusts the bandage on her arm.
‘I didn’t tell them what he was really after. I told them he wanted to terrorize us and rob us. That he wanted money. I didn’t tell them about the digital files.’
‘Thank you,’ Jill whispers.
For just a second, Ted feels relief.
But then Lara says, ‘I’m going to talk to them again, this afternoon. I may change my story. I might tell them what really happened.’
Ted tries to remain cool. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because he fucking killed my husband!’ she screams.
Ted waits for her to calm down and says, ‘We didn’t send him, whoever he was. There are other … players involved. And we don’t know who they are.’
Lara leans forward and says coldly, ‘I know you murdered Greg for his money. I know there’s evidence of that out there somewhere.
’ She turns to Jill and says, ‘Ben never believed you could have harmed Greg – he simply couldn’t imagine it.
I suspected, but I only ever wanted to support you, to protect you.
’ She pauses and catches her breath, observing them both.
‘But now I feel differently. I don’t care about you any more. And you owe me.’
It hangs there, in the silence. You owe me.
Ted knows what she wants. She wants what everyone wants.
She’s going to ask for money. He almost laughs.
Everybody is out to get him. John, Lara, the blackmailer, whoever it is.
The attorneys were right; they’re all coming out of the woodwork.
He doesn’t deserve this. He’d always been a good person, and Greg had it coming.
It’s not Ted’s fault that Greg was such a bastard and that he left him all that money.
Why did all this have to happen to him? And now he’s almost too exhausted to deal with it all any more.
He doesn’t want to deal with Lara. He wishes he could strangle her right now, with his bare hands, in this very room.
He’s not afraid to do it, but it’s a question of practicality.
He asks himself what Jill would do if he reached for Lara’s throat.
Would she stand by and watch? Would she urge him on?
Or would she try to stop him, screaming and flailing at him?
His murderous thoughts fade away because he has learned that it isn’t easy to kill someone.
It’s easy enough to do, to cross that invisible moral line, but it’s not easy to get away with it.
He can’t kill Lara. He’s stuck with her, at least for the foreseeable future.
He must deal with the here and now the best he can.
He sits back in his chair. ‘What do you want?’ he asks.