I Know Who You Are(57)
I fire my gun.
I’m so close behind them, I cannot miss.
I do what she taught me to do and shoot until nobody moves. Then I carry on shooting anyway, until I don’t have any bullets left.
“Come here, Baby Girl.” Maggie sounds croaky and far away. I cuddle up next to her on the floor and try to stop the blood from coming out of her tummy with my hands, the way I’ve seen people do on TV. But it won’t stop. There’s a great big red puddle of it now, and my fingers are all red.
“Give me the gun,” she whispers, so I do. She wipes it on her trousers, then takes a white hankie from her sleeve and wraps it around the pistol. “Don’t touch it again, don’t touch anything. Now go and put this in John’s hand, go on, hurry up now, careful not to touch it.” I’m crying and shaking, but I do what Maggie tells me to do, because I’ve learned that bad things happen to me when I don’t. John doesn’t move when I put the gun in his hand. I don’t like touching him, and I run back to Maggie as soon as I’ve done it. She puts her arm around me and I lay my head on her chest, the way I do when we cuddle in bed. Then I close my eyes and listen to the sound of her breathing, and her voice in my ears.
“When they come, you just say you hid out back and found everyone like this. You don’t tell them about the gun. You don’t tell them nothing. I love you, Baby Girl. You tell them your name is Aimee Sinclair, that’s all you say when they come, and you remember that I loved you.”
I’m crying too hard to speak. I lie in her arms, her blood all over my face and clothes, and when I manage to say, “I love you too,” her eyes are already closed.
Forty-six
London, 2017
I emerge from the bathroom at the club, coercing my head to hold itself high, and planning to just get the hell out of here as fast as I can. I feel as if everyone at the party is looking at me after my exchange with Jennifer Jones, and although she has been escorted from the building, I can’t stay here now. She’s confirmed what I suspected from the start: I’m being set up by my husband and a stalker who is pretending to be me. I remember all the vintage postcards I found in the shoebox in the attic, all written by her, all with the same short message:
I know who you are.
Well, I don’t know who she is, but I know that they’re working together, I’m sure of it.
If the woman looks older than me, then it can’t be Alicia, and I don’t know anyone else who hates me enough to want to destroy me like this. And as for Jack …
“There you are, I’ve been looking everywhere for you! I heard what happened,” he says, crossing my path right on cue. His face is doing such a good job of portraying concern that I almost believe it is genuine.
“How could you?”
His mouth opens and closes repeatedly, whatever he is trying to say experiencing a series of false starts. “Je ne comprends pas,” he eventually says with a childish grin, accompanied by a theatrical shrug.
I try to push past him, but he stops me. “I’m not in the mood for your silly French phrases.”
“No. Right. Of course, I’m sorry. If you mean sending the photos to the press, well, then I did that for you as well as me, you’ll thank me one day. All publicity is good publicity, did nobody teach you that yet?”
“I’m going to leave now.”
“No, you’re not.” He blocks my path. “Stay for one more drink. Journalists and politicians aren’t the only people who need to spin for a living. You need everyone here to think this little incident was nothing, laugh it off. Let them see that you don’t give a shit. Then, and only then, can you leave this party.”
“I hate you right now.”
“I hate me all the time, but I think you should put that to one side for a moment. Think with your head, not your heart, then you can go back to hating me again tomorrow.”
“No, I want to leave.”
He sighs in mock defeat. “Okay, then let me take you home, I’ll call us a taxi.”
“I don’t need you to take me home. Go hang out with Alicia.” He smiles at this, and I feel childish, wishing I could take back the words.
“It’s nothing, it never was. I’m not sleeping with her, regardless of what she might have told you, and I don’t plan to. Christ, she’d probably swallow me whole afterwards, like one of those spiders who eat the male after mating. I’m just being kind because she’s going through a bad patch. Her mother died a few weeks ago, and her grief seems to have consumed her. It surprised me a bit at first, because it sounded like they had a difficult relationship. I always remember this horrible story she told me, that happened when she was a teenager. Apparently, her mum didn’t speak to her for over a week once, just because she didn’t get the lead in some stupid school play, can you imagine?”
He’s talking about when I got the part of Dorothy instead of her, I’m sure of it.
“Alicia ended up running away from home because she thought her mum didn’t love her anymore after that. She slept in a cardboard box on the street for three nights before going back. Even then, her mother never forgave her, said that she had let her down because she didn’t get the part. It’s funny, isn’t it, why we do the things we do? Why we become the people we become? I’ve reached the conclusion that our ambitions are rarely our own. Her mother might have died, but I swear Alicia is still trying to make her proud, desperate for forgiveness. Imagine that; having a ghost for a muse. A few days after her mother’s funeral, her agent dropped her. It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t know, and to be fair she hasn’t even had an audition for months.”