given me that, but instead she chose to let him screw you. You’ve met her; she’s weak. I bet you walked up to my house and she just let you in. She probably offered you a cup of tea.’
Strangely, Karen wanted to defend her boyfriend’s wife, but she couldn’t. Emily hadn’t asked her to stop seeing her husband. Karen had always wondered about the type of woman who turned a blind eye, but when it came to it, that was exactly what Eleanor had done. How did Karen know she wouldn’t do the same?
‘You shouldn’t blame your mother. You don’t know what it’s like.’
‘To feel like someone you love is giving up on you?’ Anne snorted. ‘No, I’ve got no idea of that.’ She kicked at the clumps of dried soil on the concrete. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘I don’t know,’ Karen replied. Her shoulders sagged at the weight of all that had happened, all the pain she had caused. ‘I guess we should go to the police.’
Confusion passed momentarily over Anne’s face. ‘You don’t want to do that.’
‘They’ll find you anyway, Anne. It’s better to hand yourself in. They already know all about what you’ve been doing to my friends and me. You left fingerprints at my house. They’re looking for you now, it’s only a matter of time before they arrest you for Eleanor’s murder.’
It was a risky lie and Karen had no way of knowing if Anne would believe her. Anne’s eyes widened in fear, and Karen could see no trace of the confident young woman who had sat across from her in her office, mocking her with her questions of morality and taunting her with her knowledge of Karen and her friends.
‘Me?’ Realisation dawned on her. ‘No. NO. You know I’m not responsible for those things, you know her death wasn’t my fault. You can’t do this to me!’ She sank slowly to her haunches, doubled over as though hit by a sudden stomach cramp. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this.’ She began muttering something but Karen couldn’t hear what she was saying. She didn’t feel like a threat any more. Karen moved to kneel down beside her, but she didn’t even seem to notice; instead carried on mumbling the same sentence over and over.
‘Look, Anne, I’m sure they will take everything into account. It was an accident, that much is obvious. If you admit it they will go easy on you.’
The girl looked up, a mixture of fear and defiance in her murky blue eyes, and in that second Karen knew she’d underestimated her for a second time. She’d been wrong about what fear could make a person do.
‘You won’t get away with this,’ Anne hissed, and grabbing hold of Karen’s shirt collar, she dragged her towards the moving brown water.
84
Bea
‘This doesn’t feel right,’ Bea announced, following Michael up the stairs of Karen’s home. ‘I feel like an intruder.’
‘We’re trying to help. Besides, I live here.’
Bea scowled. ‘Don’t get me started on that again. I just don’t see how this is going to help Karen with your lunatic daughter. No offence. We should be driving around screaming her name out of the car window, not creeping around her bedroom.’
‘I hoped she’d have given up chasing Anne and come back here, but as she hasn’t, there’s something I wanted to show you.’ He emerged from the master bedroom with a shoebox in his hand and handed it to Bea, who took it gently, as though she was expecting it to burn her. She sat down on the top step of the stairs and opened the lid, Michael pacing behind her.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘I found this once, hidden under some of Karen’s things. I opened it up and it had your name in it, and Eleanor’s, so I put it back thinking it was personal.’
Bea pulled a notebook from the top.
‘There’s all sorts in here. It’s like a dossier of everyone she’s ever met. I’m in here, and Eleanor,’ Bea murmured, pain shooting through her chest at the picture of her friend. ‘What we like, what we dislike, what we’re scared of, practically everything about us. It’s like one of those journals you make as a kid.’
‘Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe she’s just kept it for the memories.’
‘Then how come you’re in here?’ Bea held up the notebook, open at a page that contained a picture of Michael, along with every detail of his life: where he lived, the names of his wife