The Woods, page 30
“What? Oh no—I’m fine.”
I lean down to lick a drop of champagne off my wrist and when I glance up, he’s looking at me. This has to be it, the moment. I reach up and brush my lips against his.
He jerks back so hard his arm hits mine and champagne spills all down the front of my dress.
“Christ, Hardy-girl,” he says. “What was that?”
My face floods with color while his pales and there’s a tic going in his cheek.
“Look, Tess, you didn’t think…” His voice trails off and I rush to interrupt.
“Ha, sorry! Too much champagne, I think. Ignore me. Forget this ever happened.” I turn to go so he can’t see my eyes filling with stupid tears and my back stays rigidly straight as I walk away, wanting him to call me back, wanting him to bloody kiss me back.
But he doesn’t and I speed up, walking through the garden, right to the back where I can hide my humiliation in the shadows of the overgrown fruit trees, still clutching my empty glass, the front of my dress sopping wet.
“Need a top-up?”
I glance back to see Sean behind me, a full bottle of champagne in his hand.
“Oh no, not you. Seriously, why don’t you just fuck off?”
He stiffens and turns away but I grab his arm. “Wait—I’m sorry. Ignore me. And yes, actually, I do want a drink.” I hold my glass out.
He stares at me with a frown on his face and I think he’s going to walk off, but then he shakes his head and half smiles. “I don’t get you sometimes.”
“Yeah? Well, I don’t get me, either.”
“I never thought they’d actually go through with it,” he says as he fills my glass to the brim. “Cheers.” He clinks the bottle against my glass and tilts it back to drink.
“Neither did I,” I admit. “But…they look happy, don’t they?”
“Do you think so? I think they’re fooling themselves.”
I frown. “Do you have to be so bloody bitter all the time?”
He looks at me and laughs. “Says the girl who just told me to fuck off.”
He sighs and takes another swig of champagne. “Everything’s just so weird—Dad’s gone, Julia’s got a new family. I haven’t…it doesn’t feel like I’ve got a home anymore.”
“Aren’t you back at boarding school next month?”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t want a home to come back to.”
I don’t tell him he could come back here. I don’t want him coming back here. Right now, with humiliation filling my veins instead of blood, I don’t want any of them coming back here.
“I guess it’s like that for you as well. Bella will be off to college. It’ll just be you left.”
My glass is empty again and the world is starting to look fuzzy. “It’s felt like it’s just me left for a while now,” I say. “Bella’s been acting so weird, spending all her time with Max and Lena and Jack.”
“You could always visit me at school—I’m not that far from here,” Sean says after a pause, filling my glass again, watching as I take a massive swig.
“Visit you? Why would I want to visit you?” It’s the champagne that makes these blunt words come out and I regret them as I see his cheeks go red.
“Yeah well, I…it doesn’t matter.”
I can see Bella talking to Max at the top of the garden, leaning in really close, a glass of champagne in her hand, Jack hovering near the band, watching them. I turn to look at Sean at the same time as he turns to me and I don’t know if it’s him or me who leans in first, but then we are kissing. But when I close my eyes, the world started to spin and I have to pull away.
I open my eyes and, for a second, he isn’t Sean, he’s Greg, and my stomach somersaults remembering the lies I told Bella.
“Sorry,” I say. “Too much. Too much champagne. But I like you too.” I sink down onto the grass, my eyes closing. Too much. All too much.
NOW
Chapter 37
I wake with vomit in my mouth, sour and bitter. I swallow it down and gag. My head feels groggy, my eyes are gritty. Just a dream, I tell myself. Just my brain warping memories. It’s not real, not the truth. But the memory, not one that’s been lost, but one I’ve tried so hard to forget, is ugly enough and my cheeks grow hot thinking about it.
She raged like fire when I said it, my lies about Greg Lewis. Raged and talked about the police and revenge and proof. She raged that it was true, all true, the rumors. Him and teenage girls—I was her proof. My lies were her proof. He was a pedophile. He was the one who killed Nicole Wallace and that other girl. She was convinced because of what I told her. What did she do? What did my sister do with the lies I fed her?
And Dad…Dad, who’s been down to the police station twice now, who had a fight with Greg, who never asks me what I remember about the night of the wedding. I always thought he was trying to protect me from remembered trauma. But what if Bella went to him, told him the lies I told her? I shudder. If Bella told him, did he go raging after Greg? No, he couldn’t have. My dad is not a murderer. But what about Bella? She was so angry. Oh God, oh God.
I look down at the photograph I went to sleep clutching, the last photo from Bella’s camera. It’s him, Greg, standing at the top of his stairs, bare-chested, looking confused and frightened, night sky in the window behind him, shielding his face from the glare of the flash.
Did she go there for me, whatever night this was captured on her camera? Did she go there for her proof, for her revenge?
I’ll have to tell all this to the detective. Tell him everything about my relationship with Greg, about Bella’s, about all the fears his own sons had about him and those two murdered girls. I’ll have to tell him the lies I told my sister and how she took me back there the night before the wedding and how she looked out into the woods and cried. How the house was empty, how he’d already gone. Oh God, I can’t. How will it look? I’m due down there this morning to answer more questions. How can I tell them all this and not have me, Dad, even Bella look guilty?
If it was Bella, if it was her who…it was my fault. I made her do it. But. But there was someone else with her, half revealed in the photographs. Who was it? Someone else knows what happened to Greg, someone else was with my sister when she went there looking for her proof.
Dad drives me to the police station and I’m silent the whole way, jittery with nerves. He parks outside and reaches to squeeze my hand.
“Did Bella tell you?” The words burst out of me.
“What?”
“Before the wedding—did she tell you about Greg and…what she believed he did?”
I look at him but there’s nothing but confusion on his face. And worry. There’s worry there too.
“Tess, sweetheart, I don’t know what you’re asking. What did Greg do?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. Sorry. Ignore me.”
“I’m scared, Tess,” he says in a low voice. “Why do the police keep questioning you? Is there anything…? You know you can tell me anything, don’t you?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I say, and he squeezes harder.
There are tears in his eyes and he looks so much older and I hate that this is happening now, the day after his wife’s funeral. I hate Greg Lewis for doing this to him.
“I know,” he says, his voice breaking. “It’s just routine, isn’t it? It’ll be okay, Tess.”
But will it? I can’t remember what happened, which means I can’t remember anything to clear my name, either. What if they arrest me? Fear squeezes me tighter than Dad’s hand clutching mine and I can’t breathe. Oh God, how can this be happening? I want to run away, run and hide somewhere with my hands over my ears and my eyes tight shut.
I take a shaky breath and pull my hand away from Dad. I force a smile. “Okay, here we go. I’ll be home soon, okay?”
“I’ll wait.”
“You don’t have to—I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
“I’ll wait,” he says again.
They take me to a different room this time, a gray room with a table and two hard chairs. They ask me if I want a lawyer present and I shake my head. I haven’t done anything—I won’t let any of them scare me. I don’t need a lawyer; I just need them to believe me. Bella takes the seat next to me, solemn-eyed and quiet.
“Okay, Tess—you’re not under arrest and you can leave at any time,” Detective Levinson says after setting up the tape recorder. “This is a voluntary interview but you are under caution—you do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Despite my determination not to be scared, my voice is wobbly.
“Tell me about your relationship with Greg Lewis.”
“I told you before—we didn’t have a relationship. I helped out in his garden. We met all of them when they moved to the village.”
“So the relationship was never sexual?”
I flinch; can’t help it. Of course, they notice. “I was fourteen when I met him—no, it wasn’t sexual.”
“But you were sixteen when he disappeared.”
“And he was forty.”
“We have witnesses who claim he had several relationships with girls under eighteen.”
I clear my throat. “Well, I wasn’t one of them.”
“Helena Rees has told us she believes he was in a relationship with Nicole Wallace, and Nicole’s father has confirmed she had a boyfriend at the time of her disappearance.”
“He knew she was with Greg? No. That can’t be right…when she went missing—he’d have told you if he knew. It was Jack she was going out with.”
“Unfortunately, he was unaware of the identity of the boyfriend. Our initial lines of inquiry at the time were that she ran away with someone. Jack Lewis had an alibi.” He pauses. “And no one came forward to suggest Greg Lewis even knew her.”
The criticism is implicit. What—does he think we all closed ranks to protect…who? Nicole or Greg? Or…I go cold. Does he think ranks closed to protect me?
“Helena also told us about a couple of incidents with her and with your sister. Inappropriate behavior.”
I clench my teeth but don’t say anything.
“Let’s talk about Rebecca Martin.”
“What? What on earth does Rebecca Martin have to do with anything?”
“We know about the recent assault, but your head teacher has also told us you have a history with Rebecca.”
I shake my head. “No, there was a misunderstanding, that’s all. I tried to help her.”
“They’ve told us you were so convinced she was being abused that you reported it to the police when you had no evidence. Why were you so convinced, Tess?”
“There were photos on her phone—that’s the only reason I took it. And I saw…I saw fear on her face. I did, I didn’t imagine it.”
Detective Levinson leans forward. “Is it because it happened to you? Or your sister?”
I lean back and fold my arms. “None of this has anything to do with—”
“Tess. We know Greg Lewis raped you.”
My hands curl into fists. “No. No, he didn’t.”
“If it’s true, if he did that, then it’s understandable if you fought back. If it was an accident, or self-defense…”
I shake my head. “No. I didn’t do anything. He didn’t do anything. I told you—I hadn’t seen him for weeks before the wedding.”
Detective Levinson exchanges a glance with the second detective in the room.
“Tess—we found his phone in your room.”
“What? You’ve been in my flat?”
He shakes his head. “In your father’s house. We had a warrant to search it.”
“But you can’t have!”
“Can you think of any reason his phone would be there?”
I shake my head. “No. Stop. Stop this. It wasn’t me.” I fumble in my pocket and pull out the photograph, crumpled and creased. “This was on my sister’s camera. There’s someone else there—my sister was in his house at night with someone else.”
There’s a pause as Detective Levinson looks at the photograph. “What does this prove?” he asks me. “You could have taken this photograph.”
I shake my head. “It was Bella’s camera. Ask Sean—he found the camera. He found it in Dean House when he was clearing out his dad’s stuff. I can barely manage to take a decent shot on my phone. Bella was the photographer.”
“Do you know who the other person in the photograph is?”
“No, but if you can find out, you’ll know…”
I stop. He’s right. The photo proves nothing.
“We were at the house the night before the wedding,” I say, and I see the detective’s shoulders stiffen. “Bella took me there. The house was empty and she was crying and looking into the woods.”
“What are you saying? Do you think it was your sister? Your dead sister who isn’t here to answer any of our questions?”
I don’t know. The way he says it—it makes it sound like I’m trying to blame Bella to get myself out of trouble. I have nothing concrete. I’ve never mentioned any of this before, not even when they questioned me after the wedding, a decade before anyone knew Greg Lewis was dead.
I listen back to my own words as a hallucination of my dead sister sits bleeding next to me and I sound despicable. I hate myself as Bella’s blood flows faster and pools around my feet.
“I want to go now,” I say, pushing my chair back. “Can I? You said I could leave anytime. Or am I under arrest?”
Detective Levinson shakes his head. “You’re free to go at the moment. But Tess?” he says as I stand to leave.
“Don’t go anywhere, okay? We’ll be talking to you again.”
Chapter 38
Dad looks as though he hasn’t moved the whole time I’ve been away when I slide into the passenger seat next to him. I see him visibly relax and it only frightens me more. He was expecting me not to come out, he was afraid I’d be arrested. The thought is huge and ridiculous but terrifyingly real. They just interviewed me under caution, so they might. They might actually arrest me for this. For murder. But I didn’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t have. But the panic keeps growing because of the little voice that keeps saying maybe I did. Maybe I could have.
“Was it…” he begins, his voice trailing off.
“When did they search the house?” My voice is raised. I can’t help it.
“The day before yesterday. You were out and…”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“I’m sorry, but the last few days, the funeral—everything’s been so traumatic, I didn’t want to worry you more.” He pauses. “And there was nothing to find, was there? Nothing to worry about.”
“Of course. It’s fine, Dad. Today was just routine, like you said. Let’s go home.” I look out of the window as I speak. I don’t want him to see the fear on my face. Who put that phone there? And where was it found? Those gaps in my memory from the night of the wedding and before. I’m so fucking scared of what’s in them.
Max is waiting when we get back to the house, his face somber. “I’ll make you both some tea,” he says. “And then why don’t you both get some rest? It’s been a tough few days.”
It’s only early afternoon, but both Dad and I take the tea Max gives us upstairs. I’m so exhausted I really do think I can sleep the rest of this awful day away. The tea is too strong but I’m so thirsty I drink it. My legs feel like lead weights and the simple task of going to the bathroom to get water seems like an impossible task right at this moment. All I want to do is sink into bed and sleep…
“Tess? Tess! Wake up.”
Max is shaking my shoulder and I struggle to open my eyes. The room is dark and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed and I frown. He’s holding Bella’s camera.
“Where did you get that?” My words come out slurred. What time is it? How long have I been asleep?
He looks at the camera in his hand. “I found it downstairs—it was on the table.”
No, it wasn’t. Unless Sean left it there…
“You had it all along?” he says.
I shake my head to try to clear it. My box of sleeping pills is open on the cabinet next to the bed, but I don’t remember taking one. I haven’t seen the pills since they went missing last week.
Once upon a time…Bella’s voice whispers in my head.
“So where’s the film?” Max asks.
I think of the photo of Greg, the last one on the film, the shadowy unidentified figure.
“There was no film in it.”
He looks at me. “Really?”
I nod, swallowing down the dryness in my throat.
He laughs and it sounds so odd in the stillness of the night, so wrong.
“I was so worried about that bloody camera. Bella wouldn’t tell us where she’d hidden it, told us she was going to take it to the police to prove…”
“To prove what?”
He smiles at me, but it’s Max the stranger, the one I met in my flat.
“Why did you do it, Tess?”
“What? Why did I do what?”
“You didn’t have to kill him. We would have helped you. Bella…all she wanted to do was help you. You didn’t have to kill him.” Max strokes my hair and I feel my eyes drifting shut, my mind drifting.
No.
That’s not right.
I need to stay awake and think.
It wasn’t me…
I didn’t…
I…
Wake up, Tess.
The words are hissed in my ear in Bella’s voice and it pulls me awake. I don’t…I’m not in bed anymore. I’m in a car and Max is driving. What? Where are we going? I can feel myself drifting again and I swear I feel Bella’s hand on my shoulder, squeezing, keeping me awake, pushing me along toward the truth. Problem is, I’m no longer sure I want to remember. Once upon a time, two girls went into the woods and only one came out. I’m less scared about getting to the end of the story than I am of finding out the beginning—why the two girls went into the woods in the first place. Did one of them do something awful, something that merits a whole story in its own right, something so terrible it never made it into the storybook, because it was too grim even for a Grimm’s fairy tale?
