In A Dark, Dark Wood Part 31

As I run, pictures shoot through my head, sudden flashes, like a landscape illuminated by lightning.

Clare, in her wellies, slipping quietly out of the house in the early morning to send those texts from my phone, from the point in the forest where reception kicked in, leaving her footsteps in the snow for me to find.

Clare waiting until Nina was safely gone, and then driving off into the dark to what? To park quietly in a lay-by, and wait for James to bleed to death?

Clare her face white in the moonlight, stiff with shock, as I burst out of the forest in front of the car, screaming at her to stop, let me in.

She stamped reflexively on the brakes, I scrambled into the pa.s.senger side. As I slammed the door, she glanced at me and James, both without seatbelts, and then, without trying to explain, gunned the engine and stamped on the accelerator.

For a second I didn't understand. She was steering towards the tree that loomed out of the darkness.

And then I realised.

I grabbed for the steering wheel, my nails in her skin, wrestling for control of the car and there it goes blank.

Oh G.o.d, I have to get to the road before she does. If she parks across the foot of the track and cuts me off, I'm lost.

Everything hurts. Jesus everything hurts so much. But the pills that Clare gave me have one silver lining: they've taken the edge off enough to allow me to keep going, combined with my own fear and adrenaline.

I want to live. I never knew how much until now.

Oh Christ, I want to live.

And then suddenly, almost without realising it, I'm at the road. The forest path spews me out onto the tarmac, so fast that I stumble, trying to slow down enough to stop myself shooting into the path of a car. I stand there, hands on my knees, gasping and panting, and trying to work out which way to go.

Where is Clare?

I can hear a noise, I realise, the growl of an engine as it shoots over potholes and around bends. It's not far off. She's almost at the foot of the drive. And I can't do it I can't run any more. I've pushed my body beyond what it can do.

I have to run, or I will die.

And I can't. I can't. I can barely stand let alone put one foot in front of another.

Run, I scream inside my own head. Run, you f.u.c.king waste of s.p.a.ce. Do you want to die?

Clare's car is at the road. I see the blaze of her headlights just round the bend, lighting up the night.

And then there's a horrendous, screaming squeal of tyres, and a bang like nothing I've ever heard. There's shrieking rubber, and the screech of metal, car on car; a sound that seems to echo for ever in the forest tunnel, shrill in my ears. I stand, my eyes wide with horror, staring towards the sound of the collision.

And then silence just the hiss of a radiator venting into the night air.

I cannot run any more. But I manage to walk, my legs shaking. I have lost my flip-flops and the tarmac must be cold as ice but I can't feel anything.

In the stillness I hear the sound of sobbing gasps, and the crackle of a radio. Then, with a suddenness that makes me jump and almost stumble, the trees are illuminated by a ghostly blue, flickering like flames.

One more step. One more. I force myself on, round the bend towards whatever has happened.

But before I get there I hear a voice, a shaking female voice. She's speaking into something a phone? But as I get closer I see it's a police radio.

It's Lamarr. She is standing by the open door of her police car. There is blood running down her face, black in the flashing blue lights of the emergency siren. She's speaking into the radio.

'Ground control, urgent message.' Her voice is shaking, there's a sob in it. 'Request immediate a.s.sistance and an ambulance, to the B4146 just outside Stanebridge, over.' She's standing there listening to the crackling reply. 'Roger,' she says at last, and then 'No, I'm not hurt. But the other driver look, just send the ambulance. And a fire crew, with ... with cutting equipment, over.'

She sets the radio carefully down and then goes back to the other car.

'Lamarr,' I say, croakily, but she doesn't hear. My limbs are so heavy I don't think I can go another step. I hold myself up on a tree by the side of the road. 'Lamarr ...' I manage, one more time, my voice a shaking thread against the hissing of the engine and the crackle of the radio. 'Lamarr!'

She turns and looks, and then at last I let my knees give way, and I kneel on the cold, snow-wet tarmac, and I don't have to run any more.

'Nora!' I hear through the fog. 'Nora! Christ, are you hurt? Are you hurt, Nora?'

But I can't find the words to reply. Lamarr is running towards me, and I feel her strong hands beneath my armpits as I collapse onto the road, holding me, lowering me slowly to the ground.

It's over. It's all over.

34.

'NORA.' THE VOICE is gentle but insistent, tangling in my confused, restless sleep like a hook, dragging me back to reality. I know the voice. Who is it? Not Nina. It's too low for Nina. 'Nora,' the voice says again.

I open my eyes.

It's Lamarr. She is sitting on the chair at the edge of my bed, her dark eyes wide and bright, her shiny hair smoothed back from her sculpted forehead.

'How are you feeling?'

I struggle up against the covers, and notice that she's wearing a neck brace incongruous against her silk tunic.

'I came past yesterday,' she says, 'but they shooed me away.'

'Are you in the hospital too?' I croak. She pa.s.ses me water, and I gulp it gratefully. She shakes her head, her heavy gold earrings swaying gently.

'No. Walking wounded I got sent home from Casualty yesterday morning. Good thing really, my kids hate me being away overnight. The littlest one is only four.'

She has children? This information feels like a peace offering. Something in our relationship has changed.

'Am I-' I manage, and then swallow and start again. 'Is it over?'

'You're OK,' Lamarr says, 'if that's what you mean. And as for the case, we're not looking for anyone other than Clare in connection with James's death.'

'How's Flo?'

I'm not sure if I imagine it, but it feels like a shadow flits across Lamarr's face. I can't put my finger on what changes, her expression is as smooth and calm as before, but there's suddenly a presence in the little room, a dread.

'She's ... holding on,' Lamarr says at last.

'Can I see her?'

Lamarr shakes her head. 'She's ... she's with her family. The doctors aren't permitting any visitors right now.'

'Have you seen her?'

'Yesterday, yes.'

'So she's worse today?'

'I didn't say that,' Lamarr says, but her eyes are troubled. I know what she is not saying. I know what she's skirting round. I remember Nina's words about paracetamol overdoses, and I know that the destructive ripples from Clare's actions have not yet stopped, even now.

Of everything Clare did, I think that was the cruellest. What she did to James, what she tried to do to me, at least she had a reason. But Flo Flo's only crime was loving Clare.

I don't know when Flo began to realise the truth when she started to put two and two together about the text Clare asked her to send from my phone when I arrived at the house. It was innocent enough: James, it's me, Leo. Leo Shaw. I don't know what Clare told her something silly, I expect. A hen-night prank.

The first inklings were probably when Nina spilled the beans about my past with James; perhaps she began to wonder why Clare, of all people, would want to stir things up again. Then when Lamarr started asking questions about phones ... and texts ... she must have realised that something was wrong.

I don't suppose she guessed the truth or not at first. She tried to see Clare in the hospital, but they wouldn't let her. Clare was too ill, and the police weren't keen on the witnesses at the B&B visiting the hospital anyway; Nina said she'd had to fight like a tiger to see me, and then only after they'd gone over her statement a hundred times. And Clare at that stage was still feigning confusion and semi-consciousness, waiting to see what transpired with me and Lamarr, I suppose, before 'waking up'.

No. Flo stayed at the B&B, fretting, and wondering, and unable to ask Clare about what to say. She lied. She tripped herself up in her lies. She wondered what she'd done, what she'd set in motion. She started to doubt Clare's motives. She got desperate.

'Do you know?' I ask, swallowing hard, trying to push away the thoughts of Flo lying somewhere up the corridor, struggling for life. 'Do you know what happened? Did Clare tell you?'

'Clare's too ill to answer questions,' Lamarr says grimly. 'At least that's what her lawyer says. But we've got enough to piece the case together. Between what you told us, the tox report on the drugs Clare gave you and, most importantly, Flo's statement, we've got enough. She never did phone the ambulance, you know.'

'What do you mean?'

'From the house. When James died. There was no record of her ever trying 999. That should have tipped us off, but we were too busy looking elsewhere.' She sighs. 'We'll need to take a formal statement of course, when you're well enough. But we can worry about that another day.'

'I thought it was Flo,' I say at last. 'When I found Clare's jacket, with the sh.e.l.l in it. I thought it was Flo's jacket. I thought she'd changed the sh.e.l.ls. I just couldn't work out why Clare would do such a thing she finally had what she wanted, the perfect life, the perfect fiance. Why would she throw that all away? It was only when I thought about the text, really thought about it, I realised: James never called me Lee. She didn't make that mistake twice. But I should have realised.'

'She did it before, you know,' Lamarr says. Her rich voice is like a soft, warm blanket around the coldness of her words. 'Or a variant. It took us a while to dig it up, but there was a professor at her university. He was sacked for sending inappropriate emails to undergraduates, implying that they would get better grades if they slept with him and that there might be penalties if they told anyone. He denied it throughout, but there was no doubt that the students did receive the emails, and when his machine was raided, they were there in the deleted folder, all of them, although he'd made a clumsy attempt to destroy them.

'It seems pretty clear now that Clare was involved, although at the time no one ever suspected her. She wasn't one of the students he was emailing. But a few weeks before he had raised concerns with her that one of her papers was plagiarised, threatened to take it further. Of course in the ensuing furore the accusation was forgotten but one of his colleagues remembered him discussing it. She said she'd always wondered ...'

I shut my eyes, feeling a single tear trace down the line of my nose. I don't know why I'm crying. It's not relief. I don't think it's even grief for James any more. Maybe it's just fury and frustration at the waste of it all, anger at myself for not realising sooner, for being so stupid.

And yet, what then? If I had noticed? Would it have been me, lying with my guts splattered across the blond wood and the frosted gla.s.s?

'I'll leave you,' Lamarr says softly, and she gets up, the plastic leather of the chair creaking. 'I'll come back tomorrow with a colleague. We'll take your formal statement, if you're up to it.'

I don't speak, I only nod, with my eyes still tight shut.

After she's gone there is silence, broken only by a soap theme tune filtering through the wall. I sit and listen to it, and to the breaths I draw in and out of my nose.

And then, into the middle of the calm, there's a knock at the door.

I open my eyes at once, a.s.suming it's Lamarr come back, but it's not. There's a man outside. For a second my heart flip-flops, and then I realise it's Tom.

'Knock-knock,' he says, putting his head around the door.

'Come in,' I say. My voice is croaky.

He shuffles inside. His expression is diffident, unsure of his welcome. He looks pale, and far from the groomed urbanisto I'd met just a few days before. His checked shirt is crumpled and has some kind of stain on it. But I can tell from his expression that I must look even worse myself. The black eyes are fading to yellow and brown, but they're still shocking if you haven't seen them.

'Hi, Tom,' I say. I pull the hospital gown up, where it's slipped down my shoulder and he smiles, the stiff, frozen smile of someone whose social graces have temporarily deserted them.

'Look, I have to get this off my chest,' he blurts at last. 'I thought it was you. I mean there was all that stuff about your past with James, and then when the police started on about your phone and the texts, I just a.s.sumed ...' He trails off. 'I'm ... I'm very sorry.'

'It's OK,' I say. I gesture to the chair beside the bed. 'Look, sit down. Don't worry about it. The police thought it was me too, and they weren't even there.'

'I'm so sorry,' he repeats, with a crack in his voice, as he sits awkwardly, hugging his knees. 'I just ... I never thought ...' He stops, and then sighs. 'Do you know, Bruce never liked her. He loved James. I mean, really loved him, even though they had their ups and downs. But he never had much time for Clare. When I rang him last night and told him everything that's happened he said, "I'm shocked, but I'm not surprised. She never stopped acting, that girl."'

We sit in silence for a while as I ponder Bruce's words, the judgement of a man I've never met on one of my oldest friends. And I realise he's right. Clare never stopped acting. Even as a small child she was acting a part, the part of a good friend, the part of the perfect student, the ideal daughter, the glamorous girlfriend. And I realise, suddenly, that perhaps that's why I found it so hard to reconcile the Clare I knew with these other people. Because she was a different person to each of us. What will happen to her, I wonder? Will a jury convict anyone so charming, so kind, so very, very beautiful?

'I wonder ...' I say and then stop.

'What?' Tom asks.

'I keep thinking, what if I hadn't said yes? To the hen night, I mean. I so nearly didn't come.'

'I don't know,' Tom says slowly. 'Nina and I were talking about the same thing last night. The way I see it, you weren't the point of all this. The point was James. You were just the icing on the cake.'

'So you mean ...' I'm silent, working it out, and he nods.

'I think if you hadn't been there, it would have been one of us instead.'

'It would have been Flo,' I say sadly. 'She sent the text, after all.'

Tom nods. 'It wouldn't have been hard for Clare to twist the truth a bit, start saying she was afraid of Flo, that Flo was jealous of James, acting irrationally. The worst thing is, we'd probably have backed her up.'

'Have you seen Flo?' I ask.

'I tried,' he says. 'They aren't letting anyone in. I think ... I'm not sure ...'

He trails off. We both know what he's not saying.

'I'm going back to London tonight,' he says at last. 'But it would be great to keep in touch.' He fishes in his wallet and pulls out a thick, glossy card, embossed with Tom Deauxma and his mobile and email.

'I'm sorry,' I say, 'I don't have a card, but if you've got a pen ...'

He holds out his phone and I type my email address into it and watch while he sends me a blank email.

'There,' he says at last, standing up. 'Well, I'd better get on the road. Take care of yourself, Shaw.'

'I will.'