People LIke Her(84)

Mine is very much a cash-only existence, these days. Cash-only, cash-strapped, and strictly hand-to-mouth.

Sometimes it does tempt me, the thought of all my life savings just lying there in my bank account. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I tried to withdraw them. You’d have been tempted too, with some of the places I have found myself staying these last eighteen months, some of the jobs I have found myself doing to keep body and soul together.

I meant to do it. That was always the plan. As soon as I was sure, as soon as I had achieved what I had set out to.

All I needed was a little more time. A few hours probably would have done it. Half a day, at most. When I looked in on Emmy and Bear one last time, there were no signs of movement, no stirrings among the bedclothes.

I had been keeping a close eye on her Instagram account, of course. I saw the announcement that she was missing. Then I saw all the people chipping in, helping identify the landmarks in her video. I could see them piecing together the route, getting closer.

It was all so fast. The whole thing fell apart so quickly.

Even when I got to the beach, I thought I was still going to do it. I parked and took my rings off and put my phone and purse in the glove compartment, as if I were going for a swim. It was a place I always used to notice when I drove past, years ago, because of all the signs about the currents, all the warnings about the undertow. An eerie place, desolate, with a greyish beach that appears to stretch almost to the horizon at low tide, then seems to disappear within minutes as soon as the tide starts coming in.

It would have been so easy. I got there just as the tide was turning, just as night was beginning to settle. All I would have had to do was walk out onto the sand and keep walking.

It was not a love of life that stopped me. It was not fear.

It was the thought that I had let Grace and Ailsa down again. That justice had not been served.

It was the knowledge, from watching it all unfold on social media, that this whole thing was going to make you bigger than ever.

I tried to destroy you. Instead I turned you and your family into front-page news. Emmy the victim. Dan the hero. I could picture it all. There you would be discussing your ordeal on breakfast television. Holding hands on the sofa. Talking about how much stronger it had made you as a family.

I can remember staring out across the beach and screaming with all the power in my lungs, and the wind was buffeting me and deadening the sound and I could feel sand or maybe rain battering my coat. My face was wet and cold with tears, and I kept screaming until I was just coughing and crying and coughing, my throat raw and aching.

I have never in my life felt rage like that, such all-consuming anger—with myself as well as everyone and everything else now. Such utter despair. And that was before I knew how you would portray me in the book.

As a stalker, a loner, someone “whose true motivations may never be known.” I am quoting your actual words. There is no mention of the envelope I left for you, no attempt made to connect what I did to the suicide of my daughter or the death of my granddaughter. Nothing like that. Instead there is just a load of pious guff about how jealous people are of those in the public eye, how naive you and Dan were, and how the whole experience had taught you some tough lessons, followed by an absolutely stomach-churning passage about how even if it is impossible for anyone to know what was going through my head, you both one day hope to be able to find it in your hearts to somehow forgive me.

I was tempted to buy a copy of the book when I arrived this afternoon, join the queue afterward, ask you both to sign it. It’s not exactly likely you would recognize me—not after all that propofol, Emmy; even if my picture was splashed all over the news for a couple of days, Dan. Not with my new hair, my new clothes, these glasses. The picture they kept using was one from my hospital ID card—an old image, pixelated and washed out, several years old now. “Face of Evil,” was the headline in one of the tabloids. Another one managed to find—somewhere on the internet—an old holiday photograph of me and George and Grace on holiday in Majorca in about 1995, all smiling, all in our beachwear. I am currently carry ing a canvas bag with the name of a bookshop on it, wearing a long skirt, a turquoise linen shirt, sandals. I do not look like the woman in either of those photographs. Nor do I exactly stand out in this crowd.

Even so, there is no sense taking pointless risks.

I have already achieved what I set out to achieve today. All through the reading, all through the Q&A, here I was, not more than twenty feet from you. There in the fourth row, in the sunglasses, with the program. Watching you. Listening. Reminding myself of all the pain and damage and hurt you have caused in the world. Reminding myself this is not over.

One of these days we’ll see each other again, Emmy. Our eyes will meet and you will look away and you will not give me a second glance.

I could be the woman sitting next to you on the bus, the woman squeezed up against you on the Tube. I could be the woman who stops to let your shopping cart past at the supermarket. I could be the person who brushes past you on the escalator, who pulls faces at your children across a table on the train, asks if they are allowed sweets. I could be the person pressed apologetically up behind all of you on a crowded Underground platform. I could be the person who offers to help carry your pushchair up a very steep flight of stairs. The person your husband and your children are standing next to at a busy pedestrian crossing. The person who with an accidental nudge of their elbow could send your child’s bike swerving off the pavement into the incoming traffic. The person you don’t even notice in the park. The one waiting for that single moment your attention is diverted from the new baby as you turn your back on the pram, just for a moment, to see to one of the other children.