She remembered with cold clarity the look he had given her when she’d left the Old Bailey nine months ago a free woman. She had seen him at the kerbside, standing apart from the heaving press and protestors, alone and static. Their gazes had locked, just for a fraction of a second, as Roger had shepherded her into a taxi. He had nodded his head, the cynical expression in those odd eyes unchanged, the same expression they’d held throughout her trial. She knew then that he was still unequivocally convinced of her guilt.
And now he was here, outside her safe house, shattering the anonymity she and Roger had so painstakingly constructed. She stood frozen, almost dizzy with tension and watched him study each window in turn. Could he sense her? Hear the ragged sound of her stressed breathing through the walls?
She wanted to scream, howl, cry, rip her skin from her own bones in utter desperation. How had he found her? Had Jessie Flynn betrayed her trust? Had she? No, Carolynn was sure not. Jessie had looked horrified at lunch when she had asked her if she’d tell DI Simmons where she and Roger were living. And besides, they were friends now. Genuine friends.
Carolynn held her breath as his gaze lingered on the bedroom window, on her motionless form, though she was sure that he couldn’t see her. A tense balloon of air emptied from her lungs as he moved around to the side of the house. He must have switched on a torch, because she saw a disc of light moving in jerky arcs across the bedroom’s side window, reflecting off the ceiling above her head. The torch beam moved away and she caught glimpses of it tracking across the ceiling of the landing, the bathroom across from her and Roger’s bedroom. Thank God that she had locked her car inside the garage, so that he couldn’t see it, take down her registration number. One small mercy. The torch moved back to the front of the house and then disappeared, switched off.
The sudden clang of the letterbox made her cry out. She clamped a hand over her mouth, sure that he must have heard her. But a moment later he was crossing the road to his car, casting a last look over his shoulder at the house, before climbing into the driver’s seat.
Carolynn remained at the window for a few minutes more, staring at the blank space where he had parked, too stressed and upset to move. She couldn’t let herself be thrust back into the public eye again, stomach the leering accusations, the vicious online trolling, being chased down the street by perfect strangers, pushed, slapped, spat at. No. She had to protect herself.
30
Jessie felt almost as if she was lying on the floor of a planetarium, the view of the sky and stars was so all-encompassing through the bed and breakfast bedroom’s picture window.
She had laid out the shells she’d collected on the carpet in an identical pattern to the way she’d arranged them on the beach, a perfect heart, each half of the heart, seven shells – lucky seven – each half an identical mirror image of the other.
A perfect heart, to signal love.
She’d forced herself to use her damaged left hand without respite this time, moving every shell with her unresponsive fingers, fashioning the heart’s perfect curve and checking its symmetry, checking seven times, the heat from the electric suit hissing and snapping with each frustration and disappointment, falling with each minor triumph. Pathetic, she knew, but she refused to switch to her right hand and be done with it.
Sitting on the floor, cross-legged like a school child, her gaze found Gemini, her birth sign. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt lonely. Lonely and guilty. Una Subramaniam had left a standing invitation to pop down and have a drink with her and ‘him downstairs’, but she didn’t feel like engaging in polite chitchat. Retrieving her mobile from her handbag, she climbed into bed, leaving the curtains open so that she could still see the sky, and dialled Ahmose’s number. Though she hung on for a full minute, picturing him shuffling stiffly from his reading chair in the sitting room to the phone in the hallway, the ringtone continued, unbroken. Where was he? He was hers, the one entirely reliable, unchallenging constant in her life, as she tried to be the same in his. He was her port in a storm and she felt unreasonably upset that he had gone somewhere without her.
Who else should she call? Callan? Her mother? She had argued with Callan and then cut him off and she had let her mother down a week before one of the most important days of her life. God, I’m such a cow. Would either of them want to speak with her? Because she knew that Callan was right. The need to behave self-destructively was like a parasitic organism that had burrowed itself under her skin, an organism that was hell-bent on goading her into wrecking everything that was good, everything she loved.
She had dealt with many patients who displayed self-destructive behaviour, from negative thinking that trapped them in a downward spiral, leading them to become anorexics, bulimics, over-eaters, self-harmers, alcoholics, drug addicts … Why was she refusing help from people who had her best interests at heart, people who loved her?
31
Nine months ago, after the collapse of the trial, when she and Roger had decided to run, they had both wanted to come to the Witterings, where they’d spent some of their happiest times as a family holidaying, and more importantly where people would least expect them to go to ground – the location of Zoe’s murder. The place itself, a seaside holiday destination, had worked in their favour too: crowded and anonymous in summer, shuttered and battened down in winter. They had changed their surname, bought
