be not Rowan but Rachel—just for a few hours.
“Would you want a camera in your bedroom?” I asked the detective, point-blank, but he just shrugged as if to say, It’s not me on trial, love.
But the truth is, I did cover up that camera. And if I hadn’t, we might know what happened to Maddie.
Because, I didn’t kill her, Mr. Wrexham. I know I’ve said that already. I told you in the very first letter I sent you. I didn’t kill her, and you have to believe me, because it’s the truth. But I don’t know, writing these words in my cramped cell, with the Scottish rain drizzling down the window outside . . . Have I convinced you? How I wish I could persuade you to come here. I’ve put you on my list of visitors. You could come tomorrow, even. And I could look into your eyes and tell you—I didn’t kill her.
But I didn’t convince the police of that. I didn’t convince Mr. Gates either.
In the end, I’m not sure I even convince myself.
For if I hadn’t left her that night, if I hadn’t spent those hours with Jack, in his flat, in his arms, none of this would have happened.
I didn’t kill her, but her death is on my hands. My little sister.
If you didn’t kill her, who did? Help us out here, Rachel. Tell us what you think happened, the police asked, again and again, and I could only shake my head. Because the truth is, Mr. Wrexham, I don’t know. I have constructed a thousand theories—each wilder than the other. Maddie, leaping like a bird into the night; Rhiannon, coming back early from her night out somehow; Jean McKenzie, hiding in the attic; Jack Grant, creeping past me while I was waiting downstairs for Rhiannon.
Because Jack turned out to have secrets too, did you know that? Nothing as grand or melodramatic as what I had imagined—he wasn’t related to Dr. Kenwick Grant, or at least if he was, neither he nor the police managed to trace the link. And when I told the police about the hank of string in his kitchen and the Aconitum napellus blossom, he, unlike me, had a quick and reasonable explanation. Because Jack, it seemed, had recognized the purple flower sitting in the coffee cup on the kitchen table—or thought he had. And so he had taken it with him to compare it to the plants in the poison garden. When he discovered that what he had suspected was correct, that the flower in the kitchen was not just poisonous but deadly, he had removed my makeshift string barrier, and replaced it with a padlock and chain.
No, Jack’s deep, dark secret was much more mundane than that. And instead of exonerating me, it only piled up the evidence against me—adding to the weight of reasons I might have wanted to cover up my liaison with him.
Jack was married.
When they realized I didn’t know, the police took great delight in ramming the fact home, reminding me at every possible opportunity, as if they wanted to see me wince with pain afresh each time. But the truth was, I was beyond caring. What did it matter, if Jack already had a wife and a two-year-old back in Edinburgh? He had promised me nothing. And in the face of Maddie’s death, none of it seemed important.
I would be lying though if I said that in the days and weeks and months since I’ve been in here I haven’t thought of him and wondered why. Why hadn’t he told me about her? About his little boy? Why were they living apart? Was it financial—was he sending money back to them? If the Elincourts were paying him half as much as they’d offered me, it was more than plausible that he’d taken the job for money reasons.
But maybe not. Perhaps they were separated, estranged. Perhaps she’d thrown him out, and this offer of a job, with a flat attached, had been the perfect way to move on.
I don’t know, because I never had the chance to ask him. I never saw him again, after I was taken down to the station for questioning, and then cautioned, and then remanded in custody. He never wrote. He never phoned. He never visited.
The last time I saw him was as I stumbled into the back of a police car, still covered in Maddie’s blood, feeling his hands gripping mine, strong and steady.
“It’ll be all right, Rowan.” It