It gets me nowhere.
He starts out by asking me how I’m feeling, when I last had a drink.
‘Sunday,’ I tell him.
‘Good. That’s good.’ He folds his hands in his lap. ‘You look well.’ He smiles, and I don’t see the killer. I’m wondering now what I saw the other day. Did I imagine it?
‘You asked me, last time, about how the drinking started.’ He nods. ‘I became depressed,’ I say. ‘We were trying … I was trying to get pregnant. I couldn’t, and I became depressed. That’s when it started.’
In no time at all, I find myself crying again. It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness. I confide in him and I forget, once again, what I’m doing here. I don’t watch his face for a reaction, I don’t study his eyes for some sign of guilt or suspicion. I let him comfort me.
He is kind, rational. He talks about coping strategies, he reminds me that youth is on my side.
So maybe it doesn’t get me nowhere, because I leave Kamal Abdic’s office feeling lighter, more hopeful. He has helped me. I sit on the train and I try to conjure up the killer I saw, but I can’t see him any longer. I am struggling to see him as a man capable of beating a woman, of crushing her skull.
A terrible, shameful image comes to me: Kamal with his delicate hands, his reassuring manner, his sibilant speech, contrasted with Scott, huge and powerful, wild, desperate. I have to remind myself that this is Scott now, not as he was. I have to keep reminding myself of what he was before all this. And then I have to admit that I don’t know what Scott was before all this.
Friday, 9 August 2013
Evening
The train stops at the signal. I take a sip from the cold can of gin and tonic and look up at his house, her terrace. I was doing so well, but I need this. Dutch courage. I’m on my way to see Scott, and I’ll have to run all the risks of Blenheim Road before I do: Tom, Anna, police, press. The underpass, with its half-memories of terror and blood. But he asked me to come, and I couldn’t refuse him.
They found the little girl last night. What was left of her. Buried in the grounds of a farmhouse near the East Anglian coast, just where someone had told them to look. It was in the papers this morning:
Police have opened an investigation into the death of a child after they found human remains buried in the garden of a house near Holkham, north Norfolk. The discovery came after police were tipped off about a possible unlawful killing during the course of their investigation into the death of Megan Hipwell, from Witney, whose body was found in Corly Woods last week.
I phoned Scott this morning when I saw the news. He didn’t answer, so I left a message, telling him I was sorry. He called back this afternoon.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.
‘Not really.’ His voice was thick with drink.
‘I’m so sorry … do you need anything?’
‘I need someone who isn’t going to say I told you so.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘My mother’s been here all afternoon. She knew all along, apparently – something not right about that girl, something off, no family, no friends, came from nowhere. Wonder why she never told me.’ The sound of glass breaking, swearing.
‘Are you all right?’ I said again.
‘Can you come here?’ he asked.
‘To the house?’
‘Yes.’
‘I … the police, journalists … I’m not sure …’
‘Please. I just want some company. Someone who knew Megs, who liked her. Someone who doesn’t believe all this—’
He was drunk and I knew it and I said yes anyway.
Now, sitting on the train, I’m drinking too, and I’m thinking about what he said. Someone who knew Megs, who liked her. I didn’t know her, and I’m not sure that I like her any more. I finish my drink as quickly as I can, and open another one.
I get off at Witney. I’m part of the Friday-evening commuter throng: just another wage slave among the hot, tired masses, looking forward to getting home and sitting outside with a cold beer, dinner with the kids, an early night. It might just be the gin, but it feels indescribably good to be swept along with the crowd, everyone phone-checking, fishing in pockets for rail passes. I’m taken back, way back to the first summer we lived on Blenheim Road, when I used to rush home from work every night, desperate to get down the steps and out of the station, half running down the street. Tom would be working from home and I’d barely be through the door before he was taking my clothes off. I find myself smiling about it even now, the anticipation of it: heat rising to my cheeks as I skipped down the road, biting my lip to stop myself from grinning, my breath quickening, thinking of him and knowing he’d be counting the minutes until I got home, too.
My head is so full of those days that I forget to worry about Tom and Anna, the police and the photographers, and before I know it I’m at Scott’s door, ringing the doorbell, and the door is opening and I’m feeling excited, although I shouldn’t be, but I don’t feel guilty about it, because Megan isn’t what I thought she was anyway. She wasn’t that beautiful, carefree girl out on the terrace. She wasn’t a loving wife. She wasn’t even a good person. She was a liar, a cheat.
She was a killer.
MEGAN
Thursday, 20 June 2013
Evening
I’M SITTING ON the sofa in his living room, a glass of wine in my hand. The house is still a tip. I wonder, does he always live like this, like a teenage boy? And I think about how he lost his family when he was a teenager, so maybe he does. I feel sad for him. He comes in from the kitchen and sits at my side, comfortably close. If I could, I would come here every day, just for an hour or two. I’d just sit here and drink wine, feel his hand brush against mine.
But I can’t. There’s a point to this, and he wants me to get to it.
‘OK, Megan,’ he says. ‘Do you feel ready now? To finish what you were telling me before?’
I lean back a little against him, against his warm body. He lets me. I close my eyes, and it doesn’t take me long to get back there, back to the bathroom. It’s weird, because I’ve spent so long trying not to think about it, about those days, those nights, but now I can close my eyes and it’s almost instant, like falling asleep, right into the middle of a dream.