IT IS NEARLY ten when we get to the Mill, a journey full of delays, of waiting for trains, of watching Fatima break her fast on a station platform, when I know she would rather be with her family.
At Salten there’s more waiting while we call Rick and wait for him to complete another job, but at last we are ensconced in the back of his cab, Freya chewing her chubby knuckles in her car seat, Thea fidgeting beside me, biting at her bloodied nails, Fatima in the front, staring unseeingly into the night.
I know they are going through the same disbelieving round-and-round I have been running all day. If this is true, what did we do? And what does it mean for us all?
Losing our jobs … that would be bad enough. But accessory to murder? We could be looking at custodial sentences. Fatima and I could lose our kids. If this is true, will anyone in their right minds believe that we didn’t know what we were doing?
I try to imagine myself in a prison visiting room, Owen’s pinched face as he hands Freya over to a mother she barely recognises.
But my imagination fails – the only thing I know about prison is culled from Orange Is the New Black. I can’t accept that this is happening. Not to me. Not to us.
Rick goes as far as he can down the track before the wheels begin to spin, and then he lets us out and backs carefully up to the road, while we make our long, slow way down the track towards the Mill.
My heart is thumping. It looks as if the electricity is still out, but I can see a light flickering in Kate’s window. It’s not the steady stream of a bulb, though, but the soft uncertainty of a lamp, flickering a little as the curtains blow in the breeze.
As we get closer I realise I’m holding my breath, half expecting a repeat of the flooded bridge, but high tide won’t be for another few hours, and the walkway is still just clear of the rising waters. As we cross the rickety planks I see from Fatima and Thea’s faces what they are thinking – that if the waters rise, we may be stuck here for the night.
At last, though, we are assembled on the shrinking strip of muddy sand outside the door of the Mill.
‘Ready?’ Thea says, in a low voice and I shrug.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Come on,’ Fatima says. She raises her fist, and for the first time I can remember, we knock on the Mill door, and wait for Kate to come and let us in.
‘You! What are you all doing here?’
Kate’s face, as she sees us all gathered on the doorstep, is surprised, but she stands back to let us in, and we file past into the darkness of the living room.
The only light is from the moonlight striking off the high waters outside the windows overlooking the Reach, and from the oil lamp in Kate’s hand, and as I pass her I get a flashback to her white face peering out from the shadows, watching me and Luc on the couch, and I cannot help but flinch.
‘The electricity’s still out,’ she says, her voice strange and detached. ‘Let me find some candles.’
I watch her as she hunts through the dresser, and my hand on the handle of Freya’s pram is trembling, I notice. Are we really going to do this? Accuse one of our oldest friends of killing her father?
‘Do you want to put Freya down in the back bedroom?’ Kate says over her shoulder, and I open my mouth to say no, but then nod. I don’t suppose we will be staying the night – not after we say what we’ve come to say – but there will be a scene either way, and I don’t want Freya mixed up in it.
I unclip the car-seat attachment from the pram, and then tell Fatima in a low voice, ‘I’ll be back in a sec. Wait for me.’
Freya slumbers on as I carry her carefully up the stairs to Luc’s room, and stays asleep as I deposit her gently on the floor and pull the door so it’s just ajar.
My heart is hammering as I walk back down to the ground floor.
The candles are lit, dotted around the place on saucers, and as I reach the sofa where Fatima and Thea are sitting, hands clasped anxiously around their knees, Kate straightens.
‘What’s all this in aid of?’ she asks mildly.
I open my mouth – but I don’t know what to say. My tongue is dry, sticking to the roof of my mouth, and my cheeks feel hot with shame, although I don’t know what, exactly, I’m ashamed of. My own cowardice, maybe?
‘Fuck, I’m getting a drink,’ Thea mutters. She picks up the bottle that’s on the sideboard and fills a whiskey tumbler. The liquid glints, black as oil in the candlelight as she knocks it back and wipes her mouth. ‘Isa? Kate?’
‘Yes please,’ I say, my voice shaking a little. Maybe it will help steady my nerves, help me to do this horrible, necessary thing.
Thea pours a glass, and as I swallow it back, feeling the roughness against my throat, I realise, I don’t know which is worse – the prospect that we’re wrong, and about to betray two decades of friendship on a misguided hunch. Or the idea that we’re right.
In the end it’s Fatima who stands up. She takes Kate’s hands, and I’m reminded once again of the steel beneath her compassion.
‘Kate,’ she says, and her voice is very low. ‘Honey, we came here tonight to ask you something. Maybe you’ve already guessed what it is?’
‘I don’t know.’ Kate’s face is suddenly wary. She pulls her hand away from Fatima and draws up a chair to sit opposite the sofa. I have a sudden image of her as a plaintiff and us as a panel of judges, grilling her, passing sentence. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
‘Kate,’ I force myself to speak. It was me who brought my suspicions to the others – the least I can do is say them to her face. ‘Kate, I met Mary Wren on the way to the station earlier. She – she told me something that the police have discovered. Something I didn’t know.’ I swallow. Something is constricting my throat. ‘She – she said …’ I swallow again, and then force myself to say it in a rush, like ripping off a bandage, stuck to a wound. ‘She said that the police have discovered heroin in the wine bottle Ambrose was drinking from. She said that the overdose was oral. She said they’re not looking at suicide but – but –’
But I can’t finish.
It’s Thea who says it finally. She looks up at Kate from beneath the curtain of her long fringe, and the lamplight throws her face into shadows so that it looks so much like a skull, gleaming in the darkness, that I shudder.
‘Kate,’ she says bluntly, ‘did you kill your father?’
‘What makes you think that?’ Kate says, still in that oddly calm voice. Her face in the circle of lamplight is blank, almost sur-really so, compared to the naked pain on Fatima’s and Thea’s. ‘He overdosed.’
‘An oral overdose?’ I burst out. ‘Kate, you know that’s ridiculous. It’s a stupid way to commit suicide. Why would he do it when he had his works right there, ready to inject? And –’ and here my heart fails me, and I feel a stab of even greater guilt at what I’ve done, but I force myself on. ‘And there’s this.’
And I take the note out of my pocket, and throw it down on the table.
‘We read it, Kate. We read it seventeen years ago but I didn’t understand it until today. It’s not a suicide note, is it? It’s the note of a man who has been poisoned by his own child, and is trying to keep her out of prison. It’s a note telling you what to do – to go on, not to look back, to make his final action worthwhile. How could you, Kate? Is it true you were sleeping with Luc? Is that why you did it, because Ambrose was splitting you up?’
Kate sighs. She shuts her eyes, and puts her long slim hands to her face, pressing them against her forehead. And then she looks up at us all, and her face is very sad.
‘Yes,’ she says at last. ‘Yes it’s true. It’s all true.’
‘What?’ Thea explodes. She stands up, knocking over her glass so that it smashes on the floor, red wine seeping across the boards. ‘What? You’re going to sit there and tell us that you dragged us into covering up a murder? I don’t believe you!’
‘What don’t you believe?’ Kate says. She looks up at Thea, her blue eyes very steady.
‘I don’t believe any of it! You were fucking Luc? Ambrose was sending you away? And you killed him for it?’
‘It’s true,’ Kate says. She looks away, out of the window, and I see the muscles in her throat move as she swallows convulsively. ‘Luc and I … I know Dad thought of us as brother and sister, but I barely remembered him. When he came back from France, it was like … it was like falling in love. And it seemed so right, that’s what Dad couldn’t get. He loved me, he needed me. And Dad –’ She swallows again, and shuts her eyes. ‘You would have thought we really were brother and sister from the way he acted. The way he looked at me when he told me …’ She is looking across the Reach, towards the headland, beyond which lies a tent surrounded by police tape. ‘I’ve never felt dirty before. And I felt it then.’
‘What did you do, Kate?’ Fatima’s voice is low and shaking, as if she can’t believe what she’s hearing. ‘I want to hear it from you, step by step.’
Kate looks up at that. Her chin goes up, and she speaks almost defiantly, as if she’s made up her mind, at last, to face the inevitable.
‘I bunked off school that Friday, and I went home. Dad was out, and Luc was at school, and I poured the whole of his stash into that red wine he kept beneath the sink. There was only one glass left in the bottle, and I knew Luc wouldn’t drink it – he was out that night, in Hampton’s Lee. And it was always the first thing Dad did on a Friday night – come home, pour himself a glass of wine, throw it back – do you remember?’ She gives a shaking laugh. ‘And then I went back to school, and I waited.’
‘You dragged us into this.’ Thea’s voice is hoarse. ‘You got us to cover up a murder, and you’re not even going to say sorry?’
‘Of course I’m sorry!’ Kate cries, and for the first time her weird calm cracks, and I get a glimpse of the girl I recognise beneath, as anguished as the rest of us. ‘You think I’m not sorry? You think I haven’t spent seventeen years in agony over what I made you do?’
‘How could you do it, Kate?’ I say. My throat is raw with pain, and I think I may sob at any moment. ‘How could you? Not us – him. Ambrose. How could you? Not because he was sending you away, surely? I can’t believe it!’
‘Then don’t believe it,’ Kate says. Her voice is shaking.
‘We deserve to know,’ Fatima snarls. ‘We deserve to know the truth, Kate!’
‘There’s nothing else I can tell you,’ Kate says, but there’s an edge of desperation in her voice now. Her chest is rising and falling and Shadow patters over, not understanding her distress, and butts his head against her. ‘I can’t –’ she says, and then seems to choke. ‘I – I can’t –’
And then she jumps up and walks to the window overlooking the Reach. She steps out with Shadow at her heels, and slams it behind her.
Thea makes as if to go after her, but Fatima catches at her arm.
‘Leave her,’ she says. ‘She’s at breaking point. If you go after her now, she’s liable to do something stupid.’
‘What?’ Thea spits. ‘Like throw me in the Reach too? Fuck. How could we be so stupid? No wonder Luc hates her – he knew all along. He knew, and he said nothing!’
‘He loved her,’ I say, thinking of his face that night when we saw Kate standing at the corner of the stairs – the mix of triumph and agony in his eyes. They both turn to me, as if they’d forgotten I was there, huddled in the corner of the sofa. ‘I think he still does, in spite of everything. But living with that – with that knowledge all these years –’
I stop. I put my hands to my face.
‘She killed him,’ I say, trying to make myself believe it, understand it. ‘She killed her own father. She didn’t even try to deny it.’
We are still sitting there much later, when there is a noise from the window, and Kate comes back inside. Her feet are wet. The tide has risen, covering the jetty, and the wind has picked up, and I see that her hair is speckled with rain. A storm is coming.
Her face, though, is back to that unsettling calm as she clicks the window shut behind her, and puts a sandbag against the frame.
‘You’d better stay,’ she says, as if nothing has happened. ‘The walkway has been cut off, and there’s a storm coming.’
‘I’m pretty sure I can wade through two feet of water,’ Thea snaps, but Fatima puts a warning hand on her arm.
‘We’ll stay,’ she says. ‘But, Kate, we have to –’
I don’t know what she was about to say. We have to discuss this? Talk to each other? Whatever it was, Kate interrupts.
‘Don’t worry.’ Her voice is weary. ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’ll call Mark Wren in the morning. I’ll tell him everything.’
‘Everything?’ I manage. Kate’s mouth twists in a wry, tired smile.
‘Not everything. I’m going to tell him I acted alone. I won’t bring you into it.’
‘He’ll never believe you,’ Fatima says falteringly. ‘How could you have dragged Ambrose all that way?’
‘I’ll make him believe,’ Kate says flatly, and I think of the drawings, the way Kate made the school believe what she wanted them to, in the face of all the evidence. ‘It’s not that far. I think with a tarp someone could – could drag a –’ But here she chokes. She cannot say the words. A body.
I feel a sob rise in my throat.
‘Kate, you don’t have to do this!’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I do.’ And she comes across the room, and puts her hand on my cheek, looking into my eyes. And her mouth flickers in a little sad smile, just for a moment. ‘I want you to know this, I love you all. I love you so much, all of you. And I am so, so sorry, more than I can express, that I dragged you all into this. But it’s time I ended it, for all our sakes. It’s time I made it right.’
‘Kate –’
Thea looks shaken, her face is white. Fatima is standing, and she rubs her hand over her face as if she cannot believe it has come to this, that our friendship – the four of us – is going to end this way.
‘Is this it?’ she asks uncertainly. And Kate nods.
‘Yes. This is it. This is the end. You don’t need to be afraid any more. I’m sorry,’ she says again, and she looks from Fatima, to me, and last of all to Thea. ‘I want you to know that. I’m so, so sorry.’
I think of the lines from Ambrose’s letter. I am so sorry, I’m so very, very sorry to be leaving you like this …
And as Kate picks up the lamp and walks up the stairs, into the darkness, with Shadow a glimmer of white at her heels, I feel the tears begin, falling down my face like the rain that is spattering the windows, for I know she is right. This is it. This is the end. And I can’t bear for it to be so.