I sit back in my seat, my spine almost collapsing under the weight of what is dawning on me.
Logan lied. He lied by twisting things. All of those things happened, but the way he told them, wrote them down – obviously to be read by someone else at a later date – was designed to make me look bad. Make me look terrible.
Logan lied. Did he get the idea from the court records, when he saw how easy it was to make one thing seem another? He has painted me as aggressive, moody, sexually abusive, emotionally terrifying. Slowly, carefully, Logan Carlisle has reshaped me in the twisted image of his mind’s eye.
Logan lied. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that he lied because he wanted to get me. No, actually, he wanted to ‘get’ Serena Gorringe, and to do that, he had to go through Verity Gillmare.
Logan lied. And it’s worked. I am here. Arrested for GBH with intent. Facing charges for being a controlling abuser, backed up by a mountain of evidence that proves I could have done it. Looking closer and closer to being sent down for a crime I didn’t commit.
Logan lied. He seduced me, he fooled me, he sucked me into his world.
Logan lied. And unfortunately for me, all his lies are true.
serena
Now
He’s there again.
As we approach the court, I see him standing a little way away from the entrance, wearing a grey suit, speaking into a mobile phone.
Sir.
Him.
Marcus.
My sharp intake of breath, an audible gasp when I see him again, causes Evan to look at me. ‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I manage through stiff lips. ‘Fine. Fine,’ I reply, despite my trembling hands. ‘I’m perfectly fine,’ I add, despite the fact my heart has stopped beating and I can feel the blood solidifying in my veins.
I turn to my husband, yank a smile across my numb face.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Evan says. He says this even though Darryl Palmer told us that it’s unlikely she’ll be let out because now she is being charged with coercive control and GBH with intent. This hadn’t sounded as bad as attempted murder until Darryl Palmer explained it carried the same sentence of life imprisonment as attempted murder. And they were probably charging her with that because it was so difficult to prove attempted murder. As well as the attack, they are saying she abused him and they have evidence. Diary entries mostly, but other corroboration from the conversations he had with various people. I know she wasn’t abusive, but they’re going to make an example of her. I know they are. Just like they made an example of Poppy and wanted to make an example of me.
We climb the cream-grey stone steps of the court together, knowing that it’ll just be the two of us today. At our insistence, Conrad is staying at home to revise. I don’t want any of this to impact his A-Levels and his chances of college. We asked Faye and Medina not to come. I haven’t told my mother yet, but I will today, no matter the outcome. I wanted to spare her this awful trip down Memory Lane for as long as possible. We enter through the revolving doors into the gloom of the building and I want to run back outside. I want to find out if that really was him. Obviously it can’t be him. But why is his doppelganger here? Twice now.
‘Do you want to go and find out when we’re up? I just need to get some fresh air,’ I say to Evan.
‘You do look a bit queasy, are you OK?’
‘Yes, I’ll be fine. Being outside should sort me out.’ I walk quickly to the exit, not wanting him to get away.
The magistrates’ court is a huge, grey-yellow concrete box that sits on a hill in a part of Brighton that always seems barren. The road it’s on has a couple of newsagents, dry-cleaners, and a takeaway but they all seem to be greyed-out, dull and under-used, as if they need to look that way to fit in with the area. At the bottom of Edward Street is a maze of roads that snakes you around to all areas of Brighton, there is a patch of green, there is a stand for the cream-and-red buses, there are dozens of people moving here and there, but this place, this area, seems to have had the life sucked out of it.
I exit the court and look both ways, seeking him out. He is leaning against the far side of the building, no longer on his phone, but holding a cigarette and staring hard at the pavement.
My whole body reacts to seeing him properly: my knees buckle, as my chest and stomach violently contract.
It is him.
But him from all those years ago. He hasn’t aged, he doesn’t look the sixty-odd he would be now. He looks like he is in his thirties, like he was back then. I move down the steps, determined not to let my body, my shock, stop me from speaking to him. As I approach, he stops leaning against the wall and stands upright, then takes another quick drag from his cigarette before he discards it with a flick of his forefinger and thumb.
Once I’m in front of him, and he is standing at his full height, he towers over me.
I haven’t planned what I’m going to say, so when I stop in front of him, nothing leaves my mouth, not even the smallest of squeaks.
‘I’m not him,’ he says in lieu of my words. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost, but I’m not Marcus Halnsley. Everyone says I’m the spitting image of him, but I’m not him.’
‘Oh, ohhhhh.’ My entire soul relaxes. It’s not him, he isn’t haunting me, his doppelgänger isn’t stalking me. It’s just a huge coincidence. Not that I believe in coincidences.
‘You’re Serena, aren’t you,’ he states. He sticks his hands in his pockets and looks incredibly uncomfortable, as though he is being forced to do this.
Immediately, I take a step back, put distance between us before I ask in a shaky voice: ‘How do you know that?’ I take another step back. Away. Ready to run for it.
This is not a good situation to be in. I know all of a sudden that I should not be talking to this man. And he shouldn’t know my name.
‘I’m not Marcus. But I am a Halnsley. My name’s Jack. I’m Marcus’s son.’
serena
Now
I don’t really know what’s just happened.
My mind is reeling and I’m not taking much in. But like Darryl Palmer had warned us, she wasn’t let out. Verity will stay in prison until the trial.
I can’t take any of this in properly, though, because of the man outside. His son. I knew about him, of course; he’d used his son to make me feel sorry for him, but I had put him well out of my mind. So much so it didn’t occur to me when I saw him the other day that it could be him. Jack Halnsley.
‘I’m an amateur genealogist,’ Jack Halnsley explained, looking like he wanted nothing more than to be dragging deeply on a cigarette. ‘I’ve been researching my family, starting off with my dad, for about fifteen years or so. The Ice Cream Girls thing came up straight away, of course.’
I took another step back at that point because I wasn’t sure if the affable persona and demeanour he was currently presenting could switch at any moment. ‘It was all over by the time I was old enough to be searching and my mum’s not exactly forthcoming about anything to do with my dad. So I set up alerts on my computers to let me know if ever your names came up again.
‘It did ten years ago when Poppy Carlisle was released from prison. I live in Birmingham. I actually went down to London to where it said she used to live and found that she’d moved. I chickened out at that point. I’d found out what your married name was by trawling through various records, and had an alert set up for your name. And your surname. Your daughter’s name came up to do with this case.’