“Yup. Didn’t want to give her a chance to tell me about her latest love-life melodrama, or that Champ’s just a dog.”
“Yeah, well, she was actually trying to help. She read about all the Champ stuff online and has been trying to get in touch with you ever since. When it didn’t work, she texted me. Sal, she’s got proof that Champ couldn’t have been in Bussow Court at 4:15 p.m. on 17 June biting Tess Gavey. So, just in case the police decide that Lesley confessing to lying on tape isn’t enough, we’ve now got independent proof of Champ’s innocence.”
“What?” Sally asks. She can’t understand how any evidence exonerating Champ can have come from her sister, who was nowhere near Swaffham Tilney when Lesley bit Tess and Champ did not.
“Come to our room. I’ll show you,” says Mark.
They all hurry along the corridor, past a polished wooden table with curved legs and two trays strewn with dirty crockery and shapeless chunks of cold food, the remnants of someone’s room service.
Once inside their room, Mark jabs at his phone for a fewseconds, then hands it to Sally. There’s a photo on the screen of a text Sally remembers sending to Vicky, though she can’t remember when. Then she sees the date: 17 June—the Day of the Bite, the Day of Detective Connor Chantree coming to the Hayloft’s front door to say that a complaint had been made about Champ…
That’s right, Sally remembers now: She’d tried to have a WhatsApp chat with Vicky while she walked Champ by the lode that afternoon. She’d spoken most of her bits out loud and then her phone had converted them into text, because that was easier if you were holding a dog’s lead with one hand.
“The time you sent Auntie Vicky that message is on it, at the bottom,” Ree says. “Four sixteen p.m., see?One minutebefore Tess claims Champ bit her outside her house in Bussow Court. Read it, Mum.”
“But it just stops with a dot-dot-dot after the first sentence.” Sally frowns.
“No, you have to click where it says ‘Read more,’” says Ree impatiently. “The clue’s in the… That’s right. Good.” Corinne, reading the message over Sally’s shoulder, suddenly screams, “Fuuuuuuuck!”
“What? I don’t get what you’re all so excited about,” says Sally. “It’s just me banging on about work and this couple who wanted us to do their wedding but—” She stops as she sees it. “Oh, my God,” she whispers, barely able to believe what’s in front of her eyes.
Her message to Vicky reads as follows: “V, I can’t stress this strongly enough: don’t go to Fort Collins Colorado to stay with a man you’ve never met in the flesh. You don’t even know if he looks like his photos no not in the water my baby oh you’re a sweet babyaren’t you yes, you are you are you’re my lovely baby boy and that’s why I don’t want you to fall into the water no I don’t I don’t look let’s say hello to the ducks instead and the fact that he says you can’t stay with him in his house and he’ll put you in a hotel instead? Well, bloody dodgy! And why won’t he chat on Zoom? He’s almost definitely married.”
“I… That’s me talking to Champ in there,” Sally says, excited. “How did I… No, I know exactly how. I know why I pressed Send without checking my message for mistakes like I usually do: I was too annoyed. Vicky was being so stupid and oblivious to the obvious risks—”
“None of that matters,” says Tobes. “What matters is we’ve got those Gavey fuckers bang to rights.”
Sally is too overwhelmed to speak.
“Thank God you didn’t notice and delete the Champy bits before sending it,” says Ree. “Now we’ve got concrete proof. You were with Champ at 4:16 p.m. on 17 June, and since there’s no water and no ducks at Bussow Court, which is at least ten minutes’ walk from the lode—”
“More like twenty if you’re with Champ,” Sally corrects her.
“As you kids would know if you ever walked him,” Mark adds.
“He likes to inspect every plant we pass very thoroughly,” says Sally. “Don’t you, my babiest of boys? Yes, you do, my boy-est of babies!” Champ raises his chin to make it easier for her to stroke underneath it.
“Mum, cringe,” Tobes protests.
“Thank God for Mum Cringe,” Ree says sharply. “We can go home now, clear Champ’s name, and grind the Gaveys’ reputations into the dust where they belong—all thanks to Mum having no clue how to use her phone properly.”
Sally can feel Corinne trying to make eye contact with her. She keeps her eyes on Champ. Corinne must be wondering why Sally isn’t telling her family what she’s decided and whether she’s changed her mind in the face of this new information.
It doesn’t matter, Sally thinks to herself. There’s going to be a happy ending either way. She’s just not yet sure what form it will take.
34
Cause is often a difficult thing to determine. The cause of a person’s death, for instance, can have physical and psychological components, so it’s important to ask the question: How much of a contributing factor was the going-viral of the recording Mum made of Lesley and Tess Gavey fessing up to their wicked scheme? Or perhaps it was the response to the recording that tipped Tess over the edge—the multitudes who dropped their support for her and switched sides as soon as they’d heard her ordering Lesley to trap Mum at the Stables, take her phone from her, and destroy the evidence.
Let me be clear: When I say “tipped Tess over the edge,” I’m not suggesting she took her own life. Trust me: I know she didn’t. She wasn’t the sort who would ever have done that, and she certainly couldn’t have been shamed into it; she was incapable of feeling shame. The day before she died she was more vocal than ever on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, insisting that whatever anyoneimagined had been proven against her, she hadn’t lied about anything and that Champ Lambert, not her own mother, was the one who had so ferally mutilated her arm.
All the same, I can’t believe there’s a single person on earth whose mood wouldn’t be adversely affected by the knowledge that half the world now hates them. It’s the sort of development that might weaken an immune system considerably.
Needless to say, the name of Furbert Herbert Lambert was not mentioned by anybody in connection with Tess’s death.
Here are some of the facts about how her life ended: It happened on 29 June 2024 at 1:10 a.m., not even two weeks after the day of the bite. The coroner recorded an open verdict and said there was no doubt that she’d died of natural causes but that it was nevertheless a peculiar death that raised questions to which we would probably never know the answers.
I knew the truth, but to the rest of the world, Tess’s death made no sense. There was a fire, but the flames didn’t reach her room before emergency services arrived. Nor did she die of smoke inhalation. She was, in fact, already dead before the blaze started and was in the process of being admitted to Level 4 as the fire truck pulled up outside the Stables.
