Jane Renshaw - Watch Over Me

I’d do anything to keep her safe .

It was Alec’s voice in her head and as waves of loss rushed through her they brought him, they carried him to her and she was screaming in her head at him to fight, fight , even as she knew it was over, his fight was over, Alec’s fight was over except in this one way, in this one thing, in the strength that he had always given her.

She pushed herself up, got herself to her feet, shakily, a hand on Caroline’s shoulder, and straightened. She stood straight and said, ‘Yes. Yes. To incriminate me – That’s why they – they strangled him. If they’d used a knife or a gun, the pattern… the forensics would clear me, because there’d be no blood on me, but… Using a chain to strangle him with, there’ll be nothing to clear me, and I touched it –’

‘Whoa. Let’s just call the police and ambulance, first off, and then –’

‘We can’t call the police,’ she said, quite calmly, ‘because they’d arrest me. And how would Beckie even begin to cope with that? Her mum arrested, and taken away from her, for killing her dad?’

‘God’s sakes! Of course they won’t arrest you. Their number one suspects are going to be the Johnsons, obviously –’

‘Not if they’ve set up alibis again. And they will have. They’re going to arrest me because I spent two years in a Young Offenders’ Institution – when I was twelve I killed this girl, and they’re going to go into all that and they’re going to find out I’m Rachel Clark and I was there right after Saskia was murdered.’

Caroline was gaping at her.

‘We can’t call the police because I will be their number one suspect.’

For a long moment Caroline didn’t speak. Then:

‘Okay. Okay.’ She was frowning off. ‘Right. We have to think. We have to not panic. What are we going to do?’

Flora stared at her. ‘I don’t know.’

Caroline’s eyes widened. ‘Wait a minute though! The CCTV! The CCTV will show the Johnsons getting into the house, won’t it?’

‘Yes! Yes, it’ll show the Johnsons –’

Leaving Beckie in the kitchen, where she was happily arranging the contents of Caroline’s kitchen on the table into their food groups, Flora and Caroline left the flat and ran down the street to Number 17.

With her hand on the front door, Caroline stopped. ‘What if they’re still here? Did you check the house?’

Flora shook her head. There had been no space in her brain for anything other than the huge, impossible fact:

Alec’s dead .

Caroline grimaced. ‘But I guess they’re not going to be hanging about, are they? We’re probably safe enough.’ She pushed open the door and headed through the vestibule and up the stairs. ‘Get the CCTV footage up. I’m going upstairs to – look at him, okay? To check…’

Flora just stood in the hall as the waves pounded her, the waves, the tsunami of Alec’s dead, Alec’s dead, Alec’s dead .

‘Flora? Get into the study and get up the footage for today. Fast-forward through it and check the Johnsons are on it, right, then we’ll call the police. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter what the police find out about you. If the Johnsons are on camera breaking in to the house today, that’s them banged to rights.’

In the study she breathed him in. The pine shower gel he used and that faint outdoorsy botanist’s aroma that he must pick up from spending hours in the lab around plants and soil. On the desk were a glass of water, the glass filmy from not being washed between refills; a mug, a plate, his untidy piles of paper.

How was it possible? This morning she’d been asking him to get fruit and double cream for dessert, and now she was standing here having to look at CCTV to try to get evidence against his murderers?

How could that be?

She didn’t sit down in his swivel chair, she stood with her palms flat on the desk as the computer booted up.

When Caroline appeared she was staring at the screens, at the beautiful summer’s day flashing past her eyes, like a time-lapse sequence in a nature programme on BBC 2. Trees shivering in the breeze. Birds shooting like bullets across the endless blue of the sky. Shadows moving, on the different screens, across the sandstone of the house, across rippled panes of Victorian glass, across the expanse of the glass doors.

Was he alive then – or then? Did he look out of the window and see those birds flying past? Was that when they were putting the chain round his neck, when he was fighting to stay a part of the life he could maybe see through the bedroom window, going on, just as normal, rushing on past as his time stopped, all at once and forever? There it was in front of her, his time flying past and then at one moment – maybe then , as a cloud crossed the sun, or maybe then , as a leaf flipped up in the breeze – coming to a stop. Reaching its limit. And then that and that , all the moments afterwards happening without him, without his ever knowing about any of it, second after minute after hour after day after year.

‘Got them?’ said Caroline.

‘What?’

‘Are the Johnsons on there?’

She shook her head.

‘Fuck.’

The camera angled towards the street had captured a stream of humanity, vehicles, cats and dogs and birds, but from Flora and Beckie and Caroline leaving in the morning until their return, no one had approached the house, at either the front door or up the drive to the side.

As she shut down the screens, Flora was conscious, in a distant part of her brain, of Caroline looking at her.

‘I didn’t do it,’ Flora said flatly.

‘God’s sakes, I know that! It’s just weird that the cameras didn’t pick them up. They must have come in a window that wasn’t covered, I guess.’

There wasn’t any such window. Alec had made sure, in his thorough, nerdy way, that every single window was covered. But:

‘I suppose so,’ she said.

‘Let me have a look.’

While Caroline checked from screen to screen, Flora stood, numb, staring at her back, at the pink sweatshirt she was wearing.

‘Okay,’ said Caroline. ‘Every door and window is showing up on here except one – the window in the kitchen, the one over the sink. I guess because the obvious way for someone to break into that room is through the glass doors.’

‘Oh.’

‘They must have got in through that window. But we’d better look and check.’

The family room was full of warm afternoon sun. It bounced off the grey granite worktops, the never-opened jars of artisan pasta shapes and coloured pulses on the slatted shelves above, and the shiny white porcelain of the sink, pristine and gleaming.

The window above was intact.

There was no broken glass, no grubby footprints, nothing knocked over.

Caroline was frowning. ‘That’s weird. Is it still locked?’

Flora approached the sink and peered at the window catch. ‘Yes.’

‘Fuck. So how did they get in?’

‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly it was impossible to stand up any more. Flora pulled out a chair from the table and sank onto it. The table was tidier than usual, with just a couple of plates and glasses on it, and one of Beckie’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. And there was Flora’s missing phone on top of the book. Alec must have found it somewhere. Down the back of one of the sofas? On the bathroom windowsill? In a kitchen drawer? She’d never know now.

She’d never know.

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know . Alec…’ She got to her feet. ‘I have to – Alec –’ She had to go to him.

Caroline caught her arm, so tight it hurt. ‘We don’t have time. You obviously need to call the police, but first we have to think this through. If no one’s been caught entering the house on the CCTV since you left, and the only window not covered by it is fucking locked , the police are going to look at the evidence and see no suspects except you . The Johnsons have set you up good and proper, Flora.’