Lie With Me (32 page)

‘Starting with Jasmine, tell them about the truck, the T-shirt. Tell them about the lye.’

‘What lie? There have been so many.’

‘Tell them you told me to buy the lye to cure the olives.’

She wrinkled her brow. ‘What is lye?’

‘It is sodium hydroxide,’ Gavras said with a small bow.

Alice gave her head a short, baffled shake.

‘And that you told me to mend the truck,’ I went on. ‘That’s why I was inside the shed, that’s why I touched the spanner, and the bandana. I don’t know how they both got into the well – someone must have put them there to frame me.’

Alice’s hands gripped each other in front of her stomach. Her eyes were empty. ‘If I wanted the truck mended, why would I ask you?’

‘Because you knew I once had a job as a car mechanic.’

‘Did you?’

She was staring at me, and the air turned to ice.

‘I told you I had. Remember . . .?’

‘A genuine mechanic?’ she said.

I felt a dark uneasiness, a tremor on the surface of my skin.

‘The T-shirt,’ I said slowly. ‘The one from Zeus nightclub, the one you hated. Can you tell Lieutenant Gavras that I had it in London a few weeks ago? You saw me wearing it.’

Her tongue darted across her lower lip. Her fingers still clenched, she rolled her palms together.

‘What T-shirt, Paul?’

‘The one from the nightclub in Elconda. “Let Zeus blow your mind”.’

I saw her chest move as she exhaled slowly. ‘The one you were wearing the night Jasmine went missing?’

‘Yes. Yes. That one. Tell him you saw me wearing my one in London.
Tell him
.’

She glanced over her shoulder. Gavras moved his weight from one foot to the other, lifted his chin.

‘I wore it under my jumper and showed you in your bedroom in Clapham – that night. You remember. It was a joke. “Let
me
blow your mind.” ’ I lowered my voice. ‘Don’t you remember? You said you hated it. You took it off me. We had sex.’

She shook her head.

‘Alice.
The T-shirt.
’ I could feel every sinew in my face stretching, the air against my teeth. It was my last chance,
her
last chance. ‘Why won’t you tell him?’

As she pulled down the corners of her mouth, shaking her head, a chasm opened in my chest.

Only Alice could have taken my T-shirt; only she could have put it in the well.

I thought about the expression on her face, down at the pool, before we knew what Gavras had found. How quickly she had got to her feet. How close to fear her shock had seemed. It was because she already knew Jasmine was there. For days, listening to every crack and churn of the diggers and drills, she’d been expecting it. When she saw Gavras standing in the shadow of the tree she knew what he’d found. She’d been
waiting
.

‘Oh, Alice.’ I sat down suddenly on the hard bench. ‘You know who killed her.’

She turned, made for the door. One of her ballet pumps slipped off her heel and she ducked down to secure it. The leather was bent and soft, concertinaed. Her fingers fumbled. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You’re covering for someone, aren’t you? Oh, Alice. Just as you’re covering for Louis too.’

She faltered, looked towards Gavras, and then back at me. I didn’t have much time. I said, ‘Was it Yvonne? Or was it Andrew? How can you let them think it’s me? What are you doing? You know I had nothing to do with Jasmine’s death.’

She hesitated. Gavras opened the door and was halfway out, beckoning for her to follow.

Her shoulders were shaking. I thought she was crying, but she wasn’t. ‘Can I have a minute alone with Mr Morris?’ she said to Gavras.

She and Gavras conferred; the whisper of their voices, then the door clicked shut. She crossed the room to the bench and crouched down, her mouth next to my ear.

‘You had
everything
to do with Jasmine’s death,’ she said.

She shuffled even closer, pressed her chest into me to support herself, our cheeks brushing together. ‘In Giorgio’s the night Jasmine died.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The cruel things you said about Florrie.’ She rocked back on her heels. She was speaking calmly now. ‘If you say things like that, if you are that horrible a human being, it has an effect; it has consequences. I had been feeling better. Andrew and I – we’d got into conversation with that French couple. For a few seconds, I’d let myself forget my grief. And then you – YOU. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t stay any longer. Andrew begged me not to leave, or to let him drive me, but I had this feeling I had to get out, to get away from people . . . Any people. I . . . I shouldn’t have been driving. I was drunk, I was crying. I couldn’t see straight. I wasn’t fit to drive. ’ She was gritting her teeth. ‘And it was because of you that I did. So yes, you are to blame, you did have something to do with Jasmine’s death.’

A long silence.

‘Do you
feel
it?’ she said. ‘Do you
feel
it now?’

‘
You
killed her,’ I said. ‘You killed Jasmine.’

She studied me, as if she were considering whether to respond. ‘It was an accident,’ she said almost conversationally.

‘All these years – ten years – you’ve sat at Yvonne’s side. You knew her daughter was dead. You let her suffer. I thought you believed in truth and honesty. I thought you were good.’

She didn’t answer. Her back stiffened and she stood up, stretching out the back of her legs.

‘Guard,’ she called.

I stood up to face her. ‘And now you’re
framing
me. Me. Does our relationship mean nothing?’

She looked straight into my eyes. She wasn’t whispering now, but her voice was low and there was a hard, cold tone in it I had never heard from her. ‘Of course it means nothing. Do you think I felt anything for you? Ever? I’ve had to put up with your absurdly inflated sense of your own looks, your snobbery and sponging. Your affected little French phrases, your desperate made-up stories. Why would I be interested in a loser like you? I did it all for Florrie, but I actually hate you. You are a loathsome, self-centred, self-satisfied human being. You deserve everything I’ve done to you.’

I felt so winded I could hardly get the words out. ‘I was in love with you.’

‘You can’t have been in love with me.’ She pushed her mouth so close to mine I thought she was going to kiss me. ‘Because you have no idea who I am. You never bothered to find out.’

I looked into her face, at her pinched narrow cheeks, her pale green eyes, the scar that defaced her upper lip. I thought about her orgasm the day they’d found Jasmine: it hadn’t been sexual release, it had been
relief
. I thought about my tenderness towards her, how I had stroked her damp hair, how much I had longed not just to be with her, but to
be
her, and my stomach turned.

And then she was re-tying the jersey around her neck and straightening the lapels of her shirt over it and turning for the door in order to knock and be released.

I said: ‘This doesn’t end here. When I explain what you’ve done . . .’

She didn’t bother to lower her voice. ‘Who do you think people will believe, Paul? Who do you think people have
ever
believed? You? Or me?’

And then the door opened and she was gone.

AFTER

Chapter Twenty-three

They moved me to the mainland that evening. The journey was tortuous and hot, the police van airless with small tinted windows, the road nauseatingly twisted. I remembered it from the bus: all the braking and accelerating, the rattling, the serpentine doubling back. This time I didn’t sleep. My thoughts churned as did my stomach. On the six-hour ferry crossing to Patras I vomited several times, first in the toilet, then later, when I was too sick to move, where I sat, attached to my police minder, over myself, on my coat, in my hands.

Gavras had stayed behind in Pyros. He told me before I left that I was to be held in pre-trial detention, which could be as long as six months to a year. I was formally accused of the rape of Laura Cratchet and the murder of Jasmine Hurley, and at the last minute, of a third crime – the physical assault of another female, one Greta Muller, the hippy from Epitara. As a proven danger to society and as a flight risk, I was refused bail. The investigating judge had prepared the cases against me. No translation was available at this stage, though in Athens, this would be rectified. Gavras portrayed Athens as the Promised Land. I would have a larger cell, with the company of other felons. I would be visited by the British consul. An English-speaking lawyer would be appointed. He shook his head, a small smile on his thick lips. ‘He will listen to the ridiculous claims you persist in making against Mrs Mackenzie and will advise you accordingly.’

I had been allowed one phone call. Michael answered his mobile in the garden. I could pick out the pattering sound of a hose; the rattling snarl of a distant lawnmower, the scrambled cries of children. I filled him in as quickly as I could. He listened without interrupting, made no comment except to ask exactly where I was being taken and to assure me he would be on a flight to Athens the following day. I wept when I hung up. It was just hearing his voice, the realisation that I was a long way from Beckenham. An English summer afternoon: I think I already knew it would be a long time before I saw another one of those.

The ferry docked in Patras at dawn. I felt the cool of the early-morning air through a crack in the van door. I was given a bottle of water that tasted of hot plastic, a small packet of dry biscuits, but no clean clothes. We drove for about half an hour and then the van stopped. The back door opened and two other men were thrown in – one blond with muscles bulging from a vest T-shirt; the other dark-skinned and wiry. They sat, staring at me with open antagonism, probably because I smelt of vomit. It was my first experience of other felons, of the constant suspicion, the threat, the incipient violence. I’m used to it now. I’ve learnt wiles of my own, to keep my distance. At that point I was still naive. The wiry prisoner had cigarettes. I could see the packet lumped in his T-shirt pocket. I was desperate enough, using sign language, to barter my Vans.

He folded up the flip-flops he’d been wearing and stuffed them into his back pocket. He put on the Vans – they were far too big. He handed me a single fag, not the whole packet, and made an aggressive gesture, neck extended, face in mine, when I tried to protest. I sunk back, barefoot, into my seat and they ignored me after that. I didn’t care. I was numb, devoid of emotion, and any sense of self. All I could do was try to make sense of the events that had taken place ten years ago, and of the previous six months; all I could do was sift and sort things that had happened, searching for reasons and explanations.

Alice filled my head. Her lopsided smile, the habit she had of fiddling with her hair. Alice cooking supper, on the phone to colleagues, in bed with me. This Alice had killed Jasmine. This Alice, the Alice I had fallen in love with, who was she? All this time, she’d known where Jasmine’s body lay, and lied and concealed, and plotted. It was unimaginable, and yet her face in mine in the police cell – the way she’d almost spat her words. I didn’t know her. I had no idea who she really was. She’d been right about that – I’d projected on to her the attributes I desired. And everything fitted. She had killed Jasmine, run her over in the truck. Drunk. Upset. And then she’d panicked, hidden the body in the well at the edge of her own property. (With Andrew, or without him?) And then how clever she had been, to involve herself in the search, to stick close to the investigation, to Yvonne. Was it supposed to be just the night at first, and then become a week, and then a month? Did it snowball? Become an addiction?
For ten whole years
? The campaign, the ball, the benefits, the fund-raising – why? How had Tina put it?
Alice has to be in control. Without her in the driving seat everything goes wrong.
It must have been a way of masterminding the operation, diverting police attention, keeping Yvonne in her thrall. It kept the case alive too – and why would she have done that unless deep down she wanted Jasmine found? Closure: how many times did she use that word? But for the poor grieving mother, or for herself?

Was it a coincidence meeting me at Andrew’s dinner? Already hating me for Florrie, blaming me in her twisted way for Jasmine’s death, did she see her chance to use me, to set me up for the killing? How clever she had been, if so. The redevelopment of the land would have unearthed the body. She needed a suspect. I thought back to how courted I felt that night, how flattered. She came into the garden to find me. She cadged a cigarette; her first and last, choking it back. The tactic worked, though. She got my attention.

All the time I thought I had been playing her, she’d been playing me. She’d dangled the promise of a next stage, but never clinched it. She’d offered a holiday at Circe’s House and then withdrawn it. It was all hints and delay, and hard to get. I’d been manipulated. It was the chase that made me keen. It was
not
being invited to Pyros that had made me determined to come. And then, once I got here, squeezing me into the boot of the people carrier, making me feel like a spare part, when all along I’d been the
main
part. All the acting and the smokescreens, the cooked-up hysteria about ‘sightings’; I thought I was a witness to someone else’s drama, when all along I was the star of her show.

How beautifully I had played the role she had written for me. Every one of my failings worked in her favour. My arrogance, my greed, my need to prove my own virility, my tendency to show off. My cheesy stab at seduction with the T-shirt – she must have been thrilled with that; it was the clinching piece of evidence she needed. And getting me into the truck, where she’d left the spanner and the headscarf: how easily I’d taken the bait, wanting to please her, convinced by my illusory sense of superiority that I might be able to fix it. Wonderfully underestimating my own incompetence, I had fiddled, left my DNA where she needed it, on the spanner, on Jasmine’s cotton bandana – all she had to do was move them into the well.