Elle
PAST
I sat in the police station where I’d been taken for questioning.
DC Moss and a PC had come to Jaz’s flat to escort me through the crowd of reporters.
It seemed that the death of an American expat, who’d worked for one of Silicon Valley’s top IT companies was big news, especially as a young woman seemed to be involved in his death, and I had cowered from the microphones thrust under my bowed head and the questions fired at me.
“Do you know that he’s dead?”
“Is it true that you masqueraded as a reporter to try and get access to him?”
“Is it true that you accused him of being involved in Bryony Sanders’s murder?”
“How do they know?” I’d shouted down the phone to DC Moss when I called her to tell her there were reporters outside the flat. “Did you tell them my name, where I live?”
“No, of course not.” DC Moss’s voice had been calm.
“Then who? Someone must have!”
“Reporters have ways of finding out such things. I need you to come to the station, Elle. Brett Parker is dead and his wife and son are accusing you of manslaughter.”
My teeth had been chattering so hard I could hardly speak. “It—it was an accident. He—he mustn’t have looked when he was crossing the road.”
“We’ll talk about it at the station. We’re on our way to fetch you.”
She had cautioned me as soon as she’d arrived at the flat, charging me with involuntary manslaughter.
The words rang through my brain in a never-ending loop—involuntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter.
Sitting at the police station on a hard plastic chair with DC Moss and a PC sitting opposite, a tape recorder on the table between them, I couldn’t stop shaking.
I guessed that Brett Parker’s wife, in the aftermath of the accident, had told the police that the reason her husband had run across the road without looking was because he was being harassed by a journalist looking into Bryony Sanders’s death.
Mrs. Parker must have given them my name and told them I’d been following her husband for months, and that seeing me watching them in the restaurant where they’d gone to celebrate their son’s eighteenth birthday had incensed him so much that he’d gone to confront me.
Over the next few weeks, the story took on a momentum of its own.
Maybe it was because I’d pretended to be a journalist that the press were particularly vicious toward me.
When the police went on record to say that there was no proof at all to connect Brett Parker to the murder of Bryony Sanders and that they had told me that, I was vilified on both sides of the Atlantic.
The persecution was relentless. Journalists camped in the street outside the flat.
No longer able to go to work, I resigned from my job before they could sack me.
Articles appeared in the British press portraying me as a stalker.
The American press went further, calling me a murderer.
Jaz, hounded by reporters whenever he left the flat, became more and more grim-faced.
Coupled with the crushing guilt I felt over Brett Parker’s death, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse.
But it did.