JEMMA
‘Idon’t understand why you won’t drive me to my dad’s first,’ I say. I should never have accepted her offer of a lift home, should have insisted she call a taxi to collect me. ‘Please.I need to get back to my daughter. I don’t want her to have to deal with this without me there.’
‘I keep explaining, Jemma,’ Sergeant Zailer says. ‘The officer who’s going to drive you home is—’
‘It’s not home. I don’t live there.’ Why the hell didn’t I learn to drive when all my friends did? If I had, if I owned a car and had come here in it, I could get up and leave whenever I wanted to. No one’s arrested me.
Yet.
While I’m auditing past mistakes, not fully charging my phone before coming here is right up there with the best of them. If I could talk to Lotts for even ten seconds, I’d feel so much better.
‘Right. Well, your driver’s on her way,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘And we might as well talk while we wait for her rather than sit here in silence. Are you sure you don’t want a lawyer?’
‘Are you sure you can’t remember what I said the last two times you asked me?’
‘You’re not a criminal. So you seem to believe, at any rate.’
‘Look, youknowI didn’t do it. When was Marianne killed? Around 5.30, right?’
‘Maybe,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘Though if you were to ask the police doctor … Apparently it could have been earlier from a medical point of view. Quite a bit earlier.’
She wants to make her meaning clear, though she doesn’t state it directly: by ‘earlier’, she’s suggesting I might have killed Marianne before coming here.
‘DS Kombothekra told me the murder happened between 5.20 and 5.30. And I was here then, talking to you and your weird husband.’
‘Right. But … that isn’t the “get out of jail free” card you seem to think it is.’
The wordjailis one I definitely didn’t want to hear. My brain feels slow and heavy, clogged with clumps of solid terror.
I can’t go to prison.What if Lottie doesn’t believe me when I tell her I didn’t do it?
I have to make sure she does, that she’s in no doubt.
What I really need is to be able to think, uninterrupted, for at least an hour. Not much chance of that.
Marianne is dead. She’s dead.
I can’t seem to convince myself it’s true.In 2012, when Paddy and I found her lying white-faced on her kitchen floor, blood leaking from the wound in her throat, I had to work to convince myself in the opposite direction. I found a pulse, but she was lying so still, and I was more convinced by the appearance of death than by the slow beat beneath the skin of her wrist.
This time she’s really dead. Unkillable Marianne. And I have no idea if my life has been saved or ruined.
‘If you really didn’t kill her, or get Tom Tulloch to kill her, then someone else did it and we’ll find out who,’ Sergeant Zailersays. ‘Try not to worry too much, but … you need to be realistic. Do you know how rare it is for someone to be murdered at the very moment that someone else, someone who wants to murder them, is confessing to nearly having done it at the exact time that it was getting done? Blimey.’ She smiles. ‘I don’t want to have to repeat that sentence, so I hope you got the gist. Point is: even if it wasn’t Tulloch, you’re going to fall under heavy suspicion. How does anyone know you didn’t hire someone else to do it instead?’
‘But … that would make no sense. If I’d decided to go through with it, why the hell would I come here and tell you all about it?’
‘Great question,’ Sergeant Zailer says in a flippant tone. ‘Anyway, last I heard, no one’s been able to get hold of Tom Tulloch. I wonder why that might be.’
DS Kombothekra must have told her about Tom, because I certainly haven’t. ‘If you’re suggesting Tom did it—’
‘The thought did cross my mind, yeah.’
‘There’s no way,’ I tell her. ‘Not without me giving the go-ahead, and I didn’t. Also, I never told him today was the day.’
Someone knew, though. Dad? Paddy? Not Ollie, surely.
Yes, Ollie’s possible too, if Marianne told him all about my laptop diary, and she might have. His name’s all over that file, on nearly every page, and she loves nothing more than creating drama.
Loved. Past tense.
