Lasting Damage (50 page)

‘Let’s hear the hunch,’ said Simon.

Sam looked cornered. He sighed. ‘I didn’t like her at all. She seemed . . . This is going to sound unforgivably snobbish.’

‘I forgive you,’ Charlie told him. ‘Embrace your inner snob – I did, a long time ago.’

‘She seemed stupid. Ignorant, but thinking she knew it all – that was how she came across for most of the interview. The sort of woman who imagines she’s making a brilliant impression when actually everyone listening to her thinks she’s a bigoted idiot. She came out with some classic self-righteous lines: “I live in the real world, not fantasy land”, “No one pays me to worry about murders” – that sort of thing. Quoted herself a lot, too: “I always say”, followed by some pearl of non-wisdom or other.’

Charlie laughed. ‘God, Sam, you’re such a bitch!’

Sam’s face coloured. ‘I’m not enjoying this,’ he said.

‘Go on,’ said Simon.

‘She had fixed ideas about herself, kept telling me what sort of person she was. “Two things about me,” she said, and then she listed them. The first was loyalty – if she was on your side, then she was on your side for ever.’

‘How tedious,’ said Charlie. ‘The people who bang on about their own loyalty are always the first to turn vicious if you send them a birthday card late.’

‘She told me she wasn’t “an imagination sort of person”,’ said Sam. ‘Seemed proud of it, too. She’d just got back from staying with her sister in New Zealand. From what she said, it was clear she’d spent her time there criticising her sister’s life choices and flaunting the superiority of her own – completely insensitive. But then there were times when she seemed to know exactly what I was thinking – sensitive to the point of tele-pathy. She was inconsistent.’

‘Some people are,’ Charlie felt obliged to point out.

‘I know,’ said Sam. ‘That’s what I told myself. But then she said something else, about Selina Gane’s passport photo, something that struck me as . . . wrong. Gut instinct, before I’d had a chance to think about it, even. I knew I’d heard something that jarred as soon as she said it, but I couldn’t work out what it was, not for ages. Then last night it came to me. She was talking about the woman who pretended to be Selina Gane and tried to put 11 Bentley Grove up for sale. “She was clever,” she said. “She knew all she had to do was talk about people not looking like they do in their passports. If she made me think about all those other people, she wouldn’t have to convince me – I’d do all the work myself.” ’

‘So?’ said Charlie. ‘What’s the problem there?’

Simon was nodding, infuriating know-all that he was. He couldn’t possibly understand what Sam was getting at. Could he?

‘Maybe no problem.’ Sam sighed. ‘That’s why I kept quiet about it.’

‘What might or might not be the problem?’ Charlie rephrased her question, rolling her eyes at his annoying humility. ‘I’m not asking you to commit to its problematicness – just tell me what it is.’

‘What do you think Jackie meant when she said that the woman knew she’d do all the work herself?’ Sam asked.

‘She knew Jackie would immediately think of all the friends’ passport photos she’s seen that have looked nothing like them,’ said Simon. ‘All the times she’s asked, “Is that really you?” ’

Sam was nodding vigorously.

‘The weight of your own experience always feels like solid proof.’ Simon directed the comment at Charlie. Did he think she was lagging behind? ‘Jackie’s subconscious reminds her that in all the cases she, personally, has come across, without exception, the implausible photographs
were
of the people in question, however unlike them they looked.’

‘That’s exactly right.’ Sam sounded relieved. ‘Whoever she was, this woman didn’t so much lie to Jackie as invite her to lie to herself: to think beyond the specific issue of the picture in Selina Gane’s passport to what she knew to be the norm in the generic situation: that
no one
looks much like their passport photo, and yet that
never
means it’s not a photo of them. It means it’s a bad likeness, that’s all.’

Charlie thought she’d grasped it. ‘So you’re saying this woman deliberately invoked one of Jackie’s firmly ingrained assumptions . . .’

‘One of her firmly ingrained
personal-experience-based
assumptions,’ Simon amended. ‘Those are always more powerful: I once met a gay man who had a high-pitched voice, therefore all men with high voices are gay. A group of Asian teenagers once stole my handbag, therefore all Asian teenagers I meet from now on must be criminals. Our minds are reassured by patterns that repeat and repeat: whenever X is the case, that means Y is also the case. That’s what Jackie Napier meant: that the woman was banking on her mind, all on its own, finding that familiar groove and slotting into it – no passport photos look like their subjects, yet all passport photos are, nonetheless,
of
their subjects.’

‘So Jackie was right,’ Charlie concluded. ‘Liar Woman was clever.’

‘She might or might not have been, but that’s not what matters.’ Sam looked worried again. ‘It’s Jackie’s cleverness I’m concerned with. When she told me, in passing, that this woman knew she would do all the work herself, she was making a point that was quite profound, quite subtle – a point we’ve just taken several minutes to unpack, and we’re three pretty intelligent people. Sorry.’ Sam blushed as he apologised for having awarded himself praise he perhaps didn’t deserve. ‘She was demonstrating that she understood and could sum up, far more succinctly than we just have, exactly why the deception had worked so well. That level of instinctive understanding of something so complex would be way beyond a hell of a lot of people. It’d be way beyond someone with the – sorry, this is going to sound terrible – with the hackneyed, below-average mindset she seemed to have the rest of the time.’

Simon downed the dregs of his pint, slammed the glass down on the table. ‘There’s no doubt that Jackie Napier’s clever,’ he said. ‘She’s also an expert liar. If you’re bright, it’s almost impossible to present yourself as the opposite – much harder than for an evil person to present himself as good. It’s not only the attitudes you express that are different, it’s the speech patterns, the sentence structure, vocabulary, everything. But she very nearly pulled it off. If she hadn’t said that one thing, you’d have been convinced.’

Sam nodded.

‘You were privileged,’ Simon told him. ‘She must have thought highly of you. For you, she pulled out all the stops and produced the biggest lie she’s ever told or is likely to tell. She told you she wasn’t an imagination sort of person. Wrong – that’s precisely what she is. She’s an imagination person, but with no conscience, no empathy, very little fear, hardly any awareness of her own limitations.’

Charlie felt a shiver pass through her. The description was too familiar; other names sprang to mind.
Names of monsters
.

‘Jackie Napier’s the sort of person you wish had no imagination at all,’ said Simon.

Chapter 23

Saturday 24 July 2010

‘I can’t breathe,’ I gasp. Kit’s pressing the knife too hard against my throat. ‘You’re suffocating me.’

‘Sorry,’ he whispers. He’s buried his face in my hair. I can feel his tears wetting my neck. He takes the knife away, holds it in front of my face. It shakes in his hand. His other arm is round my waist, holding me in place, pinning my arms to my sides. No way I can get away from him; I’m not strong enough.

The knife’s serrated blade gleams silver.

Images flash through my mind: a teapot, chocolate cake, a plastic beaker with a lid, the blue and pink hourglass dress.

It’s our knife, from Melrose Cottage. I last saw it on a wooden tray, beside my birthday cake.

Why didn’t I think that Kit might be here already? How can I have been so stupid? New tears prick my eyelids. I blink, try to hold them back. Try to think. I can’t die now, can’t let Kit kill me. Can’t let my own recklessness turn me into a news headline. People will hear the story of what happened to me and say, ‘It was her own stupid fault’.

‘Don’t be scared,’ Kit says. ‘I’m coming with you. Do you really think I’d make you go alone?’

Go
. He’s talking about dying.

‘We’ll go together, when we’re ready,’ he says. ‘We’re in the right place, at least.’

When we’re ready
. That means not yet. He’s not ready yet, not ready to kill us both – I cling to this shred of hope.

‘Who was the dead woman I saw on the virtual tour?’ I make a vow to myself: I might not live through this, but I won’t die until I know. I won’t die in ignorance.

‘Jackie Napier,’ says Kit.

No. That’s not right
. Jackie was alive on Tuesday. She walked into the room Kit and I were in. Said to Grint,
I don’t know where you got her from, but you can put her back. I’ve never seen her before in my life
.

‘It wasn’t Jackie . . .’ I start to say.

‘It was,’ says Kit. ‘She wasn’t dead, but it was her.’

She wasn’t dead, but it was her. She wasn’t dead, but it was her
. Horror prickles my skin, like the thin legs of a thousand tiny spiders, all over me. I can’t make myself ask if the blood was real. Don’t need to. I know the answer.

I think of Mum asking what woman in her right mind would ruin a lovely dress by lying in red paint. Jackie Napier’s mind must have gone badly wrong.

‘She was lying in blood that didn’t belong to her,’ says Kit.

She still is
. If you strangle someone to death, they don’t bleed. ‘Whose blood?’ I gasp, bile rising in my throat. I can smell Kit’s sweat, his desperation – a hard, rotten smell. As if his body’s accepted that it will die soon and is making preparations.

‘You have no idea how much I hate her,’ he says. ‘And I hate myself for hating her.’

But not for killing her
. ‘Jackie?’ I say

‘She’d have done anything for me . . .’ The rest of his sentence loses itself as loud sobs shake his body.

When he’s quiet again I ask, ‘Why did you kill her?’

‘Because I. Had to.’ His breathing is uneven. ‘There was no happy ever after for me and her. There’s no happy ever after for me and you, not now that everything’s happened the way it has. It’s left us no way out. We have to be brave, Con. You said all you wanted was to know, and I want to tell you. I’m sick of the loneliness of knowing and not being able to tell you.’

Terror twists my heart. I don’t want him to tell me, not yet, not if killing me’s what comes afterwards.

I stare at the shaking knife. Even if I could concentrate on it hard enough to make it fall out of his hand, I still wouldn’t be able to struggle free. I try to make myself believe that DS Laskey will come in time. I told her the address, told her there was a dead woman here. She might have her doubts about my story, but she’ll come anyway. She’ll want to check.

One dead woman. Not two. Please not two
.

‘I’ll look after you, Con,’ Kit says. ‘Jackie said she’d
take care
of you, but she didn’t mean look after. She meant “take care of” in the other way. There’s something wrong with that, don’t you think? That the same words can mean both?’

Words. I hear them, but they don’t seem to work. They don’t translate. What’s he saying?

I can smell death. Decay, decomposition. How is that possible? How long ago did Kit kill Jackie Napier? How long before a dead body starts to smell? She was still warm . . .

‘What did she say about me?’ I ask.

‘She was going to kill you, Con.’ Kit weeps into my hair. ‘I couldn’t have stopped her, not without . . . doing what I did.’ He kisses the back of my neck. I clamp my mouth shut to keep in the scream that’s ringing in my head.

‘I killed her to save you,’ Kit says.

Chapter 24

24/7/2010

Charlie had finished her pint and needed another one, but she knew that if she went to the bar, she’d miss too much and struggle to catch up; that was her – what had Simon called it? – her firmly ingrained personal-experience-based assumption. The other two seemed to have forgotten that there were thirsty bodies attached to their brains; Charlie tried to do the same.