Nell
PRESENT—FOUR MONTHS LATER
“Shall we take a look?” Alex asks.
“It’s up to you,” I say, because it wasn’t ever about me, it was always about him.
He lifts the small cardboard box onto his knees.
When the police asked him, once their investigation was over, if he wanted the four notebooks they’d found in Inès’s flat, in a box labeled For Alex, in the unlikely event of my death, he hadn’t known whether to accept them or not.
But because there’s so much he still doesn’t understand, he’s hoping that whatever they contain might help him come to terms, even in a small way, with everything that happened.
He knows some of it. He knows that when the police raided Inès’s flat, they found a room dedicated to him, its walls covered from floor to ceiling with hundreds of photographs, taken over the past four years.
When the police told him that Inès’s obsession with him began in Verbier in January 2021, Alex couldn’t recall having met her there, and said that as far as he was concerned, the first time they’d met had been later that year, in November, at a dinner at Béatrice and Victor’s, something which Béatrice confirmed.
But as he opens the first notebook and begins reading, understanding dawns on his face.
“I’ll make some coffee,” I say, knowing it’s going to be a long evening.
We’re staying with Alex’s dad while we look for a house in Washington.
It’s four months since we left the UK; we flew out of London two days before the story broke about Bryony Sanders’s murder having been solved.
Her killer, the lecturer at her university, died at the end of January, having clung on to life a few weeks longer than his doctors had expected him to.
Superintendent Moss kept her promise and gave me enough time to leave the country before the story became breaking news.
I hoped that my role in the story of her murder wouldn’t resurface but it did, and several news outlets ran headlines along the lines of “Where is Elle Nugent now?” I thought that my work colleagues from Drop In, or some of the regulars, would recognize me but so far no one has traced me to the US and with the story having run its course, I’m counting on being able to live the rest of my life without the shadow of the past hanging over me.
I’m not sure I’ll ever get over killing Inès.
I know it was a case of her or me, but I wish I’d only wounded her enough to be able to escape.
Alex feels guilty too but not for the same reason.
Inès had called him during the afternoon to make sure I would be on my own that night.
He told her I’d refused to let him stay and that I wouldn’t allow Victor to stay either.
He’d also added that he intended to keep watch on the house from farther up the road.
It was why she chose to break in via the roof and the bathroom window.
In further proof of her meticulous planning, she’d thought to paint the light well black so that the kitchen would be in complete darkness.
“Thank God you had the foresight to have a knife ready,” Alex had said, as he paced up and down, unable to sit still.
“It was what you said about not getting cornered at the back of the kitchen behind the island,” I’d told him. “I knew I had to prepare for that possibility.”
Alex and I had stayed with Béatrice and Victor during the police investigation into Inès.
The findings were brutal; her flatmate had never existed—the room she had pointed out to me as belonging to “Cécile” was where she housed her shrine to Alex—and Maxime, her boyfriend, hadn’t existed either.
She had invented him once Alex had met me, pretending to Béatrice and Victor that she had already known him for a couple of months.
It’s not clear why she pretended to be in a relationship but maybe she thought it would provide her with extra cover once she started stalking me.
A black wig was found in her flat, along with several pairs of high-heeled shoes and boots.
The scruffy sneakers I’d seen in her flat were hers, her preferred footwear for stalking me because not only did they make her a good four inches shorter than when she wore heels, they also enabled her to move fast. Because her face, devoid of heavy makeup and wig, was surprisingly bland, it had been easy for her to blend into the background whenever I turned around to see who was following me.
And back then, I’d been so sure my stalker was Damon Parker that I’d always looked for a man, never a woman.
The contents of Inès’s notebooks told the police what we’d already suspected by then, that she had killed both Caitlin and Ariane.
But we didn’t know how she had gotten there, how she had gone from being a young woman from a good background to being a murderer.
Alex hopes the notebooks will provide the answer.
Alex’s dad, Mike, has gone to bed so I make coffee for me and Alex and carry it through to where he’s sitting.
He doesn’t look up as I sit down next to him, just passes me the notebook he’s been reading, titled Notebook 1, and reaches for the next one.
I scan the first pages; they’re written in French but I know enough now to understand what I’m reading.
It details how Inès first met Alex during a skiing trip to Verbier at the beginning of 2021.
He’d been in a bar with his group of friends, including Béatrice and Victor, and she’d been there with a group of her friends, and the two groups had started talking.
For Inès, it was love at first sight. There are pages devoted to physical descriptions of him, fantasizing in an almost schoolgirl way about what it would be like to be kissed by him, held by him, sleep with him. But Alex had barely noticed her.
I need to change my appearance, Inès had written. Alex and his friends are all so glamorous and I am dull and mousey in comparison. No wonder he took no notice of me.
Further diary entries show how she was determined to become part of Alex’s life via Béatrice, even if it meant moving to London.
We met up with them again tonight and I made sure to sit next to Béatrice, his sister, because I need to find out what I can before they leave tomorrow.
I dragged Mélanie, my friend, into the conversation so that I wouldn’t seem too full on and I learned that Béatrice and her husband live in London.
Alex lives in Washington, but he spends a week each month in London and Béatrice always sees him when he is there so I’m going to move to London, which will be easier than moving to Washington.
It would have seemed weird to ask Béatrice for her address so I asked about her life in London, if she knew other French people there and she’d laughed and said that South Kensington, where she lived, was an enclave for French expats.
She also mentioned that she played tennis once a week at the tennis club in Hyde Park so my plan is to become a member and bump into her there.
Not that she’ll recognize me. I’m going to make sure of that.
After pages and pages of her dreams and fantasies about Alex, which both Alex and I skipped, and her annoyance at her plans not moving fast enough, I find this entry.
I’m going to London! It has taken months of harassing but Dad’s friend has finally come through and I have a job at the French Consulate in South Kensington, starting in July.
And then, in September, after detailing her frustrations about not being able to find Béatrice and how lonely she felt without friends:
Result! I’ve found Béatrice. I’ve been playing tennis at the club in Hyde Park every weekend this summer, hoping to bump into her and today my dedication paid off.
I managed to get chatting to her in the changing room.
I told her that I worked at the French Consulate and that I was new to London and didn’t really know anyone.
She immediately invited me to have a coffee with her.
She’s a journalist so maybe she thinks I can be useful to her through my job.
Or maybe she’s just a really nice person.
Best of all, when she saw me in my street clothes, she told me she loved my look.
I had a beautiful wig made because I wanted to leave my old mousey persona behind and also, I didn’t want her to recognize me from when we met in Verbier.
I’ve also taken to wearing red lipstick, high heels, and a lot of black, because it always looks chic.
It gives me a slightly vampish look and a confidence I’ve never had before. It’s like I’m a completely new person.
“I’m not sure I can read any more of this.
” Alex passes me the notebook he’s been reading.
“It’s about Caitlin. I need a break.” He gets up from the sofa and walks to the window, where he stands looking out.
I open the notebook, titled Notebook 2, and see that the first entry is an excited account of how Inès managed to get invited on the skiing trip to Verbier by Béatrice, whom it seems she saw on a regular basis.
Alex and I are the only two in the group of ten who aren’t coupled up but we soon will be, she wrote. Only three more days until we’re together!
My eye is caught by a sudden change in the writing style, from neatly cursive to dark, scratchy capitals.
I DON’T UNDERSTAND. YOU MUST HAVE FORCED HIM TO brING YOU ALONG, HE WOULD NEVER HAVE DONE IT OTHERWISE. YOU CAN’T EVEN SKI!!!
The entry is followed by two pages of abuse against Caitlin and a threat to kill her, followed by a detailed plan.