Kiss Me First (32 page)

Thursday, 25th August 2011

I am on the Dorito-orange plane, heading back to Luton. Or rather, not: we’ve been sitting on the tarmac at Malaga airport for the past forty minutes, and will remain here for an unspecified period. Apparently, there is an issue with the ‘airport management safety measures’, which I think means that not enough crew have showed up. The other passengers seem resigned to waiting, although the man in the seat beside me has made clear his annoyance at me using my laptop. It overlaps the little plastic table, and my elbows occasionally stray into ‘his’ space. He’s sitting with his thick forearms folded tightly over his chest, staring straight ahead. Maybe he’s the same man I was sitting next to on the way over. This could be the same plane I flew in on a week ago: it certainly has the same malodorous atmosphere.

This was not the plan. Not the plane being delayed – I mean, me going home now. Two days ago I was about to change my ticket and extend my stay at the commune.

I’m not quite ready to write about what happened yesterday and why I have had to leave so suddenly. However, I do want to finish my account of what brought me to Spain in the first place. It’s not far from the end.

We had reached the point when I had told the police the full extent of my involvement with Tess and Adrian. Actually, what happened next is quite simply summarized: nothing.

By which I mean that after months and months of investigation, there was no legal action taken against me. Regarding the online impersonation, there was nothing they could charge me with. Apparently, prosecution is only possible if the impersonation is used to harass or commit fraud resulting in loss to a particular victim, and I had done none of those things.

As for her suicide, the fact that there is no body means that Tess was – is – officially classed as a ‘missing person’, rather than deceased. The law states that if someone tells you they intend to kill themselves, you are not obliged to tell the authorities, but if you say or do anything at all that could be perceived as encouragement you can be charged with assisting or abetting. The police asked me again and again whether I had said or done anything that could be construed as encouraging her. Absolutely not, I said. They combed through our emails but found nothing to indicate Tess had ever wavered from her desire to take her own life, nor that I had done anything to encourage her.

I didn’t tell them about that time on Skype, when she cried.

The fact that I had received money from Tess complicated things somewhat, but I showed them my bills and calculations and they concluded that I couldn’t be said to have profited from £88 a week. In the end, they decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute me. The person they really wanted was Adrian.

Since that sighting in Gatwick early on, he had disappeared, and it turned out he had covered his tracks quite thoroughly. As I’ve mentioned, the Red Pill website was hosted by a server in Brazil, for which Adrian had provided fake details, so tracing his IP address was useless. His passport was also forged. And, despite his picture being plastered everywhere, they haven’t been able to find him. As the news reports never tire of pointing out, there’s nothing about his appearance to distinguish him from the millions of other stout, middle-aged white men in the world.
The devil in disguise as the deputy manager of Dixons.

Given this hysterical reaction, I can understand why Adrian felt he had to disappear. However, I was surprised that he did not pop up to give his version of events, and explain the principles behind it. Using an IP blocking application, he could easily have posted a video on YouTube or some sort of statement online without alerting the police to his whereabouts. Perhaps he felt that there was no point, that those who condemned him would not have their minds changed.

Still, I am disappointed in him. His silence means that there is only one side of the story, and the unchallenged consensus is that he was an evil man, who took advantage of ‘vulnerable’ people like me for his own ends. To try and say anything to the contrary has as much effect as shouting into the wind. Everyone presumes that I’m still under his influence – ‘brainwashed’ – when really I’m just pointing out something I thought any reasonable person would understand: that just because Adrian made mistakes and handled some things badly, it didn’t necessarily follow that everything he did or stood for was wrong.

By ‘everyone’, I mean the police, and Jonty. I had told him what had happened when I got back to the flat from the station, after being released on bail. I didn’t really have much choice, as he had already returned from his parents’ house, and I found him in my ransacked room, staring at the desk, where my laptop had been replaced by a piece of paper from the police detailing which items they had removed during their search. I couldn’t think up a plausible explanation for that.

Jonty took the news surprisingly well, if melodramatically, his eyes wide and his hand clapped over his mouth as I explained the situation as succinctly as possible. Luckily, he had seen the newspaper story, so he knew the basics; although, of course, this meant that he had Adrian down as an evil predator. ‘Poor Leila,’ he kept saying, clutching my arm. ‘Oh my God. That bastard. Poor, poor Leila.’

That day I didn’t have the energy to contradict him; besides, after my experience at the station, I welcomed his warmth and sympathy. But the following morning he brought the subject up again and I had the chance to put him straight, on how Adrian was not the monster the papers had made him out to be and how I had acted out of my own free will. This time, his response was more measured.

‘Look, I’m not going to pretend that I’m not spun out by all of this,’ he said, when I had finished. ‘I haven’t got my head around it yet. But I know you’re a nice person, and I’m sure you went into it with good intentions.’

That was not the end of it, however. Indeed, such was Jonty’s interest in the case, you’d think he was involved himself. He devoured the news reports and, because my laptop was still with the police, took it upon himself to update me with every development. ‘Someone thinks they spotted Adrian in Brussels,’ he shouted through the bathroom door, as I was washing my hair. One morning, he came into the kitchen whilst I was making a cheese toastie and announced that I should consider seeing a therapist.

‘Why would I do that?’ I said.

‘I was reading this thing on the Internet about Stockholm syndrome,’ he said, ‘when people defend their abusers. I think maybe you have it.’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘You keep on saying what an amazing man he was and how you don’t regret what happened—’

‘I never used the word “amazing”,’ I said, irritated. ‘I’ve just made the perfectly reasonable point that the situation is not as simple as you and everyone else are making it out to be.’

There was, however, one aspect of the case that I wasn’t prepared to discuss: Tess. Several times Jonty started to ask about the details of my involvement with her, and I blocked his questions; eventually, he got the message. It was one thing for Adrian to be public property, to be the subject of speculation and gossip, but Tess – I wanted to keep her to myself.

Weeks passed. The reported sightings of Adrian came to nothing and, with no new fuel, the media moved on to be outraged at someone else. Behind the scenes, though, the case was still ongoing, albeit very slowly, as the sight of my bare desk constantly reminded me. It ended up taking the police nine weeks to return my laptop – although, when I questioned the length of time, the man admitted that for most of that period it had been sitting in a storage facility. He added that I shouldn’t hold my breath for the results of the investigation; it was perfectly possible I wouldn’t hear anything until well into the New Year. ‘It’s a complex case,’ he said. ‘There isn’t really a precedent for this sort of thing.’

In truth, I had not missed my laptop that much – because of its associations with Connor. It was actually a relief to be away from it, at least at first. I spent a lot of my days sleeping, but I also opened a box of books that I’d never got round to unpacking and re-read my childhood favourites. Not
The Princess Bride
, obviously. After a few weeks, though, the novelty of being offline began to wane, and I asked Jonty to lend me his iPad.

It was well into the spring when Jonty decided it was finally time to clear away the mound of junk mail from the hallway. It was something he had talked about for some time but never actually got round to – it had even become a kind of ‘running joke’ between us – but on that Saturday he announced ‘today is the day’, and took some black bin liners down the stairs. A few minutes later, he reappeared at my bedroom door, holding an envelope.

‘This was buried in the pizza leaflets. It’s for you. Looks fancy.’

I wasn’t in the habit of receiving letters, and certainly not old-fashioned, handwritten ones, with the sender’s address in the top left corner. On opening it, the first thing I registered was that it was a very short letter. The second was that it was from Tess’s mum.

Dear Leila,

I would like to meet you. Could we arrange a time for you to come to my home? Please call me. I believe you know the number.

Marion Williams

I stared at it. Jonty was still hanging around the doorway.

‘Come on then, come on then,’ he said. ‘Who’s it from?’

I remembered something the girls at school used to say when the boys were pestering them and they wanted to talk in peace.

‘Oh, it’s women’s problems. You wouldn’t understand.’

Jonty looked bemused, but he went back downstairs. I continued to stare at the letter. I knew so much about Marion but, of course, I had never seen her handwriting before. The blue ink was neatly slanted to the right, with the occasional flourish, such as an oversized capital P and L. After some moments, I forced my focus away from the patterns on the paper and towards the contents of the letter.

It was dated two weeks previously. If Jonty hadn’t decided to clear up the leaflets, I thought, it would have stayed in the hall for another month; another year, possibly. I could easily not have seen it. I could just throw it away. But I didn’t entertain such thoughts for long. Daunting as the prospect of a meeting was, I knew it was the right thing to do.

I felt a rush of pleasure at making this brave decision, until I realized that the next step was to phone Marion. Although, of course, I had spoken to her before, as Tess, it had not been an easy call, and the thought of doing so again, as
me
, was excruciating. Instead, I waited until Wednesday evening, when I knew she would be at her book group, and left a message suggesting a day and time the following week. I gave my mobile number. When, later that evening, she returned the call, I let it go to voicemail and listened to her message immediately afterwards. Like her letter, it was short and to the point. Yes, that time suited her; and if I was getting a train to Cheltenham I should take a cab and give the driver precise directions, otherwise he’d miss the turning. I scribbled down the instructions, and was Googling train timetables when something occurred to me, and my fingers went still on the keyboard: how had Marion found out my name and address?

I knew what the house looked like through photographs: a large, semi-detached place with white walls and ivy growing up its front like neat facial hair; a circular driveway lined with round bushes. One of Marion’s sculptures, a spiky metal thing like a rake, stood on a plinth beside the front door.

As the cab crunched over the gravel drive, I saw that she was already standing outside. She was wearing slim red trousers and I recalled one of the last emails Marion had sent Tess, before everything blew up. In it she mentioned she was considering an operation to get the varicose veins in her legs removed, but it would mean having to wear trousers until the scars faded. I wondered whether this now meant she had gone through with it, or whether she would have worn trousers anyway. This idle thought was immediately followed by a lurch of trepidation, as if the reality of the situation suddenly registered, and I had to resist the urge to tell the driver to carry on round the circular drive and head back to the station,

The cab pulled up where Marion was waiting, and I got out and stood in front of her. She said nothing, just looked me up and down, her face unreadable. I could see Tess in her bone structure and flat nose. She was sixty-seven, a lot older than mum was, but she looked – not younger, exactly, but as if she had been made with better quality ingredients. Her hair was dark and long, and her brown skin seemed tight and polished. Tess had told me she had had a facelift. She wore a turquoise stone on a chain around her neck, and was even tinier than I expected, her arms as narrow as rulers.

She told the cab driver to wait – ‘she’ll be about twenty minutes’ – and turned and walked into the house, not looking back to check I was following. The wooden-floored hallway was lined with paintings and old, dark furniture smelling of polish.
You never let us touch your antiques
, Tess had written in one of her accusatory letters. As we passed one open door Marion moved to pull it shut, but not before I caught a glimpse of a beige hoist, similar to the one mum had. The house was silent and I wondered where Jonathan was, and whether I was going to meet him.

Marion led me into the living room and motioned at me to sit. The sofa was pale pink and so dainty I was worried its little legs would snap as I lowered myself onto it. Marion arranged herself in an ornate gilt chair, about five feet away. I had expected to see more evidence of Tess’s father, because in her emails Marion had often talked about him watching TV beside her. I had imagined a hospital bed set up in front of the TV, like mum had, but I couldn’t picture any ungainly plastic equipment in this museum of a room.

Finally, Marion spoke.

‘So, you’re the girl who pretended be my daughter.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I talked to you on the phone,’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t look anything like Tess.’