He tugs at my arm, pulls me closer. And until that tall guard and his colleagues get too close, I let him. Everyone is still looking at us. I keep looking only at him. I loved you so much. But I don’t dare think it for more than a moment, because he’s taken enough of me already.
‘I didn’t kill her, Cat!’
I close my eyes. Briefly press my lips against his ear. ‘I know.’
And then I do leave him. Raging and screaming and sobbing in my wake. I don’t look back. I close the door behind me. I leave him hanging on his hook to rot.
Outside, the rain has stopped and the sun, low and blurred, turns glass sparkling and the prison golden. I stand in the middle of the car park with my arms and fingers spread wide, head tipped up to the sky. And then I close my eyes and let the world burn warm and red.
I looked, El, I think. And I didn’t go blind.
CHAPTER 31
April 3rd
Dear Cat,
This is the last letter I’m going to write to you. I should have written it before now, but I didn’t know how. And now I can’t put it off any longer.
I’ve lied to you. More times than I can count. More times than I should have. But you need to know that it was for you: everything I kept from you, every lie I told you, every time I said trust me, this is the truth now – and it never was.
Trust me. This is the truth now.
Here is the why:
Do you remember what upset me the most the day we found that encyclopaedia entry about Captain Henry Morgan? It was that Mum had lied to us, and for so long. I don’t think I ever fully trusted her again. I stopped believing in her. I stopped believing in us. All because of one lie.
Do you remember what upset you the most? It wasn’t that Mum had lied to us, or even that he wasn’t our dad. It was the fact that he liked to torture people by tightening bands around their head until their eyes popped out. Because that wasn’t how a pirate king behaved – a father, a hero, a man. And so you instantly forgot it. You withdraw from what you can’t bear to be true and you believe the lie. And when you stopped talking to me – when you refused to ever talk about that last horrible night in Mirrorland – I withdrew from you, because the truth was allI could see. It felt like a slow-spreading disease, one that I couldn’t bear to pass on to you. I didn’t want you to remember.
But then Ross came back. Long before that day outside the National Gallery. For months, he followed me, harassed me, begged for forgiveness. I hated him. I hated him so much for that night. But he was all that was left of Mirrorland and he knew it. That day outside the gallery? It was to show me that if he couldn’t get to me, he could get to you instead. And that May Day in the Rosemount was him proving it.
So I had to make him believe that he wanted me more. I had to make him think that I needed him more. I faked my suicide attempt – you always knew it, but he didn’t. To him, it was the ultimate proof of loyalty. And maybe it was. Because I’ve tried to tell myself that I did it for you. To protect you from a monster just like you protected me. But I don’t think that was the whole truth. Not then. Because I still loved him.
So maybe our marriage was my punishment. My sentence. I didn’t lie to you about that. One day he’d be raging and cruel, the next so loving it was like agony. I’d get these cards, threatening me, telling me to leave – I guess he did it just to mess with my mind. Like the drugs he put in my food and drink. He hides them in his bedside table. And every day, I wake up craving them so much, I can’t think straight. They’re chains. Just like those ‘freedoms’ that I told you he’s allowed me to have. He succeeded, in the end, in chasing off Mouse after she came back. And when he thought I might be having an affair with my friend Vik, he threatened to find out who he was and kill him. He stopped letting me do any voluntary work. Threatened to stop letting me paint, if I ever contacted either of them again. To take away my boat. He even papered over the door to Mirrorland. And I let him do all of those things. Until I wanted to die for real.
He found me, of course. Made me vomit all the pills back up, made me walk around that fucking house until I could see and hear and cry again. And that was when he told me that he was still in touch with you. That if I ever tried to leave him again, he would do everything to you that he had done to me. And I remembered that encyclopaedia entry about Captain Henry Morgan. I knew that you’d try to survive by pretending what was happening wasn’t happening. By pretending your prison wasn’t a prison and your jailer wasn’t a monster. Until the day that you died. And so, of all the whys, that’s the real one. I’m not noble, I’m not brave. He just finally made a mistake. He gave me no possibility at all of parole.
Here is the how:
I like to plan, remember? Just like Andy Dufresne. So, here is THE PLAN No. 2.
Phase I: It was Vik who unwittingly gave me the idea for using The Redemption. He works for Lothian Marine Insurance, specialising in accident or negligence claims for recreational vessels. He told me all sorts of stories of deliberate sabotage – and how they were discovered. Yesterday evening, I visited him at his huge open-plan office, and while he was making coffee, I went to an empty desk on the other side of the building to call Ross and beg him to come back from London. I’d already made an online query in his name from our home computer, requesting a callback. The call should never be traced back to me through Vik because he’s just a very small cog in a very big wheel; Lothian Marine Insurance employs thousands of people – and anyway, no one other than Ross even knows we’re friends, and he doesn’t know Vik’s name. I have a second phone, a pay-as-you-go that I use to talk to friends without Ross knowing. And I’ve made Vik swear never to go to the police no matter what happens to me. When LMI call back Ross for real, he’ll hang up before they get to the end of their first sentence; he hates cold calling. So he will have no alibi. And a husband speaking to a marine insurance company the day before his wife is lost at sea is perhaps unlucky, but more likely guilty.
I bought a drain plug with cash a few weeks ago. Exactly the same as the one I already have. I bought two hole saws. I’ve drilled some holes with the first in the underside of the cuddy that will hopefully go unnoticed because I need that saw to be forensically traced back to the boat. I’ve left that and the new drain plug in the house, in Bluebeard’s Room, and my kayak in the shed, where I hope the police will eventually find them.
When the time comes, I’ll take the original drain plug out, toss it into the firth. It shouldn’t ever be discovered, because it takes a while for a boat to sink only from the lack of that. I’ll sail to the deepwater channel, take down the mast, disable the EPIRB and GPS. The hole saw is more of a risk. The boat will sink fast after I’ve used it for real, but I’ll just have to throw it overboard as far as I can and hope that The Redemption drifts far enough that the hole saw is never found.
Phase II: One good thing about Ross: he’s predictable. A few weeks before I had anything close to resembling even a Phase I, I found the note he left me all those years ago, setting me up to catch you both in the Rosemount. It was in his wallet, of all places – I guess he still likes his trophies. Finding it was a gift. Because I couldn’t be sure that he’d get the blame for my death, that he’d even be suspected of it. I could be sure that you’d come back. That he’d get to you, try to keep you. Unless I could get to you first. Both of us have to escape – that’s the deal I’ve made with myself. That’s the whole point of THE PLAN No. 2.