“Yeah, when she was a baby,” said Lesley. “When they’re tiny and their little buttocks are so pink and round and perfect, it’s so tempting to bite into them, isn’t it? Don’t tell me you never did that, Sally, and drew blood by accident.”
“I have never, ever done that,” said Mum. “No one does it, just like no one but you embeds their teeth in their teenage daughter’s arm in the hope of… What? Ruining our lives? Why? What did we ever do to harm you?”
“Nothing. You’re right,” Lesley sobbed. “Ree’s been a bitch to Tess at school, but—”
“Only after Tess bullied her for months.”
“—you and the rest of the family have done nothing to deserve it. Champ did nothing to deserve it. I’m so sorry, Sally. You have to believe me. I’m so mortified, I truly am! I wish I’d never suggested it or done it. Look, please don’t tell anyone.Please.I’ll contact the police tomorrow, say it was a different dog and that we made a mistake—”
“No. Not good enough,” said Mum. “No lying about made-up dogs. You’ll tell the police the truth: that you lied. And that Alastair and Tess lied too.”
“Alastair didn’t,” Lesley whispered, with a glance over her shoulder up the stairs. “He believes the story. Sally, you’ve got to help me. I think I…really need help. I’m in pieces here.”
“Why not ring and tell the police right now?” Mum suggested brightly. “I’m sure someone will be awake in a police station somewhere. It’s never too late, or early, to do the right thing. Go on, why not ring now, while I’m here?”
“I don’t understand why I do half the things I do, Sally.” Lesley put her head in her hands. “I just feel so worthless sometimes, like no one gives a shit about me, and I—I lash out, you know? At whoever’s there. You and I could have been friends when we both moved to Bussow Court, couldn’t we?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mum.
“There’s something about you, Sally,” Lesley rambled on. “You’ve got this quality that you probably don’t realize you have. You’re so lucky and so…special, in a way. Blessed. From the day we first met, when I came to view—”
“Shut up, Mum,” came a voice from above Lesley’s and Mum’s heads. “Stop talking right now.”
I pulled back a little when Tess first appeared at the top of the stairs, where I was also hovering. Silly, really, since she couldn’t see me. Nor did she see me the time before—three days ago, on 17 June—when I was last at the Stables and in her bedroom…
What’s that? Are you wondering why I was in Tess Gavey’s bedroom? (Ha! Of course you are, because I invited you to do so.) Look, I wasn’t planning to interrupt this key scene with a confession, but I’d quite like to get it over with now that I’ve started.
The truth is that however much Lesley Gavey likes to scream ather daughter when she’s feeling powerless and petulant, which is often, she wouldn’t have furiously chomped into Tess’s arm in the precise, lifelong-scar-creating way it was chomped into, namely, with an unquenchable lust for the raw meat of revenge.
For weeks before the Day of the Bite, I’d felt the danger-heralding hum of what Lesley intended to do to Champ vibrating in my veins. It drew me over to the Stables, where I found Lesley excitedly telling Tess the plan and how likely it was to work. I saw and heard the two of them giggling and plotting, agreeing there was no better time to take the toothy plunge than right at that moment. I fully agreed and, in my righteous rage, allowed myself to get carried away; I threw my full force into Lesley’s mouth muscles and into that bite. The degree of wounding that followed—the agonizing, gruesomely disfiguring kind—wouldn’t have happened without my participation.
Immediately afterward, while Tess lay screaming and bleeding on the floor of her room, I thought, “Lawks a mercy!” which is something Granny sometimes says. I’d been too impulsive and knew I’d messed up. I couldn’t bear the possibility that I’d sealed Champ’s fate in the worst possible way, when all I’d been trying to do was punish his enemies. What if he was about to be judged more harshly by the police when they saw the severity of Tess’s injury? In Level 2, we’re constantly warned to be wary of Level 3 motivations creeping into our thinking, and I’m normally good at spotting them when they try to take hold, but I completely missed it this time.
“My mum didn’t bite me,” Tess told Mum, looking down from the top of the stairs. Despite being nearly eighteen, she was wearing a red all-in-one baby-jumpsuit affair with buttons all the way downthe middle. “Your dangerous dog bit me, and he’s going to have to come back here at some point and face up to what he’s done. You all are.”
“Your mother’s just admitted it was her and not Champ,” Mum said.
Tess rolled her eyes. “Duh. Because she’s scared of you, obviously. She’d say anything. She’s probably worried you’ll strangle her to death or something. Maybe it’s not only the Lambert dogs that are violent psychos. Maybe the human Lamberts are too.”
Silently, I willed Mum not to succumb to the rage that must have been thumping inside her and to stick to the strategy. It was a good one, and our best bet. She just had to keep it constantly in mind.
“Lesley?” she said. “Anything to say?”
“Tess is… It’s true what Tess just said.” Lesley was busy wiping away her tears with the toweling belt of her robe, now undone. “I was scared. I told you what you wanted to hear.”
“See?” Tess gloats down at Mum.
“I’d imagine you get quite a lot of that, Sally,” Lesley muttered. “You can be very intimidating, whether you realize it or not.”
“Well, I suppose we’ll have to let our online audience decide who’s right and who’s lying, then,” said Mum. “Luckily, they’ll soon all be able to hear every word of who said what.”
I exhaled with relief when I heard this key line, flawlessly delivered. This was the plan; we were on track. Still, it was hard not to feel as if we’d had a setback. Lesley’s confession followed by her repudiation of it felt like an amazing gift withdrawn. I reminded myself, and hoped Mum was doing the same, that we hadn’t in our wildest dreams expected any of the Gaveys to admit to anything.That had been a bonus, of which we had retained a significant part: the recording. That had been Corinne’s idea. “She’s never going to admit it,” Mum had protested, and Corinne had sensibly said, “It doesn’t matter. Every time she opens her mouth she reveals what a baddie she is, and she’ll certainly say something, probably lots of things, which we can then share far and wide. And if there’s really nothing on the recording, you can always delete it later—but I can’t think of any good reason not to record, just in case. It’s so easy to do.”
Mum pulled her burner phone out of her bag and said, “Shall we have a little listen? A preview?”
Please let the sound quality be top-notch, I prayed.Please, Ricky.I’ll never ask you for anything again.
Mum happened to rewind to the perfect bit—assuming it wasn’t an instant intervention from Ricky that made her choose that particular point to press Play, which I for one believe it might well have been—and we all listened to the voice of Lesley Gavey say, “I never meant to bite Tess so hard. All we needed was a few little tooth marks to be able to say it was Champ.”
