In a Dark, Dark Wood(76)

‘Clare picked you up. And when she was safely on the road and travelling at speed, you grabbed the wheel – do you remember? You grabbed the wheel and forced the car off the road.’

‘No.’

‘Your fingerprints are all over the wheel. The scratches on your hands, the broken nails – you were fighting Clare. She has defensive wounds on her hands and arms. Your skin was under her nails.’

‘No!’

But even as I say it, I get a flash, like a nightmare breaking into day: Clare’s terrified face, green-lit by the dashboard glow, my hands grappling with hers.

‘No!’ I say, but there is a sob in my voice. What have I done?

‘What did Clare tell you, Nora? Did she tell you that she was marrying James?’

I can’t speak. I just shake my head, but it’s not a denial, I cannot deal with this, I cannot take these questions.

‘The interviewee is shaking her head,’ Roberts puts in gruffly.

‘Flo told us what happened,’ Lamarr says relentlessly. ‘Clare asked her to keep it under wraps. She was planning to tell you this weekend, wasn’t she?’

Oh God.

‘You’ve never had another relationship since you broke up with him, isn’t that right?’

No. No. No.

‘You were obsessed with him. Clare put off telling you because she was worried about your reaction. She was right to be worried, wasn’t she?’

Please let me wake from this nightmare.

‘And so you lured him up to the house, and then you shot him.’

No. Oh Jesus. I must speak. I must say something to make Lamarr shut up, to make these smooth, plum-coloured, vicious accusations go away.

‘It’s true isn’t it, Nora?’ she says, and her voice is soft and gentle, and finally, at last, she sits on the end of my bed and puts out her hand. ‘Isn’t it?’

I look up. My eyes are swimming, but through it I see Lamarr’s face, her sympathetic eyes, her heavy earrings, impossibly heavy for such a slender neck to support. I hear the click and whirr of the tape recorder.

I find my voice.

‘I want to see a solicitor.’





28


I TRY TO think back to the time-stamp of the first text, the one I supposedly sent to James, the one sent from my phone at 4.52 p.m. I was out on my run. My phone was unprotected, up in my room. So who else had access to it?

Clare hadn’t arrived yet – I know that for sure since I met her in the drive coming up to the house, but it could have been any of the others.

But why? Why would they want to destroy me like this – destroy James, destroy Clare?

I try to think through the possibilities.

Melanie seems the least likely. Yes, she was there while I was out on my run, in fact she was one of the few people who was up and about at the time of the second run. But I can’t believe that she could possibly care about me or James enough to do this. Why risk everything to incriminate someone she’d never even met? And besides, she’d gone by the time James arrived, by the time … by the time … I shut my eyes, trying to shut out the pictures of James lying shattered and bloody on the wooden floor. She could still have swapped the cartridge, a tiny voice whispers in the back of my mind. She could have done that any time. And maybe that would explain why she left in such a hurry …? It’s true. She could have swapped the cartridge. But surely she couldn’t have predicted the rest – the open door, the gun, the struggle …

Tom, then. He had the means – he was there in the house when my phone was, he was there at the shooting. And – it suddenly strikes me – he was the one who sent Clare driving off into the forest alone. What did make her suddenly leave like that? We only have his word about what he said to her, and now, in the light of what’s happened, the fact that she misheard him so radically seems a little convenient. Would she really just go haring off into the night like that, without double-checking? Nina was the doctor, after all. She was James’s best chance of survival.

What if he told her to go? He could have said anything – that Nina wasn’t coming, that she’d said to get going and wait for her at the hospital. As for motive … I think back to the drunken conversation we had about his husband and James. If only I’d paid attention. If only I’d listened! But I was bored – bored by the litany of names I didn’t recognise, and the bitchy theatre politics. Is it possible that there’s something there, some grudge between Bruce and James? Or maybe – maybe quite the opposite.

It seems unlikely though. And even if he did send Clare off into the night, what would it achieve? He couldn’t have predicted what would happen.

Most importantly, though, he could not have known about my past with James. Unless … unless someone told him.

Clare could have told him. I can’t get away from that. But the thing is this: this murder has been set up in such a way that it didn’t just destroy James, it is destroying me and Clare too. It doesn’t just feel like collateral damage; there is something incredibly malicious and personal about the way I have been deliberately dragged in, reminding us both of long-forgotten sores. Who would do that? Why would anyone do that?

I try to look at this like one of my books. If I were writing this, I could imagine a reason for Tom to hurt James. And I could probably manufacture a motive for him to hurt Clare in the process. But me? Why go to all these lengths to bring in someone he doesn’t even know? The only person who could possibly want to do that would be someone who knows all three of us. Someone who was there at the time it all blew up. Someone like …