The Things We Do to Our Friends(87)

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know. Everything locked in there, in her head, what happened.”

“I didn’t mean for her to die.”

She smiled at me faintly. “I don’t think that’s true at all. Anyway, things have worked out very differently than I could have expected at the beginning. There are things you might have…assumed.”

“Might have assumed?”

She sighed. “Tabitha never knew about what you did in Périgueux, about any of it.” She laughed, a short, sharp yelp of a noise that had no humor to it.

I didn’t understand at all; I tried to think back, replay the last year quickly, all the things that had happened. It didn’t make sense.

“But she must have. The video she made, or whoever made. The things that happened afterward…” I said.

“The things that happened over the last few months were so that you didn’t quit for good. That was all me. I’ve never known exactly what went on with you and that man when you were at school. The parts I did know were enough to use. Anyway, Tabitha couldn’t have coordinated any of that—too busy tormenting Imogen most of the time.”

She took a deep breath and sighed before continuing. “Yes, anyway, the video. She did rope me into that, and I saw the parallels at the time. I should have known how much it would upset you. It was…misjudged.”

She shrugged, then pressed further, as if something had occurred to her. “You were worried about the footage, weren’t you? That he’d track you down? You needn’t have been. He paid more to get that footage back in the end. He doesn’t want anyone to see that! Of course he doesn’t. She knew he’d pay up.”

Clever. How naive of me not to consider that, when it came down to it, money sat alongside vengeance—equally important—two sides of a coin in the violent currency The Shiver had chosen.

I thought of his body, flabby and pink as he climbed inside the carcass.

Then there had been the graveyard. Tabitha’s confusion when I’d spoken a single word of French.

“I don’t understand?” I said. “She never asked me about my family, about my background, not once, not one question. I thought it was because she knew. That she was helping me by not asking. By not bringing it up.”

“She didn’t know. She certainly wasn’t helping you. It’s just what Tabitha’s like. She didn’t care. She said she needed to understand you, of course she did, but think harder. Did she really? Did she ever ask you a proper question about anything much? One that wasn’t linked to something she wanted or to something helpful for her? She wasn’t ever curious, was she? Don’t be offended—she’s always been like that.”

I thought back to Tabitha and her twisty stories. The words spilling over each other like she’d die if her thoughts were trapped inside for too long.

“All you?” I repeated.

She didn’t reply directly. “I would have done anything for her, and in this case, keeping you was what she wanted. I knew how this would seem when I explained it all to you. It’s like I’m the villain. I set all these traps to make you come back. I had suspicions beforehand of what that man might do to you in the Highlands.”

She ran through a list. “And giving Finn those drugs, and chasing down that girl from your school. I didn’t enjoy doing any of that. Truly, now when I look back, I am sorry. You’ve done some awful things, Clare, and so have I, but pushing Tabitha was verging on the inevitable. It brings this all to an end, because the whole thing was getting silly, wasn’t it?”

She watched me expectantly. The way she spoke was so light-hearted and singsong, it felt like we’d been through a series of wacky dares. It was disconnected to the gravity of everything we’d done, and I think it allowed her to get through her explanation.

She continued. “Is it a relief that you’re not losing your mind? My intention wasn’t to make you…unhinged. It was just to hold it all together, make you come back, and somehow I failed and things just fell apart. Too many moving cogs.”

I didn’t answer.

“They’re all gone,” she said. “Imogen, Samuel. Then you know what happened with the Landores?”

I nodded. “They told me.”

“They didn’t like that, and who can blame them? Too seedy, too much for most of us, but not for Tabitha,” she continued. “The odder it got, the more she liked it. The attack up north with Jack the Pig—I researched him, I wasn’t sure at all about it, but she delighted in that, she knew what could happen. She said people like him were a whole ‘new market.’ Yup, those were the words she used. Because violence didn’t faze her—it never has. Of course, she enjoyed the way we punished him, even though she maintains that was a present for you when you were so upset by the whole thing. And then you saw the direction she planned to take Perfect Pieces in?”

She sighed. “She wasn’t so interested in the actual honey trapping by the end. You know how the clients always ‘seemed’ to choose you? She didn’t really give them the option to choose her, because she had bigger plans. Once you looked and acted how she wanted you to, she was absolutely fine with you taking it all on. It was why I was under such pressure to keep you.”

There was so much to take in, forcing me to examine everything between Tabitha and me, to cast her in a new light, but deep down I knew she hadn’t hidden any of this. She had never really been anything other than her own glorious, terrible self, but to see her true colors would have been like staring into the sun—painful. It had always been easier to just enjoy the warmth.