‘I found your bag.’
‘I know. Alice had it sent here.’
‘No. Not that one. Your handbag.’
I blink.
She tilts her head slightly. ‘It had your phone in it, your keys, bank cards. Everything.’
‘It was stolen. I was drunk. Marco sa—’
‘Ask me where I found it.’
I don’t want to. Suddenly I want her to go, to leave before she does some real damage. I turn away from her and pour myself a glass of water from the tap with slightly shaking hands. When I lift the glass to the light it is tinted brown like nicotine. There are bits floating in there, black flecks.
‘It was in the meter cupboard in the hall. It had been shoved right to the back, behind the pipework.’
I shrug. So?
‘It wasn’t stolen. It was hidden from you. Did Marco give you a new phone?’
I don’t answer that, so she comes around the table and stands in front of me, arms folded.
‘Do you remember what happened, Stella?’
I force myself to look at her. Her face is stone, granite. She does not smile but something softens, I think, in her eyes.
‘You lost your parents’ wedding rings. Do you remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you thought I’d taken them. Sold them. Because I was flat broke. Or because I was pissed off that you’d given my birthday party a swerve. Or because I was jealous of you and Marco.’
I’d said those things, all of them. I’d been looking for a fight, muggy-headed and restless. It was just a couple of days after her birthday party and her boxes were stacked in the hall, waiting for the shipping company to spirit them away. I’d gone to my room and upended my jewellery box onto the bed. My parents’ rings hadn’t been there. I’d grown hysterical, started pulling my room apart. I’d overturned my mattress and dismantled my bookshelf. Then I’d turned to the boxes in the hallway, the ones Carmel had carefully packed and labelled. Pulled out the contents blindly, scattering them on the floor; her clothes, her make-up, the bottle of her favourite perfume which smashed and filled the room with a dark and mossy fragrance. When she’d come home I’d been wild-eyed, shrieking. She hadn’t been able to calm me down. I’d called her a thief and worse than that I’d called her a shit friend, a parasite. I’d asked her how much she’d got for selling the story about my overdose.
‘I bit you.’
‘You did. You did. All up my arm. My cheek. I had to have seventeen stitches. When I was triaged they thought I’d been attacked by a dog. They gave me a tetanus shot.’
Of course, I remember. I called Marco. ‘Help me,’ I said, ‘help me.’ I’d been scrubbing blood out of the carpet, almost hysterical.
‘We’ll fix this, Stella,’ he told me. ‘Don’t worry. The best thing you ever did was jettison that bitch.’
‘Why are you here, Carmel?’
‘How much weight have you lost? Christ, there’s nothing to you. Sit down.’ And then more gently, ‘Sit down, Stella.’
I let her lead me to a chair. Carmel moves around the kitchen, opening cupboards.
‘Haven’t you got any alcohol here? Vodka or something? You must have something stashed away. I thought you were meant to be an alcoholic.’
I laugh, and she brightens a little. She goes to her bag and pulls out a half-bottle of brandy. Pours us a glass each, healthy measures. She clinks her glass against mine.
‘You’re no more an alcoholic than I am the Pope. Have a proper drink. I know I’ve given you a hell of a shock, and you’re about to have another, I’m afraid.’
I love the smell of alcohol, the hit at the back of the throat, the warmth blooming in your chest. I drink it in three quick swallows, and it is delicious. She pours me another, slightly smaller.
‘Do you want to do this now?’ she asks me, taking her iPad from her bag. I meet her eyes for the first time since I saw her outside.
‘I don’t know. Do I?’
She thinks for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she says.
The small screen fills with a grainy black-and-white image. It is a yard, seen from slightly overhead. A car is parked there, the back end of it just visible in the left-hand corner. It is Sadie, I know, and then the image falls into place the way an optical illusion does. It is outside our old Lewisham flat, mine and Carmel’s. There is no date or time stamp, but I don’t need one. It was the morning we left for Cornwall. Here I come into the frame, head bent, carrying my suitcase. The sun had only just begun to rise to a watery grey dawn, and my breath is visible. Here is Tonto, the neighbour’s cat, coiling round my knees, tail curved. I watch myself bend and run a hand along its spine. There’s me walking to the car and putting my case in the boot, going back through the open doorway. Moments later Marco comes out. He crosses to the car quickly, removes my case and goes back inside. It is just a moment. The entire footage is less than a minute long.
I watch it all again from beginning to end.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘The guys upstairs – their names are Drew and Ben, by the way – the cyclists. You remember they told us there had been a lot of break-ins last summer?’
‘Yes.’
We had been on the balcony, Carmel and I. Drinking wine from tumblers. The air had been dusky and smoky and just right.
‘Those bikes of theirs are expensive. They had CCTV fitted from their bedroom window. I remembered them doing it.’
She takes my hand and presses it gently between her own. ‘On the day Alice came to collect your luggage I was at the flat packing up the last of my things. I must have looked a state because I’d been crying and I was still all stitched up. Alice was very kind. Very polite. Not pushy. But she knew. She said, “Has she gone with him?”
‘“Yes,” I told her. “Looks like she forgot her luggage.”
‘“No,” Alice said, “I doubt that she did.”
‘And that was all. After she’d left I started to wonder what she meant by that. She worked for Marco, after all; she knew him better than all of us. Even you.’
There are tears standing in my eyes, shivering there. If I move they will fall, so I stay completely still and let Carmel finish.
‘After I found the CCTV, I called Alice up at work. She told me you’d been looking for photos of Marco, and, I’ll never forget it, Stella, she said, “Perhaps she is not in the dark anymore.”’
‘I’m so sorry, Carmel.’ The tears come. Thick, syrupy. I feel them drop heavily into my lap. It is as though something has fractured, some internal fault line finally shaken apart by wave after wave of shock. ‘I didn’t listen.’
‘You didn’t know. How could you? He’s a monster. Him and that quack doctor. They get off on it. Power. Control. They are very selective with their targets. They like vulnerable women.’
I wipe my nose with my sleeve.
Carmel squeezes my hand. ‘Let me tell you what Alice told me. When Marco and Doctor Wilson were at university in the eighties, two women died on their campus within a year of each other. Suicide, according to the post-mortems. One of them overdosed on Quaaludes, of all things. The other hanged herself in the basement. Both women had been involved with Marco, at least one of them romantically. Funny, huh? Funny how tragedy seems to follow him around.’