‘I’ve got a meeting in half an hour, but yes, I guess I can take a break now. Do you want to go out and get some coffee?’
He’s already reaching for his jacket, and I think about Michael Osbourne and the way his eyes flickered over me. I think I’d prefer to talk to Rupert outside, away from any connection to Caro, so I nod and follow him back into the lift and out into the street. We enter a tiny coffee shop set back from the main street and Rupert gets us both a drink.
‘What’s all this about, Em?’ Rupert looks at me warily, and tips sugar into his coffee.
‘All these things that have been happening at home… the notes, the phone calls, what happened to Lola… I know who’s behind it.’
Rupert lets out a long stream of air, his cheeks flushing a dark pink. ‘For God’s sake, Emily, we’ve talked about this! I don’t want to hear any more about it! No one – I repeat – no one is out to get you. No one is trying to scare you away. No one has been in the house, no one is watching you. Caro is dead. Please, Emily, just leave it because I don’t know how much more I can take.’
I blink and wait for a moment, a little shocked by the way his anger rises to the surface so easily, before I pull out my mobile and slide it across the table towards him.
‘Like I said, Rupert, I know who’s behind it all. Just watch the video.’
He picks up the phone and presses play, and my voice filters out from the speaker. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I watch the emotions play out across his face as he watches the video from start to finish, the blood draining from his face as he hears me accuse Sadie of pushing Caro over the edge.
‘Oh my God.’ Rupert slides the phone back to me, his hands visibly shaking. ‘Emily, I’m so sorry. I should have believed you.’
I shrug, as if it’s not that important, but part of me wants to get up and shout, ‘Good! You should be sorry; you should have taken my word for it.’ But if there’s one thing my mother did teach me, is that it’s sometimes best to hold your tongue.
‘Caro said the same things, sometimes, you know.’ Rupert speaks again, stirring at the remains of the coffee in his cup. ‘That things had been moved, that she thought someone was following her, but there was never anything concrete, nothing solid. It was exhausting, that constant act of reassuring her. I thought it was just the same thing happening again with you. I thought you were just…’ He puts his head in his hands. ‘You accused her of pushing Caro too far?’ When he raises his eyes to mine, they are bloodshot and watery.
‘It just slipped out. She denied it, but she admitted that she’d done all those things to me. That she wanted you for herself. Well, you know what she said, you watched the video. I haven’t been lying, or making things up, and I’m definitely not going mad.’
‘I’m just a bit stunned by it all,’ Rupert says, as he takes up the phone and watches the video again. ‘Part of me can’t believe that Sadie would behave as aggressively as that – I’ve known her for over twenty years! We went to uni together, I was best man when she and Miles got married and I never realized… I mean, she said stuff when she was drunk, like the night of the Easter party but she never meant it.’
I direct him on my phone to the video message that Sadie sent to me last night, watching the shock on his face as he sees himself and Sadie on the night of the party. ‘What did you say to her, that night?’
‘She was drunk,’ Rupert says, ‘she was saying something about how it should have been her, we were a good team, something like that. She always says stuff like that when she’s pissed… I always just brushed it away as a joke. I know she’s not one hundred per cent happy with Miles, but whoever is one hundred per cent happy?’ He reaches over and squeezes my hand, as if to reassure me that this doesn’t apply to him. ‘I said something to her about how I love her, but as a friend. I didn’t tell you I saw her when you asked the next morning because I didn’t want to upset you. You were already a bit down about the fact that someone had called you Caro by mistake.’
‘You should have told me,’ I say quietly, ‘and you should have believed me.’
‘I’m so sorry, Em,’ he picks up my hand, kisses the back of it, ‘and I should have known. I should have known that Sadie would be jealous, that she would cause trouble between us. I feel like an idiot for not seeing it, for just seeing her as good old Sadie, friends for years.’
‘What do you mean? Why should you have seen it?’
I certainly hadn’t – I’d been desperate for her acceptance. I remember how I had felt that day when she’d said I was ‘one of us’, how pathetically grateful I’d been.
‘Sadie was always on at Caro… she always wanted whatever Caro had; I just didn’t realize that that extended to me. If Caro bought a new bag, Sadie would turn up with the same one the next day. If Caro was wearing a new dress, sure enough a few days later Sadie would be wearing it.’
I think back to the first time I went to Sadie’s house, how it had struck me that her furniture and
