Chapter 55 Miles
Miles
Miles and Faith stare at each other for a few seconds.
In that time, a hundred thoughts race through Miles’s mind.
These frantic notions raise more questions, and some half-conclusions.
And a decision, of sorts. He elects to say nothing.
He raises his hands, palms faced towards her, and takes a half-step forward.
‘No further,’ Faith barks. She jerks her arm as she speaks, and snarls.
There’s something about her voice that sends a shiver running down his back, an icy chill that begins at his shoulder blades and travels right down to the tail of his spine.
It’s not just the aggression in her voice. There’s something else.
Miles’s heart is hammering a warning. He stares at the gun in her hand.
Miles doesn’t know what kind of gun it is.
What does he know about guns? Nothing. But it looks real.
Solid steel. It must be Faith who’s been threatening him, who taunted him with a bullet.
But why? Whatever is going on here, he needs to take that gun away from her.
She appears unhinged, and the longer she’s stood there pointing that thing at him, the greater the chance that she’ll do something stupid.
Miles calculates the distance between them; it must be about six or seven yards – the whole width of the road.
He needs to close that gap if he’s to have any chance of disarming her.
Miles take a smaller step, moving his left foot forward.
Faith lurches and pokes the gun at him. ‘I mean it. Take one step closer and I’ll shoot you in the kneecap. We can make this as painful as you want.’
Miles keeps still. He swallows. He realises what it is now about her voice.
It’s the accent. The Australian burr has gone, and her speech is eerily familiar.
She doesn’t speak exactly like he does, but it’s close to home.
There’s a detectable trace of the regional accent of the west of England.
This geographical reminder brings one place immediately to mind: Burnfield Court.
‘Who are you?’ Miles asks. There’s a tremor to his voice.
‘You tell me,’ she says, coldly. ‘Who am I?’
‘Alex Burnfield.’
She laughs. A joyless, angry laugh. ‘Did you rate my Aussie accent, Miles? I can do a whole load of accents. It makes my acting range a little more impressive than yours, wouldn’t you say?’
Miles doesn’t respond. He re-examines her, in light of that last remark.
Is she someone he’s worked with? There’s a trace of enjoyment on her face, and Miles wonders for a second whether this should be his moment to try to ambush her.
But he abandons that thought. Behaving in haste could be a fatal mistake. He waits for her to continue.
‘Anyway, Faith is my real name. But you’re right. I did send the emails.’
Miles shakes his head. ‘No. No, it wasn’t you. There was a man following me in Queenstown. One of those emails was sent while you were swimming in the lake.’
Again, she laughs. Although this time it sounds genuine. Amused. ‘Seriously? Did you not know you can schedule an email to be sent at any time? Did they teach you nothing in that forty-grand-a-year school?’
Miles shuffles his feet in tiny, imperceptible increments. Nudging forward a few millimetres. He needs to keep her talking if he’s to close the gap between them. ‘But why?’
She stares at him for a moment. Shadows waver across her face, where sunlight is streaking in through gaps in the leaves.
‘I wanted to watch you suffer. I had hoped the courts would see to that, lock you up. But what I’ve realised is, it’s not possible to make you suffer.
It all just washes off, doesn’t it?’ She spits the last two words.
A lash of venom to her rhetorical question.
Miles says nothing.
‘Murdered someone? Oh well, just hire the best lawyer. Getting some bad press? Never mind, just take a luxury holiday for a few weeks. Maybe get yourself a top-of-the-range motorhome.’
‘That wasn’t even my idea.’
‘I know!’ Her face springs open in mock delight.
‘Sometimes it just falls into your lap, doesn’t it?
Everything just always seems to work out for Miles.
You never even saw the inside of a cell.
If you were from my estate they would’ve locked you up on remand, you know that, right?
But not you. Just get Daddy to chuck a bit of cash at the judge and you’re a free man until the trial. ’
‘Is that what this is about? Money? I can give you money. How much do you want?’
‘Trust me, this is not about money. Although I must admit’ – she shrugs – ‘I have found it quite revolting, seeing this privileged existence of yours, up close. But this isn’t about privilege.
Or money. It’s about justice. What I’ve learned about justice is you can’t expect to get it through the courts.
If you want justice, you’ve got to go out and take it for yourself.
’ There’s a wild look in Faith’s eyes. She’s been working herself up; the longer she talks, the angrier she gets.
‘Look,’ Miles says, sensing the urgent need to derail her from her current train of thought. ‘Let’s have a proper discussion about this. Talk it through. But put the gun down. We both know you don’t want to shoot me with that thing.’
‘Oh, do we? Actually, I think that’s one of the ways where we are different. One of the many ways.’
‘We’re not that different.’
Again, that mirthless, angry laugh. ‘You have no idea how fortunate you are, no awareness whatsoever of your privilege, no idea how deep it runs.’
‘I do. I know how—’
She jabs a finger in his direction. ‘No, you don’t. Because you have nothing to measure it against. You’ve never been on the other side of luck.’
‘I have. You don’t know what it’s been like for me, being falsely—’
‘For you?’ Her eyes have changed. Everything has changed.
It’s as if Faith has gone and this is a whole different person.
‘Oh, my heart bleeds. As it happens, I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while, and I do know what it’s been like for you.
I’ll tell you what, though, you haven’t got the first idea of what it’s been like for me. But I’ll tell you, if you like.’
Miles swallows. ‘Please, tell me.’ He tries to make his voice sound sympathetic and encouraging, rather than eager. He really needs her to keep talking. He continues to shuffle his feet in tiny movements. So far, he’s moved maybe a foot closer without her noticing.
‘I didn’t have the sort of cosy upbringing that you had.
’ She taps a finger against her temple. ‘My mum wasn’t right in the head.
She didn’t have the ability to look after herself, let alone a child.
She was whacked out on heroin most of the time.
And she brought bad men to the house. Men like you, who took whatever they wanted without a care about the damage they left behind.
’ Faith pauses and takes a deep breath. Her speech has been slowing, and now her words are airy and drawn-out.
‘Only one person ever looked out for me, back then.’
She pauses again. Her eyes have a sheen that reflects the rays flittering across her face. Miles’s dread deepens. When someone is pointing a gun at you, the last thing you want is for them to become emotional.
Faith appears to clear a lump in her throat. ‘I remember when Caira started coming around to the house. I was one of her first cases. I was so fascinated by her. To a seven-year-old girl, she looked like a doll, or a princess, with her bright yellow hair and pretty dresses.’
Faith’s voice has taken on a floaty, wistful quality.
For the first time in minutes, her eyes leave his, looking off into the trees, as if distracted by the memory.
Then she quickly turns her stare back on to Miles.
‘I remember thinking she must have been really special to have two security guards following her. But I also got the feeling she was hiding something. Because in the picture on her lanyard she had a big beaming smile, and yet the face she used with us was always serious and sad. It made me suspicious. Especially as my mother hated her. And it was a long time before I realised that what she was doing was for my own good. She wasn’t a doll, or a princess, at all.
She was an angel. An angel sent for me.’
Faith’s composure appears to be waning further, the gun now visibly trembling in her hand.
‘You see, Miles. People have given up on me my entire life. But not her. She kept showing up. She wasn’t obliged to stay in contact with me once I left the care system, but she did.
She was the only constant thing in my life.
Pretty much the only good thing. And you killed her. ’
‘I didn’t kill—’
‘Shut up! I’m talking.’ Faith dries tears from her cheeks with two brisk sweeps of her left hand.
Her speech is fast again, now. ‘I know your defence. I read all the court reports, so there’s no point in repeating it now.
What I don’t understand is, why. Why you did it.
So, go on. Tell me. Why did you do it, Miles? Why did you kill her?’
‘I didn’t kill her.’
Faith growls and shakes the gun in her hand before steadying it again, so he can see directly into the barrel. Miles’s breathing is rapid. For a heart-stopping moment, he thinks the gun is going to go off.
‘Don’t you dare deny it. If you deny it one more time, I’ll kill you right now.
I’m not interested in your denials. You can argue it until you’re blue in the face, but I know the truth.
’ She wipes her face and breathes deeply, appearing to compose herself.
‘You’re a good liar, though,’ she says, speaking slower and softer again.
‘You almost had me believing it myself. This whole lie, it’s like you’re method acting.
The way you behave and carry yourself. All innocent.
I’ll be honest, once I met you, I really didn’t think you had it in you to kill someone. ’
‘I don’t have it in me. That’s what I’m trying to—’
‘Shut up.’ She tilts the gun slightly, so the barrel points towards his knees.
An unspoken threat. ‘Believe me, I’ve been struggling to figure you out.
You seem so gentle on the face of it. How could a nice, well-brought-up pretty boy like you commit murder?
You got me doubting everything. I had to check.
I had to know for sure that you did it. And now I know. ’
‘What are you talking about?’ Miles whispers the question.
‘Elis. I suspected he was lying for you, to cover up what you’d done. So, the night before last, I gave him my own version of the lie detector test.’ She raises her eyebrows, as if inviting a question.
Miles says nothing.
‘After you lot fell asleep, I promised Elis I’d give him a good time if he came with me to the bird hide in the middle of the night.
And his cock and balls couldn’t say no to that.
’ She laughs. ‘You men are all the same. When we got there, I asked him about your alibi. Whether that story he told the court was true.’
She glares at him. Again, Miles decides to stay silent. But his stomach is sludgy with dread.
Faith points at him with her free hand. ‘He was loyal to you, I’ll give him that.
He told me it was all true, everything you and him told the court, that that’s how it happened.
But then he started to change his tune. It’s funny, when you put a sharp knife to someone’s throat, they start to tell the truth.
They start telling the truth pretty damn quickly. ’
‘You killed him.’ Miles feels tears prick at the back of his eyes. Elis is dead because of him. Deep down, he knew it already.
‘I didn’t mean to kill him. The trouble was, I had a very sharp knife pressed against his throat when he admitted he lied to save your skin. And it made me upset. I’m not very nice when I’m upset, Miles. In fact, I can be pretty horrible when I get upset.’
There’s a silence between them, and Faith raises the angle of the gun, so it points directly at his face.
Miles stands dead-still, but inside him, his blood fizzes, electrified with fear.
Faith isn’t mucking around. She killed Elis, and she’s going to kill him.
There’s no doubt about it. Faith has said what she wants to say.
Any second now, she’s going to pull the trigger.
‘Can I ask you one question?’ Miles says.
It’s a gamble, but he hopes curiosity will get the better of her.
She pouts, in thought. ‘All right. One question—’
But before she can finish her sentence, Miles is already on the move. He ducks as low as he can and, in one movement, charges towards her.