He Said/She Said(106)

Beth’s phone buzzes and the screen lights up.

‘Hands under the table!’ shouts Jamie. We both obey; I don’t need my hands to read. Two messages are displayed on screen, one queuing behind the other. I read the earlier text first.



Where are you?

Jamie out 2 days early & AWOL already.

Probation messed up.

DO NOT GO TO MY HOUSE.



The most recent message has switched from warning to panic.



RANG YOUR FLAT.

SARA SAID YOU WERE COMING TO ME.

DO NOT GO!!!

FOR GOD’S SAKE BETH, CALL ME.



Jamie’s eyes are fixed on the phone.

‘Who’s Sara?’ I mouth to Beth, while he’s distracted.

‘Flatmate,’ she mimes back. That’s who answered her landline.

Ten seconds later, the screen flashes again.



I told police what Jamie’s been saying about you, they’re taking it seriously and going to make sure you’re safe. Pls call so worried.



Jamie snatches the handset, throws it to the floor and crunches it underneath his heel, eyeballing us, daring us to say anything. There’s a glittering seam of hope in the despair: the police will have a tracker on her phone, I think. They’ll be on their way now. I’ve watched enough Traffic Cops to know that they can put an ANPR trace on her car; even if it’s parked outside now, wedged into a tiny London space, her journey will have taken her past dozens of CCTV cameras and they will be able to narrow it down to North London. The car will have been ticketed anyway; they’re very hot on that on the Ladder. That might throw up an alert. Antonia can tell them the rest, I think; they might be on their way already. Then my heart sinks, for Antonia will be telling the police to locate Laura Langrishe and Kit McCall. If they don’t get the car, it could take them days.

Jamie trowels on the charm. ‘Right, we’ll follow the same batting order as in the trial,’ he says. ‘You first, Beth. How do you want to do this? You can write the truth down for the first time in your life, or you can take dictation.’

‘I’ve told the truth,’ she says angrily. Inside I’m screaming with frustration. Why not lie? There’s no way anything she writes here can have any kind of sway in court. An essay about alien abduction would carry the same worth. ‘I can’t do it,’ says Beth. Her eyes skid over my belly and bounce off. Whatever her fucked-up desire to hurt me in the past, she can’t want to harm these children. Stupid bitch, why doesn’t she just do what he wants?

The minute hand jumps to cover the hour: ten past two. There is nothing outside the house to warn Kit of the danger within. His shock will be greater than Jamie’s; but Jamie is closer to the edge.





Chapter 58





KIT

21 September 2000

The broken glass backfired. Rather than sever ties with Beth, Laura wanted to talk it through; to understand why she’d done it. I ought to have predicted it; she wanted to help her friend. I’d misjudged the whole thing massively; raised the stakes and leapt straight to a point where the girls could basically never talk again without working out they were both being lied to. That, of course, would mean the end of everything. The morning after the glass, I’d blocked Beth’s number from Laura’s phone, but there wasn’t much I could do about the landline except ensure that Laura was never alone in the flat.

I was already halfway to mad at this point. It was over a month since I’d last had more than four hours’ continuous sleep. My new hobby was to lie awake until Laura fell asleep, then fire up my laptop, open a blank document, the better to create a plan of action. It always began the same way:



Objective:

Get away from Beth without a confrontation.



Method:

Need Beth to do sth worse

Do midnight flit; stay with Ling? Mum?

If not look into loan so we can pay 2 lots of rent



How to sell this to Laura:

. . .



It was impossible. The screen stayed as blank as my mind.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of my new nocturnal routine was that in the absence of a plan, I’d often find myself writing a confession. It was never a conscious action; rather, I would come to and realise I’d filled half a page with the details of my night with Beth. I could never read it back; instead, I’d hold down the delete key and watch as the words were sucked back up into my hand. Then I would close the laptop and go back to bed, only to thrash awake a couple of hours later convinced that I had saved the document and given it an incriminating title. Knowing that Laura never went near my laptop wouldn’t take the edge off my panic; I’d have to go back to the computer and trawl through every file, searching for something that wasn’t there.



When Beth at last called, I hovered next to Laura, who put the telephone on speaker mode. That the appeal had been denied was the news we’d been longing for; we were free at last. This was our point of liberty; I wanted to grab the receiver, smash it against the wall, but I could only listen in horror as the girls’ first conversation since the broken glass skidded headlong into confrontation and my inevitable unmasking.

‘Can we go out to dinner to celebrate?’ said Beth. If you knew the whole story, her confusion was obvious. ‘My treat. To say thanks for everything you’ve done for me.’