She looks as if she might throw up. “You’ve clearly made an enemy out of someone. The stalker you mentioned, the name she used … Maggie. What does that name mean to you?”
“Maggie is dead. It can’t be Maggie. I watched her die.”
Detective Croft leans back, looks unsure about what she is going to say next, which makes me quite certain I won’t want to hear it.
“I’ve read about what happened to your parents when you were a child…”
Her words wind me a little. I don’t talk about this. I can’t. I never have and I never will. She told me not to.
“I know how your mother died. It must have been a horrific experience.”
“My father died too,” I say, remembering my lines.
“John Sinclair?” A deep frown folds itself onto her forehead.
“That’s right.”
“John Sinclair didn’t die in the robbery. He was in hospital for three months, then he went to prison.”
“What? No. John died. He was shot in the back, twice. I was there.”
She reunites her fingers with her iPad, swipes a few times, then reads from the screen, “‘John Sinclair was sentenced to ten years in Belmarsh prison and served eight.’”
I try to keep up with this new information. “What for?”
“He killed the alleged burglars with an illegal firearm. The gun was found in his hand and was linked to three other serious crimes.”
John is alive. John went to prison because of me. I put that gun in his hand.
“Where is he now?” I ask.
“I don’t know. And I don’t know what to think about this case anymore. You’ll be released later today.” She stands to leave, waving to the guard on the other side of the door to let her out.
“That’s it?”
“For now, yes.”
“Well, where am I supposed to go?”
She shrugs. “Home.”
She doesn’t seem to understand that I don’t have one.
Fifty-four
Maggie steps back inside the flat and slams the door closed behind her without meaning to. She’s aware that it isn’t the door’s fault she had a bad day—the dead can be so bloody demanding. She puts on her white cotton gloves to cover her hands. She knows they aren’t to blame either, but they are still an ugly reminder of who she is and who she isn’t. Maggie was taught to toughen up at a young age, but she is not impervious to pain. A thick skin can wear thin when worn too often.
She remembers that she hasn’t eaten all day, so eases her tired feet into her slippers and shuffles to the kitchen to examine the contents of the fridge. Everything she sees is disappointingly healthy, and that isn’t what she wants or needs right now. She walks back out to the lounge to use the phone and dials a familiar number. The framed photo of childhood Aimee stares back while she waits for someone to answer. Maggie glares at the child, twisting the phone cord around her gloved hands as she becomes increasingly impatient.
“Fuck you,” she says to the photo, turning it facedown so she doesn’t have to look at Aimee anymore. “Not you,” she adds, realizing that someone has finally answered her call.
She leaves the exact cost of the pizza in a recycled white envelope on the doorstep, along with a Post-it note that reads, Leave food here. She has taken off her makeup now and does not want to see anyone else again today. She closes her tired eyes and holds the three smallest fingers of her left hand inside her right, pretending she is comforting Aimee as a child when she was scared of something. Maggie wishes she could go back to that time. After a couple of minutes, sitting waiting in the darkness on the other side of the front door, she opens it, bends down, and adds the words Thank you to the Post-it note. She doesn’t want to be rude or take out her bad day on someone else.
After she has eaten almost an entire large pepperoni pizza, with extra cheese, she vomits it all back up in the bathroom, flushes the toilet twice, then wipes her mouth with a square of quilted toilet tissue. She makes herself a green tea, adding a little cold water from the tap, then settles down on the sofa to watch the news.
She feels sick all over again when she sees Aimee’s face.
Even worse when she watches the report.
Aimee has been released from prison.
Fifty-five
I stand on the doorstep, wearing the same black dress and red shoes I was wearing when I was driven to the prison. I didn’t know where else to go, and I didn’t have anything else to wear after they released me; the street outside the house where I used to live is full of reporters and satellite trucks. It seems my celebrity status might have increased over the last few days, for all the wrong reasons.
The door swings open and he hesitates for just a moment, making me worry that he’s changed his mind since I called from the taxi.
“Come on in.” Jack looks behind me theatrically, as though I might have been followed. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t hear you at first, the doorbell is broken. I broke it. Reporters kept ringing the damn thing.”
His house is beautiful. The layout is almost an exact copy of my own just a couple of streets away, but this house is a home. There are books, and photos, along with all the general clutter of life that you would expect to find, and I struggle to take it all in. It’s warm and feels safe, if not familiar. I wait to be invited to sit down. I feel dirty, as though I might accidently infect all his beautiful things if I touch them.
“Do you want to have a shower?” he asks as though reading my mind. I guess I must smell even worse than I look. “There are clean towels and plenty of hot water. You’re welcome to use anything you find in the bathroom. I have argan-oil conditioner.” He smiles, stroking his own graying but glossy hair.
I stand beneath the rain showerhead for a long time, letting it pummel my body, and I wonder how I ended up in this situation: almost completely alone in the world. I don’t know Jack, not really, he’s just a colleague, not a friend. Some people don’t know the difference, but I do. Right now, it feels as if I don’t have anyone left in the world who knows the real me. Nobody I can be myself with.
I never had much of a family, but I did used to have friends. There are people I could call, names in my phone that used to mean something. But if I did call, or text, they wouldn’t come for me, they would come for her. The me you become when you spend your life being someone you’re not. They would come to see her, then gossip afterwards about her with everyone they knew, while pretending to be my friend. Sadly, that’s my experience, not my paranoia speaking loud and clear inside my head. Sometimes self-preservation means staying away from the people who pretend to care about you.
I suppose family is who most people turn to when the world closes in, but I don’t have any of them left either. I went back to Ireland when I was eighteen, having never once been in contact with my father or brother since the day I ran away. I’m no longer sure what I expected or hoped to find there; I think I just wanted to visit what I had left behind. I found out that my real father had died a few years earlier; he was buried in the same plot as my mother, at the church we used to attend every Sunday. I visited their grave, unsure how to feel about it as I stared down at the overgrown plot and simple headstone. A neighbor confirmed that my brother still owned the house that we used to live in, but nobody had seen him for a while. I wrote him a letter and slid it under the front door before I left. Either he never read it or I wrote the wrong words. He never got in touch and it made me realize that sharing the same blood does not necessarily make you family.