Into the Water(22)

He turned to me, his head cocked to one side slightly. Still he said nothing.

‘Do you not have any suspects in this investigation? I mean … it just doesn’t seem to me that anyone here cares that she’s dead.’

‘But you do?’ he said evenly.

‘What sort of a question is that?’ I could feel my face growing hot. I knew what was coming.

‘Ms Abbott,’ he said. ‘Julia.’

‘Jules. It’s Jules.’ I was stalling, delaying the inevitable.

‘Jules.’ He cleared his throat. ‘As Lena just mentioned, although you told us that you hadn’t had any contact with your sister in years, Nel’s mobile phone records reveal that in the past three months alone, she made eleven calls to your phone.’ My face hot with shame, I looked away. ‘Eleven calls. Why lie to us?’

(She’s always lying, you muttered darkly. Always lying. Always telling tales.)

‘I didn’t lie,’ I said. ‘I never spoke to her. It’s like Lena said: she left messages, I didn’t respond. So I didn’t lie,’ I repeated. I sounded weak, wheedling, even to myself. ‘Look, you can’t ask me to explain this to you, because there is no way of doing so to an outsider. Nel and I had problems going back years – but that doesn’t have anything to do with this.’

‘How can you know?’ Townsend asked. ‘If you didn’t speak to her, how do you know what it had to do with?’

‘I just … Here,’ I said, holding out my mobile phone. ‘Take it. Listen for yourself.’ My hands were trembling and, as he reached for the phone, so were his. He listened to your final message.

‘Why would you not call her back?’ he said, something akin to disappointment on his face. ‘She sounded upset, wouldn’t you say?’

‘No, I … I don’t know. She sounded like Nel. Sometimes she was happy, sometimes she was sad, sometimes she was angry, more than once she was drunk … it didn’t mean anything. You don’t know her.’

‘The other calls she made,’ he demanded, a harder edge to his voice now. ‘Do you still have the messages?’

I didn’t, not all of them, but he listened to the ones I had, his hand gripping my phone so tightly his knuckles whitened. When he finished, he handed the phone back to me.

‘Don’t erase those. We may need to listen to them again.’ He pushed his chair back and got to his feet, and I followed him out into the hall.

At the door, he turned to face me. ‘I have to say,’ he said, ‘I find it odd that you didn’t answer her. That you didn’t try to find out why she needed to speak to you so urgently.’

‘I thought she just wanted attention,’ I said quietly and he turned away.

It was only after he had closed the door behind him that I remembered. I ran out after him.

‘Detective Townsend,’ I called out, ‘there was a bracelet. My mother’s bracelet. Nel always wore it. Have you found it?’

He shook his head, turning again to look at me. ‘We’ve found nothing, no. Lena told DS Morgan that while Nel did wear it often, it wasn’t something she had on every day. Although,’ he went on, dipping his head, ‘I suppose you couldn’t have known that.’ With a glance up at the house, he climbed into his car and backed slowly out of the driveway.





Jules


SO SOMEHOW, THIS has ended up being my fault. You really are something, Nel. You are gone, possibly killed, and everyone is pointing the finger at me. I wasn’t even here! I felt petulant, reduced to my teenage self. I wanted to scream at them, How is this my fault?

After the detective left, I stomped back into the house, catching sight of myself in the hallway mirror as I did, and I was surprised to see you looking back at me (older, not so pretty, but still you). Something snagged in my chest. I went into the kitchen and cried. If I failed you, I need to know how. I may not have loved you, but I can’t have you abandoned like this, dismissed. I want to know if someone hurt you and why; I want them to pay. I want to lay all this to rest so that maybe you can stop whispering in my ear about how you didn’t jump, didn’t jump, didn’t jump. I believe you, all right? And (whisper it), I want to know that I am safe. I want to know that no one is coming for me. I want to know that the child I am to take under my wing is just that – a blameless child – not something else. Not something dangerous.

I kept seeing the way Lena looked at DI Townsend, the tone of her voice when she called him by his first name (his first name?), the way he looked at her. I wondered whether what she’d told them about the bracelet was true. It rang false, to me, because you’d been so quick to claim it, to make it yours. It was possible, I supposed, that you only insisted on taking it because you knew how much I wanted it. When you found it amongst Mum’s things and slipped it on to your wrist, I complained to Dad (yes, telling tales again). I asked, Why should she have it? Why not? you replied. I’m the eldest. And when he was gone, you smiled as you admired it on your wrist. It suits me, you said. Don’t you think it suits me? Pinching a layer of fat on my forearm. I doubt it would fit around your chubby little arm.

I wiped my eyes. You stung me like that often; cruelty always was your strong suit. Some jibes – about my size, about how slow I was, how dull – I shrugged off. Others – Come on, Julia, tell me honestly. Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it? – were barbs embedded deep in my flesh, irrecoverable unless I wanted to tear open fresh wounds. That last one, slurred into my ear on the day we buried our mother – oh, I could happily have strangled you with my bare hands for those words. And if you did that to me, if you were capable of making me feel like that, who else did you make murderous?