mentioned having been in prison, even if she didn’t say what for. But she didn’t. She lied-made up some story about wanting a change of scene and career. He knew she was a fake when she told him that.’ Mary laughs. ‘She was a healer, did you know that? What a fucking hypocrite! No loss to the world, that’s for sure.’
‘Why did Aidan give Gemma Crowther your painting?’ Waterhouse asks.
Silence. Or else they’re talking but I can’t hear them any more. When I hear Mary’s voice, I’m relieved. ‘He said they deserved each other. Gemma and the picture.’ She’s crying. ‘As if a painting’s a moral agent, as if it can deserve anything. Monday night was going to be the last time he saw her-he told me. He wanted nothing more to do with her, or me. He was going to leave Abberton with her because it seemed appropriate, he said. And then he’d be rid of us both for ever, me and her.’
‘Makes sense,’ says Waterhouse. ‘That’s why you made him lock Abberton in the boot of his car before forcing him at gunpoint to drive here. It wasn’t only about framing him for Gemma’s murder, was it? It was symbolic. You wanted to show him he couldn’t shake you off so easily.’
He’s right, isn’t he Mary? You wanted the police to find something of Aidan’s and something of yours together: his car, your painting.
Aidan knew he couldn’t shake you off. That was one lesson you didn’t have to teach him. It’s why he went to the police and confessed, as soon as he saw I was planning to involve them. Thinking about it, I’m sure he followed me that day. I told him I was going to the dentist, but I’m a poor liar. He was right not to trust me. He’d confided in me and I betrayed him. Not straight away, but eventually, when the uncertainty became too much for me. He’d been convinced I would, ever since our night in London-it was only a matter of time. And when the time came, he was ready with his official confession. It was the only way he could keep control of the situation.
He as good as sent the police straight to your house, Mary, to see if you’d tell them. If you were going to ruin his life again, he wanted you to get it over with. He was trying to force your hand. You could easily have told Waterhouse or Charlie Zailer the truth: that your name used to be Martha Wyers, that Mary Trelease was the name of a woman Aidan had killed. You could have told them about the painting in his exhibition, The Murder of Mary Trelease.
What was in that picture, Mary? I know you remember. How annoyed you must have been when you found out from your private detective about Mary Trelease’s death. You’d had, in that painting, evidence of Aidan’s crime-had it and destroyed it. How good was it, as proof? What story did the picture tell? I’m surprised you didn’t have a stab at recreating it yourself, since by that point you’d started your new life as a painter. You must have remembered it detail for detail. Did you do a sketch of it and put it somewhere safe, so that you wouldn’t forget what you’d seen and what you knew?
No answers come. No one can hear the questions going round in my head.
What was in the picture, Aidan? Nothing obvious. You’d only have risked calling it The Murder of Mary Trelease if it wasn’t too much of a giveaway. It can’t have been a painting of you strangling her in which you were recognisable as the killer-people like Jan Garner and Saul Hansard would have asked questions. So what was it?
You told the police you’d killed Mary, told them how and where you did it. But the woman you described was Martha-the woman you knew they’d find alive at 15 Megson Crescent. That was the point where you can’t have been sure. It was a gamble: either she’d tell them everything, produce whatever proof she had, or she wouldn’t. She’d say nothing. And the police would dismiss your story as the ravings of a deranged man, a man who could look them in the eye and insist that he’s murdered somebody who isn’t dead. You wanted them to think you were crazy. You didn’t want to go to prison.
You regretted telling me you’d killed Mary Trelease as soon as the words were out and you saw the horror on my face. But you couldn’t take it back, not something as big as that. You couldn’t say you were joking. I wouldn’t have believed you. I could see the state you were in. Your only hope was to turn your confession into one you knew could be disproved-disproved by the existence of a woman calling herself Mary Trelease.
As much as you wanted to protect yourself, you also wanted to confess. And you did: finally, you went to the police and told the truth. Even when you had to lie, when you had to withhold so much of the story that you ended up telling a different story altogether, you were still able to say the main thing that was true: that you’d killed Mary Trelease, that you’d strangled her in bed, in that room. It must have felt good to say it, after so many years of guilt and silence. Unburdening yourself, but with a safety net in place to give the lie to your confession-the presence of a real live Mary in the house where you told the police they’d find her body.
She didn’t tell them what she knew. That would have meant handing control over to them, and there was no way she’d do that. You saw she hadn’t done it-no detectives came back to you to ask about the other Mary Trelease, the real one. But it still wasn’t over. Martha Wyers wasn’t going to disappear; you knew how doggedly clingy she was, how determined she was to latch on to your life as if it was rightfully hers. She was still there, at 15 Megson Crescent. She still knew what you’d done. It would never have been over, not unless you’d killed her, and you couldn’t do that. You weren’t a killer. I don’t know why you killed a woman years ago, but I know you’re not a killer.
‘Me, frame Aidan? He’s a murderer-a cold, calculating murderer. He strangled a woman-he told you so himself and you were too stupid to listen.’
Martha’s right: you wanted to know if Gemma Crowther was sorry for what she’d done to me, if she’d changed. You can’t change unless you face up to what you’ve done. That’s what you tried to do in London, at the Drummond Hotel. Maybe you’d have succeeded if I’d given you the support you needed instead of letting you down.
You wanted Gemma to show you she’d changed so that you could believe that sort of change was possible. If she could redeem herself, so could you. You must have wondered about Martha, too. Yes. That’s why you told her about Gemma, about wanting to see if she regretted what she’d done. Did you hope Martha would apologise for the terrible thing she’d done to you, even while she had a gun pointed at your face? Yes. I know the way a victim’s mind works, being one myself. You can accept that someone has damaged you beyond repair, and maybe that they will again. What you can’t accept is a total absence of regret.
Martha didn’t say she was sorry. Of course she didn’t. Did you know then that you were better than her? Or did you start to wonder if anyone, any human being, was any good at all? Maybe you were as bad as Martha and Gemma-a killer who hadn’t had the guts to face up to his crime, who’d let someone else take the blame. Did you say whatever you needed to say after that to make Martha shoot you? Was it a relief when she did?
‘Which woman did Aidan kill?’ Waterhouse’s voice swims under the surface of my consciousness. ‘Mary? You said he killed a woman. Which woman?’
‘Me! He killed me!’
‘Simon!’ A third voice. Not mine. A woman’s. I have to open my eyes again. When I do, I see Waterhouse turning, Charlie Zailer at the window, Mary lunging for the gun. No…
She’s got them both now, the gun and the hammer, one in each hand. There’s something wrong with the way she’s holding the hammer.
‘Bussey’s alive, Seed’s dead,’ Waterhouse says.
I breathe in, breathe out. I think to myself that I ought to stop if I want to die. Suicide: a sin. Does it count if all you do is stop breathing, when breathing’s so hard? If there’s a God, does he have a view on that?
‘Aidan’s not dead,’ Mary says quickly. ‘If he were dead, I’d be dead, and I’m not.’
‘Put the gun and hammer down, Mary,’ Charlie Zailer says. ‘There’s an ambulance outside. This has to stop now.’
‘Aidan’s not dead! Check.’
I hear movement; then, a few seconds later: ‘She’s right. There’s still a pulse.’
Relief washes through me. There’s an ambulance outside, Aidan. Just hold on a little bit longer.
‘Stay away from me!’ Mary growls like an animal. She’s behind Waterhouse, pressing the gun against his head. Her hand is shaking, her finger wobbling the trigger. ‘I’ll kill him if you come any closer.’
