I can’t deny that it’s a good line. When she snatches for the anorak a third time, I let her pull it away. She glares volcanic fury at me and my anger of moments before has suddenly gone.
‘It was stolen off your line?’ I say, softer this time.
‘Aye – and now I know who did it.’
‘Why would I steal your coat?’
Melanie lets out a breath of such force that it’s like a llama spitting at a selfie-taker. If I’d been closer, I’d have got a face full. ‘You’re the one who’s been stalking me,’ she shouts.
It’s now my turn to splutter. I can barely get the words out. ‘What are you on about?’ I say.
‘I’m in the park – and there you are,’ she says. ‘I’m having a quiet moment on a bench – and there you are. This week of all weeks. Can’t you leave me alone? Don’t you think you’ve done enough?’
We stare at one another. She’s so convincing that I wonder if, somehow, I am the stalker.
‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ she adds.
‘I thought you were stalking me,’ I reply.
‘Oh, I get it. I’m the crazy one.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
We stand on opposite sides of the kitchen and the buzzing fridge makes it seem as if the entire room is vibrating.
‘Get out,’ Melanie says, nodding towards the front door.
She’s right – I should go – so I step past her into the hallway, although I stop almost immediately. There’s a photo on the wall of Ben that’s so haunting, it feels as if I can’t move past it. He’s precisely how I remember him – in a vest with the long tattoo along his arm that he’d only had completed a month or so before the crash. He’s tanned, which makes the scar under his Adam’s apple more apparent, and he has an arm around someone who looks like a younger version of him. It’s Alex, of course, his brother. And, yet, in the few times I met Alex I never remembered them looking so similar. There were five years between them. Alex lacks the tattoo and the scar, but from this angle, in this light, they are strikingly similar.
‘Look alike, don’t they?’ Melanie says.
She’s uncomfortably close, yet I’d somehow not noticed. There’s a smirk in the corner of her mouth as she enjoys my discomfort.
‘When was this taken?’ I ask.
Melanie shrugs and then, seemingly without thinking, her gaze glances towards the ceiling. I follow her line of sight, but there’s nothing there.
‘Why was Alex on the train?’
My question takes Melanie by surprise. She steps backwards into the kitchen: ‘What?’
‘When Ben left in the morning, he never said he was getting on the train with his brother. There’s no reason for him to have kept it to himself – so why was Alex on the train?’
Melanie bites her lip. ‘I want you to leave.’
I think about it and even take half a step closer to the door before turning back. ‘He tried it on with me.’
‘Who did?’
‘Alex.’
It’s as if the back door has been opened. A chill bristles along the hallway from the kitchen. Melanie is lost in the gloom.
‘At a barbecue,’ I add. ‘It was the weekend before the train. He groped my bum and said he could see what his brother did.’
‘You’re lying.’ Her words say one thing but the tone says something else. She knows it’s not beyond the realms of something that could have happened.
‘He asked if I wanted to pop upstairs.’
‘You’re a filthy liar.’
‘I’m not. Why would I lie? He’d only been out of prison for a few weeks after whacking that bloke with a bat.’
It’s true. All of it.
Melanie doesn’t move, but her voice is a slithering snake’s: ‘He was provoked.’
‘Because smashing someone with a bat from behind is always the way to deal with a problem…’
We stand apart, in more ways than one. I’ve never told her this before, never told anyone about Alex trying it on with me. Ben had an important week with work and I didn’t want to interrupt that with tales about his brother groping me. I was also worried that he might not believe it.
After the crash, when it was revealed that Alex was among the dead, there seemed no reason to mention it, plus who was I going to tell? Things feel different now. I’ve never had that much animosity towards Melanie before, but I can’t escape the sense that I’ve missed something. Her jacket was in the flat opposite mine. The one from which music has been taunting me. I don’t believe her that it was stolen.
‘Go,’ Melanie says. Her voice is a low growl. ‘Go, or I’ll call the police.’
I move towards the front door but turn back to where Melanie hasn’t moved from the dimness of the kitchen. This is what I’ve been waiting five years to say.
‘You can’t keep blaming me for what happened,’ I say, ‘I wanted to marry Ben. I wanted the house and all that – but I had a job, too. I thought we both wanted the same thing. I never forced him to go on trips and, even if I had, I didn’t know he was spending our savings to fund it all. He stole everything I had. He lied to me and he lied to you. We both have that in common.’
I can barely see Melanie among the shadow, but her outline slumps to the side as she rests on the counter behind. She says nothing. I know she’ll never concede this point, even though she knows it is true. She tells herself I killed Ben because I pushed him to buy me nice things. She told me I killed Alex because Ben roped him into whatever get-rich-quick scheme they had going on.
‘Just go,’ she says.
‘If you didn’t leave your coat in my building, then who did?’
I’m not expecting an answer and Melanie sighs wearily. ‘Go.’
So I do.
It’s only as I’m out the door, down the path, and halfway back to the bus stop that I remember what she said in the kitchen. You already killed my son.
In the days and weeks after the crash, she would rage at me regularly at how I was responsible for killing her boys.
Boys. Plural. Suddenly, now, only ‘son’.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Billy’s ears prick as a firework booms into the night sky. There are still two days until Bonfire Night but nobody seems to care. Bluey-green sprinkles of light seep through my blinds, even though they’re closed. It truly is the time of year when all the knobheads come out. All sorts of weapons are rightfully banned in the UK – but tubes filled with gunpowder? Go for it, mate.
The fact Billy is reacting to the fireworks is something, though. He’s alert, awake and wanting assurance. He’s eaten a little more food and didn’t mind his second dose of medicine. He was awake when I got home from Melanie’s and the turnaround is incredible.
I’m comforting him as much as he’s comforting me. There was something about the photo of Ben and Alex that stuck with me in a way I cannot explain. The completeness of Ben’s arm tattoo means it would have had to be taken close to the crash – and the brothers looked so similar. Perhaps they always had and I’d somehow missed it? It’s hard to know.
For some reason, I picture the wolf that Tyler pointed out when we were trick or treating. There was a moment, in the murk, when the costumed head was down, in which I saw Ben. It was the light, I’m sure, and yet Alex was five years younger than his brother. Five years have passed.
And then poor Harry was bashed in the back of the head by someone in the exact kind of attack for which Alex went to prison.
You’ve already killed my son.