Untold Story (34 page)

“And there they were,” he said, “front page next day. Cathy, my wife, she called and told me. Tony had taken my name off, the bastard. I never worked with a partner again.”

“How many cameras?” she said. “And where are they? Is your computer at Mrs. Jackson’s?” The gun was starting to feel heavy in her hand.

“Two,” he said, unfurling a little. “This one around my neck and the other in the car. I’m parked on the street. My laptop’s in there as well.”

His back was aching and his knees felt like they’d been placed in a vise, the screws tightening every few seconds. He’d been standing up all night and now he had to sit on the floor like this with his hands behind his head. And she wouldn’t let him talk.

He tried again. “You can come down with me. We’ll go and throw the whole lot in a wood chipper.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “And please be quiet.”

The door to the right of the closet opened on to her bathroom. If she allowed him to go and relieve himself there might be something in there he could use. He’d got himself beaten up before, there was that time in Spain, the hotel gorillas, but he’d never faced a gun. He looked at her again. At first she had looked at ease, as if it were perfectly natural to receive him in her bedroom with a gun pointed at him. Now she was rubbing at her wrist and her cheeks were red, he didn’t want to risk making her more agitated. She wouldn’t let him go to the bathroom anyway.

“I can’t march you down the street with a gun pointing at your back,” she said. “If you tried something, I couldn’t shoot you down there. I have to shoot you in my bedroom.”

He tried to tell himself she’d never do it. If he got up now and walked over to her, she’d scream and shout but she wouldn’t pull the trigger. He shifted his weight from one buttock to the other, and she lifted the gun and cocked her head and met his gaze straight on. She was crazy enough, she was always unstable, a ticking time bomb, a human hand grenade lobbed right into the heart of the royal family.

“You’d have me on your conscience all your life,” he said.

“Who says I would?” She smiled sweetly at him.

It had been a mistake to tell her that nobody else knew about this. When she’d asked him straight-out, when he was still sweating in terror, it had been his first instinct, as if that would put him in the clear. What he should have done was lie. If he’d told her that it was too late, that the cavalry was already riding into town, then she wouldn’t be able to murder him and innocently justify it.

She might, on the other hand, have shot him then and there, out of pure fury.

He had to keep her talking.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

He didn’t look so terrified now, but she could hear the fear in his voice. Women who stand up for themselves, who don’t take it lying down, are always thought to be crazy. Esther had told her that. In the old days, right from the beginning, when she wasn’t pliant, they wanted to put her on medication. She wouldn’t have it and that proved how mad she was. Well, it was useful now, him thinking she was mad enough that she might do anything at all.

“Why did you do it?” he said. “Why did you . . . do what you did?”

“I had my reasons.”

“But, surely,” he said.

She waited, but he didn’t continue. “Surely what?” she said.

“I don’t know. Is it okay if I lower my hands for a while? My shoulders are killing me.”

She didn’t see why not. There was nothing he could do, sitting there cross-legged on the floor.

“Thank you,” he said. “You must have been very unhappy.”

“Thank you for your concern,” she said. “I’m touched.”

He worked his knees up and down and she could hear his joints click. “There were good times as well, weren’t there?”

Her eyes pricked.

“I remember some good times,” he said.

She felt the tears forming and fought to hold them. “Why did you have to come here?”

If she really wanted to kill him she could have run him over on Sunday night. She hadn’t had it in her to do it then, and she wouldn’t do it now. While she blinked back the tears he looked around the room again to see if there was anything he could grab and throw at her, just to push her off balance for a second or two while he leapt up and knocked the gun out of her hand. A book was lying on the floor, but it was too far to reach.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I told you. It was an accident.”

Her cheeks were really burning. The more emotional she grew, he saw this now, the more disabled she would be.

“You didn’t have to do anything,” she said. “You could have left. You could have left me alone.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. And he did feel sorry for her, in a way. “But you know, there’s not a single person, if they’d been in my position, who would have done differently. Can you understand that? I’m really sorry, but it’s true.”

She sniffed and didn’t say anything, as if she didn’t trust herself to speak, but she nodded her head slightly.

“Remember that fashion awards evening in New York?” he said. “I think it was ninety-four. You were staying at the Carlyle, and when you arrived at the event there were about two hundred policemen holding back the crowd. They were all there for you.” He paused to see how she was taking it. She showed no sign of wanting to cut him off. “The photographers were going wild, pushing and shoving each other, all trying to find the best angle. I remember a couple of supermodels trying to get a bit of the limelight. We yelled and screamed at them to shift their scrawny arses.”

He was talking on and on and she was trying to focus on what had to happen now. They’d been sitting here for too long. With her free hand she stroked Rufus’s head and he pushed his nose against her palm.

She would have to leave this place, that much she knew. Beyond that, she couldn’t think. On her dressing table there was a silver powder compact that Amber had given her. She should take that. And the shell necklace that Maya had given her at Christmas.

“When you were staying at the Brazilian embassy in Washington . . .”

It didn’t matter what he was saying, as long as he didn’t move. She heard her cell phone bleep and reached back for her purse without taking her eyes off him. “I’m still watching you,” she said, as she glanced down at the message.
Happy Birthday. I miss you. Carson.

“And there was that night at the White House . . .”

The tears ran down her face. She was so tired of fighting everything and everyone. It would be better to give up now. She turned off her cell phone.

“And when you were on the dance floor . . .”

She wished he’d shut up and go away so that she could sleep. He’d been talking for what felt like hours, and the tears wouldn’t stop coming.

“You see,” he said, “there were a lot of good times.” He was speaking softly, as if to an infant in the crib. “A lot of good times. And there can be again. We can work this out together, you and me. Work out how best to play it. Imagine how amazing it’s going to be, how totally breathtaking.”

“What?” she said, wiping the tears away. “What are you saying? What is it that we’re working out?”

He was walking on eggshells here—no, worse, he was tiptoeing around a battered ego, not knowing exactly where the fractures lay. The dog jumped off the bed and lay down on the floor in a pool of early evening sun. It was a pretty bedroom, he thought, simple and uncluttered, a white bedspread, dove gray walls, a few splashes of color in the cushions. This humble home . . . the words ran through his head again. Keep it together, he told himself, keep it together.

“Is it okay if I shuffle over? Lean against the leg of the dressing table. There, that’s okay, isn’t it, I’m just shuffling really slowly, like this.”

He wasn’t going to push it hard. It had to seem like her idea as much as his. Let it sink in a bit. She wasn’t condemned to live like this forever. There was a way back and he could help her make it happen. So far, so good, all the old stories of her glory days had her in tears.

“What?” she said again.

“If you wanted,” he said. He paused. “If you wanted, you could go back.”

She smiled at him, but it was a smile he couldn’t read. “Could I?” she said.

The spaniel got up and wandered around the room, and then puttered over to him. He moved his hand slowly up to the dog’s head. “There,” he said, “that feels good, doesn’t it? How long have you had him?”

“Nearly three years.”

He stroked along the dog’s spine and then withdrew his hand to his knee. The dog came forward, looking for more petting.

“It wouldn’t just be for you,” he said, as the dog climbed onto his lap. “Think of your boys. What it would mean to them, to have their mother back.”

The gun was limp on her leg, her shoulders were slumped, she’d lost her poise, lost her bearings. He fussed with the dog, reaching one hand under its belly. Another minute or two and she’d be sobbing like a baby.

The sound of her voice startled him, he cracked his head up against the table leg. “I do think of them. I think of them every day.”

“Exactly,” he said in a soothing voice. “They must miss you as much as you miss them.”

“And is it your considered opinion,” she said, “that it would be best for them? Have you given it a great deal of thought? Have you thought about it every day for ten years? Every day. Well, have you?”

She was bolt upright on the edge of the bed. Her free hand was clenched in a fist and her other was greatly animated. There was no knowing what she would do. He had to make his move. If he lifted the dog to his chest, pretending to cuddle him, he could lean right back and get some traction, enough to hurl him straight at her.

“Rufus,” she called. Rufus sprang off Grabowski’s lap and jumped back on the bed. “Good boy,” she said.

“Well, have you?” she repeated.

He pressed his eyes closed and sighed. “No,” he said. “I haven’t.”

They sat for a while in silence. She knew what she had to do, now she had to summon the energy to do it.

“Who helped you?” he said. He’d stretched his legs out in front of him. His head was crooked against the table. “How did you do it?”

“The camera around your neck, the one in the car, the laptop. What else?” she said.

“That’s the lot.” He was sliding farther and farther toward the floor. “You can’t have done it on your own.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “What else?”

He rubbed his hand over his face, over the dark bristles on his jowls. “Does anyone here know? What about your boyfriend, kept him in the dark as well?”

“No one knows,” she said. “Except you.”

She stood up and he lifted his head. She pointed the gun straight at it. “Now, I’m giving you one more chance. What else?”

“All right,” he said. “The bed-and-breakfast, left desk drawer, a memory stick. Little plastic and metal thing, about this big.” He showed her with his fingers. “That’s the backup.”

“Give me your car keys,” she said. “Slide them over on the floor. And your cell phone. Now the camera. Thank you.”

When he’d done it, she told him to get up and open the closet. “Get inside and pull the door closed.”

“Be reasonable. You’re not going to leave me in there.”

She didn’t answer and he got in among her clothes. “Haven’t you had enough?” he said. “Whatever you wanted to escape from, it can’t have been your dream to live like this.”

“Close the door,” she said. She walked over and locked the door. It wouldn’t hold him for long, but maybe long enough for her to be away from here. She picked up her bag and his stuff from the floor, scooped the compact and the shell necklace off the dressing table into her purse, then knocked on the closet door.

“Tell me something,” she said. “What kind of dog was it you had that got run over when you were a boy?”

She heard a muffled snort. “I never had a dog.”

“No, I thought not,” she said.

She ran down the road and found the Pontiac and headed into town, to the bed-and-breakfast. For a moment she thought her vision was dimming, that perhaps she was going to pass out, but it was the sky turning, in what seemed like an instant, from dusky pink to purple and black. She fumbled for the headlights. How long before he dared bash his way out of her closet?

The hail drummed down on the hood, annihilating any possibility of thought. It was as much as she could manage to peer through the windshield and keep the car steady on the road.

She rang the bell and when Mrs. Jackson failed to answer she rang again and tried to see through the front bay window. The light was on and through a gap in the curtains she could see Mr. Jackson installed, as ever, in his chair, and for once he seemed to be awake, he appeared to be reading.

“Mr. Jackson,” she yelled. She banged on the pane. “Mr. Jackson, it’s Lydia.”

She tried the bell again. Mr. Jackson didn’t hear very much at the best of times, and with the thunder and the crackle of hail he wasn’t going to hear anything.

“Mr. Jackson!” But her voice rose thinly against the storm and drifted away on the wind.

She drove east, to the river, left Rufus in the car, and scrambled down the bank carrying the laptop, the tape recorder she’d found with it, both cameras, and his phone, sliding on the carpet of hailstones. It was coming down so hard it stung the back of her neck. When she was nearly at the bottom she fell on her side. She gathered the phone and the recorder and, still sitting on the slope, hurled them as hard as she could, out into the water. She got to her feet, picked up the cameras and the laptop, slid the last couple of yards, and stood at the water’s edge. Then she laid them in a row on the ground.