them, especially if whoever bought Nulli kept Kit on as CEO on some exorbitant salary.
‘I had to pretend to go along with it, pretend we’d do it eventually, once we’d got the details right. Jackie enjoyed the planning. We stopped fighting. Completely. Sometimes I thought – I hoped – that working on the details might keep her happy for ever, that she’d never need to . . . take it any further.’
‘So your aim was to guarantee Jackie’s everlasting happiness?’
‘No! You don’t understand,’ Kit sobs.
‘I do,’ I tell him. ‘I wish I didn’t, but I do.’
I watch as he struggles to compose himself.
‘Jackie could and would have ruined my life if I’d said no. I had to give her something to hold on to. I never loved her, Con. She was more like . . . I don’t know, a colleague I felt I had to be loyal to. She loved me, though – I was in no doubt about that. You know she . . . she cried for nearly two hours after we . . . did the filming.’
Is he talking about the virtual tour?
‘She insisted on wearing my wedding ring to do it – she wouldn’t explain why. Just kept saying it would be funny, but that wasn’t the real reason. If it was funny, why did she go to pieces when I asked for it back afterwards? I felt worse taking that ring off her than I did . . .’ His mouth sets in a line, as if to stop the words escaping: than I did strangling her to death.
‘How bad did you feel about butchering an innocent family? Where does that fit in, on your scale of guilt?’
‘If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll tell you something I never told Jackie, not even at the end,’ Kit says, ignoring my question. ‘I thought about telling her, but I didn’t. It would have been vindictive.’
I wish he’d told her, whatever it is, if it’s something that would have hurt her. I wish he wouldn’t tell me, but I say nothing to stop him.
‘The address in my SatNav?’ he raises his voice, as if afraid I might not hear. ‘I programmed it in.’
‘I know that,’ I say, starting to cry at the stupidity of it all – him telling me something that I’ve been telling him and that he’s been denying for six months. ‘I’ve known all along.’
‘I did it deliberately,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d take my car that day, because of the snow. I wanted you to find out, Con. I wanted you to stop me. Why didn’t you stop me?’
I didn’t kill the Gilpatricks. I didn’t kill them. It’s not my fault that the Gilpatricks are dead.
I don’t know how much time has passed since Kit and I last spoke to one another. There’s a hole in my mind and I can’t find where it ends. The flies are still buzzing. The smell is worse.
Did I imagine it, or did Kit tell me the rest of the story? He wanted it to stop, all of it. I couldn’t stop it for him, so he killed the Gilpatricks – it was their fault he was in the predicament he was in, so they deserved to die. Did Kit say that, or am I imagining what he might have said?
It was easy for Jackie after that – she had him exactly where she wanted him. She could help him escape the four murders he’d committed, but only if he agreed to a fifth. Only if he accepted that I had to die.
Jackie copied the key to number 11, let herself into Selina Gane’s house with some prospective buyers, and told a pack of lies about a woman who looked very much like Selina’s strange stalker woman putting the house on the market, pretending to be Selina. Maybe she did other things to drive Selina out too – maybe she Nitromosed her car, whatever that means. Whatever she did, she got the result she wanted: number 11 went on the market.
Why the next part, though? I don’t have the energy to ask Kit. They must have moved everything out of the lounge at number 12, where the blood was, and replaced it with the contents of number 11’s lounge. Risky; someone could have seen them. They’d have had to move furniture and pictures across the street. But no one did see them, or else they’d have gone to the police. Of course no one saw