CHAPTER NINETEEN

Caro.

It is Caro, but for a moment I’m thrown, disorientated by the flash of Severine, then the door, then who? For a moment it could be . . . But no, it’s Caro, encased in a smart dark coat and wearing a very trendy trilby that hides the dirty blond of her hair. She has unusually dark skin and eyebrows for a blonde; with her hair hidden one might easily mistake her for a brunette. Something jerks in the recesses of my mind. I find I’m staring at her.

“Well,” says Caro, and the moment she speaks she is Caro; all suggestions of anything otherwise are swept away. I pull myself together. There is something in her eyes, some sly satisfaction that has me on guard—more on guard, that is. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“Actually, Caro, I’m really not feeling well.” I’ve kept the door only a couple of feet ajar: enough not to be rude, but not wide enough to invite an entrance. “Didn’t Julie call you?” But Julie must have called her, otherwise Caro would have expected me around this time at her offices . . .

“She did. I thought any combination of these might help.” She holds up a bottle of wine, a packet of Lemsip and some handbag-sized tissues.

“Oh. Well, that’s . . . Well, that’s kind of you.” Confronted with gifts, normal behavior demands I swing the door wide, and after all, I have resolved to follow normal behavior. “Come in.”

She enters, and I take the gifts from her as she unbuttons her coat and removes the dark red trilby, looking around her with sharp, greedy glances, stripping away every detail to store in that carnivorous mind of hers. I glance around myself, trying to see things as she must see them. It’s a nice flat in a Georgian block, small but welcoming, with some lovely old features such as the original bay windows, but it can’t hold a candle to Caro’s own apartment. Or Tom’s. Just the thought of him is a delicious secret inside me, to be held tight and treasured. The florist’s card is still in my hand; I shove it surreptitiously into my pocket.

“Lovely flowers,” says Caro. “A secret admirer?” Her eyes scan me, eager and hot and hungry—and something else, too, something like anger, but why on earth should she be angry at me receiving flowers?

“Hardly.” I give a careless laugh.

“No? Who then?” she presses insistently.

“They’re from a very happy client. Anyway, come on through to the kitchen,” I say quickly, self-conscious in my lie; anything to do with Tom is too new for me to be sure I can hide it. I lead her through the flat; it’s hard to overstate just how uncomfortable I feel with her inside my home sanctuary. Severine isn’t proving helpful, either: she’s trailing Caro, never more than a foot away, more present and more insistent than I’ve ever seen her before. “Tea, coffee?” And then because Caro is looking expectantly at the bottle she gave me, which I’ve placed on the kitchen counter, I add reluctantly, “Wine?”

“Yes, please. Is it a flu bug?”

I find some wineglasses and pull a corkscrew out of a drawer as I answer her. “The beginnings of one, I think. I’m all achy and my head is pounding.” That’s all true, actually, or it was before the flowers arrived and boosted my endorphin count, but a flu bug has nothing to do with it. Before the flowers . . . suddenly I remember—“Fuck, the bath!”

I dash out of the kitchen, leaving Caro and her surprised expression behind. The bath hasn’t flooded yet, but it has reached the level of the overflow, and the bathroom is misty with steam. I turn off the tap quickly, looking at the tub longingly. Perhaps I can get rid of Caro quickly enough that it will still be warm . . . but then I see Severine under the surface, clothed and completely still, her eyes closed and her hair fanning out lazily around her head. For all that I’ve become accustomed to having Severine around, it’s an arresting image. Arresting and chilling. Then she sits up abruptly, her soaking wet hair slicked back tightly against her head, and opens her eyes, staring straight at me. I have to stifle a small scream.

But in that instant something unlocks in my brain, and suddenly I know exactly what happened, all those years ago in France. I stand there for a moment, staring at Severine, letting it all unfurl in my mind, like leaves touched by the first rays of the morning sun . . . yes, that’s how it must have been; yes, that, and that . . . I see a plan of the farmhouse from above, laid out in miniature, like looking down on a doll’s house: there’s a tiny version of me asleep in the bedroom I shared with Seb, my tear-streaked face calm in unconscious oblivion; a mini-doll Lara dozes in Tom’s bedroom, tangled in sheets redolent of sex; Seb’s figurine is passed out in the barn, where a stray rake lies abandoned near the door, while a tiny Severine and tiny Tom are grouped by the pool. And only one question remains: where to place Caro and Theo? But I know the answer to that too now.

And then another question follows: what can I do about it? A cold, hard fear is growing inside me, too, but this is different from the fear I have been living with of late; that was paralyzing, diminishing, it made me less than I want to be, less than I am. This fear is steel cold and equally as hard, and it’s forging me into the same. Or perhaps it’s stripping me back to what was always there, underneath: the Kate I like best, who faces life head-on. Kate of the high-risk strategy.

Severine sits in the bath, water still streaming off the ends of her long hair, her soaked black shift plastered to those eternally perfect tiny breasts. She sits and looks at me whilst I puzzle and plan, and there is not a jot of expression in those black eyes.

I leave the bathroom abruptly, closing the door tight. In the living room I grab my handbag and find what I’m looking for buried at the bottom of it; I sweep it into my pocket to lie snugly against the florist’s card: all my secrets in one dark, warm place.

Back in the kitchen, Caro has opened the wine and poured out two glasses; she looks up inquiringly as I reenter. “Sorry, I forgot I left the tap on; I was just running a bath when you arrived.” I sound unnatural, but Caro doesn’t seem to notice. Severine has joined us, too, thankfully no longer dripping wet. She prowls the kitchen, unusually active. Caro removes her suit jacket, turning to lay it carefully on the counter; as she does so I notice that she has a ladder in her stockings, running in an ever decreasing inverted V from the back of one of her patent heels to disappear under her skirt. She would hate it if she knew: chinks in her armor, I think, though without the rancorous glee that might once have called up within me. I’ve had a glimpse of what lies beneath Caro’s surface, and I can’t unsee it.

She starts off with small talk—business talk, around the candidates we’re winning over to Haft & Weil, but it’s small talk nonetheless. We sip our wine and verbally circle each other. Five minutes pass. Ten even. I can’t quite understand why she’s delaying. It’s an effort to keep my hand from the dark, snug pocket of secrets.

“You must be wondering what’s so urgent that I turned up on your doorstep unexpectedly,” says Caro with a small laugh, settling herself onto one of my bar stools. Now, I think, and my hand slips unremarkably into my pocket and just as unremarkably out again whilst I remain standing, my back resting against the countertop.

“Yes.”

“It’s not so much to do with the partnership process—”

“No?”

“Well, it is, but . . . the thing is, in the office they’ve obviously heard about the investigation, what with all the rumors flying round about, well, you. Someone asked Gordon about it, and he let slip I was there, too . . .” A flash of irritation makes a dash across her face. “Anyway. There’s beginning to be a perception that it might be too much, that if I’m distracted by that, it’ll be hard for me to really shine through this crucial period.” She rolls her eyes. “I mean, it’s completely ridiculous; I’m totally focused on partnership, but it’s hard to fight this kind of thing.” Twin spots of color are burning faintly over her cheekbones. She blows out a breath, then admits grudgingly, without meeting my eye, “They’re talking about pulling me off the slate. Holding me over to next year.”

For a moment, I’m lost for words. On the worst interpretation of facts, this is deliciously—maliciously—ironic. If Caro is indeed the source of the rumors about me, then she is very much being hoisted on her own petard. Despite the cold steel within me, I realize how much I want to be wrong. I want the sum of the layers of Caro to be something better than the surface shell. I search for something neutral to say. “I see. And I suppose you were thinking, with the issues I hear Darren Lucas is facing, that you had rather a clear field—”

“Exactly,” she rushes in. “This is my year. My year.” She finally looks me directly in the eye, and I’m taken aback by the desperation I see within her. It’s as strong as the cold, hard fear that still fills my belly. “I can’t be held over,” she says with quiet ferocity. “This is my year.”

Her words are solid, impermeable, immovable. I gaze at her helplessly for a moment, then try one more doomed attempt: “Caro, I know you don’t want to hear this now, but there are other law firms—”

“No.” It’s a statement of finality: for Caro, it’s Haft & Weil or bust, partnership or nothing. I’ve met many driven candidates over the years, all of whom display a similar single-mindedness, but nonetheless something about Caro seems particularly extreme. I realize I’m staring at her bent head as I sip my wine, trying to puzzle her out.

I shake my head and remind myself of my endgame. I have a plan, after all, and solving Caro’s partnership woes is not part of it. After a moment, I say casually, “Do you still speak to Mark Jeffers?”

Her head whips up. “No,” she says carefully, after the barest hesitation, but it’s enough: I am not wrong about her. I sip my wine to hide the irrational disappointment that runs through me. “Why do you ask?” she adds, with just the right amount of mild curiosity.

“He’s been shooting his mouth off round the market about the investigation; specifically, about how one Kate Channing is about to be arrested,” I say evenly. “I’ve even had prospective clients asking me about it.”

“Well, I know him quite well from days of old,” she says smoothly. “He’s a dreadful blabbermouth, but I could speak to him and try to get him to pipe down if you like.”

“I rather think you’ve spoken to him already, haven’t you?” She is gazing at me steadily, her eyes still burning over-brightly, as if she’s the one with a fever, but her face is carefully blank. “He had my name, and that hasn’t been in any of the papers.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she exclaims. It’s a very good performance of outrage, such that a part of me can’t fail to be impressed. “What on earth would I have to gain from that?”

It’s a valid question, and one I can’t answer; I continue as if she hasn’t spoken. “And now this Darren Lucas situation. He’s a very formidable opponent, but he’s already been stitched up, hasn’t he? So now your own rumormongering has come home to roost, in the very year that everything is miraculously in your favor.”

Now her eyes have narrowed and her lips are almost invisible, clamped in a tight line. “If you have something to say, perhaps you should come right out and say it,” she says, in a tightly controlled voice.

“I thought I was.” I take another sip of wine. It’s a sauvignon blanc, absolutely not what I would have chosen, and there’s an aftertaste that definitely isn’t winning me round. “I think Darren Lucas was in your way and you found a way to remove him. And now you need a way to make sure you can capitalize on that, which means you need the investigation to disappear.”

She picks up her glass and swirls it carefully before looking at me again, with those greedy, hot eyes. The desperation within her lies not quite hidden beneath. “You should be careful throwing around accusations you can’t prove.”

“You’re right.” I pull back my hand before it can sneak into my pocket—later—and take a drink myself. “I can’t prove it. Anyway. Back to the point. You’re here to ask me to blame Theo for all of this.”

Her glass pauses halfway to her mouth, then smoothly resumes its trip. “You’ve been talking to Alina.”

“Yes,” I agree. Again, she’s undeniably impressive, with her quick, devious intelligence. She barely missed a beat there.

“In that case, I might as well admit it. I was coming here to ask you to blame Theo.” She shrugs. “After all, why wouldn’t you? Your own business is struggling because of this—”

“My business is fine.”

“Really?” She arches a brow. Something in her has changed. I knocked her off balance with my frontal assault, but I can see she has already regrouped. There’s a tension within her, like a vibration: a quiver of anticipation. The eyes are only the tip of the iceberg. What have I missed? “How fine would it be if Haft & Weil dropped you? You’d lose Stockleys, too, I’d warrant . . .”

This is what I’ve missed. I wonder how long she has been planning for this. Perhaps she perennially sees life as a chess game: putting pieces in place to defend her position should certain events come to pass . . . Or perhaps there was never any plan, and she’s just taking advantage of what lies before her. I stare at her, waiting to feel panic or despair, but there’s nothing but the cold, hard fear inside me that wills me inexorably on. And, out of nowhere, tiredness. Bone-crushing tiredness; a wave of it is rolling over me. I pull out a bar stool and sink onto it. “There’s a contract—”

“There’s a clause that gives an out for reputational risk,” she says flatly. “A debatable interpretation, but you’d run out of cash before you could face us in court over it.”

She is right, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of hearing me say it. So I say nothing, and she eyes me carefully, allowing herself a small smile. “So yes, that is what I was going to say. Blame Theo.”

“No,” I answer bluntly. Even before my epiphany in the bathroom, I would have said no. If Tom were here, he would be furious with me; he would urge me to row back, look out for myself, look after my business . . . but no. I want to be better than that; I need to be better than that. In Tom’s eyes, at least, I need to be the Kate I like best. And I won’t let Tom be a Tom that, over time, in the dark hours of the night, he becomes ashamed of. Not even for me. “No,” I say again.

“No,” she repeats thoughtfully. Then she shrugs, the skin moving over her bony breastplate revealed by the V-necked shirt. No fat there at all. Caro has no time for anything superfluous. “That’s what I thought you would say. Though I don’t really understand why. After all, it really could have been Theo, couldn’t it? I mean, who knows?”

“Who knows,” I echo, in barely more than a whisper, fighting the urge to close my eyes. This is the moment to make my move; this is what I’ve been waiting for. But even as the thought crosses my mind, somehow I know it’s too late: it suddenly seems incredibly difficult to funnel words into my mouth, let alone form them in a coherent argument. Something is wrong, something is badly wrong with me, but I have no energy to figure out what.

“Kate? Who sent you the flowers, Kate?” Her voice is overloud; it forces my eyelids open. Perhaps this isn’t the first time she’s asked the question.

“The flowers?” I repeat stupidly. My tongue feels thick. I look at Severine, but there’s no help to be had from that quarter. I look at my glass of wine. It’s nearly empty, but one glass is hardly enough to affect my speech. My head is so heavy that I feel I ought to lie it on the counter; instead, I prop my chin on my hands. I really must be getting ill: why else would I feel like this?

“Look at you,” she says dispassionately. She puts her wineglass down decisively on the counter and pushes back her stool. “You always think you’re so clever, don’t you, Kate? You always have. Clever Kate, trying to show you’re so much better than the rest of us because you went to a state school. No expensive upbringing for you, oh no. You’ve done it all on your own merit.” She’s suddenly very close to me, but I don’t remember her bridging the gap. Did I close my eyes again? “Only now it doesn’t matter how clever you are. Even the flowers don’t really matter anymore. They’re not from a client; a client would send them to your office.” I shake my head, not understanding, but she’s insistent. “They’re from Seb, aren’t they? Now he’s back in London you’re trying to pick back up where you left off.”

“Seb?” Something is wrong. I’m drifting sideways—but no, I’m not, I’m sitting at the counter; it’s the world that’s moving, spinning as if I’m drunk. Severine is next to me, something insistent in her manner; I don’t understand her expression, but then, I never did.

“Seb,” Caro repeats impatiently. “He sent you the flowers, didn’t he?” There’s something else within her now; the rapier edge that has always lurked is now glitteringly, dangerously unleashed, stabbing with an urgency I haven’t seen before. As if she has taken the cloak off the dagger. Why would she do that? What have I missed?

It’s an effort, but I manage to turn my head to her. The rest of the room is blurry, but Caro is in pin-sharp focus. “No, Caro, he didn’t. He loves his wife.” At least, I think, I hope he does. He certainly ought to. Then: dear God, why am I feeling like this?

She snorts dismissively. “Rubbish. That won’t last.” She frowns. “But he really shouldn’t be sending you flowers when we have an understanding.”

I stare at her. “Understanding? Don’t you know? Alina’s . . .” My words peter out. There’s too much to overcome for them to be born into the world, too much effort in creating them, moving my mouth and tongue, using my breath. This time I really do lay my head on the counter.

“Alina’s what?” demands Caro, drawing disconcertingly near to me. She angles her head to match mine. I’m close enough to see that her irises are curiously devoid of flecks or variation, a flat, uniform, alien blue. “Alina’s what?”

“Pregnant,” I manage to say, then I close my eyes. Must sleep, I think. Then—no, I mustn’t sleep, I have a plan to execute, this is all wrong, what have I missed? With a gargantuan effort I open my eyes. Caro’s face is still right in front of me. “What have you done to me, Caro?” I whisper.

She ignores me. “Pregnant?” she hisses, disbelieving. “No. She can’t be.” For once I see everything she’s thinking displayed on her face: her mind is racing down avenues, searching for alternative truths. “I don’t believe it.” Only she does believe it; I see the moment when that happens, and it’s desperately sad to watch: the outer shell falls away to reveal her awful hurt and fury and grief, laid bare for all to see, the vulnerable thirteen-year-old cruelly wounded once again. But there’s only Severine and me to witness.

“What have you done to me?” I whisper again. My eyelids are drifting closed.

“Pregnant.” I hear her almost spit the word. Then, “Pregnant,” I hear her say again, but thoughtfully this time. She’s already regrouping; the shell is already patched up and lacquered back into place. Once again, it’s admirable, if psychotic.

I try to force my eyes open again. There’s an important question I should be asking. Asking again. “Caro. What have you done to me?”

She’s gazing into the distance, but on my words she glances back at me. “Flunitrazepam,” she says succinctly. “About enough to fell an elephant. Also known as Rohypnol, or roofies. Mostly it hits the headlines as a date rape drug, but did you know that a study in Sweden found it was the most commonly used suicide drug? Lara would like to know that, I’m sure . . .” She frowns again, or maybe she doesn’t. I’m losing my ability to focus. I don’t understand what she is saying. A malicious smile crosses her face. “I know you, being such a clever Kate, must be thinking that no one will believe you committed suicide . . .”

Suicide?

Suicide. Caro is murdering me. Has been murdering me for a good while now, surely, for this drug to have taken effect to this extent. I should feel something about that, and I do, but it’s a small feeling, a tiny glowing ball of panic, smothered deep within me beneath cotton-wool layers of exhaustion and apathy. I can see what’s happening, I can see what’s going to happen, but I seem incapable of being anything other than a detached observer. The cold, hard, fear-forged Kate is gone, blasted away by mere chemicals; she may as well never have existed.

But . . . murder. How long has Caro been thinking of murder? Whilst I’ve been wondering . . . I’m not sure if I’ve said that out loud; Caro’s head turns to me, so perhaps I did speak. “I’ve been wondering . . . if we would have been friends . . . if I hadn’t been with Seb. Whilst . . .”—it’s almost funny; a gasp of a laugh escapes me—“you’ve been planning murder.” I think she stops in what she’s doing, I think her face is thrown into uncertainty for a moment, but my eyes are barely open. After a moment, they drift closed once more. I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t jumped off the wall into Seb’s arms; if I’d turned to Tom instead. How would the spider’s web have been spun then?

But Caro is talking now; I wrench my eyes open again. She is talking, though she is doing something with her glass at the same time. Washing it, I realize, and putting it away, all the while taking care not to touch it with her bare fingers. Now she is rubbing down the wine bottle with the dishcloth, still talking. “. . . But actually everyone will believe it. Even your secretary Julie was saying how you didn’t seem yourself today, how you haven’t for a while. You’ve been overcome with guilt at killing that girl, you see. It’s what they’ll say; your death will be the proof of it. There’s no real evidence to point to any one of us over another; you and I both know Modan’s case is weak, but suicide is as good as a confession, isn’t it? Then this will all go away . . . And, yes, I know you must be thinking that nobody would believe you had access to drugs. But you’ve had a drug dealer’s number stored in your phone for a good long while now. Ever since my party, actually.” She gives a small self-congratulatory smile and reaches for my phone, which is lying on the counter. She scrolls adeptly through the contacts, then pushes it in front of my face, but it’s just a blurred mess of color to me. “You really should put a security code on your iPhone, you know.”

As she speaks I realize I have to do something, and I have to do it now before it’s too late for me to do anything at all. I summon up all the strength I can to make a grab for her, but once again I’ve already missed the moment. The grab is more of a swipe really: she jumps back easily, out of my limited field of vision, and the follow-through overbalances me, tumbling me into an awkward heap on the floor. It feels good to lie down. My cheek is resting against the lovely coolness of my kitchen tiles.

I don’t move. It’s unclear to me whether I even could if I tried. I look at the tiles, at the contrast of their smooth sheen with the uneven texture of the rough black grout; I let my focus relax further, and it seems that I am buoyed up on a sea of pale ivory tiles stretching before me to the horizon.

But Caro is still talking. I’m only getting snatches of what she’s saying, though, and only flashes of vision. It’s simply too difficult to keep my eyes open, and I can’t imagine why I should be trying to. There’s something about Seb kissing her, but I don’t know when that happened: recently, or in France, or years ago as teenagers? It doesn’t matter anyway. Time is stretching out, each event like a pearl on a string, each leading inevitably to the next. Seb was Seb, is Seb, could only ever have been Seb, and in his careless affection for Caro—never enough but sometimes too much—he sparked something in Caro, who could only ever be Caro. And therefore here we are . . . but Caro is still talking, and it’s all of it about Seb, about him sowing wild oats before settling down, how he said she was the only one who understood him, who was always there for him . . .

At one point I open my eyes again and find my iPhone a few inches from my nose. I don’t think it was there before.

My eyes close again.

Something shakes me impatiently and insistently until eventually I open my eyes again. Caro’s face is swimming right in front of me; she has pulled my head up by the hair.

Perhaps she says something—her lips move, but I can’t make sense of it, and she recognizes that; she speaks again, almost defiantly, and this time I understand. “We wouldn’t have. We wouldn’t have been friends.” I see her flat eyes, the intensity within them, and deep down I marvel at it: that insistence, that passion for what she wants. I think I had that once, but the drug has wrested it from me now.

Something bangs. It takes a good while to recognize it’s my own head, lolling back on the floor after she drops it.

Time passes. Or perhaps it doesn’t. I’m an unreliable witness to life now.

At some point I become aware of Severine folding her beautiful walnut limbs fluidly to sit cross-legged beside me on the cold tiles, her eyes fixed on mine, and I feel . . . something. It takes a while to identify it, but I do: it’s gratitude. Gratitude for her continued presence. I feel it wash through me now I’ve named it. Don’t leave. I don’t say the words, but I can see she won’t: for the first time I have penetrated her inscrutability and can read what those dark eyes hold. She won’t leave me. She will never leave me. She will be here until there’s no more here for me. And now I know at long last what the point of her is, why Severine has been here all along. For this. This is where the ribbon of time has been leading for me. There should be no emotion because this was all determined a long time ago. Because Seb is Seb, and Caro is Caro, and Kate is Kate, and Tom is . . .

Tom, I want to say, but the word cannot be formed. There is only thought, and the thought of him, the dream of us that had only just begun to take form, pierces the cotton wool within me a little. Severine is speaking, gesturing at me urgently. She hasn’t done that before, but I can’t hear the words and I can’t understand what she wants. It’s too late in any case. It seems that she’s trying to pick up my phone, but she’s a ghost, bound too tightly by the ribbon of time. Material things are for her no longer. But she isn’t giving up. It’s almost enough to make me smile, if I had the ability to form a smile, the urgency with which she is trying to rally me into . . . what? Something. I don’t know.

Tom. I want another ribbon, a different one. I want us. I want to step sideways, into a time stream where Kate is Kate and Tom is Tom and neither of us are snubbed out by a pearl on the string of time. I want lazy Sunday mornings together and hectic dashes to work on the tube and holidays and home days and workdays and . . . days. I just want days. Days that start and end with Tom. Tom.

I’m slipping further away now. I can’t fight it, and Severine has stopped trying to make me. I want to tell her that I know what happened, that I can see it all now; I want to say that I’m sorry I can’t tell the world, but she knows it anyway and I don’t think she cares. That was never why she was here. She remains watchfully cross-legged on the ivory sea beside me, not moving, not leaving; forever beautiful, forever unsmiling.

I would have liked to have seen her smile.