‘There’s someone else too. Ellie. An old girlfriend. She died.’
Carmel’s eyes widen.
‘Here, at the house. Jumped off a cliff into the sea. She’d been taking the pills too.’
There is something unravelling within me, like a thread drawn rapidly from a spool. The more I talk the faster it comes loose. And what will happen when it does? What then?
‘Just after your dad died I had a job offer in New York. I didn’t tell you about it because I didn’t take it. I was so worried about you; you couldn’t be left alone. I didn’t mind the sleepwalking, or the crying, or the melancholy. I expected that, I think. I didn’t even mind that you were stealing my Valium because I could see how upset you were, how raw. But after the overdose something changed. It was Marco, the way he looked at me when I was leaning over you on the sofa, trying to wake you. He looked so angry, like he might hit me. He wanted to be the one to find you, Stella, to save you. Then you would be indebted to him. Bound to him.’
‘I didn’t take an overdose.’
‘I know that now. He’d put something in your drinks. He was doing it to you for months.’
I remember the night of her party. How I’d woken disorientated and naked and sad. It had ruptured things between us, Carmel and me. Not irreversibly, that was still a little way off. But the damage was deep.
‘I’m going to take you home now, Stella,’ Carmel says softly, squeezing my forearms with her long fingers. ‘You can come with me to Paris and live in the cupboard under the sink.’
I laugh. She grins at me.
‘You know I’ve met someone?’
‘No! Who? What’s his name?’
‘Her name is Zita and she’s been showing me all the most beautiful parts of Paris. You’re going to love it there, Stella.’
‘You look happy.’
‘I am.’
We look at each other in that moment with something akin to wonder, as if we can’t really believe we’re sitting opposite one another, as if it’s been years rather than weeks.
‘You didn’t sell the stories? The photos?’
She shakes her head slowly. ‘Never. And I’m betting the same person who did also hid your bag and took your parents’ wedding rings. All the better to turn the screw, am I right?’
I nod miserably and look down at my ring finger. I’m still wearing his ring, the one he said had belonged to his grandmother. I slide it over my knuckle and place it on the tabletop. It comes from Penang, he’d said. That’s in Malaysia. I know where Penang is, dickhead.
‘Now I want you to listen to me. Get your things. You need to get away from here. It’s poi—’
The knock at the door is loud enough to startle us. We exchange glances, wary, frightened, and then I remember. Frankie. I am filled with a mixture of thrill and treachery, my heart rising into my throat, blood hot and restless. Once we have broken the lock we cannot go back. I will have to go up into that dark, airless space and reveal what he has been hiding from me. All this time.
‘It’s Frankie,’ I tell Carmel. ‘He’s going to help me get into the room upstairs.’
‘You know the tale of Bluebeard’s wife, Stella?’ Carmel is asking me as I am hurrying towards the door. I don’t answer and later I will wish I had. It will be the last thing she ever says to me.
Chapter 32
Just before I open the door I turn and look over my shoulder. I cannot shake the feeling that something is creeping up on me. I unlatch the front door. ‘What took you so long?’ But it is not Frankie.
‘Hello, Stella.’
Marco. He stares at me flatly. His knuckles are bloodied and raw-looking, his nose a bright-red pulp. A bib of blood stains his shirt. I can’t speak. I feel like my throat is plugged with cotton.
‘Say something.’ He spits on the ground; it is foamy and red.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Smashed the car. Can I get a drink?’
‘Christ, Marco. You’re hurt.’
‘Yeah.’ He pulls down his lip. ‘Lost a tooth, see? Maybe I could put it under my pillow, see what I get.’
I shiver with revulsion. Something has spoiled, curdled inside him. He even smells sour as he pushes past me, into the hallway. Outside, the mist is thickening, reducing everything to shadow.
‘We need to get you an ambulance. You’re hurt.’
‘You should see the other guy.’
‘What?’
‘You should see the other guy.’
I run into the garden and down the path. Up ahead I can hear the tick of cooling metal, the hiss of escaping steam. One ghostly light winking on and off in the gloom. A hazard light.
‘Frankie!’
There, on the lane. A shape, dark lines growing clearer as I run towards it. I can see Sadie, skewed across the stony track at an angle, slammed into one of the hawthorn trees which line the road. There is steam coming from beneath the crumpled bonnet, a spider-web crack in the glass of the windscreen running from one corner to the other. The ding, ding, ding of the seatbelt alarm. I listen for a moment, and I hear something else. A faint groan, almost spirited away in the fog. I press my face up to the glass but there is no one in the car. The seatbelt alarm is chiming quietly, and there is blood pooled on the passenger seat. Chunks of safety glass stud it like glittering diamonds. Then I see him, lying in the road a little further away. He has crawled there on his hands and knees. Now he is lying face up to the sky, the mist crawling all over him, in the places where the blood has seeped through his clothes.
‘Frankie!’ I shout, unable to stop myself. ‘Frankie!’
His head lolls, his eyes rolled up to the whites. For a moment he is horribly still. Then his chest jerks and I hear him cough weakly, and with considerable pain.
‘Frankie.’ I kneel beside him, wanting to touch him, not wanting to move him, resting my hands against his face. He is cold.
‘Frankie, let me call an ambulance. I’m going to call someone for you so hold tight, okay?’
I don’t think I am crying, but when I try to speak again a lump fills my throat like soft dough. His hand lifts and drops onto his chest, on top of mine. It squeezes, just once. I lower my head to him, next to his cheek where the stubble grows thickest, the curls of his hair meeting his neck. I breathe him in, crying and choking and unable to move. I tell him I’m sorry, I tell him I will get help. He opens his eyes and gives me a pained smile.
‘Get out of here. Run.’
‘Frankie—’
‘Run, Stella, please run. I so want you to live.’
I find his lips – they are so cold – and plant a kiss there, soft and warm and tender. I am acutely aware of his taste, the firmness of his mouth, the way his hand lifts a little to stroke my hair. My eyes are bright with unshed tears.
‘Don’t leave me,’ I tell him and then—
‘Stella!’
Marco’s voice, sharp and flat like a gunshot. I jump, scrambling to my feet.
‘Stella!’
I stare into the fog. I can’t risk running along the cliff in this, not with the crumbling, unsafe ground. I can run to town along the road, maybe make it as far as the Daltons’ before Frankie dies. I don’t like the whistling sound his breathing is making, and I don’t like the sticky pool of blood slowly spreading beneath him. I can call an ambulance if I lock myself in the bathroom, but my phone is in the house and to reach it I will have to get past Marco. And what about Carmel? I can’t leave her. She has come here to help me.