He’s looking at me, his eyes locked on mine, and I’m terrified of him, but at the same time I know that his question isn’t unreasonable. I owe him an explanation. So I don’t pull my arm away, I let his fingers dig into my flesh, and I try to speak clearly and calmly. I try not to cry. I try not to panic.
‘I wanted you to know about Kamal,’ I tell him. ‘I saw them together, like I told you, but you wouldn’t have taken me seriously if I’d just been some girl on the train. I needed—’
‘You needed!’ He lets go of me, turning away. ‘You’re telling me what you needed …’ His voice is softer, he’s calming down. I breathe deeply, trying to slow my heart.
‘I wanted to help you,’ I say. ‘I knew that the police always suspect the husband, and I wanted you to know – to know there was someone else …’
‘So you made up a story about knowing my wife? Do you have any idea how insane you sound?’
‘I do.’
I walk over to the kitchen counter to pick up a dishcloth, then get down on my hands and knees and clean up the spilled beer. Scott sits, elbows on knees, head hanging down. ‘She wasn’t who I thought she was,’ he says. ‘I have no idea who she was.’
I wring the cloth out over the sink and run cold water over my hands. My handbag is a couple of feet away, in the corner of the room. I make a move towards it, but Scott looks up at me, so I stop. I stand there, my back to the counter, my hands gripping the edge for stability. For comfort.
‘Detective Sergeant Riley told me,’ he says. ‘She was asking me about you. Whether I was in a relationship with you.’ He laughs. ‘A relationship with you! Jesus. I asked her, have you seen what my wife looked like? Standards haven’t fallen that fast.’ My face is hot, there is cold sweat under my armpits and at the base of my spine. ‘Apparently Anna’s been complaining about you. She’s seen you hanging around. So that’s how it all came out. I said, we’re not in a relationship, she’s just an old friend of Megan’s, she’s helping me out …’ He laughs again, low and mirthless. ‘She said, she doesn’t know Megan. She’s just a sad little liar with no life.’ The smile faded from his face. ‘You’re all liars. Every last one of you.’
My phone beeps. I take a step towards the bag, but Scott gets there before me.
‘Hang on a minute,’ he says, picking it up. ‘We’re not finished yet.’ He tips the contents of my handbag on to the table: phone, purse, keys, lipstick, Tampax, credit-card receipts. ‘I want to know exactly how much of what you told me was total bullshit.’ Idly, he picks up the phone and looks at the screen. He raises his eyes to mine and they are suddenly cold. He reads aloud: ‘This is to confirm your appointment with Dr Abdic at 4.30pm on Monday 19 August. If you are unable to make this appointment, please be advised that we require 24 hours’ notice.’
‘Scott …’
‘What the hell is going on?’ he asks, his voice little more than a rasp. ‘What have you been doing? What have you been saying to him?’
‘I haven’t been saying anything …’ He’s dropped the phone on the table and is coming towards me, his hands balled into fists. I’m backing away into the corner of the room, pressing myself between the wall and the glass door. ‘I was trying to find out … I was trying to help.’ He raises his hand and I cringe, ducking my head, waiting for the pain, and in that moment I know that I’ve done this before, felt this before, but I can’t remember when and I don’t have time to think about it now, because although he hasn’t hit me, he’s placed his hands on my shoulders and he’s gripping them tightly, his thumbs digging into my clavicles, and it hurts so much I cry out.
‘All this time,’ he says through gritted teeth, ‘all this time I thought you were on my side, but you were working against me. You were giving him information, weren’t you? Telling him things about me, about Megs. It was you, trying to make the police come after me. It was you—’
‘No. Please don’t. It wasn’t like that. I wanted to help you.’ His right hand slides up, he grabs hold of my hair at the nape of my neck and he twists. ‘Scott, please don’t. Please. You’re hurting me. Please.’ He’s dragging me now, towards the front door. I’m flooded with relief. He’s going to throw me out into the street. Thank God.
Only he doesn’t throw me out, he keeps dragging me, spitting and cursing. He’s taking me upstairs and I’m trying to resist, but he’s so strong, I can’t. I’m crying, ‘Please don’t. Please,’ and I know that something terrible is about to happen. I try to scream, but I can’t, the noise won’t come.
I’m blind with tears and terror. He shoves me into a room and slams the door behind me. The key twists in the lock. Hot bile rises to my throat and I throw up on to the carpet. I wait, I listen. Nothing happens, and no one comes.
I’m in the spare room. In my house, this room used to be Tom’s study. Now it’s their baby’s nursery, the room with the soft pink blind. Here, it’s a box room, filled with papers and files, a fold-up treadmill and an ancient Apple Mac. There is a box of papers lined with figures – accounts, perhaps from Scott’s business – and another filled with old postcards – blank ones, with bits of Blu-tack on the back, as though they were once stuck on to a wall: the roofs of Paris, children skateboarding in an alley, old railway sleepers covered in moss, a view of the sea from inside a cave. I delve through the postcards – I don’t know why or what I’m looking for, I’m just trying to keep panic at bay. I’m trying not to think about that news report, Megan’s body being dragged out of the mud. I’m trying not to think of her injuries, of how frightened she must have been when she saw it coming.
I’m scrabbling around in the postcards and then something bites me and I rock back on my heels with a yelp. The tip of my forefinger is sliced neatly across the top, and blood is dripping on to my jeans. I stop the blood with the hem of my T-shirt and sort more carefully through the cards. I spot the culprit immediately: a framed picture, smashed, with a piece of glass missing from the top, the exposed edge smeared with my blood.
It’s not a photo I’ve seen before. It’s a picture of Megan and Scott together, their faces close to the camera. She’s laughing and he’s looking at her adoringly. Jealously? The glass is shattered in a star radiating from the corner of Scott’s eye, so it’s difficult to read his expression. I sit there on the floor with the picture in front of me and think about how things get broken all the time by accident, and how sometimes you just don’t get round to getting them fixed. I think about all the plates that were smashed when I fought with Tom, about that hole in the plaster in the corridor upstairs.