Paula Hawkins - Into the Water

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.

‘There,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you now. I’ve helped you, haven’t I? Now it’s your turn.’

My turn. I walked back over to the wall, crouched down and picked up the nail. I turned back to face him.

‘Lena,’ he said, and I could tell by the way he said my name, by the way he was breathing, short and fast, that he was afraid. ‘I’ve helped you. I—’

‘You think that Katie drowned herself because she was scared I would betray her, or because she was scared that my mother would betray her – that someone would betray you both and then everyone would know, and she’d be in so much trouble, and her parents would be devastated. But you know that isn’t really it, don’t you?’ He bowed his head, his hands gripping the edge of the table. ‘You know that’s not really the reason. The reason is that she was afraid of what might happen to you.’ He kept staring at the table, he didn’t move. ‘She did it for you. She killed herself for you. And what have you done for her?’ His shoulders were starting to shake. ‘What have you done? You’ve lied and lied, you denied her completely, like she meant nothing to you, like she was no one to you. Don’t you think she deserved better?’

With the nail in my hand, I walked over to the table. I could hear him blubbering, blubbering and saying sorry. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he was saying, ‘Forgive me. God forgive me.’

‘Bit late for that,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think?’

Sean

I WAS ABOUT halfway there when it started to rain, a light drizzle that suddenly turned into a downpour. Visibility was next to nothing and I had to slow to a crawl. One of the uniforms dispatched to the house in Howick rang, and I put him on speaker.

‘Nothing here,’ he said over a crackling line.

‘Nothing?’

‘No one here. There’s a car – a red Vauxhall – but no sign of him.’

‘Lena?’

‘No sign of either of them. The house is all locked up. We’re looking. We’ll keep looking …’

The car is there, but they are not. Which means that they must be on foot somewhere, and why would they be on foot? Car broke down? If he got to the house and he found he couldn’t get inside, couldn’t hole up there – why not just break in? Surely that’s better than running ? Unless someone picked them up? A friend? Someone helping him? Perhaps someone might help him out of a tight spot, but we were talking about a schoolteacher, not some habitual criminal – I couldn’t imagine him having the sort of friends who would get involved in a kidnapping.

And I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse. Because if Lena wasn’t with him, we had no clue where she was. No one had seen her for almost twenty-four hours. The thought was enough to make me panic. I needed to make her safe. After all, I’d failed her mother so badly.

I’d stopped seeing Nel after the incident with my father. In fact, I did not spend another moment alone in her company until after Katie Whittaker’s death, and then I had no choice. I had to question her, given her link to Katie via her daughter, given the allegations that Louise was throwing around.

I interviewed her as a witness. Which of course was unprofessional – a good deal of my conduct over the past year could fall under that description – but once I had become entangled with Nel, that seemed to be an inevitability. There was nothing I could do about it.

It felt like grief, seeing her again, because I sensed almost immediately that the Nel from before, the one who had smiled so candidly, who had grabbed hold of me, who had bewitched me, was no longer there. She hadn’t disappeared so much as receded, withdrawn into another self, one I didn’t know. My idle imaginings – a new life, with her and Lena, Helen left contentedly behind – seemed embarrassingly childish. The Nel that opened her door to me that day was a different woman, strange and unreachable.

Guilt spilled out of her during our interview, but it was an amorphous, non-specific guilt. Nel was still committed to her work, she insisted that the Drowning Pool project had nothing to do with Katie’s tragedy, and yet she radiated culpability, her sentences all prefaced with I should have or We should have or I didn’t realize . But what she should have done, what she didn’t realize, we didn’t seem to get to. Knowing what I know now, I can only imagine that her guilt was about Henderson, that she must have known something, or suspected something, and yet done nothing.

After the interview, I left her at the Mill House and went to the cottage. I waited for her, in hope more than expectation. It was after midnight when she arrived: not entirely sober, tearful, on the edge. Afterwards, at dawn, when we were finally finished with each other, we went out to the river.