He scraped the nail hard against my neck and I closed my eyes and waited for it. “You have no idea what I’ve suffered,” he said. “No idea.” Then he grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked hard, then let go suddenly so that my head slammed into the table, and I couldn’t help it. I started to cry.
Mark released me and stood up. He took a few steps back and then walked around to the other side of the table so that he had a good view of me. He stood there and watched me, and I wished more than anything that the earth would just open up and swallow me. Anything was better than him watching me cry. I stood up. I was sobbing like a baby that has lost its lovey and he started saying, “Stop it! Stop it, Lena. Don’t cry like that. Don’t cry like that,” and it was weird because then he was crying, too, and he kept saying it over and over, “Stop crying, Lena, stop crying.”
I stopped. We were looking at each other, both of us with tears and snot on our faces, and he still had the nail in his hands, and he said, “I didn’t do it. What you think I did. I didn’t touch your mother. I thought about it. I thought about doing all kinds of things to her, but I didn’t.”
“You did,” I said. “You have her bracelet, you—”
“She came to see me,” he said. “After Katie died. She told me I had to come clean. For Louise’s sake!” He laughed. “As if she really gave a shit. As if she gave a shit about anyone. I know why she wanted me to say something. She felt guilty about putting ideas into Katie’s head, she felt guilty and she wanted someone else to take the blame. She wanted to put it all on me, the selfish bitch.” I watched him turning the nail over in his hands and I pictured myself lunging at him, grabbing it and driving it into his eyeball. My mouth was dry. I licked my lips and tasted salt.
He kept talking. “I asked her to give me some time. I told her that I would speak to Louise, I just needed to get straight what to say, how to explain it. I persuaded her.” He looked down at the nail in his hands and then back at me. “You see, Lena, I didn’t need to do anything to her. The way to deal with women like that—women like your mother—is not through violence, but through their vanity. I’ve known women like her before, older women, the wrong side of thirty-five, losing their looks. They want to feel wanted. You can smell the desperation a mile off. I knew what I had to do, even though it made my flesh crawl to think about it. I had to bring her onside. Charm her. Seduce her.” He paused, rubbing the back of his hand over his mouth. “I thought maybe I’d take some pictures of her. Compromise her. Threaten to humiliate her. I thought maybe then she’d leave me alone, leave me to grieve.” He raised his chin a little. “That was my plan. But then Helen Townsend stepped in, and I didn’t have to do anything.”
He tossed the nail to one side. I watched it bounce on the grass and come to rest against the wall.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you. I will. Only . . .” He sighed. “You know I don’t want to hurt you, Lena. I’ve never wanted to hurt you. I had to hit you when you came at me back at the house—what else could I do? I won’t do it again, though. Not unless you make me. OK?” I said nothing. “This is what I need you to do. I need you to go back to Beckford, to tell the police that you ran away, you hitchhiked, whatever. I don’t care what you tell them—only you have to say you lied about me. You made all this up. Tell them you made it up because you were jealous, because you were mad with grief, maybe just because you’re a spiteful, attention-seeking little bitch, I don’t care what you tell them. OK? Just so long as you tell them you lied.”
I squinted at him. “Why do you think I would do that? Seriously? What the fuck would make me do that? It’s too late, in any case. Josh spoke to them, I wasn’t the one who—”
“Tell them Josh lied, then. Tell them you told Josh to lie. Tell Josh that he has to retract his story, too. I know you can do it. And I think you will do it, too, because if you do that, not only will I not hurt you, but”—he slid his hand into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the bracelet—“I’ll tell you what you need to know. You do this one thing for me, and I’ll tell you what I know.”
I walked over to the wall. I had my back to him, and I was shaking, because I knew he could come for me, knew he could finish me off if he wanted to. But I didn’t think he did want to. I could see that. He wanted to run. I nudged the nail with the toe of my shoe. The only real question was, was I going to let him?
I turned round to face him, my back to the wall. I thought about all the stupid mistakes I’d made on the way here and how I wasn’t about to make another one. I played scared, I played grateful. “Do you promise? Will you let me go back to Beckford? . . . Please, Mark, do you promise?” I played relieved, I played desperate, I played contrite. I played him.
He sat down and placed the bracelet in front of him in the middle of the table.
“I found it,” he said bluntly and I started to laugh.
“You found it? What, like, in the river, where the police searched for days? Give me a fucking break.”
He sat quietly for a second and then looked at me as if he hated me more than anyone on earth. Which he probably did. “Are you going to listen or not?”
I leaned back against the wall. “I’m listening.”
“I went to Helen Townsend’s office,” he said. “I was looking for . . .”—he looked embarrassed—“something of hers. Katie’s. I wanted . . . something. Something I could hold . . .”
He was trying to make me feel sorry for him.
“And?” It wasn’t working.
“I was looking for a key to the filing cabinet. I looked in Helen’s desk drawer and I found it.”
“You found my mother’s bracelet in Mrs. Townsend’s desk?”
He nodded. “Don’t ask me how it got there. But if she was wearing it that day, then . . .”
“Mrs. Townsend,” I repeated stupidly.
“I know it makes no sense,” he said.
Only it did. Or it could. At a stretch. I would never have dreamed her capable. She’s an uptight old bitch, I know that, but I would never have imagined her hurting anyone physically.
Mark was staring at me. “There’s something I’m not getting, isn’t there? What did she do? To Helen? What did your mother do to her?”
I
said nothing. I turned my face away from him. A cloud passed in front of the sun and I felt as cold as I had in his house that morning, cold inside and out, cold all the way through. I walked over to the table and picked up the bracelet, then slid it over my fingers and on to my wrist.