They faced each other like hunter and prey for a few seconds, completely still, breathing hard, muscles tense, then she ran for the door. Owen got there first and pushed her away. This time she tipped backwards over the arm of the sofa. Owen walked towards her. Her robe had risen up high over her thighs and split open at her loins to show the triangle of curly golden hair. Owen stopped in his tracks. Michelle gave him a cool, scornful look, covered herself up and sat down.
“Well, then,” she said, pushing her hair back behind her ears. “So you’re here. I must admit I’m a bit surprised, but maybe I shouldn’t be.” She reached for a cigarette and lit it with a heavy table-lighter, blowing the smoke out through her nose. He remembered the mingled taste of tobacco and toothpaste on her mouth in bed after lovemaking. “Why don’t you sit down?” she said.
“Aren’t you frightened?”
Michelle laughed and put her little pink tongue between her teeth. “Should I be?”
Her blue eyes looked cool, in control. Her long, smooth neck rose out of the gown, elegant and graceful. Even at twenty-four she still looked like a teenager. It was partly the flawless, marble complexion, the delicately chiseled nose and lips whose fine lines any sculptor would be proud of.
But it was mostly in her character, Owen realized, not her looks. She was the cruel teenager who called others names, the leader of the gang who suggested new cruelties, new kicks, with not a care in the world for the feelings of the ones she bullied and taunted.
“If you really believe I murdered those women, then you should be scared,” he said. “They looked like you, you know.”
“You were killing me by proxy. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t? You’re not afraid because you know I didn’t do it. Am I right?”
“Well,” Michelle said, “I really found it hard to believe you had the guts, I’ll admit. But then I was mistaken enough to think it takes guts to strangle a woman.”
“And you found out different?”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You did it, didn’t you, Michelle? I’m not sure about the first one, about Deborah Harrison, but you did the second, didn’t you? You killed her to frame me. Or you got someone to do it.”
Michelle laughed and glanced towards the door again. “You’re mad,” she said. “Paranoid. If you think I’d do something like that, go to all that trouble, you’re insane.” She stood up and walked over to the cocktail cabinet. Her legs swished against the robe. Owen stayed close to her. “I’d offer you a drink,” she said, “but I think you’ve had too much already.”
“Why did you do it, Michelle? For God’s sake why?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Why did I do what?”
“You know what I mean. Kill that girl to implicate me. You broke into my house, stole the film container with my fingerprints on it and took hairs from my pillow. Then you messed the place up to make it look like a hate-crime.”
Michelle shook her head “You’re crazy.” She poured neat Scotch into a crystal glass. Owen could see her hand was shaking.
“And what you said to the police about us,” he pressed on. “That stuff in the newspapers. Why did you tell those lies about me?”
“They paid well.” She laughed. “Not the police, the newspapers. And I didn’t kill anyone. Don’t be an idiot, Owen. I couldn’t do anything like that. Besides, I didn’t tell any lies.”
“You know it didn’t happen like that.”
“It’s all versions, Owen. That’s how it happened from my perspective. I’m willing to admit yours might be different. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t sound so ungrateful. You did help me through college. You helped me financially, you gave me somewhere to live, and you certainly helped with my marks. It was fun for a while… But you’d no right to start spying on me, following me everywhere I went. You didn’t own me. And you had no right to throw me out in the street like that. Nobody ever treats me like that.” Her eyes blazed like ice.
“Fun…for a while? Michelle, I was in love with you. We were going to…I can’t believe you’d say that, make it all sound so meaningless. Why do you hate me so much?”
She shrugged. “I don’t hate you. I just don’t give a damn about you one way or another.”
“You bitch.”
Owen stepped towards her. She stood her ground by the cabinet and sipped her drink. Then she jerked her head back to toss her hair over her shoulders again. It was a gesture he remembered. She looked at him down her nose, lips curled in a sneer of contempt.
“Oh, come on, Owen,” she said, twisting the belt of her robe around one finger. “You can do better than that. Or can’t you? Do you have to murder schoolgirls these days to get your rocks off?” The smile tormented him: a little crooked, icy in the eyes and wholly malevolent. “I’m glad you’ve found something that turns you on at last. What are you going to do, Owen? Kill me, too? Do you know what? I don’t think you can do it. That’s why you have to do it to the schoolgirls and pretend it’s me. Isn’t that true, Owen?”
Owen snatched the tumbler from her hand and tossed it back in one.
“More Dutch courage? Is that what you need? I still don’t believe-”
He didn’t know how it happened. One moment he was looking at his own reflection in her pupils, and the next he had his hands around her throat. He shoved her back against the cabinet, knocking bottles and glasses over. She clawed at his eyes, but her arms weren’t long enough. She scratched and pulled at his wrists, making gurgling sounds deep in her throat, back bent over the cabinet, feet off the ground, kicking him.
He was throttling her for everything she’d ever done to him: for being a faithless whore and spreading her legs for anyone who took her out for an expensive dinner; for telling the whole country he was a sick pervert who would be in jail if there were any real sting in the justice system; for framing him.
And he was strangling her for everything else, too: his arrest; the humiliation and indignity of jail; the loss of his friends, his job. The whole edifice that had been his life exploded in a red cloud and his veins swelled with rage. For all that, and for treating him like a fool, like someone she could keep on a string and order around. Someone she didn’t even believe had the courage to kill her.
He pressed his fingers deep into her throat. One of her wild kicks found his groin. He flinched in pain but held on, shoving her hard up against the wall. She was sitting on the top of the cabinet among the broken crystal and spilled liquor, her legs wrapped around him in a parody of the sex act. He could smell gin and whisky. The robe under her thighs was sodden with blood and booze, as if she had wet herself.
Michelle continued to flail around, knocking over more bottles, making rasping sounds. Once she pushed forward far enough that her nails raked his cheek, just missing his eyes.
But just as suddenly as it had started, it was over. Owen loosened his grip on her throat and she slid off the cabinet onto the floor, leaning back against it, not moving.
Someone hammered on the door and yelled, “Michelle! Are you all right?”
Owen stood for a moment trying to catch his breath and grasp the enormity of what he had done, then he opened the door and rushed past the puzzled neighbor back down to the street.
VII
“I think Deborah Harrison lied to her mother about losing her diary,” Banks said to Gristhorpe as they waited for Ken Blackstone’s call. It was well after closing-time. No hope of a pint now. “I think she kept it hidden.”
“So it would seem,” Gristhorpe agreed. “The question is, how did it get into Jelačić’s hands? We already know he couldn’t have been in Eastvale the evening she was killed. Even if the diary had been in her satchel, Jelačić couldn’t have taken it.”