Chapter 38
THIRTY-EIGHT
I run to the bridge deck and circle it so that I’m standing in front of the tall, tinted glass doors. I can see no sign of the captain inside, but that doesn’t mean he’s not there, and there’s nothing I can do about it now anyway.
I realise that the tip of my finger is bleeding and, when I look down at my hand, I’m still holding the knife. I don’t remember picking it up or running my finger over its appropriately savage point, but I’m glad I have it.
It isn’t long before Ade follows me. When he arrives along the walkway, he no longer looks besotted or concerned. He’s just confused.
“Why would you say that?” he demands as he comes to a stop a few metres away.
“My goodness, Ade. You really aren’t very clever, are you?” I’m beyond pretending now. I want him to know how much I detest him. “I didn’t come here to reignite an old flame. I came to confront you. I wanted you to know how much I’ve suffered.”
Despite his good looks and silver tongue, despite the millions he has earned from his really quite good music, Adesina Okojie is not the brightest boy around – even out here in the middle of the ocean.
“Then you lied.” He looks so hurt and, for a moment, I feel guilty that I have no sympathy left for him. “You should have told me from the beginning how you felt instead of leading me on.”
“Yeah, Ade. I led you on.” I fail to suppress a laugh, and it spurs me to tell him a truth that will upset him even more.
“I was also the one who sent Ryan his ticket.” I wait a moment for this to sink in.
“I regret it now, considering how he ended up, but I knew about your record label taking him to court, and he’d written a really not very well disguised blog post about the night you went out in Soho together. ”
I am no longer the meek little girl he believed he was in love with, and it frightens him.
“Why would you do something like that?” Whatever charm he had has gone. He’s as dim as a dead bulb.
“When I received your invitation, I screamed and cried and cursed you. I couldn’t believe that you thought a first-class ticket on a plane could make up for raping me.”
“No, don’t use that word,” he shouts back at me. “It wasn’t like that.”
“I decided it would be better to get even than get mad. I wanted to see your face when the man you’d wronged arrived here.
I wanted to see whether there was an ounce of shame in you.
I used all my savings to buy Ryan a ticket on the same flight that I was on, and then I sent him a reworked copy of my letter.
I found his address online, and Dawn had told me she wouldn’t be coming, so I knew there would be space for him.
It almost fell apart when your man at the airport realised there was a problem, but just as I’d hoped, you were too vain and too curious to stop your party-crasher coming aboard. ”
He looks down at the floor now. He’s morose and despondent, but he still doesn’t understand what I’m trying to explain.
“For all the love you claim to have for me, when Ryan stepped off the helicopter, it was him you kept looking at, and I knew what you were really made of.” I find myself smiling as I say this. “You cared more about his front at appearing here than the chance to see the girl you loved again.”
When he looks back up, he puts his hand out towards me, and it still makes me flinch.
“That doesn’t matter now, Clara. I don’t care about any of it. I just want us to be together.”
“Wow!” I say, and the laughter rises up once more. “Do you really not get it, Ade?” I hold the knife a little tighter. “Do you not see?”
“I see that you are the only woman in my whole life who has ever meant anything to me.” This misanthropic statement is not one I would want to read on a Valentine’s card.
“You are so thick.” I never imagined this would be the criticism I levelled against him, but it is very much deserved. “Have you forgotten that Dawn is my friend? She told me that you slept with Sasha again just days after you were with me. I know all her secrets, and she knows mine.”
“What happened between me and Sasha meant nothing. And when she came to me last night, I told her that I didn’t want her.”
“It’s not about Sasha. Dawn knows what you did to me; that’s why she wouldn’t live with you any longer. She was the only person I could trust. The only one of you who cared enough to check that I was okay after I left London.”
He at least holds his response in for a few moments and considers what I’ve said. “I’m sorry for however I’ve hurt you, Clara. But you are the only girl who has loved me for who I really am and not who I became.”
“Or am I the only one who said no?”
“It’s not like that!” He shouts these words with all the heartache and melancholy he invests in his songs. “I love you.”
“I killed Sasha,” I say straight back.
I might just as well have stabbed him for the impact it makes. There are ten long seconds when the only sound is the lapping sea and the wind whistling past our ears. “What did you say?”
“I knocked on her cabin door to get her to come outside, and then I pushed her off the boat. I killed Ryan too, and Bridget and Jake. Mick really did have an overdose. That wasn’t my fault, but it put the idea in my head.
” It feels so good to say all this. If he’d let go of his neck at the very last moment, this is the exact same feeling of relief that Tom would have experienced.
“You must understand that I didn’t come here set on revenge.
I was only going to kill myself, but when that didn’t work, I came up with a better plan. ”
His lips are open a fraction as he stares at me.
“A few hours in your company was enough to make me jump off the boat. I thought a suicide would be bad publicity for a star like you. It was a petty kind of revenge, but I didn’t see what else I could do.
If Bridget hadn’t saved me, you would have continued on your trip to the Maldives and got on with your lives as if nothing had happened. ”
His jaw falls lower, but no response comes.
“It was a neat twist of fate that Ryan thought someone tried to push me. Though, in the end, it just complicated things. If Jake hadn’t realised so quickly that there was a killer on board, I could have got through my plan a little quicker.”
“Your plan?” He’s shaking, and a single droplet of saliva shoots from his mouth as he speaks. I imagine there’s already enough of his DNA all over me, but this won’t hurt.
“Try to keep up, Ade. It might seem extreme but, last night, when you danced with me in the lounge, and kissed the top of my head when no one was looking, I decided to destroy you. You’d abused me once and clearly thought nothing of it, so I knew what I had to do.”
He’s the one whimpering now. His cheeks glisten and there are tears in his eyes. He takes a step forward, but he’s so shaken by what I’m telling him that he comes no further. “Then why hurt our friends? Why not just kill me?”
It’s a question I’ve asked myself fifty times over the last day.
I loved Bridget. She was like a sister to me, but I put a bunch of antidepressants in the vodka she’d brought on board.
I had no idea whether it would work, but she helpfully drank it down.
Jake and Ryan were perfectly nice to me, Sasha was always fun, and I murdered every last one of them.
“They weren’t my friends though, were they? As soon as I left uni, they forgot all about me.”
“We never stopped thinking about you. We just didn’t know whether you wanted to hear from us.”
“Yeah, well, killing you alone wouldn’t have been enough. I wanted to make your life a misery, just like you did to me. And the only way I could do that was to take something away from you that you actually treasured.”
“What does that even mean?” His voice is weak now. He’s barely got the composure to reply. “There was nothing I cared about more than you.”
“You say that, and it’s really very complimentary, but think back a few hours.” I sound like the confident, capable person I always hoped I’d become. “You said it yourself. Your reputation is more important to you than any other thing you possess.”
I’m not sure he hears much of this. His lip trembles as he stares down at his hands. “I killed Tom,” he suddenly remembers. “He was innocent, and I killed him.”
He’s a mess, which is funny as I thought I would be the one struggling to hold it together if I ever got this far. Something about his expression makes me want to tell him to pull himself together, but then the page turns, and his anger emerges.
“How could you do this?” I’m glad this is a rhetorical question, as I don’t want to have to go through it all again. “How could you think that anything I did was worth taking someone’s life over?”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” I say in my most innocent voice, as I take the knife and slash my chest and my left arm in a few different directions.
I hold the blade away from myself to make it look as though someone else is responsible.
“That was you, Ade. You did all this, and you’ll be the one who’s punished for it. ”
“What are you talking about?” The poor guy sobs as he watches his life catch fire.
I swap hands and do the other arm before wiping my fingerprints off the knife and tossing it along the floor past him. “You must get it by now. You can’t be that slow. I mean, I know rock stars are supposed to be kind of dumb, but I’ve explained the whole thing in pretty basic terms.”
I proudly turn my arms out to display the blood running down them.
“You mean that…” He’s finally got it. “No one will believe you!”
“They don’t have to, Ade. There’s already plenty of evidence of the crimes you’ve committed. Just think of the marks on Tom’s neck. It certainly wasn’t my little hands that did that.”
I back away towards the barrier. There’s a long drop down to the metal floor below, and my movement pulls Ade forward.
“You psychopathic little—”
I wonder what’s going through his head at this moment.
Is it the thought of the fortune he’ll lose or how his fans will respond?
I almost want to reassure him that, with a good image consultant, famous people can get away with anything these days.
Of course, mass murder may be a step beyond redemption.
“How could you?” He shakes his head, and huge tears fall to the deck, like raindrops in a monsoon.
The story is over. There’s only one thing left to do.
“Because you deserve it. You brought this on yourself.” I whisper to burrow even deeper under his skin.
“You killed your friends because you were jealous of the lives we lived out of the spotlight. Fame has twisted your mind, and you orchestrated this whole thing, from sending out invitations to stabbing and drowning and poisoning your way through the lot of us.”
I watch the muscles in his arms tense as his hands turn into fists.
“You’re a monster, Ade, and the police will be here soon to arrest you.”
He’s right up against me, and I see the moment when he realises that nothing he does now will make a difference.
It’s both liberating and frightening for him.
He knows he’s doomed, and he might as well make the most of it, so he extends one arm in my direction, and I smile as he makes contact with my chest.
The next thing I feel is the barrier as it slams against my back.
The force is enough to send me over and, as I fall to my death, I see his beautiful face looking down at me.
I hear the captain come running out of the door at the back of the bridge, and a feeling of true happiness washes over me because everything worked out perfectly in the end.