The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (16 page)

Nevertheless, she worked carefully through the contents, lifting papers so as not to dislodge them from place, keeping everything in line.

The cards and notes from her were on top. But right at the bottom of the pile, pressed against the base of the drawer, she found a photograph. She slid it out cautiously, allowing the papers to rest back down gently on the space it left.

The sight of it froze something inside her. They’d call it a selfie these days. There were two people in the shot, with Mark on the right and a woman Sasha presumed was Lise leaning against him, her head angled to one side so as to rest on his bare shoulder. There was what looked like a beach behind them, and they were both tanned and wearing sunglasses that partially reflected the sunset behind the camera. They both looked so young and happy, and obviously very much in love.

Is that it, Mark?

Sasha looked at Lise. Her rival in some ways, although not one she’d ever have to compete with. Or at least not directly. Lise had shoulder-length brown hair that had been slightly curled and tousled by the sea and sun. Trying to be objective – and why not, because it was hardly this dead woman’s fault, was it – Sasha thought that she had also been very pretty. Beside her, Mark looked happier than she could remember seeing him. Happier than she herself made him, perhaps.

Is that it?

Deep down, do you wish you were still with her, not me?

It was stupid to think like that, but then what other explanation
was
there for his behaviour?
Second best
, she thought. Maybe that was all she could ever be. It left her feeling numb. The worst thing about it was that it didn’t mean he didn’t love her now. It just meant that she was a decent enough option in a timeline that had skewed irreversibly away from what he really wanted.

And yet he kept the photograph
here
, didn’t he? Right beside where he slept. Where
they
slept. She knew that Mark used to have a recurring nightmare of some kind about Lise drowning. It was small wonder, wasn’t it? He kept her close enough for his mind to touch each night. As close to him as Sasha.

For a moment, she considered taking the photograph away, destroying it somewhere. An exorcism.
I’m sorry
, she would silently tell Lise.
I’m not glad you’re dead; not really. But you are, and you had your life, and now it’s time to let us have ours
. She wouldn’t, of course, but still: she wondered how long it would take Mark to notice. Would it be one day in the distant future, by which point he might convince himself he’d misplaced it himself, or did he check frequently? She pictured him taking it out and staring at it every day, remembering what he’d lost, comparing it constantly to what he had now. But if that were the case, wouldn’t it be on top of the pile? Maybe he never looked at it at all.

Faced with the unknowable, Sasha was aware her mind had a tendency to burrow along the various possibilities until it
arrived at the bleakest outcome. She also knew that people often saw her as a bit of a soft touch, like Pete telling Mark it had fallen to him to punish Mark because he had known she wouldn’t. That was true, but only to a point. The reality was more that she didn’t show any hurt she felt. She had always treated her relationships like rooms. There was a slight emotional danger in being in them at all, and if that risk increased – if there was the slightest hint of hurt to come – she would take a step closer to the door, detaching herself by increments. By the time many of her past relationships ended, she’d been able to step out without feeling a thing, leaving her former partner in the centre of the room, bewildered by how suddenly this apparently soft and forgiving woman had disappeared.

And this hurt. There was no point denying it, and she could hardly be angry at the dead woman in the photo. The solution was an unhappy one, but obvious.

Make sure it doesn’t end up hurting
more
than this
.

Yes, she could do that. She was good at that. A step away from Mark. It might not come to leaving entirely – and God, she didn’t want it to, not this time – but she would be ready if it did. Especially if it was going to distract her like it had today ...

A car in the driveway.

Sasha replaced the picture at the bottom of the pile – the right way round – then closed the drawer and made her way downstairs. But as she poured another glass of wine and took it through, there were two images she couldn’t get out of her head. How sad Mark had seemed at the engagement party.

How
guilty
.

And how happy he looked in that photograph.

Mark

If they don’t let you go

When I got home that night, Sasha was sitting on the settee, a glass of wine on the table in front of her already. Rough day, I guessed. She didn’t look up at me as I walked into the room, which also felt like a bad sign.

‘Hey there,’ I said.

‘Hey.’

She was watching the television. Local news. I stared at the screen for a moment, watching officers leading a couple of people out of a pub I vaguely recognised in the city centre. The camera followed them towards a waiting police van.

‘Wait, was that you?’ I said.

‘It was.’

‘On the door?’

‘We got seconded to Operation Viper for the day.’ She still hadn’t looked up at me. ‘Stolen goods sweep.’

‘You’re a movie star.’ I shrugged my jacket off. ‘Any joy?’

‘A few arrests. Nothing to write home about.’

‘No drama?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Just asking,’ I said.

She
was
annoyed with me. I wasn’t sure why. Things had been lovely last night, and everything had seemed normal
between us this morning. I had no idea what I could have done to irritate her in my absence. Even I’m not that annoying.

I nodded at the wine. ‘Mind if I join you?’

‘Be my guest.’

I went through to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of my own, then sat down on the settee beside her. By now, the news had moved on to something about hospital cuts.

‘I was there today,’ I said.

‘The hospital?’

‘Yeah. Interviewing a patient.’

‘Some kind of assault?’

‘Not exactly. Bit weirder than that.’

‘Well, now you’ve got me interested.’ The way Sasha said it, that was only half true. ‘Tell all.’

I sipped the wine, hesitating for a moment. It was obvious that the Matheson case mirrored my own life to an extent – or rather, that it casually reflected the difficulty that seemed to have arisen between Sasha and me. Sooner or later we were going to have to talk about that, weren’t we? And while it all felt too awkward to delve into directly, perhaps this would give us a roundabout way of addressing it.

So I explained about Charlie Matheson, and the story she was telling us, along with the basics of the investigation. And yes, by the end, it was fairly clear that it was Lise bothering Sasha – or at least that she was worried that Lise was still bothering me. Her face was blank.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘A woman’s come back from the dead.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

She was silent for a moment.

‘Well, her husband must be pleased.’

I sipped the wine again, remembering Paul Carlisle’s reaction this afternoon, and shook my head.

‘No, he’s pretty upset about it. Understandably, I guess. He’s moved on, after all. He’s with someone else now, and they’ve built a new life together. It’s about the worst thing that could have happened to him.’

‘Awkward.’

I shrugged.

‘People move on, don’t they?’

Sasha was looking at me, and I supposed it would be a good time – if we
were
going to talk about it directly – to mention Lise. I could try to explain how I wasn’t glad she was dead, exactly, but that I’d moved on too. I could say that I loved Sasha very much, and wanted to marry her now at least as much as I had when I’d asked. That I knew something was slightly off between us right now, but it wasn’t
that
.

Somehow, though, it all felt too much to say out loud.
People move on
. For now, it would have to be enough.

‘Yes,’ Sasha said finally. ‘I guess they do.’

And to an extent, she seemed satisfied by that. As the evening went on, she opened up a little more, and whatever cold there had been when I arrived home began to thaw. We ate dinner together, then relaxed in front of the television, her legs curled up underneath her and her head resting on my shoulder. There was more wine. There was even some easy laughter.

‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I
really
love you.’

She smiled at me. ‘I love you just the same.’

It was closing in on bedtime. I was about to suggest an early one when Sasha broke the short silence that had developed.

‘You know, I keep thinking about my grandad.’

‘Your grandad?’

‘Yeah. My real one, I mean. He died when I was young, and I actually don’t remember him at all. My gran remarried. He was nice, but I always called him
Gerald
. Because he wasn’t my real grandad, you know?’

‘Sure.’

‘And I remember asking my mum, because she was religious, and that was how I was raised: what would happen when they all got to Heaven? Gran had been with my real grandad for decades, and he’d died, so presumably he was up there waiting for her. But then she’d gone and fallen in love with someone else.’

I smiled. ‘There’d be a punch-up at the Pearly Gates.’

‘Well, yeah.’ Sasha smiled back. ‘And my mum couldn’t really answer. She said it wouldn’t be like that, but she couldn’t say why or how. I think that’s when I started to not believe. Because it doesn’t make any sense, does it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

‘You can only be happy if you let people go. But if they don’t let
you
go too, it doesn’t work.’

It was my turn to be silent for a moment.

‘That’s right,’ I said.

Sasha shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I just keep thinking about the woman in the hospital.’

‘Charlie Matheson?’

‘Yes. The whole thing is insane.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean, seriously. Are you
sure
it’s her?’

‘I think so.’ I drained the last of the wine in my glass. ‘We got a photo from her ex-husband. And while he wouldn’t commit totally, I know he believes it too.’

Sasha was quiet for a second.

‘He kept a photo of her?’

‘Yeah.’ I put the glass down and stretched. ‘But you’re right – it’s a strange case. Anyway. I’m worn out. Bedtime?’

More silence. I became aware after the first couple of seconds that, somehow, I’d fucked things up again. Either that, or I’d been far too optimistic about how the evening had gone.

Whatever the explanation, the shutters had come down. Sasha picked up her glass and went through to the kitchen. ‘No, I think I might stay up a little,’ she said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. I’ll see you in the morning.’

I lay in bed, in the dark, listening to the silence from the front room below, thinking about Lise and Sasha, and Charlie Matheson and Paul Carlisle.

Remembering.

There had been a few hours shortly after what happened when I’d allowed myself to believe that Lise was still alive and would be found. Not at first, I don’t think; standing on the beach, mixed in with the panic and fear, I’d already felt a kind of grief. But as the coastguards went out searching, and I sat back at the campsite with a blanket over my shoulders, I’d entered that mindset for a time. She would be fine. She would be found.

Yes: out of sight of the shore, I had allowed myself to believe that. Every few seconds I’d turned my head in the direction of the path over the dunes that led to the beach, expecting to see her walking back up, flanked by lifeguards and similarly draped with a blanket. We’d laugh about it later, I’d thought; time would turn it all into an adventure – a story to tell. Even though the footpath remained empty, I’d kept believing it would happen. She would be fine. She would be found.

The search had been called off overnight, but I’d still somehow managed to convince myself that it would all be okay. The universe had simply made a mistake – a bad one – and it would shortly realise that and rectify it. Even as the days passed, and her body wasn’t discovered along the shoreline, I still harboured fantasies of the various ways she might have survived the turbulent ocean. Places she might have come ashore without being discovered. I pictured her wandering, head thick with amnesia. She would be fine. She would be found.

But she wasn’t, and she never would be, and I think a part of me had known that from the very last moment I saw her, screaming at me from the water.

Lying in bed now, I wondered how I would feel if she turned up alive again: if she suddenly returned to my life as though the intervening time had never happened. I would be glad she was alive, of course, but only for her sake. I had changed in the interim, and the two of us would be strangers to each other now. I would still want to be with Sasha. I knew that with as much certainty as I knew anything.

So what was the problem?

Because there was one, and I knew that it was mine. Whenever my thoughts turned to the engagement, I felt that knot of tension inside my chest. Thinking about it right now, in fact, I felt sick – exactly as though I was about to make some kind of mistake, or commit a terrible betrayal, and it was almost too late to prevent it. But ...

I was interrupted from my thoughts by the sound of my work mobile ringing on the bedside table. I reached across to pick it up.

‘Detective Mark Nelson.’

‘Hello, Detective Nelson. I’m sorry – I know it’s late. It’s Dr Fredericks here. From the hospital?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, although I’d actually forgotten I’d given Fredericks my contact number. ‘Is Charlie all right?’

Fredericks paused.

‘Yes, I think so. She’s quite excited, because she’s remembered something else, but she’s all right. She was adamant that it was very important, and I needed to pass it on to you as soon as possible.’